Page 127 of Gloves Off

In an instant, he’s back, hand pressing to my lower back, pushing me down. “Stay there.”

Opening my mouth to argue is an instinct.

“Don’t argue,” he says, but softly. Almost sweetly.

I don’t know who this is. He body-swapped with someone else while my face was buried in the pillow.

Still, I sink into the duvet, catching my breath while I listen to him in the en suite. The tap runs. A rustle of fabric. His heavy footsteps return, and my lips part in surprise as a warm, damp cloth presses between my legs.

“What are you—” I start.

“Shut. Up.” Again, that soft, soothing voice.

“You’re not actually taking care of me right now?” I ask in my own soft, dazed voice as he swipes gently against my center. I want to wrench around and look at his expression to get a goddamned handle on what we’re doing here, but I don’t want him to see my baffled look of concern and confusion. Keeping my eyes open is proving difficult, anyway.

“This is what people do after sex, Hellfire.”

No, they don’t. We didn’t, not last time. This wasn’t anything like last time, though.

The cloth disappears. I hear it land in the bathroom before the bed dips. I crack one eye open. He’s sitting on the edge.

“Are you going to sleepwalk tonight?”

“No,” I lie, replaying the sickening stomach lurch as I watched the footage of his head shot, of him being carried off the ice.

“You remember what I said?” His voice teases me, low but gentle, and the stubborn part of me digs her heels in. “About you sleepwalking?”

If I sleepwalk again, he’s getting rid of my bed. He wouldn’t.

I think about him buying me that car, and I’m not so sure.

“If I wake up with you in my bed,” he warns, and I squint at him, half-awake.

“You won’t,” I promise, too sleepy and orgasmed-out to deal with tomorrow’s consequences. Around Alexei, I can’t seem to stop running my mouth. It’s a problem. It gets me into trouble, again and again.

The fun kind of trouble, though. The kind that made me come over and over.

He sweeps my hair aside and his breath skitters over the back of my neck. “Close your eyes,” he murmurs.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

I close my eyes because I want to, not because he told me to, but within seconds, I’m fast asleep.

The next morning, I wake with my leg trapped under Alexei’s, tucked into his chest.

His erection presses against my hip and my eyelids fly open. His skin is impossibly warm and his heart beats steadily under my palm. Slow, steady breathing lifts his expansive chest.

Fuck,I mouth, cursing myself and my stupid problem.

When the footage of his career started last night, I should have made an excuse and hid in the bathroom, checking my makeup, so I didn’t have to watch.

He needs youhere,Ward had said, and an ache forms in my throat at the memory.

I sneak out of bed without waking him, tiptoe into the shower, and wash every trace of what we did last night off of myself.

I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to feel like this, like I’m starting to care.

This crush I have on my husband isn’t going away, but I’m going to ignore it until it does.

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