Page 72 of Kiss Away Your Pain (Wounded Hearts 2)

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Enzo

Still deep inside her, I lift my face so I can look into her eyes. Silence fuses us, body and soul. Her mouth open, her heart pounds against my chest. Her breaths give me life. Her heartbeat is my bloodline.

My body drained, I roll off of her, keeping contact with her skin.Holy fuck.Though I’ve done coital alignment before, it was never so visceral.

“That was intense,” she says, blowing a soft puff of air.

My eyes closed, I pull her into me and kiss her forehead.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, getting up and going to the bathroom.

Lying in my post-ecstasy bliss, I can’t remember a time when I was so connected to someone. I don’t want to know a time that she’s not in my life.

My mind returns to her telling me that her mom and Dom died in the same car accident. Agony shreds my heart, gutting me for the pain she endured losing two of the closest people to her at the same time. Without a good relationship with her dad, I’m glad she has Destiny. I can’t even begin to fathom what she went through.

Returning with a warm washcloth, she wipes me off. She takes the cloth back to the bathroom and returns to me, nestling her body into the side of mine again.

“Candi?”

“Yeah.” She tilts her head to look up at me, still resting on my chest.

“I can’t tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or next year. But I can tell you I’m not going anywhere.” I pause to emphasize my next words. “Nothing will take me away from you.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, curling her body into me and holding me so tight.

I stroke her hair until we fall asleep.

With our flight not until early evening, we sleep in, have a leisurely breakfast, and find another nearby village to wander around.

Walking hand in hand, the sun warming our faces, we approach a tattoo parlor. She looks at me and tilts her head toward the parlor with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, little vixen.

“What, now?” I ask.

A laugh spills out of her. “Yeah. To remind us of our trip,” she says with a wink. “It’s a better souvenir than a trinket that just needs to be dusted.”

We walk into the parlor, the air alive with a high-pitched buzz and the smell of green soap.

“Na eísai sostós mazí sou,” says the tattoo artist who’s working on a customer.

We have no idea what he said. Probably something like, “I’ll be right with you.” considering he’s working on someone.

“What are you going to get?” she asks.

“I don’t know yet. You?”

“Me either. I don’t want anything big and it has to be somewhere discreet. While I don’t mind tattoos, I also don’t want my skin covered in them,” she says.

Considering she only has one and she’s not looking to get all inked up, I have a feeling she’ll pick something that has a lot of meaning.

We roam the parlor, looking for ideas in the images covering the walls to the ceiling and in binders overflowing the counters.

She stops on a page in a binder and looks up at me, pupils wide as a canyon.

It’s an antique-looking heart lock with flowers and filigree on it and an ornate matching key. The epitome of her. Tough as steel on the outside juxtaposed against the fragility of her wounded heart.

“They remind me a little of the patterns on your mom’s oil lamps you have in your house.”

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