She snorted.“It doesn’t look like that.”
Knowing what she was referring to, he peered down at his cock and grinned.“It does that whenever you’re in the room.”
She paused in her fumbling with the fabric at that.Mouth rounding, she turned to him and asked, “Do you mean that?”
“Do I mean you turn me on something fierce?”He snorted.“Yes, mate.You turn me on something fierce.”
She blinked.“Why?”
“Why?”He gawked at her, then shook his head.“Because you’re beautiful?I don’t think I understand the question,” he said apologetically.
She sighed.“Never mind.What are you doing here?”
He shook his head again and strode toward her, not stopping until he could cup her cheek.She sighed into him, her body relaxing against his.The brush of the silky toga against his chest, and the flashes of bare skin touching his had his cock hardening to discomfort.He shoved his desire for her aside, wondering at her lack of comprehension over something so fundamental.
“Don’t you know how gorgeous I think you are?”he asked, dropping his head so he could press a kiss to her lips.
She sighed again.“I don’t know.My head’s all… it’s messed up at the moment.I’m sorry, Ryan.I’m sorry I’ve been hiding in here with Marc.”
“We understood.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” she denied.“I shouldn’t hide from you.”
“No.You shouldn’t.But you’ve been mated just over a week,” he teased, his thumb swiping down along her cheekbone.“I think you can be forgiven for not understanding exactly how the mate bond works.”
Her lips twitched.“Well, aren’t you generous?”
He chuckled, but sobered a little to tell her, “I want you to know something, El.To us, you are perfect.You have to know that.And if you don’t, then it’s to our detriment because we’re not showing you how beautiful you are.”
Her eyes sparkled and her pouty lips firmed into a smile.“You guys are too crazy to be real.”
“Why?”he chided, but his tone was teasing in response to her tone.“Because we think you’re the most beautiful woman on the fucking planet?”
“The ‘fucking’ brought me down to earth,” she retorted with heat, but she turned her face into his palm and kissed it.“I won’t run from you again.”
“You need to tell Shawn that too,” Ryan murmured, ignoring the way she stiffened at the mention of the other male’s name.It was probably a testament to how deep he knew the bond was between Shawn and El that he didn’t try to undermine it in any way.
This could have been the perfect chance to rupture what the two had, but that never occurred to Ryan.How could it?The links uniting them were far more complex than any usual human-human bond.Even though they’d yet to find proof that there was more to El’s heritage than met the eye, he was starting to believe his own instincts.Starting to believe that there was definitely something going on with her past.
“I don’t want to talk about Shawn,” she said with a pout.
“No?Well, we don’t have to.But you have to talk to him.You can’t keep shutting him out because of a mistake he made years ago.It would be like punishing you for something you did when you were twenty.How fair’s that?”
“Very fair,” she snapped grumpily.“I don’t want to argue with you,” she admitted after a few seconds.
“No?What would you prefer to do?”he asked teasingly, loving the heat that appeared in her eyes at his words.
“I think you know.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”He grinned when she huffed.“I’m a man, baby.I need direction.”
“Said no man ever,” she hooted, then laughing, reached up on tiptoe and connected their mouths.
He felt pathetic as fuck admitting that with their kiss, some kind of planetary alignment went down.It was like the moon aligned with the sun, and Venus and Mars were having some kind of sleepover.
The rightness of their kiss seeped down to his very core.It went so deep, he didn’t even know how to quantify how perfect it was.
She was tender and gentle and delicate.She tasted like heaven and sin and his.
