Before I even open my eyes in the morning, I’m aware that Mal is lying beside me.
If his heat wasn’t a dead giveaway, the giant erection poking into my hip is.
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, his mouth near my ear. “I’m not going to fuck you.”
It’s probably my imagination, but I could swear that sentence was followed by an unspoken Yet.
Commence hyperventilating and swallowing convulsively.
When I’ve managed to pull myself together, I whisper, “I thought you were mad at me.”
“I was. I’m over it.”
“Where have you been?”
“Why? Were you worried?”
“No. I just didn’t know what to tell Poe when he showed up looking for you.”
After a moment, he chuckles. “Liar.”
I open my eyes and immediately wish I hadn’t. Not only is he lying beside me, he’s under the covers with me. He’s naked from the waist up.
And his big hand is splayed possessively over my belly again. Underneath my shirt, pressed against my bare skin, his palm is fire. His touch burns straight down to my soul.
Jesus, take the wheel. I’m drunk driving.
Mal inhales against my hair. His voice turns husky. “You have no fucking idea what it does to me when you tremble like that.”
“Please stop saying the F word.”
“I’m enjoying your response to it too much to stop.”
“Why are you in bed with me if you’re not, um…you know.”
He says deliberately into my ear, “Going to fuck you?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. My toes curl involuntarily.
His laugh is low and pleased. “I’m in bed with you because it’s comfortable. Because I like lying next to you. Because I want to be here.”
Damn, he smells good. And he feels good, so warm and strong.
And he’s hard.
Everywhere.
He runs his thumb gently along my scar. “How’s your pain today?”
“Not as stabby. More like a dull ache.”
“Did you take your meds last night before you went to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.” After a pause, he says in a throaty voice, “Are you doing that deliberately?”
I blurt, “I can’t help it if I’m shaking!”
“It’s more like quivering. Shivering, all over.”
“If you’d stop using that tone, I’d be fine!”
“What tone?”
“That sex tone!”
He says something in Russian that sounds filthy then chuckles when my shivering grows worse.
I try to get up, but he throws his leg over mine and drags me back against him, rolling me over so my stomach is pressed to his. I tuck my head under his chin and hide my face in his chest as he laughs at me.
Stroking his hand up and down my spine, he gives me time to calm down before pressing a kiss to my neck and making me hyperventilate all over again.
He murmurs, “Why are you so skittish? I said I wasn’t going to fuck you.”
“It’s your beard.”
“What?”
“Your beard.”
He sounds confused. “What about it?”
“It tickles.”
He goes from confused to blistering hot sex god in half a second, saying gruffly, “And you’d like to feel that tickle between your thighs, wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
“Then why are you squeezing your legs together?”
“I’m not.”
His laugh is slightly breathless but extremely pleased. “Oh, yes, you are, baby.”
“I really hate it when you’re smug.”
Shaking with silent laughter, he presses his lips to my shoulder, nosing aside the neckline of my shirt to do it, making sure to drag his beard lightly across my skin. He reaches down, takes a handful of my ass, and squeezes.
Then he makes the most purely masculine sound I’ve ever heard, a chest-deep groan of pleasure.
I’m sweating. My heart is palpitating. My nipples are hard, and the throbbing between my legs is intense.
And the shivering. You’d think I was lying naked on a bed of ice!
He rolls me to my back, grips my head in his hands, looks deep into my eyes, and makes a long and passionate speech, entirely in Russian.
At the end of it, he kisses me.
Deeply.
Hungrily.
Thoroughly.
Then he rolls off me, stands, and goes into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.
He turns on the shower.
He’s in there for a long, long time.
For a full week after that, he hardly looks at me.
He sleeps sitting up in the leather chair in the corner of the bedroom every night.
He chops firewood with an axe like he’s executing condemned royalty.
He goes hunting in the woods, disappearing for hours. He returns with elk, venison, and rabbit, which he expertly skins and butchers while I watch, fascinated and grossed out.
He cooks our meals, makes the coffee, washes the dishes, tends the fires in the fireplaces, repairs a leaking sink, mops the floors, cleans his weapons, hammers a loose board on the roof, takes inventory of supplies, drives into town to restock canned goods and sundries, shovels snow off the porch, shaves under his jaw with a straight razor, fixes a sagging windowsill, and completes a dozen other tasks with such utter competence, I feel like I’m getting a master class in the art of manliness.
