Viola, picturing every word he said he wanted to do to her with such clear intensity, jerked away from him, her face burning hot and her insides warming up. She’d never felt such feelings before and hearing his hot breath whisper those words against her ear, it frightened her with the overwhelming emotions.

Sebastian could tell he had managed to startle her with the intensity of his need and his face hardened and closed up slightly as it seemed she didn’t share any of that intensity with him. It was obviously one sided, and she wasn’t feeling the bond like he was, or she wouldn’t look like he had whispered words of threat into her ear rather than his passion.

"Go on inside if you don’t want any of that happening because I can’t promise to control myself if you remain in my presence."

She stood there looking up at him with her lips still parted and her eyes not entirely focused, and he kept his jaw set and didn’t look at her mouth again, lest he lost control and kissed her again, made love to her mouth and explored every corner and inch like he desired to.

She looked at him for another moment and then she turned and walked back toward the house door with as much speed as the oversized shoes would allow, and Sebastian’s shoulders dropped.

Perhaps this was his punishment for breaking hearts in the past without caring for anyone but his own desires. He was the man who always had women at his beck and call, until now that the only woman he burned for more than anyone didn’t seem to share his feelings completely.

With how she had helped him in Nightshade, Sebastian thought, he would have sworn that she loved him enough to risk her life like that.

Sebastian stood in the garden alone and breathed in the night air for a long moment and then went directly to find his suppressant before he did something he would spend a great deal of time regretting. She didn’t want him in that way it seemed, because she didn’t have the wolf to pull her sexually towards him yet.

---

Inside the room Viola was in, she lay in bed feeling miserable and hot all over her body.

A light knock on the door made her gasp, her eyes immediately snapping towards it.

"I’ll be sleeping in the next room tonight." He said through the door. "If you need anything, call for me." His voice still carried the thick rasp of desire in it, quiet yet gravel deep and she felt her insides melt like a soft puddle.

Yet a strange fear and uncertainty led her voice to come out, mousely soft as she squeaked a quiet, "Okay."

She felt him linger there for a second longer, as if there were words yet to be said between them but he never uttered them, instead, she heard his footsteps as he walked away down the corridor and went into the next room.

Lying in the darkness next to the room Sebastian was in, she found herself picturing his naked body. She knew it so well in images of him that had carved itself into her memories.

She knew many details of his body even where she’d never touched, the shape, hue and texture of it, from the valleys of his shoulder blades where strong muscles bulged and created hollows you wanted to touch, to his strong arms etched with veins.

His legs and feet, how she’d seen them, washed them in Nightshade. She knew his hands, large, square, able to tease her just as easily as they could be gentle.

His silver eyes seemed to seek her out in the darkness, she could still feel the heat of his gaze tracing her whole body from memory.

Those eyes crinkled at the corners in the instant before his gorgeous lips lifted with a lazy smile. She knew the spot where the skin grew smooth, down low where his broad tattooed chest narrowed and dove in a thinner line, narrowing and narrowing along his hard belly to his groin.

She rolled onto her stomach because her breasts ached. She clamped her arms against the swelling sides of her breasts and squeezed her thighs together, locking her ankles, holding them tightly, trying to forget the image of the naked Sebastian and his whispered words in the garden.

But forgetfulness refused her. She opened her mouth, waiting for the heat of his imaginary kiss. But she touched only the pillow, not warm, soft lips.

She rolled to her side clutching a handful of her shirt between her legs, feeling what was happening there, this awful aching need to be filled, needing him to soothe it.

Was this how it was? How it was supposed to be? This desire rushing through her body...It was fullness and emptiness, acceptance and denial, hot and cold, shiver and sweat, yes and no. It was the coming apart and not caring in the slightest, because your body spoke louder than anything.

Even though Viola was afraid, afraid to step into a deeper relationship with Sebastian because of the future she couldn’t control, she knew she couldn’t keep torturing herself in such a way and holding back on something her mind and body burned for. Though she wasn’t certain whether he returned her feelings or not, none of it was making relatively much sense to her at this moment, not when a delicious throbbing was happening between her thighs and she was feeling as miserable as she’d ever felt in her life.

Senses Viola had never realized she possessed were now expanded to their fullest. Her body throbbed and beat and begged. How right... how utterly right... it would be to simply go to him and say, "Make love to me. Show me what my body has never experienced before."

The question no longer was could she do that and live with it afterward knowing there was no going back. The question now was could she not do that, and watch her husband find that pleasure she so much refused him, because she was afraid, in the arms of another woman who would be more than willing to give it to him?

Many she-wolves would kill for this chance she had now, and though she wasn’t like many women and had her own fears, Viola couldn’t let this night pass like that when he had voiced out how much he wanted her.

Before she knew it, she was stepping out of bed and leaving the room.