Now that the idea of hearing his voice again was in her mind, she couldn’t shake it loose. Even as she tried to reason her way out of doing it, Camille lifted the phone again and, with one trembling thumb, dared to hit the call button.
Checking to make sure it was on audio only, she lay back in her pillows and squeezed her eyes shut. It rang and rang, each discordant note striking a blow in the warm darkness. Dread settled over her. He’s not going to answer.
That was good. It was foolish and sentimental to call him in the dead of night, anyway. They had their meeting planned. Surely she didn’t need to add one more bad decision to her roster for the evening.
Mind made up and stomach roiling with self-recriminating disappointment, Camille moved her thumb across the screen to end the call.
“Cam?”
Viktor’s voice came through the line crystal clear. It brushed across her senses in a silken caress, both soothing and anxiety-inducing. He didn’t sound sleepy, but he still had that peculiar note to his voice that people got when they were laying down.
Her breath hitched. Words fled. Now that she had him on the line, what was she supposed to say? Panic and embarrassment overwhelmed her.
“Sweetheart, I can hear you breathing. Are you okay?” She heard a faint rustle before his voice changed. Camille imagined him sitting up in bed, his hair tousled and his skin bare, and gripped her phone tight enough to make it creak. “Cam, sweetheart, say something so I know you aren’t bleeding out on the bathroom floor or something. Please.”
She forced herself to swallow, despite the fact that her throat was dry enough to light a match. “I’m fine. I just wanted— I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. It’s late. I’m sorry, I’ll just—”
“Sweetheart.” Viktor’s low purr stopped the progress of her finger, which had been inching toward the end call button. There was a lilting note of surprise in his tone when he asked, “Did you call just to talk to me?”
She briefly considered lying, but the idea didn’t get far. What would she say? No, I called the wrong number?
Biting back a low, pained groan, Camille leaned her head back into her pillow and tartly replied, “This was a mistake. If you’d rather be sleeping, I can let you go.”
“Camille, the day I’d rather be sleeping than talking to you is the day you should put me in the ground.”
“Yes, well…” She paused, flustered, and cleared her throat. “Now that I’m talking to you, I don’t know what to say.”
“Why’d you call, sweetheart? What made you want to talk to me? Is everything okay? Don’t get me wrong— I’m fucking ecstatic you called, but I thought after tonight you’d want some space.”
Her eyes roved over the ceiling, tracing the intricate molding designed to look like bunches of leaves and flowers and fruit. Gods, I should not admit this to him.
But she was already in deep, wasn’t she? He knew about the pull and she was the one who made the choice to call him. If he really wanted to know why, then she supposed it wasn’t unreasonable of him to ask. Letting out a slow breath, she braced herself for what she was about to say.
“The pull is… difficult.”
His voice lost its playfulness when he asked, “How so?”
“It makes you feel like something is undone — like that crawling feeling you get when you realize you’ve left the bath running or a candle lit.” Focusing on one particularly robust bunch of plaster grapes, she continued, “It’s a compulsion to be near you, and when I don’t follow through with it, my body fights me. It’s uncomfortable.” She paused, knowing it was a mistake to continue but unable to stop herself. “It’s… it’s painful, in a sense.”
He was quiet for a moment, but she could hear his steady breathing, count each deep inhale and exhale like the ticking of a clock. “Sounds an awful lot like our fever, if you ask me.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah.” The sound of fabric shifting came again. Was he laying on his side? On his back? She pictured him lounging against his pillows, one arm bent behind his head, showing off every beautiful inch of his chest and stomach.
Camille squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her thighs, trying to will the image away.
“Once we pick a mate, it’s like… Well, it’s like you said. A compulsion. The animal can’t stand to be away from its mate. The body starts to— ah, it’s hard to describe. It’s like everything gets ramped up. Our magic goes haywire. Adrenaline goes overboard. Even our body temperatures rise. We’re aroused constantly. We get territorial, short-tempered, and go den-crazy. Especially when mates aren’t marked yet.”
“Den-crazy?” She blinked. “Is that like… nesting?”
“A bit. But it’s not like how a newly mated dragon will buy out an entire store’s worth of blankets as soon as they Choose. It’s more like the whole den. Everything has to be perfect. Usually a shifter will start working on their den years before they even find a mate.”
“Oh. Elves don’t do that.” Camille caught herself before she dared ask what his den looked like. She gnawed on her lower lip, trying to remind herself that she was a big girl, that she shouldn’t get comfortable with him just because he opened up to her a few hours ago.
Still, curiosity nipped at her heels.
If she gave in to the pull, if she trusted him, would he go den-crazy? She wasn’t sure why the thought made her chest tight, but it did.
Viktor felt none of her hesitation, apparently. His eagerness came through loud and clear when he asked, “What do elves do, then?”
Eyes popping open, she sputtered, “What do you mean?”
“I mean what do elves do when they find their mates, sweetheart?” There was an unmistakable note of rich laughter in his voice. It damn near melted her. “If you don’t make a den and you don’t buy a bunch of blankets, what do you do?” He paused. Voice deepening into a hoarse whisper, he asked, “If I was there with you right now, what would it be like?”
Her breath stuttered. A rush of hot arousal flowed through her veins to settle between her thighs, making her ache more fiercely than she ever had before. Control — reason — slipped from her grasp like so much smoke.
“We don’t bother with a nest or a den,” she answered, knowing he could hear how quickly her breaths came, how raw her voice had become. “We want — need — skin contact above all things. It’s like we’re starved for touch, for the smell and taste of our consorts, and when we get it, we indulge until we’re drunk on it. If… if you were here, we would be in bed, skin to skin, until my scent lived in your pores and vice versa.”
There was a beat of complete silence. Camille had the startling realization that he must have been holding his breath.
Finally, he asked, “Is that all we’d do?”
Chapter Eighteen
“No,” she answered. Her free hand dug into her duvet, each claw piercing a perfect little hole in the butter soft cotton. “No, that’s not all.”
“Tell me, sweetheart.”
“I… shouldn’t. It’s a bad idea.”