A Mate For Phoenix (Forbidden Shifters Series Book 4) Read online

  His eyes were still following Ida’s every expression, a dark black laser that she couldn’t ignore. “I know how important jobs are,” he murmured. “That’s one of the many things that you’ve taught me. Which is why I quit the center.”

  Finally Ida gave him her eye contact. This was what she needed to know, the information she desperately needed. “What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense. It’ll be so much harder for you to get a job now that you’ve quit the center.”

  He shook his head. “I mean that I didn’t want you to lose your job. So, I quit the center. This way we both get what we want.”

  She blinked at him. “How is you quitting the center both of us getting what we want?”

  “Because,” he said, that playful light in his eyes again. He reached for her hand and tugged her up so that she was standing between his legs. “Now you won’t lose your job for kissing me.”

  “Oh, brother,” she said, gasping for air. This was… a lot. A whole lot. An awful lot. “Phoenix, I can’t let you do that. Sacrifice your opportunities for a few make out sessions.”

  “To be honest,” he shrugged, playing with her fingers, inspecting them, turning them over in his large hands. “I think this lifestyle suits me better. I don’t like having to rely on people. I liked spending time with you. But that was the only part of the mentor thing that I really liked. This is better for me. Doing it my own way.”

  “But …”

  “I’ve only been on my own for less than a day and I already have a new place to live. Diana said she had an idea for a job I could have. And the government is still paying for my physical therapy. And this way my situation doesn’t endanger your situation.”

  She got the distinct feeling that he was quoting something he’d heard before. But she couldn’t deny that he was speaking the truth. It was a weight off her soul, seeing him free of that dingy condo. She had to admit that the mentor/mentee set up had never quite suited him. He wasn’t the type of person who benefited from unasked-for help. Now, that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been good for him. There was something about the two of them together that just felt good. But Ida was starting to wonder if it had a hell of a lot more to do with chemistry than it did their professional arrangement.

  She had one more question. “What did you mean that you’d tell me next week? When I asked what all this was about.”

  “Oh.” One of his hands took a long, slow trip up her spine, his eyes dark and fathomless, his knees firmly touching either side of her thighs. “Next week I can ask if I can be your boyfriend. But not before that.”

  Ida’s chin dropped, her eyes going wide. “You want to be my boyfriend?”

  He closed her mouth with a firm hand. “Yes. That’s what humans do when they feel like this, right?”

  Feel like what?

  Her head was spinning. “You want to be my boyfriend, but not until next week.”

  He nodded, stopped, and then shook his head. “No. I want to be your boyfriend right now, but I won’t ask until next week because then I’ll have a job and I can be a really good boyfriend. According to the, uh, what’s the word? Criteria?”

  “Whose criteria?”

  “Diana’s.”

  “Right.” Ida shook her head. Diana gave Phoenix relationship advice. Right after Phoenix quit the center in order to kiss Ida whenever he wanted. And now he was living in her best friend’s childhood home. And playing with the ties on the back of her dress. And staring up at her with eyes as dark as fresh earth. And waiting patiently for her to catch up to all this new information.

  She said the only thing she could think to say. “You were so scary when we first met.”

  How they’d gotten from there to here in just two weeks she’d never know. But suddenly the memory of an angry, pained Phoenix bloomed in her mind. The man with the dead eyes. Who wanted nothing to do with human culture. He’d stared at her like she was an idiot. Like all humans weren’t worth the air they breathed.

  And now he was practically cuddling her, one of his hands firmly on her back, the other hand bracing himself as he leaned a bit back on the bed, peering up at her.

  “You’re not scared of me, are you?” he asked quietly.

  “No,” she whispered back truthfully.

  “Ida,” he said, and she already knew what was coming next. For as wild and untamed and primal as he was, he was a man who cared about the rules, if not just to make her more comfortable. “Can I kiss you?”

  She couldn’t speak. Twenty four hours ago, she’d had a whole litany of reasons why she couldn’t kiss Phoenix Wolf. Ethics, her job, the fact that he was so beautiful it actually hurt to look at him. And now, in less than a day, he’d destroyed so many of those roadblocks. Now, there was really just the beauty thing in between them.

  And the boyfriend thing.

  She would have to explain to him at some point that they could never really be together like that. That she’d never agree to be his girlfriend. But he wasn’t asking for that right now. He was asking for that in a week. Apparently.

  Right now, all he was asking for was to kiss. And damn if she didn’t want to kiss him. She could give him that. She could give them both that.

  This way we can both get what we want, he’d said to her.

  And wasn’t that the main thing she’d learned last night? Just how badly they’d both wanted it? And wasn’t that one of the sweetest, most precious moments that could open up between two people? The realization that you both wanted the exact same thing at the exact same time and that thing was something the other person could give you?

  Did it get more perfect than that?

  More perfect than this beautiful, wild man looking up at her, waiting patiently for her answer, his eyes involuntarily flicking between her glasses and her lips.

  This was what it felt like to be wanted. This was what it felt like to truly be asked. He’d set the table. Now she was going to have to decide to sit down or not.

