“You are?” The joy in his voice was unmistakable. “Really?”
“Really.”
“How much longer until you’re here?”
I grinned and pressed the gas pedal with a little more force.
Silas blinked up at me,and a fury of need nearly knocked me off my feet.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Possession barreled over me and burned through my chest as though a bullet had just torn through the muscle there.
I vibrated as he stared at me, and the intensity of his allure only served to make me more feral. It waswild. Two fucking days ago, I hadn’t even known he existed.
“Elijah!”
His hands were rolled up into the bottom of his shirt. The thing was two sizes too big on him. It hung loosely off his shoulder, exposing the crook of his neck and the dip of his collarbone. His skin was dotted with goosebumps, and they trailed up his cheek and across his slender jaw.
I wanted to connect those dots with my tongue.
“Do you always exercise in the middle of the night?”
My eyebrows pinched together. “I’m sorry?”
“The stairs.” He lifted a slim finger and pointed to the door I’d just busted through. “They’re too steep and they suck. How come you always take them?”
Uhm…“I assumed the elevator was broken.”
Silas threw his hand over his lips, and between the cracks of his fragile fingers, a burst of laughter escaped. “It’s a little clunky, but it’s not broken. I paid to get it fixed when I moved in. Could you imagine hauling all of my furniture up fifteen flights of stairs? Marv weighs like eighty pounds.”
“Marv?”
“He’s one of my plants.”
Silas slipped into his apartment and beckoned me to follow him. I slid the door shut and watched while he pranced across the apartment. He came to a stop beside his couch and threw his arms out in a prideful gesture.
“Sweetheart.” My lips twitched. “That’s not a plant. It’s a fucking cactus.”
“It’s cool, though, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t even begin to guess how he’d found a six-foot cactus in the middle of Seattle.
“It’s very cool.”
He lifted a hand, and a laugh escaped him before he stabbed the tip of his pointer finger on one of those spikes. A wince rolled through his bones, but his smile was more prominent than ever.
A thin line of blood slipped across his knuckle and he held his abused finger in the air, brown eyes widening as he studied the damage he’d done.
“Silas—”
Good. Fucking. Christ.
My kitten lapped at the blood, dragging his tongue across the puddle that had pooled against his palm. A dot of blood sat untouched on his lower lip, and dammit I wanted to suck it off.