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Tomorrow I’d rebuild the walls. Tomorrow I’d go back to the careful distance and the flat denials and the constant running.
But right now, in the dark of a Vegas hotel room with Max’s heartbeat steady against my back, I let myself believe for a moment that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t as alone as I’d been trying so hard to convince myself I was.
His arm didn’t move. His breathing stayed deep and even, and I wondered if he was actually asleep or if he was lying there awake the way I was, both of us pretending not to notice, both of us too exhausted and too scared to acknowledge what this meant.
Either way, I didn’t move.
I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the weight of him, into the simple fact of his presence, and for the first time since my father had shown up in that tunnel, I actually slept.
Chapter four
Shift - The period of time a player or line spends on the ice before changing with teammates on the bench.
Max
My dragon woke me up. Not with a warning, but with a contentment bordering on purring.
Could dragons purr?
I was still trying to puzzle that out when I realized instantly why my dragon was happy and why my body, or certain parts of it, were especially so.
I didn’t move.
That was the first conscious thought that filtered through the fog of sleep and arousal and the particular vertigo of waking up exactly where I wanted to be and knowing I absolutely could not stay there.
Ash was still asleep, his breathing deep and even, his body relaxed in a way I’d never seen it while he was conscious. My arm was across his ribs, my palm flat against his chest, and I could feel his heartbeat steady under my hand.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was what was pressed against his ass, hard enough that there was no pretending it was anything other than what it was, and the fact that moving even a fraction of an inch in any direction was going to wake him up to exactly this situation.
My dragon was absolutely content with this state of affairs. My dragon was purring, which shouldn’t have been possible, and was suggesting in no uncertain terms that I stay exactly where I was and let this play out. My dragon had apparently forgotten that I’d spent fifteen years learning not to want things, and that Ash Thorne specifically fell into the category of things I wasn’t allowed to want.
I breathed slowly through my nose and tried to think of anything else.
The Vegas forecheck. The price of hay in Alberta. My mother’s face in that driveway, my father’s steady voice telling me to get in the cab.
Anything that might convince my body that this was not the moment to betray fifteen years of careful restraint in situations that mattered.
It didn’t work.
Ash shifted slightly in his sleep, and I felt it like a current running through me, electric and terrifying. He settled back against me, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound that would definitely wake him.
His hips pressed back slightly, unconsciously, and I realized with a sinking feeling that I was about thirty seconds away from completely losing control of a situation that had very few good outcomes.
I needed to move. I needed to move right now, before he woke up, before this became something I couldn’t explain away or bury under another layer of carefully constructed distance. I needed to roll away and go stand under a cold shower and call my agent and figure out how to fix whatever was breaking inside me that made me want things I couldn’t have.
I didn’t move.
Instead, I lay there with my eyes open in the Vegas darkness, Ash’s back against my chest, his heartbeat under my hand, and let myself have this one moment where I didn’t have to pretend. One moment where my dragon’s contentment was allowed to exist without the weight of fifteen years of fear crushing it back down into nothing.
The moment stretched. Seconds became a minute. My body didn’t cooperate with my brain’s insistence that this was temporary, that I needed to fix it before he woke. If anything, I got harder, more present, more aware of exactly how little fabric was between us and exactly how easy it would be to just shift slightly, just tilt my hips, just let him feel what he did to me.
I didn’t.
But I didn’t move away either, and that might have been the most honest thing I’d done in weeks.
Ash made a small sound, something between a sigh and a murmur, and his hand came up to rest on top of mine. His fingers curled gently around my wrist, not pulling, not pushing, just holding, and something in my chest cracked open so hard it was a miracle my ribs didn’t split.
