Page 39 of Hungry Like the Wolf

She would listen to him read a romance. She would listen to him read sermons. Hell, she would listen to him read the phone book if it would relieve him of that panicked look he’d been wearing since finding her at the table.

“Fine by me,” she replied, taking a sip of the tea.

“Great. Now, mind you, I got no clue what this one is about. So we’re gonna be on the ride together.”

“Read on, oh fearless leader,” she said, which earned her a crooked smile. Her stomach dropped a little, the way it did when you drove too fast over the crest of a hill.

“Okay. Here we go.” He sat on the edge of the bed, one knee resting on the mattress. “Heart in a Hurricane by Cressida Buchanan.”

Robbie began reading. Nadja wasn’t paying much attention to the words, but he really did have a lovely voice. Warm and strong and full of character. She could tell he was doing the voices in the dialogue, even if she wasn’t tracking the conversations themselves.

But slowly, her senses began to wake up, which was odd. The air smelled different. The room felt different. She kept her eyes closed but harnessed her focus on what Robbie was saying, forcing herself to pay attention.

Briar pounded on Rafe’s back as he climbed the circling stairs that led to the top of the tower. “Put me down, you brute,” she shrieked, kicking her legs and struggling.

A heavy hand landed on her backside with a smack. “Quit kicking like that or we’ll both fall to our deaths.”

“You’re out of your mind if you think I’ll lie with you, Rafe MacCrae. You’re a beast.”

“Aye,” he replied. “But this beast is your husband now. And you will.”

Her eyes were cracked, watching Robbie. He canted his head on his neck back and forth before rolling his shoulders back. He’d put on a clean T-shirt but hadn’t had time to shower yet in his frenzy to take care of her. She smelled grease from a fryer, sweat, pine, his deodorant, and something else that she couldn’t quite place. Something sweet.

The slam of the heavy wooden door echoed through the chamber, punctuated by the metallic finality of the bolt sliding into place. Briar stood before this man, a giant among mortals, her husband as of thirty minutes prior, and tried to catch her breath. He was a mountain of tan muscle, on display beneath the hem of his plaid and in the vee of his untied linen shirt.

“I don’t—” she began, but then he was there, reaching behind her and clasping the backs of her thighs, hoisting her into the air as if she weighed nothing and pressing her back against the door. She had no choice but to brace her hands against the strength of his shoulders, which tensed and shifted beneath her palms like a horse beneath her saddle. She shivered.

“Ye didnae hate me so much when we were young, when I was a stable boy and ye’d sneak out to meet me in the hay loft.” He ran his nose up the column of her neck, then did the same with his tongue, licking a long stripe from her shoulder to her earlobe, which he sucked wickedly into his mouth.

“I didn’t—” she said, searching for an argument and coming up short. Because she had snuck out to the hayloft to steal kisses from Rafe, then a stable boy working for her father. He’d been sweet and kind and soft, nothing like the hardened soldier who held her in the air as if she were a featherbed. This Rafe had seen war. He’d killed men. She’d seen him do it, in fact, just this morning when he laid siege to her uncle’s keep.

Rafe sucked hard at the corner of her jaw, and Briar gasped.

Robbie shifted on the bed, and Nadja couldn’t help but look down, to see the growing bulge at the front of his jeans. She inhaled deeply, that rich, sweet scent so much thicker now.

Nadja sucked in breath after breath, ignoring everything she knew about going slow. She once read an article in school about how people who had nearly died of thirst had to be given water in doses as they recover or they would literally drink themselves to death. The irony had always struck her, to go from nearly dying of a lack of water to actually dying from too much of it.

But it didn’t feel ironic now. It felt too real, too possible, as she filled her lungs to the brim over and over as Robbie read words like “nip” and “suck” and “grind,” his voice getting ever so slightly huskier and deep, the hardness in his jeans fully obvious now.

She felt a hint of strength return—not actual strength, but the suggestion of it—and, like a record scratch, was yanked out of her wandering thoughts and squarely back into her body, which was beginning to siphon Robbie’s lust right out of the air without her even realizing it. Without his permission.

“Let’s save it,” she nearly shouted.

“What?” Robbie replied, shaking himself.

“It’s getting really exciting, don’t you think? And I—I worry I won’t be able to sleep if I get all keyed up from so much excitement.”

More like fatal horniness, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. How could she?

“You’re right,” he said, dog-earing the page of the book before closing it. “The oldies don’t normally get that spicy so quick.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, closing her eyes so that she couldn’t see him, couldn’t be tempted by the way the worn cotton of his shirt stretched over his shoulders, or the way the tendons in his throat worked as he talked, or that godsdamned bulge.

“You tired?” he said, placing his palm on her forehead again and frowning.

“Yeah. But thank you for reading to me,” she said. “It was really nice.”

Nice. And hell was just a sauna. But the reading had been nice. The timbre of his voice and the care that went into the gesture. But if Rafe MacCrae did one more thing to prim Lady Briar, Nadja’s self-control was going to snap and she was going to attack Robbie like a spider monkey on a branch.