Chapter Fourteen
FOURTEEN
Hailey
The belly of the beast looks more like a fantasy sprung from my head than a monstrous lair.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves full of antique hardbacks occupy my guest room.
Dark velvet drapes shade the arched windows, and a reading lamp is fastened to the wooden headboard of a regal four-poster bed.
It makes me question how much Varrick knows about me.
About all of us. Did he assign me this particular room because he’s aware of my love of books?
No. It has to be a coincidence.
A happenstance.
I can’t ruminate on hypotheticals. My brain is already fogged from last night’s measly three hours of sleep. A record low since the storm shelter, which has festered a new wave of guilt. Especially after my prenatal checkup in New Hampshire two days ago.
The baby is healthy.
The baby is the size of a date.
But Dr. Perez reminded me three times to get my insomnia under control.
That stress and lack of sleep could cause a myriad of issues, like gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, preterm labor.
The list seemed to be endless. “But don’t stress,” she insisted.
“Stress will just make it more difficult to sleep. And right now, you need to focus on sleeping. If normal methods don’t work, I highly recommend seeking therapy to root out the issue. ”
Therapy isn’t an option for me. I’d have to omit too many facts or lie my way through it, and so I’m back to my own strategy. My own tools. Last night was a bad blip because I slept alone. I know this.
I also know I don’t have to worry about that this summer. Not when Jake is currently moving his luggage into my guest room.
He shuts the dresser drawer, then spins toward me. “Are we okay to talk?” he asks, his eyes flitting around the walls like he’s in search of eavesdroppers.
“All clear,” I say. “I checked for bugs already.” It was a tedious task, flipping open each book on the shelf, checking the pages for wireless bugs.
Running my hand along windowsills and picture frames for hidden cameras.
For anyone else, it might take an hour, but I was able to do it in ten minutes.
Finding any kind of surveillance would have been definitive proof Varrick doesn’t trust us.
But I came up empty.
I plop on the springy king-sized mattress, the thick comforter a shade of plum, and the chain on my cargo pants jingles.
Jake grips the bedpost like he’s keeping himself from fully committing to sitting beside me. Veins spindle down his forearm as we silently check each other out. We are sharing a room this summer. A bed. You can’t run from him after a sensual fuck, Hailey.
I can’t tell if I love this fact or if I’m terrified of it.
His eyes stall on the two silver hoop piercings on either side of my bottom lip. Ones I take out for work at the country club.
“Snakebites,” I tell him. “That’s the name of the piercing.”
“I like it.”
“You do?”
“That surprises you, why?” Skin pleats between his brows. “We’ve had sex.”
“I’ve slept with guys who didn’t like my piercings or my lipstick or my face.”
“Your face?” He sounds more heated.
Rocky calls Jake a white knight, and I’d have to agree—he seems like someone who’d go to war for those he cares about far too easily.
“The guy didn’t say I was ugly or anything. It was an assumption on my part. When he threw his T-shirt on my face mid-act.”
“And you didn’t care?”
“It was a quickie. I didn’t care if he found me appealing,” I admit. “I just wanted to get off. It’s not like I was sticking around. It was between jobs, so I was in St. Louis only for the night.”
Jake processes this, then nods, glancing at my snakebite lip piercings again. “I like them,” he says, this time more firmly. “They’re cute. Like you. And I find you more than just appealing.”
I start to blush. “I, um…” I feel more bashful around him when we aren’t fucking, which is weird. I nod a few times. “The feeling is mutual, so yeah.” Smooth, Hailey.
He nods back to me, drinking in my mesh black top and cargo pants. “Have you always been this alternative?”
“When I wasn’t told I had to dress a certain way, then yeah. I liked grunge when I was younger. Then later, more heavy metal.”
He smiles, leans a shoulder on the bedpost. “How young?”
“Maybe like twelve, thirteen, I was listening to Nirvana. ‘Come as You Are’ got me through a whole lot of teenage angst.”
“I know how that is.” He lets out a laugh in thought. “I used to run ten miles before dawn on Faust’s track.” Faust is the all-boys boarding school he attended in upstate New York.
“What’d you listen to?” I ask.
“The sound of my feet hitting concrete. My heavy, angry breath. The rustling trees.”
I clutch either side of the bed as my mind drifts with the image. “I can picture it. Teenage angsty Jake running down his feelings.”
“I can picture it, too.” He recaptures my gaze. “Teenage angsty Hailey head-banging out hers.”
