Romance: Auctioned To The Panther: BBW Dragon Shifter Romance Standalone (Wild Shifters Book 2) (6 page)

Of course, she was his mate and he'd never hurt her like that, but she didn't know that—and that was a whole 'nother can of worms.

He led her slowly down to the kitchen so that she could get her glass of water. She'd given his explanation a doubtful look, but she didn't comment on it, for which he was grateful.

In the kitchen, she leant back against the counter as Christian got her a glass of water. He was mysterious, she had to admit—but not mysterious in a way that she feared. She was more just curious about him and about what he'd been up to.

“Stop thinking so loud,” Christian said with a smile, handing her the glass and standing so that his hands were pressed against the counter on either side of her, hemming her in. She felt safe there, even though by all rights she probably shouldn't.

She swallowed down the water and then carefully set the glass off to the side without breaking eye contact with Christian. She smoothed her hands down his sides and pulled him forward so she was cupping his ample behind and he was stood there between her legs.

They stood there for a long moment assessing one another, and then Grace tilted her head to the side. “You know,” she said slowly, “I don't know how I'm ever going to be able to get back to sleep, with how wired I am—that panic and the surge of adrenaline really woke me up! Know any ways that you could wear me out a little?”

Christian smiled wickedly at her. “I get the feeling
you
might have some ideas,” he said.

Grace raised an eyebrow innocently. “Me? I'm not so sure...”

Christian slid a hand between her legs, pleasantly surprised to find how moist she already was. “Look at you,” he said, “already ready for me to fill you, right here in the middle of the kitchen. You naughty girl.”

Grace moaned as he stroked lightly at her, doing her best to get a hand on him as well. They took turns playing with one another, letting their feelings build slowly, until Grace was biting her lip to keep from swearing and it was all Christian could do to keep up a steady rhythm and still remember to breathe. They were so incredibly compatible, Grace reflected, each of them seeming to know exactly how to get the other hot.

They came at nearly the same time. Grace started laughing softly; she felt so good just then. Christian smiled fondly at her. “Come on,” he sighed. “Let's go back to bed.”

Chapter Seven

Grace had expected that she'd go back to her home and her job eventually, but she found herself staying for longer and longer at Christian's mansion. Before she knew it, somehow she'd been there for nearly a month—and she still felt comfortable, the intimacy growing between the two of them.

She no longer felt like such a prisoner, although she didn't like to stray far from the house for strictly personal reasons (she still was afraid in the back of her mind that one of these days, Liam was going to show up and drug her again). In fact, it kind of seemed like things had worked out a little too well: sure, she'd had a horrible experience, but from that experience, she'd found herself living with the man of her dreams, and he showed no signs of getting sick of her.

Christian had, however, returned to work as usual at this point, which meant that there were some days when he was out in the office for the whole day (he could do most of his work from home, but sometimes he needed to oversee a particularly tricky deal or something like that). Still, Grace wasn't often left totally alone unless the servants had the day off or were out running errands.

It was the little things that kept Grace there, though. Christian was wonderful to her. Even on the days when he was off at work, he would always check up in the middle of the day to make sure she was all right, and usually he would bring home cookies or some other sweet treat from the bakery in the evenings.

He was the first person Grace had ever known who was incredibly rich but who didn't act like it. Instead, he just acted kind of like a normal guy—he put his feet on the coffee table, he sometimes drove himself to work, and he even sometimes played with his food, like that time he had shown her “how real Italians cook pasta” and thrown some of it at the wall to see if it stuck.

And Grace couldn't stop thinking about how attractive he was, either. She'd wake up in the morning with her pussy already wet and ready to go, just waiting to be filled. If Christian was there, of course they'd have sex; on the infrequent mornings when he wasn't there, she'd felt that she needed to bring herself off or wouldn't be able to concentrate for the rest of the day—but that had only left her feeling lonely and not entirely sated.

She liked having him there in bed with her too; he helped her get over her nightmares, and there were many nights where one or the other of them would wake up and spontaneously start to work on the other person, waking them with soft touches and deliberate gestures.

And his
tongue
—god, that man could do things with his tongue that made her toes curl! She'd never realized how easily she could get turned on before, but Christian seemed to take her body as a kind of challenge, trying all sorts of new things and cataloguing which ones worked and which ones didn't. She'd known she liked kissing with tongue before and she'd had guys go down on her before, but she was pretty sure Christian could easily make her come just by using his tongue on her nipples.

Christian, for his part, felt the same about Grace: that she was incredibly good at reading his needs and using them to drive him absolutely crazy. She would usually start off with her hands, letting his heavy prick just rest in her palm for a long moment while she thumbed at the slit, waiting until she was rewarded with a bead of precome. Then she would smear that around, allowing more and more of his shaft to slip through her fist each time she pumped her hand back and forth.

He liked it when she used her nails on him, whether she was drawing sleepy patterns on his skin early in the morning or in post-coital bliss, or when she was dragging them down his back in a fit of passion. She was so absolutely beautiful too, but at the same time, in all of their interactions, she managed to come across as adorable more than anything else. He didn't really know how she managed to be both things at once, but he liked it.

That afternoon, Christian was supposed to be overseeing a project at the office, but he found himself shut up inside his own office, unable to quit thinking of the bewitching woman he'd left back at home. They'd had a nice morning and he'd come into the office late; when he'd left, she'd been sitting half naked in bed, a sheet draped over her lap, with a book in hand, her brow wrinkled slightly in concentration.

