the height of his power. His shoulders were wide. He had a strong and muscular chest and abdomen. The thickness of his cock jutted up between muscular hips.
Beautiful or not, Tanya wasn’t about to take a shower with him. “You— What are you doing?” She held tightly to her sliced sweater and bra after Vladimir had crossed the room on bare feet to slip the jacket off her shoulders before turning to put it aside.
Once again drawing her attention to his tautly muscled arse. The man didn’t possess an ounce of superfluous flesh on his body. Or modesty, apparently.
Because he wasn’t just a man, Tanya reminded herself. Vladimir was a dragon too. A strong and feral dragon who could take down and destroy any prey or anything that stood in his path.
Reminding herself of that wasn’t helping to dampen Tanya’s total physical awareness of him when it was the man now standing naked and totally virile in front of her.
He turned back to her. “Take off the rest of your things. Then we can take a shower together,” he encouraged softly.
The hot water was already starting to steam up the bathroom. “Is this a new type of torture you’ve thought up just for me?” Tanya glared.
He chuckled softly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard showering with me called that before.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No doubt you’ve showered with lots of women in the past.”
His humor disappeared, and he took a step closer to her so he could slowly ease her clenched fingers off and away from her sweater. “I have been alive for a thousand years.”
“A thousand years?” she echoed incredulously.
“Yes.”
“Wow, that takes ‘older man’ to a whole new level,” she mocked to hide her reaction to his close proximity and being touched by him.
“It does,” he accepted. “For most of those centuries, there was no such thing as a shower, and since they have been in existence, I haven’t showered with any woman.”
Tanya gazed up at him. “You haven’t?”
“The shower as you see it now has only existed for two hundred and fifty years, and I haven’t physically been with a woman, any woman, for the past two hundred of those years.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. Opened it. Then closed it again.
Vladimir smiled ruefully at the utter shock in Tanya’s expression. “When you have lived for a thousand years, certain things are no longer…enjoyable, and abstinence becomes preferable when they are not with the right person.”
“For you, that’s your mate.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not—”
“Are you claiming to be unaware of me? My presence?”
Color entered her cheeks. “You’re too…overwhelming for anyone to be unaware of you.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Do I?” She eyed him challengingly.
“Whether you choose to believe it yet or not, that’s exactly who you are.” He lifted one of his hands to gently cup the side of Tanya’s face, frowning slightly when he felt how cold she still was. “Now take off the rest of your clothes,” he added briskly. “And let’s get you under the warmth of the hot water.”
Vladimir kept his expression blank as he watched her turn away from him to self-consciously remove the rest of her clothes. He was given a glimpse of her slender back and shapely bottom before she quickly stepped inside the steam of the shower cubicle. Her shyness confirmed for him that, despite her past, Tanya was unaccustomed to intimacy. He wanted to be the one to give her that. To give her warmth and intimacy, and ultimately love.
All dragon shifters were destined to love their mate. It was inevitable, like night following day. But Vladimir the man was rapidly falling in love with Tanya the woman. The more he knew of her, the more the depth of her strength of character astounded and beguiled him. Not as just his mate, but as the strong and fearless woman he now knew her to be.
He also believed Tanya was totally untried and vulnerable on an emotional level, having only known the love of her parents and brother before now. For one reason or another, they’d all left her. First her parents had died, and then her brother had disappeared two months ago, and by doing so, he had left Tanya to her fate.
The reason Vladimir had changed his mind about spanking her wasn’t because his anger at her having put herself in danger was any less than it had been, but because he wanted to be able to prove to Tanya that he would never