Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The cabin smelled like garlic and tomatoes, and it triggered a kind of contentment that Gregor had never associated with himself until recently.
Fergal was cooking. Or rather, Fergal was attempting to cook, which involved a lot of enthusiastic chopping, occasional swearing, and a relationship with the stove that could best be described as adversarial.
Gregor had offered to help and had been banished to the couch with a pointed “I am a king and a lawyer. I can handle pasta” that had been somewhat undermined by the smoke alarm going off thirty seconds later.
Gregor sat on the couch and pretended to read while watching Fergal over the top of his book.
Barefoot. Wearing one of Gregor’s shirts—the dark gray one, which slipped off Fergal’s left shoulder because it was cut for a frame considerably broader than his.
Black hair loose around his shoulders because he’d showered after their walk and hadn’t bothered to tie it back.
Humming something off-key as he stirred a pot with the kind of aggressive optimism that characterized everything Fergal did.
He looked happy.
The observation landed in Gregor’s chest like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread outward until they reached every edge of him.
Fergal looked happy. Actual, genuine, unguarded happiness, the kind that softened the line of his jaw and eased the tension around his eyes and made him hum off-key while burning pasta sauce.
Three days in this place, and Fergal was transforming.
The pack’s easy acceptance—the couples who held hands without fear, the omegas who spoke their minds, the complete absence of the rigid hierarchy that had defined every moment of their lives at the compound—was working on him like sunlight on a plant that had been kept in shadow.
He was opening up, unfurling, reaching toward the warmth with a hunger that made Gregor’s throat tight.
It was working on Gregor, too, though he was less willing to admit it.
This morning, they’d walked through the pack lands together, and Fergal had reached over and taken his hand again.
In public. In broad daylight. In front of wolves and dragons who could see them clearly.
But no one had stared. No one had whispered.
No one had done anything except continue with their lives because in this place, two alphas holding hands was as unremarkable as the sun rising.
“Dinner’s ready,” Fergal announced with the triumphant air of a man who had conquered Everest rather than produced a pot of slightly overcooked spaghetti. “And before you say anything, the sauce is supposed to be that color.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Your eyebrow was saying plenty.”
They ate at the small kitchen table, knees touching underneath it because the space was tight and because neither of them made any effort to create distance.
The pasta was adequate. The sauce was better than Gregor had expected and worse than Fergal claimed.
The bread, which Fergal had brought over from the pack kitchen because even his confidence had limits, was excellent.
It was the best meal Gregor had ever had.
Not because of the food but because of the way Fergal’s bare foot hooked around his ankle under the table.
Because of the way the lamplight caught the curve of Fergal’s smile when Gregor grudgingly admitted the sauce wasn’t bad.
Because of the wine—a bottle that someone named Gia had sent over from the Hayes pack as a welcome gift, rich and red and warm—that loosened something in both of them that had been tight for a very long time.
They washed dishes together. Side by side at the sink, Gregor washing and Fergal drying because if Fergal washed, more water would end up on the floor than in the basin.
Their arms brushed with every handoff. Their hips bumped.
It was domestic and mundane and so far removed from the world of kings and commanders and conspiracy that Gregor felt almost dizzy with the normalcy of it.
Fergal hung the dish towel on its hook and turned to face him, leaning his hip against the counter.
The gray shirt had slipped off his shoulder again, exposing the line of his collarbone and the warm, tanned skin below it.
His hair fell in dark waves around his face.
His eyes—those sharp, impossible brown eyes—were soft in the lamplight, watching Gregor with an expression that held no agenda, no strategy, no provocation.
Just love. Naked, undefended, incandescent love.
Oh, Gregor had known Fergal had fallen for him, had known his feelings had long since developed past an infatuation.
But to see it this clearly, to see what he felt himself reflected on Fergal’s face was everything.
Something inside Gregor, some final mechanism of resistance that he hadn’t even known was still operating, quietly disengaged.
