Seer: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves Book 8) (11 page)

Chuckling, he laced his fingers behind his head and shifted to the exact center of the bed, forcing her to move along with him.

“I can’t tell if you’re pleased or displeased about that,” she said.

“Maybe a little of both.”

She made a small motion to get off him, but his reflexes were better—
faster
. He grabbed her wrists, placed her hands back on his cock, and got them moving up and down.

“I don’t want to have sex with anyone else, Leo, but you’ve been ignoring me.”

“I haven’t been ignoring you.”

“Yes you have. You’ve been neglecting your mate, and I let you, because I thought you needed time and space. That wasn’t really what you needed, was it? You needed someone to talk to you. You needed more words, more reassurance. Squeeze me harder, baby. You’re not gonna break me.”

She tightened her grip around him—hardly punishing, but infinitely more stimulating.

“I should have been talking to you in all that time. Lubricating you with my buttery voice.”

She rolled her eyes, but he caught the flush of her cheeks, even in the room’s dim light. The surge of her arousal hit his nose with the power of a prizefighter’s punch, urging him on. He had no problem with giving her dirty talk, but he wanted to give her real talk, too.

“Petra was right,” he said. “I should have been telling you all the things you needed to hear. Not promises, but truths. I should have been telling them to you over and over again, because you needed to hear them. You needed time to believe them.”

“Maybe I still don’t believe them.”

“And that’s fine, but here we are, anyway. We’re touching, and that’s a start. You like touching me, don’t you?”

“I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t.”

“You’re touching me like you’ve never had a chance before.”

“I haven’t.”

“You’ve had two months to take chances.”

She groaned and loosened her grip on him slightly. “I don’t mean just with you. And I don’t want to talk about—about
him
.”

“So don’t talk about him. I’ll talk, and you can tell me if I’m wrong.”

She grimaced.

He was going to talk, anyway. “You got fucked by a man you didn’t get to touch, and you’ve never touched anyone else.”

“I just lay there until he was done. I didn’t want to touch him.”

That confession made Arnold want to spit nails, and he was glad there was an entire state between him and Samuel. Arnold would do everything he could to ruin the man if he ever saw him. For him, it’d be a matter of honor. Samuel had offended Arnold’s mate, and Arnold didn’t care that he hadn’t even met her yet. She was always meant to be his. Fated to be.

“You didn’t want to touch him,” he said after pulling in a calming breath, “but you’re touching me.”

“I
want
to.”

“I’m not stopping you. Touching me is your right.”

“It is?”

“
Mmm
.” He gave her a nudge. “Tell me a story, Leonora.”

“Ugh.” She rolled her eyes and unhanded him.

He put her hands right back where they’d been and got them moving again. “Tell me a story about what you want to do to me. I’m here. My body’s here for your pleasure. Cost of admission to this playground is just your words.”

“Why are you so mean to me?”

He chuckled and fisted the ends of her hair again. “I’m
so
, so mean, aren’t I?” He tugged her down, and she did that little sigh again. “Give me a kiss, and then start talking.”

“Talking? Oh. I’m good at that, supposedly.”

Leo was stalling, but Arnold didn’t seem to mind, and the stalling was quite nice. She’d been staring wantonly at his lips for months, and she was finally getting to kiss him. Kissing was easier than talking, even if she wasn’t what she would consider a champion smoocher by any stretch of the imagination. She couldn’t remember Samuel ever kissing her. He likely found such a tenderly intimate thing to be perverse.

Leo stuck her tongue farther into Arnold’s mouth and threaded her fingers through his hair.

I’m happily perverse.

She sipped him, tasted his lips, let her tongue tangle with his, and ate every little noise of pleasure that sounded from his throat.

Down below, her body squirmed and writhed on top of his. She was riding his leg like some sort of sex-starved beast, and she remembered that she sort of was.

Awkward.

“Kissing you is nice,” he said when she’d accidentally given him a moment’s respite. “But I asked you to do something else.”

She cleared her throat and landed a few more light kisses across the stubbled line of his jaw. “You hadn’t given me a chance.”

“I said ‘
and then
.’ You did one thing. Now do the other.”

“You’re bossy.”

“You like bossiness from me, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. You know my brand of bossiness isn’t the same as what you were used to. You do what I ask because you want to. Sure, at first, you may resist because you’re one of the most contrary wolves I’ve ever met, but you follow along as soon as you think I believe whatever we’re doing was your idea.”

“No more kisses for you, then,” she said quietly.

“Oh, I think you’ll be kissing me plenty.”

She bit down on her bottom lip and kept her words at bay. She was going to say, “No I won’t,” but she would, and she knew it. She’d probably be kissing him every chance she got, both publicly and privately.

“Come on,” he cooed. He slid his hands from their perches on her hips and up the sides of her ribs, his dark gaze pinning her speculatively. “Don’t forget about that cost of admission.”

She swallowed hard, and then licked her dry lips. “I—I don’t know how.”

