“God,” she cut him off and, before she could compose herself or even think a clear thought, said, “No no. Ah, Seth, I don’t think you’re that small. I mean you’re huge! Like, this towel isn’t even big enough for your—”
And she stopped herself right before she said your dick. But how could she recover?
“Not big enough for your...hair,” she said. Yeah, that was smooth. Great recovery. “Cause when I take a shower, I like to use a separate towel for my hair. A hair towel, I call it. It’s like, if you dry your hair first, then the towel is already damp when you use it to dry your body. Who wants to dry themselves off with a damp towel, right? But...if you do it the other way around—if you dry your body first—then by the time you get the towel to your hair, the towel is wet and you hair is wet too, and it just doesn’t really work. You know?”
She gasped for breath as the ridiculous excuse finished spewing from her mouth. She hadn’t breathed at all as she’d spoken, and she was certain she had made no sense at all.
“A hair towel?” Seth said. “I’ll give that a shot.” He smiled and held the towel up to his hair. The normal dark brown looked almost pure black when wet. He started to dry his hair with the towel, and the muscles all over that beautiful body flexed and bulged as he worked, and when he really got going, Lily’s eyes fell down and saw his manhood swaying back and forth. Jesus Christ. You promised to get out of here, she said to herself. But she was hooked now. Seth was willing to walk around naked. Totally shameless. But it wasn’t really shamelessness; it was...obliviousness. He thought nothing of it. It was like he was some kind of animal.
“Well,” he said, “that actually works, but like you said, I’ll want to use a bigger towel for my hair next time.”
At some point he’d taken his hands off her, and now he was walking right past her. His naked body brushed against the skin of her elbow as he walked past her toward the linen closet.
If she turned around, Lily thought, she could check out his ass. She realized that this was her last chance to be strong and leave. She could not look at his butt, grit her teeth, and ask him to take her to the hotel as soon as he put some clothes on. Or she could just turn her head and look at that naked butt, the one she’d wanted to see her entire adult life. How long would it be until he wrapped a towel around himself and covered it? If she wanted to see it—and God, did she want to see it—she had to look now. Right now.
Life was too short to be safe, so she spun around and checked it out. It was perfect. It was strong, and the way it moved when he walked...damn! He whipped a towel out from the closet and then spun it around him like a cocoon.
She got her gaze back up to eye level just before he turned back to face her.
“So what did you think of the bread?” he asked. “Did you like it best with jam or with cheese?”
“Good buns—I mean bread,” she stammered. “Shit! I spilled jam on your kitchen floor, and I couldn’t find anything to clean up with.”
“Not a problem,” he said, walking past her again. “I’ll show you where I keep the paper towels.”
He smelled delicious. All the hot water and soap in the world couldn’t wash that manly scent from him. He smelled like the forest: like pine and snow and fresh streams in spring.
She followed him, and though the towel now covered his lower half, she could still watch his wide back and shoulders as he walked.
“So,” he said, “the paper towels are in this cabinet.” He reached up above the refrigerator to a cabinet so high up Lily hadn’t even noticed it. It must have been six and a half feet up in the air.
Once he grabbed hold of a roll and turned back toward Lily, he realized.
“Ah,” he said. “I guess I built this place with just me in mind…”
He was so tall. So perfect and tall.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re going to be staying here, I’ll move these to another place lower down, one you can reach.”
Tall as he was, he got down on his hands and knees and cleaned up the spilled jam.
And sweet. Don’t forget sweet. Considerate and caring.
And out of your league, she thought.
He threw out the paper towel and the bread, and then he looked at her, waiting.
Lily didn’t think. She just spoke. “Seth,” she said, “I’d be happy to stay here, for a while at least. It would be good to have a friend after what happened.”
“Great!” he said. “Damn, if I knew you were going to stay I’d have let you have the shower first. You still want to take one tonight?”
“Uh,” she said, “yeah. That would be great.”
What had she just done? She was staying here now, with Seth, who walked around naked. Wasn’t there only one bedroom? What the hell was she thinking?
“Cool,” he said. “I’ll get you a body towel, and a hair towel.”
He rushed down the hallway, still just wrapped in a towel. He came back with two towels, a big one and a medium-sized one.
“Is this big enough for your hair towel?” he asked.
God, the hair towel had been a good excuse, at the time, but now he really thought she needed a towel just for her hair. And so she was going to have to use one every time. He must think I’m so high maintenance now.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s totally fine!”
“Cool,” he said. “So, here you go.” He handed her the towels.
She wondered just then why he hadn’t brought the towels with him into the shower. Did he regularly just drip water all over the hallway after a shower on his way to the linen closet? That made no sense...unless...had he wanted her to see him?
