Chapter 29
ADELAIDE
Paradise, it turns out, tastes like chili-lime chicken wings and feels like somebody’s elbow in my ribs.
The bench table is buried in food. Wings on a paper tray, slick and red.
A pyramid of Spam musubi because Ace made a pyramid of them.
A steaming plate of dumplings, a huge bowl of ahi poke glistening with sesame oil.
The fruit salad I cut up this morning. Six cans of juice sweating into the wood.
And a tube of sunscreen that’s been passed up and down this table so many times that nobody knows whose it was to begin with.
Six of us are making what my mother would have called an ungodly amount of noise. Nearby is a beach with a few people, but the water is tranquil and calling to me.
Clio is laughing so hard she’s crying, Aura is attempting to get a dumpling into her mouth with chopsticks, except the dumpling keeps escaping, and every time it does, Luca cheers.
North is at my left, not saying much, his forearm warm against mine, eating a musubi, seeming to enjoy every mouthful as he makes these delicious moaning sounds. The man is irresistible.
“Ha!” Aura gets a dumpling all the way to her mouth.
“No, no.” Luca pushes her hand sideways with his chopsticks. The dumpling hits the table. “Too cocky. Cocky gets punished.”
“Luca!” she bellows while the rest of us are laughing. “I was eating that.”
Clio is wheezing, trying not to choke on her drink.
At one point, Aura gets a dumpling all the way into her mouth and throws both hands up like she’s won the Olympics. Luca slow-claps with his chopsticks, and even North is grinning now.
“So.” Clio wipes her eyes with the side of her wrist. “I’ve been waiting for a lull. Are we still doing the mystery murder club?”
Aura groans into her juice can. “Hell yes. Please. I need something to do on Tuesday nights that isn’t watching my sister text-flirt with her thirst trap.”
Clio just glares at her sister, and everyone’s watching them, as clearly the guys are not clued in to this insider information. It’s not my story to tell and seems Clio is tight-lipped about it too.
“Priya’s in,” Clio adds. “Says if we’re restarting, she wants a bigger whiteboard.”
“She’s so obsessed with her stationery,” Aura says.
Clio wipes her lips from her drink with a napkin. “It’s fair. I mean, you have an obsession with romance books.”
Aura cuts her a side glance. “Anyway, Adelaide, are you in?”
I’m shaking my head. “Nope, I think I’ve lived enough mystery for a while. Let me retire.”
“Just advertise for a new person,” Ace suggests. “And much better vetting on who you accept into the club.”
Clio puts her face in her hands and shakes her head. “Not sure I’m ready for that yet.”
I nudge her side. “I can help you.”
“A simple questionnaire,” Luca adds. “Have you ever pushed a young woman down a flight of basement stairs? Have you ever stolen from local organized crime? Do you have unresolved family grievances that might culminate in a home invasion?”
Ace is hammering the table with the flat of his hand, bursting out laughing, North joining in. Even Aura is giggling. A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth.
“Just a basic screener,” Luca continues serenely. “Five, six questions. Take thirty seconds. I’d be happy to draft it.”
“Oh, you would?” Clio lifts her face, and it’s clear she’s trying to hold back a huge grin.
“Happy to.” God, Luca is so cocky and adorable.
North has his hand on my thigh, and I’m leaning against him, loving our outdoor lunch. While they’re bantering, I’m staring up into his eyes. Then he kisses my forehead.
The bench is warm under my thighs, and Ace’s foot is against mine from across the table.
“So,” Clio begins, staring at me. “You four worked out if you’re going to live in Oahu or…?”
“We want to take our time,” North pipes in. “Something with more land. More privacy. Somewhere we can breathe.”
Clio points her dumpling at him. “All I’m hearing is ‘away from Clio.’ ”
I loop my arm around her neck and pull her against me, and she lets me, the way she always does. “Wherever we end up,” I tell her, “you have a room. A key. Twenty minutes’ notice or none at all. You can show up with a suitcase and a grudge.”
Aura leans across. “I’d like a room.”
“Done,” I say.
“Sunset view.”
“I’ll put in the request,” Luca says, pretending to scribble in an invisible notebook, and he gets a piece of bread tossed at him. He catches it and chomps it down.
I used to be a person who came to a table alone, yet today I came to a table with five people, and there’s a seventh chair open because Priya was going to come but had to work.
