CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

She didn’t care if he talked back, really, as long as he didn’t make her quit trying to satiate her tactile urges. She didn’t need much. Just the sensation of her fingertips kneading into pliant flesh and the friction of his jeans against her inner thighs was sending her to a headspace where even the brush of lips across her shoulder could set her off.

“So easy to stimulate,” he murmured, darting his tongue into the lobe of her ear as his hips rocked back and forth, abrading the tender skin of her thigh.

“Get out of my brain.” She tipped her head back for him, hoping that he’d get the hint—hoping that he was a little bit psychic so that he knew that she wanted him to kiss her neck where she was sensitive.

He slipped a hand up her T-shirt and rested the palm over a breast, twisting and pressing, stimulating her nipple to an aching peak as he moved his mouth downward.

Yes. There.

He kissed the tender underside of her chin, murmuring about her scent and how she smelled like life, and his breath made the fine hairs on her jaw stand on end.

She unwrapped her legs from around his and gave his other hand room to explore.

He unknotted the towel at his waist, and tugged the wet fabric away in one hard yank, leaving her bottom exposed completely, and his hand crept downward.

She was having a hard time keeping up. Soren’s mouth—his sinful mouth—tantalized with expert thrusts of his tongue, calculated nips of his fangs, and busses of his lips over her mouth and chin. He kissed her breathless all the while plucking at her nipple and stealthily massaging her upper thighs.

She was arching up for him, ready to receive him like a professional whose only job was to spread her legs, and he wasn’t even undressed. She didn’t usually lose her composure so quickly. Normally, she was bored long before her partners had even gotten started.

“You need to take off your clothes,” she said on the tail end of a gasp. Soren scored the flesh between her neck and shoulder with his teeth, and she knew if she were to look down, she’d probably see blood there. But then he dragged his tongue over the sting, and her sex throbbed as warm prickles of pleasure coasted over her skin and pooled at her core.

He shifted to the other side of her neck and bit there, too, and licked again.

Not a fluke. She gasped as her body bowed off the bed, and scratched at anything she could reach on him. She needed to get the extra energy out somehow, some way.

“Take off your clothes,” she demanded, and he chuckled before biting her again. This time, on her breast to the left of her heart. He left perfect bloody crescents that looked to have come from someone far more beast than man, but his tongue was human enough.

His stare was direct and full of heat as he stared up at her, swirling his tongue over the mark he’d made, tickling and tantalizing.

Driving her crazy with urgency.

“Soren—”

He clucked his tongue and shook his head before proceeding farther downward. “Patience, draga mea.” He laid delicate kisses around her belly button, pausing briefly to dip the tip of his tongue into the indentation of her navel, before kissing downward. Pressing his hands against her stomach, he kneaded and groaned quietly as his mouth met her inner thigh.

She parted her legs, desperate.

Slowly, he moved his hands down and bracketed her sex with his thumbs. “Mmm. Are you the shy, prudish type, my pet? Or will you let me describe to you the pleasure I’m getting?”

Describe it to me?

She’d been lucky in the past if she could even get a man to stay down there long enough to get her wet. She obviously had a habit of picking poorly. “Perhaps my criteria has been wrong all along,” she whispered as she pulled her shirt over her head.

“What criteria?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

“If you’re talking about the people you’ve let touch you, then perhaps you’re right. I don’t want to know who’s touched you. My body count is already too high.”

She laughed and pushed his face down to her flesh yet again. “You’re funny when you try to be.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. Mmm.” He dragged his thumb along her seam and gently probed her entrance. He dipped the tip into her wetness and spread it along her lips before sliding it into his mouth. “Like buttering toast before a bite.”

She should have been appalled, but instead, she laughed again and spread her legs farther. Soren settled comfortably into the V of her legs and dipped his head low, dragging his tongue in kitten-light lines up her cleft. Tantalizing without providing too much stimulation. He was obviously in no hurry, but if he kept on at the rate he was, she would have to demand that he accelerate his strategy.

“This part’s my favorite,” he murmured, putting his lips against her button and moving his face side to side.

She sucked in a startled breath. Her belly tightened and heart rate soared as the scruff under his lip rasped beneath her hood. “Oh God.”

“Fun little toy, yes?” He sucked the nub into his mouth as though it were no more intimidating than a chocolate nib, and then worked his tongue against the underside, kneading her inner thighs all the while.

“Damn.” She shoved her fingers into his thick hair and held on tight. She didn’t want to steer him. Gods, he didn’t need help with that, but she needed to hold onto something. And she needed to express her pleasure in some way other than mewls and moans. She wasn’t usually a noisemaker.

He flattened his tongue and licked her sex upward, catching her clit on the way up and the hole on the way down. He worked a finger into her, and then another.

Her grip on his hair tightened, and body constricted liked an overstretched guitar string. She worried that with one forceful strum, she’d snap.

But maybe that was all right.

His chuckles drew her out of her head enough to notice that she was nearly suffocating him with her thighs. She loosed her clamp on his head.

He shoved a third finger into her and stretched her, all the while drawing her clit between his teeth, tapping his tongue against the underside like knocking on a door that was on fire.

