“Is that a no?”
“Well…” I didn’t remember a scary demon biker with an axe to grind from my past, but I didn’t remember all the stupid shit I ever did either. That was one long ass list, so... “Anything’s possible? You really think he’s not connected?”
“We can’t say they’re absolutely connected to each other, onlyyou.The only thing we know linking them together is you.”
Orion pressed his fingers to a darkening bruise near my abdomen. His touch made me wince but nothing really stood out as anything worse than some scrapes and bruising. My close encounter with the knife from hell and banging my head caused the most injury, but even that felt relatively minor compared to how bad it could have been.
I reminded myself of all this because the story Orion’s face told me said my prognosis was bleak and I had only minutes left to live. He had terrible bedside manner for someone so good in bed.
"Stop squirming around." Orion began cleaning the cut on my head and I had trouble staying still when met with the antiseptic and his heavy gaze.
He’d been all closed-off and blank since he saw me, and my mind went through all the usual reasons first: him annoyed that I wasted our power, ashamed at how I faired during the fight, pissed I drank his booze.
This broke my previous record for pissing him off since I’d never seen his jawthattight and his posture so rigid. And that was really saying something because I basicallyonlysaw him tense. His muscles only relaxed at the end of sex and sometimes not even then if I was purposefully annoying him during the sex because he had a ‘make Rob stop doing that in sexy ways’ kink and I had a ‘make Orion make Rob stop’ kink.
But at the first surprisingly gentle brush of cotton and antiseptic against my forehead, I realized what I was seeing. He was upset not because of something I did but because I was hurt? He didn’t like me being injured? He cared about my physical safety?
Damn, that was hot.
It touched my heart too, not just my pants, but man, so sexy.
Orion played the grumpiest nursemaid ever as he slowly tended to my wounds. He glared at each cut and scrape, willing my body to heal itself from the force of his disappointment.
"I’m okay," I promised. “The knife didn’t even really get me, did it?”
“Yes, it did.” His face grew even more pinched. “That’s why you’rebleedingand there’s a wound on your shoulder.”
"Okay, but it mostly singed me, right?" Freaking fire knife. “It’s a graze.”
His eyes were so vibrant, all the shades of green and brown brightened with startling clarity, staring like he couldn’t look away. "You were still hurt," he said quietly, the deep feeling in his eyes making his voice rougher.
"I’m okay."
"You better be."
A weird threat since the threat was to be alright or else.
Nice, though. His hands were so damn gentle as he cleaned both injuries and bandaged me up with such single-minded focus. He kept tending to me like he was physically incapable of stopping.
Huh. When did this happen? Someone cared about my well-being. Someone cared about me. That realization, that feeling, it was rarer than the perfect score or illicit magical artifacts.
It was pretty nice.
What did I say in response to all this?
“Okay, take your pants off.”
His eyebrows rose. “Really? Doctoring your flesh wound gets you in the mood?”
“Hey, it’s practical! We need to recharge.”
We needed to be at the top of our game for Lex, and I spent some of our magic on Bad Mother. A quickie first to shore up our power, then we defeated the bad guy. These were the sacrifices us heroes had to make.
However, Orion did not take his pants off.
When my hands helpfully tried to remove his pants for him, he grabbed them and held them in his own. “Our connection is well established by now. We should be able to access it and share energy without sexual contact.”
Well, that made sense. I called on our power even when he wasn’t here to fight Bad Mother.