  And sit down she did. Metaphorically at least.

  In reality, she planted two palms on his shoulders and gave him a little shove. His arm still propping him firmly up, he didn’t budge an inch. His nostrils flared but his frown increased. “You pushed me.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to fall backward.”

  “Why would I fall backward? You have no strength compared to me. It was like a light wind pushed at my shoulders.”

  She laughed, in both amusement and frustration. “Don’t you see that I’m trying to give you what you want, you big lug?”

  “You’re going to kiss me?” His eyes lit for a moment, and then they quirked down in confusion. “But only if I fall backward first?”

  Well, when he said it that way, she supposed it did sound confusing. The man was, after all, kind of at square one when it came to understanding the complicated web of human sexuality.

  In pursuit of being succinct, she merely nodded her head. “Yes.”

  “Oh. Okay. Do it again, then.”

  She planted her palms on his shoulders and pushed. This time he fell backward onto the bed, bouncing a little.

  She couldn’t help but laugh. He was just so cute when he tried to be human.

  “I still don’t understand why—oh.” He stopped talking, understanding flaring in his eyes when her knee came up on the bed, outside of his knee. When she planted her hand on the mattress and started what she hoped was a seductive crawl toward him.

  She caged him in with her body, though their size difference was such that she was more of a protective shirt for him than a full body cage. His long legs stretched out behind her, his arms thrown over his head.

  His hands came to her hips as his nostrils flared, his eyes bouncing all over her face, all over her body, dipping into the V neck of her dress, getting lost there for a minute.

  “Do you understand now?” she asked quietly.

  His hands tightened on her back but he didn’t pull her down toward him. He merely watched h
er. “I think so. Humans kiss like this? With the man on his back?”

  Instead of answering with words, Ida decided to be a more … experiential teacher. She leaned down and should have known better than to think she could possibly catch him unawares. She hadn’t been able to snatch food off his plate and she was willing to bet she’d never be able to steal a kiss from him either. As soon as she crooked her elbows, leaned down to press her mouth to his, he was lifting up, bracing his palms against her back, meeting her halfway.

  Their lips slid against one another, catching flavor, heat, a wet slide that made Ida make a noise of pleasured delight.

  He dropped his head back to the bed. “Do that again,” he demanded. “That noise. Make it again.”

  She was about to explain to him that it didn’t quite work like that when he lifted his head back off the bed and dragged her under again with his attentive, unschooled kiss. She immediately, involuntarily made the requested noise again and he seemed to almost purr in approval.

  His tongue slicked out and into her mouth and she pushed down, wanting more. She was straddling him, but they weren’t really touching. The skirt of her dress fell across his legs and when her arms started to tremble, she immediately found both of his hands there, at her shoulders, steadying her.

  “I don’t know why I’m shaking,” she whispered against his lips, her tongue deeply drawing from his.

  “Are you scared?” he whispered back.

  “No.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. You must want me very badly, then.”

  Ida laughed, because he was so confident and straightforward and he made her happy. The laugh jostled her body loose, just enough that she let herself rest down onto him, stretching her legs back and giving him her weight.

  He grunted and reshuffled her so that she wasn’t pressing on his left side, but as soon as she was in the right place, his hands were at her back again, pressing her down onto him as if her weight were delicious, deeply desired.

  “Wow. Yow. Sorry. Maybe close the door next time?”

  Wren’s voice came from the doorway and jolted Ida. She broke the kiss and, panting, twisted to look at her best friend standing there, watching her get her freak on. “Wren! I— mmmf.”

  Ida blinked in shock as Phoenix took her by the back of the scalp and pulled her back into the kiss. “Hi, Wren,” he said right before he landed lips back on Ida’s, his tongue pushing back into her mouth.

  “Phoenix!” Ida pushed herself up, out of his grasp and sat upright. Of course, that meant that she was now sitting atop a very, um, alert part of his body. It addled her brains as much as his bossy kiss had.

  He sat up as fast as she had, nose to nose, and suddenly there was more kissing. His hands were back at her hair, holding her face in place. “Did you need something, Wren?” he asked in between his fevered, unbothered kisses.

  Ida inserted a hand in between their mouths and pushed his face back a few inches. “Hold on!”

  Completely out of her depth, beyond turned on, and more than a little embarrassed at the peep show she’d just put on, Ida simply turned her head and made eye contact with Wren.

  They’d been best friends for most of their lives and didn’t really need words anymore to understand one another. Sure enough, the second their gazes clashed, Wren burst into semi hysterical laughter, her hands clapping down onto her thighs as she leaned forward, her eyes goggled nearly out of her head.

  “Ho-ly shit! You’ve gone and caught yourself a real deal caveman, Ida.”

  “What?” Phoenix asked from behind Ida’s hand. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Grown people don’t usually make out in front of their friends, sailor,” Wren informed him. “I mean, unless you’re at a sex club or hook up joint or it’s your particular sexual kink or something.”

  “Please don’t confuse him,” Ida said weakly, thinking that pretty much the last thing she was emotionally prepared for at that very moment was explaining sexual kinks to Phoenix Wolf. Especially when the softest part of her inner thigh was currently being dominated by an imposingly large erection. She cleared her throat but kept her hand firmly in place over his mouth.

