Page 81 of Oakheart

Then he reached out and ruffled my hair. “Oh no, Cashutka. You will letmecut your hair. It will be very good. You will like it, but I will do it.”

Turned out, I liked the feeling of Aleks’s fingers in my hair, so while heat rose in my cheeks, I took a deep breath. “Okay, yeah. You can cut my hair if you want to.”

Truth told, he could do just about anything he wanted with me.

His grin widened, and his fingers curled around the nape of my neck to pull me in for a kiss.

He leaned back while I was still stunned, thinking about more.

“Bath?” he asked.

Dazed, I blinked. “Um, sure.”

Somehow, he seemed more awake now than he had with everyone around demanding his attention. The smile on his face made my heart flutter.

It turned out, Katya had put a pot of water on the fire to boil before going to bed, and Aleks was the one to carry it outside now. There was a wash basin by the water pump, and he filled it, mixing water with the pump with the boiling water from inside. He turned it with his hand before standing back. “Is good, yes?”

I dipped my hand in and smiled. “It’s good.”

He went in for towels while I stripped bare and sank into the warm water. The way it was positioned, beside the wrap-around porch, it looked out over the overhang and across the whole valley.

When he came back, he stripped down too and slipped into the tub behind me. Once he was settled, he drew me back with an arm wrapped around my front, his hand splayed wide against my chest. I sank against him with a sigh, content to be held like that even while he attentively ran the soap bar over my skin.

I probably should’ve returned the favor, but fuck, it was nice to have him close. I felt warm and sleepy and safe, and I didn’t really want to move.

“I’m happy to be home,” he mumbled in my ear.

I dropped my head back on his shoulder so I could look at him from the corner of my eyes. “Me too.”

I’d never expected that to be the case. There were things here that I loved, people that meant the whole world to me, but this was the first time it’d really felt like my home. Now that I knew what else was out there, what I’d said no to when I was just sixteen, it all made sense.

I fit here. I had a purpose.

And maybe part of that was letting Aleks’s hand keep drifting wherever it wanted to go.

He’d left the soap behind, but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out how his touch affected me. His palm slipped down my stomach, and he wrapped it around my cock. I jumped, my breath catching, and I felt his satisfied growl behind me.

“Not so sleepy after all,” he whispered. His tongue traced the shell of my ear, and I shuddered in his arms.

“Never too sleepy for you,” I promised.

The way he looked down at me then, drinking me in like he could consume me just through his eyes, was possessive and wonderful.

He stroked me, slow and firm, holding my gaze the whole time. My lips parted, my breath hitched, and I swore, his did too. It was like he could feel the pleasure sparking through me in his own body, and the sound I muffled by pressing into his shoulder echoed against my ear when I came.

I turned in his arms for a kiss, reaching down to return the favor, but he stilled my hand. “Stay with me,” he pleaded. “Come to my bed.”

He hadn’t even finished the first request before I was nodding.Yes. Anything.

He helped me out of the tub, and as I crept onto the porch to wrap the towel around my waist, he emptied the water and gathered up our clothes before he did the same. We tiptoed through the house. There wasn’t much privacy among werewolves, but I didn’t want to wake his family.

More, I liked this—while the world was quiet, it was just him and me and I didn’t worry if I was doing the wrong thing or endangering him.

I got to his room first. It was still empty and sparse, but it was his. I thought the quilt on the bed had come from Katya, who missed having her son near. It made this room seem at least a little more like Aleks’s place than it had the first night we’d spent together, and there were even a few books on the shelf now.

I looked at the bag he’d traveled to California with, still packed and sitting against the wall, and the dresser that probably didn’t have anything in it. I was thinking about looking for a shirt when Aleks clicked his tongue and whispered, “No. I want you like this.”

He gripped the towel at my waist and I loosened my hold on it, letting it slither free. He looked me over, and a lump closed off my throat.