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Chapter 17 - King-Sized Problem Behind Her

The first thing Guinevere felt was cold.

Cold at her throat. Cold across her ribs. And underneath both, heat. The specific, unmistakable heat of another person's skin against her own.

She stiffened. Her eyes flew open. She tried to move.

Her body splintered.

Every rib she had went from sore to screaming in the space of a breath. Her right hand made a sound that was not a sound so much as a spike of white light behind her eyes. A broken noise broke out of her before she could catch it.

"Hey. Easy. It's me. Maddox."

She knew who Maddox was. King Drakencrest. The king with seven hundred and fifty million pounds of gold lying around evidently. The man she had told to hide in a hole in a cave before she had known his name. What she had not known, until approximately four seconds ago, was that they were apparently on a first name basis. Or that she was currently lying on top of him in her undergarments in what she could only assume was still his bed.

Her ribs were wrapped in linen. The cold at her throat and ribs turned out to be ice packs, carefully placed, held in position by the weight of his arm across her back. She was lying on his bare chest with her cheek pressed to his collarbone and her legs tangled between his, and he was holding her like she was something he was afraid to set down.

To her surprise, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

But it did not bother her. Just a surprise.

The back of his hand lifted to her hair and started moving in slow, absent circles against her scalp. His other arm stayed carefully around her, high enough to avoid the worst of her ribs. Muscle by muscle, without her permission and without her understanding why, she felt her body start to relax into him.

A man she had spoken maybe three sentences to. He pressed another kiss into her hair.

She blinked again. Like the first one had been a glitch in the matrix. It was not. Because he continued doing it, every thirty seconds or so, like he could not help it. Like his mouth was on autopilot and no one had told his brain.

Once the surprise wore off, she decided she didn't mind. That was as far as her assessment was willing to go. The rest was confusion wrapped in cognitive dissonance wrapped in a thin layer of exhaustion she could not shake.

His hand kept moving through her hair. His thumb kept stroking a slow line against her spine, careful of the bruises. Low in his chest, under her ear, something rumbled. His dragon.

A deep vibration that was not quite a growl and not quite a purr, and her wolf, battered and still half-asleep inside her, stirred and answered.

"I won't let anything happen to you, Guinevere."

His voice was quiet, directly above her head.

"You're mine."

He pressed another kiss into her hair. Then another. 

She closed her eyes again, breathing him in. Sleep pulled her back under.

What jogged her back up was the sound of muffled voices on the other side of the room.

"Her healing is faster than most wolves. Considering you have not marked her or shared your flame yet, it is remarkable. It should be much worse, Your Majesty."

"Her throat and neck are still bruised."

"Yes. A number was done to her. That will take another day. Her fever is still there as well, though much better than yesterday. Her body is working on several fronts."

Guinevere kept her eyes closed. Yesterday. She had lost a day. Possibly more than a day. Her last clear memory was a red dragon dropping through the canopy and then the dark.

Footsteps. A door closing. Silence.

She drifted again.

When she opened her eyes the next time, the light through the arched windows was either dusk or dawn. Amber and rose bleeding into the stone.

For no particular reason, panic hit her.

Maybe it was the realization that she was still half-dressed and bandaged and in the bed of a man she barely knew. Maybe it was her body waking up faster than her brain and assuming the worst. Either way, she sat up.

Her ribs screamed immediately.

"Hey. Guinevere."

She jumped. Pain lanced through her side. She had not realized he was in the room. He moved in a blur, across the room and behind her and one arm at the small of her back to support her weight before she had fully registered him standing up.

"Hang on. Hang on a second."

He eased her upright, stacking pillows behind her with his free hand, working around her ribs without ever jostling them. His other arm stayed behind her until he was sure she was steady. Then he reached for a small glass vial on the nightstand and tipped it to her lips.

She drank it in one pull. Cloves and honey. Warmer underneath. Her mouth was parched in a way that suggested she had not had water in a very long time.

He seemed to read her face before she could speak. He set the empty vial aside and replaced it with a cup of water, bringing it to her mouth and tilting it carefully. She drank that too. All of it.

Then he leaned in and pressed a kiss to the side of her jaw.

Directly on her bruise.

It took her a full second to realize what he had done. He had kissed the worst of the bruising like it was a thing he was trying to apologize for in a language she had not learned yet. Something in her chest did a slow, uninvited fold. The man had no shame and it was kind of adorable.

