RawHeat Read Online Free PDF

I’ve been asleep for a thousand years.”
    And then she closed the door in Tara’s face and slumped
against the back of it.
    * * * * *
    “I think we should just talk,” he said, which sounded
perfectly normal and reasonable. Most girls loved to just talk, she knew. Like
Tara, who’d spent the entire day trying to talk to her about this one wolf
who’d started crying and begging for his mommy when she burned him with little
white-hot wires.
    But apparently, Serena didn’t like to talk all that much.
Because when he sort of pushed her away a little and said those words, she
found several things wrong with them.
    There was the fact that he’d spent the day before kissing
and touching her and enjoying all of the above. There were the words he’d
spoken, about wanting her and arousal and all of that stuff. And then there was
his big, uncomfortable-looking erection, pressing up against the sheet.
    When she’d first come into the room she’d even seen him sort
of bumping his hips, as though the feel of the material all taut over his
swollen hard-on felt amazing. Or unbearable. One or the other.
    “Don’t you want to feel good?”
    “Of course I do. But I also…want to respect you. As a
person.”
    Where was he getting this stuff from? They’d spent a year
talking and respecting each other. In fact, they’d spent a year respecting each
other so painfully that it made her wild just thinking about it. Those barriers
were gone now. They’d been blown up. He’d blown them up when he’d let her touch
him and told her how much he wanted her and Lord, had she just imagined it all?
    “I thought…you wanted me.”
    It sounded terrible in her head and even worse coming out.
And he just looked wretched after she said it, as though it destroyed him to
have to tell her that actually, he’d just been glad of some random female
company. He’d just been happy to get anything he could and now, in the cold
light of day, he could see she wasn’t really worthy of him.
    Other girls—hell, even werewolf-hating girls—would probably
be willing, if she was. If one nurse who had problems with him calling her by
her first name was up for a fuck, then other nurses would be too. Hotter
nurses. Hotter nurses like Tara, with her wires and her little shark’s teeth
and her mean eyes.
    He probably liked that kind of stuff—meanness and torture
and so on and so forth. He probably had all kinds of kinks she’d not even
considered, when she’d sat by his bed and listened to him talk and talk about
all the lovely stories he remembered, like the one about the glass slipper and
the one about the trail of breadcrumbs and the one about the girl in the red
hood…
    Wait, what was he saying now?
    “I don’t just want you, Serena. I love you.”
    Oh. That.
    “I love you.”
    That.
    His arms were kind of burning her hands, so she let them
drop away from him. And then she stepped back, just for good measure.
    “Is that so terrible? I just thought if it was okay for us
to kiss and touch…I thought it’d be okay for me to say…”
    He looked panicked, suddenly. Unbearably.
    “It is okay. It’s really okay. I’m just…”
    Shocked? Stunned?
    Happy. Happy.
    “You’re sort of smiling. Is that a good sign?”
    He had to know it was, even though she could feel herself
trying to hold the corners of her mouth down and her whole face seemed to be
kind of trembling and oh no, oh no, he was absolutely going to know how much
she loved him too. Had he seen it on her face, the other day? The other day
when she’d thought love love love a million times, like an idiot?
    And did it really matter, when he apparently loved her too?
    “Look, I’m completely aware of how insane this is, and I
don’t expect to run off into the sunset with you forever or anything like—”
    She kissed him then. He needed kissing. She could feel his
teeth like needles beneath the press of his lips, and he made a sound too—a
little protesting sound—but she didn’t