Chapter 6
chapter six
. . .
isak
Her scent was everywhere. Honeysuckle and that unique herb scent, woven through the heavier notes of sex, four bodies, two days of a room that had stopped being a hotel suite and turned into something else. I ran my fingertips along the line of her spine and felt every breath she took against me.
She was asleep on top of me, one leg draped over my hip, her auburn hair fanned across my shoulder.
My knot was still inflated inside her, the slow pulse of it keeping me hard and aware of every tiny shift her body made against mine.
Her skin was warm, a little damp at the small of her back.
When she exhaled against my collarbone I felt the heat of her breath, the fine layer of sweat that had settled between us.
The room was quiet. Morning light had started to leak around the edges of the blackout curtains, a thin gold line tracing the wall above the dresser. The floor lamps were still on but dimmed to almost nothing, just enough to make out the room without waking anyone.
Denil was asleep on his back about two feet from us, one arm flung over his eyes, the other across his chest. Naked, flushed, and completely drained.
His chest rose and fell in the deep, even rhythm of someone who had pushed his body to the absolute edge and then kept pushing.
The toasted pine and tangelo of his scent had settled into something lower, almost earthy, the bright citrus note dimmed under two days of exertion.
Across from the bed, Miner sat in the upholstered chair by the window.
He'd pulled it close enough for us to talk if he kept his voice low.
He was wearing nothing at all, one leg crossed over the other, his blond hair slightly mussed, a hand resting on his knee.
He was lean and angular, the clean lines of him plain in the dim light.
The sight of him bare and perfectly composed tightened my chest, a clean pull toward Miner even with the knot still lodged inside Nitsa.
"You look good in that chair," I said. My voice came out lower than I'd expected, rough from two days of use.
Miner's mouth curved. "I look like a man who hasn't slept in more than a day."
"You look like a man who hasn't slept in more than a day and still looks edible. I'm a lucky man."
"You're biased."
"I'm objective. And I'm right."
He didn't argue. He uncrossed his legs and stretched, the movement fluid and unhurried, and I watched the play of muscle across his shoulders and tried very hard not to think about how his skin tasted.
Miner and I had been doing this long enough that the line between heat helper and lover had blurred into something only ours.
He was my beta. I loved him. Sometimes that meant holding a woman through her heat.
Sometimes it meant looking at him across a hotel room and wanting my mouth on his throat. The two things weren't separate.
"Water?" Miner asked.
I nodded toward the nightstand. "She got through about half the bottle before she dropped off. I tried the electrolyte packet in the Swag Bag, the citrus one. She took three swallows and then gave me the face."
"What face?"
"The one that says 'this tastes like punishment and I refuse to be punished by a powdered drink mix.' You know the face."
"I know the face." Miner's eyes shifted to Nitsa, then back to me. "Food?"
"Bites, not meals. The crackers from the minibar. Half a banana. Three of those chocolate things from the turndown service."
"Protein?"
I shook my head. "Couldn't get her to take it. She said the texture made her nauseous."
"We'll try again when she wakes." Miner's gaze moved to Denil. "How long has he been down?"
"Four hours, maybe five. He went hard for more than a day. You saw him. Then around three this morning he just—" I made a collapsing motion with my free hand. "Hit the wall. Full shutdown."
"His rut response is always like that," Miner said. "All or nothing. Once he commits, he commits."
"He commits," I agreed. "Then his body commits him to a coma."
Miner's mouth curved. He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and the shift brought him closer to the bed. His scent, sweet mint and sea salt, clean and cool, cut through the heavier notes of the room, and something in me I hadn't realized was restless went quiet.
"How's her temperature?" he asked.
"Down. Steadier. The flush isn't as deep. Her scent's less frantic. The cramping seems to have eased off."
"Good." Miner's eyes held mine. "And you?"
I knew what he was asking. My own state.
The rut that had been riding me since we walked through the door, the persistent, almost constant arousal Nitsa's heat had triggered and two days of sex had only partly addressed.
I was still hard. The knot still held us locked together, and every time she shifted in her sleep, my body answered like it had been waiting for the cue to rut, grind, claim.
