“Kind of like your dick.”
Ace snorted out a laugh and some of the tension left his body, an easy thing to notice when I was basically sitting on his lap. Running my finger along the inside seam of the zipper, and ignoring Ace’s shiver, I detected a ridge in the seam. I used my nails to tease out a long metal pin.
“Is there only one?” I asked.
“No. There’s one in the other seam.”
After another tense minute of groping and fumbling around, I located the other pin. Ace didn’t breathe the entire time.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“I will be once you get these shackles off me. I’m lucky they’re covered in leather and not bare iron.” He drew his legs up and scooched back to turn around, so we sat back to back. “Now it’s time to test out your picking skills.”
“Please. I lived on the streets for years.”
Ace didn’t say anything as I slipped the pins into his shackles and worked the lock. The metal grew warm under my hands. My magic rose and spread through my body, leaving a tingling sensation running along my skin. The locking mechanism snapped open, and Ace’s shackles fell to the ground with a loud clank.
My magic fell away as if it lost interest in my actions.
“Finally,” he said, “It’s a good thing we’re not trying to rob someone.” He turned around and pried the picks from my hands and started fiddling with the lock on my shackles. He bent his head near the base of my neck and heat radiated off him.
“I’d like to see you do as well with your hands shackled behind your back.”
“If we get out of here, I’ll let you put me in shackles again, so I can show you the extent of what I can do.” His breath fanned the sensitive skin of my neck while he worked.
What the phaan was going on? Did it take getting captured and shackled to get Ace to express his emotions? Something had definitely shifted in him since staying together at the cabin and now he didn’t seem to be holding anything back.
The metal around my wrists released and fell to the ground like a loud exclamation point.
In unison, we scrambled to our feet. I looked down. Ace was still hard, and still very much jutting from his pants. He returned his lock picks to their hiding place beside his glorious dick.
“That’s impressive,” I said. No one would ever think to look for the pins along the zipper seam.
“Thank you,” Ace practically purred. His normal growl was gone and his gaze had darkened. He looked positively feral right now.
“I was referring to the idea of hiding the lock picks in your zipper seam, not your dick.”
Ace grunted and looked away as he tucked his erection back into his pants. He was still hard enough to tent his pants, and it looked downright painful.
“Rethinking the whole commando situation?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said before turning to the door. He jerked his chin at the stairs. “Come on, let’s get out of here before you get handsy with my junk again.”
“You enjoyed that a little too much,” I said.
His gaze softened for the briefest second. “I really did.”
Not knowing what to say, I spun and headed for the stairs. “We have to find Nala.”
“Mouse.”
I glanced behind me.
“We need to get out of here first. They won’t hurt her.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“They can’t control you without her.”
