“I don’t like a lot of people around me either, Trap. Even if I make friends, and right now you have far more than I do as I don’t have any, I don’t foresee myself overcoming years of being alone in a cell and wanting to be with tons of people. Being with you is the longest I’ve ever been with another human being. I can’t relax without my silks surrounding me. It’s how I kept my privacy in the cells with all the cameras on me. I need them. I’m not certain too many other people are going to understand that. So you can cross that worry off your list. It’s you I want to be with.”

He heard the ring of honesty in her voice. She wasn’t ever going to be the type of woman who liked to go to parties and get her photograph taken with him in order to have her fifteen minutes of fame in magazines. If anything, that would be another detriment. But she’d do it for him. He got that now. She was in as deep as he was in spite of his sins.

“I like your bossiness and your demanding because I can be the same way. As far as you making demands on my body – seriously, Trap? Can you not feel what you do to me? I look at you and melt. I want to have sex with you. I love having sex with you. I may not know what I’m doing exactly, but I learn fast and I know I can give you whatever you need. I trust that you’ll do the same for me. Trap.” She turned her head to look at him over her bare shoulder. “I want you with every breath I take.”

There it was. Cayenne handing him everything. She didn’t have to, and most women wouldn’t. She didn’t play games, she wouldn’t know how. She was strictly honest and meant every single word she said. He let his breath out slowly, his fingers, as they stroked her stomach, reverent.

“My father was a mean son of a bitch, Cayenne. I didn’t have one of those happy homes like you see in the movies or read about in books. He liked to beat up my mother and his children. He didn’t work much, so he had a lot of time to think up ways to fuck with all of us. My mom worked and she didn’t often see what he did to us, but eventually she decided to take us and run.”

Her hand moved over his, stroking caresses, but she remained silent. Waiting. Knowing it wasn’t good, but wanting him to understand she was with him no matter how bad it was. He was in her mind and he felt that solidarity. It was strange to share space in one’s mind because the loneliness simply disappeared. Every last vestige of it. Cayenne filled those deep cracks and wide gaps. Her strength. Her warmth. Her caring.

Trap had never really believed in love – not since he was a boy. He hadn’t dared believe in it. He’d felt that emotion for his sister and his mother. Both had been ripped from him. He’d felt it for his aunt, and she’d been ripped from him as well. That had been soul-destroying. Utterly soul-destroying. He had forced away all emotion, turning himself into a glacier to survive.

Wyatt had found a small crack in the ice and wormed his way in. Then one by one the other team members had followed Wyatt until he accepted them into his life, but he still held himself aloof. Apart. There was no staying apart from Cayenne. None at all. He didn’t want that. He wanted what he had right in that moment. That connection. That closeness.

“I was different. He fixated on that. My sister Dru was different as well, and she understood me when no one else did. My mother loved me, but I was strange and she didn’t really have time for that strangeness. She worked all the time and coped with him, trying to keep him off of us. He grew to despise me. No matter how much Dru and my mother tried to keep him away from me, he beat the hell out of me and made my life as miserable as possible.”

Cayenne’s fingers tightened over his hand and she pushed back into him until she was practically sharing his skin. He found he couldn’t get close enough to her. Sharing her skin was fast becoming a necessity. He trudged on, wanting her to understand why he was the way he was and what that would mean to her. She had to choose him. He couldn’t see himself letting her go.

“In a way, I almost didn’t mind. When he focused on me, he wasn’t going after my younger brother, Brad, or my baby sister, Linnie. He left my mom and Dru alone. One day, though, he broke my arm and a couple of ribs. We couldn’t hide that from Mom and she took me to the hospital. He was arrested and taken to jail. Dru told Mom everything, and Mom decided it was enough and we left.”

He slid his hand down her soft stomach until his finger could caress the soft triangle at the junction of her legs. He needed the soft feel of the hourglass. Her hand went with his and there was something sexy and also loving in that. He found stroking the hourglass, tracing the shape of it in all that soft silk soothed him.

“He found us. Mom took us across the country, and he still found us. He wasn’t alone. He had two brothers. Like my father, they were vicious and cruel. They liked hurting others. They stayed outside pouring gasoline all over the walls and then coming into the house and doing the same in all the rooms. They’d planned it with him. My dad, my uncles, planned to murder his children and his wife.”

He felt her breath hitch. Her stomach contracted and he pressed his fingers deeper into the hourglass.

“My father shot Linnie and Brad and my mother. Then Dru. She tried to protect me. There was so much blood, and I couldn’t make it stop flowing out of her. Her eyes were open and she looked so horrified. Terrified. Lifeless. He should have shot me right there, with my body under hers, but my seeing him kill her wasn’t enough for him. Knowing I was going to die wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to beat the shit out of me one more time. I was nine fucking years old, he’d just killed my mother, my brother and my two sisters, and that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to beat the shit out of me one last time before he killed me.”

“Trap.” She whispered his name and pressed his fingers tight against her.

His heart tripped. Stuttered. She was so beautiful to him. Everything about her. She felt compassion for that little boy. She wanted to wrap him in her silk and protect him from what was to come. He knew, because he was in her mind. Her hand was on his and he actually felt the silken slide against the back of his. He slipped right past need and hunger to something else altogether. Something he didn’t believe he’d ever feel for anyone, let alone a woman. He’d protected his heart for years. With Cayenne, he just couldn’t find the ice to keep her out.

“I went after him. I was nine years old and I went after him. I slipped on Dru’s blood, Cayenne. It was everywhere. Everywhere. All over me. All over the floor and walls. I rammed my head into his crotch and I got the gun and shot him. He had a knife and he stabbed me with it a couple of times, but I didn’t even feel the blade go in. Not then.”