It was late, and watching her bedroom ceiling fan make its slow revolutions was making her dizzy. Nick turned over and buried her face against Derek’s shoulder. “I can’t sleep.”
His arm came around her without hesitation. “Sleep seems to be in short supply.”
And no wonder, with the difficult decisions they’d all had to make over the last week. “Are you all right with Kat being so far away right now?”
“I don’t know. I think so. It’s like I told Jackson—she’s hurting, and I’m not so good at that comforting-parent gig. Maybe she needs someone like Nancy Holt who can hug her and tell her everything’s going to be okay and sound like she knows what she’s talking about.”
Nick propped her chin on his chest and stared up at his profile in the darkness. “You’ve done the best you can.”
“Yeah. I don’t blame myself, not for that. I was too young to be everything a seventeen-year-old kid needed, but I did what I could.” His fingers traced away from her shoulder, smoothed down along her spine. “It’s not being able to protect her. I spent all that time letting Alec kick me around so I’d be good in a fight, and it’s still not enough.”
“Then maybe it’s time to let go. Stop thinking you should be able to protect her and teach her to protect herself.”
“Maybe.” He sounded doubtful. “She’s never going to be as fast or as strong as us. Jackson may not be a shifter, but he’s got spells and magic. I just wish I could get her the hell out of this life.”
Kat’s empathy was strong enough to place her outside the rest of humanity, whether Derek liked it or not. “Where would you have her go?”
“Damned if I know. If I had a clue what I was doing, Nick, I’d probably be sleeping.”
She pulled free of his arm and sat up. “That’s what I mean. Doesn’t she get to decide?” She’d spent her life having everyone else plan her future—where she needed to go, what she needed to do—and it sucked.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Derek rubbed the side of his face and blew out a tired breath. “Of course she gets to decide. I’m an overprotective bastard, but I’m not that bad, am I?”
“Good intentions don’t change the outcome.” They never had in her family, anyway.
“Are we still talking about Kat, sweetheart?”
“Maybe not.” She toyed with the edge of the comforter. “I can sympathize. With you, for wanting to protect her. With Kat, for wanting to live her own life.”
Derek caught her fingers and tugged them up to rest on his chest. “No one could ever think you haven’t lived your life on your own terms.”
Of course she had. What no one expected was that she’d continue to do so. “Most people who care to think about me consider my entire adult life a rebellious phase I just have to get through before I settle down.”
“Aren’t there any well-bred shapeshifter kids who run off to join the circus?” His sudden laugh shook the bed. “Except Alec. God, thinking of him as well bred actually hurts a little.”
“It really isn’t funny.” She pulled her hand away. “Haven’t you figured it out? New Orleans is the circus.”
His laughter faded. “Just you and Alec?”
“Alec doesn’t count. His family would be ecstatic if he took an interest in politics, mostly because they’ve been trying to claw their way up to the Conclave for fifty years.”
“Oh.” He tucked his hand behind his head and studied her silently. “Sometimes I forget the shapeshifter royalty thing. I mean, I don’t forget that your family’s important…but I forget how many people know you. Have expectations for you.”
It was the furthest thing from the truth she could think of. “They have expectations, but they don’t know me.”
“Know of you, I meant.” A gentle smile, almost shy. “I like to think I’m getting to know you.”
That he seemed so glad to have that chance humbled her. “So what do you expect of me?”
“Hmm…” His free hand swept over her shoulder. “Expect, or want? Because one of those is nice and polite and boring, and the other might get my mouth washed out with soap.”
He was teasing her, and it was impossible to maintain her dour mood in the face of it. Nick leaned over him, letting her hair brush his skin. “Tell me both.”
“I expect you’ll continue to be a sweet, open, caring woman who helps her friends whenever she can.” He lowered his voice—and his hand, until his fingers traced along the curve of her hip. “I want to see if we can use the rest of that box of condoms we bought in one night. I bet you’d sleep then.”
Arousal shivered through her, echoed by need. “Your plan is to fuck me unconscious?”
“Hell, no. That’s crude. My plan—” His arm latched around her waist and he rolled her until she was curled on her side, her back pressed tight to his chest. “Is to fuck us both unconscious.”
“Oh, good. That’s far less crude.” She reached up and ran her fingers through his hair as she stretched slowly.
“Mmm. Can you reach the condoms? Before we forget them this time?”
“We’re not going to forget them.” She dug through the bedside table anyway. His mouth found the back of her shoulder, and one hand smoothed around to cup her breast. There was something different in his touch this time, all of the need and passion, but none of the frantic urgency.
It let her relax against him and enjoy the heat of his skin on hers. “Slow?”
“As slow as we can manage.”
“Mm-hmm.” That had been hit or miss over the last week. Control always dissolved for one or both of them at some point, sweeping them away in a furious haze of desire.
He chuckled, his breath stirring against her shoulder blade. “You doubting me?”
She shivered. “We don’t have the best track record when it comes to slow, sweet love.”
“Math of mating,” he murmured, then slid lower. His tongue teased back up her shoulder to the base of her neck, where he made slow a hundred times more difficult by closing his teeth on her nape.
Nick couldn’t not squirm against him. “That’s cheating.”
“Thought we covered that during the strip poker, baby.” Another bite, harder this time, accompanied by a soft growl. “I’m a cheater.”
“Yet you have everyone convinced you’re such an upstanding man.”
“Maybe you’re the only thing I want bad enough to cheat for.”
Her laugh was shockingly breathless. It took him a matter of seconds to leave her tense and trembling, and the sudden urge to do the same thing to him overtook her. Nick turned in his arms and draped one leg over his hip. “There you go with the cheating again, when all you have to do is ask.”
“Oh, is that all?” He caught the back of her head and whispered the words against her lips. “Nicky Peyton, can we make with the dirty hot fucking?”
She bit his lip with a moan. “That’s why we can’t do slow. You say things like that.”
Derek urged her over until she was stretched out on the cotton sheets, arms above her head, and pressed the box of condoms into her hands with a low, wicked laugh. “Hold on to those. I’m gonna be busy for a bit.”
She tossed the box on the bed with another laugh and drove her fingers into his hair. “Poor baby. Haven’t I told you I’m bad at following directions?”
“So you want me to stop?”
It was the last thing she wanted, and she told him so with a pleading twist of her body. He teased her when he touched her, his fingertips skating over her stomach and hips and down her legs.
She endured it as long as she could, but she wound up bracing her hands on his shoulders and flipping him onto his back with a growl. “What if I want to be busy?”
“Well, I don’t have any particular objections…” His hands landed on her hips, fingers spanning to cup her ass. “Oh yeah, this is nice.”
“I bet.” His size and strength tripped some primal response, and her basest instincts rose. She wanted to test him, to push until he proved himself strong enough to handle her. “Tell me what stopped you before.”