Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
What do you call a wolf that knows it’s a wolf?
Aware-wolf
—From Bash’s dad joke collection
Bash
Their lips brushed, the briefest touches of their tongues, and she kissed him with a tenderness that made his heart feel about a hundred sizes too large for his chest.
This wasn’t a scorching embrace. It was a shared vow.
A truth promise—even if the premise behind it was a fabrication. Something so pure and so true, Bash knew he’d treasure it as a golden memory for the rest of his life.
Arabella rested her forehead against his. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I didn’t know I needed that, but…” She sighed against his lips. “Thank you, Sebastian.”
“Thank you.”
Between them, Chicane emitted what could only be described as a honking sound.
She breathed out a laugh. “I believe the bunny prince requests the servants feed him.”
Bash hopped up. “Me! I volunteer as tribute. Teach me what to do.”
Arabella laughed again, her eyes sparkling. So different from the version of her he’d met that day in Brinder’s office. Who knew it would be such a gratifying adventure to uncover all the facets of this complicated, beautiful woman?
“So, uh, are you staying here tonight?” Arabella looked up from her laptop, where she was reviewing upcoming surgical cases. She’d told him it was her Sunday night habit, getting her in the mindset for the week.
They were sitting on opposite ends of her deep couch, her feet tucked under the cushion at his side, his own feet rested alongside her. Not touching. But close enough that he could brush against her…accidentally on purpose.
Bash put a bookmark in the engrossing wolf shifter romance he was currently consuming. “I thought I would. I’m sorry we didn’t discuss this during the week.”
That was a lie. He’d intentionally avoided the conversation, not wanting to risk hearing she’d changed her mind on the living arrangements and he’d need to find a different place to stay while they ‘dated.’ Because he longed to be in her home.
With her. Near her. Breathing the same air.
Such was the intensity of his infatuation with Arabella Remington.
“It’s ok. We were both busy. I just…I saw your luggage, so I figured…” she trailed.
“Oh, yeah. That’s just the basics. If you’re alright with it, I’ll have Jared ship more of my belongings. I can store them in your guest room.”
Arabella bit her lip. “There might be a tiny problem with that.”
“Oh?” Crap. Did she not want him to stay?
This whole situation had evolved so quickly, and then he’d disappeared for a week, working long hours.
He and Arabella hadn’t actually discussed the specifics of how this relationship would unfold.
Oh, he’d bullied himself into her bed. Even if she never let him closer than that—Jesu forfend—a gnawing ache in him to be near her wouldn’t abate.
“I told you before. I don’t have any furniture in there.”
“At all?”
“I don’t have guests,” she snapped, and Bash realized they’d hit a nerve with the topic. Prickly, beautiful woman.
“That’s ok. How about I do some measurements and have Jared select some options for you? I’ll cover the cost—”
“I can afford furniture, Sebastian.”
The soft, vulnerable woman from earlier had retreated behind the walls of her fortress. Enter the ice queen. Oh, that reminded him of “Enter Sandman.” Epic song. Did Arabella like it?
An impatient throat-clearing interrupted the music playing in his head.
“I said I can pay for it. But I would appreciate it if you’d please ask…
Jared?”—she cocked her head and he nodded that she got his name right—“to pick something out. I don’t care.
I honestly never go in there. I couldn’t even tell you what color the carpet is.
Or if it even has carpet. Or window coverings. ”
Bash examined his couch-mate. Did her carpet match the drapes?
Did she have a landing strip? Maybe a triangle?
Perhaps full bush—he’d been with a woman sporting that and found it unexpectedly erotic.
Though Remy struck him as too tidy a woman to let the bush roam free.
Or…were her nether lips as bare as the ones currently pursed at him.
She’d removed the messy bun and pulled her lustrous hair into a low ponytail. He wouldn’t be able to wrap it around his fist, but he could tug it and—
“Sebastian? You with me?”
He blinked his eyes and then shook his head, laughing. Fucking ADHD. “Sorry. I didn’t take my meds today. I’m off schedule.”
A pretty frown marred her largely unlined brow.
For someone who scowled with such frequency, Arabella had very few lines in her forehead.
Just slight indentations that smoothed out when she was relaxed—a status that was rare but he was determined to bring out more often.
