Viola couldn’t believe he hadn’t tasted the salt but she didn’t push the topic and instead picked up her own wine glass and sipped.
The wine was good. Viola’s glass emptied faster than she intended and Sebastian refilled it without comnt as the night seed to call for it.
Her eyes drifted to the floor to ceiling glass window in the dining hall and settled on the almost full moon hanging in the night sky, and she asked, "In many other packs they will be preparing for the moon festival by now."
Sebastian humd and turned to look out at the moon, his expression barely shifting as he replied, "We don’t celebrate the moon festival in Silver."
Viola turned to look at him. "Because the past Alpha died on that day?" She asked. She had always wondered about it growing up, why Silver never celebrated the moon the way other packs did and why they never participated in the tradition of traveling to neighboring packs for the event, until he had told her how his parents died. It had made sense to her after that.
But Sebastian looked at her and said, "There are more reasons why we don’t celebrate it, but yes, that is one of them. It beca sothing I had no interest in after they died. That said, I don’t stop anyone in Silver from celebrating it as they like, as long as it doesn’t involve inviting outside pack mbers in."
Viola’s brows knitted in curiosity as she asked, "You have other reasons for not celebrating the moon festival other than the death of the past Alpha?"
Sebastian smiled but it didn’t reach his steel silver eyes as he told her, "I knew you’d ask that, love. But so things are better off being unknown. Don’t let burden you with the other reasons, they are deeply personal." He paused and then asked, "Do you want to celebrate it?"
Viola imdiately noted he was changing the topic and whatever the other reasons were, he wasn’t about to tell her. She felt a pang of disappointnt that he still had things he wasn’t sharing with her, but then realized she also wasn’t completely honest with him...
She refilled her wine glass as she shook her head. "No. I don’t want any reason to be the center of attention at a celebration right now. I am fine as I am." She gulped down a mouthful and let the sweetness of it settle on her tongue. It tasted better than any wine she had tried before, sweeter and warr going down.
"Be careful with that." Sebastian said, watching her over the rim of his own glass. "That wine is stronger than it tastes."
"I have a very high tolerance for wine. I will be perfectly fine." She flashed him a smile.
She was not perfectly fine.
She beca aware of it gradually, the warmth settling low in her body.
And the way she was looking at Sebastian across the candlelight was not helping. Tonight, she was finding him almost unbearably attractive and sowhat irresistible. Did he always sll like coffee?
His shirt was open at the collar and she could see the snake tattoo at his neck and she had the completely unreasonable urge to lean across the table and trace it with her finger and then press her lips to it just to see what his skin felt like there.
She pulled her attention back to the conversation.
He was saying sothing, she wasn’t entirely certain what, because she had gotten distracted by his mouth and the way it moved when he talked and the mory of what it felt like against hers, which was a deeply unhelpful thing to be sitting with at the dinner table.
"Are you listening to ?" Sebastian asked, and she realized his voice had stopped a mont ago.
"Yes." She said.
"What did I just say?"
She had no idea whatsoever. "What did you say?" She questioned, with a clueless expression.
Sebastian looked at her face and then at her wine glass and then back at her face.
"How many glasses have you had?" He asked.
"Two." She said. And then, because apparently wine made her honest in ways she hadn’t consented to, "Or three. I wasn’t counting, they were small glasses."
The glasses were not small. Sebastian thought, pressing his lips together.
He set his own glass down and laced his fingers together on the table and stared at her. She looked damningly cute with those flushed cheeks and glassy blue eyes staring back at him.
He was not in any position to be making good decisions tonight either, a fact he had been carefully managing throughout dinner.
His heat was slowly stirring beneath his skin, and if she had a wolf, she would have been able to sll it and feel it in the air around him. It would have made him more irresistible to her in ways she wouldn’t have been able to ignore either. Simply looking at her from across the table was enough to turn him on and make him hard.
"Co on." He said, pushing back from the table and standing. "You need so air."
"I don’t need air." Viola said with pursed lips. "I want to talk to you."
"We can talk outside." He said, coming around the table and pulling her chair back for her.
The quarter had a private garden running along the inner walls, lit at night with low lights set into the stone path, and Sebastian walked beside her with his hands in his pockets as she moved alongside him in shoes that were four sizes too large and sohow still looked comfortable on her.
His n were lurking in the dark, keeping away from their path.