I have two bruises healing on my knee and a scrape down my arm, and none of that is what I’m thinking about. It’s about who I’m with.
Together with my three Alphas and friends on a gorgeous beach, just enjoying life without glancing over my shoulder or worrying if someone is after me.
Luca stands up and climbs to get out from between Ace and Aura. “Enough. Enough. I need the ocean.”
Suddenly, he rushes over behind me, and I hold on to North. “Luca, don’t you dare.”
He ducks low, his arm comes under my thighs, and I am airborne in one smooth motion. Then I’m upside down over his shoulder. He’s striding across the sand toward the water, and I’m kicking my legs while Clio is screaming, “Dunk her!”
The cold water hits my head, and I’m in the air for one suspended second, and then I’m under.
I come up gasping, and Luca is two feet away, grinning like he’s been rewarded by God. I splash him in the face. “You deserve that,” I tease.
“Entirely fair. I accept it.”
Before I can do anything about his cockiness, North is in the water too. In moments, he surfaces behind Luca in complete silence, gets an arm around his chest, wrestling him back. “Swim away, my sweet Omega, be free!” he says, overly dramatic, which only has me bursting out laughing.
Then North grabs me, and I shriek before we go under.
I come up splashing water straight into his face just as Ace joins us, followed by Clio and Aura.
Within seconds, all six of us are in a full-blown water fight, laughing and shoving and throwing handfuls of seawater at each other, the water up to our shoulders and doing absolutely nothing to slow any of us down.
Then Clio catches hold of my wrist with a grin and tugs me out of the chaos toward the side, and we float back in the shallows with the sun on our faces.
She shades her eyes with a hand. “You realize you’re insanely lucky.”
“Yeah, I’m really starting to see that.” With it comes a grin I simply can’t hold back… just thinking of my Alphas, staring at them, I’m completely smitten.
“In the good way,” I say, staring at them trying to drown each other.
“If anyone ever comes for you again, you have three very protective shields.”
We’re both laughing.
She hooks her pinkie around mine in the water, the way we’ve done since we were in school, and for a moment, we just float there.
“They feel like family,” I say.
“That’s because they are. I’m so happy for you, babe. And one day, I’ll find my match.”
I lean into her shoulder. “I bet you will in no time.”
Strong arms suddenly wrap around my waist from below, and I am hauled half out of the water with a yelp, and a grin is pressed against my temple.
I twist around to find Ace watching me.
“You were too far from me.” He drags me into his arms, and I press closer, staring out at North and Luca, just floating, chatting.
I’ve loved them for a while, quietly, inside myself, while I worked out how to trust it.
It’s been sitting in me for days, and I’m going to tell them tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the next time one of them annoys me in the kitchen and it falls out of my mouth.
North and Luca are swimming over, while Clio is body surfing on the small waves, Aura copying her.
The four of us are floating together now, me in the middle, being kissed and held, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
North keeps one arm firm around my waist and brushes his mouth against my temple.
“You know,” he says quietly, “I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I was built to survive things.
Then you came into it and somehow made all of this feel different.
” His hand slides up my back, holding me closer in the water. “We love you, Adelaide.”
My breath catches so hard it almost hurts.
Ace lets out a soft laugh beside me, the kind that sounds wrecked around the edges.
“Yeah, well, he was always going to share in love beautifully and ruin the rest of our speeches.” He cups the back of my neck and grins at me, but his eyes are too bright.
“We love you. Completely. Stupidly. With absolutely no self-respect left.”
Luca’s mouth finds my shoulder, and when he lifts his head, his arm tightens around my waist like he’s making sure I feel every word of it.
“So much, baby. More than my own peace, than my pride, and more than I know what to do with half the time.” He kisses me again, softer this time. “We love you.”
My chest tightens, butterflies fluttering in my stomach.
Tears fill my eyes so fast I can’t stop them, and my Alphas just gather me in closer while I laugh through the happy crying, because these three devastating men decided to say the one thing that could wreck me most.
“Oh, no,” Ace murmurs, smiling when he sees my face. “She’s gone.”
“She was gone ages ago,” Luca says.
North kisses the corner of my eye and wipes away a tear with his thumb.
I stare at all three of them, at the men holding me up in the water like I’m precious, and my throat is too tight for a second before I finally manage, “I love you too.”
And when they close around me after that, and are somehow even more careful with me than before, I know I’m never forgetting the way this feels.