When You're Ready by Britni Danielle Read Free Book Online

front of her to block his view.
    I felt her finger trace the back of my arm and I flinched. Her touch sent an electric surge to my groin.
    “Sorry,” she said, sheepishly. “It’s just…you have a lot of tattoos.”
    I turned around and studied her face to see if my tats turned her off, but she had that same wonderful wide-eyed look like the first time I saw her.
    “Yeah, it’s pretty addictive.”
    “How many do you have?” she asked, still studying my arm.
    “I dunno. I stopped counting a while ago.”
    She ran her finger across the ink on my collarbone, setting my whole body on fire. I swallowed hard and hoped she didn’t notice the bulge pushing against my jeans.
    “Did they hurt?”
    “A little bit,” I whispered, afraid anything louder would give away my thoughts. I wanted to throw Nola over my shoulder, race to my house, and climb inside her.  
    She fingered a long scar on my forearm. “What happened here?”
    I gulped, burning at the lightness of her touch. “Fell off a motorcycle.”
    She winced, and then gently touched the scar on my forehead. “And here?”
    “Got it in a fight,” I said, struggling to control the yearning coursing through my frame.
    Instead of being disgusted, Nola looked at me with soft eyes and like I was a real person, not Scout Clayborne multimillionaire, or Scout Clayborne serial fuckup. To my surprise, she wasn’t repulsed when she looked at my tats and scars; instead she seemed intrigued. Of course, this just made me want to live between her thighs for the rest of my fucking life.
    “I always wanted to get a tattoo, but I was always too scared,” she chuckled, pulling me out of my thoughts.
    I cleared my throat and tried to quell my desire. “Oh yeah? What kind? A butterfly? A heart? Something girly?”
    She shook her head and grinned. “No. A bird. The Sankofa bird actually.”
    “The what?”
    “It’s an African symbol. My dad, he’s Black. He was this Jamaican guy who was deep into African things, which is funny considering he married my mom,” she giggled.
    “I don’t get it.”
    “My mom is White. She’s this stunning, all-American blonde woman from Michigan, and my dad grew up in the slums of Kingston. It was an unlikely match,” she shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve always loved the Sankofa bird. There are a bunch of different designs, but the one I wanted is this bird with big, pretty wings, and its head is facing backward toward the past.”
    She paused for a moment, and I didn’t dare say anything for fear she would stop talking. I wanted to know everything about her, wanted to hear every piece of her parents’ unlikely love story, hoping it would help us have one of our own.
    “There’s a saying my father taught me,” she said, picking up her thoughts again. “It says, ‘It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.’ When I was little I used to wonder what it meant. Now, I think I understand.”
    “Oh yeah? What do you think it means?”
    “I think it means we can fix the past in a way.”
    “How so?” I asked, hoping she was right. I’d been through so many things growing up that had left me scarred, suspicious of people, and scared to love. I hoped I could go back and patch things up because I really liked Nola, and for the first time ever, I wanted to love her…and I wanted—no, needed—her to love me back.
    “Well, we can’t change the past, obviously, but we can learn from it, and then let it go. And we can make sure we don’t carry the bad stuff into the future,” she shrugged, “But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?”
    “Definitely,” I said, wondering if Nola was reading my mind. “So, your parents are still together?” I asked, hoping to change the subject to something happier.
    “No.” Her face fell. “My father died when I was 10.”
    Fuck . The very last thing I wanted to do was cause Nola any pain, and in the first 10 minutes I’d struck a serious nerve. Her eyes got misty and I