The real him.
My breath catches.
Massive, powerful, fur shining in the afternoon light, features familiar yet larger-than-life. His presence fills the clearing like gravity.
My whole body warms.
Great green forests, he’s beautiful.
And now that he’s in his cryptid shape—now that he’s towering over the device he’s about to fix—my brain promptly betrays me.
It imagines him above me. On top of me. Around me.
“Oh no,” I mutter to myself. Because my body reacts both immediately and enthusiastically.
I shove my pack in front of my crotch, already feeling the dampness on the front of my briefs from my precum.
Boone pauses mid-step. His head lifts. His nostrils flare. His golden eyes shift toward me—slow, predatory, amused. “Hmmm. That is distracting,” he rumbles.
My entire face bursts into flames, because of course his sense of smell is ridiculously impressive. “No, it’s not.”
“It is,” he says smugly.
I groan. “Please do your maintenance and pretend you didn’t… scent anything.” My skin burns hotter, hardly believing I’m saying these words to him.
“I could,” he says lightly, turning toward the device, “but I won’t.”
I bury my face in my hands. This trip is going to kill me.
After a few minutes of him adjusting runes and replacing a stone plate, he steps back. “Functional,” he says.
I am extremely functional too, unfortunately.
I swallow hard. “Great. Good. Perfect. Should we—uh—camp?”
“Yes,” he says. “Here.”
Relief and need race through me.
Not under the stars, he said originally. Safer in a tent, he insisted. But I am absolutely not sleeping five feet away from him.
I want his warmth. His size. His arms around me. I want everything we’ve only started to explore.
And tonight? I want more intimacy. I want him.
I just have to convince my sexy, grumpy cryptid.
Boone shifts back into human form so fast I barely get a chance to prepare myself.
One second he’s towering and magnificent, all russet fur and golden eyes and power.
The next?
Suddenly there’s a very naked man standing a few feet away, steam rising off his skin from the residual heat of shifting, muscles rippling as he stretches his shoulders.
I make a sound that can only be described as a soft, strangledoh no.
Boone smirks—actually smirks—and says, “Staring again.”
