Unforgiven by Elizabeth Finn Page B

appreciate her figure. But right now, he was studying that ridiculous disjointed leprechaun on her chest, and he was remembering a different life, a different world. He liked her in that life; hell, he might’ve loved her. To some degree, he most definitely had.
    When she offered him her hand, he cleared his throat and forced his focus to move back to her hand and not some other time that simply didn’t exist anymore. He snipped through the sutures. Her laceration had healed perfectly, but she’d ignored the sutures a bit too long, and they’d already started healing into her skin. He picked up the tweezers next, and as he started pulling the thread pieces from her skin, gently tugging the exposed ends, she winced. Each thread he pulled left a small dot of blood in its wake, and eventually she had nothing but a faint pink line of healed scar tissue lined with dots of blood.
    He stood, and she did too. They were standing close, and her breasts were brushing against his chest just below his pecs. He pulled away quickly, but not before his cock was set on fire and started straining against the front of his pants to get to her. He didn’t want to respond to her, but it hardly mattered how he wanted to respond. His body had other things in mind. He pulled her to the kitchen sink, holding her hand under the faucet as he turned the water on to flush the blood away from her skin.
    He pressed a paper towel against her skin after her hand was clean and held the pressure, trying to ignore her, trying to ignore the fact he had a raging hard-on for a woman he hated. But his brain wasn’t cooperating, and instead of ignoring his arousal, his brain started flashing images of the one and only time he’d truly indulged in her. He’d been jealous, crazy jealous to the point of wanting to fuck her brains out against that damn wall on the beach. He’d been such an immature prick then. He’d touched, he’d penetrated, he’d thrust into her with his fingers as though he’d had every right in the world, when in truth, he had no right. He’d been in a relationship, and it didn’t really matter that the relationship wasn’t going anywhere.
    He wasn’t the cheating type. Had never up to that point or since then stepped out on a woman he was dating. His relationships never panned out, and he failed to commit to the level needed for something worthwhile, but regardless of his inability to truly commit to a relationship, he still respected the bounds of it . . . except for that night. That night, he’d been prepared to set his integrity aside for her. It had been wrong. It had been wrong to the girl he was dating, and it had been wrong to Bailey, but he’d needed to consume her in a way he didn’t quite understand. He’d been a jerk, and he wasn’t making any excuses for it.
    “How is your family?”
    Her voice startled him again, and as he looked down into her eyes, he was incapable of thinking about anything but the way she’d felt around his fingers that night. She’d been wet; scorching hot heat had coated and covered his fingers as he pushed. Her tightness had trembled and clenched around him, promising his dick everything he wanted. Had his girlfriend not arrived when she had, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have ended up fucking Bailey against that wall. In fact, he was quite certain he would have.
    “My family is fine.” He stared into her crystal blue eyes. He knew he was likely glaring, but she didn’t look away. She just watched him as he held her hand, squeezing gently on the side of her hand to stop the bleeding. “And your mother?”
    Her cheeks flushed, and he inhaled a deep breath while he waited for her response. She shrugged before finally speaking. “She’s okay.” He knew better. He’d seen her mother on occasion, and since Bailey’s father had passed away from cancer a year and half ago, the woman was looking more and more gaunt every time he saw her. It didn’t take a genius to understand that seeing