Page 40 of Savage Princess

“Are you coming to bed, too?” The question comes out before I can stop it, and I think I know the answer before he even says it.

“I’m going to stay up and keep an eye out for a while,” Levin says slowly. “Just in case anyone managed to see where we were going after we left the bar, or Diego has men tracking us again.”

I knew he wouldn’t come to bed, not after what we’d talked about, and not with the tension shimmering in the air that’s anything other than sexual right now. That’s not even what I want at this moment—I want him next to me, to be able to curl up against him and feel his heavy arm over my waist, and feel safe. But I can’t tell him that.

“Alright.” I bite my lip, reaching for a t-shirt to change into for bed. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

When I come back out from the bathroom, Levin doesn’t glance over. He’s sitting in the chair on the opposite side of the room, looking towards the window, and he says nothing as I slide into bed, switching off the light next to it.

“Good night,” I say quietly, slipping down under the covers, aching for the solid warmth of him next to me.

For a moment, I don’t think he’s going to respond. And then I hear his voice drift across the room, low and quiet.

“Good night, Elena.”

Levin

Apart of me wishes I’d never mentioned the idea to her.

I barely sleep that night. I sit in the chair opposite the beds, my gun balanced on my knee, waiting for something to happen. For Diego’s men to come again, for someone to have followed us from the bar, for Vasquez to have sent men to track us down instead of waiting for us to come to him. I watch Elena sleep, her still form under the blankets as she lies there on her side, her hair occasionally stirring with her breath as it falls over her cheek. I have a deep urge to walk over and brush it away from her face, and I force myself to stay where I am.

If I go over to her and touch her, I’m not sure I could keep myself from waking her up and taking it further. And more than ever, I need to be careful.

I’m inwardly cursing myself for letting the tentative idea of a plan that I’d had go further. I shouldn’t have shared it with her—I should have known she’d latch onto it, that she’d want to help. For someone so sheltered, she has an amazingly poor sense of self-preservation.

Or, as I often suspect, it might simply be that she hasn’t seen enough of the world to understand how very real the danger is.

The decision is made now, though, and I can’t go back on it. Now I have to keep her safe in an entirely new set of circumstances.

I can’t let what happened to Lidiya happen to Elena. I can’t be the reason that she ends up dead or worse, because I’ve pulled her into a world that she should never have been a part of. I can’t watch history repeat itself all over again.

At some point, I manage to doze off. I wake at the slightest noise, so I don’t get much in the way of real rest, but by the time Elena wakes, I’ve had at least a few hours of interrupted sleep. She sits up and rubs a hand across her face, and she looks like such a complicated mixture of sexy and adorable sitting there in an oversized t-shirt, her hair a mess around her face and the sheets pooled around her hips. It takes everything in me to stay where I am and not go to her.

I want her so badly it hurts, and not just physically. I’m starting to care for her, too, in ways that go beyond just the job I’ve been given. I know how dangerous that is.

“What’s the plan for today?” she asks, running one hand through her dark, tangled hair. “You said we have to get me better clothes.”

“Yeah.” I stand up, tucking my gun into my waistband as I glance over at her. “I’ll go grab our breakfast while you do what you need to—shower, dress, whatever. And then we’ll find somewhere to shop.”

“That sounds like a plan.” She slides out of bed, the shirt falling down around her thighs, and my chest tightens as I fight the urge to go to her. I can almost feel the tangle of her hair in my fingers, the softness of her lips under mine, and how easily I could spill her back into the bed, keeping her there for a little while longer.

My cock twitches, eager to continue that line of thinking, and I force myself to ignore it. “I’ll be back,” I tell Elena quickly. “Block the door until you hear me.”

She nods, and I stride towards the door, intent on leaving before I can make any further mistakes.

When I come back, she’s at the table in those bike shorts and another oversized t-shirt, and it shouldn’t be sexy. It shouldn’t make me want to do any number of things to her that I should never,everthink of doing in the first place.

I set the containers down, pushing one towards her. “I’m not exactly an expert on shopping,” I tell her with a grimace. “But I think I have an idea of where we can go.”

“Oh?” Elena stabs a bite of egg with her plastic fork, and it strikes me that she’s never once complained about any of this. She was raised in the lap of luxury, in a mansion with every comfort she could have ever wanted, a staff to wait on her, the best of all of the things that money could buy.

Now she’s running from cheap motel to cheap motel with me, wearing charity-shop clothes and eating food out of Styrofoam containers. She hasn’t breathed a word of complaint about any of it—not about the showers that don’t always run hot or the beds that are a little too hard, or any of the other things that I know are so much less than what she’s used to.

She’s tougher than I would have ever given her credit for, that’s for sure.

“I think the wisest thing to do is go to the more touristy part of the city, where the nicer shops are. It seems counterintuitive at first, but there will be more crowds, so it’s easier to get lost, and anyone looking for us isn’t going to expect to find us in some of the nicer stores. We’ll just have to make the money stretch as far as we can.”

Elena nods. “I trust you,” she says simply. “If that’s what you think is best, then that’s what we’ll do.”

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