Savage Hearts (Queens & Monsters #3)(62)

“Please stop saying the F word.”

“I’m enjoying your response to it too much to stop.”

“Why are you in bed with me if you’re not, um…you know.”

He says deliberately into my ear, “Going to fuck you?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. My toes curl involuntarily.

His laugh is low and pleased. “I’m in bed with you because it’s comfortable. Because I like lying next to you. Because I want to be here.”

Damn, he smells good. And he feels good, so warm and strong.

And he’s hard.

Everywhere.

He runs his thumb gently along my scar. “How’s your pain today?”

“Not as stabby. More like a dull ache.”

“Did you take your meds last night before you went to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl.” After a pause, he says in a throaty voice, “Are you doing that deliberately?”

I blurt, “I can’t help it if I’m shaking!”

“It’s more like quivering. Shivering, all over.”

“If you’d stop using that tone, I’d be fine!”

“What tone?”

“That sex tone!”

He says something in Russian that sounds filthy then chuckles when my shivering grows worse.

I try to get up, but he throws his leg over mine and drags me back against him, rolling me over so my stomach is pressed to his. I tuck my head under his chin and hide my face in his chest as he laughs at me.

Stroking his hand up and down my spine, he gives me time to calm down before pressing a kiss to my neck and making me hyperventilate all over again.

He murmurs, “Why are you so skittish? I said I wasn’t going to fuck you.”

“It’s your beard.”

“What?”

“Your beard.”

He sounds confused. “What about it?”

“It tickles.”

He goes from confused to blistering hot sex god in half a second, saying gruffly, “And you’d like to feel that tickle between your thighs, wouldn’t you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you squeezing your legs together?”

“I’m not.”

His laugh is slightly breathless but extremely pleased. “Oh, yes, you are, baby.”

“I really hate it when you’re smug.”

Shaking with silent laughter, he presses his lips to my shoulder, nosing aside the neckline of my shirt to do it, making sure to drag his beard lightly across my skin. He reaches down, takes a handful of my ass, and squeezes.

Then he makes the most purely masculine sound I’ve ever heard, a chest-deep groan of pleasure.

I’m sweating. My heart is palpitating. My nipples are hard, and the throbbing between my legs is intense.

And the shivering. You’d think I was lying naked on a bed of ice!

He rolls me to my back, grips my head in his hands, looks deep into my eyes, and makes a long and passionate speech, entirely in Russian.

At the end of it, he kisses me.

Deeply.

Hungrily.

Thoroughly.

Then he rolls off me, stands, and goes into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

He turns on the shower.

He’s in there for a long, long time.





For a full week after that, he hardly looks at me.

He sleeps sitting up in the leather chair in the corner of the bedroom every night.

He chops firewood with an axe like he’s executing condemned royalty.

He goes hunting in the woods, disappearing for hours. He returns with elk, venison, and rabbit, which he expertly skins and butchers while I watch, fascinated and grossed out.

He cooks our meals, makes the coffee, washes the dishes, tends the fires in the fireplaces, repairs a leaking sink, mops the floors, cleans his weapons, hammers a loose board on the roof, takes inventory of supplies, drives into town to restock canned goods and sundries, shovels snow off the porch, shaves under his jaw with a straight razor, fixes a sagging windowsill, and completes a dozen other tasks with such utter competence, I feel like I’m getting a master class in the art of manliness.

And every night, he bathes me.

What began as an exercise in humiliation, born out of necessity because we couldn’t get my sutures wet, changes slowly into something else.

Something intimate.

It becomes a ritual we never exchange a word about. After dinner in the evenings, when he’s cleared the dishes and I’ve brushed my teeth, he fills the tub, removes my glasses, then undresses me.

I lie naked in the warm water with my eyes closed, feeling his hands move over my body and listening to him talk.

Always, always in Russian.

The touching is sensual and deeply relaxing, but never sexual. It’s like he’s memorizing my body with his hands, mapping all my curves and angles with his fingertips, committing me to memory.

Groggy with pleasure, I lie in the tub passively as his soapy fingers slide over my skin.

Later, in bed alone, I burn.

I can’t deny my physical response to him, the way he makes me ache and tremble. And I know he wants me, too. The evidence of it is all over him. From his smoldering glances over breakfast to his clenched jaw when I stand too near to the bulge behind the fly of his jeans when he dries my body after the baths, his desire is obvious.