I'm still working through the logistics — bare feet on concrete, the distance to the elevator — when he opens the doorand picks me up. Both arms, no warning, lifting me against his chest easily.
My arms go around his neck. They just go there.
He carries me through the parking garage — fluorescent light honest and indifferent overhead. His shirt is smooth and warm against my bare side.
The elevator opens.
Inside, the mirrors.
I see us from every angle: him in the dark shirt with his hair slightly disordered from the forest, and me, bare, pressed against him, my face close to his throat. The image is more arresting than I expected. Not because of the nakedness, though there's that. Because of how I'm held — the security of it, the deliberateness. In every mirror I look like a woman being carried by a man who intends to keep her. I have leaf debris in my hair and the forest still on my skin and I don't mind at all.
The elevator ascends.
He carries me into the penthouse. Through the main room. Past the dining table where my sketchbook sits open. Into the bathroom. He sets me down on the marble counter and stands in front of me, his eyes still doing that thing they were doing in the car.
He turns the shower on. Adjusts the temperature carefully — too hot first, then better. He turns back to me and starts undressing himself. Methodical. The cufflinks first, set on the counter beside me. The shirt next, the buttons one at a time, the fabric coming off and being folded over the towel rack with a precision that strikes me as funny under the circumstances. He's stripping after the forest and he's folding his shirt.
Then the trousers, the belt looped and placed on top of the folded shirt, and he's standing naked in front of me, the steam beginning to fog the mirror, the gauze on his hands gone — when did that happen? Earlier, in the car, while I wasn't looking — andthe scars I've already mapped catching the bathroom light like topography.
He lifts me down off the counter and walks me into the shower with him.
He steps into the shower beside me and reaches for the soap.
He starts with my shoulders. Both hands, working the lather into my skin with even, thorough pressure. My arms next, the inside of my wrists, my palms. He turns me to reach my back, and the drag of his hands down my spine is careful and warm and makes my chest ache. He works down, thorough, deliberate, washing the forest off me — the mud, the sweat, the evidence of what happened in that clearing.
His hands move between my thighs and I exhale sharply, not because it's sexual, though it is, but because it's tender. The care of it. Being cleaned by someone who did this to you, who chased you through the dark and caught you and fucked you against the earth, now washing you with both hands like you're something worth preserving.
When he's done he holds the soap out to me.
I take it.
My hands find his chest first — familiar ground — and then move outward. I wash him slowly, learning what the light reveals. The scars emerge under my palms one by one. The thin lines on his forearms, faded but there. The puckered mark on his shoulder that I've pressed my lips to. I trace each one. Store each one. My hands move lower — his stomach, the cut of muscle there — and his breathing changes when I reach his hips. Deepens.
I keep going. My hands, the soap, the hot water. Him.
He's half-hard already. I wrap a soapy hand around his cock and wash him there too, slowly, without performance — just thorough, just care — and he makes a sound at the back ofhis throat. Low and involuntary and nothing like the controlled sounds he usually makes. His hand finds my shoulder. Grips it.
"Wren." Just my name. Just that.
"I know," I say.
The washing becomes something else so gradually I can't find the seam.
My hand, which had the soap and then didn't, is still moving on him. He's fully hard now, his cock thick and hot in my grip, and his eyes are open and on mine with an expression I have no previous experience with — not the predator's focus, not the assessing blue gaze. Something stripped of all of that. Just him.
He gently pushes my back against the glass.
But he doesn't take me immediately. His hands move over me first — one sliding up my throat, tipping my chin, his thumb tracing my jaw while the other hand finds my breast, my nipple already stiff, and rolls it between his fingers until I make a sound against his palm. He watches my face while he does it. Learning me in reverse, the way I learned him.
"Master," I breathe.
He makes that sound again, and I decide I want to hear it every day.
His chest moves. Something shifts in his expression.
His fingers slide between my thighs and find me already slick, still tender from the forest, and I gasp at the contact — two fingers pushing inside me while his thumb finds my clit, and the sound I make echoes off the tile. My hips roll forward instinctively, chasing the pressure, and his mouth curves at the corner. Not the predator's smile. Something quieter and more devastating.
"You're still wet from being hunted," he says, low, against my temple.
