Not Just the Boss's Plaything. CAITLIN CREWS

a rasp against the dark. She’d gone still, her fingers splayed across the scar in question. “He took his role as our guardian seriously,” Nikolai had said, and his gruff voice had sounded almost amused, as if what he’d said was something other than awful. Alicia had chanced a glance at him, and saw a different truth in that wintry gaze, more vulnerable in the clasp of the dark than she’d imagined he knew. “He didn’t like how I’d washed the dishes.”

      “Nikolai—” she’d begun, not knowing what she could possibly say, but spurred on by that torn look in his eyes.

      He’d blinked, then frowned. “It was nothing.”

      But she’d known he was lying. And the fact that she’d had no choice but to let it pass, that this man wasn’t hers to care for no matter how it felt as if he should have been, had rippled through her like actual, physical pain.

      Alicia had moved on then to the tattoo of a wild beast rendered in a shocking sweep of bold color and dark black lines that wrapped around the left side of his body, from his shoulder all the way down to an inch or so above his sex. It was fierce and furious, all ferocious teeth and wicked claws, poised there as if ready to devour him.

      As if, she’d thought, it already had.

      “All of my sins,” he’d said then, his voice far darker and rougher than before.

      There’d been an almost-guarded look in his winter gaze when she’d glanced up at him, but she’d thought that was that same vulnerability again. And then he’d sucked in a harsh breath when she’d leaned over and pressed a kiss to the fearsome head of this creature that claimed him, as if she could wash away the things that had hurt him—uncles who wielded kitchen knives, whatever battles he’d fought in the army that had got him shot, all those shadows that lay heavy on his hard face. One kiss, then another, and she’d felt the coiling tension in him, the heat.