“I need to go back,” I whispered.

Ellis gave a short nod. He looked a lot of things at that moment. Happy, sad, angry, determined. His personality was so big, his presence so huge. He scared me on so many levels and many of them good. In a moment of impulse, I turned and kissed him. Pressing my hands—shaking and freezing in fingerless grey gloves as if they could help me—to his rough cheeks. I held his face as I kissed him. He growled low in his throat. A constant drone of aggression and want as a back beat to the kiss. Ellis grasped my hips with strong fingers, sank them in so I worried I’d bruise—hoped I’d bruise.

Without thinking, I clasped my hands behind his neck and brought my legs up to wrap his waist. He had only three inches on me and maybe thirty pounds. He was strapping and burly but not bulky, I was curvy and solid but not fat. Our bodies pressed together in the perfect meld and I felt the hard ridge of his cock pressed the cleft of my pussy.

“You’d better stop or I’m taking you right here,” he said. His voice was rough and righteous and I believed him beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I stroked my tongue down over his and tugged the finer hairs at the nape of his neck and the growl turned dangerous. He started to move, to lay me down and I let go of him—falling away as quickly as I had latched on.

“Not yet, not yet!” I said, my hands up in mock surrender.

“Ruby,” he drew the word out and made it sound dirty and sexy and fine.

“I’m sorry. I am. Soon. I will. I just—” I didn’t know what so I shook my head instead of finishing that sentence.

“I can smell the lust on you. It’s thick and smells like lilacs.” When he grinned at me, I wanted to change my mind.

“I know you can.”

“I don’t scare you being a lycan but my want of you does?”

“And the whole dead mate thing,” I said, turning so fast my coat swept open for an instant. I hurried through the dry and brittle grass with Ellis right on my heels.

“Why are you drawn to me? Certainly not because I came into your store and bought sausage as Tyler explained.”

I snorted, shaking my head. How stupid that sounded but in a way it was true. “That’s when you caught my attention. That’s when I started…” I blew out a breath.

“Coveting me?” he chuckled, taking three big steps and grabbing my hand in his big warm one. Heat baked off of him like I was standing close to an oven or a grill. It felt good, that heat. I swore I could smell him even above the cold winter wind. He smelled like a man. Campfires and tobacco and earth.

“Coveting, yes.” My hood flew back off my head and my hair rose up. Tendrils got caught up in the wind and swirled around my head.

“But you want Tyler too,” he said and tugged me so I had to stop.

“Yes, not as…” I stared at my beat up boots until he pushed my chin up with his fingers.

“Not as…?”

I had been about to say not as much as you but realized that wasn’t so accurate. More like “In a different way.”

“He’s your friend?”

I nodded, pushing my unruly hair back even as the wind yanked it away and tossed it asunder again.

“But you want to fuck him?” He grinned.

I felt a stain of embarrassment flood my cheeks but I forced my shoulders back and my head high. “Yes,” I said defiantly.

“Okay. I can live with that. For now.”

I wanted to ask Ellis why the hell I would care if he could live with it. But I did. Why I’d want his approval. But I did. And why it mattered that he accepted it. But it did.

So I simply nibbled my bottom lip until he pulled my hood up and pressed my hair under it. He kissed my nose and said “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”