“Jace?” she said again, and I blinked.
“Sorry. I was just thinking about—” Tasting. Touching. Breaking every rule I’d ever been bound by in my entire miserable life… “—running. Together. Um…” I blinked again and cleared my throat, grasping for focus and control.
Get it together. You’ve seen many nude human women.
But Abby was neither nude nor human, and those two facts made all the difference. Wearing nothing but a towel, she seemed to straddle some erotic line between naked and clothed, and my mind couldn’t quite fathom the temporary state.
Though the rest of me knew exactly how to proceed.
“I was thinking about a Pride run,” I finally managed to say. “We should do one this month. Make it a winter tradition.”
“Sure.” Her towel slipped a fraction of an inch, and I realized I was holding my breath. I knew what she looked like beneath that white cotton, yet being limited to my own memory made me ache to refresh the mental image by removing her towel.
Slowly.
With my teeth.
Abby shrugged, and the cotton slipped a little more. “We could probably all use the physical release.”
My cock stiffened and I prayed she couldn’t see. “Release?” She was doing that on purpose. Again. She was a child playing a woman’s game, and I wanted to let her win.
Abby nodded and dropped her dirty clothes into Lucas’s already-stuffed hamper. “We’re all under a lot of pressure, hunting the murderer. And the killers he’s trying to kill. Ironic, isn’t it?” She turned back to me, and my focus snagged on her mouth again, then followed the line of her throat. So pale. So delicate. I could see her pulse through her skin, and I wanted to lick it. I wanted to feel the thrum beneath my tongue.
I wanted to know that her heart beat, and her pulse raced, and her body ached for no one else. No one but me.
What the hell was I thinking?
“What’s ironic?” I asked, and only my automatic recall of the past few spoken words gave me any clue what we’d been talking about.
“It’s ironic that the killer’s actually doing us a favor.” Abby dropped the hamper lid, and I hardly heard the clatter.
Her chest was freckled. Hundreds of tiny reddish spots sprinkled her shoulders and collarbones, then disappeared beneath the cotton. How far did the freckles go? Were they still red that far down, where the sun rarely touched them? Were her nipples pink? Large and round, or small and cute?
I’d seen her wearing nothing but a thin sheen of sweat literally dozens of times, so why couldn’t I remember? Why hadn’t I memorized every single freckled inch of her skin—every curve and dip? Every peak and valley?
When the hell had she developed peaks and valleys?
“I mean, when we find the rest of Hargrove’s group, we’re going to kill them, right?”
I inhaled deeply, trying to focus on her words as she dug into her overnight bag at the foot of Lucas’s bed.
That’s right. Think about her brothers. All five of them. They were all big, and protective, and…
And I couldn’t remember a single one of their faces or names. All I could think about was Abby, and how badly I wanted her.
My body told me I could have her. My brain told me I should have her. I was an Alpha. She was a tabby. It was only natural. And I knew she was interested. She’d kissed me in the dark, in the woods, her body pressed against mine for balance and maybe for warmth. Then I’d kissed her, in that morbid taxidermy chamber, and she’d tasted like…life. Like everything vital, and warm, and vibrant. Like everything I’d always known I wanted, but could never have.
Because Abby. Wasn’t. Mine.
“Jace?”
Damn it. She was still talking, and I hadn’t heard a word, though I’d seen every shape her lips made as she spoke. “I’m sorry. What?”
“I said we’ll kill them when we find them, right? The hunters?”
“Well, if we can capture them alive, we have to take them to the council for questioning before they’re executed,” I said, and Abby frowned. “But yes, ultimately, they’ll all be put out of their misery for the good of the entire shifter community.”
“So then, do we really have to find the stray?” She pulled a nightshirt from her bag and shook it out. It was blue and it already smelled like her, which meant she’d worn it the night before. “I mean, he’s only doing what we’re going to do anyway, and he clearly knows more than we do about the situation. So, maybe we should just wait and let him do his job.”
Wait, what? I shook my head to regain focus. Her laissez-faire approach to crime prevention had woken me up.
“But it’s not his job,” I reiterated. “It’s my job. It’s your job, now. Vigilante justice isn’t really justice, Abby. It’s violence and chaos.”