I closed my eyes and hunkered down in my chair, enjoying my buzz. The world spun around again, and I was moving through subtly shifting noises into silence. Quiet voices, deep and masculine. A cheerful ding and more movement, then the swish of doors opening and closing and soft, hesitant fingers caressing my skin.
“The pizza’s here.”
The scent of hot tomato sauce, pepperoni, and bread wafted to me, and my eyes popped open. I was sitting on a gargantuan leather sofa wearing my underwear and not a stitch more. In front of me, a square coffee table rested on a brightly colored geometric rug, its dark finish gleaming in the low lighting. I squinted past it. A high-end entertainment center occupied the opposite wall, built around a massive LED TV. Movie cases were stacked in every nook and cranny of the thing.
This was not Remy’s penthouse.
A door shut, and a minute later, Tangi walked into the room carrying two pizza boxes. “Movie?”
I scrubbed a hand over my head, tried to put two and two together, and failed. “Where am I?”
“My apartment.”
He disappeared into an arched doorway to my right and came back out carrying plates, a roll of paper towels, and two pops.
“Bathroom?” I asked.
He froze two steps away from the coffee table.
I didn’t cup my erection, but I didn’t have to. I was pretty sure ol’ tent pole could be seen about a mile away. “I need a minute,” I said as gently as I could.
He nodded, set the load he was carrying down. “I’ll help.”
My imagination shot straight to his mouth sucking me down, that ring on his lip scraping the underside of my dick, and that was the last straw. An orgasm roared through me. I shoved my hand into my underwear and stroked it out, and cum splattered all over my torso in hot, messy streams. Fuck. Oh, fuck, Tangi was probably gonna freak, and I…
The mere thought of his clever little hands anywhere nearby rolled me into another wave of pleasure. I rode it out, gritting my teeth against the need to beg him to put his mouth on me, and finally, it ebbed and faded and the last bit of cum dribbled out of me.
Tangi was gone.
I thumped the back of my head into the sofa. What the fuck had I been thinking? Ok, so, I’d been about two steps away from losing it anyway, but I could’ve reined my fucking imagination in and had the courtesy to come in the bathroom, not in front of the victim of a goddamn sexual assault.
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
The sofa shifted beside me. I jerked around, facing Tangi, and flinched. Christ. Two back-to-back orgasms hadn’t been enough to temper the one-two punch of Paolo and Remy’s blood on top of Eric’s every day for a straight week.
Tangi held a wet towel out to me. His eyes were on his knees, nowhere near meeting mine. I took the towel from him, swiped myself clean, and tried really, really hard to ignore the tantalizing scent of his cologne, an odd combination of greening forests and loamy earth.
“My uncle is close to your size.”
I paused in mid-swipe. Tangi had the most endearing lisp, so slight most people wouldn’t notice it. Unfortunately, my dick did. Predictably, that lisp went straight to its head. “Yeah?”
“He leaves clothes here. Shorts?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He eased away, fluidly silent. I wiggled out of my wet boxer briefs and folded them up, hiding the evidence of my mishap. Tangi walked in, his strides graceful and sure, and handed me a pair of black running shorts. He sat down beside me, like I wasn’t naked and still so hard it hurt, and opened up the boxes.
I squirmed into the shorts as fast as I could. “Pepperoni and meat lovers. My faves.”
“Eric said.”
“You could’ve gotten something different.”
He hunched one bare shoulder, let it drop.
I tamped down on my impatience. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I hadn’t know Tangi even that long. “It’s ok to look at me. I’m not going to do…that to you.”
His mouth turned down at one corner and the ring shifted across his lip. “Why not?”
I huffed out a laugh. “Seriously? I saw the way you reacted upstairs.”
He rolled his shoulders, less of a shrug than an ok, you caught me. “Movie?”
I sighed. Yeah. Rome was gonna need more than a day. “Action?”
“Will Smith?”
I studied the movies stacked haphazardly around the TV. “How about Independence Day?”
He smiled, slow and sweet, and I nearly groaned. Yeah, I had a type, short, dark, and intelligent, and I was beginning to suspect that Tangi met all three criteria perfectly.
God save me from sexy geeks.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tangi put the movie in, and we chowed down on pizza, wiping out most of both boxes as aliens invaded Earth, bent on mayhem and destruction. Man, we were all the time getting fucked in movies because of our resources, weren’t we?
The buzz in my head dimmed little by little as the night waxed and waned. By the time we finished eating, it had subsided to a dull roar and I was mostly in control of myself again. We paused the movie and cleaned up, me hobbling back and forth using odd pieces of furniture and walls for balance. When we were finished, Tangi cut most of the lights off, and I plopped down on the couch.
He hit play on the menu, then sat down beside me, so close his arm pressed firmly against mine. The onscreen action rolled along, drawing us both into it. After a few minutes, he said softly, “I miss my pack.”
I hesitated, searching through the questions pinging around in my mind for one that wouldn’t push him away. “Why don’t you go back home?”
Tangi’s eyes dropped to his knees and his fingertips dug into his thighs through his pajamas. “Fen.”
