TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 326

CHAPTER 255: KISSING AND TALKING

EMBER’S POV

The hot spring is exactly where the sign said it would be – a natural thermal pool set into a rocky clearing off the highway, steam rising from the surface into the frozen air, the water glowing faintly blue–green from the mineral content.

It’s deserted because it’s two in the morning and sane people are sleeping, and we are not sane people and have not been sane people for some time.

I strip off Knox’s jacket and the borrowed hospital scrubs and walk into the water in my underwear, and the sound I make when the heat hits my body is embarrassing and involuntary, and I don’t care.

The warmth wraps around my legs and my hips and my waist and crawls up my ribs, and every muscle I’ve been clenching since the first arrow hit Maurice’s wall releases simultaneously.

My body has been holding its breath for twelve hours, and this is the exhale.

Knox follows me in. I watch the dark water rise over the heavy, carved muscle of his chest, sliding down the hard ridges of his abs to swallow the sharp cut of his hips.

His jaw locks tight when the heat bites into his broken wrist, the harsh lines of his profile slowly melting as the warmth soaks the pain away.

He is wrecked and exhausted. He is wearing a splint, his arm is marked with silver burns, and brutal shadows bruise the skin under his eyes. He is still the most devastatingly sexy thing I have ever seen.

Starlight catches the pale ruin of scars slashing across his torso. Thick steam curls around shoulders

wide enough to block out the rest of the world.

I am going to marry this man.

The realisation hits me fresh every time, ringing through my chest like a struck bell, the vibration, sinking deeper into my bones with every breath. It puts a stupid smile on my face.

I float on my back, tipping my head up to the night.

r

The sky is absolute madness. It is thick and salted with stars, a sprawling canopy that exists only out here, where the dark is still pure. The steam rises. The hot water holds my weight.

For the first time in weeks, absolutely nothing hurts.

“Come here,” I say.

He wades to me, and I stand and wrap my arms around his neck.

The chest–deep water is warm. His body against mine is a furnace. He presses in, chest to chest, leaving

the thin, wet fabric of my bra as the single barrier between our skin.

My breath catches completely, and we both know it has nothing to do with the cold.

< CHAPTER 265 KISSING AND TALKING

“need you to know something,” I say, and my voice comes out more serious than I intend.

Tell me.”

+25 Points

“I’m not scared of falling out of love with you. Or having you fall out with me. I said that in the car, and it was stupid and wrong, and knew it was wrong while I was saying it. I’m not scared of that because it’s not possible. Falling out of love with you would require me to become a completely different person, and I like who I am when I’m with you too much to become anyone else.”

“Ember-”

“I’m not finished.” I put my finger on his lips, and the gesture is absurdly intimate in this setting- and he shuts up, because even the Lycan King knows when a woman has more to say. “What I’m scared of is being happy. I’m scared of the estate and the greenhouse and the boring Tuesdays and the shoes in the hallway because I have never, in my entire life, been allowed to keep a good thing. Every time something good has happened to me, something terrible has followed it, and my nervous system is wired to treat happiness as a warning sign. So when I asked if you’d still love me when it’s peaceful, what I was really asking was: is it safe to want this? Is it safe to believe that this time, the good thing gets to stay?”

He pulls me closer. His forehead against mine. The water lapping around us and the steam rising, and his eyes so close I can see every ring of gold in the blue.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving to your nervous system that it’s wrong,” he says. “I’m going to be so boring and so present and so relentlessly, aggressively in love with you that your body will have no choice but to accept that the good thing is staying. And if it takes a year or five years or twenty years for you to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, I will be standing in that hallway, next to my shoes,

waiting with you.”

“That’s a lot of shoes.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify