To Hiss or to Kiss (9 page)

“God, you’re like my own personal full-body vibrator.”

Jorge laughs but doesn’t stop moving. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

I can feel his lips moving and his breath on my skin as he talks. I giggle a bit, but I refuse to start feeling self-conscious. I focus on how Jorge feels, the hardness of his muscles under my hand, the softness of his lips as they kiss me, the bliss of each thrust bringing us both closer to the brink. I can’t believe the connection we share in this moment, how utterly right this feels. And then my orgasm rises and I shatter, followed closely by Jorge’s release.

We melt into each other as Jorge leans back, pulling me down on top of him. I lie with my head on his chest as his fingers caress the small of my back. Contentment washes over me as I listen to his now softer, rumbling purr, and tiredness pulls at me. I could lie like this forever.

“Will you stay tonight, Chloe?” Jorge whispers, his voice vulnerable.

“Of course.” I answer before I can think better—or worse—of it, snuggling a bit more into his chest.

Chapter Seven

I wake up and feel a moment of panic at the unfamiliar surroundings until memories of the previous evening float back into my sleep-addled brain. My thoughts bring a grin to my lips, a surge of desire hitting me like a lightning bolt. Unfortunately, Jorge is not in bed. I hear the rattle of dishes from the kitchen.
Mmm.
I could go for breakfast. I’m proud of myself that I am still keeping a tight lid on my desire to flee in panic. Not going to happen, brain, you hear me?

We’ll see, heart.

I roll my eyes at myself but smile again when I see that Jorge’s placed my clothes in a neat pile on his dresser. It’s kind of nice not to have to search around. I have to do that enough at home since I’m terrible about actually putting clothes away.

I’m OK with re-wearing everything except my dirty underwear, so I root around his drawers until I find a pair of Jorge’s boxers. I also hate going commando with pants.

Re-clothed, I make my way back to the kitchen, following the smell of bacon. I try to focus on the thought of breakfast and not the flutters of anxiety building as I get closer to facing Jorge. I don’t have much experience with the morning after. I’m generally not a let’s-rush-into-sleeping-together kind of girl—or an I’m-doing-a-one-night-stand-and-leaving-well-before-breakfast kind of girl—but obviously I’m not terribly rational when it comes to Jorge. I’m happy, excited, petrified, and on the brink of panic. I don’t know if I should be doing a happy dance into the kitchen or hiding my head in shame that I hopped into bed so quickly. My heart can’t feel guilty about something that felt so right—feels so right. My superego brain is a lot less understanding. Landing somewhere in between doing a bunny binky and running out the door, I pause at the entry to the kitchen, then steel myself with a deep breath and walk in.

“Morning.” Jorge glances up from the cooking bacon with a heart-stoppingly gorgeous smile. He doesn’t look ashamed at all, but then again, he does hide his emotions pretty well when he wants to. And in our sexist society I’m not sure exactly what it takes to make a man a slut.

He nods toward the counter. “Tea’s in the pot. Help yourself.”

The easy entrance does make my nervousness fade slightly, but I feel a fine sheen of panic sweat on my brow and the ever-present capillary action heating my face red. It seems more normal that I’m in Jorge’s kitchen getting tea to go with breakfast than my brain and sympathetic nervous system think it should, but I decide to just go with it. Bodily responses be damned. “Mmm. Thanks. That smells delicious.” I brush against him lightly as I pass to where the mugs and teapot sit. I figure I’ll just outdo my nervousness with sexiness.

He growls huskily in response to my touch, and I feel my arousal rising to critical.

After fixing a mug of tea, I ask, “Anything I can do to help?”

“No, you are my guest.” He grabs a plate covered in paper towels and piles on the finished bacon to drain. Then he reaches for some eggs. “Do you have a preference for how your eggs are cooked?”

“Scrambled. With cheese if you’ve got it.”

Now he looks up at me with a slight grin. “I should’ve known you’d be high maintenance about food, too. Guess I do have something for you to do. Should be some cheese in the middle drawer in the fridge.”

I move to get the cheese. “Do you cook regularly?” I’m hoping so. I hate cooking and generally suck at it. I’d much rather just do the eating.

“On occasion. Since it’s just me, I don’t have much reason to. You?”

“Only if you count heating up leftover takeout, so sounds like it’ll be up to you to cook.” Shit. There I go implying a future again. I feel the blush rise.

But Jorge only grins at me as I hand him a bag of shredded cheddar. “Hmm. I guess I will. Planning to be over for breakfast a lot?” He raises his one eyebrow again, which I’m quickly finding incredibly endearing—and hot.

“Or at least dinner.”

By now Jorge is cooking the eggs. “I guess I’ve been forewarned.”

I really like this teasing Jorge. As he stirs the eggs, I take a few sips of tea, trying to still my beating heart. Leaning against the counter, I note that Jorge has a really great ass in jeans. I smile, letting the happiness replace all the bad emotions of the rocky start to this relationship. The sense of panic still floats around, but I studiously ignore it.

I want to hold on to the lightness of the morning, but thoughts of why I met Jorge bring Gracie and the other dogs to the forefront of my mind. “So what’s the plan for today?”

Jorge pours the scrambled eggs onto two plates. “Breakfast and then going over the intel I got this morning.” He takes the plates toward a round oak table in an alcove off the kitchen.

“So you were busy this morning. I didn’t sleep that late, did I?” I look around for a clock but don’t see one. Until now I didn’t even consider the time.

“It’s only ten, so you still made morning.” Jorge smiles, then shrugs a bit as he sets the plates down. “And I was restless.”

“I thought cats liked to sleep a lot. Glad I made you feel comfortable.” Sarcasm laces my voice as butterflies flutter in my stomach. I resolutely set my tea down on the table and sink into the chair in front of my plate of food.

Jorge touches my cheek. “The cat thing doesn’t apply to shape-shifters. But more importantly, you do make me comfortable. I just wanted to do this for you before you woke.”

The sudden tenderness makes me melt. I could be a puddle on the floor, and I’m not sure how I’m still sitting upright. I feel my eyes get a bit watery and that makes me blush. So much for my tough fearlessness.

Jorge’s voice turns slightly teasing, as if he knows I can’t handle the sentimentality of the moment very well. “Please tell me you aren’t going to cry. It will totally ruin my image of you as a warrior princess.”

God, I really love this man.

I feel my pulse race, and I don’t know if it’s acceptance or bald-faced fear. Maybe both. “Warrior princess?” I laugh, scoffing.

“What? I have some awareness of pop culture. And who says you can’t be a princess?” He’s still touching my cheek, his thumb softly caressing.

“Well, then, does that make you a prince or a manservant?” My voice deepens as the heat in my core rises.

Jorge’s tone turns slightly more serious, slightly softer, as if to match the caress of his thumb. The intensity in his emerald eyes burns across my skin in the most pleasurable, and terrifying, of ways. “For you, whatever you want.”

I try to hold his gaze, but the panic in me is threatening to burst through.
Don’t screw this up, Chloe!
Yet years of keeping almost everyone at bay is taking over control of my brain. I never met someone who tempted me out of my comfort zone of me, cats, and, on occasion, Naomi.

I try desperately to bring back the bravado of last night, but suddenly this is very real and I don’t know what to do
.
Is it too early to ask for scotch? At that I dissolve into giggles. I can’t stop. I am laughing so hard, I start to cry.

Jorge drops his hand. I glance up, but amazingly, he isn’t looking at me like I’m crazy. His eyes show amusement and something deeper. “You are a confusing woman.” He shakes his head at the echo of his words from that first night we met.

“So I-I’ve been, uh, told.” I hiccup through my giggles.

Suddenly Jorge leans forward, cupping my face in his hands and forcing me to look at him. “I’m not giving you up.” He’s dead serious. It’s almost enough to sober me up, but I’m still hiccupping giggles. “Ever.” He holds me captive with his hands and his eyes until the giggles finally subside. I don’t know how long we are like this. Maybe seconds, maybe minutes, maybe hours.

His eyes bore into mine, and I have never felt so possessed in all my life. I want to trust this man, this jaguar, my jaguar man. I try to tell him this with my eyes.
Be patient with me
, I plead. And maybe more important,
don’t hurt me—again
.

He wins our staring contest.

* * *

“So, intel?” I say when I can no longer bear his stare. I feel like a coward, but it’s better than running out the door.

Jorge must understand, because he drops his hands from my face. I irrationally miss their warmth even as I feel some relief at escaping the intimacy of the situation.

“Yes, the intel.” His voice is flat as he rises to retrieve some papers from the living room. I watch him come and go out of the corner of my eye, not wanting to risk full eye contact.

He’s all business as he walks back in and spreads some papers around, shoving his abandoned breakfast plate out of the way. He focuses on what appears to be a rough blueprint of the first floor of what I presume is the farmhouse down the street. “Cameras are located here, here, here, and here.” He points to
C
s marked on the page. “That leaves this window and this approach off the cameras.” He points to a window at what would be the back of the house, which looks like it must enter into some sort of utility room. “A glaring oversight, but I assume these aren’t the brightest people.”

His vocal control winds tighter and tighter until I’m convinced his vocal cords will snap. I’m seeing what a pissed-off Jorge looks like. It’s different than the coolly contained rage at the thought of people abusing animals. This? This is personal. I can feel his anger wrapping around me like jaws, and I envision the jaguar, which I saw so briefly the night before, ready to pounce. I feel guiltier with each second and start to fidget.

“There is a basic motion-sensor-based alarm system installed on each of the windows and doors, as well as, from what I could see, wall-mounted ones in just about every room of the first floor.” His body is so still and so tense. He pins me with a hard stare. “Am I boring you?” He gestures at my fidgeting hands, which I quickly hide under the table.

I feel my cheeks heat and I divert my gaze while shaking my head. I think of Naomi telling me Jorge obviously has emotional issues—although, of course, she was just saying that to be a supportive friend. But he certainly has shown me his anger and his passion and his humor and his ecstasy. So maybe he is an emotional tornado, but, dammit, he’s mine, and I can’t let this go. I’m sick of feeling like he’s hot and cold to me. I’m sick of being afraid and preventing us from communicating better. And it’s not like I’m a paragon of steady moods. What a pair we’ll make.

His anger is killing me because I don’t want to hurt him. So I do the thing that will make me most vulnerable. I drop my shields, raise my head, and think at him,
“So how do we get in?”

His eyes register shock, and his whole body stills. “I heard that,” he says aloud.

“So answer me,”
I say silently. It comes out more defensive than I intended as I pull my belligerence around me like a protective shield. I may be trying my hand at vulnerability, but evidently I still need some security. My last line of defense.

He screws up his beautiful face in confusion, uncertainty, maybe concentration. He’s still hard to read sometimes. But then I feel his shields drop, the turbulent currents of his emotions flowing into me. Anger, love, protectiveness, fear, loneliness. So many it’s hard to sort out. I try to send calm acceptance to him, but I’m not sure how successful I am, given how turbulent my own emotions currently are.

Finally, I hear his voice in my head.
“We need a disruptor.”

“Like a distraction?”
I ask silently, confused.

“No. Electronic. To disrupt the alarm system and the cameras. Probably can’t do it until we are at the house.”
There’s excitement in his voice as he starts getting more techie on me. He flashes images of the equipment into my brain.

Then he pauses.
“I am overwhelming you.”

“No…OK, yes. But I need to know.”

“I will be there with you if we have to go in, so I can handle the tech. You handle the dogs.”
He smiles at me. Then he says aloud, “Have you had any further contact with the dogs?”

Picking up his cue, I switch back to speaking aloud. I leave my mind cracked open to him a bit, as he does for me. I wonder if he even knows he’s leaving himself more vulnerable to me. As strange as it felt to first hear his voice in my head, it now feels so natural to be connected on this psychic level. It calms my nervous system, pulling me into trusting Jorge more and more. But I can still feel myself holding back. “No. Not close enough.”

“Have you tried connecting from a farther distance with any animal before?”

“Yes, but it’s spotty at best. Sometimes I can connect with my cats from farther away.”

“So there are other cats in your life?” His grin is mischievous.

I swat at him playfully. “Ew. No comparison.”

He shrugs and laughs. “I didn’t say it was a competition. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Not funny.” I punch him a bit harder, and he reaches up to rub the spot.

“Ow.” He growls a bit even as his laughter continues.