And every night, he bathes me.
What began as an exercise in humiliation, born out of necessity because we couldn’t get my sutures wet, changes slowly into something else.
Something intimate.
It becomes a ritual we never exchange a word about. After dinner in the evenings, when he’s cleared the dishes and I’ve brushed my teeth, he fills the tub, removes my glasses, then undresses me.
I lie naked in the warm water with my eyes closed, feeling his hands move over my body and listening to him talk.
Always, always in Russian.
The touching is sensual and deeply relaxing, but never sexual. It’s like he’s memorizing my body with his hands, mapping all my curves and angles with his fingertips, committing me to memory.
Groggy with pleasure, I lie in the tub passively as his soapy fingers slide over my skin.
Later, in bed alone, I burn.
I can’t deny my physical response to him, the way he makes me ache and tremble. And I know he wants me, too. The evidence of it is all over him. From his smoldering glances over breakfast to his clenched jaw when I stand too near to the bulge behind the fly of his jeans when he dries my body after the baths, his desire is obvious.
But he keeps it under lock and chains and throws away the key.
He doesn’t get into bed with me again.
He doesn’t say the F word again.
He especially doesn’t kiss me.
With the exception of the bath ritual, he treats me like I’m his patient. He takes a keen interest in how I’m healing, asking me every day about my pain level and making sure I’m eating enough and taking my meds, but other than that, he’s distant.
Clinical.
Cold.
I think a lot about how he said he was responsible for me since I took a bullet for him. I think about how hard he tries to keep an emotional wall between us, how he only reveals himself in a language I can’t understand.
Most of all, I think about the battle he so obviously wages with himself every time he looks at me.
He can’t reconcile what Declan did to his brother to what I did for him.
He doesn’t understand how someone he thinks should be his enemy can call him a friend.
And he’s incredibly conflicted about his desire.
He wants me, but he doesn’t want to. It’s obvious in a thousand different ways.
And slowly I begin to understand that when he answered “as long as it takes” when I asked how long he would keep me here, he meant as long as it would take for him to work it all out in his head.
I think the biggest monkey wrench in his progress is my continued refusal to beg him to let me go.
Refusal isn’t the right word.
It’s more like disinterest.
To my profound surprise, I’ve discovered that I like it here.
I like the clean air and the quiet. I like seeing a million stars at night. I like the simple rituals of meals, baths, and bedtime, of Poe knocking on the window with his beak every few days for treats.
I don’t even mind it when Mal has to leave me for hours or sometimes days to go into the city, because I’ve discovered that I like to walk alone in the woods with the sun on my face, the cold air biting my cheeks, and the satisfying crunch of frozen pine needles underfoot to keep me company.
I like the cabin that he and his dead brother built with their hands.
Most of all, I like the time I have to think.
I never did much of it before, not really. I studied and worked and spent any free time in front of a screen, distracting myself. Deadening my feelings.
Some people eat when they’re depressed. Some people drink, or do drugs, or have sex with strangers. The way I dealt with emotional pain was by feeding myself a steady diet of social media and video games and pretending it wasn’t there.
It seems so obvious now.
I was lonely.
In a city of nearly a million people, I always felt alone.
But here, in the middle of nowhere with only a crow and a killer for company, I don’t feel alone.
I feel safe.
I feel content.
I feel, some days, like that bullet was the best thing to ever happen to me.
“I’ll be gone overnight.”
I look up from my scrambled eggs. Mal sits across the table from me, looking at his plate, pushing food around on it with his fork.
“Overnight?”
He nods. “I’m leaving right after breakfast.”
“Okay.”
He glances up at me. In the morning light, he’s breathtaking. His pale eyes are the color of fine jade.
“How’s your pain?”
I smile. He asks me the same thing every morning. “Pretty much gone, unless I try to lift something.”
His dark brows draw together into a frown. “Why would you try to lift something? You should ask me.”
That makes me smile wider. “It’s good for me to push myself.”
His frown deepens to a scowl. “No, it’s not. You could get hurt.”
I hold his gaze for a beat, then say softly, “Bending over to pick something up isn’t nearly as dangerous as what you do.”
“I’m a professional. You’re injured. They’re two completely different things.”
His tone is tight. I inspect his face for a moment. It’s tight, too, as are his shoulders.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Since when do you lie to me?”
