Page 52 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Be my guest,” she mumbled.
With her ill-fitting bathrobe wrapped around him, he slipped into the bathroom. He took a moment to stare at himself in the mirror, looking for wolfy traits. There were none that he could see. Even his fangs, which he had felt prickle his lips, were blunt human teeth now. His eyes were their usual gold-shot brown. Taking a deep breath, he splashed water on his face and filled a paper cup for her.
It was just the heat of climax that had made it feel like that, he told himself. Hehadn’tlost control. He was all right. Most importantly, she was all right.
He took a handful of tissues and the water back to her bedroom. She sipped the water, cleaned herself up, and pushed the small trash bin behind the nightstand. “To keep Cupcake out of it,” she whispered with a grin. “Come to bed with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Please.”
He had no defenses against that. He crawled under the covers, and they moved around for a minute or two, getting settled. When Holly finally stretched out languidly against him, all his cares evaporated. If he’d needed a way to set her fears at ease and relax her, apparently he had found the right technique.
She turned her face against his shoulder. The moonlight illuminated the long curve of her neck, and a dark blot above her collarbone. A hickey. Guilt leaped in him, but he touched it lightly with his fingertips and there was no blood there, no broken skin.
The urge to bite her had been so strong in that moment, only iron self-control had overcome it. He was relieved he’d had the strength. But what about the next time?
Right now, though, he didn’t feel self-conscious. He didn’t feel anything except relaxed and happy, for the first timesince he didn’t know how long. He felt that he could have stayed here forever, with Holly cradled in his arms, infinitely precious.
He lay down and pressed closer to her.
Holly’s lips moved against his skin. He turned his head to try to understand her. “We need to ...” she whispered on a sigh, but then she slipped into sleep before she could say what they needed to do.
HOLLY
“... set an alarm,”Holly mumbled, opening her eyes.
Her bedroom was washed in a soft gray light, somehow timeless—but definitely too bright to be merely the Christmas lights. She was tangled comfortably in someone else’s warm limbs. It was almost too hot under the covers. Moving, however, would wake Jace.
She had vague memories that he had twitched and stirred frequently during the night, but each time, when she nestled close against him, he settled again. Holly had always been a deep sleeper, with no difficulty falling back asleep if she was awakened by something unexpected in the night.
Now she tried to move slowly and patiently, attempting to roll over without waking up Jace, enough to see her bedside clock.
Once she did, her eyes flew wide.
“J—” She hastily lowered her voice from the startled yelp that tried to emerge. “Jace!” she hissed against his ear. He twitched and jerked. “Jace, it’s almost 6:30—my dad is definitely up—and he didn’t knock on the door!”
“That’s bad?” Jace murmured. He had a soft, sleepy lookthat at any other time, she would have found luxuriously wonderful.
Right now she was terrified of discovery. She pushed the covers back. Jace made a displeased noise as cold air flooded their hot and slightly sticky blanket nest. Holly scrambled for her clothes, dropped the ones she had been wearing yesterday, and tried to find something clean.
Jace was getting dressed too, at what seemed to her the pace of a geriatric snail. “Jace, we have to get you out of here,” she whispered. “Oh no!” She froze; there was the creak of a floorboard downstairs, then the sound of something clattering in the kitchen. “Can you go out the window?”
“I think trying to hide it is just going to make it worse,” Jace whispered back. “You said yourself that you’re an adult. You can make your own decisions, and your dad needs to respect that.”
“The question is whether he’ll remember that before or after he goes ballistic,” she retorted in an undertone, whacking her hair with a brush. She still felt warm and sticky between the legs—wonderfully so, but there was absolutelyno wayshe could get away with going downstairs without a shower. With shifter-sharp senses, her dad would notice instantly. “I’m going to take a shower.Youare going out the window.”
“I don’t have a coat or boots,” Jace pointed out.
Good point. “I can, uh. I can go down and get them, and bring them back up here.”
“Without being seen? Or setting off the canine burglar alarms?”
“Darn it,” she moaned. “Why did we have to, why didn’t we—ugh!”
“Do you regret it?” Jace asked quietly, looking up at her. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands—perfectly normal and human—laced together between his knees.
“No.” The word came instant and unquestioned to her tongue. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that. Jace still looked unsure, so she took his face in her hands and kissed him firmly.