She had small lines at the corners of her eyes, and Bash wondered how hard-earned the smiles were that caused those.
“Meds? Are you managing a chronic condition? Anything I can help with? I can get you in with our best specialists—”
Bash laughed, holding up a hand. “Easy there, Scrub Angel. Simmer down. Remember I told you I have ADHD?” She nodded, the frown still there.
He wanted to kiss it away almost as much as he wanted to kiss her pursed lips.
Almost. “The story is, I diagnosed myself as an adult one day on set. One of my co-stars had just had her kid diagnosed. Poor little guy sounded just like me in grade school. I was curious, so I read up on it. Turns out I’d been living with ADHD, and managing through it—unmedicated—my entire life.
“As I read more and learned more, it was a fucking epiphany. You know in school where there’s this hard concept and you can’t figure it out?
And then someone explains it the right way, and suddenly it all makes sense and you wonder why you couldn’t see it before?
That’s what happened to me. At thirty-two.
“Got in with a doctor, she verified the diagnosis, we tested some meds until I found what worked best…and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Bob’s my…what?” Arabella was just watching him, brows nearing her hairline, a look of amazement on her face. “Did you say all that in two breaths?”
“Maybe? Anyhow, Bob’s your uncle. It just means ‘and there you have it.’”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you just say that?” she grumbled.
“Because what’s the fun in saying that when you can say things like Bob’s your uncle? I mean, c’mon, that’s a great phrase.” He grinned and winked. It was fun to yank her chain.
“If you say so.” Arabella rolled her eyes—she’d sprain her optic nerve at the rate she was going with him—and made a note on whatever she was working on, her fingers flying across the keys in a pleasing tapping sound.
She nodded at her note—adorable—and looked back up.
“I wondered if that’s what it was. Well, in good news for you, thankfully a lot of the stigma is gone.
We’re normalizing all the different patterns of healthy brains.
We all work differently—there’s finally recognition of that.
Interesting though. I don’t remember reading about you having ADHD. ”
Now Bash’s eyebrows flew up. “You go on entertainment sites?”
“Pfffft.” Arabella waved a hand. “No. But we have a variety of magazines in the surgeons’ lounge.
Sometimes if I have a gap between cases and I need to breathe, it’s just the thing to help me unhook my mind.
Although, I don’t know ninety percent of the people they talk about.
All these reality stars and whatnot. But I pay attention when some of the, uh,”—she bit her lip—“older actors are highlighted.”
“Arabella Remington, are you calling me…le gasp…old?” He clutched his pretend pearls.
She kicked at him with her foot and he grabbed it, then slowly began kneading the smooth skin across the ball of her foot.
“What are you—oooh, that feels good.” She sunk down a bit and he applied both hands to the effort. Arabella’s eyes rolled back and she closed them. “Why does that feel sooooo gooood?” she moaned. “Don’t stop, Sebastian. Please...”
Bash’s poor cock, already randy and deprived, kicked up a mad storm in his pants, trying to get in on the action. “One of my vows was to always rub your feet, Arabella,” he teased. “I know the long hours you have on your feet, and a foot massage makes all the difference.”
“Mmmm,” she moaned. “How do you know this wizardry?”
Bash laughed. “Remember the day I met you? The greatest day of my life, by the way. When I told you I played a surgeon?”
Arabella cocked her head and smiled. Bash could only hope she wasn’t remembering the ‘happy surgerying’ comment that had fallen so tragically out of his mouth.
“I interviewed a few surgeons as research. One told me her feet ached horribly at the end of a long day and her wife always rubbed them for her. It was part of their love language. I pay attention.” He pressed his thumbs into her arch and her back mirrored her foot, lifting off the couch.
“Sebassstian,” she moaned again.
Trying to keep his focus so he didn’t leap across the couch, rip her clothes off, and bury his face in her pussy, he cast around for something to say. Anything. “It’s how I learned the heinie-lick.”
Her eyes drifted open, the corners of her mouth lifting. “I hope you’re kidding with that.”
“Of course I am.” He played up his pretend umbrage, making her laugh.
“But I really did learn the Heimlich. The whole premise was that I was a surgeon who saved my hospital from a mass shooter, but in an early scene, I had to perform the Heimlich. I wanted to be authentic in the depiction, and I figured it was a useful skill to have.”
