Page 76 of Fragile Heart

I offer a single nod. She purses her lips.

“That must be awkward as hell with you and Caleb being scent matches.”

I can’t help but grimace. She laughs and grabs my elbow.

“Let’s go help Liv pick some outfits.”

CALEB

Brielle’s sprawled across my bed when I get out of the bathroom,running a towel across my hair to get it dry enough to not drip. She turns onto her side as I come back into the room, resting her head on her hand. She’s slipped into one of my shirts. It drowns out her curves and barely covers her ass.

Over a week since I saw her. Sure, we’ve been texting and calling, but it’s not the same as having her with me, against me. Heat pours through my body again as if we didn’t just knot.

“Can I see it?” I ask.

“Only if you’re willing to take off the bandage.” She scrunches her nose. “I tried this morning, but I couldn’t get a good angle since I can’t really see it.”

I duck into the bathroom and grab the scent free lotion stashed in the bottom drawer.

“How did you get the first one off?”

I round the bed and kneel behind her, palming her hip to keep her on her side. Her hair is soft and still a bit damp as I ease it off her shoulder to bare the delicate tattoo. The waterproof bandage is cloudy, obscuring the details of the new artwork. I can see a couple feathers, though.

“Emily helped me,” Brielle whispers.

Lavender bleeds out from her, and I force a deep breath to keep my body in check. We literally fucked less than an hour ago. And I ate her out in the shower, too. Thisneedfor her is so intense, though, it’s nearly like those didn’t happen.

I try to keep my actions gentle, easing away the bandage as carefully as possible. It gets caught on a strand of her hair, and she hisses.

“Shit, sorry,” I mutter.

“It’s fine,” she says.

I drop the bandage to the nightstand to deal with later, my attention rapt on the small bird now emblazoned behind her ear. Not a single bit of blue from the flowers remains. Instead, blackand orange and red feathers flow together, swirling around her ear and down the first inch or so of her neck.

The tail feathers are delicate enough that a bonding mark could nestle right around one of them. Cinnamon explodes around us between one breath and the next. She whines and tilts her head, showing more of her neck. I press a kiss to her shoulder even as I shove the idea of claiming her away.

“A phoenix?” My voice is raspy with heat.

“Born from the ashes,” she says, closing her eyes even as another pulse of her scent surrounds us. “The artist said I’d need something darker in order to cover the blue. And I thought the symbolism was…” She trails off. “It felt like a good symbol.”

She relaxes under me as I cover it with the lotion.

“They wrote about us in the paper,” she whispers as I lay beside her, our noses nearly touching. “And about Ethan.”

“I saw.” I wrap my arm around her waist and pull her closer, twisting her legs with mine.

It wasn’t a nice article. But then, it was Jessica Bailey that wrote it—and God knows the Baileys can’t fucking stand Ethan’s family. Getting to write a scathing paragraph or two of how Ethan and Brielle apparently kissed after the fireworks on the Fourth of July was probably her version of winning the lottery. Her comments about Brielle weren’t quite as ruthless. Good thing, too, because there’s no way I’d let her get away with it if she’d called Brielle a whore in public.

“At least they didn’t include pictures of us,” she admits, letting her eyes close. She sucks in a hard breath before sighing. “I’m going to corner Ethan this weekend and make him talk.”

“All right.” I trace the shell of her ear and the line of her jaw. Goosebumps rise along her skin, and I smile. “Can I take you to the Outpost?”

She opens her eyes. “You want to hard launch?”

“If they’re going to talk about us, we might as well,” I suggest. “I have no intention of hiding you.”

Her gaze grows thoughtful. She traces my happy trail, the movement almost absent. “All right. Tomorrow?”

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