Chapter 40 - Dove #2
“I told you I couldn’t stay, but the truth is…” My voice drops. “I can’t walk away from you.”
His earlier claim flickers through my mind.
Before the week ends, you’ll fall in love with me.
I don’t tell him he was right. I’m not brave enough for that yet. Instead, I make a different promise.
“I’ll stay. But Jag isn’t your problem. He’s ours.” I swallow as the wind covers us in a warm cocoon of sound. “If you get hurt, Wolf…”
“You leaving me is the only way to hurt me.”
“Then it’s settled. I’m never leaving.”
“Obviously.”
“I hope you’re ready.” Frankie rises from her lounger, smiling at me over her shoulder.
“For what?” I ask.
“Your feral Alaskan family.” She winks, and sensing Leo’s movement, she bends to brush his braids from his face. “Go back to sleep, you brute.”
She steps away, and he reaches for her.
“Just using the bathroom.” With a laugh, she straightens the sun dress over her bikini and saunters into the cabin.
“Your turn.” Wolf drops a kiss on my lip piercing.
“Hm.” I prop my feet on the cushion, curling toward him. “What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?”
“Shimmering honey.”
Honey? Is that a flavor?
“Okay, but why is it shimmering?”
“Ask the color of your eyes.”
My stomach flips. “Have you ever had ice cream?”
“Once. Frankie made me try it during my first week in Sitka.”
“Which flavor?”
“Vanilla.”
“And?”
“It was…” His thumb teases my nipple through the bikini top, his confidence quiet and coaxing. “Too vanilla for my tastes.”
I expect nothing less from my dark, dirty wolf.
Tucking my knee under his, I keep my voice soft so it stays just ours. “Tell me about your first day in Sitka.”
He exhales slowly, almost smiling, his eyes softening with gratitude or nostalgia or disbelief that someone wants to know this from him.
“All right.” He leans his head back against the cushion and stares out at the water, remembering.
“When the yacht docked, I didn’t understand anything I saw.
I had no sense of how big a city was supposed to be.
No scale for any of it. I mean, the harbor looked massive.
Like a whole new continent.” He laughs under his breath.
“All those retail shops by the water… I didn’t know if I walked into a booming urban jungle or the saddest patch of nowhere on Earth. ”
“Truly?”
“It felt huge.” He looks at me, eyes bright with memory. “And alive. People everywhere. Cars. Traffic lights. Music spilling out of doorways. The smell of coffee and gasoline. My senses were overloaded, like someone had taken the world off mute.”
“When did you realize how small Sitka actually is?”
“Brace yourself, Trouble. I’m about to blow your mind.”
“We’ll see.”
“Sitka is the largest city in the United States.”
“What? No way. That’s not—”
“It’s the largest by land area, covering 2,800 square miles.”
“Whoa.” I shake my head, officially mind-blown. “But population-wise…”
“It’s small. So small it only has fourteen miles of road. But that first day? It felt fucking magical. Like standing inside a dream and finally seeing a place I’d only heard stories about.”
“Like Disney World.”
“Alaska’s low-budget, soggy, fish-scented Disney World.” He huffs a laugh.
I laugh with him, but it breaks at the end. Because I can envision it, the wild man he was, shaking, overwhelmed, stepping into sunlight after a lifetime of darkness and meeting a new world that didn’t know his name or what he’d survived.
Lost in our thoughts, we lapse into a weird little hush that feels like a hallway between rooms.
Inside the cabin, Kody and Monty argue about how much lime juice constitutes too much.
Frankie returns to the railing with a drink in hand, one of Kody’s mint mocktails that he makes just for her.
“Your turn.” Wolf pulls me onto his lap, his mouth at my ear. “Give me something real. Doesn’t have to be big. Doesn’t have to be about pain. Just something you’re willing to share about your history with Jag.”
Funny how I haven’t heard from Jag in days, yet he manages to worm his way into most of our conversations.
I think of the lies I could tell Wolf, easy ones, but they taste rotten before they form. So I pick a small truth. An important one.
“Every time Jag uproots his life, he leaves me a message at our parents’ graves.
He plants a flower or tree near their headstones, and under it, a rock with a code on it, usually the name of a city, a new phone number, or whatever.
That’s how I knew he was here. A black willow, a sharpie rock, Sitka Tattoo.
” I meet his eyes. “He assumed I’d never follow. ”
“Yet you did.”
“I had no choice after I found out about his affair with Gavin. Following him was the only way to hate him properly.”
“Nothing drives that point home like a runaway bride with a rifle.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m fucking grateful your hate-trip led you to me.”
“Me, too.”
“Tomorrow…” He shifts beneath me, banding his arms around my waist. “I need to call Wilson and get an update on the investigation.”
His private investigator isn’t going to dig up a damn thing on Jag or the criminals he’s tied to. Jag erases trails better than the FBI, including whoever is now following me in Sitka. But I keep that to myself. Maybe the Strakh family has reach I don’t fully understand.
“Sounds like an exciting day,” I deadpan.
“I’ll feed you first. French toast, maybe. Or those stupid tiny pancakes you like.”
“I never said I like tiny pancakes.”
“You inhaled eight yesterday.”
“Coincidence.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Next question.” I relax against his chest. “Did you quit smoking?”
“Not that I remember.” He scratches his jaw. “I smoke when I have shit on my mind.”
“You haven’t had anything on your mind in five days?”
“Only good things.” He dips his head, brushing a smoky whisper against my throat. “Mostly filthy things.”
My face tingles with heat.
“Your cheeks just went pink,” he murmurs, delighted.
“Shut up.”