She was on fire. Every part of her burned for him, from her scalp down to her curling toes.

“Damn.” She pushed up onto her elbows and tugged him beneath his armpits, but he wouldn’t budge. She wanted his clothes off and that fine Bear body on top of hers. She wanted to see the cock he’d been unsubtly taunting her with for days—wanted his male part in her hands so she could control, in some small way, the animal that had rampaged unapologetically into her life.

Or at least pretend that she was capable of handling him.

He withdrew his fingers from her briefly, licking along the sides of each. There was laughter in his eyes as he stared up her body at her. “I said before that I wasn’t much for biting, but you need more bites,” he said. “More marks from your Bear.”

“I need you inside me.”

He tutted and dipped his head low once again. “You’ll get what I give you. So impatient.”

“But— Fuck.”

There was nothing quite like the mashing of a clit by a calloused thumb to shut a woman up, except maybe having that pulsating little button pressed while having her sheath invaded by rough fingers. She was too full to breathe, much less talk.

“When I’m in you,” he said, kissing the top of her mound as he worked his fingers in and out of her. “You’ll appreciate the precaution. You can’t go straight from training wheels to a ten-speed. You’ve got to grow into your new vehicle. Takes effort to ride me.”

“Stop talking and back up your words.”

Pulling his hair wasn’t enough. She reached for her own, grabbing at her crown from the roots and welcoming the stinging distraction from the breaching down below. Her body was twisting and moving reflexively away from his probing hand and his terrible tongue, even as she reached for that starburst of pleasure. She wanted that and refused to run away from the sensation in spite of who the gift-giver was.

“So pretty,” he murmured, circling the pad of a finger against a sensitive patch of muscle inside her that made her eyes start watering and her mouth open wide in wordless pleasure. “I could sit and look at you for hours, and you’ll let me, won’t you?”

She hadn’t thought he really wanted an answer, but he stopped kissing her—stopped fucking her with his hand, and she was going to kill him.

“What?” she demanded.

“You’ll let me stare at you and adore you. No cheeky disparagements.”

“Soren…” She scooted downward, grinding on his still hand, and threw her head back at the flick of his thumb against the underside of her clit.

“Simple answer. Yes or no.”

“If I say no, you’ll leave me on edge?”

Another tut. “Why would you say no to me? I thought we’d moved past that.”

“No is natural.”

“And sometimes, yes is, too.” He stroked lovingly down her slit, and as his fingertips skimmed over the hole, she tried to take him inside, but he was far too clever.

Damn him.

“Ugh! Yes,” she said breathily, seriously contemplating pitching a fit. She’d never felt so wrung out before, and hated that he had such an effect on her. “Yes, damn it. You can look, and I won’t say anything.” There were probably odder things, as far as Bears went.

“You won’t roll your eyes or insult me?”

“No.”

“You’ll accept my attentions with grace?”

“Okay, now you’re asking for too much.”

Right answer, wrong answer, didn’t matter. Soren was obviously eager to get back to his work. He latched his mouth over the top of her sex and worked his fingers back into her. The suction made her back bow again. It made her belly ache with tension held too long. His fingers, thrusting in and out, tapping her G-spot and stuffing her for his visual pleasure, made the breathing stop. Too full. Too strung out.

Let go.

Fighting him was pointless. Holding onto an orgasm on the chance that he’d maybe put his cock into her was pointless. She was going to take what he was offering right then and worry about selfishness some other time.

“That’s right, pet,” he murmured around her clit. “Open up for me. Show me how wet you can get. All over my fingers. You want this, hmm?”

“Yes.” Being so breathless, she could barely get the word out, but she did. She didn’t want him to stop again—not when she was so close.

“So take it,” he said, spreading his fingers, opening her more. He pounded the tip of his tongue against her, slid his thumb into the entrance of her unexplored hole, and that got her engine revving even harder.

Too much. Just right. Perfect.

“Damn.” Pleasure undulated through her body, like waves running opposite toward two different shores, starting where his mouth and fingers were and spreading up to her paralyzed lungs and blazing cheeks, and down past the thighs clamping his head again, and the toes that wouldn’t stop curling.

He slipped his fingers out of her one by one, pulling the fullness away in increments while still flicking his tongue gently against her heat.

Finally, with one more kiss, he pulled away, wearing a smug smile as he did.

She didn’t dare complain. She just closed her eyes and basked in the afterglow of the pleasure, enjoying the retreating warmth and the relaxed state of her muscles.

Chuckling, he padded away from the bed. She heard water running in the bathroom a few seconds later. “I thought you were going to evaporate on me for a while there,” he said.

She sighed. “I worried I wouldn’t hold myself together, either. I don’t know what it is about you. When you touch me, I don’t experience the same compulsion I have in the past to pull away. I don’t want to repel you or to go into my natural defense mode. I wonder why that is.”

“It wouldn’t make sense for you to have a mate who can’t touch you, draga mea.”

Of course, this would be so simple for him.

He turned the water off. A moment later, Marcella could sense him looming over her, so she opened her eyes.

