Mine to Possess

Surprised by her shyness with him-no matter their years apart, they had never been strangers-he ran his lips along her jaw and nuzzled gently into her neck. Her hand rose from his shoulder to push into his hair. It was tempting to take his other hand off the back of her chair and stroke it down to her breasts, but he kept it where it was, his grip white-knuckled. Slow. This had to be a seduction not of the body alone but of the mind, too. He’d lost Tally once. Damn if she was ever leaving him again.

“Why not?” he whispered against her neck, flicking out his tongue to taste the lush femininity of her skin.

She jerked but then, to his shock, nipped at his ear with sharp little human teeth. He’d never before had to worry about spilling in his jeans. “I haven’t forgotten the question.” But he had realized that Tally was going to drive him insane in bed. God, he couldn’t wait.

“It’s just so…well, the whole thing seems very embarrassing and undignified.”

It was the last thing he’d expected to hear. The leopard wasn’t quite sure how to react. “Well, now,” he said after getting his voice back, “that’s a challenge if ever I heard one.”

Her hand clenched in his hair. “I didn’t mean it to be.” She sounded very young and very honest.

Unexpectedly, he felt the same way. “How about you let me? Once?” Right then, he could’ve been a teenager trying to talk his date into the backseat. But only if that date had been Tally-he’d never flirted this way with any other. Neither had she. He knew that in his gut.

“Clay.” Her face was hot against his cheek, the tendons of her neck stretched taut. “We aren’t going there. I told you.”

He began to kiss his way up her neck. “Just once,” he said, pressing a kiss below the curve of her ear and drinking in her responsive shiver. “You can even set a time limit.”

“Stop it.” But she made no effort to halt him as he nibbled his way along her jaw and back up to her mouth. “We aren’t going to sleep together.”

“Fine, we can do it with you on the kitchen table,” he murmured, drowning in the rapid beat of her pulse. It echoed the thunder of his own. “Or maybe on the cushions with you on your hands and knees. I like that one.”

She moaned and the kiss this time was open and hot and wet. When they broke apart, her eyes were huge, her lips bruised. “No.”

He gave in to the leopard’s urge to bare his teeth. “Why not? We’re good together.” And she sure as hell wasn’t going to be touching any other men. A growl built up in his throat.

“You’re my friend.” She scowled. “Sex will mess that up.”

He looked at that stubborn mouth, those expressive eyes, and suddenly understood what she couldn’t say. Sex had ruined her childhood, scarred her so badly that she’d used it as a weapon to hurt herself. For her it was nothing good, nothing that could be allowed into this relationship.

Because, he understood at last, this relationship was important.

His beast calmed. It wasn’t the calm of surrender but that of a predator sizing up his prey. “I’m a healthy adult male,” he began.

“And you have needs.” All softness leaked out of her face. “Spare me the lecture-if I don’t give it to you, you’ll get it from somewhere else. Do I have it right?”

CHAPTER 21

Clay decided it would be impolitic to laugh. If she’d been a leopard, she’d have been showing him her claws about now. “Not quite.”

“What, there’s been a new development?” she snorted. “Men are all the same.”

“As a healthy adult changeling male,” he continued, ignoring her glare, “touch is part of my life. I won’t turn into a raving lunatic if I don’t get it-living without a pack for so many years taught me how to go without the kind of touch most of DarkRiver takes for granted.”

She continued to watch him, eyes narrowed.

“But,” he said, “it’s important to me.” He was known as a loner but that had never meant exclusion. Not in DarkRiver. “Same as when I was a kid.”

She folded her arms. “You just said you got used to not having it so much when you were young.”

“No, I said I got used to living without the kind of touch the pack takes for granted,” he corrected. “I had another kind of touch to keep me sane. I had you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, arms falling to her sides.

But he could see she did remember. All those times when she’d crawled into his lap, neither of them saying a word as he held her and they watched the sun set over the broken edges of the city. All those hugs she’d given him without guile. All those days she’d held his hand as he led her safely through the junkyard.

“That was friendship.” Her eyes filled with memory. “You were my best friend.”

“I still am.” He always had been, in spite of what he might’ve said in anger.

“So, why…?”

“Is that all you want? That we be friends?”

A hesitation, then she nodded. “Friends.” Talin needed this relationship to be something pure, unsullied by lust and the evil it spawned.

“And if I need the touch of a friend from you, will you give it to me?”