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I spent years thinking a bond would feel like a cage closing in on me. Like a lock sliding into place. Like losing the last piece of myself I had fought so hard to keep.

But this doesn’t feel like that at all.

It feels like a door opening.

It feels like Nash’s mouth on my wrist and his hand careful at my injured shoulder and the weight of his gaze asking instead of assuming.

It feels like choice.

Mine.

And it feels like the thing protecting me rather than exposing me to heartache. It feels good to let myself be protected at last. Especially by someone like Nash Cross.

I cup his face with my good hand and kiss him again.

This time, there is nothing slow about it.

He groans into my mouth, and the sound lights me up from the inside. His hands move over me with careful hunger, one at my waist, the other braced along my back where he can hold me without hurting my shoulder. He knows exactly where I’m injured. Exactly where to be gentle.

Which only makes the rest of him feel more dangerous.

I push at his shirt. “Off.”

He obeys fast enough that I almost laugh.

Almost.

Then his shirt is gone, and I’m staring at a whole lot of bare Nash. Warm skin, hard muscle, bruises already fading from Ramsey’s claws, and the dark marks at his throat where he came way too close to dying today.

Something inside me goes sharp.

I touch the bruising with trembling fingers.

His breath catches.

“I’m okay,” he says.

“You’d better stay that way.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yes.”

His smile turns wicked. “Yes, ma’am. Any other orders you want to give me?”

“You’d better already understand the assignment,” I say.

He grins. “Oh, I understand perfectly.”

He runs his hand over the part of me that aches for him most. Then he stops. Like a fucking tease. And because he’s an asshole, because he knows exactly what that does to me, because apparently my future husband has a death wish and excellent instincts, I kiss him hard enough to shut both of us up.

He stands with me in his arms; one smooth motion that makes me gasp and clutch at his shoulders. My legs lock around his waist before I decide to put them there.

His hands flex under my ass as he walks, and my breath catches at the pleasure of it.

Echo makes a sharp chitter from somewhere behind us.

“Absolutely not,” I call over Nash’s shoulder. “Stay out here.”