Chapter Thirteen
Nora
The penthouse was not what I expected.
I’d imagined something cold. Chrome and marble, the kind of aggressive minimalism that men with too much money and too little warmth built for themselves. A showpiece. A statement.
What I walked into was a home.
It occupied the entire top floor of a building downtown, all open space and floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of square footage that made my small apartment feel like a closet.
But it was lived in. Beautifully, messily, completely lived in.
Kieran’s leather jacket was thrown over the back of a dining chair.
Declan’s bookshelves lined an entire wall, organized with the precision of a man who alphabetized as a coping mechanism.
Rhys’s guitar sat in the corner by the window, a battered acoustic with a worn strap, and the light from the city caught its body in a way that made it look like it was waiting for someone to pick it up.
And Jonah’s blankets. Soft, layered, draped over the couch and the armchair and piled in a basket by the fireplace. His nesting instinct made visible, the physical manifestation of a man who needed softness the way other people needed air.
I stood in the foyer and felt the weight of it. Four people had built this. Four people slept here and cooked here and argued here and loved each other here, and the evidence of that life was in every surface, every object, every worn corner of the place.
It made the pack real in a way that hurt.
“It’s not usually this clean,” Kieran said from behind me. “I tidied.”
“You tidied for me?”
“Jonah tidied. I moved things from one surface to another and he followed behind me fixing it.” A pause. “The others are out for the evening. Declan has a client dinner. Rhys is... somewhere.” He said it carefully, the way you stepped around a crack in the sidewalk. “It’s just us.”
Just us. In the home he shared with three other men. I could smell them here, faintly, beneath the candle he’d lit on the kitchen counter. The absence of the pack was as present as their belongings.
“You said you were cooking,” I said, because I needed to do something other than stand in this foyer cataloguing the evidence of a life I desperately wanted to be part of.
“I am cooking. I should warn you that Jonah has described my culinary skills as ‘a danger to the household’ and Declan once timed how long it took me to set off the smoke alarm. Eleven minutes.”
“Eleven minutes from when you started cooking?”
“Eleven minutes from when I entered the kitchen.”
I laughed. He grinned. And the tension that had been coiling in my chest since I’d walked through the door released, just a fraction, because this man.
This terrifying, tattooed, dangerous man who had beaten another alpha into a hospital and who could silence a room by walking into it was standing in his kitchen with an apron over his dress shirt, warning me that he was going to burn dinner.
· · ·
He made pasta.
Or rather, he attempted pasta with the earnest incompetence of a man who had never let inexperience stop him from doing anything in his life.
The sauce was too thin. The noodles were slightly overcooked.
The garlic bread was perfect because Jonah had apparently pre-made it and left instructions that even Kieran couldn’t ruin.
It was the best meal I’d had in months.
Not because of the food. Because of the way he watched me eat it, with an expression of barely concealed anxiety that was so at odds with every other context I’d seen him in that it made my chest ache.
Because of the wine he’d chosen, which was good, which Declan had recommended, which told me he’d asked his packmate for help making this night right.
Because of the conversation, which started with work and drifted into stories and landed, eventually, in the kind of honest, unguarded territory that only happened when two people stopped being careful with each other.
He told me about his parents. His father, an alpha who’d been more interested in dominance than fatherhood. His mother, who’d left when Kieran was twelve and sent birthday cards with checks inside, which Kieran had never cashed and still kept in a box under his bed.
“Jonah found them once,” he said. “The cards. He didn’t say anything. He just put them back and that night he held me a little tighter.”
I told him about growing up beta in a beta household. About the gentle ceilings. About my mother’s kitchen and my father’s recliner and the Sunday dinners where we loved each other carefully and never once talked about wanting more.
“You deserve more,” he said. Simply. Like a fact.
“I’m starting to believe that.”
He looked at me across the table with the city glittering behind him, and the expression on his face was not the alpha intensity I’d gotten used to, the focused, predatory attention that made my heart race.
It was softer. More devastating. A man looking at a woman he wanted, not with hunger but with gratitude.
