Page 42 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“Because if you don’t tell me to go, I’m going to do something we’ll both have complicated feelings about.”

“Like what?”

“Like kiss you. In this stockroom. Surrounded by romance novels. While naked.”

“That’s very specific.”

“I like specificity.”

I should tell him to go. I should push him away, grab the knife again, demand that he leave and never come back. That would be the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing a person does when a supernatural creature shows up in their place of business and starts talking about kissing.

But my mouth won’t form the words. My hands won’t push him away. My body has apparently decided that being close to him is preferable to being safe, and my brain is too scrambled to override it.

“You need to go,” I whisper, and even I can hear how thin the words sound. How unconvincing.

“I know.” He doesn’t move. “Call me if you need anything. I mean it. I’ll run fast as hell for you.”

“You don’t even have my number.”

“I’ll hear you anyway.”

And then, before I can process that impossible statement, before I can ask what he means, before I can do anything except stand there with my mouth open and my heart racing, he leans down and presses his lips to my forehead.

It’s not a real kiss. Not the kind he was threatening-promising a moment ago. It’s something else, a benediction, maybe. A promise. Far more intimate than it has any right to be.

His lips are warm. Soft. They linger for just a moment, just long enough for me to feel the weight of the gesture, and then he’s pulling back, and his eyes are still gold, and his expression is something I can’t read.

“Goodnight, Fable,” he says.

The shift takes him before I can respond.

One moment he’s a man, warm and solid and close enough to touch. The next he’s a lycan, slipping shadow-quiet through my back door, disappearing into the night like he was never here at all.

I stand there for a long time after he’s gone.

My forehead is still warm where he kissed me. My heart is still racing. My hands are shaking, not from fear, not from the cold, but from something else entirely.

Then I look down.

There, on my back step, exactly where he sat before the shift, is a single wildflower. Purple and delicate, with petals that look almost silver in the moonlight.

He didn’t have it when he arrived.

I have no idea when he picked it.

No idea how it got there.

I lock the door behind me, once, twice, three times, and my hands won’t stop shaking, and I press the flower to my chest like it’s something precious, and I don’t know what any of this means.

But I’m starting to think I want to find out.

9

— • —

Orion

My routines have never felt so hollow.