CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Does this feel like a fucking obligation to you?”
No.
It felt like… well, it felt like… Derek, huge and hard, pressing into my belly button.
I didn't know if by crowding me against the counter he was trying to scare me, but if so, it was backfiring. Because his nearness was having the opposite effect. I felt hot all over, my belly swirling with a kind of desire I’d scarcely felt before.
“No,” I admitted softly. “It feels like you want to,” I paused, my face warming at what was about to come out of my mouth, “it feels like you want to f-fuck me.”
Derek nearly choked on his own spit as I stumbled over the word, and he yanked himself away from me. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, digging the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.
I swallowed the apology that instinctively bubbled up my throat at causing him any kind of distress. Because beneath the surface embarrassment I was feeling, longing still buzzed under my skin.
“Am I right?” I asked carefully when he didn’t say anything else. “Is… is that what you want?”
Derek slowly dragged his hands away from his face, shifting to face me. His green eyes were bright with unnamed emotion. “I want to do more than just…” he trailed off, his jaw clenching, “fuck you,” he spat. “I want to taste your skin, run my hands over every inch of you. I want to be so fucking entangled in you that neither of us know where one ends and the other begins.”
My mouth was dry, his declaration stoking the fire burning at the bottom of my belly. But alongside the excitement, confusion still lingered.
I frowned. “Then why…?”
Why do you strive to keep me at a distance? Why do you tense whenever I kiss you? Why do you continuously push me away?
I pressed my lips together, unable to force any of the questions out. They must have been written clearly enough on my face, though, because Derek sighed.
“I just… I can’t,” he claimed.
Judging by the… enormity of what had been pressing into my stomach a minute ago, it wasn’t a physical issue that was stopping him. Which meant it was a mental block. I wondered (worried) if I had inadvertently done something to cause it.
I chewed anxiously on my bottom lip. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
Derek scoffed, the noise one of blatant disbelief. “Of course not. It’s just the opposite. You’re so damn… sweet-tempered. So nice, so good.” He paused, swallowing. “Too good for someone like me,” he muttered before adding more loudly, “If I let myself have you the way that I want… I don’t think I could ever let you walk away.”
If Derek thought that explanation cleared up my confusion, he was wrong. It only compounded it. “But Derek… I don’t want to walk away,” I pointed out sensibly.
“Maybe not right now you don’t, but one day… one day, you might.”
Oh.
And just like that, I understood the source of his mental anguish. He was afraid that if I remembered my life before washing up on his land, my life before him, that I would regret… giving myself to him.
I straightened my spine. “I won’t,” I denied, taking care to keep my voice firm, hoping he could hear the sincerity in it.
Derek stiffened, the declaration giving him pause, but he shook his head a moment later. “You can’t promise that,” he argued. “You don't know what or who” – his mouth twisted on the word – “you may have left behind when you lost your memory. Hell, you don’t even know your own name.”
I frowned. “My name is Wisp.”
Derek snorted derisively, refusing to look at me. “Your real name,” he clarified.
“Wisp is my real name, and my feelings… they’re real, too.” Feeling brave, I pushed off the counter and took a step forward. “It’s not like we have to have sex,” I pointed out, biting my lip. “I just want to be close to you.” I remembered how three nights ago he had promised to kiss me every day for as long as I wanted, and I had half a mind to call him a liar. “I thought that was what you wanted, too.”
Derek winced. “It was. It is,” he said, sounding more like he was confessing to murder than wanting to be near me.
“Then… then maybe we should experiment a little?” I suggested, inching closer to him. “See what you can handle?”
“Wisp,” he warned, but he made no move to stop me as I moved closer still.
“How about this?” I asked quietly before using his shoulders to balance on the tip of my toes and press a kiss to the underside of his jaw. “Is that okay?”
Derek swallowed, and my eyes were immediately attracted to his bobbing Adam’s apple.
“And this?” I asked before darting forward and kissing him there, too.
Derek sucked in a breath. “Wisp,” he said again, his voice so raw it sounded like he’d just gargled rocks.
It was proof of my effect on him, and it caused a heady sort of satisfaction to roll over me. It also injected me with enough courage to take things further. I used my grip on his shoulders to pull myself up until my eyes, my nose, my mouth were aligned with his.
“This?” I whispered, the word little more than a puff of breath against his lips before I was moving forward, closing the distance between us until my mouth was fused with his.
For a prolonged moment, Derek stayed perfectly still.
Thinking I had pushed him too far, remorse crept up my spine, and I was about to pull away.
But then, suddenly, and all at once, Derek was upon me.
His hands clutched at my waist at the same time his mouth began moving against mine. He sucked on my bottom lip, nipping at it, before invading my mouth with his tongue. His movements were hasty, impulsive – frenzied, even, in their intensity.