CHAPTER SIX
Seth
Seth was proud of himself for realizing that Lily would want the towels ahead of time. Usually he took showers in the morning, and so he just stepped outside, shifted, and ran himself dry. That was the best way to wake up. Lily was a human though, so she’d want to dry off like he just had, with a towel. Or no, with two towels. She needed a hair towel; he’d have to remember that.
It was so weird though, using a big thing you had to wash just to dry yourself off. Humans made everything so complicated. And two towels? Well, that was just women, not humans. They made everything even more complicated.
He smiled though, because Lily was going to stay with him. That made him feel really proud, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was just that he’d gone so long without a mate and there was this hole inside him. He wanted to provide. He wanted to protect. His job as a firefighter filled some of that void, but his best friend suddenly being in need...it felt good to help her. That was it.
Wait. The towels. Had he...had he been naked when Lily handed him the towel? He must have been, since he’d just stepped out of the shower. He hadn’t thought twice about it, but humans were super weird about being naked, weren’t they? Lily wouldn’t look at him like that, but he still might have made her uncomfortable. She had seemed kind of tense when she handed him the towel, hadn’t she? Idiot...big dumb bear!
His inner bear hadn’t spoken to him in over ten years, but he still remembered the childish things it had said to him. It had in many ways split his persona: All the big dumb bear thoughts came from the big dumb bear voice, and the more rational and reasonable human thoughts came from Seth’s own inner voice. Ever since that night, when he’d killed for the first time, his inner bear had become silent. With that, his personas seemed to almost merge together. No longer were the goofy thoughts of his inner bear separate from him. He no longer could ignore them if he wanted—they were his thoughts. That was what had happened with the gate, wasn’t it? It was a dumb bear thought that he had to rip the hinges off the gate rather than just climb over as a human. Walking around naked in front of a woman he’d invited into his home as a guest...that too was a dumb bear thought.
He sighed. As a little kid, he’d told his parents about “his bear” like it was a separate person, like it was an imaginary friend. They’d smiled and nodded, and t
hey’d never acted like there was anything strange about it. Yet he’d never heard them mention anything about their own inner bears. And so as he grew up, he stopped talking about his bear, but his bear had never stopped talking. Not until he had killed. And he’d never asked another shifter about it. He didn’t know why, but it seemed like something intensely personal. Maybe every shifter heard their inner animal speak to them, and maybe every voice was different. His had been a “big dumb bear,” but maybe the man he had killed...maybe his had been an angry wolf voice. Maybe the man hadn’t wanted to burn down his family’s house, but the wolf had rasped in his mind and urged him to do so. Or it could have been the other way around: The wolf begged him to be peaceful, but the human had wanted revenge.
Either way, the voice had not spoken in Seth’s mind for a decade now, so he’d have to make due with the bear encroaching on his personality instead.
Seth realized he’d been zoning out. Lily had already left for the shower, and he was just standing alone in the kitchen, staring at nothing. Like a big dumb bear.
Hearing the water, an image flashed into Seth’s mind—of Lily in the shower. Jesus! Why had he thought that? He’d never thought of her like that, but suddenly that image burned and clawed at his mind. Without clothes, her curves were intensely visible and exposed. Plunging curves. High mountains and deep, deep valleys. He felt blood rushing away from his head...toward his...his…
He backhanded himself, hard enough to send a shock up through his jawbone and into his inner ear. His head jerked from the force, and his ears rung for a moment. The perverted thoughts were knocked from his mind. Then a mental silence swallowed him, and he thought of nothing for a brief moment, but like the calm before a storm, the images came back twice as vivid and even more perverted than before. And his little dumb grizzly rose up beneath the towel. It pushed the towel up, and there was simply no way to hide it. Thankfully Lily was in the shower, but this would not do.
He could...relieve it...but not with Lily in the house. He could shift and run it off...that would probably work. But what if Lily came out of the shower and he was just gone, his truck still in the driveway?
This wasn’t middle school. Surely it would go away in a minute or two. He’d just get the bedroom ready for Lily, and the damn thing would go down while he made the bed and tidied up.
He couldn’t keep wearing just the towel, could he? Even without the rock-hard boner poking through, humans didn’t just walk around in towels. But they did sleep in their underwear, right? That would be even worse, especially if he was still hard. It would be even weirder though if he put jeans on. Humans didn’t take a shower before bed and then put on clothes they wore during the day only to take them off again and go to sleep. He didn’t own any pajamas or anything like that.
Seth considered all the factors, the boner being the biggest one. Jeans.
He put on some fresh jeans and an undershirt. That was a good compromise probably. It was not like his nipples were poking out.
But damn, there was still a big and awkward bulge, like a tent pitched on his crotch. He reached into a drawer for the clean sheets and pillowcases, and when he stood up to pull off the old ones, he realized he couldn’t even stand up straight without pain. If he readjusted the boner, it would peak out of the top of his waistline.
Don’t think about it. Just make the damn bed.
