"Oh, well." Emmy's gaze came back to him and she dropped her voice, too. "Virtue is a shifter sanctuary town. There are twenty or so families who founded it or came here a long time ago to be safe. But most of the regular people don't know that it's full of shifters, no."
Karl tilted his head toward the door, where Donna had just left. "So does that mean—wait, is it rude to ask? I don't want to go around trying to out people if that's not cool."
"Well, you're my mate, so you're already in the know," Emmy whispered. "So people will tell you, but it's a big act of trust, Karl. You can't break that trust. It'd be so dangerous for all of us."
"I wouldneverdo anything to endanger you," Karl said so fiercely it was hard to keep his voice down. Emmy's huge soft brown eyes softened even more and she leaned across the remains of their carrot cakes to kiss him. It gave him the most magnificent view of her incredibly ample cleavage as she both rose and sat, and he had an embarrassingly difficult time getting his gaze back up to meet hers.
She was grinning, like she knew exactly what he'd been staring at. Well, of course she did. They were her boobs, after all. He mumbled, "Sorry," with both genuine apology and no regret.
Emmy, still grinning, did a little shoulder-wiggle-chest-shake thing. There might be a name for that motion. If there was, Karl didn't know it. Hedidknow that it sent heat and desire shooting straight through his body and that he would probably get kicked out of the cafe if he spread Emmy on their table like a feast. "That was…you did that on purpose," he said hoarsely.
"Yeah. And you liked it."
"I really really did." Karl swallowed, trying desperately to keep his eyes off her cleavage. "I don't suppose you'd like to get out of here and go…do you have a place?"
Emmy's smile disappeared into a bone-deep groan and she pushed her plate away so she could gently thunk her forehead on the table. "I do not," she said between thunks, then lifted her head. "It's one of those 'I should really get around to it' kinds of things, but as there were no fabulously hot fated mates on the horizon, I've just kept putting it off."
"Right." Karl took a deep breath. "Are there any hotels or B&Bs around here thataren'towned by your family? Alternately," he added more than a little desperately, "can you be very very quiet?"
Her gaze jerked to his and a smile formed on her beautiful lips. "Rabbits," she breathed, "are not known for the amount of noise they make."
The words shot straight to his groin in the same way her shoulder wiggle had. For a few seconds Karl couldn't even think. Then he raised a hand and, raggedly, said, "Check, please."
* * *
In point of fact,they'd paid at the register when they'd ordered their food, so Emmy laughed out loud and got to her feet with another shimmy—that was the word that had escaped him earlier. She'dshimmied, and Karl had lost all ability to function on a level much above 'caveman.' Luckily for him, Emmy appeared to have some appreciation for cavemen. They were out the door in a flash, hand in hand, and the B&B was only a hop, skip and a jump across the town square. They could be in bed in less than ten minutes.
"Oh, hell," Karl said aloud as they went down the cafe's front steps. "We need a drugstore or a grocery store or something. Condoms. Unless you've got them at the B&B?"
"I can just about manage sneaking up to your room without being seen," Emmy said in wry despair. "I cannot possibly stop at the front desk to raid the 'oh yes we do have some of those on hand' rubber supply without subjecting myself to roughly a decade of good-natured, but ribald teasing. Ask me how I know."
Karl prepared a cringe. "How do you know?"
"Because my older brother did that his senior year of high school and the whole family kept going 'eeeeehhhhh!' and waggling their eyebrows at him every time he brought a date within a mile of the B&B until he got married. On the other hand, it did set a precedent for high schoolers dropping by to get condoms when they couldn't bring themselves to face theextremelystern-faced woman who ran the drugstore back then. I honestly think there was a while where she thought we were running a bordello, not a B&B, we bought so many condoms. But then Dad got in touch with some health programs and they started supplying them to us, and we still hand them out."
They'd swung toward the church side of the square, and then around the corner, away from both church and square, as Emmy explained the increasingly complicated, and funny, condom situation at the B&B. Karl ended up pausing outside a local drugstore business and stealing a kiss. "I didn't expect one single word of that story, but it was all incredible. Virtue isnotwhat I expected from a town with that name. And your parents are apparently legitimately cool."
"I mean, if anybody knows that teenagers are going to bang like bunnies…" Emmy ducked under Karl's arm as he pulled the drugstore door open for her, although she didn't really have to duck. She just walked under it. She was genuinely short when not in heels, although Karl, following her in and following the line of her boots against her calves with his gaze, thought he didn't miss the heels at all.
Then the idea of her bending over for him wearing nothingbutthose pretty wedge heels struck him, and any hope of pretending he was a nice civilized man went out the window. He was so focused on Emmy he actually ran into a wire stand with his shoulder and knocked roughly forty thousand magazines onto the floor in a clattering rush of metal and paper. His howl of, “I amso sorry!” was accompanied by a cry of dismay from a staff member, who rushed to tidy up.
Karl righted the stand and started to help put the magazines away, but the staff member shook her head. “Believe it or not, they belong in specific places. Helps them sell better. I’ll take care of it. Easier than fixing your well-meaning efforts later.”
“I am so sorry,” Karl repeated, mortified, and the woman shrugged with the weary acceptance of the inevitable.
“It happens. At least it was magazines and not something breakable. You haven’t had fun until a toddler somehow manages to shatter an entire fingernail polish display all over the floor. Those nail polish bottles are hard to break, and yet.” She had a distant, mystified expression, as if remembering the moment in detail. “They ended up re-flooring the whole store after that. It was a disaster.”
“At least they had the excuse of being a toddler,” Karl said, shame-facedly.
The store employee came back to herself and laughed. “Seriously, it’s okay. My colleague can help you at the till.”
Karl, knowing when he’d been dismissed, stood to look for, and then join Emmy, who was in the personal products aisle, her mouth pursed thoughtfully. “Sorry,” she murmured when he got to her. “I’d have bought them during all the fuss, but I couldn’t decide if I should get large or extra large.”
Heat crawled along his jaw as he selected the brand he usually used. “I don’t know why I’m embarrassed, except you haven’t even seen me naked yet.”
Emmy gave him a deliciously lazy smile. “No, but I’ve felt you, and IthoughtI probably needed to go big. Go big and go home. That’s how the saying goes, right?”
Karl’s heart leaped with anticipation. “Close enough for me.”
