Chapter 35 #2
Everything is slow. Deliberate. From his lips on mine, the clothes he strips off my body and then his own. His hands caressing every inch of me…
His mouth between my legs.
Everything is so damn slow I want to scream at him to pick up the pace.
But he’s already gliding up my body as my pussy ripples with aftershocks from his tongue on me and inside me. He uses his thighs to spread me, his knees to keep me open, and his fingers joined with mine to pin my arms over my head.
He never looks away. All his feelings are right there. He’s holding my legs open as he thrusts deep into me, but he’s the exposed one.
He wants me to see what I’m doing to him. Wants me to read each flicker of emotion in him. To see all the things words can’t say because some words aren’t enough.
But some feelings are.
We come together with flushed skin, damp sweat-slicked bodies, and low moans. And when the explosion comes, it starts as a tingle at my curled toes, creeps up my legs and blooms between my thighs.
He spills himself into me, shuddering as he holds himself there, his face against my throat, and his ragged breaths echoing my name.
I don’t know what this feeling is yet, but I don’t want to let it go, so after Archer releases my wrists from the bed and gathers me close, I don’t shove him away and get up.
He didn’t knot me, but I feel as tied to him as if he were trapped in my body.
We share the same pillow as the last of the late afternoon warmth from the sunlight spills from the window beside my bed and onto our bare shoulders.
“How I feel about you will never change or go away, Juniper,” he says quietly. “With the bond or without it, you’re mine and I’m yours.”
I know that.
He showed me, and now he’s telling me in case I didn’t read it in his eyes. But he wants something from me that I’m not sure I’m ready to give. Or if I ever will be.
I open my mouth, hesitating.
He touches his mouth to mine. “I’m not asking if you can forgive. I don’t deserve it yet.” He sweeps hair back from my face. “Have you eaten?”
My stomach lets out a long, echoing roar of a cavern filled with wild things that have been starving for a decade or more, and I blush.
He grins at me. “Wait here. I’ll make you something.”
He swings his legs out of bed and pulls on his pants. He doesn’t bother with a shirt. I love it and hate it. Love the view. Hate that I’m attracted to him when I haven’t come close to forgiving him for hurting me. Or if I’m even sure if I want to.
And I watch him from bed, with the covers held to my chest, as he pads across the room to the kitchen and starts pulling ingredients from the refrigerator.
He’s frying bacon when he catches me looking, his mouth quirking in a brief smile. “What?”
“No one has ever cooked for me before.”
“Good,” he says from the stove. “I get to be your first.”
All my firsts have been different.
Torin was the first person I ever slept with.
Callum was the first to knot me.
And Archer is the first to cook for me.
His eyes burn when he looks at me. My cheeks burn and I turn away, though my gaze returns to him far too soon. “Why breakfast for dinner?”
He shrugs, embarrassed. “It’s the only thing I know how to make. I can try something else if you don’t mind me setting fire to your kitchen,” he says, surprising a laugh out of me.
“I don’t mind.” I scrunch my nose. “And I couldn’t complain even if I wanted to. Cooking is not one of my strengths.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “What have you tried to make?”
“It doesn’t matter what I try,” I mutter, “something always goes wrong.”
He chuckles. “How’d you like your job?”
I shrug. “It’s okay,” I say, when in reality I hate it.
Head down, he whisks eggs in a small bowl. “You don’t have to work. You know that, right?”
“I know, but I need to.”
“Okay.”
I really thought he would push the issue. Then again, he never once complained about people on the bus shoving their armpits into his face, and I thought he’d have gotten fed up with those bus rides within days. I know I did. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was.”
He flips the bacon and glances at me. “To have a job?”
“Not to work. I grew up in a bubble where I never had to see how hard life could be. I’m just looking after myself, and it’s hard. Some people have children to look after when they get home from work. I can make myself toast, call it dinner, and crawl onto the couch. I don’t know how they do it.”
“It’s harder and easier when you have someone else to look after.”
“I don’t understand.”
He scoops the bacon onto a dish and adds the eggs to the pan with the bacon grease.
“My mom used to say if it were just her, she would have crawled into bed after my dad died in a work accident and not gotten back out of it. Having me to take care of pushed her to start living again when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. ”
I hug my knees as he puts bread in the toaster. “What happened to her?”
“She died.”
I brace myself for the worst. “Was it like Callum’s mom?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing like that. Just a hit and run when I was in school. Wrong time, wrong place kind of thing. I went into the system and wish I’d raised myself. Maybe some kids get a good foster, but I didn’t.”
“Which is why you were desperate to earn money?”
He plates up the bacon, scrambled eggs, and buttered toast. “I was seventeen years old and hanging around on the street when a man in a limo pulled over and asked me if I wanted to make some money.”
I stare at him, wishing he were joking. He must hear my mental horror because he flashes me a smile and turns to pour a glass of OJ. “Like I said, I was desperate. And I figured I’d run if he wanted me to do anything too fucked up.”
