Chapter 17 An Extremely Poor Time for Chemistry
An Extremely Poor Time for Chemistry
Cassie
The bite changed after midnight.
That was the only way I knew the hour had turned.
The suite lights had been dimmed and the curtains were drawn.
Ian had stayed, though not in the chair beside the bed this time.
I had told him earlier that sitting there made him look like a haunted bodyguard in a luxury hotel brochure, and apparently that was not the tone he wanted to set.
He had taken the chair near the door instead, close enough that the mark stayed quiet, far enough away that I could pretend I had privacy.
Pretending had become one of my last remaining hobbies.
For a while, I slept badly, in the shallow, broken way a body sleeps when it keeps waking up to remember it is in trouble.
Pain woke me once. Thirst woke me twice.
A dream woke me the third time, though calling it a dream gave it more structure than it deserved.
It had no scene and no story. There was only warmth, a hand at my back, a mouth near my throat, and the heavy, steady presence of someone holding back with everything he had while wanting anyway.
I woke with my heart pounding and my skin too sensitive under the sheet.
The bite didn’t hurt and that was the problem.
For days, it had burned, pulsed, stabbed, and pulled, and as horrible as the pain had been, at least pain had the decency to be honest. Pain didn’t pretend to be anything except damage.
Pain didn’t slide down my ribs and settle low in my belly with the slow confidence of something that had no medical reason to be involved.
This was not pain. This was heat.
I lay very still, staring at the dark ceiling while my body warmed around something I had not chosen.
Somewhere under the bandage, the mark pulsed with a rhythm that felt too close to a second heartbeat.
It didn’t demand, exactly. It simply woke, and my body answered before my mind could decide whether answering was betrayal or biology.
Across the room, Ian inhaled sharply.
I closed my eyes.
Wonderful. Of all the times for a werewolf to have supernatural senses, he had chosen the exact moment my body turned traitor under hotel sheets.
“Don’t,” I said into the dark.
His voice came from the chair by the door, low and rough enough to suggest he had not been sleeping either. “Don’t what?”
“Whatever honorable, miserable thing you are about to say.”
The silence that followed had weight. I felt it gather near the door, where he sat too still in the dark.
“Are you in pain?” he asked.
“No.”
The answer hung there between us, too honest to be useful.
Ian stood.
I heard the chair shift, then his weight moving across the carpet. He stopped several feet from the bed, close enough that my skin recognized him before my eyes did.
“Fever?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what?”
I laughed once under my breath, though there was nothing funny in it. “You tell me.”
Another silence passed, and the room felt smaller without either of us moving.
“I can feel it,” he said.
The words went through me because I had known, and because hearing him confirm it made the whole thing impossible to pretend around.
The mark warmed again, responding to his voice, and my body became brutally aware of the fact that he was standing in the dark a few feet away.
Tall, still, barefoot now because apparently even monsters took off their boots before a long night of guarding women they had bitten.
I turned my head toward him. In the dim room, he was mostly shape and shadow, all broad shoulders and dark shirt and hands held open at his sides. His face was turned slightly away from me, as if looking directly might make the problem worse.
The problem.
Me.
Him.
The bite.
The heat under my skin.
I hated not knowing which parts belonged to me.
“Is it yours?” I asked.
His head turned back. “The want?”
The word came quietly, but it still filled the room.
I swallowed. “Yes.”
His hands flexed once, then stilled. “Some.”
That answer hit harder than a denial would have.
Some, not all. My body knew the rest before my mind wanted it. Some of this was mine, and the knowledge made me look back at the ceiling as if flat hotel plaster could offer legal counsel.
“I don’t like that,” I said.
“I know.”
“I don’t like when you say that either.”
“I know.”
A ridiculous laugh caught in my throat, and this one came closer to real. “You are impossible.”
“Yes.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“I can try.”
The faintest warmth moved through the bond, not lust and not pain, something almost human that made my chest ache worse than the bite.
I pushed the sheet down with my good hand and sat up too quickly.
The room tilted, and Ian was there in two steps, then stopped himself so hard I saw the motion break through his whole body.
“Cassie.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not.”
“I am upright. Lower your standards.”
“You are shaking.”
