It’s an achievement she should be proud of, but, of course, being the good girl that she is, Nora is immediately horrified and remorseful.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” She rushes to me, grabbing a towel to stop the bleeding. She appears so distraught that I burst out laughing, though my nose throbs like a son of a bitch. This is what I get for being distracted during training. She’d managed to catch me off-guard at a moment when I was looking at her breasts and fantasizing about pulling up her sports bra.

“Julian! Why are you laughing?” Nora’s voice rises in pitch as she presses the towel to my face. “You should see a doctor! It could be broken—”

“It’s fine, baby,” I reassure her between bouts of laughter, taking the towel from her shaking hands. “I can promise you I’ve had worse. If it were broken, I’d know it.” My voice sounds nasal due to the towel pressed against my nose, but I can feel the cartilage with my fingers, and it’s straight, undamaged. I’ll have a black eye, but that’s about it. If I hadn’t deflected to the right at the last second, though, her move could’ve crushed my nose completely, forcing fragments of bone into my brain and killing me on the spot.

“It’s not fine!” Nora steps away, still looking extremely upset. “I could’ve seriously hurt you!”

“Wouldn’t I have deserved it?” I say, only half-teasing. I know there is a part of her that still resents me for the way I took her—that will always resent me for that. If I were her, I wouldn’t apologize for causing me pain. I’d look for opportunities to kick my ass any chance I got.

She glares at me, but I see that she’s beginning to calm down now that the immediate shock is over. “Probably,” she says in a more level tone of voice. “But that doesn’t mean I want you to suffer. I’m stupid and irrational like that, you see.”

I grin at her, lowering the towel. The bleeding is almost over; as I had suspected, it was only a mild hit. “You’re not stupid,” I say softly, stepping closer to her. Though my nose still hurts, there is a new, growing ache in a much lower region of my body. “You’re exactly as I want you to be.”

“Brainwashed and in love with my kidnapper?” she asks drily as I reach for her, dropping the bloodied towel on the floor.

“Yes, exactly,” I murmur, pulling off her sports bra to bare her small, perfectly shaped breasts. “And very, very fuckable…”

And as I tug her down to the mat, my injury is the last thing on my mind.

As Nora’s semester progresses, we develop a routine. I usually wake up before her and go for a training session with my men. When I return, she’s awake, so we eat breakfast, and then I head into the office while Nora goes for a walk with Rosa and listens to the online lectures. After a few hours, I come back to the house, and we have lunch together. Then I go back to my office, and Nora either meets Monsieur Bernard for her art lesson or joins me in the office, where she studies quietly while I work or conduct meetings. Even though she appears not to be paying attention at those times, I know that she does—because she often asks me follow-up questions about the business at dinner.