Chapter Thirty-Nine
Feralyn
“How many times have you worked out with me? How many times did my sweaty ass hug you after?”
The soft night breeze drying my own sweat—on my bare arms, on the back of my neck—chilled my skin, and I fought a shiver. “A lot.” I’d been working out with Helios for the better part of eight years.
At first, I’d follow him wherever he went in the house, including the home gym he’d set up, because I couldn’t stand to be alone. For weeks on end, while my bruises had healed and my mind got sicker, he’d said nothing.
Then, twelve weeks to the day since we’d moved into the house, when I’d trailed him into the gym in the large, air-conditioned room behind the four-car garage, Helios hadn’t gone straight to the weights. He’d turned around and raised an eyebrow at me.
I remembered it like it was yesterday.
“You need something, or you just following me, making sure I don’t fuck shit up in this overcompensating, bullshit excuse of an apology house?”
“I….” I what? Wasn’t following him? I was. Everywhere. I could only breathe if I was near him or Ares, but mostly him. Except I couldn’t say those words. I couldn’t say any words about…. I shook my head. “A house can’t overcompensate.” Could it?
My safety, my sanity, my anchor, my savior—the reason I was alive—smirked. “This house can. Ask your piece-of-shit half brother if you don’t believe me.”
“Ghost is your brother too.” By marriage, just like Helios was technically my brother by marriage.
Ghost’s dad had married Helios’s mom. Helios’s mom had married my dad, who also happened to be Ghost’s dad, but we had different mothers.
Our family tree was so convoluted, you needed a spreadsheet to track it, but I was to Helios what Ghost was to Helios.
Why I had never thought of it that way before, I didn’t know.
I only knew that there’d been animosity between Helios and Ghost before I ever met them, and we never saw Ghost growing up anyway.
I’d barely seen Helios or Ares growing up, let alone Ghost, but ever since…
since…. I couldn’t even think the words, not even in my thoughts.
Which was just as well because Helios’s voice turned deadly as he leaned toward me. “That motherfucker isn’t shit to me. The only reason Ghost is still breathing is because you asked me not to kill him. But make no mistake, if he so much as steps foot near you, he’s fucking done.”
My heart pounding too hard, my breath short, the tingling sensation started again. I couldn’t stop my half brother from coming here any more than I could bring myself to tell my stepbrother to move out and start living his own life instead of babysitting me. “Ghost owns this house.” He’d bought it.
Instant anger contorted Helios’s expression. “How many times do I need to repeat this? You own the motherfucking house, woman. Deed’s in your name.”
“In an alias.”
Helios kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Your house, your fucking rules. Never forget that. But just so we’re clear, if I ever see that motherfucker step foot in here, I’m pulling the trigger.
” He turned toward the equipment that I’d never used.
“Come on. If you’re gonna follow my ass in here, you can work out.
” He aggressively adjusted something on a weight machine I didn’t know the name of.
“You’re starting with lat pulldowns. Low weight, ten reps, three sets. ”
Not knowing what any of that meant, I stood there.
Shirtless, wearing gym shorts and trainers, he sized me up with a single look.
“Christ.” His hands on his hips, he jerked his chin toward the tower of metal bars and rectangular weights that’d been delivered the day after I—we—moved into the house.
“Get your barefoot ass over here and straddle the bench.”
I glanced down at my feet, then looked back at the equipment.
His tone softened, which was to say, it edged close to how most people conversed but was by no means soft. “Nothing’s gonna happen to those pink-painted toes. Promise.”
The color was coral, and I now regretted it because he’d noticed. He seemed to notice everything now.
“Feralyn,” he snapped.
My body moved before my thoughts suspended, and I was scurrying toward him.
“Straddle,” he ordered.
I straddled.
“Sit,” he demanded.
I sat.
“Grip the lat bar like you mean it.”
I gripped.
Then he issued instructions rapid-fire, and I followed them.
For the next hour and a half, he put my body through the wringer. I was dripping sweat, my clothes were drenched, and my legs turned to rubber. But my heart was pounding from exertion instead of anxiety, and my thoughts were intoxicatingly blank of everything except him.
I smiled.
Chuckling, Helios pulled me into one of his hugs. “Good fucking job.”
“Sweaty,” I managed, horrified by my own exertion getting on him as I tried to pull away.
My brother-not-brother, my new trainer, my sanctuary, he hugged me tighter.
Then he hazed me, Helios-style. “What’s wrong, Haven?
” Gripping my shoulders, half his mouth tipped up in a smile that was all cocky arrogance, he rubbed me against his bare chest like I was his post-workout towel. “Can’t take the heat?”
“You think I stunk then?”
The dominance in his tone, the question posed as a challenge, they brought me back to the present.
“No. Never.” All those workouts, all the hugs afterwards, the excuses to touch me, he’d made them into a joke.
