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I looked at him, feeling my ears burning in spite of the pain pretty much everywhere. “Keep you safe,” I whispered.
The look of horror on his face made me feel even worse.
“Valentine Hart, don’t youeverdo anything like that again.” He was pissed. Like seriously pissed.
I dropped my gaze down to the bandaged hands in my semi-reclined lap and tried to swallow around the emotion stopping my throat.
“Promise me,” Taavi insisted.
“’Kay.”
“I’m serious, Val. Don’t you dare ever put yourself at risk like that again.” His voice broke, making me feel like absolute dog shit.
“’Kay.” It was a lie—or at least partly a lie. I wasn’t about to go off and do something that dumb for no reason, of course. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat to protect Taavi. I mean, I really, really hoped I’d neverhaveto do something like that again. But I would.
The expression on Taavi’s face told me he knew damn well that I was full of shit.
“I mean it,” he said, fingers tightening on my thigh—just a little. “Val, I couldn’t stand it if you got yourself killed because of me.” A few more tears crept out of the corners of his beautiful, mismatched eyes. “Please.”
Fuck. I hated that I’d made him upset. But I also couldn’t promise not to try to protect him. I just—couldn’t. It was like asking me not to breathe.
“I’ll try,” is what I said, this time.
“I—I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered, leaning down from where he sat in the hospital’s vinyl-upholstered visitor chair so that he could rest his cheek against my thigh.
It took far too much effort to move my hand so that I could rest the pads of my bandaged fingers on his hair. “I don’t wanna lose you, either,” I managed.
He blew out a sigh that ruffled the starchy sheet covering my leg, but he didn’t say anything, just stayed there with his cheek on my thigh, my fingers in his hair.
I wanted so much more.
I wanted to hold him, to wrap him in my arms and feel the heat of his body against mine, the taste of his lips on my tongue.
I also knew that if I tried, I’d end up screaming in pain.
So I settled for the silk of his black hair under the pads of my fingers and the warmth of his hand and breath on my leg, knowing that he was here with me. For me.
That he cared enough to ask me to stay alive.
Sure, he was also mad at me, but if our positions had been reversed, I’d have beenfuriouswith him, so I got that.
“Taavi?”
He lifted his head, resting his chin on my thigh so he could look up at me. “What?”
“How did you find me?”
He blinked, surprised. “You knew I was there?”
I let out a pained breath as I tried to settle myself a little against the reclined bed. “I thought it was a wolf at first,” I admitted. “The howl. But then I heard you barking.”
“You knew it was me?”
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the question. Of fuckingcourseI knew his bark. I knew the sound of his footsteps—dog or human—the sound of his breath as he slept, the sound of his surprise at a jump-scare in a movie or the growl he made in the back of his throat when he was angry and how it was different from the growl he made when he was writhing in pleasure in my arms.
But I wasn’t going to laugh because it would hurt like a fucking bitch.
I carefully licked my swollen lips. “Of course I knew,” I told him, holding his gaze. I had known the second I heard it. I would always know him—had always known him, even that first day in the dumpster, because there had always been a space in my chest, huddled up under the left side of my currently-bruised and cracked ribs, that was just the right size and shape for a Xoloitzcuintli shifter.