I sucked in a deep breath. It didn’t take a lot of brain matter to jump from that single, softly spoken word directly to the worst conclusion, though I hoped like hell I was wrong. “Christ. I’m sorry.”
“I was fourteen.”
My stomach turned over, and the pizza I’d eaten churned and threatened to come back up. Fen working his special brand of torture on a fourteen-year-old kid? Shit. No wonder Tangi hated anything sexual. “Your family didn’t go after him?”
“They tried. He took me…” Tangi swallowed hard. “I can’t go back.”
“Shh, I know. It’s ok.”
I held my free arm out, inviting him to share skin or not, and that’s all it took. He launched himself into my lap and curled up in a ball, and I wrapped myself around him as Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Pullman formulated a plan to save the world.
How long we stayed wrapped around each other, I don’t know. The movie’s menu music ended and looped back to the beginning, waking me. I must’ve dozed off while comforting Tangi. Somehow, we’d ended up sprawled out on the couch, me flat on my back, him on top of me. I groped for the remote in the last place I’d seen it on top of the coffee table and missed.
Tangi stirred. “Time izzit?”
“Don’t know.”
“Mmph.” He braced himself above me and arched his back, stretching sinuously. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Dumping.”
“Yeah, you dumped all right. I think you used up maybe a dozen words. Paolo will be so disappointed.”
His mouth quirked into a small smile. “One more?”
“Why not. Bathroom first, though.”
He jerked his chin to his right. “Back there.”
He climbed off of me, and I staggered around the couch and into a bedroom. King-sized bed, chest of drawers, a bureau supporting another humongous TV. I yawned and stumbled into the bathroom, did my business and washed my hands. A soft tap on the bathroom door startled me. I yanked it open and found Tangi standing stock still, his head bowed, a movie in one hand.
“It’s after midnight,” he said.
And Eric wasn’t down yet. I prodded our bond, got an all’s well back, and relaxed. “Do you need me to clear out?”
“Sure,” I said slowly. “Can we leave the apartment door unlocked?”
“Eric’s got a master keycard.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Holy shit. Remy really is a trusting fucker.”
Tangi’s free hand knotted into a fist. “He hates Oriana.”
Well, that I understood. “I’ll put the movie in.”
Tangi handed it over and slipped past me into the bathroom. I fiddled with his electronics as fact upon new fact turned over in my mind. With all the enemies Oriana had made over the past five decades, why hadn’t anybody taken her out yet? Why hadn’t her enemies banded together and made a stand?
Tangi’s alpha, for instance. I wasn’t stupid enough to judge all alphas by the one I knew, but if a fourteen-year-old kid under his protection had been kidnapped, raped, and tortured, Darien himself would’ve torn the offender into tiny pieces.
The movie popped onto the screen and the studio’s theme music blasted out of the speakers. Serenity. Excellent.
I slipped into bed and propped up on a pillow, my mind still focused on the problem at hand. Maybe the different groups opposing Oriana were still trying to negotiate a plan or something. Though, fuck, fifty years was a long time to spend dickering back and forth. Among the Vampyr? Sure, I could see stuff taking a long time. Vampires could potentially live for centuries or longer, so they were hardly ever in a hurry, but werewolves had a shorter lifespan.
I frowned. At least, I thought they did.
The bathroom door squeaked open, and Tangi walked out, completely nude. His skin was the same color from head to toe, no tan lines, nothing to mar the perfection of a golden honey shade so rich, it tempted the observer to taste him. Another tat covered his left hip, a black line sunburst. A barbell pierced the frenulum of his half-erect penis, bobbing as he walked toward the bed, and I zeroed in on it.
What would it feel like for him to fuck me with his piercing in?
Pleasurable throbs zinged through my anus and every rational thought in my head evaporated.
Tangi flipped the overhead lights off, snagged the remote, and crawled into bed beside me. As he had every single other time he’d been anywhere near me, he cuddled right up, plastering his arm against mine.
I eased an inch away, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be able to smell my arousal through my borrowed shorts and the sheet covering my hips.
He hit play and set the remote on the nightstand, his gaze well away from mine. “You sleep clothed?”
No, I absolutely did not, and I wasn’t talking about the whys of not being nude, either. I scrambled around my mushy, sex soaked brain for something else to say and landed on the questions I’d had before he’d entered the room, naked as the day he was born. “How long do werewolves live?”
His hand crept into mine, one inch at a time. “Born or made?”
“You can make a werewolf?”
“It’s hard.”
“But it can be done.”
“Yes.”
“So which are you?”
His eyelashes swept down and his face turned into my arm. “Born.”
“And you’ll live to be…?”
“Couple of centuries, maybe more.”
Not vampire long, no, but pretty damn long. “What about the made ones?”
“Depends on how strong the maker is.”
“If you made one?”
“I won’t,” he said flatly.
A dozen more questions floated through my head, begging for answers, but I let it drop. Hearing all the sweetness drain out of his voice wasn’t such a great thing. So I resettled myself on the pillow another inch away from him and focused on the movie. Who didn’t love Captain Mal and his oddball crew?
