Authors: Christine Warren
All she could do was feel.
The pinching pleasure-pain of the fingers on her nipple and clit. The hot, slick press of his bare skin against hers. The violent contractions of her womb as her body struggled against the overwhelming sensations. The brutal impact of his thrusts as he raced toward his own climax. It lasted for the rest of her life, and then she melted onto the table like warm cream. Her mind struggled to remember how to breathe while Rafe gave one last, hard thrust and began emptying himself inside her.
Eventually, he pulled out of her body—which made her wince and whimper at the same time—and peeled her off the entry table. She felt him swing her up in his arms again, but she didn’t even have the strength to open her eyes to see where he was taking her. She didn’t think she could survive another taking, anyway.
Her head bobbled against his shoulder as he carried her through darkened rooms deeper into the apartment. She felt the rush of cool air against her sweaty skin when he shifted her away from his body and laid her down on a set of cool, smooth sheets of incredibly soft cotton. She murmured in pleasure at the feel of them against her bare skin and stretched out, flexing sore muscles and testing to assess the damage. Nothing permanent, she was happy to note, and curled back onto her side to snuggle into a fluffy pillow.
She felt the bed dip as Rafe crawled in beside her. She frowned as a wisp of thought drifted into her exhausted mind and teased at her. She struggled briefly to recall what it was, then felt his arms curve around her waist and gave up. She let him pull her limp body back against his and sighed sleepily. She was warm and comfortable and more tired than she could remember being in her life, and nothing in the world sounded better than sleep. Giving up the struggle, she let herself slip into unconsciousness, lulled by the deep rumbling rhythm of a big cat’s contented purr.
* * *
When Tess woke, she remembered just enough to know she wasn’t in her own bed or her own apartment, but it took a few minutes of lying absolutely still and taking very deep breaths before she remembered any of the rest of it. The thing that finally brought it all rushing back was the feel of long, masculine fingers gliding up her thigh and toward an ache in a place that didn’t usually ache.
Her eyes flew open and she found herself looking into the amused face of Rafael De Santos.
Oh, shit.
“Good morning.” His voice sounded even huskier than usual, and she could feel it rasping over her skin almost like his clever tongue. “I thought about letting you sleep some more, but I wasn’t sure if you needed to be at work.”
He bent down and pressed a warm kiss to her lips, seeming to savor her sleepy, helpless response.
“What time is it?” she asked when he finally pulled away.
“Ten after ten.” He grinned. “And if you are already late for work, I apologize, but I only woke up a few minutes ago myself. Something wore me out last night.”
Tess cleared her throat and reached out for a sheet to pull over herself. There wasn’t one. She looked around but couldn’t find a single cover, so she yanked her pillow out from under her head and clutched it to her chest. She also pinned her thighs together to discourage the fingers that were currently wandering higher and higher up the sensitive patch of skin.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, watching him warily. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late. Actually, I didn’t mean to stay at all.”
He shrugged and flexed his hand to squeeze her thigh. “It’s just as well. I had no real intention of letting you go.” Reaching out with his free hand, he tugged the pillow out of her grasp and threw it across the room. “I’m still not sure I will.”
Her eyes widened as his head bent toward her now exposed breasts. When his hot mouth closed around a nipple, she yelped.
“Hey! Stop that!” She pushed at his shoulders, which he apparently misinterpreted as a cue to suck harder. She bit back a moan and tried to pretend her body was neither stupid nor masochistic enough to actually be getting wet for him. Again. “Are you insane? Get off me!”
He raised his gaze to hers without releasing her nipple and quirked one dark, eyebrow. She saw his eyes glint, but barely had time to get properly worried before his teeth closed delicately around the base of the peak and began to nibble.
“Ayiiiee!”
The noise came from her, much to her astonishment, since she wasn’t quite sure how she had made it. In any case, she had one brief, astonished moment of desperate arousal before her pussy throbbed sullenly, bringing her to her senses. Burying her fingers in his hair, she spent a few minutes gathering her strength—the fact that she was moaning and cupping her breast for him like an offering at the time meant nothing—before she tugged hard enough to get his attention.
