Jess gave a nervous laugh, her eyes shifting around the room with an endearing look of panic. You’d think she hadn’t kissed a man before.
Time to fix that.
She was in his arms in half a second, his lips on hers, his hands sinking into the warm, luscious curves. This would be perfunctory. A social nicety. The completion of a seasonal ritual designed to elicit titters and smug smiles.
And then he was lost, sinking deeper and deeper into the sweet honey and cream of a woman he never knew existed. Now that he knew she did, he could never let her go.
And oh, that taste. She was the taste.
His. Only his.
Chapter 4
For Jess, it was as if the world had disappeared in a blast of red-hot fire. Lilah, Gavin, the club, the music, the conversation—gone. There was only him. She couldn’t even remember his name. The big one, the strong one, the bad one. The one who was wrapping her in flames.
Knees buckling, Jess reached for his shoulders. She dug her fingers into muscle, and feeling his strength brought her some comfort. But it wasn’t enough. Her hands wanted skin, warm flesh to match the blaze enveloping them. To match the wet, slick heat of his mouth.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a meal. He was consuming her in fire, engulfing her deepest places with the taste of him, this burning deliciousness.
She slid her hands up the side of his neck—finally, warm skin under her palms—and up into the soft, thick waves of his hair. She gripped his skull between her hands and held him where she wanted him. Feasting on her mouth. Bowing to her. Taking from her. Opening—
With a grunt of pain, not pleasure, he broke the kiss.
“While I admire the holiday spirit,” Eva said loudly, “the cornerstone of pleasure is moderation, don’t you think?”
Derry staggered back a step, pulling Jess, whose hands were still entwined in his hair, along with him. Realizing this in horror, she jerked away, stumbling without his support and feeling the blood rush to her face.
What had she just done? My God. It was like the time when she was little and had fallen off the swings. At first it had been fantastic to fly through the air, but then she’d landed and everything hurt and she couldn’t breathe and everyone was yelling at her.
“Jess?” Lilah wasn’t yelling, but her tone wasn’t happy, either.
In a daze, she looked at the faces around her. Gavin had pulled Derry a few feet away and was still holding his arm, looking like he was about to tear it off and feed it to him. Lilah hovered between Jess and Derry like the landlord of an Old West saloon trying to prevent a gunfight.
And Eva…
Oh God. Her boss. There wasn’t much on her face at all. It was a professional mask. What was left of Jess’s stomach fell to the floor.
She was going to lose her job on her first day if she didn’t spin this somehow. Like that childhood day in the playground, her lungs weren’t filling with air and she ached all over. But she could fake it.
Laughing with as much bravado as she could muster, she pointed a finger at Derry. “They weren’t kidding. You kiss like an industrial vacuum cleaner. You could get a second job doing tonsillectomies.”
Silence. Then, after a moment, Lilah put a hand over her mouth, stifling a giggle.
“The club must like having you around,” Jess continued. “Suction like that would be more effective than the Heimlich maneuver. If anybody’s steak goes down wrong, you’re the man to call.”
Derry’s mouth dropped. A flush rose up on his neck.
“I think you owe the lady an apology, brother,” Gavin said.
“She—she—I was not alone—” Derry looked more confused than angry.
Jess grabbed her tray. There weren’t any drinks on it, but the prop gave her confidence. “Perhaps alone time is just what you need, big guy.” She turned to Carl. “Could you please hand me my water? I’ve got the funniest taste in my mouth.”
Shooting Jess the faintest of smiles, Eva picked up a box from the bar. “I’ll be in the fireplace room.” She looked at Derry. “Neither your attendance nor participation is required.”
After she had glided away, Jess relaxed slightly. She gulped the water Carl handed her and scanned her section, but another server had taken over for her while she was…
Indisposed.
Insane.
Gavin had released Derry and now seemed to find the situation hilarious. She’d compared him to a vacuum cleaner. She’d laughed at him. She’d humiliated him.
Good. Inside, she was a seething mess. She couldn’t let him do anything like that ever again.
“Better get back to work. See you later, Lilah, Gavin, Dyson—” With a mock gasp, Jess put a hand over her mouth. “Derry, I mean.”
Gavin and Lilah’s laughter gave her the exit she needed. She dove back into the rhythm of serving drinks to the elite.
Although she didn’t see him leave, she knew—she felt—the exact moment Derry was no longer nearby.
It felt awful.
Derry stormed out of the club humiliated and reeling, his skin buzzing like bees.
It wasn’t the first time, but typically he was drunk and had done something to deserve those feelings. This was different. He was dumbstruck and aching, like an adolescent fumbling through his first kiss.
That had been no child’s kiss, though.
That had been eternity in the form of a woman.
How her body had yielded to his, those lips opening and taking him in, welcoming him with the sighs of a thousand years of yeses. Her scent embedded itself in his DNA and made him want to smell her for the rest of his days. To taste, to touch, to sniff, to devour. For a moment, like in the elevator, he’d felt his body strain to shift into its other shape, but the feel of her in his arms had given him the power to control it, to remain a man who could—who would—drive his body into this woman who was born for him.
And then.
The mockery.
As his mind raced through the past few minutes, replaying it like a television caught in an infinite loop, his blood doubled in volume, and he felt the familiar expansiveness settle into his cells, burning with the pre-shift frenzy that the prodromal warnings gave him.
Fuck.
Now?
Why now?
Derry jabbed the elevator button with a rising sense of panic, knowing the change was imminent. The Novo Club was achingly far, though deceptively close. If he couldn’t get in the damn elevator in time and get his palm on that silver plate, he was screwed beyond belief.
And not in a good way.
Her scent consumed him as insipid modern techno-beat music cluttered his ears, each note acute and fiery, screaming with the echoes of the damned. Senses sharpening by the nanosecond, the scrape of his fingertip against the burnished metal of the elevator button felt like sandpaper. The sound of seltzer sprayed into a highball glass was Niagara Falls. Jess’s shower gel was a field of lavender in Provence, the purple a swirling, swaying vision behind his closed eyes.
His chest swelled, his cock hardened, and he struggled to stop his skin from growing the fur that tipped him from man to animal, from one form to the other, neither more true.
Both just who he was.
A deep breath brought thousands of scents, a mix of despair and arousal, loathing and desperation, the pheromones and perfumes and chemicals all mingling into a kind of olfactory madness overridden by one scent: