21. Ten More Minutes #2
"Listen. I'm not trying to be a dick here.
I'm not looking to come strolling into your territory and rub your noses in what jerks you've been — kind of.
" A breath. "But we've got to find some middle ground, the four of us.
And that conversation? It belongs to Amber.
Not to me. So you boys can hash it out with her once these agreements are signed — today, tomorrow, whenever she's got the stomach for it.
With me in the room, or without me. Depends entirely on what makes her comfortable.
" A pause. "Since, near as I can tell, you three occasionally need a referee in the ring. "
A long pause on the line. Then August, quieter, conceding the way he always concedes — first, and all the way. "Fine. We'll cooperate." A breath. "And you're right. It's all down to what Amber wants, at the end of the day. It always should have been."
It always should have been. Something complicated happens in my chest at that.
Five years too late, delivered over a speakerphone at dawn while I lie tangled in another man's arms — and still, some stubborn, half-starved part of me leans toward the words the way a plant leans at a window.
I hate that part of me. I'm working on it.
The line rustles. "Now — are you two on your way? We've got an hour. Barely."
"Yeah," Sawyer says, and his palm settles warm and flat between my shoulder blades.
"Giving her a few more minutes first. She's worn clean out.
" The smirk climbs straight back into his voice.
"And I wouldn't go straining yourself wondering why, flower.
You already know the exact answer that jealous head of yours is busy cooking up. "
"Fuck you," August says, with feeling.
"Apricot, anyone would love to fuck me," Sawyer replies, breezy as a Sunday morning. "I happen to be very, very good at it. Ask around."
I have, in the last twelve hours, gathered fairly comprehensive data on that particular claim, and I regret to report the man is not exaggerating. I keep this scientific finding to myself.
August makes a sound low in his throat — a real growl, frustration and something warmer than frustration all tangled up in it, something I don't think he means to broadcast over an open line. Sawyer just hums, delighted down to his bones.
"You know," he says, thoughtful, "you remind me an awful lot of one of my old pack mates."
"Did you fuck your pack mate?" August fires back, quick as a struck reflex.
There's a beat of stunned quiet — I think August startled his own self — and then Sawyer whistles, long and scandalized and thoroughly delighted all at once. "Why. That is some deeply confidential information, sir." A wicked, dangling pause. "But do tell me. Do inquiring minds want to know?"
August says nothing. The silence stretches out, loaded, and I feel Sawyer's grin bloom against the top of my head like a sunrise nobody asked for. "Mm. That's what I figured," he murmurs. "Tell you what — I'll take that one up with Amber, then. She's a wonderful listener."
Are they — is this — flirting? I go very still, suddenly and completely awake, because the charge crackling down this open phone line has taken a hard and fascinating left turn that nobody involved seems willing to acknowledge.
August is jealous. Fine. Established. But August is also, unless I have entirely lost my mind under this quilt, the tiniest bit curious.
I tuck that away in a drawer I fully intend to reopen later, with a glass of something red.
August huffs, hard, a man yanking the wheel back toward the road before the whole conversation drives clean off a cliff. "We need your pack's approval," he says. "The registration. That's not optional, it's not a joke, and we are running low on morning."
"I'll handle it." Sawyer says it easy. Certain. "Don't you worry that pretty head."
"I don't trust that for a second."
"No?" Something in Sawyer's voice goes quiet and edged, just for a breath.
"See, here's the whole difference between you and me, flower.
I actually pull through for the people I love.
Every single time. But I'm more than happy to keep reminding you of that — slow, as many times as it takes for it to sink in. "
That one lands right where it's aimed. August goes quiet.
Then, faint and further off from the phone, gravel-deep and flat with pure suspicion, a third voice I know down in my bones — Beckett, who has clearly been looming over this entire call the whole time like a thundercloud with its arms crossed.
"I don't like him," Beckett says. "Not one bit."
Sawyer laughs, bright and delighted, like Beckett just handed him a bouquet.
"Well, get used to it, boys. In about an hour I'm going to be your brand-new temporary pack brother, signed and sworn and notarized.
So savor the quiet while it lasts. Real peace before the chaos, this.
" He's already pulling the phone from his ear. "I'm hanging up now."
