Chapter Seventeen: Werewolf Ears

His hand moved to my hair, tilting my head back, as he trailed kisses down the column of my neck. His other hand disappeared back into the water, and I felt his fingers brush the sensitive folds between my legs. One finger pushed inside me gently, pumping in and out of me slowly. Torturously. Exquisitely.

"Fuck, Princess. You are so tight," Varul groaned against my neck, like he was the one being tortured.

"Ah!" I moaned. The sensations coursing through me were clouding my senses. I was dimly aware of the cold water and the moonlight and the forest sounds, and none of it mattered because—

Suddenly, he moved. Faster than I could process. One moment I was pressed against his chest and the next I was behind him, his arm sweeping me back, his broad back a wall between me and whatever was beyond the tree line.

"What the—" I sputtered in confusion.

"Varul." A man's voice. Calm, professional, coming from the direction of the trees.

"Darren."

I pressed myself flat against Varul's back, which was, I noted, in the small rational part of my brain that was still functioning, extremely effective as a shield. Broad. Solid. Warm despite the cold water. I could feel the tension in him, controlled and deliberate.

"We have completed the night patrol," Darren continued, with the unhurried tone of a man delivering a report. "The turned ones are already in position at their stations—ah..."

He trailed off, seeming to have noticed then that Varul hadn't been bathing alone. A pause. A short, telling pause.

My face went nuclear. I pressed closer to Varul's back, gripping his arms with both hands, acutely, comprehensively aware that I was naked in a forest pool and that Darren was approximately twenty feet away.

The darkness was thick here. He couldn't see me. Almost certainly couldn't see me. The rational part of my brain ran the numbers on the lighting and came back with a cautiously optimistic report.

I still didn't breathe.

"Good," Varul said. His voice was completely, infuriatingly level. The voice of a man doing nothing unusual whatsoever. "You can return to the tents and rest for the night, Darren."

Another pause. Shorter this time. I had a feeling there was a silent exchange going on between them.

"Your Grace," Darren said, with the deference of a man who knew his place...and underneath it, so faint I almost missed it, the ghost of something that sounded extremely like suppressed amusement. His footsteps retreated and faded into the forest. Gone.

I let out the breath I'd been holding. Varul turned to face me.

"How did you know he was coming?" I asked. "I didn't hear anything."

"I did." He said it simply, like it required no further explanation.

"Werewolf ears?"

A smile ghosted his lips at my question. He cocked his head at me, watching me with a strangely soft expression. "We are known for our stealth," he said finally. "But our hearing picks up the faintest sounds." His eyes moved over me slowly, a deliberate, unhurried survey that started at my face and went down to my nipples, floating above the water. "I would have noticed him considerably earlier."

I swallowed, wondering for the bazillionth time in approximately forty-eight hours, how this man could light me up with just a look. "But?" I prodded breathlessly.

"I was," the survey completed itself, his eyes returning to mine with that dark, steady heat, "distracted." The word landed low in my stomach, and my cunt clenched around nothing.

"Oh," I said. Breathier than intended.

He reached up and cupped my cheek, his thumb tracing slowly across my lips. I held very still. This man could ruin me, and the scary part was that that didn't sound half as bad to me.

"He is a lucky bastard," he said, almost musingly. His thumb gently brushed my lower lip. "It would have been a sad affair to kill my most loyal man."

I blinked. "Kill—"

"If he had seen you."

I stared at him. The word kill sat in the air between us, and I waited for the qualifier — the obviously I'm joking or the figure of speech — and it didn't come. He looked back at me with complete, untroubled calm.

I was disturbed. I was also, and I was not proud of this, seriously turned on. Something that lived in the same complicated territory as the wedding night and the chair and the three seconds of his hand over mine on the reins. Something that had no business existing and existed anyway.

"You would have actually killed him?" I asked incredulously.

He tutted. The sound was quiet, almost patient, like a teacher gently correcting a student who had asked a question that was beneath their ability. His hands found my waist under the water and gripped it possessively.

"Yes, Princess," he answered matter-of-factly. "You are mine. No other man will see you this way." A pause. "I would hack my way through a thousand pack members if I had to."

The silence that followed was enormous. I was breathless. Completely, helplessly breathless — from the words, from his hands, from the specific quality of his voice when he said you are mine, like it was simply a fact about the world that had always been true and required no justification. Then he kissed me. It was searingly hot. The kind of kiss that was a punctuation mark rather than a sentence, the period at the end of everything he'd just said. He pulled back.

The devilish curve of his mouth was back. It was unhurried and satisfied. "I am done playing with you for tonight, Princess," he said. "You should be back in your bed. There is a long journey tomorrow."

And that was that. I tried to quell the disappointment I felt. We waded out of the pool. I caught a glimpse of the rest of him as he stepped out of the water, and I looked away so fast I nearly lost my footing on the bank. Holy smokes. The irony of that was not lost on me. Twenty minutes ago I had been pressed against him like a hungry leech, and now I was averting my eyes like a Victorian novel.

I turned my back and fumbled into my shift, acutely conscious of the sounds of him dressing behind me. The particular silence of someone who was not fumbling at all, because of course he wasn't. I felt his eyes on my back the entire time. I raised my wet hair and tied it above my head, and tossed my blanket once more over my shoulders.

He was dressed. His hair was slightly damp at the ends. He escorted me back to camp in silence, moving through the dark trees with familiarity. I walked beside him and focused on not tripping over roots. At the tent line, he stopped.

I looked at his tent. Looked at him. "Aren't you sleeping?"

"I do not sleep."

"What...?"

"Get some sleep, Princess," he said wryly, and turned and walked back toward the trees before I could ask what that meant, the dark swallowing him between one step and the next.

I stood at my tent entrance and stared at the space where he'd been.

I do not sleep. What did that mean? Did he never sleep? Was that a werewolf thing? If it was, why were the members of his pack currently in their tents?

I finally got into my bedroll, and for several minutes, I stared up at the canvas ceiling. You are mine. I pressed my fingers to the wolf pendant.

Tomorrow, I decided. I would ask my ladies everything they knew about this man. I needed a full briefing. I closed my eyes.

He was the last thing I thought about before I slept. He was, if I was being honest, the only thing I thought about.