"There's something hard jabbing my ass," she whispered, though they both knew their bunk mates wore ear buds to bed.

He rocked his hips. "Can't help it. You're a wiggler."

"And you're a freak. Who sleeps in a t-shirt and no underpants?"

He missed sleeping nude with her. On the road, she slept in panties and nothing else while he wore a shirt at all times to hide the scars from their bus load of roommates.

He shifted their entwined hands into the valley of her tits, and she stretched her fingers to roll them over her nipple.

Christ, he was desperate for her touch. "Please. Put your hands on me." He ground himself against her to emphasize the area that needed the most attention.

"Tell me about the shed."

He flinched. Damn her stubbornness to hell. "We have a break in the schedule tomorrow night. We'll talk then. I promise."

"All right."

"So you'll touch me?"

"Yes. Tomorrow."

"Fuck, Charlee." He let a hard edge dominate his voice, even as excitement skipped through his bloodstream. Hopefully, his iron tone would provoke the twinge of anticipation she needed to climax.

He shifted, rolling her beneath him, and settled between her legs. His fingers met the moist crotch of her panties, and he tugged it to the side. He lined up his erection and bit his lip. Slowly, torturously, he pushed in. Her heat encased him.

"Ahhhh, yeah. Ah, God, feels so good." The bellow in his heart exploded with the thrust of his hips. He couldn't see her eyes through the dark, hated he wouldn't be able to read her expression.

He pushed two fingers past her teeth, curled them, and put pressure on her jaw. Leveraging the grip, he turned her head toward him and strengthened his fingers to hold her in place. It was a perception of dominance rather than pain. He hoped the acceleration in her breathing was testament it was working for her.

He pressed kisses across her open mouth, licking over and around his fingers as he stroked and rotated his hips. So fucking warm and wet, the sensation of her spread through his groin and enveloped his body. Good God, he wanted to come. He picked up his pace and pulled harder on her jaw.

Her sharp, heavy pants unraveled the reign on his release. He pushed the surging sensations back, pounded into her, his free hand flexing beside her face. Her hips met him punch for punch. Was she close? Getting closer?

She bit down on his fingers, arched her back, and the hot walls of her cunt contracted around him. Oh, thank fuck.

He yanked his hand from her mouth, balls curling up. "Unngh, I'm gonna come. Oh, Jesus. I'm coming."

"Mmm." She bucked with him. "Come in me. God, I want to feel you come."

Amplified by her throaty whisper, the spasm of bliss shot through his dick and tingled over his body. He collapsed onto his elbows, braced on her pillow.

Laughter tumbled from the bunk above. "Who needs groupies when I can listen to you two every night? Can you pass me a sock or something? I just spewed down my leg."

Fucking Laz.

Chapter Seventy-Seven.

The next night, Charlee padded through the bathroom of their suite in the City of Fountains. Who knew Kansas City boasted over two hundred outdoor water-jetting displays?

Extra tubes, needles, ink, and green soap scattered the marble vanity. The remainder of the tattoo equipment waited with Jay in the bedroom, machines prepped and ready.

The old leather sketchbook she'd carried for three years lay open to the illustration she'd just transferred to stencil paper. She knew the drawing intimately, had doodled it so many times through the years, it was sketched it into her memory.

She washed her hands in the sink. No need for gloves. The body fluids they shared daily were much more intimate than blood and sweat.

Hands dried, she held up the stencil by the corners, her nerves aflutter. Hadn't every day since the day she'd met him led to this?

Whatever you gave him made him look at things differently, made him want to get better.

Laz's words came back to her from the night they fled the Cuban restaurant. Jay had worn his partial outline for three years. How did he envision the finished design? He didn't know about the sketchbook, unless he'd snooped in her messenger bag while she slept. What if it disappointed him? Or worse, what if the completion didn't give him the catharsis she knew he anticipated?

Deep breath. The forge of fire and steel was destined to exist on his back. She just needed to go slow, not screw it up. They had twenty-four hours until the Kansas City show. Plenty of time to help him uncover what he'd hid for so long.

Another lungful of air. She lowered the stencil behind her and walked to the bedroom, her gait jittery, her heart more so.

He sat on the edge of the bed, palms flat on his thighs. "It's time." He addressed Nathan and Tony, who stood in the sitting area outside the bedroom, but his gaze was on her.

The bedroom door clicked closed followed by another click of the outer exit.

Jay had demanded total privacy for the remainder of the night. Because their suite was a fraction of the size of the one in New York, it made it easier to convince the protective team to guard from the hallway. In reality, they were only one room away.

She placed the stencil on the desk and moved toward him until her knees brushed his bent ones. "Ready?"

"For three years." He removed his shirt, tossed it behind him, eyes on her, overflowing with emotion. Was he as anxious as her? Was he having second thoughts?

Her need to touch him, to connect to him, roiled inside her and spread to her fingertips. Her equilibrium wobbled. "We'll go slowly. Stop me when you need to. If you change your mind, if the memories come-"

"Charlee." He rose a breath away and rested his hands on her waist. "I want this." Dipping his head, he opened his mouth and swept his tongue over hers. Pushing past her parted lips, he licked and nipped, sensuously, lovingly, restoring her balance.

She pulled back, breathless. My, how their roles had flipped. The last time she aimed a needle at him, she'd taken the lead, controlled the outcome. "Do you want to see the stencil before I start?" Nervousness cramped her gut.

He turned, lay across the foot of the bed, face down, one arm hanging over the end. "I want you to stop deliberating and finish what you started." Impatience sharpened his tone, but the gold in his eyes glimmered with amusement.