I stood up to clear my plate.
He stood up at the same time.
And we were close, the way we’d been close in his office the night of the first kiss, except this time there was no desk between us and no building full of colleagues below us and nothing, nothing at all, standing between his body and mine except a few inches of air that was vibrating so intensely I could almost see it.
“Nora.” Low. Rough. A question and an answer at the same time.
I kissed him.
· · ·
The plates hit the table with a sound I barely registered.
His hands were on my waist, lifting me, and my legs were around his hips, and his mouth was on mine, and the world contracted to the heat of his body and the strength of his arms and the desperate, broken sound he made when I pulled his lower lip between my teeth.
He carried me out of the kitchen. I didn’t ask where we were going and he didn’t tell me.
The hallway was a blur of movement and warmth and his mouth not leaving mine for a single step.
He walked like I weighed nothing, like carrying me was as natural as breathing, and when my back met the door of what I dimly registered as a bedroom, his hips pressed me against it and I felt the full, hard length of him and my head fell back against the wood.
“Is this okay?” he asked against my throat. His voice was wrecked. His hands were tight on my thighs, holding me against the door, and I could feel the tremor running through his arms.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Kieran.” I put my hands on his face and made him look at me.
His eyes were dark and wild and so full of want that it should have been terrifying, but underneath it was that fear again, the one that cracked me open every time I saw it.
He was afraid. Not of me. Of himself. Of being too much, too intense, too alpha.
Of breaking something he couldn’t fix. “I’m sure. I promise I’m sure.”
He exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for weeks. Then he opened the door behind me and carried me inside.
The room was his. I knew it instantly. Sparse and dark and warm, a bed with rumpled sheets and a single lamp and a window overlooking the city.
It smelled like him, concentrated and intoxicating, woodsmoke and pine and ozone, and the scent wrapped around me like a physical thing as he laid me on the bed.
He stood over me. The light from the lamp caught the tattoos on his forearms, the ink disappearing under his rolled sleeves, and I reached up and began unbuttoning his shirt.
My fingers were shaking. His chest was shaking.
The shirt fell open. The tattoos went further than I’d imagined, climbing his chest in dark, intricate patterns, and beneath them was solid muscle and warm skin and a heartbeat that I could see pounding at the base of his throat.
I pressed my palm to his chest. His heart slammed against my hand.
“You’re trembling,” I said.
“I know.” His voice was barely a whisper. He was looking down at me like I might disappear. “I’ve wanted this for so long and I’m terrified of getting it wrong.”
This man. This enormous, powerful, feared man, standing over me in a dark bedroom, trembling because he was afraid of hurting me.
Because the hands that had broken another alpha’s ribs were the same hands that had left tea on my desk and held my face like glass, and he knew what they were capable of, and he was more afraid of that than anything else in the world.
I sat up. I pulled my shirt over my head. I watched his eyes track the movement, watched his throat work, watched his hands curl into fists at his sides.
“You won’t get it wrong,” I said. “Touch me.”
He touched me.
His hands found my skin and I learned three things in rapid succession.
First, that Kieran Ashworth touched the way he did everything, with total, consuming focus.
Second, that the contrast between his size and his gentleness was the most erotic thing I had ever experienced.
And third, that I had been right about the trembling.
He was shaking not from fear alone but from restraint.
From the effort of holding back the full force of what he wanted because he was determined, absolutely determined, to give me a choice at every step.
“Is this okay?” he asked when his mouth found my collarbone.
“Yes.”
“This?” His hands at my waist, thumbs tracing the dip above my hips.
“Yes.”
“This?” Lower. Slower. Every touch a question.
“God, yes.”
He undressed me with the careful attention of a man mapping territory he intended to return to.
Every piece of clothing removed was a discovery.
Every new inch of skin earned a reaction from him, a low sound or a tightening of his jaw or a shudder that ran through his body, and the cumulative effect of being wanted that intensely, of watching a man come apart at the sight of me, rebuilt something inside me that I hadn’t known was broken.