by Selena Scott
“There’s actually a meeting I really wanted to go to. I’m not ditching you, I swear. You could actually come with me if you wanted.”
He felt fuzzy and worn out and syrupy. “A meeting? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Seth,” she laughed. “It’s 8:45 pm. The meeting’s at nine at that event space over by all those coffee shops.”
“It’s only 8:45?” He hauled himself up and squinted across the room at the clock. “How it that even possible?”
“Dinner was at six, we stayed for, like, an hour, and then we came back here and fucked each other’s brains out for an hour and a half. That’s how that’s possible. If the fucking part had lasted any longer, I think I would have foregone the meeting, but as it is, I think I can make both things happen.”
“Meeting?” he asked again, just as blearily as the first time. Pleasure and heat still thrummed through his veins. It was a Friday night. He simply couldn’t make it make sense that she was leaving bed to attend a meeting.
She slid her bra on and cocked her head to look at him. “I would invite you to join again, but something tells me you’ll be better off with a few hours rest.”
“You definitely wore me out.” His brain played a high-speed replay of the events of the last hour and he couldn’t help but press a hand over his skipping heart. He thought for a second. “If you leave me here and I get an hour or two of a nap, you could come back and wear me out again.”
She grinned. “I like the sound of that. Very much. Consider it a date.” She leaned across the bed and kissed him soundly. “Now, where the hell are my clothes?”
“Your dress is in the hall. I’ll grab it.” He hauled his naked ass out of bed. “What was the meeting again?”
“Citizens Taking Action Against Rogue and Unregistered Shifters. I guess they call it CTAARUS.”
Everything within Seth froze solid. His blood was like a long line of icicles racing through the tunnels of his veins. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t even let his foot drop back down onto the floor of his hallway. Her dress was pooled on the ground in a shaft of moonlight, looking like a puddle of dark black blood. He stared unseeingly down at it.
The woman he’d just slept with was about to attend a meeting for the group of people who literally tried to kill him just a few nights ago. If they knew who and what he was, they would shoot him in his sleep, animal form or not.
Sarah was going there.
Sarah.
He couldn’t make it make sense in his head.
“What?” he asked hoarsely, mechanically picking up her dress and padding back into the bedroom. “What did you say?”
“Yeah. I heard them the other night. The full moon. I heard them up in the hills, the gunshots. And then I see on the news that a mountain lion has been shot and killed and basically dragged through town the other morning?”
“I heard that, too.” His heart beat like a mallet against rock. He felt faint.
“Well, I refuse to be taken by surprise like that again. I figure that it’s best if I’m on the inside. The meeting is open to the public. We need to know what those maniacs are planning for the next full moon.”
The meaning of her words sifted down onto Seth like bits of hot sand against his cold skin. He knew that he’d feel relief at some point at what she was saying, but for now, he was still too shaken up to feel anything but a dull prickling in his fingers and toes as feeling came back. He handed her her dress and sank to the edge of the bed. “Oh. You’re… you’re going to the meeting because you want to fight against those people?”
“Seth, are you kidding me?” She looked like he’d slapped her. “How could you ever think I’d support those psychos?”
He shrugged and cleared his throat. “You never know what someone’s politics are. It… seemed out of character for you to be so anti-shifter but really, who am I to guess how you feel about such a hot button issue?”
He could hear the hollow tone to his voice but he couldn’t alter it.
“They shot and killed an innocent animal the other night. That’s bad enough on its own. But what if it had been a shifter? I can’t even talk about the horror of that! They would murder a human being in the name of fear and hatred? I can’t stand by and watch while they pull that shit.”
“You … don’t believe in vigilantism when it comes to taking care of the shifter problem?”
“The shifter problem? Jeez louise, which news channel have you been watching? I don’t have a shifter problem. The only shifter problem I can see is that we’re legally requiring them to register and then locking them up like prisoners because of who they are. That’s the shifter problem. I refuse to stand by while a bunch of men with guns take matters into their own hands and start hunting shifters who, for most part, aren’t hurting anyone. And even the ones that do or have hurt people? They deserve a trial by jury, just like the rest of the human beings in the United States of America. Just like, oh, I don’t know, the Constitution says!”
Seth took a long, deep breath. He’d bypassed warm and moved straight on to hot. He felt as if he might start sweating soon. His heart wasn’t thudding in his chest anymore; rather, it was sort of pattering. He’d never heard someone besides a member of his family defend shifter-kind so fiercely before. And to have it be Sarah? With the taste of her still on his tongue? It was affecting him in a way he couldn’t quite have predicted.
He hadn’t realized that he’d been worried she’d find him disgusting if she discovered him as a shifter. Not that he could ever tell her, but still, if she did somehow figure it out, there was always the risk that she’d find him revolting. Lots of people did. But the way she was talking, it didn’t seem like that would be the case. It seemed like she might not care at all.
“You really believe that?” he asked hoarsely.
“Of course I do!”
“You’re not disgusted or fearful of shifters?”
“Disgusted? God, no. Fearful? Maybe if I met one in the woods, alone, and it was one I didn’t know. But no. One of my closest friends was a shifter. I was with him when he shifted a few times. I’ll never forget it. It was some of the most incredible moments of my life. He was a ferret shifter. Dark red in color. Snuggly.”
