“Habit.” He shrugged. “I doubt I can change you from whatever you are, but I’m used to being careful in bed with non-wolves.”
The reminder he’d done with other women what he’d done with Thea made her instantly and irrationally upset. Maybe if she had more experience, it wouldn’t bother her so much, but Thea somehow doubted it, and that worried her. She’d never imagined she’d feel so territorial or possessive of someone, and it did not sit well with her. Conall wasn’t hers. A person couldn’t belong to another person.
“Sorry.” His gruff apology brought her eyes up from her plate. “I shouldnae have mentioned … that.”
Thea gave him a half-hearted smile, wondering what the hell had possessed her to think she could handle this with Conall. But it was too late. The damage was done. No going back. “We should get going if we don’t want to miss the ferry.”
Once they’d cleared their table, he took her hand again, pulling her into his side, holding her close as he checked out of the hotel.
It was as if he knew she had the sudden urge to run as far and as fast from him as possible.
And he wasn’t letting her go.
Conall led her out to their car, opened the passenger-side door for her, and just as she moved to get in, he pulled her against him.
He kissed her as if he were trying to steal the very essence of her into himself.
Thea was panting by the time he let her go, her body humming with renewed desire. Her hazy gaze lifted to his, and he slowly released her with a very smug, self-satisfied smirk on his face.
The haze instantly lifted. “Neanderthal,” she said as she stepped into the vehicle.
Thea heard his chuckle as he rounded the SUV and she shook her head, bemoaning the fact she found everything he did this morning funny and charming. Not that she’d let him know that. Conall swung into the driver’s side and grinned at her scowl.
“Werewolf,” he said.
“What?”
“Werewolf, not Neanderthal.”
Thea rolled her eyes. “I don’t think there’s a difference.”
She tried very hard not to smile at his answering bark of laughter.* * *It was a mistake.
Rationally, Conall knew it was a mistake.
However, calling what he felt for Thea a mistake seemed like a betrayal.
As he drove them into Denmark, Thea sleeping soundly in the passenger seat beside him, Conall used the icy control he was known for to keep the fullness of his emotions buried deep.
Letting them out was dangerous.
Before her, he’d been a fairly simple wolf. The world was black and white, and although wolves felt deeply, his emotions had been pretty black and white too. There was right and there was wrong; there was loyalty and responsibility.
Everything he felt now was complicated and confusing.
His eyes kept moving from the road to her. Glancing off her cheek, her mouth, her lashes fluttering in her sleep. The urge to pull the car off the road somewhere so he could haul her into his arms was nearly overwhelming. He tried to squash it down deep too, but the animal in him made it difficult.
When they’d arrived in Frederikshavn at the ferry terminal, Conall had kissed Thea awake, and she’d pushed willingly into his kiss. It took a lot not to dwell on the feeling that rose swiftly in him. The same encompassing euphoria he’d felt as Thea came apart in his arms last night.
She’d trusted no one for years.
Until him.
It was a privilege and responsibility but more, it was a gift. A gift that made him want to howl from the tallest peak back home in Torridon. A gift that made him want to claim a woman he had no future with.
Now the ferry was on the move, cutting through dark waters to Norway, and Thea sat across from him in the busy restaurant. Conall’s control was slipping. There was an invisible hourglass between them, the sand falling faster and faster with every second.
It made him feel powerless with despair, much like how he’d felt when Callie was diagnosed.
And from the way the tension thickened between them, Conall knew Thea felt it too.
They should never have touched each other.
But he couldn’t regret it.
He’d never regret it.
In fact, he’d hold on to the memory of Thea in his arms until his dying fucking breath.
Thea pushed back from the table. “I’m not hungry.”
Oh, aye, she was.
Conall’s heart pounded hard in his chest as he nodded and stood, leaving cash for the meal on the table. His body brushed hers as he followed her through the wind of tables to the exit, all blood rushing south in anticipation.
As they turned the corner and into the narrow hallway that housed their small cabin, Thea suddenly slammed him into the wall, tugging his shirt front and him with it down to her so she could reach his mouth. The taste of her filled Conall, and he groaned, sliding his hands under her shirt to feel her hot skin.