“Will I survive it?” he asked, standing and picking up his plate.
“Potentially.”
He reached down and lifted mine from the coffee table before walking out without being asked.
He is on his best behaviour, Bad Girl said as I followed him.
There hadn’t been a single complaint all evening. Not once did I feel that he was looking down at me or my home. If anything he’d spent half the night wandering—rifling through my books, examining ornaments, sliding open drawers with the unabashed curiosity of someone who wanted to know everything—all while keeping the conversation going without pause. It should have felt intrusive.
It didn’t.
??????
All evening I’d sat on the single couch opposite him. Now he was beckoning me over—and he was right, the angle was wrong for the television. Bad Girl offered no resistance. I changed seats.
It was nothing. A couch I’d sat on countless times.
But as I lowered myself onto it, something clicked quietly into place around me. Like a trap that had been waiting with infinite patience.
He was too perfect. Wasn’t he?
Bad Girl said nothing. Pretending. I could feel her there, watching.
Conrí’s arm moved and settled around my shoulders—big and warm and unhurried, his fingers curling around the top of my arm as if they’d always intended to be there.
“You always smell so perfect,” he murmured.“If I were creative I’d write songs for you. I don’t know how they do it.”
I relaxed slightly when he didn’t push for anything more. The closeness of him was its own problem—a concentrated, unavoidable hit of his scent at this distance.
“You don’t know how people write songs?”
“Do they write the lyrics first and fit the music around it—or the music first? It’s all very confusing.” A pause.“But my point stands. If I could, I would write one for you.”
“I’d imagine they have a technique,” I said.
Bad Girl had started full of questions tonight. Then she’d settled into observation—the thing she’d been doing in the dark for so long, watching and cataloguing without being seen. But his attempt to dissect the mechanics of a creative art, genuinely puzzled, genuinely trying—that was very un-Alpha. It softened something in me I hadn’t planned on softening.
“You make me—feel.”
I turned and looked at him.
He was frowning slightly, as if he were working out the architecture of his own sentence. I raised my hand and rested it against his cheek. His eyes found mine immediately.
Other than brushing his lapel this morning it was only the second time I’d touched him. I had no regrets about either.
The rough prickle of his stubble was a friction I had to consciously file away rather than lean into. He closed his eyes as my fingers moved along his jawline—slow, deliberate—and the arm around me went rigid, locked, as if keeping still had become a matter of significant effort.
I looked at his lips. The stubble surrounding them would irritate my skin.
I slipped my fingers around his nape, into the space between his collar and his flesh.
His eyes snapped open.
Gold in the green. There and unmistakable.
His wolf.
A soft growl. Not warning. Something older than that. Something that had been waiting considerably longer than tonight.