I gasped into his mouth when he used his grip on my waist to lift me and sit me up on the countertop, quickly stepping between my spread legs and pressing himself against me right there.
All the while, he never stopped kissing me.
Feeling dizzy, I struggled to match his pace – his fervor – but it was all I could do to hold on, clutching at the front of his shirt with the same urgency that his fingers dug into my waist.
We were both breathing hard by the time he finally pulled away.
“Too much?” I asked, struggling to catch my breath as I rested my forehead against his.
Derek groaned, his fingers twitching against my skin. “Not enough. It’s never fucking enough.”
Then he shocked me by pulling me forward and lifting me off the counter. Hands gripping the sensitive area where my legs met my butt, he carried me over to the couch.
He set me down carefully, urging me to lie down as he hovered over me, his knees between my thighs.
“What-?” I asked, but I couldn’t finish the question (whatever it was going to be – I had no idea), because Derek’s mouth was on mine again, attempting to devour me whole.
A second later, he pulled away just enough to tug at the bottom of my shirt. “I need to see you, feel you. Please.”
It didn’t even occur to me to say “no”.
Nodding dumbly, I raised my torso up off the couch enough that he was able to pull my shirt off over my head. He threw it to the floor, where it rested in a crumpled heap, forgotten as soon as it left his hands.
And then Derek stared.
His gaze was so intense that it left a searing trail on my skin in its wake. Feeling self-conscious under the intensity of his perusal, I fought the urge to cover myself with my hands.
Almost like he knew, Derek’s hands came to rest loosely around my wrists. Dipping his head, he brushed his nose along my jaw. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered into my ear.
I flushed at the compliment, an involuntary smile pulling at my mouth. “So are you,” I said.
Derek snorted, releasing my wrists and bringing his hands to my waist. He swept them up and down my sides, and my breath hitched when his thumb brushed over my belly button.
“Ridiculous, too,” he muttered before (without any warning whatsoever) he attacked my neck. His mouth sucked eagerly at my skin before sliding down, lips and tongue caressing my clavicle. He buried his nose into the hollow there, drawing in a deep breath.
Then he slinked down further still, his mouth skimming the swell of my breasts until his chin was pushing against the silk of my bra.
It was there that he paused, pressing his ear flat against my chest. “Your heart is beating so fast,” he mumbled.
I was still cognizant enough to realize what a strange statement that was to make. “You can hear my heart?”
Derek nodded against me, his overgrown stubble brushing against my skin. I gasped at the sensation. “What?” I rasped, attempting to ground myself instead of allowing the sudden rush of pleasure to pull me under. “Is that, like, a shifter thing?”
A lazy smirk pulled at Derek’s mouth from where he still rested against me, and I knew I must have sounded as out of it as I felt.
“In a way. For most shifters, the characteristics of their animal forms tend to leak over into their human ones. For me, that means heightened strength, and enhanced hearing and sense of smell.” He buried his nose into my skin. “Fuck, you smell so good.”
I swallowed. “I do?”
He nodded. “Especially here,” he said, dragging his nose up to the juncture of my neck and shoulder. He paused, taking a breath. “And here…” he muttered, moving in the opposite direction this time, down past the swell of my breasts, my belly button, until he had reached the spot where my bare skin met the cottony fabric of my shorts. Derek pressed a kiss to my exposed hip bone before he began lapping at my skin with his tongue.
His scruff grazed the sensitive skin of my stomach, and I was half-convinced I was going to end up with beard burn by the end of the afternoon.
But I didn’t care.
Why would I when I was already on fire? The embers that had been burning at the bottom of my belly had grown, magnifying into a raging inferno of pure want.
“Derek,” I keened, barely recognizing my voice. My fingers had buried themselves into his hair of their own accord, clutching desperately at his roots.
Derek’s fingers, on the other hand, were curled around the elastic of my shorts, not tugging them down, but there – teasing.
I lifted my hips off the couch. “Please,” I begged, hardly knowing what I was asking for, but knowing that to get it, the shorts would have to go.
Derek’s green eyes flickered up to meet mine, something like uncertainty shining in them.
I don't know what he saw reflected back at him, but whatever it was, it caused them to darken with desire, with decision.
His fingers tightened around my shorts.
Brrring. Brrring.
We both stiffened in surprise, shock infiltrating the haze of passion blanketing logical thought.
I blinked, my head fighting to clear itself as I turned towards the source of the noise.
The phone was ringing.
But… Derek’s phone never rings, a confused voice pointed out.
It was true.
In all the time that I’d been living with him, Derek’s phone hadn’t rung once. Sometime during that first week, I’d started to wonder if it was just a prop and had even held the receiver to my ear to check if it was connected.
To my surprise, there had been a dial tone.
But that surprise had nothing on the shock I was feeling now.
Brrring. Brrring.
Derek’s phone never rings, the voice repeated incredulously.
It had been true.
Until now.