If after … how long had he waited by her side, nothing covering his lean, powerful body, as he watched her sleep?
Heat that had nothing to do with the bath flooded her lower abdomen. She watched Julian from under lowered lashesas he stepped into the pool, entirely bare. There was something draconic about him even in this form, something deliciously dangerous and inhuman in the long lines of his body.
He turned to face her, and she opened her eyes wide as though she had been staring at him blatantly the whole time. A challenge.
He was being too gentle. She didn’t trust it.
Or was the truth that she didn’twantto trust it? Every second she spent with Julian, every time she reminded herself that no matter what fate wanted, there should not,couldnot be anything between them, she convinced herself less. She knew him too well, now.
And the better she knew him, the more she wanted him.
Amusement glinted in his eyes and pinched the corners of his mouth. “These herbs aid shifter healing,” he said, sprinkling what looked like branches of pale rosemary into the water. A sharp, delicate scent filled the air. Not rosemary. Nothing she’d ever smelled before. “Lie back. Let me see your arm.”
The edge of the pool was curved, a comfortable pillow for her to lean against. She watched Julian gather cloth and soap from a compartment in the wall above one side of the pool. The water reached his ribs. It lapped greedily against his skin.
No. Francine closed her eyes, just briefly, but couldn’t keep them that way. She opened them again, unable to tear her attention away from the dragon in human form stalking towards her. The water wasn’t greedy. She was. She wanted to touch him like that, to slide her mouth over him. To lick him from neck to cock.
She must have lost a lot of blood for her mind to be wandering like this.
“Can you hold out your arm?” His voice was coolly professional. She gritted her teeth.
“Like th—aah.” She bit off a gasp of pain.
“That’s fine.” Julian supported her arm, and she relaxed, letting the water and the marble bath hold her. And him. Her mate.
Oh god, her mate. Every time she thought it, it hit her anew.
He washed her arm—she didn’t want to thinkher wound, didn’t want to remember the torn mess of flesh and skin—with gentle, careful strokes. The soap had the same soft-sharp scent as the herbs he’d put in the water. Her eyes began to close.
But not to leave Julian. She watched his face as he tended to her. His expression was not quite carefully blank; there was an intense focus, a carefulness, that made her heart flutter.
“You’re healing faster than you did from my claws,” he said. “Are you … feeling better?”
Her lioness flicked an ear at the question. Despite herself, despite everything, Francine smiled. “Yes. The distance between my lioness and I … I’m feeling better. I’ve been poisoned, and shot, and my best friend is—” She broke off before her voice fractured. “But my lioness is back. I’m healing. Even if—” She winced. “Not fast enough.”
“It’s been less than a day.”
“One day less until Eloise and her pack get here.”
“Hmm.” Julian placed the washcloths in a bowl at the side of the pool. Her eyes flinched away from them. “Are you still noticing the effects of the dragonsbane?”
“How would I tell?”
“I don’t know. If you were a dragon, you would be comatose. Or dead. The after-effects are somewhat limited in that case.”
Her jaw tensed—more out of habit than actual reaction to what he was saying, she realized. His words were cool and light, and whenever he spoke like that, he was hiding something.
“I’m exhausted, and my arm hurts, but other than that, there’s nothing.” She hesitated a moment to make sure that was true. To her slight surprise, it was. The clinging, sick feeling from before was gone. “Good. We know what to do if they try that again.”
“You willnotput yourself between me and—”
“You’d rather we both die?”
His eyes widened with alarm, their icy green mingling with a darker, oilier color. His dragon.
She reached out without thinking, her fingertips brushing the delicate skin beneath his eye.
“You said dragonsbane kills dragons. All it did to me was make me feel sick. I’ll take that over watching you die and then seeing the walls close in around me.” She stared directly into his eyes. “I will put myself between you and whatever we come up against, if it means that.”
