Case looked her up and down, from those curling toes all the way to her tousled dark hair spread out across the pillow. God, she was gorgeous. “If you want, I could get started on that right now.”
“I’m extremely tempted by that,” Lydia said, and from the way she languorously stretched, her toes curling again, Case could tell she meant it. “But the last thing I want is to have to stop what we’re doing to get up and open the door for our room service delivery.”
“Okay, that’s a good point. Maybe I should close my eyes in the meantime so I won’t be tempted.”
She let out a pleased little chuff of laughter. “As long as you don’t fall asleep.”
“I won’t if we talk,” Case reasoned, shutting his eyes. It didn’t do as much good as he would have imagined, since he could still feel the velvety expanse of Lydia’s bare skin against his and still smell the mingled scents of sex and her coconut shampoo.
He knew at some point they would have to put on actual clothes to answer the door, but there was no way someone could prepare lamb and beef tenderloin that quickly. He had at least a few minutes of absolute safety that he could use to enjoy the feel and smell of her.
Speaking of which ....
“I feel like I have a better sense of smell now,” Case said. “Is that normal?”
“Oh yeah,” she said instantly. “All shifters have heightened senses, even when we’re in our human forms, but inner animals like wolves and dogs make the smell thing especially obvious. You can probably smell plenty of things that you can’t identify yet, so your brain isn’t even fully processing them. Danger, fear, home. It can be a big help, and it’s a big part of wolf life.”
He could see that. His wolf clearly thought of smell as its primary sense and took it in first, the way Case took in sight.
Lydia added, “There are other advantages too, even if they’re a little weird.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I’ve never been human, so I don’t know about this firsthand, but I’ve always gotten the impression that most people think that, say, walking by a full dumpster on a hot summer day isn’t exactly pleasant.”
Case shuddered. “In this human’s opinion: no, definitely not. Are you saying it’s going to be pleasantnow?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but your wolf tends to take the lead when smells like that are overwhelming. And when it comes to abunch of strong scents all piled on top of each other like that, it usually reads it as ‘interesting,’ not ‘awful.’”
As hard as it was to imagine taking an inquisitive sniff at trash, Case could actually see the wolves’ point. Unless he was trying to make a joke, he wouldn’t actually violently recoil from a bunch of clashing patterns and loud colors and 3D Magic Eye posters layered on top of each other, shouting, “Oh God, my eyes!” It would be a lot, and he might not like having to look at it, but it would also be a hugely overwhelming amount of visual input that his brain would struggle to make sense of. And that kind of thing could be fascinating if you were in the right mood.
Of course, my vision doesn’t feel as connected to my gag reflex as my sense of smell is,he thought wryly.But maybe my wolf can overpower that too. Its instincts are part of mine now.
“I’m willing to count that as a plus,” Case said. He cleared his throat. “Um.Yousmell good, by the way.”
Really, really good. Before his transformation, he had mostly been able to pick up on the stronger artificial scents around her, like that shampoo, but afterwards, it was more about her: the light, feminine musk of her body, the clean smell of her sweat, the scent of sex in the air between them. Now the mate bond amplified his appreciation even more.
Lydia didn’t look like she found that confession as awkward as he had. She snuggled up against him even closer, burying her nose against his chest. “You smell good too,” she said, the words muffled. “Amazing, actually. My wolf won’t shut up about it, and I don’t blame it one bit.”
My wolf won’t shut up about you period, and I don’t blame it one bit either.
He ached to say that—it couldn’t possibly be as weird as talking about how good she smelled, and Lydia had been fine with that!—but that lifelong habit of keeping himself to himselfwas hard to break. He couldn’t make himself say something that might—
Might what? Ask her to want him? Assume that he was wanted already? Imply that he had a right to be here?
That shook him up a little. Case had always enjoyed his life on the road, despite its occasional drawbacks. Hestillliked it, even if he thought he could settle down in Mountainview as immovably as a rock if that was what was right for Lydia.
(He wasn’t sure that it was, but that was her decision to make, not his.)
Because I was never wanted anywhere, I never settled down—that wasn’t accurate. It wasn’t how he’d felt at all.
But now he had to wonder if a whole life’s worth of it had left him with a confused sense of cause and effect.
Because I never settled down anywhere, I keep feeling like I’m not wanted.
Was that it? Was this all in his head? There had to be a difference between being considerately cautious and being too gun-shy to ask for anything at all.
Maybe he should risk telling her more about how he felt and what he wanted. If she didn’t want to have a life with him after the fight with Reeve was over, all she had to do was say so, right?