During the first half, we danced around the bed, him scooting closer in tiny increments, me struggling to keep distance between us in a futile effort to calm my body down. It didn’t work. My dick used any and all excuses to stand at attention, the brush of Tangi’s fingers on my arm, the scent of his spicy shampoo, the rhythmic thud of his heartbeat. God in Heaven, the swoosh of his blood through his veins ratcheted my need so high, my fangs punched out of my gums.
Like I needed any more blood.
The last time I tried to ease away, he sat straight up and slipped out of the bed. I snagged the remote and paused the movie.
“Don’t,” he said softly, and then he was gone, padding so quietly out the door into the living room, I couldn’t hear his footsteps against the carpeting.
I waited for him to come back. And waited. The rustle of fabric drifted to me, the creak of leather. There wasn’t enough light in the living room for me to see what he was doing. The apartment fell into dead silence. About fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t come back.
I finally gave up waiting and went into the living room to check on him. He was curled up in a tight ball on the sofa facing the back, his arm folded under his head as a pillow, with a thin, cotton sheet pulled up to his neck. I knelt on the floor beside him and whispered, “You ok?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look ok.” He didn’t so much as shift. I reached a hand out, remembered Paolo’s warning, and dropped my hand to my side. “If I did something to hurt you, I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
He expelled a soft breath. “I miss my pack.”
“You told me.”
Silence.
I rewound the night, searching for clues, for anything that would help me get through to him. He’d been hurt, and bad. His alpha had sent him here to recuperate. He’d exposed his throat, supposedly a sign of submission.
And submission couldn’t happen without trust.
So maybe I’d done something to hurt him and he just couldn’t talk about it, but what? Christ, everything I’d done had been to protect him, not drive him away.
I inhaled a slow breath, released it. “Movies aren’t any fun to watch by yourself.”
He half turned his face toward me. “You wanted to be alone.”
“What? When did I say that?”
“You moved away.”
“Yeah, because I’m…” I nipped that comment in the bud. Sure as hell, my reaction to him wasn’t his problem. “Come back in and finish out the movie with me. It’ll be fun.”
He buried his face in his arm, and my patience snapped. “Look, I don’t know anything about werewolves. Christ, Tangi, you’re only about the third or fourth one I’ve ever met. I don’t know what you need, I don’t know what you want, and I suck at reading body language. If something’s wrong, you need to tell me so I can fix it.”
“Skin,” he blurted out.
The single word cut through my growing irritation, whittling it away. “Skin?”
“Contact.” He hunched his shoulders, drawing them toward his chest. “Physical affection.”
“Oh.” The night’s events shifted and resettled in my mind, and Tangi’s actions suddenly made a lot more sense. Paolo had tried to explain it to me. Skin to skin, he’d said, and like a dummy, I hadn’t connected the dots. “Ooooh.”
“I’m ok here.”
Since he was still curled up in a tiny, little ball and his muscles were so taut, they were on the verge of breaking, I guessed not ok was closer to the truth, maybe even really not ok. And he wouldn’t do anything to fix it, if Paolo could be believed. “I’m going to touch you.”
Tangi nodded slowly, and that was good enough consent for me. I eased the sheet off of his body, tucked him against my chest, and stood. He was light, lighter than Eric, anyway, and stiff as a board. I carried him back into the bedroom, struggling against the weakness lingering in my legs, and tucked him into bed. He balled up facing away from me, in exactly the same position he’d held in the living room.
“Movie?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I switched it on, shucked my shorts, and crawled in behind him, curling around
his frozen form. “Is this ok?”
“Yes.”
It took him a long time to relax against me. As the horrifying truth of the Reavers’ origins played out onscreen, Tangi’s muscles gradually loosened. His legs slid down and fit themselves to mine. His hand inched upward and wedged itself under the arm I’d draped around him. His bottom arched into my hips, rubbing innocently against my hard-on, and I gritted my teeth against the need to press him for more.
When he was melded as close to me as he could be, he sighed and shifted and a soft, pleased growl rumbled out of his chest.
“You like this,” I guessed.
“My beast likes this.”
“What about you?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry about the erection.”
He laughed softly. “I like it.”
“But you’re…” Traumatized, wounded, damaged. I settled for another mumbled, “Sorry.”
He wiggled around, facing me, and tucked himself against my body again. “I recognized you, earlier. My beast did.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Instinct is…what drives us.” He pressed his forehead against my chest, under my chin, and sighed. “You’re safe. You’re familiar.”
“We’ve never met.”
“No. I…” Another sigh and warm, moist breath feathered across my skin. “Can I touch you?”
The pack thing again, contact and affection. I could do that, as long as his hands didn’t wander too far south. Given what he’d been through, it was a good bet they wouldn’t. “Yeah, sure. You can do anything you need to.”
He was on me in a heartbeat, pushing me onto my back, covering me with his slight form. His mouth came down on mine, not possessive or demanding, but sure, purposeful. I let out a surprised yelp and curled my hands into the sheet, and he took advantage, stroking his tongue into my mouth in short, quick dives.
His tongue was pierced. The ball flicked against my tongue, skidded along a fang. Molten heat boiled through me, burning away reason and sense. I cupped his head in one hand and his ass in the other and ground into him, and he moaned and growled and scratched my chest with his fingernails.
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