Page 45 of Countdown to Murder
And to prove this to myself, once I’d had enough to eat I was no longer in danger of losing control, I told him how close I’d been.
“You hid it from me?” Brisk words. Carefully checked anger. No, not anger, but heated words that could easily boil over.
“I needed to know if I could. I’m telling you now because I understand it’s important not to have secrets in a relationship.”
The heat didn’t go away.
“You’re mad?” I asked.
“Irritated that I didn’t sense it. I need to be able to read you better.”
“No one can read me unless they’re in my head, which means the vampires who trained me, and a good portion of the Chattanooga coterie.” I blew out a breath. “And Apollonius and Mordecai, apparently.”
“Those two can read just about everyone. How many vampires have had your blood?”
“Too many for me to go on a mission to kill them all. Besides, I like most of the ones in Chattanooga. The only one I had a real problem with in Chattanooga moved to Alaska.”
“Gavin?”
“He was never inappropriate. There’s no specific reason for me to dislike him, he just set me on edge.”
“Which means you’re a decent judge of character.” He sat back and looked at my plate and then the lasagna pans. “You ate, what, two-thirds of a pan before you felt in control?”
“Yes.”
“Good to know. Mornings were hard for me when I firstchanged. Nathan gave me some protein bars so I couldeat the second I was awake. Some are nut based, some are whey based. You should experiment around with both and see which helps the most, and the fastest.”
Panda heated the apple pie, put extra-large pieces on two plates, along with ice cream, and walked to the bedroom with them.
I followed him in, stopped at the roses, and smelled them. I’d seen them earlier and thanked him for them, but again, I wasn’t really sure what to do with them. I understood the concept, but it felt as if they should have a use. You eat the fruit and smell the flowers?
I looked at him, standing beside the bed with both plates on the side table.
“Why did you bring the food in here?”
“Because we’re going to have fun with dessert. A game. I can’t feed myself, and you can’t feed yourself. Also, since this might get messy, I’m going to strip down to my undies. You should, too.”
He situated the huge beach blanket he’d bought but we hadn’t used yet over the top of the bedspread, stripped to his boxer briefs, and carried the plates to the bed.
“Damn, I want some pie.” He looked to the plates as if he was sad. “I sure wish someone would come along and feed me some.”
I stood at the side of the bed, cut into the pie, and fed him a bite. I hadn’t understood why he wanted me to do it until I did. It seemed...intimate.
He grinned and cut a piece of pie from the other plate, loaded some ice cream with it, and held it in front of my mouth. “The fun of this dessert is the mixture of hot and cold. Open for me.”
I opened my mouth and let him put the food into my mouth. Being fed was way more intimate than feeding someone, and heat once again traveled between my legs. The oddest things made me want to touch myself there.
No, if I was honest, I wanted Panda to touch me there. He knew how to play my body in ways I hadn’t known were possible. And this was a prime example. The fork going into your mouth, the sweetness that followed — why the hell did this make my clitoris throb and need to be touched? How did he know this would happen?
“Clothes off, Darlin’. I want to make a mess with you.”
It sounds completely silly to say that ten minutes later, I was licking ice cream from his stomach, and he was licking apple pie filling from the skin between my breasts, but that’s what we did, and by the time the food was gone, neither of us much cared because we were sating a different hunger by then.
I licked and tasted with my nose, my tongue, and my Jacobson’s organ, and I thought I’d drown in the raw, male taste of him. Testosterone and masculinity and lion. He licked me between my legs, and I managed to get himnaked while I licked my way to his beautiful penis. Dick. Cock. I didn’t care what it was called, I wanted to lick it.
* * * *
Panda
