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“I’m sorry,” she finally said, and lowered to her knees. “I didn’t understand how…” her head shook, lips wobbling. “How anyone could love a creature, a monster like him, until I saw the way he loved you.”
My heart softened, warmed, and I clasped her hand in mine over my knees. “It’s okay. If it helps, I tried not to.”
She laughed then, loud and wet, and I pulled her to me, hugging her tight. “He wouldn’t like it,” she whispered to my stomach. “Of course, he wouldn’t. But he would love that you are happy.”
A tear slipped down my cheek, and a buzzing drew my gaze to the window. “I know.” A bee hovered and then continued on.
Some minutes later, Linka filling me in on how what remained of our army had come to help close out the battle—which did not officially end until an entire day after Dade and I had fallen and were taken to the Keep—there was a knock on the doors.
“Your king is likely to break down the doors.”
Another followed Linka’s words. A warning veiled as a request.
He was coming in any second now.
I smiled, shifting my arms into the straps of the clean blue nightgown. “Better let him in.”
As though he’d heard, the doors opened, and Linka bowed before hurrying out with the pail and cloths in hand.
The doors closed after her, and I heard a click. “Did you just lock my mother out?”
“Of course,” he said, prowling toward me with a grace that defied his injuries. Even with a bandage around his torso, his skin and muscles gleamed—radiant in the remaining sunlight that streaked across the room as though in search of him.
Taking my hands, he helped me to my feet, then lowered the nightgown with two careful tugs and shifted it into place. The brushing of his roughened fingers over my skin, the heat of him at my back, circling and caging me, had me nearly pleading for him to rip it off.
His mouth hovered over my shoulder, lips pressing soft. “Later.”
“That word again,” I said without meaning to.
He hummed as though understanding, then directed me back to the bed with a hand at my waist. As I slid onto the mattress, and he pulled the blankets over my bare legs, guilt overran me. “Dade, I need to apologize,” I started, steady yet my breath quaked. “What I said to you outside that shop…”
“It was true, was it not?” He gestured for me to lie down.
I leaned back on my elbows instead, my neck cricking so I could read his tight expression. “Yes, but you need to understand that—”
“Stop,” he said, and a rough exhale left him as he scrubbed his hands over his face, then carefully folded his large frame onto the bed beside my knees. “You think I wasn’t aware that there were times you were toying with me?” I blinked, falling onto the pillows. “Your every deception was known and welcomed if it brought you closer to being where I needed you.” His mouth curved. “Completely and irrevocably mine.”
Torn between wanting to smother him with the pillow and with kisses, I just laid there, speechless.
“You love me.” His lips curled higher, exposing a dimple and a flash of teeth.
I melted even while trying to resist doing so. “You forced my hand.”
“You forgive me, and you love me.”
“Again, you gave me no choice,” I rasped, my smile shaking. “There was no other choice.”
He sprawled himself beside me, head propped on his hand and that maddening grin still in place. “You love me.”
I absorbed that face, the golden brows residing over eyes that contained an ocean reflected sky, and then that bandaged chest. A chest that contained a rapidly increasing heartbeat. A heart. A heart and soul that had been slow to warm, to learn, and to love. Absorbing everything, I declared vehemently, “Yes, I love you.”
The king of wolves spread his lips into a smile so dazzling, so sincere, the largest I’d ever seen him wear, that I found myself saying so again just to keep it there. “I am in complete, utterly stupid love with you, Daden Volkahn.”
That smile stretched, then fell a little with a breathy laugh. “I suppose I did force you.” He frowned then, but it didn’t detract from the magic in his gaze. Happiness.
Unfettered, undiluted, unprecedented happiness.
I gestured for him to move closer so I could smooth the creases from between his brows. His eyes shuttered. “You forced me, yes, but only by showing me who you truly are,” I whispered, “who you could have always been, and who you are capable of becoming.”
Taking my hand, he brought it to his mouth, lips brushing over my skin. “You showed me that.” Another dazzling smile. “So I suppose it is you who forced me, my lovely swan.”
I laughed, rolling into his arms. He caught me, held me close, fingers rubbing over my back, into my hair, and his mouth upon my forehead.
Within minutes, I drifted back to sleep, lulled by the comforting cadence of the beat within the unearthed heart of my sweet, savage king.