“No, just let me...” I reached down for his long length.
But Zion caught my wrist gently before I could. “I haven’t given my consent for you to touch me. Look at me first. Look at me, Bell Winters.”
I reluctantly raised my gaze to his.
Zion studied me with a shrewd expression wrinkling his forehead.
Whatever he found in my eyes made the glow in his own fade, returning them to brown.
“No,” he answered in the end. “Not this particular morning, I believe. You’re not ready for that step.”
He was right.
Relief crashed over me so hard, followed immediately by an abject, all-consuming guilt. He’d just given me that incredible experience, and I couldn’t even?—
“Stop that,” he murmured. “I can smell your guilt, too.”
“Can you really?” I asked, shocked that his scent receptors were that specific.
“No, not truly,” he confessed with a dry smile. “But I cannot stand that you think you owe me anything after that.”
He took my chin between two fingers. “If you had any idea how good you taste, there’d be no question of what a privilege this has been for your poor vassal.”
My guilt lifted a bit.Flatterer.
And did I mention even older artists love flattery? Apparently, in all aspects of life.
“May I hold you while I calm down a bit?”
That wastouching, but...
I tentatively laid my head on his shoulder while we both breathed and watched his length slowly, eventually soften.
“It was the thoughts of returning to school on Monday for an entire week of math testing,” he explained. “I detest math.”
I found myself letting out an empathetic laugh against his chest. “Me, too.”
The laughter faded, and I knew then that Zion couldn’t really smell guilt. Because the old ugly feelings started to rise inside of me.
I don’t deserve this! I don’t deserve this! I don’t?—
“So,” Zion said, interrupting my spiral, “is this when we make sugar cookies?”
A beat.
Then I said, “Actually...”
26/
don’t mess it up
RAVIK
Early that morning, I stood in my kitchen, holding both of today’s gifts: two tape measures. I’d picked up a soft fabric one the other day at Barrington’s in Blue Water, and the metal, retractable one was from my own toolbox.
So, not entirely free. And Bell would probably wonder why she needed a tape measure. She’d find out soon.
I’d been planning to leave the gifts on her porch around dawn, like always. But Zion was still over there after that damn nightmare.
