Page 92 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

My eyes are stinging. My throat is tight. And the speech I practiced, the eloquent one, the one with actual structure, has completely evaporated.

“I love you too,” I whisper. “I’m terrified, but I love you.”

“That’s enough.” He rises, and his mouth finds mine. “That’s everything.”

The snow-light pours through the windows as he lays me back against the pillows.

Everything is slow. Unhurried. The urgency of that rain-soaked night in my apartment has been replaced by something else entirely. A vow.

He kneels over me and takes the hem of his shirt, the one I stole, the one that smells of him, and lifts it over my head with a care that makes my breath go shallow. Then he just looks. Down the whole length of me, laid bare in the pale morning light, and he doesn’t hurry, and he doesn’t blink, and being looked at like this should make me want to hide.

It doesn’t. It makes me arch.

“What?” I ask, when the silence stretches.

“You’re beautiful.”

“That’s a cliché.”

“It’s a fact.” He lowers himself over me, bracing on his forearms, his weight a warm cage I never want out of. “The optimal ratio of milk to flour is a fact. This is a fact. I don’t traffic in opinions before nine a.m.”

“You’re comparing me to crêpe chemistry.”

“I’m comparing you to the most precise and beautiful thing I know.”

“That’s either romantic or insane.”

“It’s usually both with me.”

He kisses me then, deep and patient, and I stop thinking about crêpe chemistry. His mouth moves to my jaw. My throat. The dip of my collarbone, where he lingers, unhurried, learning the exact pressure that catches my breath and then applying it again, and again, a scientist confirming his results.

“Orion.”

“Mm.”

“You can go faster.”

“I know.” His lips drift down my sternum. “I’m not going to.”

“Why not?”

“Because I told the woman I love that I would take my time.” He drags his mouth along the curve of my breast, close to my nipple and deliberately not on it, and smiles when I make a wounded sound. “And I’m a man of my word.”

“You’re a menace.”

“A gentleman menace.” His mouth finally closes over my nipple, hot and wet, and my whole spine bows. “You named me yourself.”

He worships me. There’s no other word for it. He maps me with his mouth in the snow-bright quiet, unhurried, thorough, cataloging every gasp: the undersides of my breasts, the ladder of my ribs, the soft give of my belly, the crease of my hip, the inside of my knee. By the time he finally works his way to the slick heat between my legs I’m shaking, wet and swollen and so keyed up that the first slow lick pulls a sound out of me I’ve never made in my life.

He takes his time there too.

Long, patient strokes of his tongue, no rush, no destination, until my hands are fisted in the sheets and my heels are digging into his back and I’m chanting his name to the ceiling of a house on a mountain in the middle of a snowfield where no one can hear me. He brings me right to the edge, holds me there, suspended, sobbing, and then eases me over so gently that the orgasm doesn’t crash. It unfolds. Long, rolling pulses that go on and on while he works me through every one of them, humming his satisfaction against my clit, his hands warm and steady on my hips.

I’m still trembling when he crawls up my body.

“Eyes open,” he rasps, wrecked, gravel and want in every syllable. “I need you to see exactly what you’re choosing.”

I open them.