He does not wait for a single one of them to answer. The line goes dead with a soft, final click, and he tosses the phone onto my nightstand like the entire exchange cost him nothing at all.
"You," I inform the ceiling, my voice a wrecked morning rasp, "are a menace to polite society."
"I much prefer diplomat."
"You told my ex-fiancé we did 'more than share space.'"
"I told your ex-fiancé the truth. There's a difference, and I traffic mostly in the second one." He sounds insufferably pleased with his whole self. "Besides. He asked."
"He did not ask."
"He implied." A beat. "Loudly."
I drag a pillow over my own face and consider, seriously, smothering myself with it to escape this entire situation.
It smells like him. That is the central discovery of my life as of roughly eleven hours ago — everything I own now smells like him, and I have alarmingly few complaints on the subject.
For a moment there's just the hush of my little room.
The gray dawn coming soft through the curtains.
The two of us tangled in sheets that smell, frankly, like the best decision I've made in five long years.
Then he presses one more kiss into my hair and slides out of the bed.
I hear the soft shuffle of his bare feet crossing my floorboards, the whisper of a curtain drawn back an inch, a low and knowing hum at whatever it is he sees out there on my quiet street.
Then the shuffle returns. The bed dips under his weight, and his lips find the side of my neck — warm, open, dragging a slow line up to the spot just below my ear that he learned, with great and thorough enthusiasm, sometime around two in the morning.
"Up you get, Blooming Apricot," he murmurs against my skin. "Time's up. You strike me as a great many wonderful things, but the tardy type? No. I refuse to believe it of you."
"Go away," I groan, with absolutely no conviction, throwing an arm across my face.
He chuckles, low and warm against my throat — and that is the precise moment a knock sounds from the front of the house. Three raps, brisk and unbothered, carrying clean down my little hall.
My eyes come open. I blink up at the ceiling, my whole face folding into a pout of deep confusion.
A knock. There is a knock. On my front door.
At — I don't even know what unholy hour this is, but the light through the curtains is still gray, and nobody knows where I live.
August said so himself, not four minutes ago.
I take rapid, horrified inventory: I am wearing precisely nothing, in a bedroom that looks like a wine bottle detonated in it, with a half-naked Alpha unfolding himself beside my bed and my hair doing something I can physically feel defying the known laws of nature.
Whoever it is, they cannot come in. I am not receiving guests.
The inn is closed. There is, in point of fact, no inn.
"Relax." Sawyer's already pushing up on one elbow."You know exactly who that is."
I do not.
I arch one eyebrow at him — an impressive feat, given my eyes are functioning at roughly eleven percent capacity — and level him with my flattest, most unimpressed, freshly-hauled-from-sleep stare.
"I assure you," I rasp, "I have no earthly idea who that is. Enlighten me. Who is it?"
His smirk is a slow, playful, deeply dangerous thing, tugging at one corner of his mouth.
"Our ride back into town," he says, like it's the simplest answer in all the world.
Then he stands.
He rises off the bed in one unfair, unhurried motion, both arms lifting over his head to stretch.
I am treated — at whatever ungodly hour this is — to the full, leisurely display of him: all that chiseled warm expanse of chest and stomach, the muscle shifting lazy under the skin, a fading pink mark near his collarbone that I have a horrifying suspicion I am personally responsible for, as he arches his back.
My mouth goes dry. Every last brain cell I had left abandons its post to file an urgent report about the view.
This is going to be a problem. An ongoing, recurring, deeply inconvenient problem, and I have signed no paperwork anywhere that protects me from it. For one long, stupid, wine-warm heartbeat, I forget entirely that I asked the man a question.
I make myself look away from him. It takes real effort, the kind I generally reserve for tax season.
I clear my throat, gather up the shredded remains of my composure, and try very hard to sound like a woman who runs a business and stares down the federal government, rather than a woman currently short-circuiting over a stranger's obliques at dawn.
"A ride," I repeat. "Fine. Good. Wonderful. Who did you call? Marlowe? Please tell me you called Marlowe."
Then he drops his arms.
He looks down at me, and that smirk tips into something almost apologetic — almost gleeful — the exact look of a man striking a match he knows full well is about to catch.
"And my ex."