Rafe lifted his head, her nipple slipping from his mouth with a pop, and she stifled the urge to whine a complaint.
“Thank you,” she said instead, mustering up a halfhearted scowl. “Now I think it’s time you let me up so I can go home.”
“Home?” Rafe dragged his avid gaze away from her glistening nipple and raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m letting you go home?”
Tess stiffened. “Um, because I want to and there are laws?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“A whole hell of a lot, considering it’s the difference between whether or not the police come swarming around your building like a plague of locusts.”
Rafe ignored her furious scowl and sat up. “Since no one is going to be calling the police, I doubt they will have any reason to come to my building and eat all the crops.”
“I damned well will call the police if you don’t let me go.”
“How?” His tone was idly curious as he stood and crossed to an enormous closet, emerging a moment later with an enormous bathrobe and a pair of casual linen trousers. The robe he tossed to Tess and the trousers he pulled on, covering up a tragic amount of bare, bronzed muscle. “If I decide not to let you call the police, Tess, it is not as if you will be able to defy me.”
Tess blinked at him, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing with shock. “You mean—you won’t … you’re going to … you can’t just…”
Rafe grinned at her. “Hurry up and put your robe on, Tess, before I get so distracted that I forget about making you breakfast.” He gave her an arrogant, indulgent look and swaggered out of the room.
Tess stared after him for a good long minute before her shock faded enough to let the anger bleed through. Shoving her arms into the sleeves of the massive terry-cloth robe, she didn’t even bother rolling them up before she snatched the phone off the bedside table and held it to her ear.
She didn’t get a dial tone, but she did get an annoying masculine chuckle and the infuriating sound of, “I’m not stupid, sweet Tess. Now come out to the kitchen—where I have the phone off the hook, by the way—and have some breakfast. After last night, you can use the protein.”
Click.
Tess slammed the phone down on a strangled scream and headed for the kitchen, fully prepared to do battle with an arrogant, troublemaking werecat.
She wasn’t prepared for French toast.
She couldn’t have been more than five minutes behind him, yet when she stepped into the gleaming pine, black, and chrome kitchen, he was already laying the first thick slice of batter-drenched bread onto a sizzling griddle. It wasn’t possible. And it damned sure wasn’t playing fair.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
He looked up from slicing another slab of bread off a thick loaf of challah and smiled at her. “Making breakfast. Do you want syrup or jam with your French toast?”
She braced her hands on her hips and glared at him. “What sort of dirty rotten trick is this? How dare you!”
“How dare I feed you?” He shrugged. “I suppose I thought you would be hungry. I myself am starved. And waffles would have taken much longer to prepare, but if that is what you would prefer…”
“That’s not what I’d prefer. What I’d
prefer
is for you to act the way you’re supposed to, damn it. Stop being so nice!”
“I am not supposed to be nice to you? How am I supposed to treat you?”
“You know. You’re supposed to act like a man. Tell me how much you enjoyed spending time with me last night, and you hate to rush me out because it makes you feel so sleazy, but you really do have an appointment in a couple of hours. And can you get me a cab? You’ll definitely call me if your schedule clears up so we can have dinner tonight, okay?” She paused for breath. “Aren’t you supposed to be the Don Juan around here? Shouldn’t you know how to do all this?”
She watched as he dipped a slice of bread into the bowl, then held it up to let the batter drain off. His movements were economical and expert and rather annoyed. “I am afraid not. Somehow I must have missed the training in how to behave as an inconsiderate ass when I was becoming such a ‘Don Juan.’ You will just have to forgive me if I am unable to behave as a total prick.”
“That’s not what I said.” She shifted her weight and burrowed her hands into the opposite sleeves of the enveloping robe. How had she started to lose the upper hand here?
“Actually, that is exactly what you said. Or at least what you implied.”
“But it’s not what I meant.”
“Then tell me what you did mean.” He set a filled plate down in front of her and handed her a glass carafe of syrup. He pulled out a stool on the opposite side of the island from the cook top he was working on. “And eat your breakfast while you clarify for me.”
