Wild and Free (The Three #3)(14)

Unfortunately, he didn’t answer that way.

I watched his body brace as I heard his lips say “Shit.”

I threw the covers back and jumped out of bed, leaning toward him, shouting, “Wrong answer!”

“Delilah—”

I interrupted whatever he was going to say by raising my arm and throwing the toothbrush at him. It bounced off his chest and landed on the floor as I started yelling.

“You fed from someone you f*cked and you did that yesterday! The day you met me!” He lifted his hands like he was going to touch me, so I threw one of mine out, batting his away, shouting, “Don’t touch me!”

“I didn’t know you yesterday,” he pointed out.

“So?” I snapped.

“Take a breath, Delilah,” he ordered.

“Fuck that,” I retorted, then demanded, “Why do you have an extra toothbrush?”

“You don’t want the answer to that,” he answered.

“Ding, ding, ding!” I yelled. “Wrong answer again!” Then I kept going. “Did I sleep in a bed last night where you f*cked other women?”

“It won’t happen again,” he stated.

Oh my God!

“Damn straight it won’t!” I shot back loudly.

“Even if it’s to my peril, I think it’s pertinent to point out at this juncture that you’re in a serious f*cking jealous rage and I haven’t even kissed you yet.”

I snapped my mouth shut.

He watched me do this before he grinned.

My stomach flipped over.

Oh yeah, he was beautiful.

“You wake up in a bad mood all the time or just when you think of me bangin’ another bitch?” he asked.

Needles pierced through my brain at his last four words, the pain so severe, I flinched and felt nausea roil up my throat.

“Hey,” his voice came soft at me. Soft and close.

I opened my eyes and saw him in my space, his face dipped to mine.

“What’s the matter with me?” I whispered, my recent uncontrollable and totally irrational behavior filtering through my conscious, freaking me out.

“You get you’re mine?” he asked back instead of giving me an answer.

I was not ready to commit to that verbally so I just stared at him.

He let that go but kept talking.

“If you’re mine, I’m yours. Not even gonna think of another man’s hands on you, much less anything else.” His jaw tensed even as he continued, talking mostly between his teeth. “Tear the room apart if I did.”

“This is freakadelic, Abel, and not in the good way freakadelic can be.”

His head twitched as his brows drew together.

“Freakadelic?” he asked.

I nodded once. “And not in a good way.”

He shook his head, but his features softened, most specifically his mouth.

Oh man.

Definitely.

Unbelievably.

Beautiful.

Uh-oh.

“I’m here,” he stated.

“I can see that,” I replied.

“And you’re here.”

“That I am,” I confirmed unnecessarily.

His face dipped closer. “We’re together, Delilah, nothin’ else matters.”

At that, I pulled in a soft breath, and as I did, his eyes dropped to my mouth as if he could hear it even though it was silent.

They moved back to mine. “Now you got ten minutes. I get time today, I’ll put up a curtain or somethin’, give you some privacy while we’re here. But until then, I’ll give you the room.”

After saying that, he turned, moved to the kitchen, flipped on the light switch that illuminated that space, then he went to the door and out of it, giving me the room.

It was then I realized he was talking about the bathroom area.

I bent to retrieve the toothbrush that caused my first-thing-in-the-morning psycho behavior and hurried to the bathroom area, not about to waste my opportunity for some privacy for my morning business.

I took care of it, including washing my hands, brushing my teeth, and splashing water on my face, before I turned to the room, still drying my face with a clean hand towel I’d grabbed from the shelves.

It was then I spied my purse and my body grew solid.

I stared at my purse over the hand towel I had pressed to my face as all the events of last night washed over me, every freaking whacked-out, impossible-but-they-still-happened one.

He’d saved my life. He might have saved me from getting raped, but he’d definitely saved my life.

He’d protected me, and of an instinct I didn’t know I had, I did what I could to protect him.

We’d both nearly died last night, and the last thing I knew before showering and hitting the sack was that he was out with his friends hunting a f*cking werewolf.

But before he came home, he found my purse.

He found my purse.

Something I hadn’t noticed, even if I couldn’t believe for an instant I didn’t, came clear in that moment. It was so enormous, I dropped the towel and stumbled to the armchair, leaning a hand heavily into it, taking my weight in my arm, holding myself up, my eyes never leaving my purse.

It was gone.

“Holy shitoly, it’s gone,” I whispered.

I’d lived with it since I could remember. “It” being what my mother was convinced made me nuts. It convinced her enough to make me go see psychologists, three of them, all of them declaring I was attention seeking and, due to that, had an eating disorder and needed long-term psychological care and medication.