Arabella pulled her foot away and Bash pouted at the loss. “So that’s what the headline meant from last week, after the restaurant. About life imitating art.”
He nodded, pulling her foot back and resuming his ministrations. “When I realized you were choking, I just…sprang into action. I think it was muscle memory.”
She bit the inside of her lip. “I’m grateful, Sebastian. Even though you looked amazing in that photo and I looked like a koi fish begging for snacks.”
Bash snickered and she joined in, mumbling ‘heinie-lick’ to herself and chuckling.
“I’m good at that too.”
“At what?”
“Licking. Heinies…and other parts.” He watched a flush rise from the neck of her Red Bull shirt—possibly the least suggestive top a person could wear…and yet, she looked delectable.
“Sebastian.” Her voice was barely a rasp.
“Yes, my queen?” Bash gave her an innocuous look. Fuck, it really was way too much fun to wind her up. It would—no, will—be way more fun to wind her up higher…and watch her detonate.
“Can you—” She coughed, cleared her throat, and started again, this time her voice held its customary cool edge. “Can you not talk about…licking parts, please?”
“If you insist. I do agree, talking about licking isn’t the best.”
“Thank you,” she replied haughtily, turning her attention to the fucking laptop.
“Doing it’s way better.”
“Sebastian!” Her face blazed, but he reveled in the laugh he saw her fighting to contain. And the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
Bullseye.
“Enough. I’m going back to my charts now. And you go back to Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or whatever it is you’re reading.” She waved a dismissive hand and shifted her focus to the device that was currently battling him for her attention.
He would triumph. That was the thing with ADHD. When you were doing a ‘preferred’ task, it made it easier to focus. And, right now, Arabella Remington was his preferred everything.
He tugged one of her toes. “Hey…no disparaging Wimpy Kid. That’s a great series.”
“You read it?”
“Hell, yeah. I’m a connoisseur of the words. There can be long waits on set, and I like to read. I enjoy all sorts of books. Romance just happens to be my favorite. So how do you know about that series?”
“From a pediatric ortho trauma patient I had at Hopkins. She was a bookworm. She’d suffered a compound femur fracture in a car accident.
When she woke in the post-anesthesia care unit, she kept asking for her book.
Her mom didn’t know where it was—probably in the car, which had been totaled and towed away.
” Arabella’s gaze was wistful. No sign of his grumpy ice queen.
“This young girl didn’t even complain about her pain.
She only wanted the book—at one point breaking down into tears.
I ran out to a nearby bookstore, and thankfully they had the series.
I wasn’t sure which ones she’d read, so I bought the whole thing. ”
Bash lifted her foot and pressed a kiss to her instep. “You pretend to be all tough and hard edges, but you’re a softie, aren’t you, Arabella Remington?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she sniffed. “It was just the right thing to do.”
“Mmmhmm,” he replied, opening his book with one hand so he could continue to hold her foot with the other. He’d never had a foot fetish, but Bash was pretty sure at this point, he had an overall Arabella fetish.
“What are you reading?” She nudged the book with her toes.
“Shifter romance.”
“What the hell is that?”
“You don’t know what a shifter romance is?”
“Clearly. Pretty sure my question ‘what the hell is that’ is a dead giveaway. If you’re into conversational cues.”
“Oh, she has jokes, my friends. Well, Dr. Remington, shifter romance is a subgenre of romance. I read all the subgenres, but I’m a mood reader and I was in the mood for shifters.
Basically, one or both lead characters can shift into the form of an animal—usually a wolf, but there are many others.
Good plots and steamy sex. Especially when the male knots the female. ”
“Come again?”
“Exactly. Come again, and again, and again. All the wolves are hung like…well, it feels weird to say ‘horses’ when I’m talking about wolves. Suffice it to say, they’re hung. And very protective. Possessive. Secretly romantic. It’s good stuff.”
“Knotting?”
“Look it up. Then tell me what you think.” Bash winked at her and he’d bet his entire bank account she’d be opening a new tab in her Internet browser before too long.
“Also, remember how you were during the race, wanting to focus and all that?” She nodded at him.
“Be quiet. I’m getting to the really spicy stuff.
Knot forthcoming.” Then he adjusted his glasses and pretended to read.