Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 111

Chapter 111: Bathtime With The Dragon King

Guinevere placed both palms flat onto the mattress on either side of Maddox, and tried to push herself up.

Her torso made it approximately two inches off his body. His arms clamped down. Steel bands. Zero give. The laws of physics were firmly on his side.

"Are you going to let me move?"

"Haven’t decided yet."

"Maddox."

"The answer is evolving. Current trajectory says no."

She huffed against him. His dragon purred so loudly he was fairly certain she could hear it through his ribs.

"What do we usually do in the mornings?" His question was casual. Conversational. Not at all the energy of a man whose dragon was feeding him the question like a lawyer coaching a witness.

"Interesting. Your heart rate just went from seventy to ninety-four," he commented, and the grin was audible.

The noise she made was somewhere between a groan and a laugh and it was his new favorite sound on the planet.

He moved.

The flip was fast enough to be disorienting and slow enough to be deliberate. One arm braced behind her head, the other at her waist, and he rolled them in a single, fluid motion that put her back against the mattress and him above her.

His weight settled over her. Hips between her thighs. Forearms framing her face. The position was proprietary and unapologetic and his body locked into it with the confidence of a man who had been here before, even if his brain couldn’t supply the specific receipts.

He kissed her forehead. Slow.

Then her left cheek. Her right cheek. The tip of her nose. The space between her eyebrows. Her temple. Her jaw. The corner of her mouth.

He had done exactly this two weeks ago. Same sequence. Same deliberate avoidance of her lips. Same devastating patience. The man had no memory and the same playbook.

A laugh broke out of her. Real. Bright. The kind of laugh that lives in the chest before it reaches the throat, the kind that can only be startled out of a person who has been holding themselves together so tightly that joy catches them off guard.

"If I’d known face kisses got that reaction, I would’ve woken you up like this," he said in between kisses.

A sound left her throat that was half laugh, half something else entirely. She felt the effect of it immediately. His mouth paused against her skin. His grip tightened. Whatever that sound was, it had landed.

He pressed his lips gently to the mark on her neck.

She winced for a second. It was definitely bruised.

He pulled back immediately. His thumb found her jaw and tilted her face toward his. The playfulness was gone.

"Will you let me take care of you, Gwen?"

Gwen. This version of Maddox had already shortened her name. He had also asked her this exact question two weeks prior.

"What is it, baby?" he asked, studying her face.

She hadn’t realized her eyes were welling until they were. He caught a tear with his thumb. She didn’t want to tell him that he’d said that exact same thing to her.

"Was that question rhetorical?"

It was the first thing that came to her mind. The exact response she’d used the first time. Word for word. And the fact that he would never know that, that the echo existed only inside her, was the loneliest thing she’d felt since waking up.

He laughed. The sound rumbled through his chest and into hers and her wolf pressed forward so hard Guinevere’s vision blurred at the edges.

He rolled off the bed, picked her up, and was through the bathing chamber door before she could point out that her legs worked. They did work. He didn’t care.

He turned on the faucets, still holding her. A talent.

He set her on the counter. Stepped between her legs. Turned her chin with one hand and went still.

She watched his face change. The playfulness left first. Then the color. It took her a second to understand that he was looking at the bruise, and another second to understand how bad it must look based on how bad he looked seeing it.

His thumb hovered over it without touching it. His jaw worked once.

She could see him doing the math. Every calculation was making his jaw tighter and she needed to stop that before he spiraled into guilt that would ruin the best morning she’d had in a week.

She gently put her hand on his wrist. "Hey, Maddox. It’s okay."

He looked at her, surprised.

"Wolves heal fast. It doesn’t hurt," she added. It did hurt. A white lie. He needed it.

Unbeknownst to her, he had also zeroed in on something else with the bruise. Something he wanted to ask about, but was holding off because, from his vantage point, she had just relaxed and he wasn’t going to be the reason that stopped.

So he swallowed it and refocused.

"It looks like I hurt you."

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