The night air was doing what he had hoped, clearing his head by degrees, but not so much.
They walked in silence for a while and it was a comfortable silence, the kind that didn’t need filling.
Then Viola said, "I want to ask you sothing."
"What?"
"Do you think about ?" She questioned.
Sebastian looked at her sideways, taken aback by the question. "In what sense."
"In the sense of." She stopped walking and turned to face him and appeared to be organizing her thoughts with great effort. "In the sense of when I am not in a room with you. Do you think about when I am not there?"
He looked at her for a long mont, knowing the wine was loosening her up again. "Yes." He said simply.
She seed to find this extrely significant and looked away from him and then back again. "I think about you too." She said with a grave seriousness. "More than I want to. A lot more. Sotis in my sleep. Sotis I feel you touching and doing things to ..." She smiled in a silly way.
Intrigued, Sebastian asked her, "What kind of things do I do to you in your sleep?" The corner of his lips pulled up at the side.
"You know it..." She whispered shyly and Sebastian chuckled at the reaction that was so unlike her.
"How am I to know it, amor? I am not a mind reader. Tell ." He leaned closer to her as if wanting her to whisper the secret into his ear.
She opened her mouth and closed it again before shaking her head. "I am not saying it." She then frowned slightly, sniffing him. "Why do you sll like coffee and rain? You sll different tonight," she grumbled to herself.
"I sll different to you tonight?" Sebastian’s eyes glistened, and she bobbed her head. If she thought he slled different tonight, didn’t that an she could sense his cycle? Only a mate with a wolf could pick up on that. Was this a sign that her wolf was awakening slowly?
"What else do you notice about tonight?" he asked quietly.
She moved closer and began sniffing him properly, standing on her tiptoes and touching his chest and neck in the process, causing Sebastian to stiffen.
"Your skin is hot. You’re sweating and..." She paused, her voice dropping softer. "I feel like licking you. You sll like sothing I want to...eat," she whispered. "No wonder your wolf’s na is Muffin. I like muffins."
"What?" Sebastian stepped back, glaring down at her. "How do you know that na? Who told you?"
"You did," Viola said with a smile. "In Nightshade. When you were falling unconscious, you told your wolf’s na while I was driving and trying to keep you talking to ." She giggled, and he arched a brow in displeasure, not recalling telling her that at all, not unless Muffin had been responsible for it.
But that wasn’t as important as the fact that she was aware of him in a way a wolfless mate wouldn’t be.
"Muffin!" she laughed. "Just picture that. I never thought you would have such an adorable na for your wolf, and I’m going to call you that from now on. Muffin, Muffin—"
He plastered his mouth over hers to shut her up as he didn’t want that na associated with him.
Her arms ca around his neck imdiately and he lifted her clean off the ground, her breasts flattening against his chest, and the mont his mouth covered hers he forgot entirely that shutting her up had been the point of it.
He took her mouth wholly and there was nothing restrained about it. She had both arms folded behind his neck, her toes dangling off the earth, and they stood in the silver moonlight and kissed and kissed, all tongue and heat and the soft press of her lips that tasted of wine and sothing beneath it that was entirely hers.
Her mouth was hot and sweet. She made a small sound deep in her throat, warm breath against his cheek, and his body responded to it with a completeness that reminded him sharply and urgently that he had not taken his suppressant.
He set her down on her feet quickly and pulled her arms from around his neck, pinning them firmly at her sides when she tried to wrap them around him again. His powerful body crowded hers as he looked down at her with a raw, burning hunger he made no attempt to hide.
"Kiss again," she whined.
His silver eyes darkened, almost savage now.
Then he leaned in, letting his lips brush against her ear, his voice low and rough with need as he whispered,
"If I kiss you again, baby... I won’t be able to stop. I’ll strip you bare right here and taste every inch of you. These breasts..." His breath grew heavier as he ran his knuckles against her nipples and she gasped.
"I’ll suck and lick your nipples until they’re swollen and you’re trembling. I’ll spread your legs wide open and bury my face between them, licking that sweet, wetness until you’re riding my tongue and screaming my na. I want to feel you co apart for , Viola. Over and over. I’m so hard it hurts... and if I start, I’ll take you completely. Deep. Hard. Until this tight little body of yours knows exactly who it belongs to. Do you want that?"
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