8. Fable #2
I laugh. I don’t mean to, the sound just escapes, startled out of me by the absurdity of the whole situation. He smiles at that, a real smile, and something in my chest does an unnecessary flip.
Stop that. Stop reacting to him. He’s a wolf person. A lycan. A…
I’m staring at him again. At his chest, specifically. At the way the dim light from the shop catches the planes of muscle, the ridges of his stomach, the dark trail of hair that leads down to…
“My eyes are up here, sweetheart.”
My gaze snaps up so fast I almost get whiplash. He’s smiling, actually smiling, not just the almost-version, and his whole face has gone warm with what looks dangerously like satisfaction.
“Though I don’t mind the ogling,” he continues, and his voice has dropped lower. Rougher. “Look as long as you like.”
“I wasn’t OGLING.”
“Your pupils are dilated. Your breathing has changed. Your cheeks are flushed.” He takes a step closer, and suddenly the stockroom feels very small. “And I can smell…”
“DON’T finish that sentence.”
“…that you’re not entirely unaffected by this situation.”
And the worst part, the truly unforgivable part, is that being called out doesn’t cool me down.
It makes it worse. Heat pulses low in my belly, my thighs press together entirely without my permission, and I know, I know, he can track every second of it.
The flush. The racing pulse. The slick, humiliating evidence of exactly how unaffected I am not.
Stop wanting him. Stop wanting the naked immortal wolf king standing in your stockroom. This is a solvable problem. People stop wanting things all the time.
I do not stop wanting him.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die of embarrassment in my own stockroom, murdered by mortification, killed by a naked wolf man who can apparently smell my arousal.
“You can’t just…” My voice comes out strangled. “You can’t just say things like that. It’s not fair. I can’t smell you.”
“Would you like to?”
“WHAT?”
“I’m just asking.” His eyes are definitely lighter now, gold bleeding into the gray. “If the sensory information would help you process this situation, I’m happy to provide it.”
“I don’t need to smell you!”
“Are you sure? You seem tense.”
“I’m tense because there’s a NAKED MAN in my STOCKROOM.”
“Would you prefer I put on clothes?”
“YES.”
“I don’t have any clothes here.”
“Then SHIFT BACK and GO HOME.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re still holding your breath every time I move, and your heart is racing, and you look like you’re about to either kiss me or stab me, and I want to know which one it’s going to be.”
I open my mouth to tell him that it’s definitely going to be stabbing, that I would never, ever kiss a naked immortal predator in the back room of my own bookstore, that the very idea is absurd and offensive and…
He steps closer.
Close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his skin. Close enough that I can smell him now, even with my inferior human senses, pine and something wilder underneath, a scent that makes me think of forests and moonlight and things that run through the dark.
His thumb traces my lower lip.
Just that. Just a touch. Just the pad of his finger against my mouth, the lightest pressure imaginable.
But it sends electricity through my entire body.
Down my spine, through my limbs, pooling hot and liquid low in my belly.
My lungs forget their job. My eyes flutter closed without permission.
Somewhere beneath the mortification, my underwear becomes a lost cause, and I hate that he probably knows the exact moment it happens.
“Fable.” His voice drops so low I feel it more than hear it.
“What?” Mine isn’t much louder.
“You need to tell me to go.”
“I know.”
“Because if you don’t tell me to go, I’m going to do something we’ll both have complicated feelings about.”
“Like what?”
“Like kiss you. In this stockroom. Surrounded by romance novels. While naked.”
“That’s very specific.”
“I like specificity.”
I should tell him to go. I should push him away, grab the knife again, demand that he leave and never come back. That would be the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing a person does when a supernatural creature shows up in their place of business and starts talking about kissing.
But my mouth won’t form the words. My hands won’t push him away. My body has apparently decided that being close to him is preferable to being safe, and my brain is too scrambled to override it.
“You need to go,” I whisper, and even I can hear how thin the words sound. How unconvincing.
“I know.” He doesn’t move. “Call me if you need anything. I mean it. I’ll run fast as hell for you.”
“You don’t even have my number.”
“I’ll hear you anyway.”
And then, before I can process that impossible statement, before I can ask what he means, before I can do anything except stand there with my mouth open and my heart racing, he leans down and presses his lips to my forehead.
It’s not a real kiss. Not the kind he was threatening-promising a moment ago. It’s something else, a benediction, maybe. A promise. Far more intimate than it has any right to be.
His lips are warm. Soft. They linger for just a moment, just long enough for me to feel the weight of the gesture, and then he’s pulling back, and his eyes are still gold, and his expression is something I can’t read.
“Goodnight, Fable,” he says.
The shift takes him before I can respond.
One moment he’s a man, warm and solid and close enough to touch. The next he’s a lycan, slipping shadow-quiet through my back door, disappearing into the night like he was never here at all.
I stand there for a long time after he’s gone.
My forehead is still warm where he kissed me. My heart is still racing. My hands are shaking, not from fear, not from the cold, but from something else entirely.
Then I look down.
There, on my back step, exactly where he sat before the shift, is a single wildflower. Purple and delicate, with petals that look almost silver in the moonlight.
He didn’t have it when he arrived.
I have no idea when he picked it.
No idea how it got there.
I lock the door behind me, once, twice, three times, and my hands won’t stop shaking, and I press the flower to my chest like it’s something precious, and I don’t know what any of this means.
But I’m starting to think I want to find out.