“God. Fine. Declan, will you play nice and give Lola his treats, please?”
My voice comes out breathy and smoky and fuck. I need to run, but I’m caught as he leans in, and I realize he’s only inches away, crowding me. My breathing changes, speeds up, and mybody wants things I can’t have, even as heat pools between my legs.
“Please, what?” he asks.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Will you be a good girl and ask, or will I have to withhold that pleasure?”
I shiver. “Please… sir.”
That last word comes out low, sultry, and hits me like a battering ram. God, I want to go back to the time when I was his, when he collared me, even just for one night. I want to do it all again and mean more than just that night.
“Good girl,” he says, and the sound of it melts me as it sinks into my veins and swirls, hot. “Give Lola his treats.”
I expect him to back up, but I have to reach around him. My breasts slide up his chest and this close I can feel his heart thudding. It’s not slow. It’s fast.
I get the treats, close the door, and turn, pressed against the pantry door with my hand full of treats for Lola who won’t just meow now, he warbles. Like he’s singing to us.
Or me.
The look in Declan’s gaze is complex. Dark. Full of want, and hate and… longing.
I’m frozen in place as he cups my face with one hand, takes a treat from my open palm with the other, and throws it to the cat who chases it.
Declan doesn’t back up.
My pulse thrums. I lick my lips because they’re dry, and his gaze follows the movement.
“Molly,” he says, his voice like gravel, like smoke, like the edge of a cliff before we leap.
And I want to leap.
I want to wrap my legs around his waist and let him take me hard againstthe pantry door.
A screech from upstairs breaks the spell.
“Murder! Murder! Bitch-ass monster! Murder! Help!”
He lets me go abruptly and rises, forgetting me as he follows the high-pitched squawking.
In the library, Daddy’s crotchety African Grey sits on his perch in his huge brass cage, and on the back of a chair, swishing his tail, is Lola.
There’s evil in the cat’s eye and malice in the parrot’s.
“What took you so long, bub?” Pepper asks, dropping the call for help.
Lola lets out his scratchy, deep meow, sticks out a leg with a permanent bald spot and a scar, then licks it.
“Dear Jesus, you live with all this?”
I nod. “Yep. And I like to travel with them all.”
“Like some sort of spoiled Doolittle?”
I’m about to talk it up, try to make him see how crazed this would make him, being with me and the pets all the time, because I spend six to seven hours rehearsing every day. He’d have to sit somewhere with the lot of them.
But instead of balking, he grins.
