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But the hands that settled on my waist were gentle.
“Don’t touch it. You’ll hurt yourself,” Fallon breathed, lifting me from the floor and setting me back on my chair. “I will clean it up.”
He put me down on my chair as if I weighed no more than a child. I gawked at him as he disappeared into the mud room and returned with one of the brooms, sweeping up all the shattered bits with graceful, efficient movements that made those legendary forearms flex.
“What are you doing?” I found myself asking. The absurdity of a question with such an obvious answer made Fallon falter.
“I am… I am cleaning up the pieces. Do you…” He looked down, then back at me and said, “This is called a broom.”
I snorted and then shook my head. “We have brooms on Terratribe II!” I told him. I couldn’t tell if I should be offended that he thought I didn’t know what a broom was or happy that he’d tried to educate me in such a nice way. Good grief.
“Oh! I did not… It is just, you went down to clean it up with your bare hands,” he said, resuming sweeping until everything was in a neat pile. “I was worried you would-”
He dropped the broom with a clatter that made me nearly jump out of my skin.
“Jesus! What is it?” I asked, nearly wrenching my neck with how fast I looked around for the source of Fallon’s alarm.
But he wasn’t looking around like I was. He was staring straight at me. Or, more specifically, the skirt of my dress. I looked down at myself to see a bloom of scarlet over my right knee. His eyes, which had remained mysteriously dark throughout the meal, blazed bright white.
In an instant, he was on his knees before me, wrenching up my skirt.
“Um, excuse me!” I stammered, ignoring everything my mother had ever taught me about not refusing your husband’s advances. The dress wasn’t stretchy, kind of a sheath style, which meant the skirt had absolutely no give. When Fallon couldn’t easily flip the skirt up over my thighs, his face darkened, his ears twitched, those glorious forearms tightened and…
He fucking ripped it. Like it was paper. Wet paper.
The sound of tearing fabric startled me so badly that my body reacted on instinct, my uninjured leg bucking upward. I was about to send my solid, size-ten boot right into the man’s nose.
But without appearing to even notice my foot flying towards his face, he darted to the side and effortlessly dodged it. Before my leg fell, he caught my ankle in the air, slinging it over his shoulder like it was a bit of spare rope or the strap of a bag.
“Sorry,” I breathed, heart in my throat. “I didn’t mean to… I wasn’t going to…”
And then the man had the nerve to grin up at me and say, “I’ve dodged enough shuldu kicks that should have killed me in my time. You’ll have to be faster than that.”
Despite his words, I wondered if he actually was worried about me accidentally trying to shove the heel of my boot into his eye again. Because his tail wrapped itself around my ankle. It pulled until my foot was partway down his back, my knee bent over his shoulder.
His grin vanished as his big hands settled on the meaty part of my calf above the boot of my other leg.
Trying and mostly failing to ignore the suddenly erotic positioning of our bodies – me with one of my legs slung up over his shoulder, him with his head bent low near my crotch, his hands on my bare skin – I looked down at my knee.
It was fine. Bleeding, sure. But fine.
“I must have knelt on one of the broken pieces,” I explained, even though it was completely obvious what had happened.
His white gaze drilled into my knee before snapping up to my face.
“How do you feel?” he asked with an intensity that probably should have scared me. “Feverish? Light-headed? Weak from blood loss?”
“Blood loss?” I blinked at him. “Are you serious?”
“About my wife?” he replied without hesitation. “Always.”
He jolted up to his feet, simultaneously using his tail to put my left foot back on the ground. I moved to stand, but he made an affronted sound of complaint and instantly swept me up into his arms.
“I can walk!” I sputtered as Fallon moved with furious purpose out of the kitchen and into a hallway.
“Not on that leg!”
Not on that leg? Not on that leg?