Her words rang a bell for Seth. “Simon Lau?” He’d recently read up on Sarah’s Olympic past and her friendship with the outed Olympic shifter had been in the news cycle both when he’d been outed at the Olympics and then later, after he’d died at one of the shifter camps.
She nodded, tugging the dress over her head. “Simon… was one of the best people I’ll ever know. And he deserved a hell of a lot more than he got. I’m never going to stand by and let the government destroy the lives of innocent shifters. And I’m sure as hell not going to stand by and let vigilantes hunt them down. This is a democracy, for heck’s sake!”
She’d tied her hair up into a messy knot, her dress was wrinkled and she was barefoot, her eyes sparking over the shifter injustice in the world.
A cork popped somewhere deep in Seth’s heart and he knew there was no putting it back. A heretofore unfamiliar emotion broke free within him, as bright and forceful as champagne from a bottle, and Seth was dreadfully certain it was love. He looked at this messy, strong, interesting woman and he couldn’t stop himself from loving her.
Maybe he could have been able to if he’d stayed well enough alone, but now it was all over. He couldn’t un-feel it. He couldn’t forget it. And he couldn’t turn away from it.
He put his head in his hands and bent over his knees.
“I’m so fucked,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I—nothing. It’s nothing.” He looked up at her. She was roughly brushing at the wrinkles of her dress.
“I didn’t freak you out with my political ranting?” She had a wry smile on her face.
“No. Well, yes. But not the way you’re thinking.”
“Social justice isn’t everyone’s thing, I’m not trying to force my ideals onto
you, Seth.”
He had to smile at that. She had no freaking idea how much her ‘ideals’ were his reality. “I like that you’re passionate, Sarah. It just took me by surprise, is all. I guess that’s dumb, though. Obviously, anyone who had the drive to become an Olympic athlete must have a highly passionate personality.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Or they must have a psycho egomaniac for a father.”
Seth frowned. Sometimes she was so strong, so put-together, so reasonable, that Seth could forget that Sarah had her very own set of problems. He immediately felt like an ass. He’d been trying as hard as he could to make sure that Sarah wouldn’t get hurt by him that he actually hadn’t been thinking of Sarah at all. He hadn’t been considering the intricacies of her life, of what made her her.
“I’ll come with you,” he decided on the fly. He didn’t particularly want to be separated from her at that moment, when he could still taste her in his mouth. And he definitely didn’t want to just send her into the warzone with that bunch of unknowns.
“Are you sure? I thought you wanted a nap.”
He shook his head. “I’m good. I wanna be with you.”
He cleared his throat as he grappled with all the different ways he meant that statement.
“All right.”
He glanced at his watch. “Why don’t you run home and put some unwrinkled clothes on? I’ll drive us.”
When he looked up, she was grinning, holding the sweater dress out like it was an old-timey skirt. “Let me guess, the wrinkles are going to drive you insane?”
He grimaced. “You… just… look so much nicer in unwrinkled clothing.”
She laughed and went on her tiptoes to kiss him. “You’re such a freak, Seth.”
And then she was gone, out his bedroom door and then out of his house.
Seth stood there alone, scratching the back of his neck, attempting to figure out what the hell had just happened to him.
***
“What a bunch of whackos,” Sarah muttered as she stripped off her clothing and let it fall in a pile on the floor of Seth’s bedroom.
Seth grunted, stripping off his own clothing on the other side of the room. He was quiet. He’d been pretty quiet since the meeting and Sarah wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have pushed him to attend. This kind of thing wasn’t for everybody. And she didn’t need his politics to perfectly reflect hers, but she wondered if normally Seth was a bury-his-head-in-the-sand type of guy and she’d pushed him too far out of his comfort zone with that meeting.
Because it had really been insane. She’d rarely seen that kind of hatred have such a comfortable spotlight. It was nothing more than a lynch mob, really. Like the scene in Beauty and the Beast when Gaston gets all the villagers riled up to kill the Beast. But what had chilled Sarah the most was that the men on the stage, shouting all the vitriol about shifters, hadn’t been the most menacing men in the room. No, the most menacing men in the room had been a group sitting quietly halfway back in the crowd. They were quiet. And satisfied. Sarah had gotten creepy crawlies up her back. She would have put an awful lot of money on the fact that they’d been the men who were shooting guns in the woods last week.
Sarah shivered off the thoughts and pulled back the covers on Seth’s bed. She dimly registered that he’d somehow found the time to make the bed before they’d gone to the meeting, after the best sex of her life. She heard a rustling behind her as she slid between the smooth, cool sheets and turned back to see Seth picking up her leggings and T-shirt from the floor. He carefully folded them and set them on top of her dresser. Next, he fished one of her socks out from under his bed, where she’d accidentally kicked it, and paired it with its partner.
She grinned up at him. “I’m going to drive you into an early grave, aren’t I?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m so messy.”
“I like messy. Gives me something to do with my free time.” He scratched his head as he looked down at her. “I thought you didn’t like to sleep in your sports bra.”
