Page 135 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

For a while, I slept badly, in the shallow, broken way a body sleeps when it keeps waking up to remember it is in trouble. Pain woke me once. Thirst woke me twice. A dream woke me the third time, though calling it a dream gave it more structure than it deserved. It had no scene and no story. There was only warmth, a hand at my back, a mouth near my throat, and the heavy, steady presence of someone holding back with everything he had while wanting anyway.

I woke with my heart pounding and my skin too sensitive under the sheet.

The bite didn’t hurt and that was the problem. For days, it had burned, pulsed, stabbed, and pulled, and as horrible as the pain had been, at least pain had the decency to be honest. Pain didn’t pretend to be anything except damage. Pain didn’t slide down my ribs and settle low in my belly with the slow confidence of something that had no medical reason to be involved.

This was not pain. This was heat.

I lay very still, staring at the dark ceiling while my body warmed around something I had not chosen. Somewhere under the bandage, the mark pulsed with a rhythm that felt too close to a second heartbeat. It didn’t demand, exactly. It simply woke, and my body answered before my mind could decide whether answering was betrayal or biology.

Across the room, Ian inhaled sharply.

I closed my eyes.

Wonderful. Of all the times for a werewolf to have supernatural senses, he had chosen the exact moment my body turned traitor under hotel sheets.

“Don’t,” I said into the dark.

His voice came from the chair by the door, low and rough enough to suggest he had not been sleeping either. “Don’t what?”

“Whatever honorable, miserable thing you are about to say.”

The silence that followed had weight. I felt it gather near the door, where he sat too still in the dark.

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“No.”

The answer hung there between us, too honest to be useful.

Ian stood.

I heard the chair shift, then his weight moving across the carpet. He stopped several feet from the bed, close enough that my skin recognized him before my eyes did.

“Fever?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what?”

I laughed once under my breath, though there was nothing funny in it. “You tell me.”

Another silence passed, and the room felt smaller without either of us moving.

“I can feel it,” he said.

The words went through me because I had known, and because hearing him confirm it made the whole thing impossible to pretend around. The mark warmed again, responding to his voice, and my body became brutally aware of the fact that he was standing in the dark a few feet away. Tall, still, barefoot now because apparently even monsters took off their boots before a long night of guarding women they had bitten.

I turned my head toward him. In the dim room, he was mostly shape and shadow, all broad shoulders and dark shirt and hands held open at his sides. His face was turned slightly away from me, as if looking directly might make the problem worse.

The problem.

Me.

Him.

The bite.

The heat under my skin.