Page 9 of Lucky or Knot
But a quick glance around, and a deep breath to parse any scents in the air, gave me nothing at all to concern me.
By the time he pulled a key card out of his pocket and beeped open the door to a ground floor room at the back of thehotel, I’d pushed it out of my mind. Fuck it. Of course I’d feel weird about the whole situation; I was being paid to knot a fairy who’d gotten me hard with magic.
He flipped the switch by the door and bathed the drab room in equally drab yellow light: a maroon bedspread with the faint sheen of cheap polyester, chipped particle board furniture, and a dark blue carpet that, surprisingly, bore the faint imprints of an actual vacuum cleaner.
Whatever. It didn’t smell any mustier than the back of the club, and shifters didn’t really get human diseases. It’d take a worse breeding ground than this place to produce a fungus that could overcome my inborn healing magic.
The room had no personal touches at all except for the expensive-looking glass bottle of lube on one of the nightstands. I had to choke back a laugh. This guy really had planned ahead. How incredibly presumptuous—except that he’d had a solid gold coin and magic to back up his confidence.
Speaking of which.
The fairy stepped aside, and I followed him in and closed the door behind us with a click.
“Let’s see that coin again,” I said.
He nodded and fished in his pocket, and when he held out his hand the coin glittered in his palm. It looked bigger lying flat like that, and now I could see that the wings belonged to a dragon, stylized and outspread, with its tail curling around the edge of the coin and traceries filling in the rest of the design.
I reached out and took it, and he didn’t stop me, though he whipped his hand away and rubbed his fingers together as I did. Huh. Well, if I worried about every weird thing he did, I’d need a therapist. It had more heft to it than I’d expected, and the warmth of it heated my hand. It’d been in his pocket this whole time absorbing his body heat, but…fuck it. Put that in the same category of things I shouldn’t worry about. It felt like gold, andhe’d promised me it was real in a way that would bind a fae, and more questions would be useless, anyway, I had no doubt.
I slipped the coin into my own pocket, pay rendered for expected services, no more denial possible. And there we were. Closing the door had shut out the wind and the groan of the ice machine compressor along the walkway and the idling car a few doors down. Silence fell. Near silence, anyway, since my alpha shifter ears picked up everything. But now I could hear him breathing, short, sharp little inhales and exhales, as if his apparent calm poise was nothing more than the thinnest façade.
On the walk I’d been more focused on my surroundings and my sensation of unease than on his physical presence. But now that we were alone in a private place, with the bed right there…he might not want me, particularly, but I had nothing here to distract me from how fucking badly I wantedhim.
Would his scent intensify if I rubbed my face against the curve of his throat? Or wrapped my hands around his waist, his hips, his thighs? Maybe his breath would come even faster as I slid my palm over his cock, teasing out an erection I could fondle to full hardness as I pressed into him from behind, my own cock digging into his lower back…
“You might as well do whatever it is you’re thinking about that’s getting you so worked up,” he said irritably, and I snapped out of it with a jolt, biting my lip to keep in the…yeah, I’d been fucking growling. Well, at least he couldn’t claim he wasn’t getting the alpha experience. He’d done that chin-lifting thing again, that made me want to bite his neck, and his black eyes blazed. “I’m paying you to do it, and we’re here, so get it over with. Please don’t trip and fall on me and mess up my clothes.”
Everything around me—the faint hushing of water through the hotel’s pipes, a distant siren, the turning of the gods-damned Earth—came to a halt so grinding I could feel it in my teeth.
Get it the fuckover with?
Don’tfall on him and mess up his clothes?
Okay, this was some bullshit. And I’d had enough. Dominic and his metallic jock strap and his dangling hairless testicles. Cassidy and his miserable body oil addiction. Motherfucking Louie planning to call my parents, reveal that their only son was a hopeless screw-up, and break their hearts.
More than anything, me, and my own feckless habit of kicking the can down the road and hoping it’d all work out somehow.
And now…this. This mysterious, condescending little magical jerk who’d used magic to make himself more appealing to me on the one hand, and then had the nerve to snark at me for getting “all worked up” on the other!
“Okay then,” I said, and I moved at last, prowling like the tiger I was, circling him, not closing the distance between us until I’d forced him to twist around to face me, off-balance and flushed. I leaned down until our faces were only inches apart, until I could feel the quick, uneven brush of his breath and see myself reflected in his pupils. “Let’s get this straight. You are requesting, and in fact demanding, that I earn my pay by doing whatever I’m thinking about doing. I have to knot you, and other than that, it’s up to me. Yes?”
That quick, not-quite-human tongue darted out again, flickering over his lower lip and leaving it glistening. His pulse pounded in the side of his neck.
“You’re not allowed to hurt me. I could defend myself effectively, I warn you, but I don’t want to have to. I don’t want to be concerned that I’ll need to.”
“No hurting you,” I said, and meant it down to my bones. He might be annoying as hell, but—no. “I don’t want to, and I’ll be careful not to. You can relax.”
The fae could detect lies most of the time, I thought. I’dheard it somewhere, probably from the same dubious source that had claimed they couldn’t lie themselves. Maybe he could tell if I told him the truth, maybe not, but either way, he believed me; he nodded slowly, and some of his tension seemed to ease.
“Fine. Then yes, do whatever you need to do to get the job done. You have carte blanche.” He paused. “No ruining my shoes, either. I’m not sure how you would, but it’s worth mentioning.”
He thought I was a graceless, crude knothead with more glitter than brains, and he obviously expected me to flip him over, pull down his pants, trip, and possibly only manage to fuck him because my cock went in when I fell over on top of him.
No. Screw that. I had carte blanche, and I was going to give him the absolute best fuck of his life.
Whether he liked it or not.
Chapter 4