“Just tell me what you want to do to me.” He inched his thumbs up to bracket her breasts, and all the air in her body flowed out in one shameful
whoosh
. “Or what you want me to do to you.”

“That would be easier,” she said quietly.

“Why?”

“Because I have no idea what I’m doing. I should be embarrassed to admit that, but I think you would have figured that out on your own quickly enough.”

“Okay. So there’s a learning curve. Granted, it’s not much of one. If sex was so hard, the human species would have died out ages ago.”

“Sex is easy, but making it worth having isn’t.”

“In my opinion, all sex is worth having, but I could see why you’d disagree.” He eased up the hem of her shirt and pressed his hands to her belly.

Her abs clenched beneath his touch, and he slid his rough palms upward without pause until he covered her tender breasts with his large hands.

She curled her toes, and, reflexively, grabbed his wrists. “Um. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m, um…”

“Soft and insanely touchable?”

She forced another swallow down her constricted throat and let go of his wrists. “I was going to say nursing.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I want to touch you. I want to make you squirm, and you’ll squirm because you like the touch, but are afraid of what’ll happen if you let me have my way.”

Oh.

“See how easy that is?” He nudged down the cups of her bra and massaged the undersides of her breasts.

She kept her teeth clamped and gaze on the ceiling, both terrified and titillated.

“I told you what I wanted,” he said. “Now you do the same.”

“What if I don’t know?”

“You don’t have to know all at once. Start with one thing, and then think of the next. For instance, I’m going to take your shirt off, and your bra, and I’m going to put you on your back and try to find where I bit you when I was in my wolf form. I think I know, but maybe I won’t take the most direct route to get there for my confirmation. Maybe I’ll take some detours.”

She’d been so busy watching his luscious lips move that she didn’t notice where he’d had his fingers and how they’d been poised to pinch.

At the startling jolts to her nipples, she dug her fingers into his chest and snarled at him. He’d nearly launched her off the bed. “How dare you?”

“You like that,” he whispered. “You want me to do that again, or should I move on in my narrative?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the one telling stories.”

“So go on, then.” He dropped his hands from the inside of her shirt and laced his fingers together behind his head.

Leo didn’t like backing down from a dare, so she pulled her nails out of his flesh and sat up a little so she could stare him down. “You’re not always going to get your way.”

“Is that what’s happening right now? I’m getting my way?”

“I think you are.”

He shook his head slightly. “No, baby, if I were really having my way right now, you’d be on your knees facing the headboard, my cock would be inside you, and you’d be saying my name like a curse word into the mattress.”

“Oh, dear lord.”

He shrugged. “Real talk. I don’t see you running.”

She blinked at him and, instinctively, snarled again. Her inner wolf was feeling a little petulant.

“Still not running,” he said.

“This is my house.
My
bed.”

He pushed up an eyebrow. “Are you telling me to get out?”

She had no good quip for that, so she kept her mouth shut.

“See. I don’t think you are. I think you like me being in your bed, even if you don’t want to admit it. You want to play house with me.”

Lucifer probably hadn’t had a smile as charming as Arnold’s.

“You’re deluded,” she muttered, even as she idly traced circles around his nipples.

“You can admit it, Leonora. You can say that you like the idea of living with someone—of there being someone around, making noise and messes. Maybe you didn’t think you’d ever want a man in your house after what you went through with Samuel, but you do, don’t you?”

She hung her head rather than answering.

Arnold was right. But…he usually was, and not just because he was some kind of weird psychic. She was probably easier for him to read than one of Kinzy’s squeaky baby books.

“It’s okay to want that,” he said. “There’s no reason having me here will obliterate your ambitions to live independently. You can still get satisfaction from that, but you can let me in, too. I’m not going to get in the way of you accomplishing things on your own. I just want to be there to see you do them.”

“I’m not used to that.”

“I know. That doesn’t mean what you want is impossible. Independence and companionship aren’t mutually exclusive. I think they’re complimentary, otherwise Petra and I wouldn’t have survived being around each other for as long as we did.”

“I want you here.” Leo’s heart stuttered at the words having flown from her mouth. “I mean—you want me, right? Not just because the wolf in you says that I’m open and available?”

“The wolf in me has a lot to do with me wanting you. Not gonna lie about that. If I weren’t a wolf, I probably never would have been sent to you. And, yeah, that part of me likes you a lot and wants to keep you, but the human part of me is just as invested in us paring off.”

“Alpha always says that every wolf likes having his own little pack.”

Arnold shrugged again. “He’s right. There is a draw to going home and having dominion over something. A place to belong, and people who belong to you.”

Belong
.

The word triggered a reflexive shift away from him. She wasn’t going to belong to any man ever again.
That
was what she hadn’t wanted.

“Leonora,
please
, be still.”

“I’m not going back to that place again, Arnold. I’m not gonna be somewhere where people think my value is based on the sum of my body parts, and that I’m not good for anything else but making babies and washing dishes. I’m not gonna—”

“Leo, you’re misreading me.”

