“You asking to feel me up?”

“Um—”

“Sorry, you’re easy to rile, it’s hard to resist. Be my guest.”

He rested his arm on his knee, palm up, hand relaxed and open. He didn’t look all that sorry with the way he was smiling, but I was too curious, and he was willing. The muscles in his arm flexed when I traced the vines leading to the heart. The inside of his forearm seemed a sensitive place to tattoo. Wherever there was color, the skin was slightly raised, not by much, but enough that I could feel the dimension of the design.

“This must have taken a long time. Did it hurt a lot?”

“Pain is relative, isn’t it?”

I gave him a quizzical look.

“These—” He skimmed my ear. “They hurt, right?”

“Sure, but not much.” Disappointment followed when he dropped his hand.

“But there’s still gratification in the pain, yeah?”

I nodded, even if I couldn’t be sure how much I agreed with that statement. Hayden must have picked up on my uncertainty.

“Any kind of modification, whether it’s to alter physical features, like cosmetic surgery, or to decorate, like piercings and tattoos, cause some degree of discomfort. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s cathartic because it’s the promise of change in some form or another. My tattoos give the memory related to the art a place to exist outside of my head, on my body. At least that’s my interpretation, but not everyone feels the same way I do.”

Expelling pain by giving in to it held quite the allure. The reasons I wanted to put my own art on my skin were difficult to reconcile. I swiped at an inked droplet of blood, almost expecting to feel the wetness against my fingertip.

“It looks so real.”

“Jamie’s an amazing artist.”

“Lisa’s boyfriend?”

Hayden nodded.

On the occasions I’d dropped by Inked Armor he’d always been with a client, but I’d seen him and Lisa leave together many times.

“So he did this?” I asked.

“Most of my tattoos were done by either Jamie or Chris.”

“You designed them and they put them on you?”

“Yeah. Or we collaborated. The only one I didn’t design was this one.” He pulled up the sleeve on his other arm. It was covered in a black pattern I couldn’t decipher.

“How far does it go?”

“All the way up my arm and over half my torso.”

“What is it?”

“If you come to the shop, maybe I’ll show you.”

The idea of Hayden shirtless was like a shot of fire through my veins. I didn’t hesitate this time. “Okay.”

“That’s better than a maybe.”

He was openly flirting. As apprehensive as he made me, part of me enjoyed the nervous anticipation and the warmth under my skin. The heavy strains of a rock anthem came from Hayden’s pants, and he dug in his pocket. He looked annoyed as he checked his phone. Instead of answering the call, he silenced it.

A minute later Cassie appeared at the top of the stairs. The call he avoided had been Lisa; his client had arrived and she was still waiting for her latte.

“Duty calls.” Hayden hefted the box filled with keepables under his arm. “I’ll go through the rest another time. You’ll stop by the shop?”

“Sure.” I wasn’t sure at all. Talking to Hayden had only served to ratchet up my infatuation with him; indulging in his presence wasn’t likely to make that dissipate.

He gave me a look but dropped it. “Thanks for keeping me company.”

“No problem.”

In an unexpectedly tender gesture, he leaned down and kissed my cheek, those steel rings piercing his bottom lip treacherously close to the corner of my mouth.

I stood there long after he left, my fingers pressed to the spot where his lips had been. Warmth radiated out with the echo of sensation, moving down until it settled low in my stomach. I felt suddenly vulnerable as the vortex of emotion that followed threatened to lift me up and take me away. I hadn’t expected him to do that. At all.

If I’d been stronger, I would have left him to sort through things on his own. But I didn’t, and now I had this memory of his lips on my skin. As innocent as it might have been, it brought with it unexpected feelings. I hadn’t felt anything close to lust in almost a year. That one simple gesture of affection had awoken the dormant desire I’d been fighting since the first time he came into Serendipity.

Hayden was the opposite of everything I’d ever known. He defied convention at every turn, and it made him that much more of a weakness. He was not only inordinately gorgeous but intelligent and passionate as well. Beyond the hard exterior, the brash comments and flirtation, a sensitive side lurked. But, like me, he was closed off; his tattoos formed his walls. I knew all about walls. I had built my own. With him I wanted to let them down, if only just a little. It was a dangerous thing to contemplate because in doing so they could very well crumble completely.

Until now I’d thought I had been managing well enough, that I was making progress and moving on. But even after all these months, I was still so broken. This man could very well be my undoing.

HAYDEN

Early on Tuesday afternoon, Tenley—who still hadn’t stopped by since we hung out in the basement of Serendipity—left her apartment. The entrance to the apartments above was at the rear of the store. There was a narrow alleyway between Serendipity and the adjacent low-rise apartment building giving her access to the storefront. I liked it, because it allowed me to see when she was coming or going. Not that I was watching for her or anything.

Instead of going into Serendipity, she turned in the opposite direction and headed down the sidewalk. She was wearing a dress that hugged her curves but still managed to be conservative. On the plus side, it ended midthigh. She had great legs, the kind I wanted wrapped around my waist, or my head, whichever. I wasn’t picky.

After my dreams last night there was relief in seeing she was okay. My subconscious alternated between lurid fantasy and horrifying nightmares, which had been dominating my sleeping hours as of late.

I couldn’t get the images out of my head. The bad dreams weren’t unusual; there were past mistakes I couldn’t undo. The part that was messing with me the most was Tenley’s arrival in my subconscious and the way I managed to insert her into the clusterfuck of a nightmare. Usually they revolved around the same theme—death. In this dream, though, the loser from the bar hadn’t let her go. He’d pulled a gun and aimed it at her chest. I couldn’t get through the crowd to help her. I woke up before he pulled the trigger, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

That she had been in any kind of danger, imagined or not, left me unsettled and raw. Awake or asleep, I didn’t like the loss of control.

“Have you heard a thing I said?” Chris stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the empty sidewalk.

“What?” I asked testily.

“What’s up with you? You’ve been all over the board this week.”

“What are you talking about?” I leaned back in the chair and laced my fingers behind my head, feigning nonchalance. His rare moment of perceptiveness stunned me. I hadn’t realized I was so damn obvious.

“If you were a chick I’d say you have PMS. Since you’re not, I’m saying you need to get laid instead, which brings me back to the original one-sided conversation I was having while you so rudely ignored me. I’m going to the peelers tonight, you should come.”

That meant The Dollhouse. Sometimes I believed the only reason Chris asked me to come was for company in his pit of moral decay. As if my being there somehow made what he did okay. Just because I tolerated his actions didn’t mean I condoned them. Not anymore.

“Seriously? Why there?”

“You need to ask?”

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t eager for a trip down memory lane, and there was a good chance I’d run into Sienna. I had successfully avoided her for the past year. I was inclined to keep it that way.