21. Ten More Minutes
Ten More Minutes
~AMBER~
My phone is buzzing from the far side of the room, insistent as a wasp trapped behind a curtain.
I could not tell you where it landed last night, what hour it's currently declaring, or how a single working brain cell of mine survived the wreckage. I am far too busy being unconscious to care about any of it.
I am, I decide with my eyes still shut, no longer eighteen years old.
There was a version of me once — lithe, well-rested, criminally stupid — who could fool around all night, sleep for one generous hour, and turn up to a nine a.m. lecture and a lunch shift running on nothing but an energy drink and pure delusion.
That woman is dead. I buried her. What's left of me this morning feels distinctly like it got hit by a truck.
A good truck, mind you.
A sexy truck.
The kind of truck that knows how to hit every angle just right, that takes its sweet confident time, that knows — with an arrogance that ought to be illegal in this state — exactly where the g-spot is and precisely what to do with the address once it's found it.
I like the truck. I like the truck a genuinely disgraceful amount.
I smirk into my pillow at the sheer idiocy of my own half-asleep brain, shifting against the cotton, sore in six brand-new and frankly smug places.
Arms tighten around me before I can drift off on the thought. Big ones, warm and heavy, banded low across my middle, tucking me back into the furnace of a body that has no business being this comfortable at this hour. His scent does the rest of the damage.
Magnolia gone soft and open in the warm bed, black pepper mellowed down to a low hum, aged bourbon deepened into something sated and content that curls down the base of my spine and unknots it one vertebra at a time.
It's all over the sheets. It's all over me.
Threaded underneath it is my own — apricot and roses gone honey-warm and shameless — the two of us braided together on the pillowcase until I can't say where he ends and I start.
I crack one eye open, purely for reconnaissance.
My grandmother's quilt is a heap on the floor where it plainly gave up on the both of us hours ago.
Above me, when I risk a glance up, he's still half-under — eyes shut, dark lashes low, a day of gold-flecked stubble along a jaw that has no business looking that good at this hour, his hair a complete wreck that four separate passes of my own greedy fingers are directly responsible for.
I did that. I did all of that, on purpose, with my whole chest. The thought lands with a giddy, mortified little flip low in my belly that I decline, on principle, to name.
I keep waiting for the regret. The cold clench, the what-have-you-done, the frantic mental drafting of an exit route.
It doesn't come. That's the part that ought to frighten me, and mostly just doesn't. I feel warm.
I feel wrung-out and sore and absurdly, dangerously safe, tangled up in the arms of a man I've known for the length of one bad head cold — and the only alarm bell ringing anywhere in me is the distant, tinny one still buzzing from my phone across the room.
I'm three breaths from gone again when his lips press to my temple. Warm. Unhurried. The bristle of his stubble drags soft against my hairline, and a voice rasps down low against my ear, wrecked and gravelly with sleep in a way that should come with a warning label stapled to it.
"I'd love to let you sleep in, Blooming Apricot." A pause. I can hear the smirk building in it. "But I've got a strong hunch you'd skin me alive if I let you snooze clean through all that government contract business. Hmm?"
I think about that. I think about it very hard, with my whole entire face, which is currently doing something between a pout and a scowl into the warm plane of his collarbone.
I grumble a response. It is not, strictly speaking, made of words — it's a low, wounded, deeply unprofessional sound of protest — and then I do the mature thing and burrow deeper into his arms, turning my face flat into his chest like a woman climbing down into a bunker.
His laugh rumbles up under my cheek, low and pleased, vibrating clean through my skull. He presses a kiss into the top of my hair. "Ten more minutes," he murmurs. "That's the entire offer on the table. Take it before I come to my senses, counselor."
I grumble something else — I could not for my life tell you what, my mouth is operating with no executive oversight whatsoever — and I'm already sliding back down the warm slope toward sleep when a voice cuts through the fog.
Tinny. Furious. Coming from the phone he has, at some point, answered against the side of my head.
Somebody is shouting. Demanding to know where she is — where I am — with the particular strangled panic of a man who has called four times running and been sent to voicemail three.
It takes my sleep-drunk brain a full second to place the voice through the little speaker.