Teasing, taunting me. Telling me if he had to put up with my health food, or whatever made-up slight he came up with that day, then I had to put up with his sweat.
But lately, there’d been less joking and longer embraces.
“Pheromones, woman. We’re all animals.” His voice quieted just enough to make my stomach swoop. “You never fucking stink to me. You got that?”
Perched sideways on the gas tank of his Ducati with my knees pulled up against my chest and his arm around me, I simultaneously felt safer than I had all day and restless. The kind of restless that prickled my skin and made my nerves vibrate as I craved something I didn’t have a name for.
Staring up at Helios, I watched as the headlights of a passing car illuminated the hard angles of his handsome face. Washing the color away from his stark eyes, it made him look as if he were more avenging angel than warrior.
But I’d always seen him as a warfighter, even as a teenager.
He fought for everything, even when he didn’t have to.
Combativeness was ingrained in him long before we met.
Which is why I knew that if I had the courage to reach for him, if I could just put my arms around him and surrender, if I could just sink into his strength, these frenetic nerves pulsating through me would quiet. He would make them quiet.
I didn’t know how. I just knew he would.
And that scared me more than who I saw at the farmer’s market.
Before this morning, losing myself to bouts of anxiety, succumbing when everything became overwhelming, even at my lowest, I had tools.
I could run. I could meditate. I could cook, clean, garden, swim.
And eventually, I’d picked my camera back up.
The new one Helios had bought for me. I could make beauty through the lens of my camera.
Frame life in a certain way. All of those seemingly inconsequential activities were footholds in my life. They were my avenues for navigating.
But if I surrendered all of that hard-fought agency to Helios for even a heartbeat’s worth of peace, the deep kind of peace I knew I would feel in his arms, there wouldn’t be any coming back from that.
I already knew what his arms felt like around me.
I was sitting here now, protected in the cocoon of his embrace, but I wasn’t returning the affection.
It wasn’t as if I’d never hugged Helios.
I did.
But I never allowed myself to hug him how he hugged me.
Helios surrounded you with everything he had when he embraced you.
His body, his power, his full attention, his intoxicating natural musk, right down to how he angled in his wide shoulders and braced his legs slightly apart so he could envelop all of you against all of him.
It wasn’t a hug. It was the tenure of a warfighter who used his six and a half feet to border every inch of my body in the possessive circle of his protectiveness.
He held me as if he knew my body could finally stop pretending.
He embraced me as if saying, You can break here. You’re safe.
He hugged me as if he knew those few breaths I stole from him moved my mountains.
I craved it as much as I craved the very scent he was asking about.
Which was why the day, the night, the residential street, the distant traffic, they all fell away as I stared up at him. “I like how you smell after you work out.” Rich, real, full of life.
With a twist up on the right side of his mouth, he gave me a flash of a smile that was all cocky confidence.
“I know.” Letting go of my legs, he grabbed his helmet off the handlebar and carefully but swiftly placed it on my head before securing the chin strap.
“Come on. Let’s get you that ride you wanted. ”
Almost regretting now that I’d asked for a ride, I stretched out my legs to hop off the bike so I could climb on behind him, but Helios stopped me.
“Halt right there, woman.” Already halfway out of his leather, his free arm wrapped around my waist and held me in place as he shrugged out of the other half of his jacket. “You’re putting this on.”
Before I could protest that my running bra was soaked, he was feeding my arms through his custom-made leather jacket with the integrated armor plates and zipping me in.
Still holding on to me, he started the engine and lowered his face toward the open visor of the helmet.
“We’re not far from the house, and I know you hate riding backpack on this bike.
You want to ride in front of me?” He plucked the one earbud I was still holding out of my hand.
Then he grabbed my cell from the pocket on my leggings, swiped across the screen to turn off the music, and shoved my phone and earbuds into his jeans pocket.
I hadn’t ridden in front since he’d taught me how to handle a motorcycle. He also knew this was my least favorite bike of his to ride on because of how high the second seat sat.
Taking my hesitation as an answer, he slid back on the seat as he hooked his hand under my right thigh and lifted it over the bike. “Front it is. Lock in, sweetheart. You know the drill. I’m clutch and steering. Throttle’s yours.”
I did know the drill. I was painfully, excitedly, and hesitantly aware of this exact position—straddling a performance racing bike as a six-and-a-half-foot warfighter crowded me against the gas tank, then both took away and gave me control.
Hungry for danger—the contact, the position—I angled my legs over his thighs and tucked my feet behind his knees, then I leaned forward and gripped the right handlebar.
Helios grabbed the left.
I wrapped my free hand around his wrist.
He shifted into gear. “Ready?”
I glanced up, then down the street. No traffic. “Yes.”
His right hand covered mine. “Easy does it.”
I was already giving the superbike gas.
Helios’s chuckle filtered into my helmet right before he flipped the visor down and shifted through second, third, and into fourth gear.
Then we were flying.