“I have had a busy couple days.”
He stayed where he was, close enough that the heat from him reached me, not close enough to touch.
I hated how careful he was, though that was not exactly true.
I hated that I needed the carefulness. I hated that every restraint he offered made Grant look worse in memory.
I hated that Ian, who had put the mark on me, kept asking.
I hated that the man who had hurt me most physically was the only man in this whole miserable resort who seemed determined not to take another inch without permission.
The anger and want braided too tightly to separate.
“I want water,” I said.
“There is water beside you.”
I looked at the glass on the nightstand. So there was.
“Fine. I want different water.”
“That is not true.”
“No, but it was a reasonable attempt to have a task.”
He didn’t smile. His gaze dropped to my hand gripping the sheet, then rose back to my face.
“Give me one,” he said.
“One what?”
“A task.”
I looked at him. The question should have been absurd, but he meant it. I could feel that too, the need to be useful in a way I could name and control.
I pointed toward the end of the room. “Open the curtains.”
Ian turned without argument and crossed to the windows.
The curtains pulled apart, revealing black glass and a thin spill of moonlight over the water beyond the resort.
The moon was not full yet, though it hung heavy and bright over the ocean, turning the surface silver.
At the sight of it, my shoulder tightened and the damned mark answered with a low pulse that made my fingers curl in the sheet.
Ian looked back immediately. “Too much?”
“No.”
He released the curtain and waited.
Moonlight changed him. That was an unfair thing to notice under the circumstances, but fairness had apparently left the island with my cell service. He didn’t look like a man softened by night, he looked more like something built for it.
Dangerous. Beautiful, though I hated that word for him. Beautiful in the way wolves probably were when you saw them from a distance and forgot teeth existed.
The mark sent warmth down my core again and his eyes darkened.
Damn it.
“You felt that,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You are not supposed to answer that fast.”
“I cannot lie well to you now.”
“That sounds inconvenient.”
“It is.”
I looked at the moonlit water because it was safer than looking at him. “What did it feel like?”
His voice came carefully. “Your feeling?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Wonder,” he said.
I had expected desire. I had expected want, heat, hunger, some word that would let me be angry enough to shove this whole thing back into a box and sit on it. Wonder was harder because it was true.
“I wasn’t wondering at you,” I said.
“I know.”
“I was wondering at the general nightmare ambiance.”
“I know.”
“You do not know everything.”
“No.”
He came one step closer.
“You were looking at the moon,” he said. “Then at me.”
I closed my eyes. “That is an extremely rude level of detail.”
“I am sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“I am sorry it makes you feel exposed.”
The answer scraped something open in me. I looked at him again. He was still by the window, one hand at his side, the other curled slightly as if holding still required grip. His face had gone careful in a way I understood now, guarded for my sake.
“You are too good at that,” I said.
“At what?”
“Making restraint look like respect.”
“It is respect.”
“It is also self-punishment.”
His jaw tightened.
There. I had hit something true. The bond confirmed it with a quiet pressure under my ribs, then Ian looked away as if he could deny me the evidence by denying me his face.
“I hurt you,” he said.
“Yes.”
His gaze returned to mine. “Wanting you does not change that.”
The room lost air. The wanting moved between us again, and this time he didn’t hide it fast enough.
Or maybe I had become better at feeling it.
It came through stronger now, not the messy flare from the elevator, not the sharp jealousy from Grant’s letter.
This was worse because it had been there all along, buried under guilt and fear and held down so tightly I had mistaken its absence for safety.
He wanted me.
And because the bond had become a treacherous little translator, I felt the way he fought it. Every line he would not cross. Every image he forced away before it formed. Every instinct to come closer locked behind the fact that I had not asked him to.
My body responded before I could stop it and a slow, answering heat moved through me.
Ian’s breath changed and his eyes closed.
“No,” he said, almost silently.
That did it. Something in me snapped hot and human.
“Stop saying no to yourself like you’re saying it for me.”
His eyes opened.
I pushed the blanket aside and stood. Badly. The floor shifted under my feet, and pain caught at the bite, but I stayed upright. Ian moved toward me, then stopped when I lifted a hand.
“Don’t.”
He stopped.