I dropped my forehead so it was resting on hers and the water from the showerhead was cascading down around us. I was making a mess, but I didn’t care because I had her, and she was my home.

“Do you love me?”

The words sounded so foreign, but so right, when I was saying them to her. She brushed her full lips across mine and the last three months without her faded away.

“Do you want me to lie to you or tell you the truth?”

I smiled against her mouth and kissed her back twice as hard as she had kissed me.

“Lie to me.”

She reached up and put her arms around my neck and took a step back, dragging me all the way into the shower stall with her. The water was lukewarm at best, and it made me shiver. So did the fact that she started to impatiently pull the tail of my shirt up over my head. A task made increasingly difficult considering I was now soaked head to toe and the material was clinging to me.

“Of course not. You’re the last person in the world I could love.”

Even though she was just playing my own game, it still stung and made me scowl down at her. She lifted an eyebrow at me and put her hands on the sodden leather of my belt.

“Want the truth?”

I nodded and grunted a little when she finally managed to get the front of my heavy pants open. The water was going to ruin my boots but I didn’t care because she gave a little hop and I had her in my arms and was pressing against her and the back of the shower wall. She was slippery and warm. I didn’t even need her to tell me the truth; I could see it shining out of the forest that colored her eyes.

“I didn’t want to love you. You’re not the kind of guy who is ever going to be easy on my heart. You take things to the extreme and I don’t love how easily you slip between Bax and Shane.”

I ran a hand down her side and curled it around her hip. She locked her ankles around my back and arched into the light touch. All I had to do was lean forward just a little and I would slide inside her, but then there would be no more talking and I needed her to finish what she was saying. Needed it more than I needed to push my way home.

“But you also make me feel safe and cherished and you make me feel like the entire world has to get through you to get to me. There is just something about that that makes all the other stuff incidental. I believe from the bottom of my heart that we can make each other happy. I’m never going to ask you to be a good guy, Bax, because I fell in love with you just the way you are. Bad.”

I blinked at her and bent down to seal my mouth over hers. She tasted like toothpaste and redemption. She tasted like mine. I rubbed my tongue across hers, sank my teeth into her bottom lip, and pulled her hips just close enough that I could use the angle I was holding her at to sink all the way inside of her. She gasped into my mouth and I groaned into hers. I felt my fingers tighten on to her skin and she burned all along the exposed length of my cock.

The fact that I was inside her, that we were together with nothing—both literally and figuratively—between us anymore seemed to hit both of us at the same time. Her eyes got huge in her face and I felt everything under my skin start to buzz. I pulled back and dropped a kiss on the end of her nose. Her fingernails dug into the back of my neck and her freckles stood out in stark relief across her milky-white skin.

“You know where I’ve been this time.”

“I just want you. I missed you. Missed this.”

I throbbed inside of her, felt the way her body paid testament to her words, and I think it made me even harder. Her chest was pressed intimately into mine and I could feel the tiny points of her nipples stabbing into me, slipping along with water trailing between us.

“I don’t know how love works, Dovie. I don’t know how to be anything other than this, but I know the only thing that gives me hope is the idea of you and me. I know I’m not the ideal, not the dream guy, but no one will ever fight for you the way I will. I promise you that you will always have the best parts of me I have to give.”

“I know, Bax, and I know that’s how you love me. Now, can you please get your ass in gear and MOVE? Three months was way too long.” She leaned forward and ran her tongue along the shell of my ear, which made me shiver, and not just because the water was now cold as hell. She whispered in a husky voice that just turned me inside out. “I need you to make me come.”

“Shit.” Of course I was in love with her. Who didn’t love a good girl who could get bad when the mood struck her?

I slid my hand around her hips and grabbed her under her ass so I could heft her up and sink more fully inside her damp heat. I braced a hand on the slippery tile next to her head and buried my face in the curve of her neck. She tightened her arms around my neck and I felt her drop kisses all along my shoulder as I thrust inside her like I had no control. I didn’t. She felt so good, felt like where I should always be, that I just lost all sense of being and ground into her, moved along her until I heard her whimper, felt her inner walls start to spasm around my quivering dick. It wasn’t just sex, it wasn’t just making love, it was her imprinting on me, and me on her, with nothing between us ever again. It was a primitive claiming of another person in the most basic way possible.

I lowered my hand from the wall and tangled it in her hair. I pulled her head back and tapped her lax mouth with mine. I breathed my life into her as I felt my body start to release into hers. She brought a shaking hand around to the front of my face and rubbed my cheek. She tapped her middle finger along my star and wordlessly mouthed my name as I pumped into her until I was empty and spent.

It took the last of the strength I possessed to reach behind me and crank off the freezing water as we just stood there, replete and soggy.

She put a kiss on my shoulder then walked around me to climb out of the shower. She made a face when she saw the mess on the floor, but just walked around it to fish some towels out of the linen closet. I just stared at her, trying to get my head around the fact this was all real. She was here, she had given me a place to call home, and she was going into it wide-eyed, with no illusions about who she was going to be crawling into bed with each night.

I climbed out of the shower and sat on the toilet to struggle with my boots. I’d just got one off when she came back in, wrapped in a towel, and handed me one. I ran it over my head and looked up at her.

“Gus left me the garage.”

She leaned a shoulder on the doorframe and lifted a rust-colored eyebrow at me. “That’s sad, but kind of fitting. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Whatever you decide, I’m behind you.”

I got the other boot off and tossed it with a thud onto the floor. I had to do a little wiggle and shake to get the damp denim down my legs, and by the time I was done, her eyes were glowing bright green at me again.

“What if what I do isn’t exactly on the up-and-up?”

She came back into the bathroom and took the towel from my hands. She wrapped it around my waist and used the tip of one of her fingernails to trace the top of one of my flags.

“Three months apart was a really long time, Bax. I just want you to consider that when you make whatever choices you make. I love you and I’m not going to tell you what’s the right or wrong thing to do, but you need to remember now that what you do ultimately affects me too.”

I closed my eyes briefly and pulled her against my chest. “All right, Copper-Top.”

She smoothed her hands along my sides and grasped my hand. “What do you think of the house?”

“It looks like home. It looks like you, and I love the bedroom.”

She giggled a little and I followed her to the big bed. It just took a little nudge and she was sprawled on her back, the terry cloth between us long gone. I braced above her and grinned down at her.