Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
The latter, he’d expected. Psy who’d grown up under Silence weren’t easy with touch. As for the huskiness, it affected him the same as when he’d spoken to her on the phone: straight to his dick.
Real evolved of you, Yakov, muttered his internal prude. That prude, however, was soon swatted away by his bear. A bear that really, really, really liked Theodora Marshall and her tightly pent-up energy and her unexpected and sharp comeback to his comment about looking out for him in bear form.
Woman had claws.
The bear was intrigued. It wanted to stroke her until she went boom for him.
Forcing himself to breathe and to keep his bear in check, he took in the rest of her. She was shorter than him by at least a couple of inches, maybe more. At five-eight, he was somewhere in the midrange for changeling males, but even though she was technically shorter than him, with fine features, there was nothing small about her—Theodora Marshall had what his babushka Graciele—his father’s mom—would call a presence.
This, despite the fact that she wore generic black flats, a wraparound calf-length skirt in the same color, and a plain white shirt with long sleeves. No studs in her ears, no sign of piercings at all. Her only jewelry appeared to be the metallic comm device on her wrist. Her nails were clean and unpolished, her hair pulled back into a severe knot at the back of her head. Even her purse was nothing but a large black square with no personality.
Everything about her said Don’t touch.
His bear was all about touching, but skin privileges were a serious matter. To be given, not taken. So he wouldn’t assume anything. But he also intended to charm the heck out of her.
Hold on, hold on.
A screeching sound in his mind, a reminder that she was part of a family that had made a business out of lobotomizing people.
She was a child for most of that, another part of him murmured, but the earlier reminder managed to cut through his knee-jerk reaction to his dream woman. He might think he knew her, but all he knew of her was a figment of his imagination, visions caught between sleep and wakefulness.
Yakov didn’t know the real Theodora Marshall.
He still intended to stick to her like glue—because if she was real, then so was that vision of her jugular spurting blood. His bear paced inside him, hunting for a threat neither part of him could see.
This woman who was both a stranger and not, he vowed, would not die under Yakov’s watch.
He fell in step with her as she walked toward where the system would spit out her luggage after she scanned her ID. It didn’t matter that she’d flown on a private jet—all luggage went through the airport’s security systems and could only be collected by the person to whom the luggage was linked. At which point, it would either be handed over, or Theo would be pulled into a private cube to be questioned about items inside.
Moscow had a number of the most secure ports of entry in the entire world. A result of the fact that Kaleb Krychek, the StoneWater bears, and the BlackEdge wolves all called it home and had worked in concert to put those precautions into place.
“I’ll grab it,” Yakov said when her suitcase appeared in the waiting area behind the collection points.
He didn’t realize what he’d done until she said, “How do you know it’s mine?” Her ID was still in her hand.
“Scent,” he said, though he didn’t need to be thinking about the enticing lushness of her scent, all heat and dynamite and vanilla. Definitely a hint of vanilla in there. He just needed a closer sniff to be certain.
Sending a stern signal to his dick to behave and to not get all energetic about taking a deep draw of the scent at the delicate curve of her nape, he said, “Yours is all over the suitcase.”
A pause, her eyes staring into his, as if she expected him to sprout claws at any moment, go rampaging through the airport. “Of course,” she said at last, and scanned her ID so the luggage could be released. “That makes sense. By the way, you can call me Theo. My full name is a mouthful.”
“You pack bricks in this thing?” he muttered as he picked up the case with ease, his bear sniffing at the idea of turning on the hover function.
Also, in Theo’s defense, certain bears had been known to run amok in Moscow. Perhaps even Yakov. When he was much younger, of course. But even his kretin juvenile self had known better than to do it at an airport or any other port of entry. The alliance that held the city took no shit where security was concerned, and he’d have had his skin flayed off his body by his alpha and the wolf alpha.