Beauty Dates the Beast(10)

Sara trembled slightly as she stared down at the bed, knowing she couldn’t get into it and relax. Knowing that our being here wasn’t a full reprieve, that in the next room was a man who could give away everything we had worked so hard to conceal. As I watched, she rubbed her arms. They were covered in goose pimples, a sure sign that she was about to shift due to stress.

I waved a hand to get her attention, then gestured at the connecting door. “I’m going to go sleep with Beau,” I mouthed. “You take this bed.”

Her eyes went wide with shock and she forgot to whisper. “Bath, what—”

I cut her off with a quick wave of my hand, then mouthed, “Not like that!” I moved closer to her to explain my plan. “I’ll just tell him that you snore and I won’t be able to sleep. It’s perfect, because if I sleep in the same bed as him we’ll have the same scent, and he won’t suspect a thing.”

It was a perfect plan, but it wasn’t why I wanted to sleep next to him. I wanted to sleep next to him because the very thought made me shiver with excitement.

“Bath, no.” Sara mouthed the protest. “What if he’s a creep?”

I shook my head. “He’s not a creep,” I whispered back. “He’s nice. He won’t do anything.” I decided not to mention the whole “in heat” thing.

She didn’t look convinced, but I saw her gaze sneak back to the bed, and she sighed. “I can sleep on the floor,” she began, but my eye roll cut her off.

She sat down on the foot of the bed, then gave me a weak thumbs-up that I returned. When she was freshly showered and wrapped in the bathrobe, I flicked the lights off, then closed the door behind me, stepping back out into the hall.

A loud, fake snore began to rise from the room, so I took a deep breath and knocked on Beau’s door.

He opened it a few moments later, his hair tousled, chest bare. My gaze went immediately to the low-slung plaid sleep pants around his waist, noticing the dark trail of hair that crept down his abdomen.

“Hi, again,” he said.

I jerked my head up, caught staring. “Oh. Hi.”

“Something wrong?”

Not in the slightest, I thought as warmth spread through my body. I gestured at our room. “I hate to ask, but my sister snores and I thought I might sleep with you.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Sleep in the same room as you,” I amended quickly. “We could put pillows between us or something. And it’ll give us a chance to … talk.”

“I can get another room,” he began.

“I’d rather stay with you,” I said. “It’s not a come-on. I just feel safer with you in the room, if that’s all right.”

He stepped aside to let me in. “Of course.”

Ever the gentleman, Beau immediately offered me a spare set of pajamas, and I took a quick shower and brushed my teeth with the complimentary toothbrush. When I emerged the room was empty, with a note that Beau had gone to get extra pillows from the front desk.

He returned a short time later. The click of the lock on the door was the only thing that let me know that he’d come back; other than that, he moved as silently as a cat. Hah.

I had already prepared the bed for his return. Pillows were stacked in the middle and I’d wrapped myself in one of the extra blankets, leaving him the sheet and the duvet. His lips twitched at the sight, but he said nothing. He simply put the extra pillows down and clicked the light off.

“I thought we were going to talk,” I reminded him.

The other side of the mattress dipped with Beau’s weight as he chuckled. “My mouth works just fine in the dark, Bathsheba. I imagine yours does, too.”

Now that was a blatant double entendre. My heart pounded with nervous excitement. Oddly enough, I was a little breathless at his pursuit. Would he shove the pillows aside and take me into his arms? Kiss me senseless?

I squirmed a little at the thought and forced myself not to think such things. I had told him this would be innocent, and he had agreed. Why was I fantasizing about him ravishing me? I rolled over on my side, facing away from Beau, and tried to relax. It was a near-impossible task—my body was utterly conscious of the man who lay so close to me.

I tried to think of something to say. After all, the premise of my being here was that I wanted to talk to him, right? So I needed to talk.

One arm snaked out and grabbed me by the waist, pulling me across the bed. Instead of the wall of pillows I expected to meet, I slid across the sheets and bumped into his chest. “Shhh,” he said softly in my ear, his breath warm. Hot snakes of desire coiled through me.

