Page 53 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“I haven’t been with all those people you’re imagining.” His voice is quiet. Serious. “I’ve lived a long time, Fable. But I’ve spent most of it alone. Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

He doesn’t answer. Just looks at me with those gold eyes, and something in my chest cracks open.

“I want you to know,” he says slowly, “that whatever happens tonight, whatever you want, whatever you don’t want, it’s an honor.”

“What’s an honor?”

“That you want me. That your body does things when I’m near.” Another step. “I’ve been wanted before. But not like this. Not by someone who looks at me the way you do.”

“How do I look at you?”

“Like I’m the most interesting thing in any room. Like you’re cataloging me. Like you want to know everything, every secret, every truth, and you’re willing to wait until I’m ready to tell you.”

Oh.

Oh, that’s…

“Tell me to stop,” he says, voice dropping lower, “and I will.”

Every rule I have is screaming at me to send him home. To lock the door three times and spend the night listing all the reasons this is a terrible idea.

I don’t listen to a single one of them.

“Then don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t stop. Not this time.”

He reaches behind him and closes the door.

The first kiss is nothing like I expected.

I expected urgency. Heat. The kind of desperate collision you read about in books, bodies crashing together, hands tearing at clothes, mouths consuming.

Instead, he cups my face in both hands, tilts my head back, and presses his lips to mine with a gentleness that makes my eyes sting. Soft. Slow. Like he has all the time in the world. Like he’s been waiting three hundred years for this exact moment and he’s not going to rush it now that it’s finally here.

His lips are warm. Firm. He kisses me like I’m fragile, like I’m precious, like I might disappear if he moves too fast.

I make a sound, somewhere between a sigh and a whimper, and he swallows it, tongue sliding against the seam of my lips, asking permission.

I open for him.

The kiss deepens. His tongue strokes against mine, slow and deliberate, learning the taste of me. One of his hands slides from my face into my hair, fingers threading through the strands, tilting my head to a better angle.

“Fable,” he breathes against my mouth. “You have no idea what you do to me.”

“Then show me.”

He changes against me. The gentleness gives way to something hungrier, more urgent, and suddenly he’s walking me backward, his mouth never leaving mine, until my thighs hit the arm of the couch.

“Here?” he asks against my lips.

“Yes. Here. Now.”

He lifts me onto the arm of the couch one-handed, effortless, and slots himself between my thighs, and I can feel his cock, hard and heavy against me, nothing between us but the thin cotton of my leggings. The contact punches a gasp out of me, makes my hips rock forward instinctively, chasing friction.

“Easy.” His hands grip my hips, holding me still. “We have time.”

“I don’t want time. I want…”