Page 123 of Beautiful When He Breaks

His hand slides up beneath my shirt, palm warm against my bare side, and whatever respectable version of myself I was aiming for immediately dies. I make a sound into his mouth that’s more desperate than I mean it to be, and Julian’s fingers tense on my skin before he smooths them again.

That tiny restraint lights me up more than if he’d shoved me flat.

I pull back just enough to breathe against his mouth. “You’re doing that thing again.”

His eyes are dark and focused, but his lips twitch. “What thing?”

“Being all careful.” I hate how breathless I sound already, but apparently pride left the building when I told him I loved him while straddling his lap. “It’s hot, and I need you to stop making it hotter if you expect me to function.”

Julian stares at me for one second, then laughs quietly. “I’m sorry my effort not to traumatize you is inconveniently sexy.”

“See?” I mutter, kissing him again because his mouth is right there and I’m weak. “That. Fucking that.”

His hand spreads wider over my ribs, thumb dragging once across skin, and my whole body leans toward it. I’ve been waiting years for that exact touch. Maybe that’s the part I’m not ready to stare at directly tonight—the possibility that wanting Julian was never as new as I thought, only unnamed. His other hand finds my jaw, tilting my face up, and when he kisses me deeper, I let myself sink into it instead of trying to manage every reaction.

My arms lift late and awkwardly when he pulls off my shirt, and Julian smiles against the corner of my mouth before tossing the shirt somewhere off the side of the bed. He doesn’t move away afterward; he just looks at me.

His gaze travels over my chest, my shoulders, the line of my stomach. I know he’s not judging or comparing me to anybody else, just absorbing me with open hunger and something so tender it makes my chest ache.

I’ve been shirtless in front of him a thousand times, so this shouldn’t feel different. Except it is different because this time, he’s allowed to look and I’m allowed to want him to.

My face heats anyway.

His hand settles over my sternum, right above the place my heart is trying to break through. “You’re blushing.”

“Thanks for the update.”

“It’s cute.”

“I’m naked from the waist up and emotionally compromised. Don’t call me cute.”

His smile turns slow, but his eyes stay warm. “You’re cute and hot. People can contain multitudes.”

“Fuck off,” I say, but I’m smiling when I say it, and when he leans in, I meet him halfway.

His shirt comes off next, and that should be illegal too, because I have seen Julian’s body before and it still somehow catches me unprepared when it’s presented to me like an answer.

Tattoos climb over muscle and golden skin, dark ink shifting with every breath, across his chest, over his shoulders, down his arms in patterns I used to notice and pretended I didn’t. Up close, in his bed, with my hands allowed to go where my eyes have gone for years, he’s devastating. Solid. Beautiful. Mine in a way I’m scared to say even in my head.

I touch him with both hands before I can talk myself out of it. His breath catches, and that one sound changes something in me.

My palms skim over the hard planes of his chest, over the warm rise and fall of his breathing, over ink I’ve seen a hundred times. They’re a map I thought I knew from memory, but up close they become unfamiliar.

Skulls, flames, a phoenix, quotes, ivy vines, thorns, and snakes. Pieces disappearing beneath the waistband of his sweats, others climbing toward his throat like they’ve been trying to reach his voice for years.

I trace one curling pattern over his ribs, then another along the edge of his sternum, and my hand stops.

There, partly tucked beneath the darker ink over the left side of his chest, close enough to his heart that I almost miss it, are two small shapes worked into the design.

A rugby ball cleanly shaded and angled slightly against a football with its familiar laces marked in tiny, careful detail. The two are crossed like symbols in a crest, hidden inside the larger sweep of ink of the skull and flames behind it.

I touch the tattoo with two fingers, and Julian goes very still under my hand.

I look up. “What’s this about?”

His face changes immediately, and God, he blushes. Julian West, tattooed, unfairly gorgeous, stupidly confident when he wants to be, actually blushes while lying half naked beneath me because I found two tiny sports balls over his heart.

He looks away, jaw working. “Nothing.”