Free The Bite Before Christmas by Lynsay Sands, Jeaniene Frost Page A

tightened along with it.
    Groaning, Teddy shook his head and leaned his forehead on hers, muttering, “Sweetheart, I’ve been half-erect all damned day watching you run around in those damned tights of yours. It wouldn’t take much to bring this to a premature end.”
    â€œYoga pants,” Katricia murmured, easing her grip a little.
    â€œHuh?” He raised his head to stare at her blankly.
    â€œThey’re yoga pants, not tights,” she explained, nipping at his chin.
    â€œYoga?” Teddy echoed.
    â€œHmm.” Katricia grinned at his expression and then whispered, “I’m very flexible.”
    â€œDamn,” Teddy breathed, staring into her face. “This is going to be the poorest showing I’ve given since I was an eager teenager.”
    Katricia chuckled at his dismay and released his erection to slide her arms around his chest. “Then we’ll just have to do it again and again. We have all night.”
    She saw his eyes widen, and then took him by surprise and turned him suddenly onto his back so that she could rise up to straddle him, but he was suddenly gone.

Five
    T eddy grunted in pain and blinked his eyes open. He was still in his zipped-up sleeping bag, or mostly, his arm had escaped and he’d turned in his sleep and thumped it against the stone lip of the fireplace. It was the source of the pain radiating up his arm and what had woken him. Grimacing, he pulled the arm back into the sleeping bag and rubbed his wrist with his good hand, his eyes shooting to Katricia. She was still asleep on the couch, but her sleeping bag was undone and half off her.
    He wondered briefly what was happening in the dream or if it had stopped with his waking, then tried to settle down to sleep again, eager to get back to it, but now that he was awake he was aware that the room was much colder than it had been when he’d fallen asleep. Frowning, Teddy glanced to the fire to see that it had burned down to embers while they slept. He almost ignored it and went back to sleep anyway, but recalling that Katricia was farther away from the fire and half-uncovered, he reluctantly sat up and then slid from the sleeping bag to feed more logs to the fire. There were only two logs left, he saw with a frown. He hadn’t noticed earlier they were running low or he would have fetched in more wood before retiring.
    Teddy placed both logs in the fire and poked at them a bit, then straightened and quickly pulled on his jeans and sweater over his flannels. He then started to head over and get his coat, but paused beside the couch long enough to cover up Katricia. Immortals weren’t affected by cold like mortals, but they were still affected. The nanos would be using up blood at an accelerated rate to fight the cold and Katricia couldn’t afford that. As confident as she’d been that, snow or no snow, her blood delivery would come, it hadn’t shown yet.
    Katricia stirred sleepily as he tugged the sleeping bag back into place over her, and Teddy paused to peer at her for a moment. The dream was still fresh and clear in his mind, but it suddenly occurred to him to wonder if that wasn’t all it had been. Maybe he just wanted to believe they were life mates and it had really just been all his own dream and not a shared one.
    The thought was alarming. When she’d said it was a shared dream and they were life mates, he’d been happy to believe it. In fact, he’d eagerly embraced the news, knowing it meant having what both Mabel and Elvi had found: a relationship of earthshaking passion, complete trust, and deep binding friendship and love.
    Teddy was too pragmatic to believe he loved Katricia already. It had only been a day, but he was pretty sure he was firmly headed that way. The woman was just . . . Well, she was sassy as hell, smart as a whip, and had a killer sense of humor. He’d laughed more today during their snowball fight, card games, and