Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
But still, I am restraining my most animal passions out of concern for the fact that they would probably frighten her if she had any idea how intensely I want her.
Her lips quirk into something faintly reminiscent of a smile.
“You’re looking at me like you want to eat me.”
“I do want to devour you, but you’ll stay intact.”
She shifts on the bed, looking at me with the wide eyes of prey. That is not the reaction I want to arouse in her. I want to see her anticipation, her need. I don’t want her to be afraid of being with me intimately.
It all raises the question yet again. The question I don’t think I can survive not knowing the answer to. The question that drives me, torments me, and commands me to find an answer to it no matter what.
How did she shift without having been mated by me?
I want to ask her again who she has slept with, but I know how that question will come across. It will seem like petty jealousy. It will diminish me in her eyes, and that I will not have.
It is a question only I am struggling with because for the moment, I am sure the pack assumes we consummated quickly. They do not know that she shifted on her own accord, that she fled me in a wolf form I had never seen before. Maybe the boys put two and two together, the fact that she was in her wolf form and I was not in the room, the fact that I hadn’t mentioned needing the painkillers immediately, and was talking about the whole thing as something that was yet to happen.
That doesn’t matter. What does matter is someone has been where only I should ever have been.
Jealousy sparks through me at the same time as concern. Something must have happened to her before I met her. Something terrible, perhaps. A lone wolf may have smelled her out, decided to take advantage of her. I can imagine her being loose in the Scottish wilds, roaming restlessly, eager for any acknowledgement of her true self.
A female wolf cannot shift for the first time until she has been mated. That is common knowledge. It is also widely regarded that it has to be a fated mate to trigger the shift, but that is where the whole argument starts to become gray. Some insist that only a true soulmate can bring out the beast in a female shifter, but nature is a messier creature than that. She makes a lot of spares. She revels in options.
It may be that we each have only one true fated mate, one who brings us the full joy of connection, the depths of animal soul connection, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy others to lesser degrees. According to nature’s design, it is always better to breed with a lesser option than to avoid breeding at all.
I look at Beatrix and am tortured by the notion of someone else putting so much as a finger on her.
“Have you been in love before, Beatrix?”
She shakes her head.
I breathe out a little and relax somewhat. She has not given her heart, even if she happens to have given her body.
I reach out and cup her chin with my hand, rubbing the pad of my thumb over her lower lip in a gesture faintly reminiscent of the way I handled her pussy in the orphanage. I can see by the blush on her cheeks she has put two and two together as well, and feels the same sparking of sexual intensity between us.
We have chemistry that cannot be denied, and whenever I touch her, it flares into intense, all-consuming life.
“Who are you… what are you…”
She asks the questions with her voice muted, but her tone intense. She is shaking. I don’t think she can help it. Her arousal is tinged with fear, and the combined scent is absolutely intoxicating.
She knows who I am, superficially at least. She’s not asking for my name. She’s not asking for my position. She’s asking for something deeper, something I am not sure I can answer now.
This should be so straightforward. She should be my virginal mate, she should submit to my cock, and she should be bonding with me as nobody has ever bonded before. There should be nothing even faintly resembling a question of anything in either of our minds.
This is the sort of nonsense reserved for humans, all the wondering and the worrying and the uncertainty.
It is my job to provide clarity and leadership. Sitting around wondering who took what should have been mine, if they took what should have been mine, and how such a thing happened, and all the other terrible questions that lead inevitably to terrible conclusions, is of no use to either one of us.