I smile a little. “I did do that a lot. Even with Phoebe.” I soak in his white button-down, the pressed navy-blue slacks, the brown leather belt on his towering athletic frame. He could be in a J.Crew catalog holding the bow of a sailboat. Pensive and masculine and blatantly handsome.
It feels strange that he’s in my bedroom. In front of me. “Have you always been this preppy?”
“Yeah. My style wasn’t anything I ever questioned changing.” He steps away from the bedpost and finally sits beside me.
My face bakes at his closeness. Too shy to meet his gaze, I focus on my toes skimming the velvety moss-colored rug. “This is a Tibetan rug. Silk or silk blend,” I say absentmindedly.
He glances down at our feet. “How can you tell?”
“The knot structure gives it away. Plus, the wool. It feels buttery soft in a specific way because of Tibetan sheep. The extreme cold climates make the sheep wool denser and longer than other sheep. So when it’s hand-knotted, it enhances the quality of the rug.”
Jake’s gaze bores into me as if I’m rehashing some action-packed story.
I bite my lip piercing. “Anyway, it’s not that interesting. Just a mundane fact about a rug.”
“Everything about you is interesting to me.” His eyes cradle me tenderly, and heat ascends the base of my neck. Concern washes over his expression. “How much sleep did you get last night?”
I nestle my hair behind each of my ears. “Your observational skills are getting better.”
Laughter catches in the back of his throat. “Yeah, no. I’m still average at best. Except, I guess, when it comes to you…” His gaze sweeps me again. “Did you get any sleep?”
My fingers skim the spine of the hardback I’m holding. “Three hours. I spent the night reading.”
He sees my book. “Did you bring that with you?”
I nod and show him the spine: A History of Wolves.
“You know it’s ironic that Rocky chose the name Grey when he was born a Wolfe.
A gray wolf. Canis lupus.” I draw my finger over the title.
“Most people think of penguins when they’re asked what animals mate for life.
I think of the gray wolf. My brother.” I pause in thought.
“A pack animal that can only be temporarily alone before searching for another pack.” I hug the book, then glance over at Jake.
“Rocky can’t survive alone. If he could, he would’ve left us years ago.
Unburdened himself with the resentment he carries for our parents.
But he never did—he won’t. He found his mate with Phoebe, and his pack with the rest of us. ”
Jake extends a hand.
I place the book in his palm and then watch him thumb through the pages.
“I see the connection,” he says, “but why keep reading it if it keeps you up at night?” He slips me a look like he’s trying to unpuzzle me. “Do you think it could help with the job?”
“Not really, no.” I lift my feet to the bed and sit cross-legged.
“It’s just another fascination, an obsession, to keep me from thinking of the job and the risks and all the ways I’m putting the people I love in positions that hurt them.
” My throat swells. Emotion barreling into me.
I toy with the chain on my pocket. “Easier to think about wolves than Oliver snorting an obscene amount of coke up his nose.”
“He’s still doing that?” Jake frowns.
“He went to Collin’s last night.”
“Maybe summering here will be good for him, too. Get away from that guy.”
“Maybe…” I’m unsure. It feels na?ve to think this isn’t trading one viper’s nest for another.
He slides his hand over his lips, the thick tendons and muscles a real turn-on for me.
I love the veins tracking up his knuckles.
I remember following them one night with my finger.
Our bodies sweaty and spent after an hour-long fuck.
Jake watches me watch him. It’s like a book catching you reading its pages.
I smile.
His lips lift.
“Can I blow you?” I ask bluntly. A sudden desire to watch him come shoots through me. Desires. Wants. Aches. They’re so easy to share with Jake.
As I turn to him on the mattress, he leans forward. His fingers thread through my hair, cupping the back of my head. “I can get you off first—”
“No, I want you in my mouth.” I’m already sliding to the floor. My knees dig into the expensive carpet between his feet. The bed isn’t too high, thankfully. He stays seated while my hands rest on his thighs in practiced patience.
When I first asked him to fuck me, I was tornadic winds full of starved kisses and ravaging hands.
He captured my wrists to try and slow me, but I kept kissing.
The edges of his lips. His neck. His collarbone.
“Hailey. Hailey. Hails. Heyheyhey. Slow. Slow down.” He cupped my cheeks, guiding my face back to his.
I was breathless. Confused. Then he said, “There’s no rush.
” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Can we try it slow?”
Slow.
I’d never had slow.
But with Jake, sex is a slow-building four-section, hundred-musician orchestral performance. A grand symphony.