Page 30 of Her Purr-fect Christmas Mate

He didn’t know. No. He knew, he just didn’t know how to say it. He’d trained himself to lock target on his goals and pursue them with ruthless efficiency—he couldn’t treat Peony that way.

But he didn’t know how else to be.

So he kept picking up her suggestions and insinuations and tossing them aside. In a moment, she would give up and storm off, or—worse, so much worse it made his chest lock up—she would crumple in on herself. Like she had at the bookshop.

Instead, she tipped her head back. Cat-like green flashed in her gold-brown eyes, and her full lips twitched with mischief. “Good point. I should learn to be more specific. In no particular order, then: You confirmed that you can’t hear all my thoughts right now, but you never answered whether you can tell what it is I thought would be more difficult about this situation.”

She regarded him with a teasing patience that surely violated the Geneva Convention.

She was naked as sin in front of him, and she was asking himquestions.

“In answer to that question,” he forced out. “No. I can’t tell.”

Her lips quirked. “Next, and again in no particular order, do you want me to stop whatever it is that you claim you don’t know I’m doing?”

He was the world’s greatest idiot. He should kiss her. Hold her. Press her backwards onto the bed and do all the filthy things his mind was conjuring up.

But he couldn’t move. The ice he’d spent years building around his heart paralyzed him.

“No,” he choked out.

She moved closer, and his senses flooded. Her scent. The heat of her body.

“I think I’ll skip the telepathy questions. They were more rhetorical, anyway.” She stood on her tiptoes, her lips a whisper away from his. “Can you still not tell what I want?”

He had to say something. He was losing control of the situation, not like a runaway train but like a warm, slow-moving river buoying him up and floating him away.

You never had control of this situation in the first place, his dragon informed him. He thought he heard it laughing.

“Whatever it is, I imagine you’ll begin by kissing me again.”

Kill me now,his dragon groaned.

Peony laughed out loud. “Close,” she said and dropped to her knees.

His brain whited out. She was kneeling in front of him, her hand pressed against the seam of his pants. Pressed against him. Feeling just how hard he was.

The one part of me not frozen into paralysis.He wasn’t sure whether he was grateful or embarrassed.

She ran her hand down his length, exploring every inch of him through the fabric of his trousers.

Grateful. Oh god.

She pulled him out, and his knees almost buckled. He needed to steady himself, but there was nothing to hold on to except her, and he couldn’t—

Her hand, hot around his cock. The sight of her holding him, so close to her face, her lush lips, seared into his mind. And the expression in her eyes. Curious and excited andcalculating, and somehow that made him even harder, the idea that she was looking at his cock like it was a puzzle she wanted to work out.

Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and he made a noise. He didn’t even know what the noise was.

But Peony’s gaze turned to pure fire. “I should tell you now that I don’t have a whole lot of experience with this,” she admitted, and he would have called her tone dry except for the teasing light in her eyes. “Mostly what I’ve read in books.”

His hand clenched involuntarily on thin air. “That’s not—”

She put her mouth on him.

His brain stopped functioning.

He didn’t know what to do with himself. What was left of his brain was sending him urgent, fragmented messages.Don’t be too eager. Don’t thrust into her mouth. For the love of god, don’t grab hold of her head to steady yourself.

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