her. The closer I got, the more the pressure in my chest eased, yet my heart felt heavier at the same time. It was the strangest shit I’d ever experienced.
“Having a good time?” I asked.
Her cheeks were beautifully rosy in the chilly October weather. “Very. Your mother has told me several hilarious stories about you as a child that I’m having a hard time believing. She also promised to send me baby pictures.”
“I need you to stay in my room tonight,” I blurted out.
Her eyes widened, then immediately softened. “All night?”
I felt my own eyes go flinty. “Well, you’re not hitting and quitting me in my own fucking bed. So, yes. All night.”
After ten years of doing it myself, I finally understood why women got so miffed about a man bailing on them like that. Watching Lexi walk out my door right after sex, leaving me alone in bed, would sting like a son of a bitch.
She smiled. “It’s a date.”
When I gently cupped her cheek in my hand and kissed her in front of everyone for the first time, I felt my entire family’s astonished expressions burning into my back.
Yeah, yeah. The Wonder Man-Whore has finally found lov—companionship.
Ignoring them, and all the heaviness threatening to weigh me down, I just focused on kissing my girl.
Because right then, she was all that mattered.
I followed Nico into his bedroom later that night with both anticipation and trepidation rushing through my veins. Anticipation because this felt like some sort of step forward, even if we weren’t labeling those steps or even acknowledging the journey.
Trepidation because, well…
“Nico, I have to tell you something before I sleep in here tonight.”
We’d entered the room hand-in-hand. At my words, he turned around and pulled me closer to him by our interlocked fingers. “I knew it. You have one of those unsightly, full head gear retainers that you sleep with every night, don’t you?”
The more this playful side of him came out—a side I suspected was part of the real man beneath—the harder I fell. “What year do you think it is? Do they even make those anymore? Though I should warn you that my morning bedhead is unsightly enough.”
Lifting my hand to his mouth, he laid the most sensual kiss on my wrist. “What is it?”
“Sometimes I have…nightmares.”
His body stiffened, his expression hardening. “Nightmares about what?”
All kinds of things. “Just bad memories.”
He tipped my chin up to look me in the eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d lowered it. Too lost in thoughts I’d rather forget. “The fire?” he asked softly.
I nodded. “And the nights when I was alone on the streets. I remember being so tired all the time because every night I would shiver so badly I could never fall asleep for very long.” My smile was tight. “Twenty years later and I’m still losing sleep over those nights. No matter whether I dream about fire or ice, I always wake up sweating and shivering at the same time.” And screaming. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
His hand slid over my jawline, gripping it firmly. “As long as you’re in my bed, Lexi, there will be no bad dreams. I’ll chase them all away.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’ll be right beside you whenever they try to come for you. I’ll make sure you go back to sleep knowing there’s no safer place in the world for you than the spot right next to me.”
My mouth slowly spread into a smile. “Heroic.”
I so badly wanted his words to be true.
The last time I’d slept all night with a man, it had ended badly and had turned me off the experience entirely. It was back during my modeling days when I’d briefly hooked up with one of the guys in my temporary circle of friends. Someone who was just trying to climb up the social ladder. The first night we’d spent together, I’d been yanked out of my nightmare by the sounds of my own screams and his voice yelling at me to wake up. Then he’d put an exclamation point on his exit by stating that he didn’t have the time or patience to deal with someone else’s “baggage.”
Before that, in my younger years when I lived at my father’s estate, Dimitri had always been there to hold me after I’d awoken screaming in terror. I suspected that after the first few times it happened, he’d started standing guard outside my bedroom all night, ready to come to the rescue.