Free Lifebound by Leigh Daley Page B

“Come on in and shut the door.” Josh stepped into the tub and sank deeper into the foaming water. “You don’t have to be afraid. I’ll keep my hands off you.”
    However, that was not what she wanted. Not at all.

Chapter Nine
    J osh eased his aching, exhausted muscles into the warm water. He wasn’t usually a bath kind of guy, but he had to admit that it felt good on his aching hip. The gash on his back stung a bit at first but then began to cool and tingle. Next to the tub was a stack of thick cloths. He took one and soaked it in the hot water, then spread it over his face to wash away the dirt and dried blood from the scrape on his cheek.
    He was used to coming home a battered, filthy mess, but for some reason it had embarrassed him for Adriana to see him looking like a ten-year-old boy who’d wrecked his dirt bike. He wanted her to see him as a man, not as some reckless kid.
    She sat down on the little bench that nested beneath the vanity in the huge bathroom. He’d said he didn’t want secrets between them, but he had no idea where to start.
    So, you’re a lamia. I never heard of those but fill me in .
    Idiot.
    “You had a chat with Rekkus, I assume?” she began.
    Damn it. He didn’t want to put the burden of breaking the ice on the whole lamia discussion on her.
    Josh pulled away the washcloth, hoping he’d washed off the worst of the dirt. “Yeah. He kind of filled me in on everything.”
    “And you are okay with this? With me?”
    “Yeah, sure I am.” Though he wasn’t sure himself whether “okay” was the right word for it.
    “I know this has to be really difficult to deal with, learning that this whole world exists.” She picked up a hand towel from the counter and fingered the fringe.
    “I don’t know what was worse, seeing a giant black and silver tiger attack the giant lizard-lion thing that was trying to eat me, or seeing that giant tiger turn into Rekkus,” he said. “So everybody here is some kind of weretiger or witch or vampire or something?”
    “Oh, no. Dana is human, and everybody who came on the ferry with you is human too.”
    Josh grinned. “I could have sworn the guy in the three piece suit, what’s his name? Preston? I thought he had to be some kind of zombie when we got here. But he has definitely loosened up a little. When we were walking back, I saw him heading out to the pool in a Speedo.”
    “Preston Mitchell in a Speedo? That’s scarier than a weretiger.” Adriana laughed.
    The sound of her laugh broke down some of the anxiety that had been crawling through him. He had only known her a couple of days, but making her laugh was something he wanted to spend a lot of time doing. Her fingers played with the towel, and he imagined them playing with him instead. Slow down. No need to rush. There’s more to love than sex. But his dick didn’t agree, and the warm water wasn’t helping.
    “Listen”—he began talking to try to take his mind off sex—“Rekkus told me about how you need a host to touch to keep you balanced or something. I can do that. I want to be that for you.”
    Adriana stopped smiling and the sadness in her eyes froze him. “No, Josh. You don’t want to do that. It’s not like you think. I can’t just touch you whenever I want to. I have to be so careful to only have the contact I need to balance the energies in me and feed part of it back to the host. If I touch for too long, I begin to drain the host instead.”
    “That’s no problem,” he replied, having thought all this out in advance. “Whenever you say stop, I stop. Now that I know what’s going on, I won’t push it.”
    She sighed. “I have to tell you what happened to Tom Bridges.” He listened intently as she recounted the story of having almost ten good years with Tom until his wife died. “Josh, the extra little touches didn’t seem like much, but I could tell it was beginning to wear on him. He had that stroke because his body was overtaxed. And he died because I