He let muscle memory take over and made the bed, and he started to think about random stuff: anything to get his mind off the hard on. He thought about foosball. They had a foosball table at the fire department, and Patrick always beat him. When they’d started playing, it had been pretty even, but Patrick had gotten really into it—had watched a bunch of YouTube videos and read up on strategy—and suddenly Seth could never beat him. Maybe Seth would switch up his grip like Patrick had, keeping one hand on the goalie at all times: one hand gripping tightly on the goalie, the other moving about freely as needed. That’s how Patrick did it. He gripped the goalie rod so tightly and moved it back and forth quickly as needed. He squeezed and tugged that goalie rod and kicked back each ball…
Seth looked down, and his own rod was in his hand. He was gripping it tightly and moving it freely as needed, and the image of Lily flooded his mind with ferocious intensity and clarity.
The shower was off now. Fuck! He heard the door hinge creaking, and with all the speed he could muster, he pulled his pants back up, over the hard dick, and barely managed to zip and button them. And then—as if he were straight back in middle school—he lifted up the mass of old sheets and held them in front of his crotch, as if they were textbooks used to hide a boner in the hallway.
Just as he got the sheets in front, Lily stepped in. “Hey!” she said. “I’m done! There was plenty of hot water left too.”
She had on just a towel. It covered much of her body, but her breasts bulged beneath it. He could even see some cleavage, and he could nearly feel his dick pulsing in pain as he forced his eyes up to her face.
“Great,” he said. “You can throw the towels into this hamper here after they’re dry, and I’ll wash them tomorrow. I need to wash these sheets anyway.”
“Sure,” she said. “So...do you want me to help make up the couch? I don’t need anything fancy, just a nice big pillow and a warm blanket will be fine.”
“Oh,” he said, “no. You’re taking the bedroom, of course. I just made up the bed for you.”
He stood there, still holding the dirty sheets in front of his crotch. He was still hard as stone. He tried to make it seem natural—it wasn’t as if he was hunched over, holding the sheets over his dick with a beet-red face—but there’s no way it didn’t still look odd.
“Come on, Seth,” she said. “You’re doing so much for me. I’m not going to steal your bed from you.”
“Really,” he said, “I’ve slept on the forest floor before, with nothing.” Why did he say that? Shit. “When I was out camping, I mean. The couch will be perfect.”
She sighed. “Fine, but let me help you at least. Give me those sheets and I’ll put them in the hamper.”
“These are dirty,” he said, “and actually...I’m going to put them straight in the washing machine.”
“Okay,” Lily said. Her eyebrows rose when she said it, and she tilted her head ever so slightly. He couldn’t get the idea of her being naked out of his head still, and the cute face she was making made it even worse.
“Be right back,” he said.
He went over to the washing machine and threw the sheets in. The boner was still there, and he had nothing to cover it with. He took a laundry basket and carried it back to the bedroom. She’d think it was weird that he was always holding something in front of him, but that was preferable to her seeing his erection.
He stepped into the bedroom, and the lights were still on, but Lily was passed out on the bed. Her hair towel was over the pillow.
He put the basket down, thankful that he didn’t have to hide anymore.
Lily hadn’t even used the blankets. Probably she had planned to lay down for just a minute but had fallen asleep from exhaustion.
Slowly and carefully, not wanting to wake her, Seth pulled the blankets. They slid beneath her, and finally he had them out from under her. She didn’t wake, but her face scrunched up and she rolled onto her side. Slowly again, he brought the blankets over her without touching them to her body. Once he had the blanket held just over her neck, he let it fall slowly down atop her. The blanket covered her body—but still he could make out her ample curves despite the blanket—and only her head popped out. Good; she’d be warm tonight.
He realized then that his erection was gone. All he’d needed to do was take care of her it seemed.
***
He dreamt again of his mate. She was close this time, so damn close. But she was shrouded in fog, so still he had no idea what she looked like.
As always, he could not control himself within the dream. Yet this time dream-Seth had manned up, and he walked faster to c
atch up to his mate.
The closer he got, the thicker the fog became, until soon his mate was nothing but a silhouette with plunging curves. He reached her side, and dream-Seth didn’t dare to turn and face her, but he took hold of her hand instead. Feeling her hand cupped in his was pure bliss, and he needed nothing more. For a time. Soon though Seth and his mate craved more contact, and the mist had become so thick that they could no longer see the path in front of them. So they stopped, and wordlessly they embraced. It was impossible to hold her in his arms without kissing her, and so he kissed her. His body sighed relief as he felt her lips lock with his and their warm tongues massaged each other. Soon his hands grasped at her, and he felt full and voluptuous flesh filling both his hands. She was warm and wonderful, and as he squeezed her, she moaned and nuzzled up against him. He took in deep whiffs of her, but he could smell no hint of bear. Was his mate a human?
Unbearable Heat (The Grizzly Next Door 2) Page 4