“Don’t you dare try to minimize what I’m feeling. I—”

“I don’t want to make a habit of interrupting you, baby, but you
are
overreacting. You’re responding to my words and not the intent behind them. You want to be mad at me because that’s easier for you than being compliant, right?”

“You’re just trying to soften what’s already been said.”

“No. I’m not. Once I put words out there, I don’t take them back. I own them, and will humbly apologize if I’m in the wrong, but I didn’t say anything wrong. Stop trying to run from me. You don’t like the words I used? Give me different ones.”

“Doesn’t matter what words you use. They’d mean the same thing.”

“What do you think I’m trying to tell you?”

“You want to own me.”

Arnold closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Leo. Just—
no
.”

“That’s what you said.”

“No. I said you’d belong to me. I understand why you’d interpret my words that way, but there are other ways to belong to people.”

The part of her that was wolf was calm, and perhaps even a little bored by the conversation. That part of Leo didn’t think Arnold had any ill intentions. If he had, he would have probably demonstrated them weeks or months before. He’d been incredibly patient, and patience was so rare in wolves.

Try harder, Leo
.

She closed her eyes, counted to three, and swallowed hard.

“Tell me what you meant,” she whispered.

“I think you know already. You can belong to people or things without being owned by them. Just like we belong to this pack. The pack doesn’t own us. The pack doesn’t tell us how to behave, or who we should be with. The pack doesn’t demand that we ignore the people we innately are. Families are the same way, right?”

Leo opened her eyes and fixed her gaze on his pleading stare. He wasn’t asking her for much.
Hadn’t
asked her for much, except for a chance to get close. No one in the past had bothered to ask. They just took.

And took. And took.

Ask, not assume, Leo
.

“When you say,” she started haltingly, “that I belong to you, what do you mean?”

“The usual stuff. That I’m responsible for you. That I care about you. That I’m
invested
in your wellbeing, and your happiness.”

“I’m afraid the happiness will go away,” she whispered. “I’m just now starting to get used to it.”

“Oh, Leo, why would I do anything to make it stop?” He dragged the pad of his thumb across her lower lip and wore a soft smile. “I like seeing you laugh and grin. I like seeing how the people around you respond to your brightness. Your happiness is infectious.”

“My father always told me I’d get myself in trouble if I kept drawing attention to myself.”

“Well, he doesn’t get to see you smile anymore. His loss.”

Loss. That’s right. I’m worth being missed.

She’d never let herself believe she was worth anything.

She choked back a sob and nodded slowly.

“They all lost me,” she said. “They’re too stuck in their ways to change anything, even if everyone would be happier for it.”

“And would me belonging to you make you happy?”

Leo batted her sloppy bangs out of her eyes, stalling. She didn’t want to tell him. Was too afraid.

“
Leo
.”

“Dang it.” She groaned. “There’s no good answer to that. If I tell you yes, I become a possessive shrew. If I tell you no, I’d be—”

Lying. I’d be a lying-ass-liar
.

“Why lie?” she said quietly.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“This isn’t what I thought I wanted, and I’m afraid that accepting this huge freakin’ change means I didn’t know what I wanted in the first place. Or that I’m fickle and indecisive.”

“But how could you possibly be expected to know what you want when you haven’t been exposed to all the potential options? You can’t want what you don’t know exists.”

And she hadn’t known people like Arnold existed. If she had, she would have wanted him for sure. She would have ran sooner to go looking for him.

“How’d you get so smart?” she asked in a quavering voice.

Arnold settled his hands on her waist and just looked at her for a long moment.

The compulsion to try to tidy up her hair or rub her face was so strong, but she kept her hands still and let him look.

“You and Petra can argue about whether or not I’m smart,” he said after a minute. “I don’t know if I am. I just do what makes sense, and try not to hurt anyone in the process.”

“Don’t hurt me.”

Everything coming out of her mouth was admittedly pretty pitiful, but if he wanted her to talk, she was going to tell him what she needed him to hear. She didn’t want to belong to things that would hurt her.

“I can’t promise that I never will,” he said, “but I’ll do everything I can not to hurt you intentionally. People aren’t perfect, but I won’t stop trying to be. For you.”

The truth wasn’t extinct yet. Arnold harbored it, and wondered if that was part of the reason she’d been trying so hard to avoid him. The truth was scary, but she believed him.
Trusted
him, as much she did Mrs. Carbone and any of the other lady wolves, and she was tired of running away from him. They all had something good with their mates, and Arnold was offering Leo a shot at the same. He was offering her a true mate, and not just treating her like a woman who’d been assigned to him.

She eased his hands down to her waistband and helped him wriggle her pajama bottoms down her hips. “You wanted me to talk, so here you go.” She knelt up so he could slide her pants to her knees. As she carefully pulled her legs from each hole, she said, “I want you to touch me like you see me as an individual, and like you know that I can feel things. I want you to look me in my eyes sometimes, so I know you remember that I’m still here.”

She tossed her pants onto the floor along with her panties, and then retook her seat atop his legs.