He snaps, “Since I’m your kidnapper.”
He’s in a foul mood, but I don’t know what set him off. I put my fork down, lean back in my chair, and take him in.
“Stop staring at me.” He shovels a forkful of eggs into his mouth.
“Why are you upset, Mal?”
“I’m not.”
He chews angrily. I can practically hear him crushing his molars together.
“Okay. Except you are. Did I do something?”
He swallows, looking at me with blazing eyes and a set jaw. “Why haven’t you asked me to take you home?”
This again. As if I have a logical answer. “Would you if I did?”
That seems to make him even angrier. “That wasn’t my question.”
“I know. It was mine.”
He stares at me, breathing audibly. Looking as if he’s only controlling himself through a great deal of willpower, he says, “Spider is still in Moscow.”
Startled by the news, I remain silent.
“I saw him. I drugged him. I threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave. He stayed anyway. Do you know what that means?”
My heart jumps into my throat. I put my hand over my chest and stare at him in horror. “You drugged him? Why?”
Mal shakes his head in frustration and ignores my question. “It means he won’t leave without you, even though he’s risking his life. He doesn’t care that he’s risking his life, understand?”
He’s trying to make a point, but I don’t know what it is. “That’s his job. He risks his life all the time, on Declan’s orders.”
“I don’t think this was Declan’s doing. I think it was his own decision. And I think there’s a lot more than guilt motivating him.”
“My head is spinning. What are you saying?”
“I’m saying why the fuck are you not begging me to take you to Spider right now and let him take you home? He’s your friend, according to you. I suspect he wants to be much more than that. He’s from your world. He’s part of your family. He cares for you. Yet here you sit, with me. Why?”
I look at his beautiful face. I look at his beautiful eyes. I think of all the ways this killer has proven himself to be so much more than that. All the ways he’s denied himself what he wants, including—so far—revenge for the murder of his brother.
And the truth just comes out.
“Because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
His lips part. His pupils dilate. He stares at me, motionless.
Then he looks away and swallows, hard. He exhales and says gruffly, “If you don’t go back with him, he dies. I’ll kill him.”
“You’re not going to hurt him.”
“Yes, I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
He looks at me again, and his eyes burn with anger. “Goddammit! You’re not listening to me!”
“Yes, I am, but you’re lying. Because you know that if you hurt Spider, I’ll never forgive you. And no matter how much you try to tell yourself that shouldn’t make a difference, it does.”
Infuriated, he stares at me in crackling silence.
Feeling daring, I add softly, “And we both know why.”
He jolts to his feet, flattens his hands on the table, and leans over it, glaring at me. “If you think I care about you, you’re wrong.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. You’re only here because I’m punishing Declan.”
“Okay.”
His voice rises. “You’re nothing but a means to an end. You’re part of my plan. This”—he waves a hand between us—“isn’t anything. It’s nothing. You mean zero to me.”
I look down at my hands then back up at him. I say quietly, “Okay.”
His temper snaps. He shouts, “Why do you keep agreeing with me?”
“Because we both know you’re full of shit, so arguing would be pointless.”
He stares at me. A vein throbs in his temple. Then he straightens abruptly and stalks out of the kitchen.
I sit in my chair, listening to him storm around the cabin, stomping from room to room. After several minutes, the front door slams.
Now I’m alone, wondering if I’ve just signed Spider’s death warrant.
You never know what a trained assassin will do when he loses his temper.
I jump up and run out to the front porch. Mal is nowhere in sight in the meadow, so I run around the side of the cabin, stumbling in my haste. I’ve never seen where he parks his car—there’s no barn or detached garage within sight—but it must be nearby, hidden somewhere in the trees.
When I regain my footing and look up, ready to sprint into the woods, my heart drops. I suck in a terrified breath and freeze.
A bear stands motionless ten feet way, its attention focused on me.
It’s an adult. I can tell by the sheer size of the thing. It must weigh eight hundred pounds.
Its head is a massive wedge shape. Its fur is a glossy dark brown. If it stood up on its hind legs, it would tower several feet over me.
It makes a terrifying chuffing sound, a low grunt of aggression. It lowers its head, clacks its teeth, and pounds a huge paw against the ground.
Shaking in fear and badly hyperventilating, I take one careful step backward.
The bear watches with hostile black eyes as I take another step.
Then it lunges.
