I inhaled a shaky breath and fought back tears. Way to go, Bell. Now I felt ashamed and confused and angry, all at once. And I hated him for it.

“You hear all that?” I bit out.

“I hear it.”

The steely grip on my shoulders loosened, and before I realized what was happening, he was running a hand down my arm, down my scaly skin. When he got to my hand, he entwined his fingers with mine and pressed my palm right over the straining fly of his jeans. He was hard. Big. And hot as damnation against my too-cool transmutated skin.

“Feel that?” he said. I couldn’t answer. “Every time you give me one of those coy looks of yours. Every time you wrinkle up your nose in that snarky little way of yours. Every time you brush up against me ‘accidentally.’ Yes, I knew exactly what you were doing, and I’ve been in hell all day long.”

I whimpered. But when I tried to get a better feel of things, he tore my hand away. “Not going to break me. Come here.” His arm swung around my back. He dragged me to the sofa and sat, pulling me down to straddle his lap. “You think you’re making a connection to the Æthyr, you tell me that very moment, you hear me?”

I nodded, not really understanding what I was agreeing to. Then he let out a long breath and looked me over. His fingers lightly stroked over my arms. The insides of my elbows. My palms. He splayed his fingers over my stomach, up my sides, his index fingers hooking beneath the thin fabric of my tank top and pushing it up, up, up, notching it over my breasts, which rose and fell under his languid scrutiny. He traced the long, flat scales between, and when his thumbs stroked over my nipples, I planted my hands on his shoulders and gasped as if I was dying.

And maybe I was a little. Dying, or living for the first time since I’d left the hospital, it was hard to tell which.

His hands circled to my back. He stroked down, down, down my spine . . . until his touch grazed over my tail. For a moment, I was caught between a weird, unexpected embarrassment—he was touching territory no one had touched, not even me, barely—and an ecstatic anticipation, for exactly the same reason. But when his fingers slid to the underside of my tail, I forgot all of that. Waves of pleasurable chills rolled in, ebbed, and rolled in again as he stroked down the length of it, bringing it around between us to see the rings of black and white stripes.

“Amazing,” he whispered as it curled around his hand and wrist. “So goddamn amazing.”

Before I could respond, he shifted his free hand to my leg and slid his way up to my inner thigh, eyes intently fixed on mine. “I’m going to touch you now. Can you handle this?”

Holy freaking Harlot. My senses went bananas.

“It’s sort of a forest down there,” I warned, panicking at the last second.

“Fantastic,” he murmured, as if I’d just given him a birthday present, then pushed my panties aside and slipped his fingers between my legs.

If all the rest of it was good, this was divine. He touched me as if he’d aced Pleasuring Cady 101. I mean, seriously, he wasn’t messing around. No awkward searches, no guesswork, no fingers going everywhere but where they should. Where had he been all my life? I couldn’t have done this better myself. And all the little whispers of encouragement he gave were the icing on the cake.

I wanted to hold back and make it last, but I got greedy fast, and before I knew it, I was bowing off his lap, cheek bent to his, every muscle straining. And in my ear, his low voice said, “Come for me, Cadybell.” That was it. I tipped over the edge and cried out, utterly and completely lost.

It took me a few seconds to come back down and a few more for the heat of his proficient fingers to slip away. At that point, the only thing on my mind was returning the favor. Well, first it was a whole lot of Holy shit, that was amazing and a little bit of I can’t believe that just happened. But next, when I was able to think properly, I slowly reached for him.

And that’s when I got the boot.

“Go on and shift back down,” he said in a strained voice, gently but firmly ejecting me from his lap. “We need to be ready to leave in a half hour and pick up our clothes on the way out.”

And as I dazedly pulled my clothes back into place and watched him disappear into the bathroom and lock the door, I realized something that made me sad.

During everything that had just happened, he’d never even kissed me.

If I thought the Pasadena kiss was the elephant in the room, it was a mouse compared with our little predawn tête-à-tête on the love seat. And maybe because we were barely speaking after it was over, we efficiently got ourselves ready to leave on time . . . only to have rain-slicked roads and an overturned eighteen-wheeler make us late.

But by the time Lon and I had inched through the detour with a million other cars and found our way back to Reptile Hell, it was 8:15 a.m. A quarter hour past the time this Parson Payne guy was supposed to show for his snake pickup.

I squinted past the windshield wipers as Lon flipped on his turn signal and spied an empty loading dock. No way had we traveled half the state to follow Wildeye’s notes only to be stymied by a random traffic accident.

An old dark brown Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled out of the parking lot—one with blooming rust spots, a dented fender, and the back windows covered in peeling do-it-yourself tinting. It most definitely qualified as “ratty-ass.”

“There!” I shouted to Lon as the Jeep turned onto the road in front of us. “That’s him.”

“Are you sure?”