Page 60 of Cold Moon

Right. That was the leather bag he had in his hand. He set it by the couch and straightened again, and—I was supposed to be smooth, supposed to take charge and provide. Where the hell did my wolf get off, getting all defensive around Linden but struggling to figure out what to do now?

“Want something to drink?”

“I’m good for now, thanks.” His tongue pressed into his cheek, rounding it out. When he sighed, his shoulders slumped low. “I should probably tell you I haven’t done this either, right? Shared a heat with anybody. Because, you know, I’m Skye and I’m—”

I scowled when he cut off so abruptly, but it didn’t take a supergenius to figure out what he was going to say. He had the Condition, and the people he’d grown up with treated him with kid gloves.

I nodded, stepping around the kitchen counter and onto the carpet, but I hung back on the other side of the room. “It’s okay, Skye. I don’t care about that. I just—”

He stared at me, spots of pink high on his cheeks, his eyes wide and pupils huge and dark in the low living-room light. His warm, clean scent drew me another step toward him.

“I just don’t want to hurt you.” Without thinking, even noticing, I’d closed the distance between us. My palm cupped his cheek, and his flushed lips fell open on a breathy laugh.

“You won’t.”

He made it sound so simple, but when I frowned, he shook his head. “You overthink everything, Dante. It’s sweet. And I guess I don’t mean you’ll never hurt me, but I do know that you wouldn’t do it on purpose. Little hurts—the kind I’ll always be able to forgive.”

My breath caught. Forgivable? That wasn’t a word I’d ever thought applied to me, applied to alphas. But there Skye was, offering me blanket forgiveness for every time I made a misstep but didn’t mean harm.

Frozen, I stared as he held my hand steadily against his face, cupping the back of it, even as he turned his head. He kissed the skin inside my wrist where my pulse jumped, then his lips pulled back over his sharp teeth. He bit me, a scrape of teeth that sent a shiver down my spine. When he caught my eye, his flush had swept down his svelte neck, disappearing below the collar of his shirt.

“Little hurts,” he repeated, while I watched the blossom of the red line against my skin, marking where his teeth had dragged across my skin, not hard enough to break it but enough to make the blood rush to the surface. “Forgive me?”

All I could do was groan, grabbing him by the back of his neck and pulling him into me. He pushed up on his toes, his body tight against mine while I swallowed his moan and plundered his generous mouth with my tongue.

“Always,” I rasped against his lips. “Anything, Skye. Whatever you want.”

His hands settled on my shoulders and he pushed me back, only to nod down the short hallway toward my bedroom. His brows rose in silent question, and though my mouth went dry and my tongue was thick and useless, I nodded.

I snatched the grocery bag with the bottle of lube off the counter, took his hand, and pulled him away from the locked front door and the rest of the world while my wolf preened. This once, I supposed, it was fine for me to keep Skye to myself.

When we got to my bedroom, Skye stopped in the doorway. I almost ran into him, but when I caught myself, I saw no good reason not to pull him back against my chest. He took a deep breath, and his whole body trembled against my front.

“This okay?” I dipped my head to brush my lips across his ear, and felt the tickle of his black silk hair against my cheek when he nodded.

“Smells like you,” he said hazily, turning to kiss the edge of my jaw, making little nips across my skin with the edge of his teeth that sent all my blood rushing straight down to my cock. It pushed into the small of his back, and he wiggled up on his toes, straining to get closer.

He twisted at the waist, and I took his arm, dragging it around my neck to steady him as I bent to scoop my arm under his knees. “Well, let’s make it smell like you.”

I carried him to the bed, unceremoniously dropping the bag of lube on the mattress before I gently set him down. He stared up at me, the muscles of his throat working with a nervous swallow. “You’d like that?”

“If my sheets and blankets and pillows smelled like the sweetest omega I’ve ever met?” I dragged my shirt over my head by grabbing it between my shoulder blades and tugging it off. I threw it across the room and grinned at Skye as he gaped up at me. “I’d love it. Settle in. Nest in here and never come out, so long as you stay with me.”

There he was, chewing on his lip again. He sat up, fiddling with the hem of his shirt in a way that seemed a little too nervous for my liking. Rather than keep his hungry gaze on me, he stared at the bag.

“What’s in there, condoms?”

I blinked. I hadn’t even thought about condoms. Werewolves didn’t get sick—except the Condition—and, well, nobody had come up with a knot-friendly solution.

While I had a flash of horror that I’d done the completely wrong thing, he grabbed the bag, the crinkle of treated canvas loud in the room as he pulled out the bottle of lube.

“Did you... want condoms?”

He kept staring down at the bottle, chewing on his swollen lip. “No. Rather have your knot.”

His voice was short and strained, and I wanted to get him out of that shirt and see the way his blood blossomed under his skin, heating it up. I just didn’t want to push him.

“Do you think we’ll need this?” He held the bottle up, finally lifting his eyes to mine.

---