“Hey, hey, stop that. You need sleep, and so do I. Also, reading my mind is cheating,” she pointed out. She slipped from his grip and turned the shower off.
“I wasn’t reading your mind. It shouted it at me,” Bas said, a hungry look in his eyes as he stared at her, wet and dripping.
“Focus, Bas,” she teased. Bridget was tired but was secretly pleased that he liked the way she looked. She didn’t give much thought to how other people viewed her. Bas wasn’t other people.
They toweled off and climbed into bed, naked. It was another kind of intimacy that Bridget never explored because she thought it would make her too vulnerable. She was safe with Bas. She knew that down to her bones. He wrapped his arm around her, and she rested her head on his chest.
Bridget was almost asleep when Bas murmured, “Bridget? I love you too.”
31
Bas was disorientated when he woke later in the day. His days and sleep patterns had been smashed to bits in the past weeks, and it was starting to get to him.
Slay the monster. Get the girl. Win the sleep routine back, he told himself.
Bas did a body scan, and despite the agony of shifting the night before, he felt suspiciously good. He would have to get Apollo to check him out in case the dragon shifting had kicked off some kind of healing ability. He needed to experiment with shifting back and forward as well. He remembered parts of being a dragon and not others, and that worried him.
Bridget was his constant. She was what the dragon had focused on most the previous night. It had let him share their mind when she had begged him to come back to being human, and that had led him back to himself. Shifting back into a human hadn’t hurt at all.
Bridget was still lying curled up beside him. She hadn’t run from his dragon or after it. She had looked after him. Cooked for him. Made sure he had showered.
He would have rejected anyone else helping him when he had been so vulnerable. Bridget was different. His mate caring for him unlocked a yearning in him he didn’t know existed. He had spent so long looking after everybody else that he had forgotten what it was like to have somebody return the favor.
Bas stared at Bridget. The smooth brown curve of her back, the way her shoulder met her neck, and at their junction, the marking bruise that claimed she was his.
He had to tell her. It was getting to a point where he couldn’t avoid it for much longer. She had said the previous night that she loved him. Maybe she would accept him as her mate after all.
As if sensing that she was being watched, Bridget murmured in her sleep and rolled over.
“Morning. Or afternoon? I can’t tell anymore,” she said with a yawn. “How are you feeling?”
Bas placed one of his big hands on the curve of her hip. “Grateful to be waking up next to you. Eager to show my thanks for how well you treated me last night.”
Bridget’s eyes widened. “Oh? And how do you plan on doing that?”
Bas’s hand traveled up her rib cage to cup her breast. “I thought I would start by eating your pussy until you come on my face and then watch you ride my cock until you come on it as well. Just for starters.”
“All of that before coffee?” Bridget said, a teasing smile starting on her lips.
Bas’s thumb brushed over her nipple. “You know that as soon as we leave this room, it will be on. We will have to deal with the family and then go out to the Ironwood estate to plan how we are going to corner and kill the Brollachan. There won’t be a moment’s peace before it’s done.”
“When you put it like that.” Bridget reached up and patted his cheek. “Don’t you have a pussy to eat?”
Bas nipped at her fingers, making her giggle, and damn if that wasn’t the greatest sound ever. He doubted many people had been blessed to see this side of Bridget, and he wanted to keep it all to himself.
He didn’t think he would ever get enough of the taste of her skin, the feel of its softness against him. Bas loved her breasts and every sound Bridget made when he sucked and teased them into hard buds.
Bas noticed his senses were heightened even more since the shift. He knew because he could smell her musky, sweet arousal already building in between her thighs. He teased his fingers through her wetness, adding a little pressure on her clit.
“Fucckk,” Bridget groaned, her hands tightening on his forearm.
Bas took it as a sign to do it again. “Never going to tire of making you come. You squirm so sweetly.”
“Shut up,” she said, throwing an arm over her red face. “It’s completely unfair that you can wreck me so easily.”
Bas kissed his way over her stomach. “Wrecking you is my new favorite hobby, little hawk.”
She looked up to glare at him, and Bas took that moment to make full eye contact and lick her pussy. Bridget’s eyes rolled back in her head, her fingers twining in his curls and tugging him where she wanted him.
