The Strongest Steel (6 page)

“You asked,” she responded with a small smile.

“My sister Kit is an interior designer. She helped me with the whole place.” He looked around the room. “So. Ready to do this?” he asked. “This is the easy part.”

Harper nodded. “I think I am.”

Trent got up and went to the light table, flicking the light on. He reached over to grab the brown cardboard tube, flipped the plastic lid off, and pulled the papers out.

He held out his hand toward her. “There is only one rule from this point on.”

Trying not to overthink it, she reached out and took his hand and he lifted her to her feet.

“What’s that?”

His dark eyes looked deep into hers unflinchingly. “Total honesty. Once we do this, it’s going to be on your back a really long time. You need to love it. Not just like it. Not just decide it’s good enough because it covers up what is already there. You have to love every single piece of it. It has to speak to you. You won’t hurt my feelings at all if you don’t like it. We’ll draw it as many times as we need to so it’s perfect for you.”

What he was saying made sense and addressed one of her own worries, not wanting to offend him if she didn’t like what he had drawn for her. “Okay. That, I can do.”

He unrolled the artwork onto the table, the design slowly revealing itself to her. It was too much to take in. The colors drew her eye, and the beautiful lines of the lettering captured her breath. She lifted her hands to her face in a prayer.

She could feel Trent studying her, scrutinizing her reaction. The first tear rolled down her cheek as she moved to stand in front of the sketch and touched it with two of her fingers.

The sword, with its jeweled handle and detailing, was spectacular. The flames were so vivid and looked so real that her fingers felt hot as she stroked over them, yet the way they morphed into fiery flowers was beautiful. The stone was dark granite with sparks within it. And the script—it was perfect. The slanted italic script swirling through the fire simply stated “…
strongest steel … hottest fire.
” It was everything she had hoped it would be. She moved her fingers over it a second time.

Trent came to stand next to her. “Like it?”

“Like it? It’s exquisite,” she whispered, struggling to rein in her emotions. “I’ve never … I mean … shit … sorry. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Are you sure you can do this on me?”

“Yeah. See this area here where it’s just flames? That’s where the two biggest vertical scars are. And this part here, where the rocks are, this will be where the horizontal scar is. We’re going to draw people’s gaze away from the scars by just shading here, making the focus the sword and text down the center. That’s where all the detail will be, the fine-line work. That’s what people are going to look at. Not going to lie, though. It’s going to hurt like a bitch.”

“No more than it did when he did this.” Holy shit. Words like
loquacious,
garrulous,
and
voluble
came to mind. Had she meant to say that? Unlikely. She didn’t talk about him. Ever. Unless she counted the one time she’d felt the need to share with Drea—and that had been a long time in the making.

“What if I can’t do it?” Harper asked. “What if it’s too much?”

“I’ll get you through this. I promise. If it takes fifty short appointments, if I have to come to your home, if I have to sic Cujo on you, I’ll get you through it somehow. We’ll figure it out.”

They stood in silence as Harper continued to run her fingers over his design.

Needing to lighten the conversation, she shook the thought of not being able to go through with it from her head. “Maybe I’ll be able to wear a bikini before the end of the summer.”

“Now there’s your motivation. You go through with this and I’ll buy it for you.”

Harper looked up at him. “No! You can’t do that. I’ll buy it.”

“Yes, I can. You aren’t the only one who likes a bit of motivation.” He smiled at her, but his eyes were intriguingly inscrutable. Was he flirting with her or just being nice? It had been so long since she’d had even the remotest interest in someone that she couldn’t even tell anymore. He held out his hand to her.

“Deal?” He narrowed his eyes at her.

“Okay.” She reached out and put her hand in his. “Deal.”

He gave her a rough sense of the cost. It made her eyes water, but she could afford it. She clutched the piece of paper that listed her appointments.

“Just one last thing I’d like to do before you go,” Trent said as he put the designs back into the brown tube.

“What’s that?”

“I need a sketch of your back.” Harper could feel the color drain from her face. She’d thought she’d have a few days to deal with the psychological buildup of him touching her.

