I feel her hands at my collar just before she tugs me down to her mouth—her lips colliding with mine only moments before I hear the creaking sound of the glass door sliding in the track behind me. I hear a distant oh followed by a soft chuckle, but even when the door quietly slides closed it feels like a faraway thing, because suddenly . . . all I can seem to focus on is Mackenzie’s mouth.
I’m fully aware of the biological happenings that come with being so intimate with a female shifter—but Mackenzie’s lips on mine feel much less textbook than I’d believed it could be up until this point. The soft shape of them melds against me as her fingers fist the collar of my shirt, and beyond all reason, I can feel the barely-there slide of her tongue over my lower lip, which makes me groan in a way that feels far from pretend.
I can’t fathom what drives me to open my mouth any more than I can guess at why her tongue tangles with mine, but as her flavor explodes there, making me dizzy, I can’t really contemplate anything more than the way my hand fits against her spine when it finds a place to rest there. Does she even realize what she’s doing?
Fuck, do I?
Something in the back of my head tells me I should put a stop to this, that I should pull away from her before things get complicated—but that voice is viscerally silenced by the soft sound that emits from Mackenzie’s throat, one that I all but swallow down as my fingers find their way into her hair. I am a mess of scent and touch and sensation as her body presses closer to mine, and I am fully aware of the way I’m getting hard against her stomach—I just can’t seem to do anything about it.
I can’t say how many seconds it takes to break away from her—to untangle myself from her soft body and her softer mouth—but when I’m finally able to, I find her breath as ragged as mine, and her lips as red and as swollen as my own must surely be.
Her lashes flutter dazedly as the tip of her tongue swipes at her lower lip, and I feel a carnal need to pull that same tongue back into my mouth, to kiss her until the sun comes up, maybe. I’m not sure.
I’m very careful, as I peel myself away—trying to steady my breathing even as all of my senses scream at me to get closer to her.
“This is—” I have to clear my throat, my voice sounding all wrong. “This is what I mean,” I warn roughly. “We won’t be able to control things like this. If we keep this up.”
Mackenzie is still looking at me, her eyes moving over my face in a lazy but calculated way, as if she’s considering the pieces of a puzzle. I watch her tongue trace her lip again, and I’m pretty sure if she does it one more time, I will go insane.
“Say something,” I urge. “Help me figure this out. I could get back on my suppressants, or maybe . . . Maybe we should call the whole thing—”
“What if we just . . . do it?”
I freeze, staring at her. Surely she said something different than what I heard. “What?”
“We could just . . . try it out,” she goes on. “See what all the fuss is about.”
“You can’t be serious,” I say incredulously.
“Why not?” Her eyes look less glazed now, sharper, like she’s really thinking about this. “I mean, it’s not like it has to be a big thing,” she reasons. “We’re already pretending to date. Why not enjoy it a little?”
“I can think of a dozen reasons as to why that’s a bad idea.”
“I can think of one reason why it’s a very good idea,” she counters, nodding at my still-tented pants. “I mean, it doesn’t seem like you’re too opposed to it.”
I press my palm against the stiff front of my dark jeans, immediately regretting my actions when it makes my traitorous cock throb. I hiss through my teeth, closing my eyes. “Mackenzie . . .”
“Seriously, what’s the harm? It sounds like neither of us have had much luck in the dating department lately. I mean, if we had, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. Plus, you’re leaving soon! It seems like a win-win to me.”
“It sounds like a very good way to make things complicated.”
“I’m not going to go all dickmatized on you,” she snorts, barreling on before I even have a chance to process that phrase. “It’s just sex. No need to make a big thing of it.”
I stare at her openmouthed, this turn of events nothing like what I could have ever expected when she got into my car a few hours ago. I can honestly say I’ve never been propositioned for sex like some sort of business deal. The entire thing is . . . bizarre.
But not enough to make it easy to turn down.
I meant it when I said there were a dozen reasons why it’s a bad idea—so why in the world have I not definitively said no yet? Why am I standing here considering what she’s saying, trying to make it seem reasonable in my head? Is it just hormones, or is it . . . something else?
“Dessert is ready,” I hear Moira call from the other side of the patio door, making me jolt as I’m realizing I’m still hard on Mackenzie’s grandmother’s deck. I hear another soft giggle. “Whenever you two are done.”
I close my eyes in embarrassment. I don’t think I acted this way even when I was a teenager. I take a deep breath to steady myself, and when I open my eyes again, I’m startled by the sight of Mackenzie right next to me, her hand reaching to gently press at my shoulder as she peers up at me in the half dark.
“We’ll talk about it after,” she says, her voice low and her eyes full of promise. Her fingers slide down my bicep to trace one of the lines in my sleeve, and the sudden burst of her scent threatens to knock me on my ass. “Just . . . think it over. Okay?”
I have to remain outside for several more seconds before I can will the most traitorous part of me to calm down—Mackenzie’s wild proposition bouncing around in my head in tandem with all the reasons why I should turn her down.
And I will. Turn her down. I absolutely will. It’s a terrible idea. Horrible, really. There are a million things that could go wrong. I will turn her down.
At least . . . that’s what I’m telling myself.
9
Mackenzie
Noah hasn’t said a word since we left Gran’s, and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s embarrassed by my proposition or because he’s actually considering it. In my head, it had seemed like a perfectly reasonable and logical thing to propose—or at least, it had seemed that way in the afterglow of that kiss. Because it was . . . a hell of a kiss.
I’m not stupid. I know a lot of what I felt out there on Gran’s deck was just hormones and biology and compatibility—but that doesn’t change the fact that it felt really good. Noah’s kiss had been rough and messy and a little bit desperate (but that might have been me, who can say), but not once in my life have I been so turned on by just a kiss, and it makes me wonder how good everything else might feel with Noah Taylor. Plus, I’m honestly getting a little tired of being revved up in offices and closets and having to brush it off for no real reason.