Page 45 of Ruthless Bond

He looks at me. His eyes are still gold.

“Shower,” he agrees.

The shower in his bathroom is enormous, tiled in dark stone, with a rainfall showerhead the size of a dinner plate. The hot water hits my skin and I moan in a way that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the fact that every muscle I own is sore. He steps in behind me. His hands find my shoulders and he turns me around and my back meets the cool tile and his mouth meets mine and we were supposed to be getting clean.

We don’t get clean. Not right away.

For a while, he just holds me under the water. My legs are still unsteady, so one of his arms stays wrapped around my waist while the other reaches for the soap. There’s no urgency in him now. No sharp edge. He works the lather slowly over my shoulders, down my arms, across my back, his hands gentler than I knew they could be.

When he turns me toward him, I expect that intensity in his eyes again. Instead, he looks at me like he’s checking for damage. His fingers skim carefully around the bite mark at my shoulder.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

His jaw tightens.

“It’s okay.”

His gaze lifts to mine, and I know immediately he doesn’t believe that answer is enough.

He rinses the soap from my skin with one hand cupped beneath the spray, guiding the water where he wants it instead of letting it hit the mark directly. Then he washes my hair, slow and careful, his fingers working through the strands with a tenderness that almost feels more intimate than everything we just did.

I close my eyes and let him. Because I didn’t know a man like Dominic Voronov could touch anyone like this.

We dry off. We put on enough clothing to be decent, which in his case means sweatpants and nothing else and in my case means one of his shirts that falls to mid-thigh and smells like him so strongly that the pull in my chest settles into a warm, satisfied hum.

We eat the lamb cold, standing at the kitchen counter, and it’s still the best thing I’ve ever tasted. He watches me eat with an expression that manages to be simultaneously possessive and soft, and I catch him looking at the bite mark on my neck every few seconds, his gaze returning to it over and over.

“Stop staring at it,” I say.

“I can’t.”

I glance down at the mark. “You know, most men just leave hickeys.”

One corner of his mouth lifts.

“I’ve never been accused of being like most men.”

I snort. “Clearly.”

We finish dinner. We go back to bed. He pulls me against his chest, my back to his front, his arm around my waist, and his mouth finds the mark on my neck and rests there. His body is finally still. The vibration that’s been running through him all night, the low-frequency hum of the wolf at the surface, has quieted into something barely perceptible, a faint tremor that I feel only where his skin touches mine.

I close my eyes. The double heartbeat in my chest is synchronized now, mine and his beating together, and the sensation is so calming, so deeply and inexplicably right, that sleep takes me before I can think about what it means.

The last thing I register is his breath against the wound on my neck, warm and slow and steady.

And the word he whispers into my skin, so quiet I almost miss it.

“Mine.”

Chapter Nineteen

Dominic

She’s sleeping in my bed with my mark on her neck and my heartbeat sealed inside her chest and I have never felt more like an alpha in my life.

I don’t move. I lie behind her with my arm around her waist and my mouth against the wound I made, tasting the copper of her blood and the salt of her skin. I listen to the bond settle into permanence, the last restless movement inside it going still.