"Good. I don't need a stencil anyway since I'm just doing a big ol' sheet of black." She diluted a paper towel with Dettol antiseptic and swiped long strokes from shoulder to shoulder.

"Since you inked the first outline freehand, I'm confident you could make even a black square look like art. Can't wait to see what you do with a stencil." He turned his head away, and the muscles in his back loosened under the rub of the towel.

It had been a huge risk inking him without a stencil the night she met him, but she'd had little choice in her sneaky offense to defy his wishes.

She squirted a dollop of stencil gel at the top of his spine. "Here come my hands." She waited for his deep breath and eventually let out her own when his tension never came.

With hesitant fingertips, she spread the gel over the nearest cluster of scars. His back rose and fell with steady breaths, his trigger quiet.

She worked the gel lower, and his skin took on a tougher, more wrinkled texture across a horizontal line from armpit to armpit. Was his back curved and chest tucked in when the burns were inflicted? The bubbles weren't raised enough to be noticeable, but the discoloration made them impossible to miss. A motley of reds blended into browns and pinks. The damage covered his upper back from just below his neck to under his armpits.

Once the gel covered the areas to be inked, she positioned the stencil on his back and adjusted the ohms on the machine. "You know, I don't know your full name."

He twisted his neck to face her, cheek resting on the mattress, eyelids heavy. "James Kristopher Mayard."

"James? Really?" She removed the stencil and blew on his back.

The arm he dangled off the bed shifted and his hand curled around the back of her bare calf. "I changed it to Jay when I started The Burn."

She tested the machine with a few pulses of the needle. Jay. Laz. Rio. Wil. "All your proportioned names would make charming tattoos. You could wear each other's names in a matching design." A smile tugged her lips as she touched the machine to his skin and began the first stroke.

He chuckled. "I love those guys, but not that much."

She followed the stenciled lines, dwelling on three-lettered names. One in particular tried to scorch her mood. She would not allow Roy to taint this moment. "What are their real names?"

"Lazarus Bromwell." One dark eyebrow arched.

"Of course." She moved to the most disfigured section, where a nickel-sized patch of skin had twisted as it melted. Watching his face for distress, she inked a line over it. "And the others?"

"Richard." A gentle fondness intoned his voice.

"Rio? Richard Ketch?" She laughed. "Catchy. And Wil must be William."

He shook his head, creasing his smile against the bedding. "Bruce Sima."

The machine went still as she tried to pair that name with Wil's young, surfer-boy face. "No way."

"It's probably no surprise it was his idea to change our names. I guess Bruce the bassist didn't have the right ring."

His scars blazed red beneath the stab of her needle, prompting her next question. "The band's name was your idea?"

He nodded. "You're the only one who knows what led to the name."

Hopefully, sometime soon, she would know what led to the burns. Lulled by the buzz of the machine, she drifted into a Fugazi song, humming the in-your-face chords with abandon.

"Waiting Room." He sighed. "You're subtle."

She snorted. "It's a good song."

"Especially in your adorable tonality." His eyes danced.

"Hey." She held the needle away and pinched the tender skin under his arm. "You're not paying me to sing well."

He jerked back from the sting of her pinch, lips crooked up. "I'm not paying you at all."

She wiped Vaseline over a finished flame and shifted to outline the next one. "Laz paid me twenty grand for a rainbow."

"Laz got ripped off." His voice broke with laughter.

"So true."

They fell quiet for a time, sharing glances and smiles as she worked. Her mind raced to the final design, mentally shading between the bold lines, trying to predict his reaction. It would be primarily black. Red and brown ink would be used sparingly to blend the drawn scars into the existing ones.

She took her time, following the outline with a steady hand. Working over the scar tissue, she must have hit a sensitive area because his body shuddered. "Sorry. You okay?"

"Wasn't you, Charlee." A ragged exhale. "I was thinking about my parents' death, of the burns that occurred over the year that followed."

Chapter Seventy-Eight.

The machine jumped in Charlee's hand. She held it midair, hovering, her heart thundering.

"Keep going." Jay's palm rubbed up and down her leg. "I need the distraction."

She swallowed and brushed out another rivet in the steel plate beneath the outline of charred skin.

"We lived in Canada, a rural area near the Boundary Waters, and the land is only accessible by plane. They were on one of their supply runs when their plane went down."

"How'd it happen?"

"A malfunction. My father was a pilot, owned an old plane. I usually joined them on those errands-so I've been told-but they'd left me with the closest neighbor that day. Some family that lived a few miles away." A pause. "I was an only child."

He'd carried his loneliness his entire life. Her chest ached and her stomach tumbled as the machine vibrated in her hand. "Abandoned and alone."

"You, more than anyone, can sympathize with that. Makes this next part easier to talk about."

Brown eyes scrutinized the wall behind her with more interest than it warranted. "My father inherited the land and a great deal of money before I was born. His sister didn't receive a crumb."

"Aunt El?" Her brain scrambled to put the pieces together. Bitter aunt. Traumatic childhood. Acid seethed through her gut.

"I've said her name?" His face tightened with wide eyes. "When I...flashback?"

"Yeah." She kissed his shoulder beyond the reach of the ink.

He relaxed beneath her lips. "Elena Mayard. Something was wrong with her. I always thought of it as unexamined viciousness. She was manic, I think. I don't know. Before my parents died, she'd kept herself isolated from the family, so much so my grandparents cut her out of their will."