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“So let ’em see,” he growled.
When we’d reached our floor, we slid against the walls of the hallway, kissing and groping and laughing, until we finally found our room. When I unlocked the door, all kissing and/or groping stopped. This wasn’t a room, this was a suite. It was the fanciest space I’d seen since leaving my “married” apartment all those years ago. Even with the beige, ivory, and slate-blue tones, it was still remarkably feminine. The delicately beige carpet was plush and thick under my toes as I pranced around the room, hopping up and down over the view of the skyline and the mountains. We disheveled the hell out of the immaculately white duvet on the enormous bed, revealing the delicate blue sheets.
I dashed into the bathroom and made a squealing noise that brought an alarmed Caleb running. “There’s a separate shower and a bath!” I cried, climbing into the white-tiled whirlpool tub. Every square inch of the bathroom was pristine, recently cleaned white ceramic.
I was reasonably sure there would be no bugs in the tub. I wanted to bask in the cleanliness, wallow in it. I wanted to eat dinner in that tub, just because I could.
“It’s so clean.” I sighed. “And it has a separate tub and shower.”
“And that’s scream-worthy because . . . ?”
“Because sometimes a girl wants to wash her hair in a separate space from where she washes the rest of her.”
Caleb frowned. “Girls are weird.”
“Hopelessly so,” I admitted. “This seems a little too good to be true. Are you sure that Lolo’s not setting us up for credit-card fraud or a body hidden in the closet or something?”
“No, Lolo likes to treat people well when they do right by him. If you’d ever met his wife, you’d understand why he was so grateful,” Caleb assured me. “She’s got a temper on her and doesn’t care much who sees her flip out. We didn’t just save Lolo’s marriage. We might have saved his life.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “She tossed a cake at Lolo’s head once. Most awkward birthday party I’ve ever been to.”
I considered that for a moment. “So how long is that massage he booked for us?”
He chuckled, wrapping his arms around my waist. “That’s my girl.”
“Are you going to take a swim in that tub with me?” I asked, kissing his chin.
“I think we’ll get to that eventually.” He grinned down at me and lifted my hips, locking my ankles at the small of his back. He gave me one long, heated look before devouring my mouth. His hands were everywhere, cupping my face, my ass, teasing my breasts with light little touches around the nipples but never touching them.>“Actually, it’s probably the cleanest surface in the room.”
He was particularly interested in my tattoos, now that he was seeing them up close. He wanted to know why I’d chosen that design, when I’d started them, and whether I planned to get more. He traced the length of my spine with his lips, biting lightly at the ridge of each vertebra.
“It’s my personal star chart,” I murmured into the pillows. “It’s how I keep track of where I’ve been.”
“Don’t most people use stars to keep track of where they are?” he asked, chuckling into my skin, tracing the outline of one with his tongue. I think he was somewhere near the Topeka star.
“Well, I was going to do push-pins, but they weren’t as pretty.”
“You don’t strike me as the tattoo kind of girl.”
“I wasn’t, but that was sort of the point. Don’t you have any?”
“I had a very strict mother,” he said, smiling into my skin.
“I think you would look awesome with a tattoo,” I told him, rolling over so I was facing him. “You could get a butterfly, right here.” I stroked the tramp-stamp area of his lower back. He chuckled again, jerking a little as my fingers stroked a particularly ticklish section of his back. “Or something tribal.” He snorted. “The Chinese symbols for love and strength . . . which inevitably will translate to ‘cliché tattoo.’ ”
“It’s a little alarming that you came up with those ideas so quickly.”
“Spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
“You are a very strange girl.”
I rolled over, balancing my chin on his chest. “Did you really have a strict mother?”
It seemed a little wrong, asking about his runaway human mom when I knew a little bit of the history. But I wanted to hear more about Caleb from his own mouth, his own version. The story I’d heard about cruel, thoughtless Lydia Graham, who had forgotten the promises involved in mating and left her husband and child to themselves, had been twisted in the telling by so many indignant werewolf housewives that I didn’t know if I could trust it.
He blanched a bit at the question. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, she didn’t stick around long enough for me to figure her out. She left when I was five. Dad met her when he was traveling in Washington State. He told her that he lived in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, but I don’t think she really got it until she moved there. And then she was stuck. Not stuck the way you were,” he clarified carefully. “I don’t remember them fighting or yelling or Dad being anything but good to her. It was seeing the same people every day, having the same conversations. Dad said he thought it drove her a little crazy. So she waited until I was in school one morning and ran for it.”