“So tell me,” he whispered quietly in my ear. “Who would want to kill Sara?” His thumb began to stroke my arm in a rather distracting, shivery pattern.

I stilled in his arms, shocked by the rush that crept over my skin. It took me a moment to recover, and then I realized what he was asking. Lots and lots of people probably wanted to kill Sara, but I couldn’t tell him that. I feigned ignorance. “What do you mean?”

“Whoever was in the house.” He pulled me closer until my backside was spooned against his front. The breath stole out of my lungs at the warmth that flooded through me. His arms enveloped me, and huddled next to him, I felt like the smallest, daintiest woman in the world rather than my five-foot-ten self. It was pretty close to heaven.

“The intruder?” I asked. “No one who knows Sara wants to kill her.”

It was all those wolves that didn’t know her that were the problem.

I could feel his warm breath against my ear and neck. “Any ex-boyfriends or angry lovers?”

I was silent. The only ex-boyfriend she had was a dead one.

I knew he was dead because I’d shot him.

“No angry lovers,” I said. “Sara’s not seeing anyone. Do you think she was the target?”

I could feel his chest moving with every breath. His hand slid off my arm and down my waist, then across the cradle of my hips in a very intimate embrace. “Would someone be after you, then?”

He was making it damn hard to concentrate. I struggled to gather my thoughts and shook my head. “Not unless I’ve pissed off the bookkeeping mafia. We’re dangerous people, you know.”

“Shhh. Keep your voice down,” he said, then bit my earlobe gently.

That playful caress made my entire body flare, and I flexed my hips back against his instinctively. A small whimper rose in my throat.

I heard his groan in my ear, and his spread hand flexed across my belly. “Did you like that?” he murmured, and repeated the action. His teeth scored against the edge of my earlobe, and I felt his tongue flick against my earring. “Shall I tell you how sexy you look wearing nothing but my pajamas?” Nip, nip.

Dear God, this was the best thing I’d ever felt. Why in the world was I still a virgin? My hand covered his, my fingers pulsing in time with his, kneading the flesh of my stomach as well. I felt his cock against my backside, hard and obvious, and began to entertain some very naughty thoughts.

But I couldn’t. I removed his hand from my belly and could have wept. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Beau.”

He chuckled as I tried to move my head. He was lying on my still-damp hair. “Who says we have to sleep?”

I jerked on my hair and he moved, leaning over me instead of next to me. His breath fanned across my neck. Though I was free now, I made no attempt to move, excited and quivering. What would he do?

To my surprise, Beau leaned over me and bit my collarbone. Too low to be a vampire bite at the carotid, but I felt the definite scrape of teeth at the base of my neck, and then the sensual slide of his tongue over my flesh.

It felt so good that I wasn’t able to contain my moan of pleasure, and when his tongue stroked over the sensitive spot again, my hand twined in his hair to hold him in place, encouraging him to do it again. With every stroke of his tongue, a whimper of enjoyment slid from my throat.

“Shhh,” he whispered against my ear before nibbling at it again. “You’re going to wake up the neighbors.”

Through the wall, I could hear Sara fake-snore loudly.

I froze.

What was I doing? I wanted to thank Sara for the obvious reminder, and smack her on the head for interrupting. As smoking-hot as Beau was, he was a shifter, and off-limits in more ways than he could imagine. He also just wanted someone to slake his needs while he was in heat.

My sister was probably scarred for life, listening to me make out with Beau. My hand went to his face and I pushed him away. I felt Beau’s snort of amusement against my fingers, but he took the hint and backed off, returning to his side of the bed.

There, he grabbed my hand, then pressed a kiss to my palm. “We’ll talk in the morning, Bathsheba. Get some sleep.”

“Good night,” I whispered back. I lay there, awake and breathing hard for long minutes. My body still thrummed and my legs felt curiously liquid. Just from a nip or two at the neck and ear.