Gravel, clipped, a growl fraying loose at every edge.
Cade.
Sawyer yawns. It's a theatrical thing, that yawn, drawn out and lazy and mounted entirely for the benefit of the man on the phone, and I feel the whole of it move through his chest beneath my ear.
"Well," he drawls, in no hurry on God's green earth, "she could be with me.
But if I say that, you'll lose your entire mind, and frankly I need the four of us to prove we can behave like a pack that actually functions long enough to get these documents signed for this whole temporary arrangement.
So." A beat, wicked and unbothered. "I've got no earthly clue where she is. "
On the other end, Cade detonates. Most of it reaches me as a furious tinny buzz against my ear, too fast and too hot to parse — but one phrase rides up clear above the rest, "—if you've got her, I swear to—" before it dissolves straight back into profanity.
I feel my own face go hot against Sawyer's sternum.
He's not wrong to panic. I'd have lost my whole mind in his shoes.
I'm losing a modest amount of it right here, warm and safe and accounted for.
I lift my head off his chest just far enough to glare, hair in my face, and mouth the words give me the phone with every ounce of menace a woman can summon at this hour.
Sawyer looks down at me, supremely serene, and holds the phone a clean six inches out of my reach — the exact move, I note with fury, that he pulled with my neutralizer canisters not a full day ago.
"She's fast asleep," he says smoothly into the receiver, staring dead into my furious eyes the whole time.
"Dead to the world. Couldn't possibly come to the phone.
" I will end him. I will end this beautiful, infuriating man, and the federal government can simply learn to understand.
I flop back down against his chest with a muffled sound of pure betrayal.
His thumb resumes its lazy path up my spine, entirely unrepentant.
There's a scuffle of sound. A muffled argument, a palm dragged over a receiver, the phone changing custody like a contraband note in a classroom. Then a new voice comes through, and this one I would know underwater, in the dark, from a mile off — low, careful, gentle even now, even furious. August.
"So," he says, and that single syllable is doing a heroic amount of work to stay level. "You found her."
Sawyer goes quiet. A long beat, longer than it strictly needs to be, the pause of a man deciding exactly how much mercy he feels like extending before breakfast. His thumb strokes idly up and down my spine the entire time, unbothered, like we're chatting about the weather rolling in off the water.
"Yeah," he says at last. "I'm at her place. Which — I've got to say — surprises me not one of you thought to swing by and check."
A silence on the line. Then, quieter, almost sheepish: "We don't know where her new place is."
Sawyer whistles, long and low and merciless. "Well, now. I'd call that a you problem, gentlemen. Not a me problem. But it's early, and I'm doing my level best to be diplomatic before coffee, so I'll let it lie."
The words land in a tender spot I wasn't guarding.
They don't know where I live. Five years, three men who swore they'd have married me, and not one of them knows which crooked little door on which lane is mine.
I press my face harder into Sawyer's chest so nobody — not even the man holding me — can watch it cross my face.
But he feels it anyway. The small flinch, the way my breath catches and holds.
His hand splays wide and warm between my shoulder blades and presses there, once, a silent and steady I've got you that he's decent enough not to say out loud where the others could hear it.
August exhales, a long, tired rush of breath through the speaker.
"I'm a jealous motherfucker," he says, plainly, the heat gone right out of it.
"I'll own that much. But I've got reason to be, and I also know none of us has earned the right to judge a damn thing — or to hold one single opinion on who Amber chooses to share her space with. For the night."
Sawyer's chest shakes with a quiet laugh under my ear. "Well," he says, "in the strict interest of honesty — we did rather more than share space. But—" the laugh again, warmer, wickeder "—maybe I ought to shut my mouth now. Purely for my own personal safety."
Sawyer. I bite down on his pec to communicate my precise feelings on the matter. He does not so much as flinch. If anything the smirk gets worse; I can feel it press into my hair.
August is silent for a long, dangerous moment. "Yeah," he says at last, flat as a slammed drawer. "Shut up."
Sawyer chuckles, entirely unrepentant, a man who knows exactly what flavor of menace he is and made his peace with it years ago. Then his voice shifts. Still easy, but the teasing sanded off it now, something steadier standing underneath.