Page 60 of Irish Brute

And he’s not wearing a stitch of clothing.

“I…” I can’t keep from looking at the dresser, at the drawer that holds my collar.

“I sleep in the nip,piscín.”

I swallow and nod.

“That’s all I’m asking of you. Sleep.”

I can’t help but look at his cock. He isn’t erect. Yet.

He closes the distance between us and reaches out to slip a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I want to wake up next to my wife. Do you have a problem with that?”

I shake my head.

“I’d like to hear her say a word or two as well.” He grins as he says it, the smile transforming his face from calculating brute to charming boy.

“I— I’d like that too,” I say.

He gets into bed first. He holds up the duvet, extending an invitation that feels nearly formal.

I can still change my mind. I can remember an early meeting I have to take tomorrow. I can decide to wash my hair.

But I cross the room. I put my toothbrush on the nightstand. I reach for the hem of my sleep shirt.

It feels wrong to keep wearing it, like I showed up to a picnic dressed in clothes meant for the office. I pull the gray cotton over my head and drop it on the floor by the nightstand. He waits for me to climb onto the mattress and settle on my side, facing the door.

When he reaches across me, his weight feels like a promise. But he only reaches for the lamp, turning it off at the base.

I exhale slowly.

I hear him breathing in the dark. I feel the heat of him, radiating against my back. I smell him, cedar and spice, or maybe that’s my own arm I smell, because he’s touched every inch of my body.

Eyes closed, I try to find the shadow-fog trail to sleep. But my mind overflows with memories of what we did here, just an hour or two before. My belly swoops as I think of how close he got me, how many times. How he knew my body even better than I know myself.

I stretch my legs, trying to ease something between an itch and a pang. I spread my fingers wide on my pillow, desperate to bleed off some of my nervous energy.

“Stop thinking,” Braiden says, his voice scraping the bottom of the range for human ears.

Those are the words he said to me, right before he short-circuited every nerve in my body. It’s not likely they’ll work now. Not when I’m remembering every devastating move he made.

“Piscín,” he says, swallowing the word in a way I’ll never learn to imitate. “Sleep.”

I want to. I need to. But I’m terrified I’ll do it wrong. I’ll ruin whatever we have, whatever this strange attraction is between us, whatever our utterly unlikely marriage is turning out to be.

His arm settles over me like a weighted blanket. He flexes his wrist and pulls me closer, until my back is spooned against his chest. He throws one leg over mine, anchoring me into position.

His breath is warm on the back of my neck. Each hair on his arm, his leg, his chest writes a separate private message against my skin. His cock lies against my bottom, quiet for now.

“Sleep,” he says again, and this time it’s an order.

There’s no question that I’ll do what he tells me. My resistance simply melts away. His command is actually the thing I desire most in the world.

So I sleep.

I jerk awake in the middle of the night. Slipping out from under Braiden’s sheltering arm, I pull away from the heat of his chest, even though I immediately start to shiver. I sit up in bed, knowing I heard something urgent, something important.

There. Something is dragging across the floor upstairs. It sounds like an enormous snake, slithering scale by scale above my head. The noise is ominous. Threatening. I catch my breath, to better make it out over the pounding of my heart.