  “I shouldn’t have kissed you in front of Wren?” he asked, his voice muffled, his eyes full of both heat and questions. There was just something about that combination of things that really, really got Ida going. That he could be so unbelievably sexual and so unbelievably unschooled at the same time. Why did that turn her on so much?

  “I should have closed the door if I was going to kiss you,” she explained. “And once Wren caught us, it would have been polite to stop kissing and talk to her until she left.”

  “Okay.” He shook free of Ida’s hand. “I understand the rule.” Phoenix turned his head to look at Wren. “Can you leave now? And close the door on your way out?”

  Ida opened her mouth to protest his rudeness but Wren simply chuckled and held up a hand. “Say no more, caveman. I like your style. I just wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood and let me know if you need anything, but Ida here has the whole welcome wagon thing pretty well covered, it would appear. So, yeah. Sleep tight, etc. Ida, I will be texting you later for deets.”

  And then the door was closed up tight.

  Ida would have liked to have said that she had enough restraint to drag herself off of Phoenix’s lap so that they could actually talk about what the hell was going on between them. But alas. More kissing, it was.

  ***

  Phoenix learned quite a bit over the next hour. In his mind, it was perhaps the most educational sixty minutes he’d ever spent. He learned that one could kiss a woman while on his back, while sitting up on the bed, while she was on her back, while they were both on their sides, while they almost tumbled off the bed and into a pile.

  But perhaps most importantly, he learned that kissing didn’t necessarily have to be done on the mouth.

  Ida shocked him when she tore her kiss-reddened lips from his and opened her mouth against the beating pulse in his throat. He’d jolted and held her even tighter, a guttural noise tearing free from him.

  What is she doing? He’d wondered, but he’d had the foresight to keep the words inside. She’d shown him soon enough exactly what she was doing. Which was to plant warm, wet, teasing kisses up the tendon of his neck to the recess behind his ear.

  If he’d been in his wolf form, his back leg would have started kicking in the blissful scratch of an itch he hadn’t even known he’d had. Her mouth was warm sun, liquid bliss, making him … want.

  He tangled his hand in her hair and pulled her head back. “That’s also something that you like?”

  “Kissing on the neck? Yes. Definitely, yes. I mean— nnngh.”

  She had more to say, he could tell, but there was no stopping him. He dove forward and devoured the fragrant column of her throat. He thought that every single inch of Ida was attractive, but there was just something about her throat that was especially pretty. Elegant and such a nice scent to it. He used his teeth to tug at the thin gold chain she wore, watched it pool in the triangle at the bottom of her throat. He kissed his way up to her ear and for some unknown reason, followed an urge to test the softness of her earlobe with his teeth.

  “Phoenix!” she said in a voice as breathless as it was pleasured.

  He stiffened against her.

  Well, it was decided. He’d thought his life’s goal was to get himself and his family the hell back into the wilderness, but no. Apparently his goal was getting Ida to say his name like that a hundred more times. A thousand. It would never be enough.

  She nudged his face away from hers with her nose and used her teeth on his own neck. Not something he would have thought he’d like, having the teeth of another animal at his throat, but nonetheless, he was making some sort of deep sound that he couldn’t stop. Must be he liked it.

  She gave his neck a good hard suck and he liked that so much that he tipped her face back and did th
e same to her. He did it in a nice, perfect line, wanting to taste every inch of her.

  “Where,” he asked breathlessly. “Where else do people kiss?”

  Ida blinked at him, obviously trying to bring him into focus. “Um, to be honest, everywhere?”

  He blinked back at her. “Everywhere?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  This was new information for him. He catalogued it carefully. “If they kiss everywhere…” he said slowly, gathering his thoughts. “Then do they also touch everywhere?”

  “Definitely,” she said with an assertive nod of her head. “Definitely yes to touching. Everywhere. And kissing. All over.”

  Well, this was great news. He reared back from her, rolling her onto her back, needing just a half a second to get his bearings. Everywhere was suddenly quite a lot of territory to cover.

  He knew just where to start.

  Phoenix sat up onto his knees and braced his weight back onto his heels. He took his two hands and pressed them to the sides of Ida’s breasts. Never in his life had he been this grateful for his human form. His human hands were so dexterous, so many nerve endings. He felt every soft, warm press of her and he was grateful.

  She gasped when he pressed her breasts together, making the tops of them form a deep shadow that peeked from the edge of her dress. She’d said everywhere so, taking her at her word, he dropped his face into that warm crevasse and kissed her there like he’d been kissing her mouth just ten minutes earlier.

  “Phoenix!”

  And there it was again, his life’s work. His name in that breathless, needy voice of hers. Why did that get him so badly? It had a helplessly joyous intensity to its sound that he reveled in.

  “Wow,” she gasped, “You really go for the gold.”

  “What?” He pressed his face harder into her soft breasts. He had no idea if this was a common sex act amongst humans, but it sure felt freaking good. He figured he’d better double check though.