Chapter 35
June
Archer has one hand in his pocket, but I don’t wait to hear what he knocked on my door to say.
“It was just fucking,” I tell him.
But it rings hollow. Like a child repeating a lie and hoping if they say it enough, everyone else will believe it too.
Archer’s expression doesn’t change, but in his head, he’s calling me a liar.
If it were just fucking, I wouldn’t have let Callum knot me. I wouldn’t have slept tucked up against him, practically heart to heart, all night. And I wouldn’t right this second be imagining what a future might look like where I’ve somehow forgiven three men I swore I'd die to escape.
“It wasn’t just fucking,” I whisper.
“You’re allowed to still want us,” he says. “That’s what scent matches do. Want and need each other. You’re not doing anything wrong in letting those feelings in.”
“Those feelings hurt me before. You hurt me before.” I shake my head so violently my hair flies into my face, and I scrape loose strands out of my mouth. “I won’t let you hurt me again.”
“I won’t hurt you again, Juniper,” he says quietly.
Spinning around, I dump my bag on my coffee table, then turn back to find he’s stepped into my apartment and closed the door.
I stare at him, fury sparking hot in my blood, I say what has hurt too much to voice out loud before. “You fucked me against the bookcase in the library like I was just a whore and you left me on the floor once you’d had your fill of me.”
He closes his eyes long before I’ve finished speaking, face stark with pain, brow deeply furrowed.
He looks like he aged ten years. “I know.” He opens his eyes and walks over to me.
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness. What I did was…
” He takes a breath and releases it as he sinks to his knees in front of me. “Unforgivable.”
He takes something from his pocket, and the breath catches in my throat when I see what it is.
“Every day, for the rest of my life, I will prove to you that I will never hurt you again.”
The soft click of my great-grandmother’s gold and emerald bracelet around my wrist is barely audible over the pounding of my heart.
“Where did you get this?” I whisper, joy and relief filling me up so completely I want to laugh and cry.
“From a greedy pawnbroker.” His wry smile fades as he takes my hand and presses a soft kiss on the center of my palm.
“This is the first step on a long road to forgiveness. I know that. Just give me a chance to prove I can do more than hurt you. I can be the mate you deserve, and a man you can love.”
I swallow around the lump in my throat. “You followed me to the pawnbroker and bought my bracelet back.”
Guilt creases the corners of his eyes. “I told you I was hiding something from you, and there was no way to tell you without you getting pissed at me. I shouldn’t have followed you.”
“Why did you?”
He grasps me with large hands that span my hips. “Because you might have needed me. I was in my car when you walked out of the pawnbroker so dejected that I guessed you might have gone to buy back something important, but the owner jacked up the price.”
My eyes widen. “That’s what they do?”
I feel like the biggest idiot in the world for not knowing something he told me so casually.
He nods and gets to his feet. “They prey on the desperate. It’s mostly addicts who steal and sell things that don’t belong to them, so they never go back. Or it’s someone who desperately needs money for a few days, but no bank would lend to them.”
“How did you know the bracelet was mine?”
He shrugs. “I walked in after you and told the pawnbroker I wanted to buy whatever the woman who just walked out tried to.”
“He said he would keep it for thirty days,” I say, frowning.
Archer’s expression doesn’t change.
“They never keep it for thirty days, do they?” I ask, feeling like an even bigger idiot.
He shakes his head. “If someone wants to buy it, they sell it.”
I let out a tired sigh and scrub a hand over my face. “How much did you pay for it?”
“Five grand.”
“Five!” My eyes widen. “He wanted two from me.”
He shrugs. “Like I said, greedy and exploitative. I could have gotten the price down, but I had to beat you back to the apartment.”
“Why?”
Guilt once again flickers across his golden gaze.
“Because your apartment looks out to the front, and we’ve been hiding the fact that we took the apartment a few doors from yours to watch over you.
” He smiles wryly at me. “I got caught in traffic on the way back. If Torin hadn’t locked the stupid door before he crashed, you wouldn’t have seen me. Are you angry with me?”
I shake my head, too relieved to have my bracelet back to be angry at him for following me. “I can’t pay you back for the bracelet. I mean, I could, but it would take a long time to save that much money.”
“I’m not asking you to pay me back. It’s yours. It still would have been yours if we hadn’t fucked things up. You sold it to afford the rent on this place, didn’t you?”
