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His mouth curved against mine. “Cheating.”

“I conducted extensive research.”

“Three days.”

“Intensive longitudinal study.”

Barrett laughed, the sound low and warm against my lips. This wasn’t reckless anymore. That should have made it less exciting. It didn’t.

It made it better.

His hands moved over my back, broad and warm. He knew where I liked to be held now. Knew I’d arch when his palm slid beneath my shirt and spread across the bare skin at my waist. Knew exactly how slowly to drag his mouth down the side of my neck before my fingers tightened in his fur.

I knew things too.

The sensitive place under his jaw. The way the muscles in his stomach jumped when I ran my nails through the darker fur there. How much he liked having his ears touched.

I pulled back enough to look at him. His amber-brown eyes were darker, his breathing heavier, but there was something else beneath the desire.

Contentment.

The knowledge surprised me.

Barrett looked content with me standing between his knees, my shirt half untucked, my hands on him. Not grateful or relieved. Happy.

It hit me harder than lust ever had.

Barrett’s arm tightened around my waist. In one smooth motion he stood, lifting me with him as if I weighed nothing. My feet left the floor. I made a startled sound that turned into a laugh against his shoulder.

“Bedroom,” he said, voice rough and certain. “Now.”

We passed the kitchen window on the way to the bedroom. My drying rack stood beneath it. Beside it, Barrett’s propagation trays caught the late-afternoon light.

His seedlings. My specimens.

Except I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.

He carried me the short distance without another word, shouldering the door open and kicking it shut behind us. The late-afternoon light striped the wide bed in gold.

Three days of learning each other’s bodies had burned away most of the careful edges. I rose onto my toes and kissed him, my palms sliding up the dense pelt of his chest beneath his shirt, finding the places I already knew would make his breath catch.

I reached for his shirt. He pulled it over his head in one motion, and I splayed my hands across the thick pelt of his chest, nails scraping lightly down the centerline exactly the way I’d learned drove him half-mad.

His breath hitched, and a low growl rolled out of him. “Hazel⁠—”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said, already working the button of his jeans. “And so do you.”

He let out a short, incredulous laugh that turned into a groan when I freed him. Everything proportional, just more of it everywhere, and the sight of that thick, heavy length stole my breath. I wrapped my hand around the hot, flushed heat of him, thumb stroking the sensitive underside, and watched the way it twitched in my grip, already slick at the tip.

I leaned forward and took him into my mouth as far as I could. The taste of him was salt and musk and something deeper—warm, earthy, almost feral. Some animal chemistry my scientist brain wanted to call pheromones while the rest of me simply wanted more.

His hand came to the back of my head—not pushing, just holding—while a continuous growl vibrated through him.

When I pulled back, he was breathing hard, eyes dark. He watched me with open want, looking at me the way he looked at something he wanted to keep.

I stood and shoved my jeans and underwear down while he watched, then unhooked my bra and let it fall. His gaze raked over me with open hunger as I lay back on the bed.

“Come here.”