Page 57 of Bound

“A glass.”

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “The last few nights have been bad. But I didn’t. I stopped.”

“I want you to call Cal. And if you’d rather not go down to Austin tonight—”

“I’m going. But I’ll call Cal on the way.”

“I smelled the blood, felt you blocking me. I didn’t know what to think. It felt like… before. And my wolf can’t handle feeling yours in pain. He flies into a panic every time.”

Topher reached for my hand, lacing our fingers. “You want to tell me where you’ve been the past three days?”

I closed my eyes. “I can explain.”

“It have anything to do with the snarls coming out of your apartment at all hours of the night? The super was up here. I told him you’d found a dog, that Brody was on his way over to pick it up and take it to the shelter.”

I cursed. “Thanks for covering for me.”

“I won’t beg you to spend the night in my bed, Caldwell. But I can’t understand why you’re destroying your apartment one cheesy dragon romance at a time when I want to be with you as badly as you want to let me.”

I shivered, instantly going hard. My heart began to pound. Disengaging our fingers, I scraped a hand through my hair and turned to lean against the sink. “River said some stuff to me when he was down for my birthday, stuff that… I’m not ready to talk about yet. It’s… got me all up in my head.”

A beat. “About you and me?”

My throat felt like I’d swallowed a mouthful of crushed glass. “Yes,” I ground out.

Topher stared down at his bandaged wrist. “Whatever you think you’re protecting me from, I can handle it.”

Except I wasn’t sure I could.

“Rain check?” I said softly. “I promise, we’ll talk soon. Really talk.”

Topher closed his eyes. “What keeps me up at night is knowing that even once we get Kieran back, this won’t end. The undeads took him in order to get to me. I’ll always have to wonder if I’ll go to work one night and it will be the day they come for you.”

I cupped his face in both hands. “No one is taking me from you.”

“You can’t promise me that.”

“I need you to listen carefully. Somewhere between my going to teach every day in a button down and slacks and driving a Prius—”

“Hot, by the way.”

“—which we’re definitely revisiting, you’ve somehow gotten the idea that I’m breakable and will melt at the sight of the first vampire, rather than kicking ass like every other fully functioning werewolf. So let’s be clear. I may have a thing for Pattinson, which everyone in Blood Moon now knows about thanks to Cedric’s unfortunate run in with that air freshener. I may flirt with you over texts. I may let you steal all my onion rings even though you refuse to order your own despite them being on the menu. Because, spoiler alert: you’re mine and I will always like feeding you.”

Topher pushed away from the counter, threading his fingers through my hair. “West—”

“I will always protect you,” I breathed. “Just like I did the night we met.” I leaned down, pressing a kiss to the curve of his collarbone and then to the base of his throat, nipping at the rough underside of his jaw where he needed to shave. “All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is to see you whole.”

I’d never hoped I’d be lucky enough to fall in love. I’d watched my parents growing up, and although theirs wasn’t an overly demonstrative relationship, it was one of the deepest bonds I’d ever witnessed. We’d all been broken the day Ben Caldwell was taken. My mom had simply packed up her gear and left the following day. She would keep hunting until she found him. Of that I was certain. And I knew that somewhere out there, wherever my dad was, he had never doubted for a single second Sofia was coming for him.

I wanted that, too. Someone who got my sense of humor, snarked back at my quirky texts and snort-laughed at the latest chapter of my fic, where a tattooed gryphon with a fondness for onion rings may have fallen for the hot wolf shifter. That one person who made you want to run out to the parking lot after school because a Friday night sitting on the couch together while he read and you graded papers sounded pretty much perfect.

Topher backed me up against the counter, thumb grazing the oh-so-sensitive mark his teeth had left at my hip through my jeans. I shuddered, hard and aching for him.

“Show me,” he whispered, capturing my mouth in a kiss that left no room for argument. He nudged my mental walls and my magic shivered. “Let me in.”

I did. And when, moments later, my name fell from his lips, our fingers sweaty and knotted where they were tangled against the bathroom sink, the link between us blazing bright as the stars had been that night when we’d first met, I knew there was no going back. Not from this singular moment. And not from him.

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