“Okay,” She whispers. “I trust you.”
Those three words break something loose inside me.
I wrap my arms around her and hold her there, breathing her in, trying to calm the storm raging in my chest.
She’s safe. She’s here. She’s mine.
For now, that has to be enough.
After a long moment, she pulls back and looks up at me with flushed cheeks and tangled hair.
“I think...” She pauses, biting her lip. “I think I need to cool off. Can I take a bath?”
“Cool off? It’s ten degrees, Lumi.”
A bath?
Right. Because we were seconds away from consummating the bond against a tree, and now her body is screaming for relief in a completely different way.
“It may be ten degrees, snow-boy, but I am melting.”
I nod stiffly, “Of course. I’ll get the water going for you.”
She smiles and heads toward the bathroom. Saevel scampers after her.
But I can’t shake the feeling that whatever was out in the forest...isn’t done yet.
40
Lumi-
The ride back from the forest was... intense. My thighs are still twitching from the effort it took to stay on top of him, aching from more than just the strain of gripping his shifted form.
I can still feel the way his muscles bunched and rolled beneath me—how every stride of his massive legs vibrated straight through my bones. Every time he growled, the sound rumbled through my lap and up my spine. He didn‘t just get us home—he lit a fuse I didn’t know I had.
The bathroom feels like it’s a bajillion degrees. Andrik whirls around me with quiet tenderness, his massive frame somehow graceful despite the cramped space. He tests the water with a clawed hand, adjusting the temperature until the steam blooms in soft clouds along the ceiling.
My skin feels two sizes too small. There’s a low hum pulsing in my center, like I’m standing too close to a live wire. I’m not just ‘hot’ anymore. I’m burning from the inside out, and I’m pretty sure if his eyes roam over my body one more time, I’m actually going to catch fire.
“Lumi?”
I blink. He’s watching me, one brow raised, a small glass bottle of light purple liquid in his hand.
“Sorry, what?”
His expression softens. “I asked if Lavender was alright, for the bath.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s... that’s perfect.”
Except it’s not perfect. Railing me on the forest floor would be perfect.
He uncorks the bottle and pours a few drops of the liquid into the water. The calming scent hits me immediately, but unless Jesus Christ himself made that oil, it’s not going to soothe a single part of me.
He reaches for another bottle, this one filled with chunky white crystals.
“Epsom salt,” he murmurs, pouring a generous amount into the tub. “For your muscles. You walked all day in the cold.”
I watch his hands flex, like every action is a small act of devotion. My chest tightens... and so does something else.
