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.