"Thank you for taking care of me," she whispered after a moment.

He looked at her with an expression she didn't recognize. His throat bobbed once. Then he schooled his face with efficiency.

"Of course."

There was a long pause. He studied her face. His gold eyes were softer than she remembered them. Softer than any king had a right to have his eyes be.

"You are sore."

Guinevere's lips twitched. "I feel great."

His laughter filled the room. Real laughter, warm and unguarded, and he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. It occurred to her, in a very clinical way, that the man had kissed almost every part of her head by now except for her mouth. She was not going to examine what she thought about that. Not yet.

"Will you let me take care of you, Gwen?"

Gwen.

Very few people called her that. He had shortened her name offhand, easy, like it was something that already belonged to him.

He picked her up before she answered.

"Was that question rhetorical?" she managed. 

He looked down at her, surprised by her hoarse voice. "Yes."

An actual smile tugged at her mouth.

He carried her out of the bed and across the room.

Heat crawled up her cheeks as the bathing chamber door opened. The room beyond was carved stone and steam, a deep sunken tub already filled and waiting, soft towels stacked on a warm rack by the wall.

He set her on the edge of the long stone counter near the tub. She inhaled sharply on the fact that they were in the bathing chamber and a bath was steaming.

His face darkened instantly. His jaw flexed once, hard.

He stepped between her knees on the counter. His hands went to a small pair of shears resting on the shelf behind her.

She blinked at the scissors. Then at him.

Her eyes widened.

He caught the look and kissed her shoulder. Gently. Like a promise.

"It will hurt you to take this off the normal way. Your arms cannot lift over your head yet. I checked with my sister. She confirmed there is no hook on this one."

Guinevere's face went hot.

He registered what he had just said and paused. Considered it. Then shrugged one shoulder with the faintest trace of self-aware chagrin.

"I am aware that sounded weird. It was weird. We are moving forward."

A laugh almost escaped her. She caught it in her throat and held it there because her ribs would have punished her for it.

He cut the bralette off with quick, careful motions, his knuckles never once brushing her skin, the shears moving with the precision of a man who had probably used them on battlefield dressings more than lingerie. The fabric fell away. Cool air met her bare skin. She did not stop him.

He moved to her thong next. The same careful efficiency. The same refusal to touch her where he did not need to.

She was fully bare in front of him.

Her face was so hot she could feel it radiating. She did not cover herself with her hands, because her right hand was in a splint and the left could only do so much dignity management on its own. 

His pupils dilated.

It was instant, and it was involuntary, and the gold of his irises darkened to something closer to molten, and his hands made a small, careful fist at his sides before relaxing again. 

Then he moved. He lifted her off the counter with the same impossible gentleness he had used at every other part of this process, and carried her the three steps to the tub.

He lowered her into the water.

She made a noise she had not made since she was a child. A small, involuntary sound of relief, because the heat hit every bruise and every wrapped rib at once and every muscle in her body that had been clenched let go.

The water smelled like eucalyptus and something green.

She heard fabric hit the floor behind her.

Before she had fully processed what was happening, he stepped into the tub behind her and lowered himself down, and his arms came around her, and he pulled her gently back against his chest.

Skin to skin. Again.

Her brain reported this as a thing that should have alarmed her. Her body reported back that it was not interested in alarm right now. It felt natural. It made no sense that it felt natural. The bath felt too damn good for her to question it, and the man behind her felt too damn steady, and she was so tired.

There was, however, one thing she absolutely noticed.

He was very, very hard against her lower back.

Her face, which had already been burning, went several degrees hotter.

He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. Then to the shell of her ear.

"Your blush is so cute."

She could not come up with a single response to that. Instead she locked her fingers over the hand he had resting low on her stomach. Her non-broken hand. A small, wordless thing. She felt his heart rate jump against her back the moment she did it.

They sat like that for a while. Steam rising. His thumb drawing slow, aimless circles on her stomach. His chin resting on top of her head.

"What are you thinking?"

His voice was low and unhurried, and it jogged her out of her thoughts.

She swallowed. Her face heated all over again.

"That you smell good."

His laugh came out low and stunned and delighted all at once, rumbling against her back. It was the kind of laugh a man gave when a woman had just said something he had not been expecting and was not sure what to do with.

"Gwen."

"Mm."

"You are going to be the death of me."

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