“I’m going to make the transfers that make up the outline, so I can put them on your back at your first appointment. I drew the artwork with a rough idea in mind.”

She watched as he put the brown tube on a shelf
,
Harper Connelly
written on it in black marker in the same script he’d used in her tattoo. There was a small lotus blossom in the curve of the letter
Y.
Trent had paid attention to every small detail. Grabbing her own hand, she jammed her fingers painfully together to stop their usual dance.

“Guess I am going to have to get used to you touching my back at some point.”

He turned back to look at her. Reaching out, he separated her hands, holding them gently and rubbing his thumbs on her inner wrist. His furrowed brow relaxed as he looked at her. “Yes, you are.”

“Okay. Where do you need me?”

“I’ll take you to the private room we used the other night and have you lie down on the bed. There’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“How would you feel if Cujo came in and helped me? It’s a big area, and it’ll be hard to keep the paper still. I can manage if you’d rather not, but it will be more accurate if he can help.”

“No” was on the tip of her tongue. Someone else seeing her back was not part of the plan. But she trusted Trent. He was looking at her so patiently. No pressure. Everyone else seemed to expect her to have switched back to “normal” by now, in a hurry for her to get back to the rest of her life.

“Okay. I’m fine with Cujo.”

Trent stared at her intensely. “Can I ask you something highly inappropriate?”

“You’re about to see me partially naked, so sure.”

He grinned at that, a delicious smile giving up both dimples.

“How would you feel if I hugged you?”

Being touched by him didn’t seem as frightening as it had the night before, but what if she freaked out?

“I’m not sure,” Harper whispered.

He opened his arms to her. “Care to find out?”

Harper’s fingers started to twitch, but she stopped them quickly by linking them together. Wasn’t all of this about moving on? She slowly walked toward him, never losing contact with the dark pools of his eyes until she was close enough to feel the warmth radiating from him.

His chest was reassuringly sturdy, an anchor to her restlessness. She rested her forehead on it, the only part of her to touch him. Her arms hung uselessly by her side, incapable of reaching for him, unable to deal with anything more than just standing there.

Harper flinched as his hands settled first on her shoulders, resting there softly. She closed her eyes. Slowly he slid his hands down her arms and wrapped them around her lower back, south of the scars that had taken control of her life. He smelled of soap, laundry detergent, and something decidedly male.

Like a desert flower after the rain, Harper drowned in the contact. Her chest expanded, and she breathed deeper. Inexplicably, she felt safe in the arms of a man she hardly knew.

*   *   *

What was it about this woman? She tugged at him in a way no one had in a really long time. His thoughts wandered to his one disastrous attempt at a long-term relationship. A game changer for his love life ever since. Not once, since then, had he considered any kind of permanent relationship. Until now. Trent pulled her closer to him and took a deep breath.

The way her body fit against his perfectly, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, was so incredibly good it scared him. Lowering his head until his chin rested on hers, he appreciated every curve and line pressed against him. Her scent reminded him of summer air, vanilla, and strawberries. Fresh, clean, and mouthwatering. He felt her warmth against his chest, absorbed the slow and steady rise and fall of her breath. Christ, songs had been written about this very moment—and wasn’t he getting all poetic and shit?

She still hadn’t moved. Maybe he should just let go, but he really didn’t want this moment to end. Then he felt it. The smallest movement from Harper as just one of her fingers gently threaded through the belt loop of his jeans.

The small gesture of trust almost brought him to his knees. He swallowed hard as his hand slowly drifted up and down her back. The heat from that single finger meant more than the most passionate embrace. When she sighed and sank against him, he sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever might be out in the universe listening.

Her dark waterfall of hair was soft under his cheek as he pulled her closer, clenching his jaw and swallowing hard. Why did she affect him so much? His feelings were running wild, but was it just empathy for what she’d been through, or was it something more? Determined to keep his shit together, he swallowed hard. She had no clue how much that one finger on his belt had him churned up inside. Now was not the time to pussy out, so he tried hard to cool his emotions. Harper trusted him with the most significant part of her. How on earth was he going to live up to that responsibility? How was he going to prove to her that her faith in him was justified and that her courage wasn’t wasted?

