Page 143 of Bought for Blood

“May I?” he says.

He has asked every night since we came home. Six nights, six times, and every single time he does it the way he did it the first night, as though he has no idea what the answer will be.

And I let him ask. Every night. I’m not going to be the one who makes it ordinary.

“Yes.”

He undresses me slowly, and I return the favor. We take our time. We have all night, and nobody is coming to take anything from either of us. When he finally lays me down, I’m shaking, and it’s not fear.

He kisses my throat first. Just his mouth, a long while, until I’m shaking again and my hands are fisted in his hair.

“Bastien.”

“Yes.”

“Now.”

His fangs go in, and heat spreads from the punctures down through every part of me.

There’s no pain. When I think about it, there never has been with him. But every other time, I held something back. Some part of me stayed braced. That’s what hurt. Now I don’t hold anything back. He feels the difference within the first swallow.He groans against my throat, and his arm comes under my back to hold me up into his mouth.

The pleasure moves through me with every draw, deeper each time. I can feel his body coming back to life against mine, the tremor going out of his hands, warmth coming up under his skin where there was cold. In that place, feeding meant being emptied. This is different. I’m giving it, and I can feel exactly what that does to him.

My wolf rises through the middle of me and doesn’t fight anything at all.

Mate,she says.

I know,I tell her.We got there.

He seals the wound with his tongue and lifts his head. His eyes have the light back in them, and there’s color in his face I haven’t seen since before the quarry.

“Thank you,” he says, and his voice isn’t steady.

“You’re welcome.” Mine isn’t either. “You’re going to do that every night until I say otherwise.”

“Am I?”

“You rationed yourself for too long. We have to make up for lost time.”

He laughs, and his forehead comes down on my shoulder, and then neither of us sleeps for a long time, and it isn’t the bite keeping us awake.

Afterward, lying across his chest with his hand moving in my hair, I tell him.

“Grace is having a baby.”

His hand stops. “I know,” he says.

I lift my head to look at him. He’s looking at the ceiling and not seeing any of it.

“In the summer. You’re going to be… I don’t know what you’re going to be. Whatever you call the man who belongs to the aunt.”

“Nothing,” he says. “I’ll be nothing to it.”

“You’ll be the man with the house it gets lost in every summer. The one with the clocks, and the pony—you’ll have to buy a pony—and the library it hides in when its mother says it’s time to leave.” I rest my chin on his chest. “You’re about to have a family, Bastien. Nobody planned it. It’s coming anyway.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. His hand starts moving in my hair again.

“Playrooms on the garden side,” he says at last, mostly to himself. “The light’s better.”