But it hurt, imagining how Nathan would have stood there, taking the blows, a man big and strong enough to stand toe to toe with scarier things than a pissed-off woman who was barely over five feet tall, even if she was a cop. He would have waited until she finished, the blood filling his mouth. Then once again, he’d quietly ask for a chance to talk to them. It was that which would have gotten through to Violet. Seeing that there was something different about him. Something worth hearing.

He was fiercely devoted to the quest to make amends. Fiercely devoted to taking care of Dona. Maybe too devoted, she reflected.

She worked late hours at the free clinic. While society’s memory of the previous life associated with her name had vanished, her medical degree and credentials were unquestioned. The advantage of having Lucifer as her previous employer, she suspected. Another of the quietly amazing gifts she’d been given.

Every day, Nathan came to escort her home, no matter how tired he was after a hard and hot day of roofing in the new subdivisions going up on the outskirts of the city.

“A kick-ass Mistress you might be,” he’d tease her, “but you’re still a woman. My woman. You’re not walking home alone.”

He liked to hold her hand as they walked. They’d talk about their day, watch the neighborhood kids squeeze in that last moment of play in the darkening streets.

Those moments of male testosterone meshed oddly well with his submission to her in the bedroom, his willingness to serve her however she desired. But it wasn’t just the roughness of the neighborhood. He knew how she felt about opening the door of their home alone, fighting the hold of what might be behind it, a lingering phobia.

Therefore, when she woke to find herself held tightly by him in the loneliest hours of the night, she understood. He’d tear open his heart and let her have it if she asked. It was all for her. He’d found something worth saving his soul for, and that had made all the difference. She wondered if he understood he’d saved her soul as well.

“I want to celebrate.” He turned suddenly and caught her about the waist, twirling her, sending the handful of cotton balls she held flying and making her laugh with his boyish exuberance. The light and the shadows in her mind joined hands, making it the best kind of ache to look up at him. “I got paid yesterday. I’m taking you out to dinner and for ice cream afterward.”

She cocked a brow. “And ice cream?”

“Waffle cone, cookie crumb topping, everything.” Sobering, he brought her closer.

Despite the injuries to his face, she got lost looking into his blue eyes, feeling the muscled length of his body press against her. “Anything you want, Mistress. Today, tomorrow…”

She let him kiss her, and as he deepened it, those calloused hands clutched her hips, pulled her closer in male demand. She decided she was going to exercise a Mistress’s prerogative. Dinner could wait. Ice cream and him. Those were the only two things she needed, and if she could have them together, so much the better. She had half a pint of mocha vanilla swirl still in the freezer. The microwave would melt it just enough…

A summer breeze flitted through the curtains. The bed was stripped down to just sheets as his body stretched over her, giving her the pleasure of running her palms up his strong arms, braced on either side of her. Across the broadness of his back, down to his hips, slightly sticky from the ice cream she’d licked off his buttocks and his long cock. He’d had some too, and her pussy still ached from the pleasure of the cold and heat mixed, the warmth of his mouth before she’d had him replace it with his cock.

Lean, a roofer’s spare body, but all muscled and more wide-shouldered than expected. When he bent to her, catching her lips in a kiss that was somewhat off center because of the rhythm of his body stroking into hers, everything was dusky, dim, soft at the edges in the quiet room. The noises of the street outside blended with the radio inside.

“Dona.” He murmured her name, sinking deeper. She arched, wanting all of him and more.

“Mine,” she whispered back, biting his lips a little harder, feeling him swell inside her at the sensual punishment, the claim on him.

“Yours,” he agreed. “Forever, Mistress. Yours to fuck…however, whenever…” Humor glinted through his gaze, but something even more intense.

“Mine to love.”

“Yours to love.” He bent, kissed the point of her sternum, just beneath her breasts.

“Yours to keep.”

Her protector. Her lover.

Each declaration in her mind was punctuated by his next kiss as he worked his way up the bone that helped guard her heart. But she didn’t need anything to guard her heart anymore.

This quiet moment held all the answers. He had her. She had him. Happiness was as simple as this. As she opened herself further to him, his arms tightened around her.

She let herself be absorbed by him, her slave. The man who called her Mistress.

The man who had her heart because he believed in what lay behind redemption, forgiveness, karma, Eden… What was worth every torment. He’d helped her believe in it again as well, giving her the strength to follow him out of Hell and link her destiny to life again. To him.

Love and faith. Inseparable, because they were One.

Just like soul mates.

The End