She shrugged. “I forgot pajamas.”
He turned on his heel and went to his dresser, fishing out the softest looking T-shirt she’d ever seen in her life and handing it over to her. Sarah immediately rubbed her face in the shirt. “I want to take this T-shirt intravenously,” she informed him, stripping off her sports bra and slipping into his shirt.
“That’s how I feel about this sports bra.” He did the same thing she had just done and buried his face in it. Then he crisply folded it as well and turned back to her.
“Water? Tea? Midnight snack?”
The part of Sarah that was still so injured over how much food her father had withheld from her over the years thrilled at the idea of Seth feeding her in bed. Seth was always feeding her. It was one of the main ways that he showed her how much he cared about her.
“I’m good. Except I’m a little cold.” She reached up and tugged on Seth’s hand. It didn’t take any more than that for him to get the hint.
He was instantly under the sheets, crowding her in and shoving her bodily over to one side of the bed in a way that was rough and almost childlike. Sarah delighted in it. Before tonight, he’d always been exceedingly careful with her. But now that they’d been together the way they had been, he seemed to let a guard down. He was comfortable with her. Fully.
“You smell good,” he said, his voice muffled by her hair and her neck, where he was pressing his face.
“I smell like sex.”
“Exactly.” He lifted his face and smiled at her. Sarah was suddenly very aware of the fact that he hadn’t done much smiling since they’d had sex. Actually, instead, he’d looked a little wrecked.
“I wanted to wreck you,” she confessed.
His eyebrows quirked upwards. “What’s that?”
“When we were having sex, I wanted you to be wrecked by it. But… now I’m thinking maybe you actually are a little wrecked and I feel guilty.”
He tipped his head back and laughed, a dark, caramel-ish sound. “You feeling a little full of yourself, Sarah?”
She smiled sheepishly. “I’m not trying to brag. I guess I’m just trying to check and make sure you’re okay? I know I can be a lot to handle and you’ve been pretty quiet…”
“I’m good, baby.” He leaned forward and kissed her mouth sweetly, sliding one hand down her side to her knee so that he could prop her leg over him. “I think I’m just getting used to my new reality.”
“Your new reality?”
He nodded. “A life where I’m wrecked over you.”
“So you are wrecked.”
His eyes wrinkled with a smile. “Yet, you seem perfectly composed.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head adamantly. “I’m wrecked, too. But I like it. It looks good on me, I think.”
He laughed again. “I love your confidence. It’s the sexiest thing in the world.”
“Seth…” she dragged one hand over the stubble she’d never seen on his chin before. She realized that he must shave it very close every morning. She wanted to ask him what all of that had been about before they’d had sex. All that mess about wondering if she was going to fall in love. She wanted to get to the bottom of why taking care of other people was so important to him. She wanted to know what his secret was. Because she was certain now that he had one. He was burdened in the way that implied he wasn’t living life in the manner that he would if he had his way. Which made her wonder, why oh why couldn’t he have his way?
She wanted to remind him that she was an open-minded person, that there was very little he could tell her that would make her recoil from him, if anything. What was important to her, over anything, was that Seth was a good man, that he treated others well, treated her well. And she’d seen enough evidence of that to already be halfway in love with the man.
But she figured that if he didn’t already know that about her, that she was accepting, then flat out telling him wasn’t going to convince him. He’d have to s
ee it for himself, come to the conclusion based on her actions.
That was fine with her. She had time. She’d come here to start a new life and she’d known that would require patience. Not her strongest suit, but she could learn. And hopefully so would he. He’d learn that she was down for the ride. Open to it. Open to him.
“Yeah?” he asked after a minute when she didn’t say anything.
“Nothing,” she whispered. His brow furrowed but she smoothed it away with her fingers. She leaned forward and kissed him. A long, slow kiss that was devoid of any of their earlier, frantic energy.
He rolled over her and it wasn’t long before their hugging, rubbing cocoon of warmth was suddenly underwear-less. She tipped her hips up to him and he pushed forward, half an inch inside of her.
“Shit. Condom.” He pulled away and she got to see the tremendously delightful view of him leaping over the side of his bed butt-ass naked and sporting an incredibly impressive boner. He was back and sheathed with the condom just moments later, resuming his position on top of her.
Seth wrapped his arms completely around her, kissing the hell out of her as he pushed inside. Sarah opened for him, arching and hissing and saying words that made his eyes widen with surprise and lust.
He started pumping into her and she pushed back on him, tumbling them both to one side. Seth took her by the hips and held her at the perfect angle for him to keep working against her, but her leg was caught under him. She slid off of him and turned her back, sliding back toward him like spoons.
He guided himself back into her and they both groaned when he bottomed out. Seth’s hand dropped between her legs and he lazily pumped into her, gently playing with her clit in pinching circles that made her toes curl.
Usually when she had sex with someone, Sarah’s mind was a reel of fantasies, but right now, she was simply lost in sensation. He felt so good, so firm, so real, so hot. He wasn’t hammering away at her, lost in his own passion, he was reading her, nudging her into new sensations as he held himself deep inside her and pulsed, driving her into passion from the inside out.
