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succumbing to some heavy wishful thinking.
    Chloe wanting the same things as his wolf in its most feral state? Ha. Not bloody likely, no matter how much Merrick was prowling around inside her.
    Being a Lycanthrope, his sexual style was aggressive at the best of times, but now…damn it, it was crazy for him to even be thinking about touching her. He knew it was too dangerous—knew he could too easily lose control and actually hurt her. His primal instincts were in full roar after spending so much time in his feral wolf form. So far he’d managed to keep them under control, but he was tempting fate. Try as he might to act within reason, sooner or later, the beast was going to wrestle that control away from him. As the poison continued to wear him down, he would become too weak to fight it. Then all hell was going to break loose, leaving him at the mercy of those dark, predatory desires.
    And yet, he couldn’t stay away from her. Not when being near her felt so good. So… right . When he’d stood outside her cell earlier, the cold, hollow feeling that’dbeen lingering in his chest for so long had simply faded away. Instead, there’d been a warm, unfamiliar sensation of comfort. Of…peace. And it’d been fucking amazing.
    So amazing that he’d had to come back for more.
    As he braced his shoulder against the bars at the corner of her cell, her voice reached out to him from the far side of the small enclosure, where she lay on the cot, huddled beneath her blanket. “What are you doing?”
    Kellan raked his gaze over her, making sure she was okay. “Not to state the obvious,” he drawled, “but I’ve come to see you again.”
    “Why?” she groaned, pulling the blanket over her head.
    With his hands shoved in his pockets, he moved along the front of her cell, until he’d reached the middle, where the door stood, which was as close to the cot as he dared. The rough gray stones were cold beneath his feet, but his body was burning with heat, the skin he’d washed earlier when the guards had brought each of them fresh water and food already sheened with sweat. “I can hear you groaning from my cell,” he rasped, “and it’s driving me bat-shit. I can’t stop worrying about you.”
    “I told you I was fine,” came her muffled reply. “All twenty freaking times that you’ve asked me in the past hour.”
    “Yeah, well, I needed to see for myself that you were okay.”
    “For the twenty-first time, then, I’m fine. F-I-N-E. Now leave, before I embarrass both of us again.”
    Softly, he said, “You didn’t embarrass me, Chloe.”
    Peeking over the top of the blanket, she cracked open one eye. “Really? Because from where I was standing,you looked like your grandma had just shucked her panties and asked you to do something that would be illegal in at least forty-nine states. Not to mention seriously whacked.”
    He gave a gritty laugh that rumbled deep in his chest, finding her funny as hell. “You just took me by surprise, that’s all.”
    “Ha. I’ll bet I did,” she snorted, finally moving into a sitting position on the cot. As she braced her back against the wall, the flickering firelight from the continuously burning hearth that sat on the far side of the underground level played over her feminine features, and Kellan was struck again by how beautiful she was. It wasn’t an in-your-face, porn star kind of look, like most of the women he’d bedded, but it worked for him. She had an ethereal, serene kind of beauty, like something you expected to see in the pages of a fairy tale. She was small and slim, her fair skin smooth and fine, her mouth lush in a face that held a dainty nose and slim, sweeping brows that arched over the most mesmerizing eyes he’d ever seen. They were big and long-lashed, with an unusual black ring surrounding the smoky irises. Her hair was so dark, it almost looked blue in the golden light of the fire, the glossy strands still a little damp from where she’d washed