"So. What did your lion decide?"
He looks at me. Those eyes — brown, steady, the gold edge barely visible in the dim light of the nightstand lamp. The gold that means the lion is close to the surface. The gold that I've been learning to read for almost two weeks.
"My lion decided about you," he says. "The night you ended the date with Troy. The moment you told him to leave, not because he was rude to you, but because he was ugly about shifters. My lion heard that and decided."
"Decided what?"
"That you're mine." He says it plainly, without drama. The way he says everything, factual, clear, this is the data. "It's not a claim. I haven't claimed you. It's just what my lion wants. What it's been wanting since that night. It's why I shut you out for four days, because wanting you when you worked for Coldwell was stupid and dangerous, and the lion didn't care, and I couldn't fight both the lion and the wanting at the same time."
"And now?"
"Now you drove to my bar at dawn with evidence that your company is hurting people like me. Now you sat at a table with five lions and told them the truth with your heart going a hundred and twelve beats per minute. Now you messaged me on a dating app instead of texting me because you wanted me to know which door you were knocking on." His voice is low, steady, but the gold is brighter. "Now I'm not fighting the lion anymore."
The two feet of comforter is suddenly not enough distance for the magnitude of what he just said and simultaneously far too much distance for what I want to do about it.
"What doyouwant?" I ask. "Not the lion. You."
"I want to kiss you," he says. "I've wanted to since you sat at my bar on day one and ordered an IPA and tipped three dollars on a six-dollar beer. I wanted to when you asked about the oak and when you wrote that note about Robin's lemon bars and when you told Troy to leave. I wanted to at dawn when we were one inch apart and Knox's footsteps stopped it."
He's moved. Or I've moved. The two feet is less than one now. I can see the gold in his eyes without squinting. I can smell the bar soap and the night air and the warmth underneath.
"I want to kiss you," he says again. "Can I?"
"Yes."
He kisses me.
It's not careful. That's the first thing I register. It's not the tentative, testing-the-waters first kiss of two people who aren't sure. Ezra kisses me like he's been holding his breath for days and just decided to stop. His hand comes up to the side of my neck, warm, certain, the callused grip of a man who works with engines and spreadsheets and his hands know both, and his mouth is on mine and my brain, which has been running calculations and worst-case scenarios and room sweeps for days, goes quiet.
Just quiet. The only time it's been quiet since I got here.
I kiss him back. My hands find his shoulders, his arms, the solid weight of him. He's warm the way shifters are warm — not just body heat, something deeper, something that runs hotter than human. His t-shirt is soft under my fingers and the muscle underneath is not soft at all and I pull him closer because the distance between us has been a decision for twelve days and I'm done deciding.
He makes a sound. Low, from the chest, not quite a growl but close. It vibrates through his body and into mine andmy own body responds in a way that is entirely unhelpful for rational thought. His hand slides from my neck to the back of my head, fingers in my hair, tilting me to change the angle, and the kiss deepens into something that is definitely not a first-kiss-appropriate level of intensity but I don't care because his mouth tastes like tea and his hands are in my hair and the HVAC is humming and I'm alive in a way I haven't been in years.
We end up horizontal. I'm not sure who decided that. I think it was gravity, or possibly my back against the headboard giving way, or possibly Ezra's weight shifting forward in a way that had exactly one logical conclusion. He's over me, forearms braced on either side of my head, and his eyes are fully gold now and that should scare me. I'm pinned under a lion shifter whose eyes have gone predator-bright. But it doesn't. It doesn't scare me at all.
"Hi," I say. Because my brain has apparently abandoned all higher function and that's what came out.
"Hi." He's breathing hard. His arms are steady but his pulse isn't. I can feel it in his wrists, bracketing my head, fast and urgent. "Your heart is doing the thing again."
"Different reason this time."
"Yeah." He dips his head. Kisses the corner of my mouth. My jaw. The spot below my ear that makes my breath catch in a way I can't control and don't try to. "Very different reason."
His mouth moves down my neck. Not gentle. There's teeth in it, the scrape of canines that are sharper than human and the knowledge of what those teeth could do mixed with the absolute certainty that they won't. He bites down on the muscle where my neck meets my shoulder. Not hard enough to break skin, just hard enough to make my hips jerk off the bed and a sound come out of me that I didn't authorize.
"Good?" His mouth against my skin, the word more vibration than voice.
"Do that again."
He does it again. Harder. His hand slides under my t-shirt, palm flat against my stomach, and the contact of his skin on mine is a line crossed. The shift from kissing totouching, from testing to taking. His hand is hot. Hotter than it should be. The shifter heat pouring off him like a furnace, and everywhere he touches feels branded.
I pull at his shirt. He gets the message. He sits back on his heels, strips it off in one motion, and the sight of him. I lose the sentence. Broad shoulders, lean muscle, the body of a man who works on motorcycles and carries kegs and does everything physical with the easy efficiency of someone whose body has never been a problem to solve. A scar on his left side, old, silvered. Chest hair that trails down past his navel. Gold eyes looking down at me with an intensity that makes my mouth go dry.
"Your turn," he says.
I pull my shirt off. His eyes track down my chest, my stomach, the line of my hips above my jeans, and his expression does something that isn't the composure or the half-smile or anything I've cataloged. It's hunger. Naked, unperforming, the look of a man, of a lion, seeing something it wants and deciding to have it.
