Page 136 of The Favorites
With a sigh, I twisted around to lay my foot in his lap—careful tohold my hotel bathrobe shut, since I wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Not that he hadn’t seen it all before.
Heath examined my wounds, the heat of his hands grazing my skin. I flinched.
“Sorry,” he said. “Did that hurt?”
“No.” Yes, but I didn’t want him to stop.
“Want me to bandage it up again?”
“Probably better to let it breathe.”
Heath nodded and set my foot gently down on the comforter, then reached behind him to adjust the pillows for more support.
“Your back?” I said.
He nodded. I stood on my knees and gestured for him to sit up.
“You don’t have to—” he started.
“I want to.” I smoothed my palm over his trap and dug my thumb under his scapula. “Unless you don’t think you can take it?”
Heath smiled. “Do your worst.”
For the next twenty minutes, I worked my way through every major muscle in his back. He melted under my touch, eventually stretching out flat on his stomach so I could get more leverage. I straddled his legs and ground my knuckles into his lumbar spine until he groaned.
“You areevil,” he mumbled into the pillows.
“Oh, come on. You’ve had worse.”
I was only teasing. But with my fingers brushing his scarred skin, it didn’t seem so funny.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Heath flipped over underneath me. “For what?”
“That you had to go through…everything you went through. That I wasn’t—”
“Like you said.” His voice rumbled against my bare thighs. “I’ve had worse.”
“Still.” The belt of my robe was starting to come undone. Heath’s towel had slipped too, exposing his hip bones. “No one deserves—well, whatever the hell Veronika did to you.”
“It wasn’t Veronika.”
I froze.
“She never touched me,” he continued. “Although she did scream alot, whenever we did something wrong in practice. She said it was so we wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”
My hands had come to rest on Heath’s chest. His fingertips skimmed the hem of my robe.
“If it wasn’t Veronika,” I said. “Then who—”
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. We both turned to look.
Bella Lin’s smiling face lit up the screen.
Chapter 78
“Is everything okay?” Bella said as soon as I picked up the Skype call. “You didn’t contact me after the short, and I—”