“So it wasn’t fucked up?”
“It was. Just not in the way I thought it would be. I needed money, and he needed someone to pretend to be his son’s friend.
” He carries everything over to me. He puts the glass on my new table and the plate on the bed next to me.
“I got cleaned up and brand-new clothes. My mission was to run into a guy my age, convince him to be friends, and spill all his secrets. Secrets I would then spill to his dad, who could use them to control him.” He snorts.
“He might have had better luck getting a hot girl to seduce him.”
A flare of jealousy surprises me, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether the mate bond between us ever really snapped. Maybe it can’t. How can man break something the universe creates? “Why didn’t he?” I pick up a piece of bacon.
“Callum said he expected something like that from his dad. He didn’t expect me, which I guess his dad knew.”
“So you hung out, went skateboarding, and did all the sports that his dad told you he liked to do,” I say, remembering everything he told me when he’d walk me to work in the morning.
He nods. “And over time, he became a real friend—a brother—instead of a paid one.”
“Why?”
He tilts his head. “Why?” he echoes.
“Why did you become real friends instead of pretend ones?”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t as good at hiding the shit parts of my real life as I could have been. He figured out that his dad picked me up off the street, and he did something I never expected him to do?”
“What?”
“He treated me like a real friend. A brother. I got to know Torin and Lottie, and we became Pack Wells, where our mission in life became to crawl out of the deepest well in the world.”
I startle.
He smiles at me. “You had to wonder where the name came from, right? Everyone always asks, but we never tell them shit.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was that.”
“We all felt trapped. I stopped wanting to spy for Callum’s dad, and I started wanting to be his friend too. It became impossible to act the paid friend and report everything Callum had said to me to a man who treated me like a bug on the bottom of his shoe.”
“How did Callum’s dad work out you were keeping stuff from him?”
“When we tried to run. He must have worked out I was making stuff up to tell him. He grabbed Lottie and used her as a hostage to keep us at the bottom of our well.” His smile is mirthless.
“I think he would have killed me if Callum hadn’t made me part of his agreement to stay in the city.
What we know about him—and others like him—means they can never let us leave. And if we talk, Lottie dies.”
An impossible situation for all of them.
“I thought—we all thought—that you were the newest viper Callum’s dad had tossed into our lives like a grenade,” he says quietly.
“It was after another failed attempt to free Lottie. He must have decided that Veronica wasn’t doing a good enough job of spying and he needed someone we’d get closer too.
Somone we would want to tell our secrets.
Choose an omega, or I’ll choose for you.
That’s why we were at the Haven Academy ball that night. ”
“He sounds evil,” I whisper.
“Not evil. Just someone willing to go to whatever lengths it takes to avoid jail. If he were truly evil, he’d have killed us all, but I don’t think he can bring himself to kill his son. And if he hurts us, he knows nothing he tries will ever get Callum to do what he wants.”
As I finish my breakfast for dinner, he sits on the side of my bed, talking to me as I eat.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Telling me about your past. Cooking for me.”
Why are you doing all the things I once ached for?
“Please don’t act surprised that I’m doing something I should have done a year ago, Juniper.”
I pick at my eggs as I ponder this new relationship he seems to want to have with me. Can I have a future with a man who treated me so badly? And do I even want to try?
“If things hadn’t gone so badly wrong, would you have done this?” I ask.
“Cooked breakfast for you in bed?” he considers it, then nods. “Yeah. I think I would.”
“What else would you have done?”
“Maybe pick you up and carry you into the bathroom the morning after we spent the night together. We’d shower. I’d scrub your back and kiss your neck.”
That sounds like it would have been nice. The sort of life I dreamed I would have.
“Just shower together?” I ask, my gaze dropping to his washboard abs.
His eyes turn hooded. “No. We would have done other things in the bathroom.”
“Things like what?”
He swallows thickly. “You want me to tell you… Or show you?”
I look away, cheeks hot. “You can’t show me now. One person can barely fit in my bathroom. You’d knock everything off my shelves, and I’m too tired to pick it all up.”
“Maybe I could show you one day.”
“Maybe you could.”
I return to eating my breakfast, smiling gratefully at him when he passes me my juice. I drain my glass, and he takes it back.
He’s lifting my empty plate when I say, “I’m not pissed at you for staying in the apartment next door.”
“You’re not?”
“I was worried about Oscar… Wilkes. Every time I leave the house, I worry, but now I know I don’t need to. Well, as long as you’re not over there listening to me pee through my door or anything.”
He grins at me. “No one is listening to you pee through anything. Just there in case you ever need us.” His shoulders relax, and his eyes dip to my empty plate. “You want more?”
I nod. “But only if you make yourself some as well. These three men I know keep sending me more groceries than I can eat.”
He flashes me a smile. “Those three men have a lot of wrongs to make right. But they will.”
The Juniper Harrington who wanted love and a real, genuine relationship, perks up at that. That Juniper wants to believe Archer, and this new Juniper, who had her heart broken, starts to believe it too.