“Yeah, but it’s right next to yours and I don’t want to hear you being smarter than the average bear.”
She stared at Dennis. Damn it, she was actually in crisis here. Logically it made way more sense that she had a brain tumor than that shifters existed and magic corrupted data files. But she knew what she’d seen. She knew Abby had changed into a bear. Hank, too. And then there were the werewolves and Sammy and…
She dropped her head in her hands. “I need a CT scan.”
Dennis didn’t answer, but Hank did. She hadn’t heard him come in, but the big man was incredibly quiet. Even his voice was soft, soothing her ragged nerves.
“Let me take you out to dinner.”
His hand was warm on her shoulder, big and comforting. She felt it like a drop of oil on a turbulent sea. It expanded across her churning thoughts, quieting them though she didn’t know how. Normally when she was upset, she hated it when people touched her. But not Hank. She wanted to crawl up inside him and stay there forever. Instead, she thought about dinner.
“Is there anything still open?”
“I can cook.”
Of course, he could. He was the most perfect man ever.
“I don’t even know if you’re real,” she said. “Maybe I’m hallucinating you.”
Dennis groaned from the coach. “He’s real. Go away. Get your freak on.”
She dropped her head against Hank’s large, comforting chest. “What do you think?” she asked.
“About what?”
She tilted her head up. She saw his broad shoulders and large, dark face. Never in a million years would she have predicted being attracted to a man like him. He wasn’t an academic. He was a man of few words, and God knew everyone in her circle talked until forced to shut up. He was a building superintendent in a not-so-spectacular area of Detroit. An army medic and, she now guessed, a Zen master. None of that added up to anything she’d ever imagined in a man. And yet, looking at him now, she wanted to kiss him with everything in her. Worse, she wanted to go to bed by his side and wake up with him in the morning. She wanted to hear about his days and could think of no one better beside her when she wrestled with her own demons. She wanted him forever and always.
What was that if not a brain tumor? And yet, part of her didn’t care.
“So do you want to…um…get our freak on?” she asked.
His eyes blazed hot and his nostrils flared, but there was no other indication that he’d even heard her. She wasn’t sure he breathed.
“Hank?”
“Yes.”
She frowned at him. Was that aYes, I want to get our freak on?Or aYes, what are you asking me?She opened her mouth to ask him to clarify because honestly—brain tumor here—she needed things very clear. But her words were stopped when his hand touched her face. He was a large man and his hand was no different but she hadn’t realized just how gently he could touch her.
His fingertips barely skimmed her skin and left a tingling wake as he skated along her jaw. Then his thumb stroked across her cheeks to her mouth. She didn’t even think he touched her lips, but they plumped and tingled just from the thought. And from the dark intensity in his eyes as he watched her.
Her fears shorted out. Brain tumor? Psychotic break? Magic was real? All those confusing thoughts kept screaming, but she couldn’t hear them when he looked at her like that. When he leaned down as she stretched up to him.
Their breath mingled, but again, he didn’t touch her. He just breathed her in as she ached for him.
“Please,” she whispered.
He closed the distance between them, but he didn’t press deep. Lip to lip now, he brushed back and forth as her breath caught and her head dropped back. His other hand caught her, supporting her head as he pressed deeper, harder against her mouth. In that moment, she opened all of herself to him. Her heart, her head, and her body, and he thrust inside with a hunger that matched her own.
He plundered her mouth and she dueled with him without restraint. Animal hunger. Desperate passion. She had no words for this, no other experience that matched the need that pounded through her blood. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, drawing him closer as she stretched higher.
His tongue became wilder then. The thrust and parry seemed harder now, more powerful as he owned her mouth, but she didn’t give way. As he started to take from her, her passion roared through and suddenly she was dueling with him as if her life depended on it. Her life felt poised in the balance as she thrust and took from his tongue, his mouth, his hunger.
She clutched his shoulders harder. She used him to pull herself up along his torso. She even curled a leg around his as she tried to climb up for a better angle. His right hand left her face, dropping down to her thigh as she wrapped herself around him.
Need clawed at her, irrational and overpowering. She dove into it, throwing away her rationality as if it meant nothing. All she needed was him. Right now. Right here.
She would have done it, too. She would have ripped off her clothes right here while Dennis pretended to sleep six feet away. She would have, but Hank kept control. Where before he was holding her against him, pressing the bulge of his hot penis against her groin, now he gripped her hard and pushed her back.