You never would have known that just an hour before that, she'd been falling apart beneath him,
begging
him to let her come. He'd denied her permission the first few times, testing her limits, and when he'd finally allowed her to come… Well, it was a pretty heady feeling for both of them. He couldn't believe he had lucked out with a woman who was so malleable and yet also so headstrong.

Thinking about that morning, he couldn't help but touch himself through his slacks; even though he'd been having sex fairly frequently lately, it seemed like he was constantly still in need of more. The more attention she gave him, the more he craved.

He thought about calling her up, but he didn't know how she'd react to that. Instead, he contented himself with pictures of her that he had in his head: her splayed out on the bed with her legs wantonly open—her touching herself as he undressed as fast as he could… He especially liked to picture her the way she was first thing in the morning, so sleepy and gorgeous and ready-to-please.

Christian glanced guiltily at the blinds on his office windows and checked the lock on his door, then collapsed into his desk chair and undid his belt and his button. His penis sprung free of its former confinement, curling anxiously up towards his desk. He spat into his palm and started rubbing at himself, imagining it was her hands on him instead.

He set a similar rhythm to the one he would set if he were inside her, pulling slowly out and then slamming back in. In his head, he could hear those soft noises that she always made, could see the surprised and needy look that she usually got on her face. God, she was beautiful like that…

The problem was, despite all the images in his head, doing something like this without her here just wasn't enough. If anything, it made his panther itchier to claim her as his mate—and despite the fact that the woman had been living with him for nearly a month now, he still had yet to claim her, still waiting for the right time.

His feline side didn't approve of that. His human side insisted it was necessary.

Whatever the case, he still had yet to inform her that he was a shifter; there was never really a good time to do so, and truth be told, he was a bit nervous about what her reaction might be. Would she still trust him? Would she be afraid of him? He just didn't know.

The more restless the panther got, the more difficult it was to get himself off with his hand alone—but that was all he had at the moment. He rocked desperately up into his hands, smearing around the precome and trying hard to mimic the feel of her vagina closing around him—but it was futile, and he could feel his orgasm slipping further and further away the more he overanalyzed his need and tried to compensate for the current lack of her.

He slammed a palm down on his desk, causing a few papers to flutter down to the floor, and then buttoned himself up in disgust.

“Tonight,” he promised himself. “Tonight, I'll tell her all about what I am and about the mating process.” He breathed in a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm down his overexcited body and the restless panther side. “
Tonight
,” he vowed again.

He wanted everything to be perfect, so he quickly wrote out a list of things that he knew she liked that he could incorporate—things like her favorite food (lasagne), her favorite color (blue—they could put those blue placemats out on the table), etc. He wasn't really any party planner, but he hoped she would appreciate the effort, anyway.

He placed a few calls to make sure everything would be ready when he arrived at home, although the best way to word things escaped him. Of course, Pearson and some of the other staff knew what he was—there really was no way to explain it to someone that they might sometimes come home to find a sentient panther lounging on the living room couch.

But they were fiercely loyal and wanted to protect him, and that didn't mean they would approve of his sharing that information with all and sundry. They'd been frustrated enough when he'd accidentally shown Miranda what he could do.

Miranda… He hadn't thought about her in a while, although he probably should have wondered what she was up to. His psychotic ex-girlfriend lived to make his life difficult. Even though it had been over three years since she'd cheated on him and ran off with someone else, she still expected that Christian would pay her bills every month. And he had been, up to the point when he'd met Grace, in a mis-guided attempt to keep the society ladies happy.

Now that he'd decided he no longer wanted anything to do with her and had refused to pay her for that month, well…suffice it to say that Miranda was not very happy with him at the moment. But then again, between the number of people the authorities were going after for the slave trade scandal and Miranda, well...it seemed like most of the elite had turned against him at the moment.

And the scary thing was, he almost didn't mind. He'd give up all the business deals he was currently working on if it meant he could keep Grace happy and safe. And he didn't think that was just his panther side talking, either: he was pretty sure the human side agreed. It was...disconcerting, to say the least.

Christian collected the papers that had fallen and booted up his computer, knowing he needed to quit allowing Grace and all the other drama to distract him; he had come into the office, after all, to get some work done—he would much rather have stayed home in bed with his mate. The sooner he got everything finished up here at the office, the sooner he could race home to her and tell her his secret, the one he'd been keeping hidden for as long as he could remember.

Chapter Eight

It was one of those rare moments when Grace was all by herself at the mansion, and she kind of reveled in it. Not that she didn't love Christian or recognize the use of having a full staff of servants around (it was especially wonderful, for example, to have somebody else cook them breakfast in bed after a night of passionate love-making, or to be able to chat on the phone with her sister while Pearson drove her in to work!).

But it was also nice to know that she could turn on music and wander around the house singing off-key while she did some tidying (not that there was really anything to tidy) or that she could catch up on terrible TV shows without fear of being caught (although she suspected Christian would've been intrigued).

When the front bell rang, she hesitated to answer it, but then again, she'd been half living there for nearly a month at that point, so she might as well answer it. It was probably only the mailman with a package or something anyway.

So she was a bit surprised to find an impeccably-dressed,
beautiful
young woman waiting at the door. Glancing past her, Grace could see a limo waiting in the driveway, so she must be one of Christian's friends amongst the elite.

“Um, hello,” Grace offered, feeling a bit shy in her tee-shirt and jeans in the face of this woman's designer suit.

The woman offered her a charming smile, though—she didn't seem at all as standoffish as most of the other society women Grace had met over the past month. “Hello,” she said pleasantly, holding out her hand. “I'm Miranda Keating, I don't think we've met yet? You're the talk of the town, though; all those women have been positively
drooling
over Christian for ages now!”