Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 288

Chapter 288: Damn Right He Kissed Her

The last thing she remembered was Nicholas’s face. The first thing she felt was a pulse under her cheek that she hoped was his.

Her eyes fluttered open to gold, but not from torches.

Gold water lapping against skin she couldn’t account for and a warmth so thorough it had settled into her bones without asking.

Confusion came first. Her brain felt like someone had swung a sledgehammer. Then the tingling registered. Sparks lit up every inch of her skin like the sun after a long winter. She was in water. Her bare skin was against someone else’s bare skin and there was a lot of contact happening in a lot of places.

Her eyes opened fully and the gasp came out before she could stop it.

Naked.

Nothing separated her from the man holding her but warm water and whatever dignity she still had left, which, at this point, could fit in a thimble and still have room for a middle finger.

Her face went the color of a pomegranate.

Just another naked-and-glowing wake-up. You’d think she would be getting used to it by now, but she was not.

An arm clamped tighter around her. One of his hands was already working slow circles against her scalp, which she was only now noticing because her brain had been busy processing the nudity and had deprioritized the head massage.

"Hey, Guinevere. It’s just me, Nicholas. I’ve got you."

His voice was low and close and the sound of it went through her like someone had just turned the volume up on every bad idea she’d ever had.

Her muscles resisted for two seconds. Three. Then they gave up the fight and she melted into him like her body had decided this was correct.

For a second, she felt safe.

Safe in a way that she couldn’t remember feeling before tonight. Like the world and every sharp thing in it had been put behind a door and the man holding her was the lock.

She could feel his wolf as if it had moved in without asking, blurring every line between them. It was entirely too pleased with this arrangement. Very cute. It made her almost smile.

Then a rumbling started under Nicholas’s ribs, the vibration traveling into hers. Apparently purring was not exclusive to dragons and cats because his wolf was full-on doing it with the energy of a golden retriever who’d been told it was, in fact, a good boy.

If someone would have told her she would be held by a purring wolf king in a glowing tree pool a week ago, she would have asked what they were drinking and whether there was enough for two.

But the massaging on the back of her head, the way his arm held her, the feel of the water and the sparks against her skin, pulled something loose in her chest.

A memory. Or the edge of one. Close enough to feel but too far to see, like reaching for a word you know but can’t say. It was warm and it was kind and it made her deeply, inexplicably sad in a way she had no framework for.

Her eyes burned. She shut them before they could betray her.

Nicholas’s wolf stopped purring. The silence it left behind was louder than the rumble had been.

"Hey, I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere."

He kept massaging her scalp like the fate of the world depended on it and his arm stayed clamped around her like a seatbelt. The silence stretched for a full minute before he broke it again, voice careful.

"What are you thinking about right now?"

She didn’t know how to answer that. How do you explain a sadness you can’t source? A memory you can’t reach? The feeling of something missing that you can’t name because the name is inside the thing that’s missing?

But that wasn’t the only thing. She also remembered Nicholas on the floor of that corridor. Not breathing. His eyes on the ceiling. The void in her chest where he should have been. He was alive right now, or they were both dead, and she wasn’t fully sure which option they’d landed on.

She didn’t want to scare him.

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