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A dog I’d let lay on my couch with his head in my lap.
A dog I’d scratched and petted pretty much all over.
A dog I’d let lick my hands and my face.Fucking hell.
Because now all of that wasn’t about a dog at all, but this absolutely gorgeous man in front of me, his mismatched eyes making it completely impossible for me to pretend that he wasn’t the same so-ugly-he’s-cute dog I’d fit into my life for the past two months.
If I weren’t attracted to him, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. But I so totally fucking was.
The copper-tan of his skin, the vivid black ink of his tattoo peeking out of the collar of his t-shirt and running down his left arm, which had seemed to be nothing more than an odd mottling when he was a dog, the thick black hair shaved on the sides and long on the top that mimicked the tuft of hair on his canine head…
Fuck.
I wanted to kiss him again.
Who was I kidding? I wanted to do a lot more than kiss him. I wanted to do everything to this body that I’d done to his other one, and then more. A lot more.
And I absolutely couldn’t.
I untangled his fingers from the collar of my shirt, inwardly cursing the tingles that shivered through my hand as my skin touched his.
“Stop,” my mouth said, even while my head and heart screamed in frustration at my own thick-headedness.
“Why?” he asked, and his voice was rich, like chocolate, with just an edge of heat.
“Because—it’s wrong.”
He frowned at me, tilting his head to the side in that same fucking way, strange and achingly familiar at the same time. “Why?” he asked again. “Because I’m a man?”
“Of fucking course not,” I snapped back, a little insulted.
“Because I’m a shifter?”
Now I really was insulted. “Don’t be stupid.” I could hear the roughness in my own voice and didn’t care. In fact, it was probably better I sounded like a total asshole, because Iama total asshole, and the sooner he remembered that, the better.
“Thenwhy?”
I knew the easy answer was to just tell him I wasn’t attracted tohim, but that was a lie too big for me to pull off, especially if he called me on it by getting close enough to find out exactly how attracted to him I really was. I took a step back, just to keep space between us.
“Because you aren’t actually attracted tome,” I answered.
Both dark eyebrows went up. “Why would you think that? You—” he waved the hand I didn’t still have in mine—which I was in no way holding because I didn’t want to stop touching his skin—at me. “You are beautiful.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I replied. I’m an elf, for fuck’s sake. Beautiful is mandatory. I don’t bear any responsibility for it, and I’m certainly not proud of it. “But you aren’t attracted tome. You’re attracted to theideaof me. What you think I am, not what I actually am.”
His expression—unfamiliar on his less pointy human face—was pure incredulity.
“Then what are you, actually?”
“Not your hero.” I’d been here before. It never ended well. Take one ridiculously attractive elf cop, add a rescued victim, stir vigorously, and you get this weird, pseudo-toxic form of attraction that was essentially hero-worship and had nothing to do with the actual person I was. It was a rude awakening for both parties when the shine wore off, and I had no interest in going through it with Taavi.
Especially because I might actually fall for him. Who am I kidding? I’d kissed him once and I was already on a downward trajectory. Fuck, I’d probably been on the slippery slope about the time he’d given me puppy-dog eyes in the passenger seat of my car while covered in blood and garbage.
I knew damn well that I was an emotionally stunted immature asshole and about as far from an ideal romantic partner as you could get on this side of non-abusive. I was brash, rude, and definitely not the sort of person you brought home to meet the family because I was guaranteed to say something highly offensive to somebody’s auntie or grandma or mother.
Taavi studied me with the same intensity he’d sometimes looked at me with in Xolo dog form. “You really think that?”
“I know that.”
