Page 23 of Crying Wolfe
“Oh.” She blinked rapidly, her shoulders deflating as a rash of color crawled from beneath her collar. “Oh. I see.” Turning, she picked up the pencil from where it rested in the open spine of the logbook. Dropped it. Retrieved it. “I-I understand now. I suppose I didn’t realize—that is…” Closing the logbook, she set the pencil down beside it. “I thought the marriage in name only was for my benefit, rather than yours,” she told the far wall.
Aw hell, he’d made her feel rejected.
“It was,” Eli rushed. “Itis. Morley and I thought since such unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances forced us into this—”
“No. Yes. You needn’t explain.” She gathered up a shawl from the table next to the logbook, and didn’t seem to notice when her abandoned pencil rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor. “It is my fault we find ourselves in this…unfortunate circumstance.” Visibly battling for her composure, she wrapped the shawl around her shoulders. “I was out of line just now, Mr. Wolfe. I hope you’ll forgive—erm—I should go.”
Clutching the shawl to herself like a shield, she ducked her head and scurried forward, obviously intending to rush past him before he saw any tears fall.
Before he made the conscious decision to do so, Eli reached out and clamped his hand around her upper arm. “Wait.”
“Please,” she whispered on a suspicious hitch of breath. “I really should—”
He searched a head empty of blood for something to say. “Look. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Oh God.” She lifted both hands to her mouth. “You’re in love with another woman and I ruined it for you both.”
“That’s not it.”
She eyed him carefully, dare he say, hopefully. “Another…man, then?”
“No!” He put his hands up against any more guesses. “No,” he repeated. “It’s just that—I mean— Aw hell, I don’t know what I mean.” Plunging fingers through his hair he tugged in frustration as he paced away from the dais and returned to it in several swift strides before squaring his shoulders and pinning her with a hard stare.
“Goddammit, look at me, Rosaline.” He opened his arms and presented himself for inspection. “I’m a man more comfortable with a pickaxe in his hand than a teacup. I’m a heavy-fisted juggernaut with more scars than sense and prone to more cussing than culture. And you?” He tossed a gesture at her entire person, which seemed smaller and more vulnerable than ever.
“You’re just a little bitty thing with those doe eyes that take up most of your face. You’re young and fresh and innocent and I’m not only old enough to be your father, but I’m just about used up by hunger and ambition and…Christ. I just—I don’t know, I feel like kissing you makes me some kind of middle-aged pervert. Wanting you is like a golem wanting a goddess.”
At this point, Eli didn’t know what kind of fool words were spewing from his mouth, they just flowed in a tirade of frustration, lust, and a foreign need to keep the dampness clumping her lashes together from spilling down her blush-stained cheeks.
“It’s damned strange,” he lamented. “I’m not a man who is clumsy around women…butyou. You come in here looking like a schoolboy’s wicked fantasy and show me these stars—meteors—whatever they are. Mesmerize me with mythology and beggared if you don’t spin my axis until I don’t know which way is up or—”
He didn’t see her move until she was in his arms.
Or he was in hers.
After a breath it didn’t matter, because her sleek, slender body pressed against his and she was clinging to his shoulders as if letting go would send her tumbling down a mine shaft.
In the past, such a move had been followed by a crash of mouths. The ripping of clothing. Passionate, violent, loud fucking.
Sure, kissing might be involved, mostly on places other than the mouth.
But Rosaline…in the twenty-four hours since they’d met, she’d failed to do anything he expected. He’d be a fool to imagine anything else now.
She lifted onto the tips of her toes, her hands reaching up to cup his face and drag it down toward her. Eyes closed, mouth artlessly seeking, she held him by the jaw and planted what he could only identify as a gentle but determined kiss square on his mouth.
It lasted a stunned second, maybe two, before she pulled back and searched his face, eyes touching everywhere. Lips parted. His jaw still a prisoner of her palms.
Eli stared down at her, rocked in a way he’d never been before. Overwhelmed by her scent. By the surprising strength of her grip and the confounding way in which someone so physically different from him in every way seemed to conform to him as if she’d been crafted to do so.
“Oh my,” she said, as if something important had been decided.
“Oh no,” he groaned as his head lowered to capture her mouth again. The heat that at once surged through him was followed by a cold, hollow ache. One that’d been mined in the depths of the earth so long ago, a void he carried around with him that refused to be filled no matter what wealth he acquired.
She was a dainty morsel of pleasure. An epicurean delicacy placed before a wolf used to tearing into flesh with his teeth and claws. He hardly knew what to do with a woman like this.
As his thoughts scattered like a bag of marbles on a concrete floor, his body reacted to her kiss as if it’d been waiting for one like this since kissing had been invented. With a skill he’d forgotten he possessed, he swept his lips over hers in deep, drugging passes before teasing the seam of her delectable mouth with his tongue.
Pleasure and pain mingled within him. She was like a storm approaching a dying man. First, he would lap at the rain, open his mouth and drink until his thirst was quenched and his life restored.
