Page 224 of Bonds of Hercules
He kept tugging the blanket up higher on my face, and it took me a second to realize what he was doing.Poco likes to have just his ears out.
My heart melted in my chest as my scary husbands fussed.
Finally, they both climbed into bed, draping themselves around me like another layer of bedding.
Kharon pressed a tender kiss to my forehead. Augustus feathered a kiss on the side of my neck.
I smiled sleepily as I closed my eyes, feeling warm inside and out.
Why didn’t we do this sooner?
I was so content, I’d forgotten to ask when they’d gotten my name permanently placed on their skin.
Sleep pulled me under.
40
THE HUNTER
KHARON
Eyes fluttering open, intoxicating heat surrounded me.
I squeezed Alexis against my chest with a satisfied yawn. Sometime in the middle of the night, I’d pulled her from under the covers and draped her on top of me.
She was a delicious weighted blanket.
Divine.
Augustus’s bronze thigh was hooked over both of us, pinning us in place. Her name was tattooed across it.
We’d gotten the ink the day after our wedding, the day she’d disappeared.
It was a promise that we’d earn Alexis—ourwife—back, with bloodshed or tenderness,whateverit took. No cost was too high. Not when it came to her.
And now she was lying in my arms, trusting me to hold her while she slept.
I’d thought standing over her all night, watching her breaths rise and fall, was what my soul yearned for.
I was wrong.
Thiswas what I’d been born for—clutching her close, our hearts beating in rhythm, while she snored into my neck.
I smiled into her curls.
Before the competition, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept, let alonerestedpeacefully for hours on end.
All it had taken was a week of isolation with my wife—the punishment was the cure.
Hands tracing over sleep-heated skin, I mapped the marks that were scattered haphazardly across her back. They covered the front of her torso too.
Her skin was a patchwork of survival—cigarette burns, a dagger wound on her sternum, jagged notches from what looked like the ends of twigs, the indents of perfect edges like she’d been thrown against the corner of a counter.
My lips quivered, falling.
I tucked my face into the crook of her neck, moisture blurring my eyes as my chest heaved raggedly.
Life had not been easy for my wife, yet she’d endured and was still so …good.
