28. Try To Keep Up #2
The old name lands in me like a struck bell, low and resonant and complicated.
Sweet Apricot. The name they gave me, before.
The name I made all three of them swear off in a contract with my own lawyer's signature drying at the bottom of it.
Here's Beckett Shaw, breaking that particular clause without a single flicker of hesitation, in front of a total stranger, like the rule was never anything more than a dare I set down for him to pick up.
Part of me wants to elbow him for it. Part of me — the traitor part — goes warm at the sound of it in his mouth.
I file the whole confusing thing away for later.
"You know the type," he goes on, conversational, his arm a warm iron band across my middle.
"The one that got away, on account of you fumbled her the first time, and now you spend the rest of your life trying to reclaim the territory.
" A pause I feel rumble straight through his chest into my spine.
"This here's the only shot I get at her all night. So."
I tip my head back to look up at him — and I have to bite down hard on a laugh, because Beckett is wearing a cowboy hat.
A genuine, well-worn, brown felt cowboy hat, tipped low over those serious dark eyes, and it should look ridiculous on him. It does not look ridiculous. It looks, against every law of God and good taste, like a problem I'd very much like to have.
His eyes drop and lock onto mine, and a slow smile tugs at one corner of his mouth. "Evening, Miss Whitlock," he drawls, thick as molasses. "Right dandy, meeting you here. Hmm?"
I let the smirk come, arching an eyebrow up at the brim of that absurd, wonderful hat. "Why, Mr. Shaw," I say, matching him beat for beat. "Dandy seeing you here too, I'm sure."
He chuckles, low and pleased, and I can smell the shot or two on his breath, warming the black tea of him.
Whatever he's had has loosened the bolts he usually keeps torqued down bone-tight, and the sheer boldness of him tonight lights something up under my ribs.
He leans in, close against my ear. "Please tell me I'm allowed to call you Amber," he murmurs.
"Seeing as we're well and truly outside of work hours. "
I snicker, narrowing my eyes at him. "Well. Since you've correctly identified the operating principle," I say, "I suppose I'll allow it."
He grins and lifts his gaze to Brady, who's been standing there this entire time watching his odds evaporate into the rafters.
"My pack mates are floating around here tonight, friend," Beckett tells him, easy.
"And they're a good sight more anal than I am about the whole possessive-ego business.
So you'd be a wise man to go find yourself a different Omega to charm. "
Brady laughs and lifts both hands in surrender.
"Hey, I ain't fighting nobody tonight." He looks at me, and there's genuinely no heat left in it, just an easy grin.
"She's worth it, though — and I don't mean that in a hitting-on-your-Omega way.
I mean it as a straight-up compliment to the whole situation you got here.
" He tips an invisible hat at us. "Y'all have yourselves a good night.
" Then he's gone, swallowed back into the churn of the crowd.
I twist around in Beckett's arms to squint up at him properly. "Okay. Where in the hell did you come from? You don't even like drinking."
"Now who told you that?" He looks deeply affronted.
"You did!" I poke him square in the chest. "Verbatim. Years ago. 'I don't see the point of it, Amber.'"
"Mm. That may have changed some, these last five years." He says it lightly, but there's a whole apology folded up small inside it, the kind Beckett will never once say out loud in plain words.
There it is again — that thing all three of them keep doing lately.
The apology tucked neatly inside a joke.
The sorry they can't seem to spit out with their whole chests.
Five years ago it would have been enough.
A crumb, and I'd have called it a banquet.
Not anymore. Show me. Don't hint at it under your breath — show me.
His hands find my hips and turn me fully to face him — and then, with zero preamble whatsoever, because he is Beckett Shaw and subtlety was never among his gifts, one of those big hands drops and takes a frank, unapologetic handful of my ass.
I arch an eyebrow at him. Slowly.
He groans, low in his chest, and leans down until his forehead is nearly resting against mine, the brim of the hat shadowing us both.
"Okay. Look. I'm supposed to be working.
I'm supposed to be helping out." His voice drops to a rough growl.
"But I have had two full shots already, and if I have to stand here and watch you in a sea of strange men eyeing you up from every possible angle for one more second without kissing you, I am going to lose my entire goddamn mind. "
My heart stutters and skips. It clicks into place — Beckett's here working, pitching in behind the scenes tonight, and he stopped whatever he was doing the very second he clocked another Alpha leaning over my table.
Some things a man simply can't stand to watch.
"Then what," I breathe, "are you waiting f—"
He doesn't let me finish.
He kisses me, right there, in the dead middle of the packed Driftglass, and his free hand comes up and wraps around the front of my throat — not squeezing, just there, a warm, claiming collar of a grip that tips my chin exactly where he wants it and leaves me absolutely nowhere to go.
I'd forgotten this about him. I'd let myself forget it on purpose.
Beckett does not fumble at a thing he's certain of.
When Beckett Shaw knows what he wants, he takes it clean and sure and without one word of apology — and right now, his mouth slanting hot over mine, his hand at my throat, he is reminding me, in no uncertain terms whatsoever, of exactly that.
My knees do something unforgivable. Five whole years I spent quietly convincing myself I'd misremembered him — that no one actually kisses like this, that I'd gilded the memory in hindsight the way you gild anything you've lost. I did not gild it.
If anything, I undersold the man to myself, just to survive the missing of him.
He only breaks the kiss when a hand lands on my hip.
A second hand. A second man. A kiss presses soft to the side of my neck, unhurried, and a new scent rolls in over both of us like a flood tide — blue iris and pear blossom, white musk and cool green sage, so thick and sudden and deliberate that it isn't so much an arrival as a forced introduction.
It's so obvious, so pointed, so completely unlike his usual careful gentleness, that a giggle bubbles straight up out of me and breaks the kiss clean in two.
I look back over my shoulder, already knowing. "August."
"Now where the hell did you come from?"
He's pouting. A full, wounded, flower-boy pout. "I cannot even let you walk into a single establishment by yourself," he laments into my hair, "before you've gone and gotten yourself taken."
"He's on your team, you know." I point a finger at Beckett, who's still holding me in his arms, entirely unrepentant.
"It doesn't count." August sniffs, magnificently.
"Admit you're jealous and move on, flower boy," Beckett rumbles against the top of my head.
August's chin snaps up. He levels a finger at Beckett over my shoulder. "And where did you come from? You told me you were busy tonight. You specifically said — and I am quoting you exactly — that you had 'a thing.'"
"I did have a thing." Beckett smirks and nudges that ridiculous hat back with one finger, tipping his chin toward the bar.
"They called me in to run security and pick up the slack behind the bar if Cade got underwater.
And look around you—" he gestures at the roaring chaos of the room "—the man is drowning.
I used to be real good at this, back in the day.
Bouncing. Pouring. Keeping the general peace. "
"You sound," I inform him sweetly, "like an extremely old man."
A warm laugh comes from my other side, and I turn my head to find Sawyer sliding onto the stool at my right — magnolia and cracked black pepper and aged bourbon folding themselves into the frankly ridiculous bouquet the three of them have already made of the air around me.
"Sorry I'm late, Blooming Apricot." He drops a kiss to my temple, easy as breathing, grinning like the whole night belongs to him. "Had to stop off and pick up a hitchhiker."
"Hitchhiker?!" August demands, wounded all over again.
"Blooming Apricot?" Beckett says, at the exact same instant, catching the name, both brows climbing toward that hat.
I press my lips together against a grin, looking between the two of them — Beckett caging me in the front, August bristling at my left — before I turn to Sawyer, the man I am technically, allegedly, supposedly here to have one quiet little date with.
"So," I say. "Our date's shaping up to be a touch eventful tonight, huh? "
Sawyer sighs, long-suffering and delighted in the exact same breath. "Well. The more the merrier, I always say." He sweeps a lazy hand at the other two. "I can actually share, you understand. Unlike these two possessive fools."
"Hey," Beckett and August say, in perfect, wounded unison.
I can't help it. I laugh — really laugh, the kind that surprises its way out of me.
"Share," Beckett repeats flatly, over the top of my head. "You want to lecture me about sharing, Devereaux. You. The man who kept her all to himself the whole night, then rang the three of us up at dawn just to say so."
"That was communication," Sawyer says, entirely unbothered. "You're welcome."
"It was gloating."
"It was gloating as a form of communication. Very healthy. Very modern of me."
"Speaking of modern—" August starts.
"Do not," Beckett warns, without so much as looking at him, "start in on the hat."