After debating with myself about whether I should lie, I nod. “My parents wouldn’t even open the front gate to me after I publicly embarrassed them. I got $700 for it.”
“Seven hundred!” He glares down at me. “That bracelet is worth at least five times that price. I’m tempted to go back and set the guy’s shop on fire for ripping you off like that.”
I almost want to smile. “You sound like Lucia.”
“Lucia?”
“A neighbor you never want to piss off.”
He backs up a step, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Well, I’ll let you relax from work. You must be tired.”
“I am.”
He nods again and turns to leave. And he stops with one large hand around my doorknob and his back to me. “I ran because I still wanted you.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turns around and looks at me. “What I did to you in the library…”
I feel my face harden. “I don’t want to talk about it, Archer.”
“I didn’t trust you,” he says quietly, his eyes locked with mine. “I thought you were the enemy in our lives to spy on us, and even then, I couldn’t help but want you. And I was ashamed of myself for wanting you more than wanting to protect my pack. That’s all I wanted to say. I’ll go now.”
He turns to leave, but I’m not ready for this conversation to be over. With a sigh, I walk over to my dining set and pull up a chair. “Where did you go?”
He turns to face me, eyebrow raised. “When?”
“After you left me.”
“To the bathroom, where I failed to deal with the issue of still wanting you.”
I frown. “Deal with the…”
He lifts his right hand and glances at the front of his pants.
“Oh.” My cheeks burn, and a tiny smile pulls at one corner of his mouth.
“Then where did you go?”
“After I freaked out to Torin and Callum, I went to a bar where I nearly pushed a woman off her bar stool for leaning her shoulder against mine.”
I massage my forehead. “I’m going to regret this.” I point at the dining chair opposite me. “Sit down.”
He walks over to the chair and sinks into it. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything that happened in the bar.”
Archer tells me about Isla, who accused him of trying to drink away his problems with Irish whiskey and offered herself up as a distraction instead. He refused, leaving the bar to walk the street for nearly three hours.
“That woman didn’t deserve to be shoved off her stool because she leaned against you,” I tell him, frowning. “I know she was flirting with you, but shoving her off her stool would have been extreme.”
“I wasn’t feeling reasonable at the time. My feelings for you are not reasonable, Juniper. If your next question is whether they ever will be, I doubt it.”
I make a face, looking away. “I nearly shoved a woman talking to Callum at the hotel.”
They took me to the party to humiliate me. It still hurts to think about it.
“We wanted to hurt you,” he admits quietly, and I lift my head, surprised. “Callum wanted to make you jealous, and we wanted to hurt you for selling out to his dad and betraying us.”
“I didn’t betray you,” I bite out.
“If any of us had thought to use our brains, we’d have worked that out a long time ago. Someone smarter pointed that out to me.”
“Who?”
He shakes his head, a faint smile curving his lips. “It’s not important right now. But I like him more than I thought I would.”
I marvel over the fact none of my scent matches are behaving the way I thought they would.
“What?” he asks.
“You keep surprising me.”
“How?”
“Your honesty. By saying things that don’t make me want to throw objects at your head. And I was prepared to. It’s why we’re having this conversation in the kitchen within easy grabbing distance of the apples in my fruit bowl.”
Maybe Lucia is rubbing off on me more than I realize.
“Here.” He leans forward to nudge the bowl of fruit closer to me, then he takes my hand and lifts it to brush a kiss across my knuckles.
I think he meant it to be a casual thing. Just a way of convincing me I could throw whatever object at his head if I wanted to, and he wouldn’t care.
But a kiss that shouldn’t mean anything at all to me does something to my brain.
Not my brain.
To the place inside me that wants him as much as a part of me always has. The part that’s been telling me the bond between us never broke, and it is still alive and kicking.
That kiss does something to him as well.
His grip tightens around my hand, and as my breath hitches, a muscle in his jaw ticks.
We stare at each other across the tiny two-person dining set, and none of us breathes.
He swallows so hard I track the slow action down from his mouth, his jaw, and the bobbing of his Adam's apple.
“Do you want me to go, Juniper?” he asks, voice soft.
It’s my turn to take a long breath, even as I continue to hold his gaze. “No.”
I don’t know who moves first.
If I cared enough to track the moment that we stopped sitting opposite each other at the table and wound up pressed flush together, doing a slow backward walk to my bed, then I would know. But I don’t care to know. It’s happening and that’s all I let myself think about.