He must have read it in my face because his expression softened.
"You're safe with me," he said, and there was something in his voice that made my chest tight. "I need sleep to heal. And forcing scared females isn't my style."
"I'm not scared," I said automatically.
The look he gave me called me a liar without saying a word.
My cheeks burned. "I'm not—"
"It's okay." He lowered his hand slightly but didn't drop it. "It's okay to be scared. After what you've been through." His jaw tightened. "But I meant what I said earlier. I will never hurt you."
The absolute certainty in his voice broke something loose in my chest.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I approached. Each step felt like a decision I couldn't take back. The mattress dipped slightly when I sat on the edge, as far from him as I could manage while still technically being on the bed.
He made a sound that might have been amusement. "I don't bite."
"You have fangs."
"I have fangs," he agreed and made a soft sound that sounded like the beginning of a chuckle. "But I don't use them on unwilling females."
The word "unwilling" hung in the air between us, heavy with implication. Suggesting there might be willing ones. Suggesting that under different circumstances...
I shoved the thought away.
"Just go to sleep," I said, lying down with my back to him, curling into myself at the edge of the bed.
For a moment, there was only silence.
Then I felt the mattress shift as he settled back down, felt the warmth of his body even though we weren't touching, and the strange safety of knowing he was there—this massive, powerful creature who'd promised to protect me.
"Merrilee?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For the stitches."
Something in my throat went tight. "You're welcome."
Silence again. The kind that should've been awkward but somehow wasn't. It was just sleeping. People slept next to each other all the time.
Except this wasn't "people." This was an alien warrior who'd won me in a fight. This was a male whose body I'd been cataloging and fantasizing about for the last several minutes. This was someone I barely knew, in a prison planet city where trust could get you killed.
Heat radiated from his body like a furnace. I felt it even with the gap between us—a living warmth that seemed to reach across the distance and wrap around me. The room wasn't cold, but I found myself drawn to that heat anyway, my body responding to it on some primal level I didn't want to examine.
I lay rigid on my back, staring at the ceiling, hyperaware of every breath he took. The rise and fall of his chest. The softsound of air moving through his lungs. The occasional shift of muscle as he settled deeper into sleep.
His scent surrounded me. That clean, masculine smell I'd noticed earlier, but stronger now. More intimate. It filled my lungs with every breath, and made my head swim.
I told myself to ignore it. To just go to sleep.
But sleep felt impossible. My entire body was strung tight as a wire, every nerve ending firing with awareness.
I turned my head slightly, just enough to see him in my peripheral vision.
In sleep, he looked different. Less intimidating. The hard edges of his face had softened, and without those intense golden eyes watching me, I could study him without feeling exposed.
I saw the fresh bruises blooming across his ribs. The stitches I'd put in his chest. The split in his lip that had finally stopped bleeding, the swelling and bruising surrounding his eye.