She sat down reluctantly and picked up a fork, more to have something to do with her hands than because of an actual desire to eat. She didn’t say anything while he finished cooking his own serving and sat down beside her with an impressively heaping plate.
“All right, I believe I asked that you to eat your breakfast and explain to me what you meant. Would you care to try for one out of two?”
Tess glared at him and speared a bite of toast, swirling it around in a puddle of maple syrup. “I just meant that you’re … not acting quite like I expected.”
He swallowed a mouthful of breakfast and sipped from a huge glass of milk. “What were you expecting? For me to boot you out of bed the second I rolled off you?”
She squirmed in her seat. “Well, a little.”
“You really think I am that sort of man?”
“You do have a—a … reputation, you know.”
“
Madre de Dios,
Tess, if you thought that I might be so large of an asshole, why in God’s name did you go to bed with me to begin with?”
Tess rolled her eyes. “Right. Like I had a choice about that.”
His brows drew down as a dark storm front passed across his face. “Are you implying that I somehow forced you to have sex with me?”
“Of course not.” She blushed, feeling a surge of guilt. She hadn’t meant it to sound like that. Or at least, she knew it wasn’t true. “We both know it didn’t happen that way. But Fate is Fate. And when it comes down to it, there’s not much use in fighting what’s meant to be.”
Tess stared at her plate while Rafe pushed his empty one aside and cleared his throat. “So you are saying that we were somehow destined to sleep together last night?”
“I can’t say for sure that it had to be last night in particular, but I’d be an idiot if I tried to pretend that all the signs didn’t point to it happening at some point. I just didn’t see any point in waiting. I think I figured that if we got it over with, it would be a lot easier for both of us to relax from now on.”
“Of course. As you look so much more relaxed this morning.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it again when she saw a decidedly odd look cross Rafe’s face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked instead.
He looked at her, his face a carefully blank mask. “Your cell phone plays ‘Turkey in the Straw’?”
She flew off her stool and out of the kitchen so fast she should have left skid marks on the parquet floors. “Granddad!”
Eight
She sprinted toward the entry hall like it was an Olympic event, then wasted valuable seconds picking her way through shards of broken pottery in order to get to her denim jacket and the cell phone she kept in the inside pocket. She flipped it open just before the last strains of the square-dance classic faded from hearing.
“H’lo?”
Pause. “Tessa?”
“Yes, Granddad, it’s me,” she said, stepping gingerly back into Rafe’s living room and checking the bottoms of her feet for shrapnel. “How are you?”
He ignored her question. “Is something the matter? You sound out of breath.”
“I’m fine.” She looked up when Rafe appeared in the doorway, but she didn’t tell him whom she was speaking with. “I left my cell phone in the other room, and I had to run to answer it. Is everything all right?”
“I had called to ask you the same question.” His voice cooled and began to take on the tone of disapproval and censure that was a Lionel Menzies trademark. “I expected you to call me first thing this morning to tell me how everything went last night.”
“Last night?” she repeated, her mind flashing to the events she decidedly did
not
want to share with her closest living relative.
Rafe clearly intended to give her no privacy. Instead of leaving her to finish her call in peace, he perched on the arm of the living room chair nearest the entry and watched her with interest while he sipped from a mug of steaming coffee.
“Yes. Of course, last night,” Lionel snapped into her ear. “When you were asked to deliver a message to the head of the Council of Others. Did this task prove to be another that was too complex for you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then I assume you delivered the message without incident.”
Tess pursed her lips and looked away from Rafe’s curious stare. “I delivered it safely to the head of the Council, just like you asked.” She didn’t intend to discuss any of the details of last night’s incidents for her grandfather. Especially not the ones that had happened right next to where she stood.
“And was there a reply?”
“A reply?”
Lionel sighed over the phone, his voice ringing with impatience and condescension. “Yes, Tessa. A reply. You were instructed to wait to see if their leader would offer a reply to our message. Did he give you one?”