His grip is firm, fingers cradling the base of my skull.
I’ve never noticed it before, but my head is heavy. There’s a weight to keeping it upright that I wasn’t aware of until he took it from me.
My head lolls back, leaving my throat exposed.
Warmth pulses through my veins.
The moment drags out until it’s all I can do to bite back the strangledmeepthat’s stuck in my larynx, fighting to get to the surface.
He leans in again, this time so close that the tip of his nose trails up the sinew pulled tight on the left side of my neck. His breath touches my skin. Then his nose. Then his beard and maybe his lips.
It’s a light touch. The lightest, most insignificant touch you could ever imagine. That is, it’s the lightest, most insignificant touch you could imagine any other day. Today, this day, right now, it’s the single most erotic thing that’s ever happened to me.
A low rumble leaves his chest and reverberates through the room.
Branson releases me and straightens, leaving me struggling to hold my head up as he returns to his seat. He sits back in his chair, cool, calm, and collected as can be, and looks directly at me. “You smell like something that’s mine.”
7
Branson
Lucienemergesfromhisbedroom and his scent hits me like a brick wall. A solid mass of seduction. A thick haze of arousal. It wafts down the hall and singes my mind before I so much as lay eyes on him.
I hear his footsteps on the floor as he approaches. He treads lightly, bare feet padding on timber. I take several deep breaths to prepare myself before he appears in my field of vision.
It doesn’t help.
As always, the second I see him, my feet are swept out from under me and my knees go weak. He’s beautiful always, but with signs of his approaching heat written all over his features, it’s almost too much. It’s almost impossible for anyone to look like he does. A seraph in human form. A blond halo of hair that’s overlong, ends in curls on the back of his neck, and falls carelessly, seductively, intohis eyes. Spun gold so pale that in certain light, it looks silver.
His eyes are the kind of blue I typically only see when I lie flat on my back in the woods and look up at the sky. That, along with his sweet, heart-shaped face, had me convinced I’d been introduced to an angel when I first met him.
Then he started talking.
The second he opened his mouth, I knew I was in trouble. Deep trouble. Lucien Leigh is brimming with barbed intelligence and simultaneously capable of saying and doing things that leave me scratching my head. His presence is effervescent. It renders me a speechless, sullen fool able to do little more than patrol the perimeter of the rooms or buildings he’s in.
I’ve been agitated since I scented him at the cabin, unable to rest peacefully since I sensed his oncoming heat. I’ve gone back and forth, fighting a cacophony of internal voices that all say different things. On the one hand, I know he didn’t plan this. He didn’t want it, and it kills me because even though he isn’t mine, I’m protective of him. I don’t want a damn thing happening to him that isn’t what he wants. Not now. Not ever.
Even if that thing is me.
Hand on heart, I did everything in my power to get him off the mountain and back to the city, so he’d have choices about how to manage his heat. I did. I swear I did. I want that for him. Even now, if there was some other option, I’d offer it to him, though it would pain me in a way I’m not sure I’d ever recover from.
At the same time, there’s an old, animalistic part of me witnessing Lucien’s unfolding heat and basking in the rightness of it. The correctness of my being here at the same time as him. The serendipity of the snowstorm. The kismet of the monumental mistakes that delivered a simmering, glistening Lucien to me.
I’m not proud of myself for thinking like this. I’m tied up in knots, but every time Lucien smiles—or snaps—at me, something in my center turns to mush. It’s hard enough for me to fight it when he isn’t going into heat. Now, it’s all but impossible.
“How are you this morning?” I ask.
I heard him get up several times in the night. At one point in the early hours of the morning, he stood at my door and whimpered softly. I’m loath to ask about his well-being in any more detail because my previous mention of bodily functions was not well received.
“I’m hot,” he replies with a belligerent little pout that makes my knees weak.
His lips are swollen, stained dark with heat, and his eyelids are heavy. He looks like a sultry Old Hollywood movie star and has the attitude to match. He’s wearing a tight white tank and pale-blue cotton pajama pants. The pants are twisted at his waist, and his erection is clearly visible. It has been since yesterday. There’s a bulge in his pants. Small, but solid. A mouthful, a handful, no more.
I salivate at the sight of it, and my dick goes harder than it already was.
I turn my back to him and quickly palm myself into a more comfortable position. It doesn’t help.
“Coffee?” I offer.
