Page 29 of Her Purr-fect Christmas Mate

He could hear her smile. It lilted the edges of her words and made him feel as though his feet had left the ground.

How is this happening?He replayed the last several minutes of their conversation. The whole painful half-dozen hours since they’d met. None of it added up.

Except the most obvious, impossible equation: that she was his mate and he was hers and she wanted him as much as he wanted her. And she hadn’t locked herself inside her animal form to stay away from him, after all.

He wet his lips. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to—”

“Of all the— No. I don’t feel obligated to doanythingin regards to you. The circumstances took care of that.” She made an amusedhuff,and he couldn’t imagine how she was managing to find the situation amusing.

“That’s good.” His teeth clacked shut.

Neither of them moved. Peony didn’t retreat, but she didn’t get closer, either. Didn’t touch him. The brush of her breath on his neck was driving him mad.

He tensed his jaw. “If you’ve changed your mind, you can leave.”

“I’m still waiting for you to answer my question.”

“What?” He spun around, eyebrows furrowing. God almighty, she was right there. Naked and soft and more glorious than anything in his life had any right to be.

Her eyes danced. Was the gold in them stronger than it had been when he first saw her?

He stared, speechless, and her smile widened.

“I really thought it would be more difficult than this,” she said, a shade ruefully, and brushed his hair back off his forehead with one delicate finger. Fire blazed across his skin where she touched him.

“What would be more difficult?” There was no trace of fire in his voice. It was as though the turmoil raging in his veins made his outward self even frostier. He sounded like the world’s worst prig.

Worse. It sounded as though he was rejecting her. As though he was standing here, in the spun-gold spotlight of her eyes, her warm bare body only inches from his, and wasn’t affected.

She’ll hate me for this.

He waited for the light to go out of her eyes.

Instead, her smile widened, cat-like.

“You can’t tell?” Her eyes widened. “You can’t hear me thinking about it?”

He shook his head wordlessly. The connection between them was humming, but it was… muted. Not the roar of input it had been when she was in cat form.

“Hmm.” Her eyebrows twitched. Momentarily, her gaze turned inwards. He watched entranced as she seemed to focus intently on something beyond his reach. “Maybe my telepathy is less strong in human form?”

“Perhaps you have more control over it when you’re in a shape that’s more familiar to you.”

“Shouldn’t it feel stranger to have new powers in a familiar body, than the body and the powers both being new? Or it could be that since I have no other way of communicating in cat form, my psychic powers compensate. Or—” Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

“I’m trying to get a straight answer out of you, not get distracted into a discussion about the hows and whys of telepathy.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes!”

“You’ve asked me several questions. Which one did you want me to answer?”

This had to be a dream. If it was real life, he would have been able to take control of the conversation as he normally did. If it was real life, Peony would have grown as frustrated by his constant conversational detours and eddies as he was. Why couldn’t he tell her what he really wanted to say?

What do I want to say?

---