Matthew not only didn’t have an agenda, but he sincerely believed every word of it.
Some nights, when I’d gotten too much in my own head and Matthew lay sleeping peacefully beside me, I second-guessed whether I’d really removed that love spell I’d placed on him when we first met. What if I’d fucked up the counterspell? What if all the time I’d believed he genuinely adored me, he’d been the victim of my magic?
“Except the way you smell right now, sorry,” he said with a laugh in his voice as we turned down the upstairs hall toward our room at the far end. “I’ll run you a bath.”
Okay, yeah. Never mind. No one under a love spell would tell me I stank.
I wanted to argue, but I really couldn’t. Running through the woods had left me streaked with dirt and forest detritus andhalf-melted snow, getting Jessica out of the car and back to the house had added blood to the mix, and I’d been sweating the whole time. Healing her had left me sweatier still, and then I’d gone to rummage through a wrecked car, crawling half under the seats to find the spell bags. I could smell myself as much as he could, and it disgusted me beyond measure. Every bit of grit I’d encountered tonight had found a home somewhere on my body, behind my knees, on the back of my neck. Ugh.
Matthew opened our door, and I let out a long breath and half my tension as I stepped through it. The scent of my mate always put me at ease, and that mingled with the lavender I kept in our clothes and the cedar in the closet and my own pheromones made a relaxation cocktail that couldn’t be beat.
“Fine, I don’t mind taking a bath,” I said loftily. I fucking loved taking baths, the hotter and longer the better, and he knew it. He’d been the one to install the giant bathtub, after all. “Make sure you put in some of the salts from the green jar. Two scoops.”
Matthew bent and kissed me, quick and hard, and strode off to the bathroom, calling, “Your wish is my command,” over his shoulder.
My lips tingled pleasantly as I stripped, tossed my clothes in the general direction of the hamper, and followed him. He’d started the bath, turned out the light, and lit the two big candles I kept on ledges around the tub, and his mouth fell gratifyingly open as he looked up from putting my bath salts in, his eyes flicking up and down my body.
No, I didn’t need a love spell to keep my mate’s attention. Maybe I never had—and there was a thought I could pull out and examine to reassure myself on my next late, brooding night.
“I need to go out to my office and do a few things and look for a book I think I have out there. Check the answering machine,” he said. But he didn’t sound all that convincing.
I stepped into the tub, lifting my hair off the nape of my neck and twisting it up onto my head, securing it with a chopstick I kept on the edge of the tub for precisely this purpose.
And then I leaned back, showing the long line of my throat, the silvery scar of his mating bite fully exposed on the side of my neck.
Matthew’s gaze arrowed there and stuck. He swallowed hard.
“Later,” he said. “Once you’re settled in bed I’ll go out there.”
Steam billowed up from the surface of the water, coating the window and the mirror, the flickering candlelight setting it gleaming as if the air was made out of tiny diamonds. Matthew looked like something out of one of those moodily lit, porny period pieces, the kind where everyone fucked the king of England and then got their heads cut off: all broad shoulders and swarthy chest, hair a little longer than usual and hanging in a rakish wave over his forehead, the bulge in the front of his jeans pronounced enough that it could’ve been an Elizabethan codpiece rather than real.
He shoved the jeans over his hips along with his boxers. Mmm. Very real.
Usually I preferred to bathe alone. Werewolves might like living in large, noisy groups, but I’d always been more of a solitary creature. My baths were my quiet time, and Matthew respected that completely.
Tonight, though, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to scoot forward and make room for him behind me and around me, leaning back to savor the solidity and warmth of his muscled body. His cock pressed equally solidly into my back, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to do anything about it. Once he’d reached between us and readjusted a bit, he wrapped both arms around me and didn’t make any moves at all.
“You have a chance to talk to Calder tonight?” Matthew asked after a few quiet minutes.
My eyes had half closed; my own body had begun to respond to Matthew’s, but in a sleepy, non-urgent way. Now my eyes opened, and I stared at the condensation slowly forming rivulets on the tiled wall at the foot of the bath.
“He’s not exactly demonstrative, and he’d rather hide it when he’s upset,” Matthew went on. “But this…I don’t know how this is going to hit him. Ian and Jared and I had pretty stable childhoods. Always someone around to protect us. This has to bring up some shitty memories for him. A couple decades’ worth of shitty memories.”
Right. Calder’s childhood, which hadn’t been much of one to start with, had been cut abruptly short when he took on parental responsibility for an abandoned bobcat toddler at the age of only twelve. I’d been kind of a sickly kid, too, who’d needed more attention than most, which had only made it harder.
Any friend of Calder’s would have good reason to worry that tonight’s events would bring up a lot of topics he’d rather not dwell on.
But Matthew wasn’t worrying about Calder, per se. Did he really think I wouldn’t understand what his questions actually meant?
“I’m fine,” I said, answering the real one. “I understand why you’d think I wouldn’t be. But I don’t remember the part where I nearly died as a baby, or where I got abandoned or orphaned or whatever the hell happened to me. All my nightmares come from the stuff that happened later on. Nate was poking me about it, too, but I think maybe I convinced him I’m fine and to shut up about it.”
“I’m taking that as a hint to shut up about it, too,” Matthew said dryly, but he kissed the side of my head and gaveme a squeeze. “You don’t have to talk to me. Obviously. But maybe you should talk to Nate about it instead of blowing him off, huh? His childhood fucking sucked. It’s not like he wouldn’t empathize.”
“Nate doesn’t want to be my therapist,” I scoffed. Although…would he listen? If I wanted to talk about it?
“Not like a therapist. I mean, he’s your best friend. Of course he’d want to—”
I scrambled up and spun around so fast the water sloshed wildly over the sides of the tub, splooshing against the tiled wall and washing onto the floor. The candle at the head of the tub hissed and spluttered as a few drops of water flew onto it, and Matthew let out anoofas my knee grazed his groin on its way to settle next to his hip.
