The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 14 - Left a Mark

"You want me to mark you?" Jace asked. "Now?"

I shrugged at him. I had stopped after three buttons, deciding that enough of my chest was exposed. "Now works for me. I want to get it over with."

Jace was making a point of keeping his eyes fixed firmly on mine. He was frowning slightly and had been since I'd first touched those buttons, and I could see the tension in his muscles, plain as day. "I'd rather do it somewhere private. Someone might walk in."

"So what if they do? It's just a quick nip, right?" I replied.

"It's a bit more intimate than that."

But he seemed to have lost the will to argue. He stepped closer and looked down at my bare shoulder for the first time. I watched him swallow and found myself smiling a tiny bit. I wasn't sure he knew exactly how to do it ... but no one ever did, when they were marking someone for the first time. We all just muddled through life, trusting that we'd work it out when the time came. I knew how panicky I had been when I had marked Angie.

"You need your wolf out. At least a little bit," I told him. "So try and get him on board."

"He knows you're not actually my mate," Jace murmured.

There was no helping that. I could feel the turmoil behind those blue eyes - his wolf's rumbling uncertainty and suspicion at the idea of marking a stranger. Jace and I had never met in wolf form. We should have, really, if only to ease this next part.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked me in a low voice.

I could have sworn my cheeks were getting warmer. "Do you need to?"

"No, but I think it would help."

I gave him a tiny nod. I felt one of his hands touch my hip and the other brush my hair away from my shoulder. His head tilted down, mine tilted upwards, and our lips met tentatively. I wasn't prepared for the swarm of butterflies which erupted into my stomach because I was much too old and jaded to be nervous about something like this.

I was ... I was kissing a guy. I'd done this before - I knew it was fine. It was what came after kissing that I was entirely unsure about. His lips were rougher than Angie's had been, and when I moved my hands to his sides, I was struck by how solid the muscle felt beneath his shirt.

I wasn't sure if the kiss was helping him. But it had only been ten seconds at most when he pulled back, and he kissed my collarbone instead, close to where a mark was supposed to go. That I hadn't been expecting, and it took a lot of effort not to squirm backwards. It was the wrong side of my neck, like I'd asked.

After his lips came the scrape of teeth against skin, and that did make me wriggle a bit. Jace waited until I'd stilled to bite down. The pain followed in a hot flash that left me reeling, because I hadn't been expecting it to hurt so much. I was determined not to squeal or yelp or anything remotely over the top. Instead, what came out was a quiet and pathetic groan.

"Sorry," Jace said. He stepped back and seemed relieved to be doing so. "It's not bleeding much. I'll find you something..."

My hand went instinctively to my shoulder to check. Touching it hurt. I tried to keep the pressure on, all the same. I didn't want to bleed on this shirt so soon after buying it.

He had brought me a box of tissues. I sat down on the edge of the sofa and pressed a wad of them to my shoulder. And for a while, we just sat there in silence, waiting for the bleeding to stop. I probed the new mate bond. It was hanging between us - painfully flimsy compared to my last bond, given that we hardly knew each other. It should have been a way for me to peek into his mind, but from the look of it, his walls were so firm and so permanent that I didn't stand a chance of that.