Chapter 71: Invitation Accepted. No Takebacks.

He kept her hands at her sides and kissed down the line of her throat until her head tipped back without her deciding to.

"Fuck you are beautiful," he groaned against her skin.

Her breath caught at that. Her voice was not working.

That was when she felt the hard, unmistakable line of him pressed against her. She thought she had felt it with him earlier. But she was not naked earlier. Knowing and feeling it shoved up against her skin were not the same thing.

He went rigid against her. She felt every muscle flex at the same time. Then, with zero warning, she found herself laying on the bed with him on top of her. The transition had been so fast her brain was still standing.

She gasped in surprise.

Then she noticed his eyes had changed, now glowing wolf gold.

Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it hurt. Mates got horizontal. She knew that too. When they slept that is. And when they did mating activities.

But this felt different.

One hand gathered both of her wrists and pinned them to the mattress above her head where the cuffs used to be and the skin was sore.

His knee shoved her thighs apart hard.

She jerked on instinct.

"D-D-Derek?" she managed, furious at herself for the stutter.

He froze.

Derek closed his eyes for three seconds, his entire body trembling. Then he opened his eyes and they were regular again.

He scooped her off the bed and carried her towards the bathing chamber like the last ten seconds hadn’t happened, her bare skin against his forearms. Her arms looped around his neck without thinking, and the ease of it surprised her.

He didn’t say a word. She almost wondered if she had imagined it. The gold eyes. The pinned wrists. The weight of him. It had been so fast and ended so abruptly. Or maybe he hadn’t realized it.

He shouldered the door open without breaking stride.

The bathing chamber was black marble, floor to ceiling, with floor lighting. It was too large for a yacht. Larger than any she had ever used.

He lowered her into the tub. The heat hit every bruise and every rib at once and a sound came out of her that she would deny under oath. Every muscle that had been clenched since three in the morning released at the same time, a full-body surrender to hot water.

His arms slid out from under her. Wet. Reluctant. He knelt beside the tub, hands gripping the edge with a force that turned his knuckles white.

His eyes went gold again. His chest expanded on an inhale that didn’t seem to end. He held it.

"Derek?" she asked softly.

He shook his head once, hard, and his eyes went back to normal. He still didn’t move.

There was a level of concern on his face through the steam as he watched her that took her a moment to understand.

He was looking at the water. Then at her. Then at the water. Then at his own hands on the edge of the tub.

"Do you want to come in too?"

The question came from somewhere she didn’t know she had. It left her mouth before the part of her brain that handled quality control could review it, and she regretted it the second she said it.

Surprise flashed across his face. His lips parted. Apparently, that question surprised him as much as it surprised her. A beautiful moment of mutual shock brought to them by her mouth.

"Or not," she said immediately. She didn’t need a mirror to know her face had turned the color of a pomegranate. She could feel the heat radiating off her cheeks like a space heater with a grudge.

He stood. Fabric hit the floor from somewhere behind her. She heard it land and chose to stare at the far wall with an intensity that could have burned a hole through the marble.

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

Skin to skin. All of it this time.

"Just like that. I’ve got you," he whispered, settling her against him.

Her body relaxed on its own. Every point of contact between his chest and her back, his arms and her sides, his legs framing hers under the water, all of it registered as safe in a way that bypassed every rational thought she had. 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. Which made zero sense because she had met this man today and was currently sitting between his legs in a bath on a hover yacht in the middle of a storm and nothing about any of that sentence was natural. But here they were.

He was also very hard against her lower back.

Her face, which had already been burning, went several degrees hotter. The pomegranate upgraded to a fire engine. The fire engine considered spontaneous combustion.

"Your blush is going to be the death of me."

He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. Then to the shell of her ear, his lips grazing the curve of it with a softness that sent something down her spine that had nothing to do with water temperature.

She could not come up with a single response to that. Her vocabulary had staged a walkout and left a note that said good luck. Instead, she locked her fingers over the hand he had resting low on her stomach.

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, rain hitting the tinted windows.

She didn’t know when her breathing matched his. She didn’t know when the last of the tension in her shoulders dissolved into the water and floated away. She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep like that either.