“And if I don’t want you to?” To my own ears, my voice sounded high and thready, like it belonged to someone else entirely and I didn’t know who the hell she was.
“Then I wouldn’t be touching you at all, but look at your hands, pet.”
Reeling back and doing my best to ignore how the movement rubbed my core against the top of his thigh, I found my hands gripping his tuxedo jacket tightly. My strawberry scent wafted up in between us and Edison’s lashes fluttered and his nostrils flared wide as he took a deep drag of my scent.
“And if that wasn’t any indication, the slick leaking from what is sure to be the prettiest pussy I’ve ever seen in my life sure is.”
It was clear he was changing the subject and steering us away from our earlier discussion. I had half a mind to let him, but I still hadn’t gotten my answer about Rhodes.
“What are you going to do if we say no to being a pack? Rhodes and me, I mean.”
Edison’s hands paused on my bare thighs, his body stilling entirely as he seemed to contemplate my question.
“I don’t know, but I really don’t think I’m going to have to worry about it much.” He leaned in close and pressed his mouth to the shell of my ear. “You looked as if you wanted to devour him whole today after you caught us in the hallway.”
“I did not.”
A total lie. One created in order to protect the pieces of the fragile dignity that I still had left because even if I was feeling that way in the hallway, Rhodes’ refusal to come upstairs with us had definitely checked that desire.
Rhodes didn’t like me. Maybe he liked the way I smelled—but he didn’t like me and what I represented. At best he tolerated me for Edison’s sake.
“Whatever you say, pet, now would you like me to continue to touch you or shall we pull out a game of cards? We’ve got all night and I am a killer speed player.”
Nibbling on my bottom lip, I glanced down to where the skirt of my dress was hiding the evidence of my arousal. The same arousal that I knew he could definitely feel through the legs of his pants. “And if I say no? What about the bloody sheets that you need for the morning?”
Edison’s expression flattened into a grimace as he lifted me up into his arms again and tossed me into the nest, reaching into his jacket and fumbling around for something.
“What are you—?” I began but my words were cut off when I saw him hold a fancy looking pocketknife up.
For just one, brief second I thought he was going to use it on me.
Then I watched in horror as he drew the knife down his palm, causing a thin rivulet of blood to form in its wake. It wasn’t overly deep, but the sight of it ripped a gasp from me.
“Edison!” I sat up quickly, reaching for his hand but he pulled it out of my reach before leaning over me and drawing his hand down the sheets next to me, leaving one long smear behind.
“Perrie, let’s get one thing straight,” he growled as he put one knee on the bed and shrugged out of his suit jacket, revealing the chest holster underneath and the shiny black pistol that sat underneath his right arm. “I will never make you do anything you don’t want to. Ever. You are now my partner in this life—even if it started as a contract. I can’t promise you love, but I can promise you that.”
Then he undid the buckle on the holster and let it drop to the floor. Not even a few minutes ago he told me that a woman had shot him in the chest when he was vulnerable and it had caused him to not sleep with anyone but Rhodes again, and now he was opening himself up to it again.
It was showing that he trusted me. A warmth filled my chest and it had nothing to do with how turned on I was.
“So what’ll it be, Perrie?”
We stared at each other for a beat, sizing each other up, before I finally gave in and reached out and tugged on the front of his dress shirt.
Edison fell over me, his arm resting above my head as his nose brushed against mine. “Tell me. Verbally.”
I knew what I wanted and I just hoped I wasn’t making the biggest mistake of my life. Sucking in a deep breath, I nodded to him. “Please touch me, Edison.”
Our lips met in a crash and Edison wasted no time tasting me, his tongue slipping into my mouth in an even deeper kiss than the ones we’d shared earlier. His vanilla scent wrapped around me so completely that I felt almost drunk on it.
Edison’s other knee came up on the bed, forcing my legs to spread in order to accommodate it as a hand returned to the inside of my thighs.
“Have you ever touched yourself before, Perrie?” Edison asked gently, his words muffled by our still joined mouths.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, my face turning red as I remembered the times that reading my romance novels had made my insides tingle so badly that my hand couldn’t help but creep up in between my legs to soothe it.
“Is that a yes?” His thumbs hooked on the strings of the lacy white panties that I was wearing, his breathing turning heavy when he realized that he wouldn’t actually need to pull them down because there were little strings on either side he could untie.
You’ll be like a present, Oona had declared proudly earlier when she presented them to me. MasterEdison won’t know what to do with himself.
That was a lie, though, because Edison Keane seemed to know exactly what to do as he undid each little bow and pulled.
“Yes,” I finally managed to rasp out.
“Really? My sweet little omega touches herself? I didn’t take you for the type.”
He was teasing me now, his fingers returning to my legs and slowly inching upwards to the spot that was now leaking freely.
“And what type am I?” I challenged, feeling his purr of satisfaction at my snappy question.
“Sheltered, sweet, maybe a bit of a prude.”
His lips cut off my squawk of protest, his teeth gently pulling at my bottom lip and making me squirm underneath him. “I bet you can’t even say the word pussy.”
“I can too!”
“Then prove it.”
