Chapter 350: Shower With A Side Of Dragon

If you’ve never been hunted by a possessive dragon while naked and soapy, congratulations. Your life has been blessedly boring.

Guinevere Lunaris stood under a rainfall shower.

The hot water was her therapist, her priest, and her parole officer rolled into one. It didn’t judge. It didn’t ask questions. It just provided heat and pressure and the illusion that standing under water long enough could wash off all her problems.

Steam curled around her in thick clouds. The eucalyptus soap was doing something unholy to her sinuses and she was furious about how much she liked it. The water pressure was perfect. The temperature was perfect. Everything in this goddamn bathing chamber was perfect.

She didn’t say anything to anyone about this, but she found Maddox’s chambers unsettling at first because his room was almost identical to the chambers she found herself inside of after one of her white light travel flashes. The room she thought was the brown room for a split second but it was navy and white. The room she had managed to stab herself in. The room where she saw a jester in the mirror behind her for a split second and thought she was losing her mind.

She tipped her head back and let the water flatten her white hair against her scalp, working her fingers through the length of it. It had seen more action this week than most hair sees in a lifetime.

She squeezed her eyes shut and let the water hit her face. Focus. Breathe. Stop thinking about three heartbeats against your body. Stop thinking about the way Maddox said your name like he was tasting it. Stop thinking about Kael’s hands. Stop thinking about the fact Nicholas had come like he said he would and must have fallen asleep, waiting for her to wake up.

The shower was supposed to be a reset. A hard reboot. Ten minutes of hot water and eucalyptus and absolutely zero men and then she would emerge a functional human being capable of rational decisions.

That plan lasted four minutes. At minute five, a dragon would be interrupting it. She did not know this yet. She had about thirty seconds left. The universe does that sometimes. Lets you think the shower is going well right up until a naked apex predator opens the door.

✦✦✦

Maddox woke up to an empty room and his dragon went from asleep to homicidal in under a second.

The blanket was new. He didn’t remember having one. His eyes swept the chairs. Kael, unconscious, clutching a throw pillow. Nicholas, out cold, also blanketed, also tucked in.

Three apex predators. Three blankets. Three tucks. She had covered all of them while they slept with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had fought demons, outrun kings, and fallen through the sky, and still made time to tuck grown men into chairs like toddlers after nap time.

Maddox stood. The blanket fell. He locked onto the only thing that mattered, her scent trail, and followed it through his own chambers the way a bloodhound tracks a fugitive except the fugitive was using his soap and the bloodhound was aroused and the crime scene was a bathing chamber. ℴ

The shower was on.

Relief hit first. She was here. She hadn’t flashed. She hadn’t vanished into another kingdom.

His second thought was less noble. His wife was naked, twenty feet away, in his shower, behind a door. He opened it with zero hesitation. Closed it softly behind him.

The shower was the glass-walled rainfall type that left nowhere to hide. Through the steam and the water and the glass, he could see her. She was standing under a waterfall of hot water working tangles out of her hair with her eyes closed and her guard completely down and Maddox had never seen anything that made his chest hurt and his cock hard at the same time with such ruthless efficiency.

Water streaming over her shoulders, her collarbones, the runes that were pulsing gold across her skin.

She was glowing. She was always fucking glowing. The woman had a luminosity problem and it made his dragon’s possessive streak look reasonable by comparison because she was a goddamn lighthouse and every man on two continents could see the signal. The lighthouse didn’t know it was a lighthouse and that was the most dangerous part.

He stripped and stepped in behind her. The decision to enter the shower required zero thought, zero hesitation, and zero clothing. All three were shed at the same speed and with the same commitment.

Guinevere’s eyes flew open.

She spun, lips parting, face turning red. The blush started at her chest, climbed her neck, conquered her face, and kept marching north like it was trying to reach her hairline before she could form the word.

"Maddox."

His name out of her mouth was still new enough to hit him somewhere between his sternum and his ego. She had said it in the bath and his whole body had locked. She was saying it again and the lock engaged harder.

"Keep saying my name like that and I’m going to develop a condition."

The condition already existed. It had existed since the first time she said Maddox in the bath and his entire cardiovascular system had rearranged itself around two syllables. The condition was permanent. The condition was terminal. The condition was named after her.

"I was just—"

She backed up. He followed. She hit the wall. He didn’t stop.

The wall had opinions about the arrangement. Guinevere had opinions about the arrangement. Maddox did not have opinions. Opinions require alternatives. Alternatives require options. Options require a man who is willing to consider a universe in which he is not currently in this shower. Maddox was not that fucking man.

"You weren’t where I put you."

"Where you put me." She repeated it with a blink.

"Yes." His hand found her jaw. Tilted her face up. Warm water ran between his fingers and down her chin. "I put you somewhere. I expect you to be there when I wake up."