“My turn.” He bites my neck and moves to my ear. “What do you collect without meaning to?”
“People who irritate me.” I squeak when he nips a ticklish spot. “So far, that list is just you.”
“For that, I get to ask another.” He rests his chin on my shoulder. “What’s one thing you want?”
“Everything you’ve already given me.”
His breath releases with a purring rumble. “Something else.”
Soft music starts thrumming through the hidden speakers, and Frankie straightens at the railing. Her head snaps toward the cabin, green eyes sparkling.
Monty stands in the doorway, framed by sunlight, holding a drink to his lips, hiding a smirk. Frankie’s whole face softens. No, it glimmers. Cocking a hip, she crooks a finger at him in a silent summons.
Then she moves. God, she moves. A slow, swaying walk across the deck, hips rocking gently to the music like she’s answering an invitation only she can hear. Her fiery hair catches the breeze, her smile lazy and luminous, and for a heartbeat, she looks like a woman with no ghosts at her heels.
Monty meets her halfway, setting both drinks on the sideboard without breaking eye contact. He sweeps an arm around her waist, pulls her in, and spins her across the deck with a fluidity that doesn’t match his crisp, collared shirt.
Frankie’s head tips back, sunlight catching her freckles as she laughs. The sound floats over the water, mixes with the music, and settles in my chest with a swirly warmth I didn’t know I needed.
“Her,” I say, answering Wolf’s question.
“You want Frankie?” His head jerks back.
“For friendship, you gremlin.” I poke his ribs.
“I’ve never had a loyal female friend. Definitely not one like her.
She gives strong woman sass but also vulnerability.
Protective, but at the same time, accepting and kind.
I don’t have much experience with kindness.
Most women judge me. Or use me. They all fuck my brother. I’m not normal.”
“Neither is Frankie. She doesn’t have experience with female companionship, either. Before she met my family, her closest friend was her boss.”
“The doctor.” My stomach sinks.
“Yeah, and you know how that turned out.”
Dr. Rhett Howell lied about being her gay best friend. Turns out, he was her stalker, her kidnapper, and her rapist. Until the Strakhs hunted him down and hacked him into three hundred pieces.
“She needs a good friend, Bluebell.” Wolf entwines our fingers. “And so do you.”
Leo stirs on the lounger and lifts on an elbow, his dual-colored eyes searching, searching… When he spots Frankie twirling in Monty’s arms, his face brightens. Softens. Fucking melts.
He pushes to his feet, strong and balanced, like a Viking born for the sea. Monty notices him and, without breaking rhythm, passes Frankie smoothly into Leo’s waiting arms.
Leo catches her, his big hands settling on her hips. She beams up at him, rising on tiptoes to loop her arms around his neck. He sways with her, awkward and adorable, his feet doing something that can’t be called dancing, but she laughs like it’s the best performance she’s ever seen.
Kody leans against the railing, an unguarded smile glittering in his black eyes. He doesn’t move toward them. Just watches in his brooding way. Content.
Leo tries to spin Frankie and nearly flings himself sideways, but Frankie saves it, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him close. They sway again, slower this time, her cheek resting on his chest.
Then Monty slips in behind her, one hand at her waist, the other on Leo’s bicep. She sighs as they sandwich her between them, the three of them stepping to the music and bumping into Kody, their movements imperfect and unsynchronized, yet in total harmony.
Wolf regards them with a soft hum in his throat, his chin nudging my temple.
“That,” he murmurs, “is how they survived.”
Frankie presses her freckled nose to Leo’s chest, her hand reaching back to squeeze Monty’s ass, her other reaching for Kody.
Kody takes it and joins their circle.
She looks held from all sides.
She looks safe.
She looks loved.
I understand what Wolf means when he says this family doesn’t operate by normal rules. They don’t patch wounds with distance. They patch them with closeness. With touch. With presence. With whatever strange balancing act keeps them from tipping over again.
Frankie laughs louder as Leo spins her. Badly. Monty stumbles. Kody steadies him, and the foursome dissolves into a golden knot of motion and light.
“Come on.” Wolf slides his hands beneath my thighs and lifts me.
My arms wind around his neck as he carries me out onto the deck. Sunlight washes over his dark hair, the breeze tugging at it like even the wind wants a piece of him.
He sets me on my feet, his palms wrapping around my waist, guiding me close, his body pressing along mine. He starts to move with the music, far more skilled than I expect from a man who grew up in the frozen wilderness.
He’s tall and heat-warm, firm everywhere, his chest a solid wall my hands can’t stop groping.
His virile scent wraps around me, and his arms curve around my back, pulling me in until there’s no space left, his breath caressing my cheek, his confidence enveloping me in a protective embrace.
I melt. Full-on, shameless melt. My knees go soft. My pulse sings, and I let him move us across the deck in fluid, deliberate steps that feel indecently sexy.
“Your turn,” I whisper. “Ask me if I’ve ever danced with a man before.”
He bends his neck, mouth hovering near my ear. “Have you ever danced with a man?”
“No.”
Pleasure shimmers across his gorgeous face. His fingers tighten at my waist, drawing me even closer. He stands taller, prouder, and it hits me how much he loves this. How much I love giving him this. How he looks at me like I’ve handed him the world.
And I’m happy, too. Not the fleeting kind. The deep, forever kind that reshapes my heart.
He spins me, catches me against his chest, and I laugh, unfiltered and honest.
Surrounded by glittering water and the laughter of family, we dance in the warm sunlight. I lean into him fully, letting the day be exactly what it is.
Beautiful. Simple. Safe enough that neither of us pulls away.
Maybe that’s the biggest question answered today.