I let out a soft laugh at the worry in her expression. “You can’t hide anything, you know that? I’m fine.”
“I heard you had to get treated.”
“I just got my arm twisted bad—nothing to worry about. I’ll be healed up by tomorrow.”
She pressed my lips together, as if she didn’t care for the answer. She always worried too much, always felt I was too cavalier about my own safety. While she rarely tried to lecture me much, she was too honest to hide her feelings from her face.
And a pathetic part of me really liked that worry.
I let out a soft sigh. “You really are worried, aren’t you?” He held out his hand. “Come here.”
She crossed around to my side of the desk, and I pulled her into my lap with a quick grab of her wrist. I held her tight, letting her hear the steady beat of my heart to reassure her.
“You’re about the only person in the world that worries about me,” I said, my arm wrapped around her, my hand on her hip. “Everyone else is, at best, indifferent and more often terrified of me. You though? You not only don’t fear me, you actually worry about me.”
I caught her chin and pulled her in, taking her lips in an aggressive kiss. Then again, I wasn’t ever gentle. If she wanted softness and romance, she needed to get that from someone else. From that first night when I’d crawled into her bed and we’d had what could only be described as desperate hate sex, I’d always touched her with a passion I couldn’t hope to hide.
I wasn’t rough because I didn’t care about her, but because I did, because I couldn’t help it, because I needed her so much I couldn’t control myself around her.
And for the first time, I trusted someone enough to accept me entirely, even the difficult parts, even the violence that was so much a part of me, a part others had always rejected.
And she gave in to me as she always did, somehow using her sweetness to stand against my darker urges.
When I went to pull her even closer, I winced. I tried to hide it, but Hera wasfartoo observant.
She pulled back and zeroed her gaze in on my side.
“It’s nothing,” I assured her.
She leaned away to grasp the hem of my shirt and pull it up, finding the large bruise across my side that I’d tried to hide from her. When she met my gaze again, she lifted my eyebrow to ask me,‘You call that nothing?’
“I’ll heal by tomorrow. It’s just a bruise.”
The look on her face melted me. It was so damned earnest. Despite the power she wielded—both due to her powers and because of her position at Larkwood—she never let it go to her head. It hadn’t twisted her, made her cruel and uncaring as it so often did to people.
Instead, she had this expression of guilt, as if each scratch and mark on me were a failure she had to claim and carry with her. She wanted so badly to protect those around her, even when we weren’t people who needed much protection.
Just how was I supposed to deal with that? She crawled under my skin, an attack I couldn’t even hope to resist or stand against.
I let out a soft laugh at just how whipped I really was. “You look tired. Maybe we should just relax for a bit, hmm?”
She gave me a look that said she thought I was an idiot. I didn’t even need her to move her hands for me to guess what her thoughts were.You’re the one with a bruise the size of Texas and you say I need a rest?
Even still, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against my chest, reveling in the way she fit there perfectly. She was warm and soft and sweet—all things I’d been denied most of my life. The movement aggravated my shoulder and my side, but fuck it, I didn’t care. She soothed and healed me more than any amount of rest ever could.
“You work too hard,” I whispered. “I know you’ve got a lot to do, but you need to take care of yourself, too.”
She pressed her finger against my side—not hard enough to really hurt but enough to remind me of the injury and make her point.Back at you.
I snorted softly and tightened my arms around her. “Fair point. Of course, I’m still pretty damned careful. I didn’t used to be because what was the point? What the fuck did it matter if something happened to me? Now, though? I’ve got something worth coming back to, so I’m very cautious.”
I wasn’t the type of man to give declarations of love, so she’d better enjoy this rare moment of honesty from me. My life before her hadn’t meant much of anything beyond trying to keep Knox and I alive. Looking back, I wondered if I wasn’t reckless on purpose, as if I were just looking for a way out of it all.
That was over with, though. This last mission had sent me to the home of a well-known drug lord who had taken to keeping shades as pets. Before Hera, I’d have attacked that place alone and reveled in each bullet I’d taken. Now, though? I’d planned our attack carefully, avoiding every injury I could, desperate to make it back to Hera.
I hadn’t wanted to see the worry or guilt on her face if I got seriously hurt.
She wrapped her arms around me, as if to ask me to never let her go, to assure me that she wasn’t going anywhere.