“We were just trapped in a wardrobe by murderous werewolves, who are apparently on the hunt for something that makes them immune to Werewolf Killer, or makes you vulnerable to their attacks, or dissolves your protection spells. And that is very easily the least sexy situation I can think of,” he said—which should really have shoved her attention firmly back to the danger they were in. But the only thing she could think of were denials. And almost none of them felt like denials anymore.
They felt like explanations. Reasons.Excuses.
“Okay. Okay, but you’re very hot and close.”
“We’ve been hot and close before.”
“Yeah and—you—we—the thing is—” she tried.
But she knew what she had given away before he even replied.
“Oh my god, this isn’t the only time that has happened,” he said, and he just sounded so wasted by the idea. Like it had detonated a bomb between his ears.
Even though he had to understand.
Wasn’t it just a bit understandable?
“It isn’t the only time—but honestly, I’m so sorry about it. And I really didn’t mean to feel like this, over it all. I think it’s just that I’m not used to really graphically sexual stuff happening. I mean, god, I get horny over a fade-to-black scene in a book,” she protested. Then tried to see what his expression was in response, through the darkness.
Did it reveal belief in what she was saying? Or something else?
But she couldn’t make out a thing. And now the silence was spinning out.
It wasn’t even a comfort when she heard the front door open and close and knew the Jerks had left the building. She was too busy waiting for his answer. In fact, by the time she got it, she was holding her breath.I just can’t accept your sorrys and your excuses, she imagined.
Instead, he answered quietly.
“So you swear that’s all it is.”
“Of course.”
“There’s nothing else that did it.”
“Look, if you’re trying to get me to say I’m superhot for your sexy body—” she started to say, but his frustrated sound cut her off.
“Cassie, I would never think that. I would never believe that. I know you never will be. However, what I donotknow is exactly how unhinged my werewolf pheromones appear to be making you. Because quite clearly, that is what is happening to you, to an almost nightmarish degree.”
She fell silent. She had to, because all her mortification died away, like it had never existed. It just couldn’t survive after he saidI know you never will be. And it burned up entirely based on his other words. The ones that knocked the breath out of her. The ones she couldn’t believe.
But struggled to refute somehow, anyway.
“But I’m not a werewolf. It shouldn’t work that way,” she tried to protest.
Though god, when she did. The sheer sense of wrongness that went through her.
She knew, almost immediately, that he was correct. She knew it so well that she wondered how she had missed it before.Of courseit was something beyond the physical. Of course it was. What else could it have been, when she was getting so wet that even denim couldn’t hold up to it? It was blatantly obvious.
And he seemed to think so, too.
“Honestly, I didn’t think it did. But I should have known. Sometimes I could hear your heart hammering so hard, and you looked so flushed, and you smelled so rea—” he started to say.
But it was all right, he didn’t have to finish. She knew the last word he had skipped was “ready.” She knew, because it made her shiver. It made her want to say,because I am. And then she was glad he started talking about something else, before she could.
“Plus there was all the shit I kept getting the urge to do. All the stuff that I should have guessed was just me trying to make myselfa better mate to you. As if some part of me knew that you being my mate was possible.” He let out a frustrated sigh. Like he was talking about something simple and practical with an easy fix, and not something that had caused him to use the word “mate.” But he didn’t even stop there. “You obviously prefer the person I was, the person I still am inside, so the wolf kept pushing me to show you that more overtly. Like, you know. A fancy bird showing off the right feathers.”
And oh god the doors that were blown off in her head, on hearing that.
She could immediately see exactly what he meant.
