Page 10 of Rebel's Fairytale

How long can you stay shifted?

How often can you shift?

What happens to your clothes?

…

Rebel grinned as he read the questions. The list was neat and organized, but the questions were all over the place. There were sixteen items on the sheet, and he assumed it wasn’t complete. His woman was a curious creature, and Rebel loved that about her.

“Okay. I’m ready,” he heard Ruby say as she jogged down the stairs.

Keeping his eyes on the list, because he knew his brain would short-circuit once he got a glimpse of her, Rebel began answering her questions, “No, shifting doesn’t hurt. I can stay shifted as long as I want to. I can shift whenever I want to. Nothing happens to my clothes when I shift. They’re just there, and then they’re not. No, we can’t change people into shifters. We’re born this way. The moon is interesting to look at, but it doesn’t affect us any differently than it affects you. If I eat in wolf form, it’s what a wolf would eat. Werewolves are the half-wolf, half-man creatures you see in movies. We shift into a full animal, so we are shifters. I don’t necessarily clean my fur. It’s just clean when I shift. Axle is our alpha, but we don’t have to have one. The mate thing is most definitely a real thing, and we will get into that more later. No, our mate doesn’t have to be a shifter. Our mate bond is about the person, not the animal, so tiger shifters can mate lion shifters, for example.” He grinned and raised a brow. “Sex works the same way it works for everyone else on the planet. If my mate is human, which she is, our kids would be wolf shifters.” He set the notepad down on the table. “Any other questions?”

Rebel finally looked at her, and instantly, his pants got tighter. He couldn’t look away from her, and it became harder to breathe. Sheliterallytook his breath away.

Damn, she’s beautiful.

She was wearing a pair of black slacks that were fitted in all the right places, accentuating her hips and that ass he just wanted to bite into. Her blouse was light gray and simple, but it looked like it was made to wrap around her curvy body. She paired the outfit with a black and gray scarf that looked to be made out of some type of sheer material, and a pair of light gray heels that would most certainly make her as tall as him.

She looked how he expected her to look for work, which made sense, since that was where she was going after their date, but it was probably the sexiest thing he’d ever set his eyes on.

Fuck! Pull yourself together, Rebel. Your first date!

He swallowed hard and gave a shake of his head, trying to push his lust to the back of his mind. “You look beautiful.”

Ruby smiled that sweet smile she always gave him and tucked a bit of her blond hair behind her ear as the blush grew on her face. “Thank you, Rebel.”

He crossed the room to where she stood and cupped her face in his palms. Running his thumbs over her reddened cheeks, he stared into her gold-flecked blue eyes. “I want to kiss you.”

“What are you waiting for?”

Her breathy question sent his banked lust into overdrive, bringing it right back to the front of his mind. With a low growl, he pressed his lips to hers and moved one hand from her cheek to her hip. As he pulled her closer, his other hand slid into the hair on the back of her head, tilting it, and as she gasped, he deepened the kiss.

She wrapped one arm around him, under his cut, fisting his shirt, which made him growl. Her free hand slid into his hair, taking a grip of it the same way she had his shirt, eliciting another growl from him.

Rebel moved both hands to her lower back, forcing her body up against his. His wolf was growling his approval and urging Rebel to claim their mate, but Rebel told him toshut the hell up.

A whimper came from Ruby as Rebel broke the kiss and made his way across her cheek to her jawline. He nipped the skin there, before he whispered into her ear, “As much as I fucking love what we’re doing right now, we should stop.”

It took everything in him to step back. He didn’t want to. He wanted to press her against the wall under her stairs and show her exactly how sexy he thought she was in that outfit, but there were a number of reasons why he couldn’t.

Rebel didn’t want to go too fast and ruin things. He was in it for keeps. That meant he couldn’t treat her the way he would treat a woman he picked up at a bar. She deserved better than that. She deservedthe world, and he intended to be the one who gave it to her.

Not to mention, if he started down that path, he wouldn’t want it to end for hours, and she had to go to work. The real world couldn’t wait on him to get his fill of her. If that were the case, they’d never leave the townhouse.

She cleared her throat as her arms dropped back to her sides. “Yes. You’re probably right.” Another throat clearing. “Tea. We were going for tea.” He wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince with that statement.

After taking in her mussed hair and her lust-filled eyes, Rebel’s gaze drifted down to her kiss-bruised lips. Her lightly tinted lip gloss was smeared, and her lips were plumper than they had been before he kissed her. Rebel wanted to mess her up more, have her completely undone on his bed, the couch, hell, the floor.

“Rebel, if you don’t stop looking at me like that, we’re not getting our tea,” Ruby warned with a smirk.

He grinned as he ran his hands through his hair. “I think we should probably pull ourselves together, unless you want to go to work with your hair looking like my hands had spent some time in it.”

Giggling, Ruby took his hand, pulling him a few yards away and into the guest bathroom. It was through a door in the dining area of the open-plan space of the first floor.

In the bathroom, Rebel pulled out the hair tie he always kept in his cut pocket.So much for the no man bun look.Standing next to each other, he pretended he was just pulling his hair back, when really, he was staring at her out of the corner of his eye. He knew she was doing the same thing, sneaking glances at him, as she leaned forward a bit and began to fix her lip gloss.

Once he was done with his hair, and she started fixing her own, he crossed his arms over his chest and allowed himself to take in every one of her curves. His wolf was doing all the snarling and growling that he wanted to do at the visual.

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