“You came up with this scenario pretty quickly,” I muttered.
“I’m a creative thinker.”
“Oh, my God,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands. I laughed and shook my head. “OK, second, it wouldn’t work anyway, because I chose you, I marked you. Remember? No substitutions, no take-backs. My body won’t accept, uh, contributions from anyone else. You’re my mate, for better, for worse. Human or werewolf. You’re mine, and I’m yours.”
“Good,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “ ’Cause I’m going to ask you to marry me, sometime soon. I know this is sort of a good moment, what with the successful deflowering and biting and all. But I didn’t want to do it when you were expecting it. And I didn’t know whether you wanted an engagement ring or not. I didn’t see any of the women in the pack wearing them.”
I smiled and was amazed at how easily I accepted the idea after a lifetime of sneering at happy married couples Then again, engagement is sort of a bump in the road, compared with lifelong bonding through a bite on the ass.
“Rings slip off too easily when we change,” I told him. “Most of us have our bands tattooed on our fingers. But if that’s too much for you, some of the women accept necklaces as a sign of betrothal. The chain has to be sturdy and long enough to wrap around our necks in either form.”
He grinned. “Is that what you want?”
“I’m not much on needles.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “I like stones with some color to them. Don’t get me a door-knocker-sized diamond. Just a little stone.”
“What color?”
I grinned up at him, pushing the blond strands of hair out of his eyes. “Blue. I’m awfully partial to blue.”
I WOKE UP, THANKFUL TO be in my human form.
I was in Nick’s bed, snuggled up on his blankets. I could smell him all over me, as if I’d been rolling around on him all night. I smiled, stretching across the bed and its cozy, nestlike arrangement of pillows. I don’t think I’d ever been more comfortable.
I sat up, propping myself on my elbows, listening for sounds of him moving around the house. Through the bedroom door, I felt a weird tension coming from the living room. I threw on one of his T-shirts and padded toward the sound of his voice.
“You know exactly why not!” Nick was in a shirt and tie, complete with a tweed jacket, pacing back and forth with the cell phone clutched against his face. He noticed me standing there and froze as the person on the other end of the line seemed to be whining at him. He gave me an embarrassed shake of the head and then shouted, “I don’t care! I don’t care if you end up ‘evicted,’ which we both know is code for ‘dealer is going to beat me up.’ I don’t owe you a fucking dime. If we’re going into debts, let’s talk about the money Dad sent over and over to help you ‘move home’ that never seemed to get your ass on the bus. Or how about the shit you took from my apartment when you just had to sleep on my couch for a week? Trust me, I’ve paid back whatever you spent on my miserable childhood twice over.”
With my supersensitive hearing, I could hear the tenor of the caller’s voice change from helpless sobs to a vicious stream of curses.
“You know what, go ahead and call the press. Tell your fake fucking sob story to whoever will listen. I don’t give a shit. Hell, people will probably feel sorry for me. Game subscriptions will go up by the thousands.”
He clipped the phone shut and roared, tossing it across the room, where it bounced off a steer skull and landed on the counter with a clatter.
“You’re right, it was a bad phone,” I said, lifting an eyebrow. “Look at it, lying there, all superior. The phone had it coming.”
He swooped in on me, claiming my mouth with a ferocity that took my breath. “Your family,” he said, his hands trembling at my cheeks. “Do you know how lucky you are to have that?”
I nodded. “Yes. Now, what’s wrong?”
“My mother.” He sat down and sighed, his head slumping forward. I straddled his lap, pushing his hair out of his face. “Same old song and dance. She’s living in Nashville. When she’s sober, she wants to be the next big country star. She’s behind on her rent. She just needs a measly thousand to make it until the end of the month. Doesn’t see why I’m being so unreasonable and stingy when I have so much. She had to chase her dreams, and she did me a favor, leaving me with my dad. She couldn’t help it if he turned out to be a drunk. And she did send me a birthday card that once. And she would hate to have to resort to selling her story of an impoverished mother of a gaming magnate to survive. To tell about how she bought me my first computer secondhand at a yard sale, sob sob. I don’t even write the code for the damn game. But she doesn’t realize that. She doesn’t take enough of an interest in what I did, just how much money I made.”
I couldn’t fathom that. Until Eli’s betrayal, I’d never experienced family members turning on each other. It was a foreign concept to want to suck resources away from a pack member. Of course, in the pack, if you needed money, it was practically in your pocket before you could even ask. We took care of our own. And if some people tended to mooch more than others, we just accepted it as part of their personality and teased them about it.
I stroked my hand down his cheek. And he looked up at me with his baby blues, begging for some sort of acceptance, comfort. I kissed his forehead. “Don’t worry about her. People like that, you can’t make them go away by giving them what they want. They’ll only come back for more,” I told him. “Besides, you don’t need her. You have a new family. We’re not exactly normal, but once you’re ours, you’re ours for life.”
I tipped my forehead so it was touching his. “I love you,” he said in a voice that had my heart breaking.
I covered it by stroking his arms, gently rotating my hips over his. “I love you.”
“And it’s very naughty of you to dress this way right before you leave town,” I purred as his pulse quickened and his breath grew ragged. His hands slipped under my shirt and traced frantic little patterns on my back. “You did this on purpose to provoke me,” I murmured against his mouth as I unzipped his pants, sliding my hand under his waistband and wrapping my fingers around his hard, hot length. “This is like the nerd version of answering the door in Saran Wrap.”
He gently eased me back onto the couch, settling his weight over me as I pushed his jacket from his shoulders. “I’ve been thinking—”
“I love it when you’re thinking.”
“I know you don’t want to have a baby right away. And I’m fine with that. I don’t think we should stop using birth control anytime soon. But we can, say, lessen our chances by participating in activities that aren’t as chancy but just as satisfying.”
I laughed as he eased out of his jeans and kicked them off. “Why do I have the feeling that you have charts showing the fertilization risks of various sex acts hidden behind the couch?”
“I’m just saying we should test a few theories,” he said, rolling off the couch and settling in front of me on the floor, stroking his fingers along my instep.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Well, I mean, touching you with my hands doesn’t count as sex, so there’s no danger there,” he said. He wiggled his eyebrows, ghosting his fingertips along my shoulder, up my chin, and over my lips. “It doesn’t count as sex.”
“So we’re going with Clinton’s rules?” I asked, just before catching his thumb with the edge of my blunt front teeth and biting down gently. He trailed his fingertips between my breasts, over my belly, and through the wisps of dark hair between my legs. He traced the outlines of my sex, dipping the very tip of his finger just inside me, barely brushing his thumb across my clit. My head thumped back against the table behind the couch as my hips shot up off the couch.
“That’s so mean,” I moaned.
Chuckling, he kissed across my hips, biting gently on the little bumps of my hipbones, before nibbling his way down my thighs, to my knees.
“There’s no danger in kissing you,” he said, running his lips along the little bone in my ankle, brushing them lightly over my shin, tickling my knee with his beard. He grinned at me, balancing his chin on my kneecap. “No matter where I do it.”
