TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 276

CHAPTER 206: THE L WORD

EMBER’S POV

“I don’t care. Somewhere warm. Somewhere with an ocean.”

“I have a house in the south of Portugal. On a cliff. You can see the Atlantic from the bedroom and the kitchen and the bathroom and frankly from every room because I had very specific requirements when it was built.”

“You built a house on a cliff in Portugal and never mentioned this?”

“It never came up.”

“An entire HOUSE, Knox.”

“A modest house.”

“Your idea of modest is most people’s idea of a palace.”

“There’s a garden. Olive trees. A terrace where you can eat breakfast and watch the waves and the nearest neighbour is four miles away and there is no one to interrupt or attack or betray or politically manoeuvre and it is the one place in my life where I have ever felt anything close to peace.” He presses his face into my neck. “I want to take you there. I want to sit on that terrace with you in the morning and drink coffee and listen to you complain about the heat because you’re Alaskan and anything above fifteen degrees is a

harassment-”

“It IS a harassment-”

“And I want to cook for you every night. That ridiculous egg thing from the safehouse – remember the

spatula and the divine taste and you staring at me like I’d invented fire?”

“You had egg in your hair.”

“I had egg in my hair and you looked at me like I’d hung the moon and I have been chasing that look ever since.” He pauses. “I’ll expand the menu. Beyond eggs. I’ll learn pasta. Possibly a roast,The terrace

demands a roast.”

“You’re going to roast things now?”

“I’m going to attempt to roast things. The results may vary. There may be smoke. The fire department in the Algarve may learn my name.” He pulls back and looks at me and his face is so open, so unguarded, so full of joy that it looks almost foreign on him. “I want to worship everything that you are, somewhere quiet Ember. I want to give you the entirety of my heart without a deadline. Without a thirty–day contract or a seven–day extension or whatever legal fiction we were pretending this was because we were both too cowardly to say the real word.”

“What’s the real word?”

A CHAPTER CHHEL WORD

“Love” He says it like he’s tasting something for the first time. “Love. I am in love with you, Ember Aragon.

I have been in love with you since the airplane and possibly since the summit and definitely since the first morning I ever saw you and I thought fuck, this woman is going to ruin me and I’m going to let her.” He takes my face in his hands. “Fuck the thirty days. Fuck the arrangement. Fuck every version of this that was supposed to end with me walking away because I was NEVER walking away, Ember Aragon. I was never capable of it. The man who got on that helicopter and flew to Switzerland was lying to both of us and the man who turned around and ran back through a forest as a wolf was telling the truth for the first time in his miserable life.”

Love.

He loves me.

The word ricochets through my skull and hits every wall and bounces back and hits them again.

He loves me.

Knox Volkov loves me.

And he said it without a single second of hesitation, without a flinch, without the usual wall slamming down behind his eyes to protect him from whatever comes next – he just said it, the way you’d say the sky is blue or the earth is round, like it’s fact, like it’s physics, and this thing spreading through my chest won’t stop.

This warm, gooey, devastating thing that’s eating up every other feeling at a pace I can’t control, swallowing the grief and the fear and the exhaustion and replacing all of it with something so bright it almost hurts.

“At the card game,” I say, and my voice comes out strange and breathless. “The confession cards. When

Rayana read ‘I love you‘ out loud and you looked at me across that table.”

Something shifts in his expression.

The raw confidence of a moment ago faltering, replaced by a flush that creeps up his neck and a look! have never seen on Knox Volkov’s face before – sheepish. Almost embarrassed.

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He glances away and the glance is so boyish and so un–Knox that my heart nearly stops.

“Was that yours?”

He clears his throat. “It’s possible.”

“Knox.”

“Yes.” He meets my eyes again and the sheepishness is still there, duelling with defiance. “Yes, that was my card. Happy now?”

I can’t breathe.

My chest is doing something my lungs can’t keep up with, this expanding, blooming pressure that’s filling

CHAPIT 206 THE WORD

every cavity and leaving no room for air, and my hands are shaking against his jaw and I think my mouth is open and no sound is coming out.

His expression shifts instantly, Concern wiping out the embarrassment, his thumbs pressing into my cheeks, scanning my face.

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