He dried his hands on his trousers and crossed the two steps of the kitchen floor between them. He raised his hand and brushed the fallen shirt back up onto Fergal’s shoulder, his fingers trailing across the collarbone, lingering on the warm skin. Fergal’s breath caught.
“I want you,” Gregor said.
Fergal’s lips parted. His pupils dilated, the brown swallowed by black. “You’ve had me.”
“Not like this.” Gregor’s thumb traced the line of Fergal’s collarbone, feeling the pulse jumping in the hollow of his throat.
“Not because you’re falling apart and need me to put you back together.
Not because we’re desperate or scared or running on adrenaline.
” He held Fergal’s gaze. “Because I want you. Because we’re here, in our home, and there’s nothing in the way. ”
Fergal’s hand came up to cover Gregor’s, pressing it flat against his chest where his heart was hammering. “There’s never been anything in the way except you. You’ve been the brakes on this thing the whole time, and we only ever moved when you took your foot off.”
“I know.”
“So what changed?”
Gregor considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
Fergal deserved a real answer, not a deflection.
“This place. Seeing what’s possible. Watching you hold my hand this morning and realizing that the sky didn’t fall.
” He paused. “And the fact that I’m tired.
I’m tired of being afraid of this, Fergal.
I’ve been afraid of it for years, and the fear has never once protected either of us from anything.
It’s only kept us from having what we should’ve had all along. ”
The honesty cost him—it always did, if only because even now, he wasn’t fully honest, wasn’t sharing what he had buried so deep inside him—but the expression on Fergal’s face was worth every syllable.
Wonder and tenderness and a fierce, blazing joy that made him look like the twenty-six-year-old he was, young and beautiful and burning with a fire that had nothing to do with his dragon.
Fergal pulled him in by the shirt and kissed him with complete commitment, holding nothing back, pouring himself into the act with a generosity that was staggering.
Gregor kissed him back. His hands found Fergal’s waist, slid beneath the borrowed shirt, and the skin underneath was warm and smooth and alive.
Fergal arched into his touch, a soft sound escaping into the kiss, and Gregor’s body responded with a surge of heat that was no longer filtered through guilt or caution or any of the hundred mechanisms he’d constructed to keep himself in check.
He wanted this man. He was going to have him. And for the first time, he wasn’t going to apologize for it.
They made their way to their bedroom in stages—kissing against the kitchen counter, then the hallway wall, then the bedroom doorframe.
Gregor’s shirt was gone by the hallway, pulled over his head by Fergal’s impatient hands.
Fergal’s shirt disappeared somewhere near the door.
By the time they reached the bed, they were both barefoot and bare-chested, and the skin-on-skin contact was sending jolts of electricity through Gregor’s nervous system that made coherent thought increasingly difficult.
He eased Fergal onto the bed and stood over him for a moment, just looking.
Fergal lay on his back, dark hair fanned across the white pillow, chest rising and falling with quickened breath, his body lean and taut.
The lamplight painted him in gold, catching the definition of his abdomen, the line of dark hair below his navel, the visible bulge straining against his soft pants.
He was lean for an alpha, but oh, how stunning he was. Beautiful.
“Stop thinking and get down here,” Fergal said, propping himself on his elbows.
Gregor lowered himself over Fergal, bracing on one forearm, and the full-body contact—chest to chest, hip to hip—pulled a groan from both of them.
He kissed Fergal’s mouth, then his jaw, then the spot below his ear that always made Fergal gasp.
He worked his way down the column of his throat, tasting salt and clean skin and the faint, smoky undertone that was uniquely dragon, uniquely Fergal.
“I want you inside me,” Fergal said, and the directness of it—Fergal telling him exactly what he needed with fierce certainty—made Gregor’s cock throb painfully against the confines of his remaining clothing.
“Are you sure?”
Fergal lifted his head and fixed Gregor with a look that could’ve leveled mountains. “I’ve been sure since I was eighteen years old, Gregor. If you ask me that again, I will fire you.”
Gregor laughed. A real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than amusement, the kind that only Fergal had ever been able to pull from him. “Understood, Your Majesty.”