Wasn’t this what his own tattoo was all about? It was part of him. Fortitude or courage being one of the four cardinal virtues shown in
Paradiso
in the
Divine Comedy
. The ability to confront fear and intimidation. And yet what did he know about it? She was the one standing in his studio sharing the toughest parts of her life with a stranger.

“I don’t want to move.” The whispered words drew him from his thoughts.

“So don’t.” He pressed a soft kiss into her hair.

“No one has hugged me in a very long time,” she said, pulling away to study him with those soulful eyes. “Thank you.”

“Any time. Tattoos and hugs. I’m great at them both. Just don’t tell the guys out there or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

He tried to sort through his feelings for Harper, shaking his head to clear it. The idea of doing her ink excited him as an artist. As a man, he appreciated the way she’d fit in his arms. And shit, didn’t it make him want to pound on his chest that she’d come to him for help. But if all he felt was compassion for the victim she’d once been, then he shouldn’t be holding her like this, no matter how perfect it felt.

*   *   *

Five hours later, as he nursed a shot of whiskey, he still couldn’t get Harper out of his head. The whiskey burned as it slid down Trent’s throat, a necessary evil to ward off the chills from drawing up Harper’s back. He had felt her distress every time she flinched, every time he’d heard her counting her breaths to ten.

When she’d finally sat up, the red rims of her eyes had given away the tears that had fallen while she’d lain there. It had ripped his gut apart that he couldn’t make it all better.

He’d wanted to cradle her close, soothe away her tears, and feel that same sweeping rightness he’d felt before with her in his arms. Instead, he’d held back and watched her walk away from the studio. From him.

Trent cradled the glass in his hand. Holding Harper in his arms had felt like heaven. For so long, after Yasmin, the idea of a permanent relationship had felt like hell. He’d worshipped her from the day she’d walked into Junior’s on her twenty-first birthday for her first tattoo, but despite his best efforts during their two years together, he’d never been enough for her. Hadn’t earned enough, hadn’t been famous enough, hadn’t known the right people. Last he’d heard she was shacking up with some bit-part rapper from the local scene. As for him, he’d gotten into having girls interchangeably and often. He was honest with them, always, about the short-term nature of their relationships. But in the three days since he’d met Harper, he hadn’t thought of anyone else.

“That was something else,” Cujo said, as he walked into the office, poured himself a shot, and swallowed half of it down. “You know the story?”

“Not really. Just that it happened a few years back and she’s been hiding it ever since. I don’t want to push too hard.” Not that he didn’t want to know. It was gnawing away at his gut.

“Who the hell would do that to another human being? That’s some messed-up stuff.” Cujo’s visible shiver summed it up.

“It’s going to be a tough one. Booked it over five or six sessions of a few hours each and we’ll see how we go.” Knocking back another couple of fingers of the golden liquid, he squeezed his eyes closed and let his head fall back on the sofa to avoid thinking about just how tough the first appointment was going to be for her.

“Who do you think did it?”

“No idea. Can’t stand even thinking about it.”

“There’s something about her, isn’t there?” Cujo asked. Trent opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow at his friend. “For you, I mean. Something’s got to you.”

“Thanks, Oprah.”

“Oh come on, dude. I’ve known you long enough. I can tell. You’re different around her.”

Trent sighed. There was no point denying it. He refilled his glass and knocked it back. He just didn’t know what he was going to do about it.

*   *   *

Crap. Eddie was home. Harper dropped her keys in the colorful fish-shaped ceramic dish that sat on the corner of her tiny kitchen counter. Picking up her broom from its narrow slot beside the fridge, she knocked on the ceiling like someone in an old TV sitcom.

The volume dropped. “Sorry, Harp!” came a bellow.

“Thanks, Eddie,” she yelled toward the ceiling.

Her cupboards and fridge revealed some leftover spaghetti sauce and a dire need to go grocery shopping. Harper made a shopping list while the spaghetti cooked. Maybe she could persuade Drea to drive her. Highly possible if she threw in a free meal.