His joy dimmed.
He could still feel her skin, silky and wet against his, still taste the wild heat of her mouth. God, but he craved the right to have her. Except that she was a dominant female, the highest-ranking woman in the pack, and he was a male whose dominance level was ambiguous—an unusual situation in a wolf pack, but his work for their alpha depended on him being seen as outside the hierarchy. However, no matter how you cut it, she outranked him; she’d been lieutenant for years. Added to that, she was four years older.
Frustrated at his thoughts, he moped his way back to his rooms when Lara released him, barely noticing the flesh-colored thin-skin bandage the healer had slapped on his side. He was just getting out of the shower when he heard the door to his room open. Indigo’s scent followed a moment later. Rubbing haphazardly at his hair, he wrapped the towel around his waist and walked out to find her sitting cross-legged on his bed, her back to the wall, a huge slice of cheesecake on the saucer she had in her hand.
She was here. In his territory.
Leaning against the bathroom doorway, he just watched her. Her skin was flushed with heat, so she’d taken that bath. And the hair she usually tied up in a ponytail lay sleek and damp down the back of her white T-shirt. Her soft black pajama pants hid the long length of her legs, but Andrew had memorized every lithely muscled inch of her.
“Do you want some or not?” She lifted the fork.
Not stupid enough to refuse, he shot her a smile deliberately laced with pure wickedness. “Let me put on some clothes. Unless you want me naked?”
A feminine snort. “Seen it, felt it, don’t want to buy the T-shirt.”
The insult cut. He was male, and he wanted her until he could hardly see straight. But he couldn’t let her know that, not when she already held all the cards, so he shrugged. “Fine.” And dropped the towel.
Indigo almost choked on her cheesecake as Drew walked over to the bureau on the other side of the room. Oh . . . my. Her eyes couldn’t seem to move off his butt. Hard and muscled and bitable. Definitely bitable.
It was all she could do not to moan when he pulled a pair of sweats over that beautiful golden skin, those taut muscles. About to ask him to take the thing off, she realized exactly who it was she was ogling. What was wrong with her? Horrified, she stabbed the fork into the cheesecake and stuffed a big gob into her mouth just as Drew turned.
There was no longer any humor on his face, and suddenly, she saw not Riley’s younger brother, not the laughing, teasing male who could charm every female in the den to get what he wanted, but the tracker who’d hunted down his prey in a storm so harsh even the feral wolves had taken shelter. And he’d never lost the scent—a task she’d have thought impossible given the mix of torrential rain and driving wind.
Shoving his hands through his hair, he walked over to the bed. The muscles at the front of his body, she thought, were as impressive as the ones in the back. But her eyes, right then, were on his face. She couldn’t read him, she realized with gut-wrenching shock, not like she could the other young males. But she knew she’d insulted him. Predatory male changelings could be very touchy about that kind of a statement from a female—but that was usually within the confines of a relationship or courtship.
Still . . .
He sprawled beside her, bracing his back against the wall. Turning a little, she scooped up a bite of cheesecake on her fork and lifted it to his mouth. He took it, holding her gaze as she drew the tines out from between his lips. Her body warmed with a slow burn of heat as she remembered those lips on her mouth, strong and confident . . . and tempting.
He flicked out his tongue to lick up a bit of the cream, his eyes never leaving hers. When he sat up and took the fork from her hand, she let him. And when he raised the cheesecake to her lips, she almost let him put the tines to her mouth. Except that the intimacy of the act suddenly hit her with blinding force.
“Drew, we’re not—” The cheesecake was in her mouth, the flavors lush and rich, the tines warm as he drew them through her lips oh-so-slowly.
Drew took a long, deep breath. “I can scent your hunger,” he murmured, his voice dropping until it scraped over her skin, raw and arousing. “I want to taste it.”
Thrown off center by the unexpected, shocking shift in atmosphere, she shook her head even as her muscles seemed to melt, her body aching in a way that had nothing to do with the hunt they’d just completed. “I don’t sleep with my subordinates.”