“Bear?”
She sat up on the bed with the sheet pooled around her waist, her hair loose and tangled, watching him with an expression he couldn’t read in the low light.
When he didn’t respond, she got up and crossed to him.
“Dane,” she said his real name, softer. “What’s wrong?”
“I hurt you.” His voice came out flat and wrong.
“You didn’t.”
“Those are my handprints.”
She glanced down at herself. “I know whose hands they are.”
Christ, he should’ve known. It never mattered how careful he was. That was the lesson he’d been trying to teach himself for twelve years, and then he’d fucking forgotten it the moment she’d told him not to hold back.
“I knew,” he said, low and shaking. “I knew I was too big, too strong. I knew I’d hurt you. I knew?—”
“Stop.” She put her hand flat on his chest, right over his sternum, and reached up to cup his cheek and make him look at her face. “I am not hurt. I have bruises. Those are not the same thing.”
He opened his mouth.
“I liked it. I liked your hands on me. I liked how hard you held on.” She held his stare. “If I hadn’t, you would have known, because I would have said so, and you would have stopped.”
She reached up and took his hand off the wall, where it was plastered. Held it in both of hers—it was enormous next to hers—and she looked at it for a second, then pressed a kiss to his palm.
“You would have stopped,” she repeated, enunciating each word. “Let me show you how much I liked it.”
Then she pulled him back to bed and did just that.
When he surfaced again a few hours later, the rain was coming down harder. He lay on his back with her head on his pec and her hand flat over his heart, her sleeping breaths tickling his skin.
The room was quiet except for the water against the glass.
He watched the rain fall and thought,fuck.
He’d been avoiding this for two years, but there was no denying it anymore, no pretending she just irritated the hell out of him.
He was in love with Greta Dougherty.
And he had no fucking clue what to do about it.
nineteen
The next morning, Greta stood in Bear’s bedroom in the gray morning light and did a quick inventory: sore in the places she expected, bruised in the places that made her grin, and completely without pants. She found his flannel on the floor and shrugged it on over her bra. Her shirt was downstairs somewhere. Her jeans were ruined, the buttons ripped off.
She picked them up off the floor anyway, rolled the waistband twice, and put them on. They held. Barely.
She looked at the bed.
The sheets were twisted beyond any hope of reconstruction. The top blanket had migrated entirely to the floor on his side, as had the pillows.
The wreckage of a very good night.
She grinned and went downstairs.
King spotted her first and threw himself sideways into her legs, nearly taking her down. Atlas came in behind him with more dignity but equivalent enthusiasm, pressing his muzzle into her palm. She got both hands into both dogs at once, which was the only way to manage mornings in this house, and looked up.
