Page 46 of Stags

Truthfully, until she turned around at the bar and found herself caught in that gaze of Athos the arrogant jerk, she hadn’t even realized it was a thing she missed very much.

Maybe she’d lashed out at him in annoyance with herself as much as with him. She had felt like some part of her—some long forgotten part—had been jerked awake, and she hadn’t even known how to react to that sensation.

He was still backing away now, still giving her that wicked little smile, and she was torn between going after him and slapping it off his face—no, she wouldn’thithim. Okay, torn between expressing some kind of righteous indignation and between encouraging him.

Damn everything.

She jerked her gaze from him and turned all of her attention back to her mimosa.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ATHOS SENT STOCKTONa text.Where are you? We should talk about something that just happened to me.

Stockton texted back that he was seeing his father off and that he was curious. What had happened?

Athos said they should talk face-to-face. He wasn’t going to tell the younger buck that he was blowing him off for this Tawny woman in a text. It wasn’t exactly the right thing to do, but he didn’t fucking care at this point. If he did not stick his dick in that doe, he was going to regret it for the rest of his life.

He did not feel exactly, uh, rational about his sexual attraction to her at this point.

He had not had sex since the end of his marriage.

He hadn’t even tried.

He hadn’t even wanted to try.

He’d sort of hoped this weekend would make him function again, he guessed.

And, um, it was working. It was working too well, maybe? Sex with Cira had been unlike anything he’d ever really experienced in his life. It had been intense, ridiculously intense, frequent, and he’d, you know, thought it was good.

Apparently Cira had not. Apparently Cira had been craving a bond with a swan, not with him, the entire time they’d been together, but he hadn’t craved anything except her. He’d been totally and completely satisfied with the arrangement, even though the way swans fucked meant that orgasm was sort of… besides the point. You didn’t do it to come, you did it tointertwine.

And what was more, he found himself not fucking caring about the orgasm element of the whole thing fairly quickly.

He was easily hopped up on the bonding part. The bonding part was just out of this world. It was better than just getting his rocks off.

Or…

Well…

This, though. Possibly, he’d never done this. Possibly, he’d never experienced this kind of sex or a mating ritual that was aligned to his biological needs or whatever, because he was feeling a little crazed.

It was partly because that Tawny woman had some incorrect idea about who he was. Sure, he shouldn’t have made that joke when she accused him of weaponized incompetence. Okay, maybe it hadn’t even been a joke. Maybe he meant it.

Or maybe it was because his own relationship with Cira had fallen apart in such a way where he felt like he had more in common with the things that women complained about with men than he did with the things men complained about with women?

He had devoted his entire existence to his wife, at least to his way of thinking, he had. He’d lived for her.

When they got divorced, and she said he was never around and he thought of his job as more important than her, he couldn’t believe it.

He only ever did that job because of her.

When they’d started dating, he’d been thinking about dropping out of pre-law, and she had been so hot for it.I can’t believe you’re going to be a lawyer,she’d said. And it wasn’t as if it was a sacrifice, not exactly. It was just that if Cira liked it about him, he liked it about him. He wanted to be whatever she wanted. He wanted to be worthy of her, to earn her, to satisfy her, to spend his fucking life worshiping her. Just…

Anyway, whatever.

He was not the kind of arrogant buck that Tawny thought he was. He did not think of himself as more important than women. He did not expect women to serve him.

But, uh, something about pretending to be that kind of man had felt good in a weird way.

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