The heat in her neck drove up to the tips of her ears. She probably looked like a ruddy tomato right now. “The bandages take away from my sex appeal.”
“Says who?” he asked, pulling her ankles until her backside hit the edge of the bed. He placed her palm against the rigid roll of his erection pressed against the seam of his jeans. “I think your sex appeal is just fine.”
Dade knelt in between her legs.
“What are you doing?” she asked, jerking her knees in reflexively and bumping his ribs.
Dade pressed her thighs wider and said, “Not what you obviously think I’m doing. I’m going to take your bandages off because I want to show you something.”
“Okay,” she said softly.
Dade canted his head, eyes serious. “You ever had a man eat you before, Quinn?”
Her breath caught at his dirty words. Heat pooled between her legs just thinking about his head bobbing between her thighs. “No.” She and Jay had been young, and he’d never offered.
“Mmm,” he said, tugging at the bandage on her right leg and unrolling it slowly. “If you ever want me to, just say the word. I’ve been wanting to taste you since I met you.”
“That sounds uncomfortable for you. I’d…feel bad asking.”
Dade laughed and folded up the first bandage, then removed a long pad of gauze Moira had put over the burn. “It would be my fuckin’ pleasure to make you come with my tongue. I bet you’d be a noisy little thing.” His hungry eyes held her frozen in his gaze, churning blue-green that dipped her stomach to her toes. “Now, look at what your bear has done for you.”
She gasped at the pink scar across her thigh. It barely hurt past a dull ache anymore and looked weeks old. “I don’t understand. I knew I was healing fast, but this is insane.” She scrabbled to remove the other bandage, and when it was in a little pile on the bed beside her, she looked in amazement at the matching scar on her other leg.
Dade ran his fingertip along the line of the mark on her right leg, conjuring gooseflesh with his touch. “Damn, woman. You’re gorgeous.”
“Even scarred?”
“Especially scarred. Tell me, why were you so far away from the door when I found you?”
She shook her head as emotion crashed over her at the memory of that awful fire. “The cats,” she whispered. “They were so scared. I could hear someone banging on the door, trying to let me out, but the cats were screaming, and I thought if the wall caved, they could maybe get out. I was opening their cages when the beam fell from the ceiling.”
Dade gripped her knees and spread her legs wide, then brushed his lips against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. “I knew it as soon as the cats ran past my legs. I knew you’d taken a risk to save them. Brave, selfless, beautiful woman.”
Quinn exhaled slowly, her breath shaking as she leaned back on locked arms and let him kiss her other leg. His soft smacking sounds pooled wetness between her legs. “If we do this, you’re in this with me. No half-in, trying to convince us both we’re not right together.”
Dade’s eyes snapped up to hers, and a slight frown took his face. “Quinn, we don’t have to go that far right now. You and Jay took your time, and I can wait, too.”
Heat flooded her cheeks. “I thought you said I was your mate.”
“You are.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It is.”
“Then I’m asking you.”
Dade’s eyebrows arched high, and two dimples bracketed his sensual lips as he offered her a surprised smile. “Asking me what?”
“I’m asking you to be with me. Not just intimately either. I want to feel like you have my back, no matter what we go through with shifters coming out to the public. I want to know in my heart you will be there for me, like I’ll be there for you.”
“Quinn, sex doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
She smiled sadly and pulled at his shirt until it came off his head, leaving his hair mussed. His skin was smooth between the shrapnel scars. She understood now how big an injury had to be to leave a mark like that on a bear shifter, and he’d somehow survived everything that had marred his body. She traced the chemical burn on his throat, and this time he allowed it, though his eyes lost their smile. “You’ve trained yourself to not feel sex, Dade. It has to be different with me. I want all of you. I don’t want you to fuck me like you’ve trained yourself to do with other women. I want you to feel me.”
At her words, he weaved like a drunk man, his eyelids closed half-mast, and now his hands were stroking up and down her legs rhythmically as if he didn’t know he was even doing it.