“I don’t have a mate,” she said. “Perhaps you have one.”

“And that mate is you, which means that I’m your mate. Simple algebra. If A equals B, then B must equal A.”

“Mate implies permanency.”

“And?”

“And I—”

“If you’re going to be doomed to have me as a partner,” he interjected, scrubbing a hand down his chin, “you may as well get some fringe benefits out of the ordeal, hmm?”

She rolled her eyes, earning another tut from him.

“You should be sweet to me,” he said. “I’ve got something you want.”

“I can get cock anywhere.”

“Yes, but you want my cock. No use denying that you want to take your Bear for a ride. It’s okay if you do. I think the Shrews would be more surprised if you didn’t. After all, they don’t have the greatest track record of avoiding their partners.”

“Go away, you brute,” she muttered. There wasn’t any heat behind her words. She was all out of fight. He’d chased her resistance away, not with a roar and claws, but with his tongue and fingers.

“No. I will spend the rest of my life serving you.” He fixed the covers over her and snuggled next to her, draping his arm over her too-sated-to-move body. “Are you hungry?”

She sighed. “Maybe a little.”

“Probably will be a lot more in an hour or so.”

“Are you offering to fetch me dinner and serve it to me in bed?”

“Mmm. That sounds nice. I could watch you lounge naked and press delicious morsels into your mouth.”

“Let’s make that happen.”

“Alas.” He fastened his hand onto her right breast and kneaded while staring at the ceiling with contemplation.

All she could do was shake her head. She’d given up on trying to predict Soren’s actions and making him stop was against her best interests. She didn’t mind the fondling. The touch actually felt lovely.

“We should head out and track down leads, maybe,” she said dourly.

“I was thinking that I should head out and track down leads.”

“My case.”

“My mate.”

“I don’t want to argue with you.”

“So, let’s compromise.” He nestled his face against her hair and slung one of his incredibly heavy legs over her thighs.

She was absolutely pinned. Ensconced in his warmth and being petted by him wasn’t exactly a place to be, even if she did have things she needed to be doing.

“You’re tired, and not only from the orgasm. I don’t think that’s worth arguing about.”

She pressed her lips tightly together and motioned for him to go on. She was wiped out. If she had to do any tasks that required even the smallest amount of magic, she’d be fucked again, and not in a good way. “What’s your proffered compromise?”

“We’ll go out for an hour or two. See if Pamela’s working and see if we can finagle any more information out of her, now that we know better what we’re dealing with.”

“She might be able to lure Wes here for us.” Marcella recounted the discussion she’d had at the office with the peppy clerk and also about how Kim had shown up at the end.

He grunted. “Huh. Odd that Kim was there.”

“I want to know why she was there. She can’t possibly be that hard up for money, and even if she were, wouldn’t she look for any other opportunity? She saw what happened to her mother.”

“We don’t know for sure why she was there. Also, for all we know, Pamela’s been keeping the worst of the Bear shit from her.”

“Damn. I hadn’t considered that.” She didn’t like that possibility any more than Kim possibly knowing what was happening, but choosing to be involved anyway. If one way, she was a hapless fool who needed babysitting. If the other, she was someone who also needed to be carefully monitored.

“I trust Pamela,” Marcella murmured. “Nothing about her negatively hits my senses.”

Soren grunted. “I didn’t read anything suspicious about her, either. I didn’t smell the hormonal spike on her that I usually catch when people are being deceptive.”

“But Kim? What’d you think of her?”

“I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t paying as much attention to her as I should have. I wrote her off as a bit player in the scheme of things. Usually, children are.”

“But she’s an adult.” Marcella traced the outline of the bear tattoo on the back of his wrist.

“Yes, I suppose she could be trouble.”

“We can’t watch her and deal with everything else at the same time.”

“We don’t have a choice.” He lifted her hand for a kiss, and that simple act started a blush that spread all the way down to her thighs. “We’re not going to split up and do that divide and conquer shit that always gets the Shrews into trouble.”

“How would you know what kind of trouble they get into? Their men don’t talk, and I doubt they include any of that information in their final reports.”

“Their men have a way of communicating facts without being specific. It’s easy enough to extrapolate what sorts of frustrations the supposedly professional investigators they’re tailing find themselves in.” He kissed his way up her arm, lingering at the tender inside of her bicep and rolling his verdant gaze up to her. “I’m not going to let you get into trouble, in spite of the fact that you’re itching for some.”

“I’m only trying to show that I can hold my own.”

“Do that by showing up for work with a case you can close and with all your body parts intact. Hmm?”

She sighed. “Fine. I suppose that’s reasonable enough.”

“Get dressed.” He snuck a kiss onto her breast and then sat up. “You can have another one of those chicken sandwiches, and we can see what Pamela can do to further the demise of a certain mad scientist.”

“And by demise, you mean capture and detain, yes?”

His nod came slowly. “Yes. That.”

Again, she sighed. She had no idea what she was getting into with him but suspected she couldn’t back away from the partnership even if she wanted to.

And she didn’t want to.