"I'm good," I said. "Less urgent. Still present."
"Present is putting it mildly."
"I'm aware of my condition, yes."
Miner's mouth twitched. "You're always aware of your condition. Your condition is typically 'available.'"
"Thank you," I said. The words came out quieter than I'd meant them to. "For having the app active that night."
Miner held my gaze. His eyes were blue-gray in the thin morning light, steady and warm. "You would have done the same."
"I would have done it faster and with significantly less deliberation."
"That's not the compliment you think it is."
"It's the truth. And you're welcome for it anyway."
He didn't smile, but the skin around his eyes softened. He sat back and stretched his legs out, bare and relaxed in the chair. My throat tightened. The hotel suite felt dangerously like ours.
Heat Seekers had always worked for me because it was honest. I liked sex.
I liked being useful. I liked the concrete satisfaction of walking into a room where someone was in trouble and walking out having fixed something.
The app let me turn want into service without pretending either part was noble or sexless.
Want was want. Service was service. The fact that they sometimes overlapped was the whole point of the design.
But this heat wasn't an app response. This was a woman asleep on my chest with my knot inside her, my beta across the room asking how I was holding up. The difference between that and a job was wide enough that I never wanted to go back.
Nitsa resettled in her sleep, one leg drawing tighter over my hip.
Heat flashed straight through me. I locked every muscle and breathed until her body softened again, careful not to wake her.
She had spent two days running on instinct, heat, and far too little rest. Staying quiet beside her, asking for nothing while she slept, was the only care I could offer that did not become another demand.
My fingertips found the line of her spine again.
Up and down, light enough to barely register, the kind of touch that said I'm here without saying I need something from you.
Her skin was warm and soft under my fingers.
Every time I reached the small of her back I felt the ridge of her vertebrae through the muscle.
Denil snored softly from his corner of the bed. Miner watched us both from the chair, his expression quiet and contained, and the morning light kept inching across the wall above the dresser, gold and patient, in no hurry to change anything.
Miner's gaze stayed on my hand, on the line of Nitsa's spine where my fingertips were moving. "You've been doing that for twenty minutes," he said. Not an observation. A question.
"I like her spine," I said. "It's a good spine. Very well-designed. Excellent vertebrae placement."
"You like everything about her."
"I don't know everything about her, but I do have opinions about her spine. Strong ones. Separate from my other opinions."
"Which are?"
A slow pulse of my knot drew an unconscious squeeze from her thighs.
Thought disappeared under the rush, leaving only her heat and the dangerous urge to move.
I fixed my hips in place and counted my breaths, willing back the blood that would have taken me from half-hard to another climax in two grinds.
By the time my head cleared, her legs had gone loose around me again.
Miner watched me for a beat. "It bothers you."
"A little." The words left no room to joke. "I don't like watching someone talk themselves out of their own needs. Especially when those needs are written all over their body and I can fix it."
"So tell her that."
"We don't know her well enough."
"We've been inside her for two days."
"We've been inside her heat for two days.
That isn't knowing her." My hand paused on Nitsa's spine.
"If I tell her to stop minimizing, I'm asking her to trust us with the vulnerable parts.
We haven't earned that. She called Heat Seekers for anonymous, temporary help.
We showed up. Whatever this has become," I gestured at the room, at the three of us, at Nitsa asleep on my chest, "she never agreed to the emotional package. "
Miner held my gaze. His eyes were steady, the blue-gray of them warm in the thin light. "What do you know about her, then? Outside the heat."
I looked down at Nitsa's face, at the auburn hair spread across my shoulder and the line of her jaw against my chest. Two days had given me fragments: a laugh that came from somewhere honest, lips pressed flat against pain, the pointed look she gave the electrolyte packet before handing it back like I'd offered her poison.
"She minimizes," I said. "Pain, hunger, thirst, need.
If it might make her sound dependent, she shrinks it to the smallest possible version and adds a joke.
The cramps were 'uncomfortable.' The slick was 'a little inconvenient.
' Pushing her heat back for three weeks until her body staged a full rebellion was 'bad timing. '"
"Sounds familiar," Miner said.
"It's not the same."
"It's exactly the same and you know it."