bookshelves. The bookshelves had both evolved and multiplied, now taking up the entire wall.
I forced myself not to look at the titles, having had enough trouble not pole-vaulting onto his cock last time I was here based on his book collection alone.
This was to say nothing of the artwork lining the walls, these having been painted by Morrison himself.
“I had some free time on my hands,” he said.
Free time, being code for being suspended for beating Abernathy to a pulp during an interrogation.
“The couches look really comfortable. I don’t mind sleeping down here if you have a blanket I could use.” I would have brought mine with me, had it not been stuck under a pile of prostitutes.
“Come upstairs,” Morrison said, looking over his shoulder.
“James, I don’t think—”
“That’s where the guest room is,” he added.
“Oh. Right.” At some point, I really should stop assuming everyone wanted to sleep with me. Just because I’d been propositioned by a unicorn didn’t necessarily mean every male on earth wanted a go.
I followed Morrison up the stairs, smiling to myself as he schlepped my oversized bags without complaint. He paused at the first room and flicked on the light.
This was his room. I knew it even before the warm glow washed over the king-sized bed. His scent filled my chest, my head, my heart. Not just any scent. His sleeping scent. The heavenly distillation of his skin, his cologne, his deodorant, concentrated by hours of applied body heat. The same scent he’d left on my pillows, my sheets after he’d warmed them for a night.
A little ache radiated out from the center of my chest when I saw the pile of books slanted across the nightstand on the side closest to the bathroom.
Just like mine.
The other nightstand was bare.
“Hanna?” He’d continued walking, and was now standing in the doorway of another room, the light already on.
“Oh, sorry.” I shuffled down the hallway to meet him in the doorway of the guest room and had to stifle a gasp.
A four-poster wrought iron canopy bed. Filmy, diaphanous swags of fabric slithered between the ornate rods and fell, shimmering to the carpet. The plush velvet damask bedding and matching throw pillows looked like they’d been seduced from a courtesan’s boudoir. Somehow the configuration sailed past feminine and landed squarely in erotic. This was a bed you tied someone to. A bed built for begging mercy, and being given something far better.
I had always wanted one of these.
“I always wanted one of these,” Morrison said, hauling my suitcase onto the vintage steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. “Guest room seemed like a good place for one.”
I walked past him to click the lamp perched on the nightstand. The glow revealed a stack of books that might have been at home on a coffee table. Large, ponderous tomes about Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh.
Van Gogh.
Even if his brother had stabbed me a few times, I couldn’t find it in my heart to hold it against Vincent, my first and longest art historical love. I smiled, thinking of the impossibility of my situation. Vincent Van Gogh’s brother had tried to kill me. And here, a book about him adorned the guest room where I was staying.
Given a thousand years, Morrison could not have guessed the reason for my grin.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“That’s not a nothing smile.” His observational acuity had ever been finer than a razor’s edge, and so it remained. The source of equal parts pleasure and problem for me.
“This room is more me than me. Does that make sense?”
“No. And yes. We share some territory.” He reached out and caught up a length of the silky fabric. It sighed as it yielded to his fingers, much as I would, and had. And wanted to.
The ache in my heart found my breasts. Something pulled my magnetic center south.
You’re coming into heat. This is so, so not the place to be when your every cell is begging to be fucked.
“You should go,” I said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“Why?”
Surprise etched every muscle in his face when I leapt at him. Though not yet a werewolf, I moved faster than he expected. A familiar sensation of falling, the world blurring around us, then ceasing to spin on its axis when our bodies made contact. One moment of perfect stillness held us before I descended, pinning him to the bed beneath me. Like the predator I might yet be, I devoured him—my prey, my prize. I lost and found myself in the taste