Page 22 of Slow Heat
“Yeah?” Jason reached out to take the ribbon from him and Vale let him, carefully avoiding skin contact. The ribbon was soft and worn, but the color was still vibrant. The words readPOET OF THE YEAR, and Jason traced them with his finger. “Did you win this?”
“I did. My last year in Mont Juror.” Vale chuckled, and sweetness zipped up Jason’s spine. “The poem was entitled ‘when the sun sets on your skin’. It was terrible.”
“No, you won!” Jason argued. “It must have been good.”
“It was student work.”
Jason smiled, his heart tripping. So Vale was hard on himself and a bit of a snob. He could handle that. That was good. That was information he could work with to gather more. “And you’re a professor now.”
“Was, apparently.”
Shit. Another misstep. He was an idiot. Vale would never believe Jason was actually intelligent at this rate.
“Back to poetry,” he said hastily.
“Yes, it’s much safer,” Vale said, a sarcastic but amused tone ruffling his words.
“Chancellor Rory said you should write poems and publish them.”
Vale rolled his eyes. “I’ve been publishing them for years.”
“So I could buy them?”
Vale’s cheeks paled a little. “I can’t stop you from it, but I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why?”
“They’re personal.”
“How?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Jason’s feet were starting to hurt, and he wanted to crawl in the room and throw himself into one of the comfortable looking chairs. He leaned against the sill and shifted his weight. “Why?”
“Wolf-god, you’re annoyingly persistent.”
“I want to read them, but if you don’t want me to…then I feel torn. I want to know more about you, but I want to please you, too. One is the real me. The other one is instinct. Give the real me a reason not to go to the book store on my way home.”
Vale’s jaw clenched and released like it had on the phone with Chancellor Rory when he’d been especially pissed off. “I’ve written and published poems about my experiences with heat, Jason. I’ve been through many heats since I came of age. Rarely alone.”
Jason sucked in a breath and took a step back from the window.
He’d known. Okay, so he hadn’tknown, but Vale was thirty-five. There was no denying the implication. Not to mention the alpha he’d been with the day before had been covered in Vale’s scent. There was no way they hadn’t…even when there was no heat to be pacified.
“Oh,” he said.
Vale stared at him coldly, measuring Jason’s response. “And?”
“And what?”
“Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes.”
“And why you shouldn’t read my poems.”
“I can handle it.”
