Oaths and Omissions (Monsters & Muses #3)(37)

Her arms are crossed over her chest, pushing her tits up obscenely, and she’s scowling. If she’s at all startled by the fact that I’m in nothing but a towel, she does a fantastic job covering it.

“Can I help you?” I ask, turning my chin down to meet her gaze. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for brunch?”

“What are you doing?”

My eyebrows knit together. “Ah… I believe we call this bathing?”

“No, I mean…” She trails off, walking backward to the partially closed bedroom door. Pushing it open with her bum, she sweeps her arm to the side, brows arching into her hairline. “With all of this. Why did you go back and buy this stuff?”

Following her into the room, I look at the bed where she’s emptied the contents of the thrift store shopping bags. Articles of clothing and trinkets are piled up in the middle of the duvet, and the bags are discarded on the floor.

She clutches the receipt in one hand, shaking it in my direction. “Honestly, Jonas, what the fuck?”

Holding my towel closed, I narrow my eyes at her tone. “Are you seriously mad right now? Over a kind gesture?”

“Was it just a kind gesture?” She hooks her fingers, putting air quotes around the last two words. “Or are you trying to bribe me into sleeping with you?”

The question catches me so off guard that my chin actually snaps back, like the recoil on a bobblehead toy. She’s seething, her tanned skin flushed and clammy, genuinely pissed off that I bought the stuff she’d been halfway through ringing up before she fled the store.

According to the cashier, at least.

Taking a deep breath, I hold one hand up in her direction. “You’ve got it all wrong, love.”

“People don’t just drop hundreds of dollars on strangers for no reason,” she snaps, balling the receipt up and throwing it at me.

The wad of paper bounces off my wet chest, and she blanches as she watches it fall, her eyes seeming to get stuck on my exposed skin. Clearing her throat, she crosses her arms again, cocking a hip as if waiting for an explanation.

Amusement filters into my blood, and I inch closer. “Still strangers, are we?”

She swallows. Hard. I track the movement, my eyes desperate for the image.

“We… our circumstances don’t mean we’re close.”

One of my brows arches. “Perhaps we don’t know each other’s favorite songs and worst nightmares, but you can be soul mates and still not be aware of those things. Some connections are physical, love. Tangible. You know them when you feel them.”

I walk closer, and her jaw tenses. Spine straightens.

Bloody hell. Defiance lines the rims of her irises, blazing like tall flames in her gaze. They lick at my skin, scorching a path to my cock that leaves me a bit light headed.

“For instance,” I say, lifting my hand slowly. She watches the motion from the corner of her eye, keeping her face forward even as I skim her side, smoothing my fingers over the silk material of her top. “Do you feel hollow when we kiss?”

“What?” she breathes.

“The other day in the kitchen, when you had my tongue in your mouth. Did it feel like kissing a stranger?”

Circling her like she’s a deer and I’m the hungry wolf, I stop just behind her, letting my voice dip an octave as I bend to speak in her ear.

“When you were thinking about grinding your sweet little cunt on my cock, did that feel foreign? Wrong? Strange? Or was it just right, just crazy enough that you were as tempted as I was to spread your thighs and let me bury myself between them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “It was just a kiss.”

“Just a kiss,” I repeat, chuckling darkly. My fingers find her hip, and my thumb draws slow circles over the waistband of her sleep shorts. “So, you don’t think about it when you touch yourself at night?”

Silence. My thumb pauses, slipping beneath the elastic to seek warm skin. Behind the flap of my towel, my cock jerks to life, despite having been drained less than ten minutes ago.

“No.” Lenny draws in a shaky breath. “I don’t think about that.”

“Right.” I hum, moving forward so my pelvis fits against her backside, the shift causing me to flatten my hand and press lightly against her hip. “What do you think about, then?”

“I-I don’t,” she stammers, her breathing growing shallow. My thumb flicks against her skin, my hand sliding up until I can feel the weight from the underside of her breast pushing back. The swell rests against my forefinger, and my thumb twitches, grazing the edge of her nipple.

She gasps, and I want to crush her to me. Cover her mouth with mine so every sound she makes after this belongs to me, as well.

But I don’t.

I resist, despite the ache in my balls and the lust twisting my gut.

“You’re lying.”

Scraping my teeth over the shell of her ear, I let my fingers curl into her flesh, squeezing her tit and reveling in how it’s the perfect size for my palm. Like she was bloody made for me.

Her back begins to bow, her hips pushing into me as if searching for friction, but then she catches herself. Clears her throat and tries to relax. Closes her eyes.

“I wouldn’t need to bribe you.”

“No?”