Page 58 of Slow Heat

“Yes.”

“Okay, one last question for you, Jason Sabel. Do you believe you’re capable of being my alpha?”

Doubts that he’d ever convince Vale that he was old enough plagued him, but he lifted his chin, remembering the sweet sound of Vale’s climax. “I know I can be.”

“And if your parents don’t approve?”

“It’s my choice, not theirs.”

“You don’t know everything about the situation. I’m not asking for promises from you tonight. I just wanted your honest gut feeling. A surrogate might still be—”

“Don’t talk about that. We just…the two of us… We were together.” He fought to untie his tongue. It’d been over the phone, but it meant something. “We just made love together. I don’t want to hear about surrogates. Not now. Not ever.”

“I agree it’s poor timing, but—”

“No,” Jason cut him off. “Stop. I have one last question for you.”

Vale hesitated. “I’m all ears.”

“In your poems, what do you have against capital letters?”

Vale giggled softly, sounding young and embarrassed. “It’s a ridiculous affectation I started in my youth and has now become my signature style, that’s all. Do you prefer capital letters? I can start using them if you’d like.”

“Do whatever makes you happy. Your words are beautiful just the way they are.”

Vale was silent for a long moment. “Goodnight, Jason. Sleep well.”

“Goodnight. Sweet dreams.”

They listened to each other’s breathing for a half-dozen heartbeats and then Jason hung up first, determined to show his strength of will and exert his power.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You jerked offtogether?” Rosen’s dark brown eyes flew wide and his red mouth hung open. His hair was twisted up into one of his artful buns, and he wore a paint-spattered shirt as he prepared a canvas for another of his ‘expressions’, as he called the art he produced when he wasn’t teaching at the university or playing at being a chef.

Vale sighed, scratched at his unshaven face, and paced the messy room over the detached garage near Rosen and Yosef’s apartment. Rosen rented it as his studio. The floors were tacky with half-dried oil paint and spilled turpentine, and the astringent scent of the place filled Vale’s nostrils completely despite the open windows. Colorful canvases lined the walls and leaned in small stacks a foot or more deep. Glass jars, smeared with paint, were stacked on a counter.

“It was a mistake,” he said finally.

“Huh.”

He frowned and pulled up short next to Rosen where he mixed a blue very similar to Vale’s favorite color on a large, wooden pallet. “What do you mean by ‘huh’? Your expression said everything about what a disastrous move it was.”

Rosen shrugged. “It’s done now. Who cares if it was a mistake? Onward, I say.”

“Onward into what, though? That’s the real question. Now I’ve given him hope.” And he’d given himself hope. That was the worst of it, really. Jason was a child; his parents could break him easily enough. It was Vale’s own heart that he’d stupidly risked.

“Was it good?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Amazing, then,” Rosen murmured. “You’d tell me everything if it sucked. There wouldn’t even be a problem if you’d hated it. You’d just decide that you didn’t want to contract with some alpha who couldn’t even hold his own for phone sex, force him to take a surrogate, and be done with him.”

“Wolf-god, you’re almost as impossible as Urho.”

“You didn’t tellhim, did you?”

“No. He’s so old-fashioned at heart. He’d find it all ‘improper’.”