Chapter 615:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

He traced the line of my temple and cheekbone, his movements slow and careful.

Hours passed. In the gray, pre-dawn light, my fever finally began to break.

My eyelids fluttered open. My vision was blurry. I felt a cool, damp cloth on my forehead. I turned my head, seeing the hard, aristocratic silhouette of a man sitting beside me, dark stubble shadowing his jaw, intense pale blue eyes watching me.

I was stunned into absolute silence. A jolt of pure shock shot through me, clearing the last of the fever fog from my brain.

“What… what are you doing here?” I whispered, my voice a raspy croak.

Alistair set the cloth in the basin. “Your nurse called me,” he said, his voice low and rough with lack of sleep. “You’re my wife. Where else would I be?”

A hot flush of humiliation washed over me. The thought of him here, all night, watching me in this helpless state, touching me… it was an intimacy I had never consented to.

“You shouldn’t have come,” I said, a spark of my usual defiance returning as I tried to push myself up.

𝗕𝗲 𝘱𝘢𝗋𝗍 of о𝗎𝗿 с𝗼𝗆𝗆un𝗂𝘵𝘆 о𝗇 g𝗮𝘭ոо𝘃еlѕ.с𝗈𝗺

“I should have done a lot of things,” he countered, his voice dropping to an intense, guttural pitch. He leaned forward, planting his hands on the mattress on either side of my head, caging me in completely. “Like forbidding you from running yourself into the ground for a job.”

Before I could form a retort, he closed the small distance between us.

He captured my mouth in a kiss.

It was nothing like I would have imagined. It wasn’t gentle or diplomatic. It was hard, demanding, and punishing, fueled by hours of gut-wrenching worry and raw, terrifying anger at the thought of losing me. It was a brand, a claim, an explosive release of every emotion he had suppressed. I was too shocked, too weak to resist. My mind went blank as my Inner Wolf let out a startled, breathless whimper against his assault. All I could register was the rough scrape of his stubble and the pure, intense taste of Alistair.

He broke the kiss as abruptly as he had started it, resting his forehead against mine, his chest heaving. “Don’t you ever do that to me again,” he breathed against my lips, a rough, desperate command that shattered the last of the fragile boundaries between us.

Blake Davenport POV

The morning after the kiss was a landscape of charged silence. I sat propped up against the pillows, pointedly avoiding Alistair’s gaze. My cheeks still burned with the memory of his mouth on mine. I felt exposed, my defenses completely stripped away.

Alistair sat in the armchair, his expression once again controlled and unreadable. He gave me space, but he didn’t leave.

The doctor arrived, examining my chart and declaring my fever gone. “With a few more days of rest, you’ll be ready for discharge,” the doctor announced with a smile.

.

.

.