“Like a wet willy?”
His hand lifts to my neck.
Stops.
“May I touch you?” He’s asking for permission, but there’s nothing insecure or tentative about it. I nod. “Weres have scent glands—here.” He brushes the pad of his thumb against the hollow on the left side of my throat. “Here.” The right side. “And here.” His hand wraps around my neck, palm flush against my nape. “Your wrists, too.”
“Ah.” I clear my throat. And resist the urge to squirm, because I’m feeling . . . I have no idea. It’s the way he looks at me. His pale, piercing eyes. “This is a, um, fascinating anatomy lecture, but—Oh, shit. The green markings, at our wedding! But I—”
“You don’t have scent glands,” he says, like I’m more predictable than taxes, “but you do have pulse points, where your blood pumps closer to the surface, and the heat—”
“—will augment the scent. I’m familiar with the whole blood thing.”
He nods and holds my eyes expectantly, until he understands that I have no clue what he’s waiting for. “Misery. Do I have your permission?”
I could say no. I know that I could say no and he’d probably just find another way to protect me—or die trying, because he’s that kind of guy. And maybe that’s exactly why I nod and close my eyes, thinking that it won’t be a big deal.
Which, I soon realize, might not be the case.
It starts with heat, drifting over me as he shifts closer. The faint, pleasant scent of his blood climbing into my nostrils. After that, his touch. First his hand on my jaw, holding me still, angling my head to the right, and then . . . his nose, I think. Nuzzling down the column of my throat, moving back and forth over the place where my blood flows the strongest. He inhales once. Again, deeper. Then travels back up, the scratch of his jaw tickling my flesh.
“Okay?” he asks in a low rumble.
I nod. Yes. It’s okay. More than okay, though I wouldn’t be able to qualify how, or why. An “I’m sorry” stumbles out of my mouth.
“Sorry?” The word vibrates through my skin.
“Because.” My knees are buckling, so I lock them. I still feel like I might lose my bearings, so I blindly reach up. Find Lowe’s shoulder. Grasp it for dear life. “I know you don’t like my scent.”
“I fucking love your scent.”
“So the baths did work— Oh.”
When he said tongue, I expected . . . Not that his lips would part at the base of my throat, and then a soft, drawn-out lick. Because this feels like a kiss. Like Lowe Moreland is kissing my neck, slowly. Grazing it with his teeth and finishing off with a light nibble.
I nearly moan. But at the last moment, I manage to swallow back inside my body the whimpery, throaty sound, and . . .
God. Why does what he’s doing feel so phenomenally good?
“Is this as weird for you as it is for me?” I ask, trying to make light of the flutters of pleasure in my stomach. Because this thing spreading like spilled water below my navel, it’s arousal, and it could explode into wildfire very fast. It makes me think of blood and touching and maybe fucking, and as things are happening to my body, I’m terrified that he’ll be able to smell them.
Smell me.
“No,” he growls.
“But—”
“It’s not weird.” Lowe lifts his head from my neck. I’m so close to begging him to come back and do it some more, but he’s just switching sides, and I almost yelp in relief. This time, his palm cradles the entire back of my head, and for a few moments he thumbs the tip of my ear, exhaling slowly, reverently, like my body is a precious, beautiful thing. “It’s perfect,” he says, and then his mouth lowers again.
First a delicate bite on my earlobe. Then the swipe of his tongue at the base of my jaw. Last, right as I’m thinking that this is different from what I thought scenting would be, he moves to the bottom of my throat and sucks.
He grunts.
I gasp.
We both let out staggered breaths as my hand creeps up to press his face deeper into me. He pulls gently at my skin, open-mouthed, and the stimulation is like electricity, flooding me with warmth. Weres’ body temperature is much higher than Vampyres’, and his body is a scant inch of air and possibilities away, and the heat of him . . .
My breasts ache, nipples hard as gems, and I want to arch into him. I want contact and flesh and skin. Lowe is solid, and I feel so soft, and his thundering heartbeat—his delicious beating heart—is a hazy, indescribable wonder pulling me to him. I squirm in his arms, trying to press against him, rub just a little, but no.
Because Lowe pulls back. His hand closes on my shoulder, spinning me around until I’m facing away from him. My breath catches as I clasp a headrest for balance.
“Okay?” he asks, wrapping his fingers around the base of my throat. I say yes as fast as I can, well before the word is fully out of his mouth, and he doesn’t waste time, either: he lifts away the heavy mass of my hair. Clutches my hips in his palm. Presses my body against his.
And once he has me how he wants me, he bends down.
His teeth close around the back of my neck, hard this time, and I am flooded with a filthy, instant kind of pleasure. The cry that I managed to leash earlier burns out of my throat. There’s pressure inside me, heady, scalding, and I can’t bear for it to grow. Lowe’s hand travels down to my stomach, settling me more tightly against him. The curve of my ass finds his groin, and he lets out a satisfied, guttural sound that jolts my nerve endings.
My blood sings. My ears roar. I’m melting.
“Fuck,” he mouths. He runs his tongue over the knob at the top of my spine one last time, as if to soothe the sting of his bite, and suddenly I’m cold. Shivering. When I turn, he’s standing several feet away from me, eyes pitch-black.
The roar in my ears is getting louder—because it wasn’t in my ears at all. A car is driving across the tarmac, toward our plane.
Emery.
“I’m sorry.” Lowe sounds like a rake has run through his vocal box. His fingers twitch at his side, a reflex. Like my hand lingering on the damp spot at the base of my throat.
“I . . .” My hand shifts to massage my nape. I can still feel his touch. “That was . . .”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
My fangs ache, itch, want like never before. I trace them with my tongue to ensure they aren’t on fire, and Lowe watches me do it, every second of it, lips parting. He takes a small, involuntary step toward me, then retreats again, appalled at his lack of control.
This might be new to me, and I may not be a Were, but whatever just happened between us went beyond let me disguise you real quick and straight into something different.
Something sexual.
And if I know it, there is no way he doesn’t.
“Lowe.” We should talk about this. Or never mention it again.
The way he’s looking, he’s opting for the latter. “I’m done,” he says to himself, eyes glassy. “It’s done.”
“Is it better?”
His lips press together. As though there is a flavor he wants to hold in his mouth a moment longer. “Better?”
“My smell. Do I smell like . . . ?”
“Mine.” It’s a rumble in his throat. “You smell like you’re mine, Misery.”
Something charged shimmers through my body.
It is, after all, exactly what we were going for.
CHAPTER 15
She’s not like he imagined. He won’t admit to picturing how she’d be while he was growing up, but there was always something in the back of his head, a faint hope that maybe, one day.
She’s not like he imagined. She’s more, in every possible way.
Emery Messner is petrifying. Mostly because she looks really nice.