“I need to speak to Zander, Rissa, and Anatoly,” Arthur said, letting go of the two of them. “I’ll meet you there.”
Titan nodded and opened the passenger door for Beatrix to get in. After shutting the door, Arthur grabbed him again by the back of the neck.
“Drive carefully,”" he ordered. “You’re both precious to me, but Beatrix will be especially fragile until we soul bond.”
“I won’t let anything happen,” Titan promised. “I’d die before I let her get hurt.”
“Neither of you is to die,” Arthur warned, gave him a last, brief kiss, then stalked off.
It was hard to sit down with his erection painfully confined in his pants, but Titan managed to get himself in the passenger seat and buckled in.
He started up the old van and looked at her. “Which way?”
She had a map opened on her phone. At his question, she pointed. “We need to get on the 163.”
He nodded and put the vehicle in drive.
“Why does Arthur call you wolf?” she asked, making him jerk the wheel a little.
“Um, maybe because I'm big?” he offered.
“I guess, but I’d think calling you bear would be more fitting,” she said, then reached across the open space between them to rest a hand on his leg. “Is this okay?”
Touch was his love language. “Very much!”
His enthusiasm made her chuckle. “Is it hard to be as tall as you are?”
He grimaced. “Yes, but mostly it’s just inconvenient. It’s hard to find clothes that fit, and showers are almost never tall enough.And hum—uh, people are always trying to pick fights with me.” He paused, then confessed something that made his parents deeply ashamed of him. “I hate violence and fighting.”
“I can understand that,” she said without a hint of censure or condemnation.
Her kind words gave him the courage to tell her his deepest secret. “I’m a vegetarian. The thought of something having to die to feed me makes me feel horrible. I know dogs and cats need protein in their diets so I don’t deny them, but I can’t bring myself to eat meat.”
Far from looking disgusted, her expression brightened. “I’m a vegetarian too! Same reason. Well that, and it’s also a good excuse to never eat seafood because that stuff is simply disgusting!”
This was too good to be true. “You hate seafood?”
“Loathe it,” she assured him.
“You are the most perfect woman ever.”
She laughed. “Don’t say that. You haven’t seen me eat an entire jar of pickles in one sitting.”
“I have a pickle shelf in my fridge,” he said. “Multiple jars of dill, spicy, and bread and butter.”
“Do you mix the spicy and bread and butter pickles together?” she asked.
His exaggerated, “Of course” made her laugh again. Goddess of the Hunt, he loved her laugh!
They spent the rest of the drive talking about all their favorite pickle brands and flavors.
It wasn’t until they pulled into the driveway and were confronted by Arthur’s home that they lapsed into silence. It was a massive, contemporary style house that looked like a bunch of squares stacked on each other at slightly different angles.
“That’s, um, a home,” he said, hating the cold look to all the concrete and glass. “Of sorts.”
“It’s a monstrosity,” she said with a little shake of her head.
“If I know, um,” he almost saidvampires, but caught himself in time, “men like Arthur, he’s probably got several houses. This is probably just the one he’s living in right now.”
