Chapter 75 Mira
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Mira
The bookshop smelled of sawdust and paint with the faint ghost of old books that no amount of renovation could erase.
I ran my fingers along the shelves. Same arrangement I’d designed months ago, every section exactly where I’d placed it before it burned down.
Romance alcove in the back corner. Poetry by the window. The reading nook with its worn armchair that Solomon had rebuilt because I’d mentioned once, exactly once, that I missed it.
Lucian had hired a caretaker and never told me. Just quietly ensured that the building was restored and maintained while I was busy dismantling a paramilitary organization and growing three humans.
The man’s idea of romance was property management and honestly, in this economy? It worked.
The bell above the door still chimed when I walked in.
Some things survived fire and war and the complete restructuring of your worldview, and a brass bell on a hinge was apparently one of them.
I hadn’t named the shop yet.
Still couldn’t bring myself to commit those words to a sign. But the fact that I was thinking about it, turning names over in my head while I straightened spines and dusted shelves, told me I’d crossed a line I hadn’t noticed.
The woman who’d been too scared to put down roots was standing in her rebuilt bookshop with three claiming marks on her throat and a belly full of triplets, thinking about signage.
Growth. Terrifying, inconvenient growth.
The front window gave me a view of Main Street, where Ashvale continued to exist with the cheerful obliviousness of a town that had no idea it sat thirty miles from a compound full of twisted evil.
The diner was open. The hardware store had a new display. Mrs. Tenley was walking her ancient beagle past the post office at the same glacial pace she’d maintained for the entire duration of my residence here.
Normal. Aggressively, persistently normal.
A woman I recognized from the grocery store passed the window, glanced in, saw me, and did the double-take that had become standard since I’d stopped hiding.
No brown dye. No contact lens. Copper hair and mismatched eyes on full display because I’d spent enough of my life making myself invisible and I was done.
She waved. I waved back. She hurried on with the particular speed of someone who had information to deliver to the next available ear.
The town’s gossip network had been operating at peak capacity since the three most popular firefighters in Ashvale’s history had resigned simultaneously. Broke the town’s heart, apparently.
Percy told me that two separate women had cried at the station when they turned in their gear. Solomon said the fire chief had stared at them for eleven seconds without blinking and begged Lucian not to leave as he was their greatest captain.
Of course, it went in his arrogant head after.
Now the gossip had a new engine: the visibly pregnant bookshop owner who’d been living with all three of them and showed no signs of clarifying the situation.
I’d heard the betting pool existed before I’d confirmed it. The diner had a running wager on which firefighter was the father. Percy was the favorite at three-to-one, because the town had decided his golden retriever energy was “the most likely to result in an accident.”
Lucian was the dark horse at eight-to-one. Solomon wasn’t even on the board because, as one regular apparently put it, “that man is too scary.”
If they only knew.
The answer was all three, the mechanism was a supernatural heat cycle that resulted in triplets. But Ashvale wasn’t ready for that conversation and neither was I, so the betting pool continued.
Percy had placed twenty dollars on himself. Walked into the diner, slapped the bill on the counter, and said “me”. The waitress hadn’t known what to do with that.
Solomon had placed his bet on Lucian. When I’d asked why, he’d said, “Statistical misdirection,” which was Solomon for “I think it’s funny.”
Lucian had refused to participate on principle. Then, two days later, I’d found a receipt in his jacket pocket. Fifty dollars. On me.
When I’d confronted him, he’d said, “If anyone in this arrangement is responsible for the outcome, it’s the woman who told three alphas to take their clothes off.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I’d thrown the receipt at his head anyway.
After the month I’d had, I deserved entertainment that didn’t involve guns.
The bell chimed again. Percy walked in carrying a paper bag that smelled of grease and sugar.
“Pancakes,” he announced. “From the diner. Because every batch I’ve made this week has been a personal failure and I’ve accepted my limitations.”
“I wanted the burnt ones.”
Percy blinked. “You wanted the burnt ones?”
“The crispy black edges do this thing where they crunch and then the middle is still soft and it’s the only thing I’ve been thinking about since I woke up.”
“That’s a pregnancy craving. Your body is using my failures as a food source.”
“Make me burnt pancakes, Percy.”
“I can’t burn them on purpose. The burning is an accident. That’s the whole problem.”
“Then have another accident. Tonight. Three batches. Extra burnt.”
He stared at me for a long moment, caught between offense and delight, then set the diner bag on the counter and leaned against the shelf beside me.
The shelf I’d been reaching for, specifically, which put his arm directly above my head and his chest directly in my sightline and his cologne directly in my lungs.
The pregnancy had done a number on my hormones.
I’d expected the nausea, the fatigue, the bizarre cravings. Nobody had warned me about the other thing. The thing where I looked at any of my three mates doing absolutely mundane tasks and my brain immediately departed for territories that would make the romance alcove blush.
Percy reaching for a shelf. Percy’s forearm, specifically.
The way the muscle shifted under his skin when he stretched, the scatter of freckles across his wrist, the casual flex of fingers that had held me on a sublevel floor during danger. My brain supplied a vivid, uninvited image of those fingers somewhere else entirely.
Gripping my hips. Pulling me forward. Sliding under the hem of my shirt the way he used when he wanted to watch me come apart.
My mouth went dry. Heat bloomed low in my belly, separate from the babies, deeper, the kind that made my thighs press together and my breath shorten.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“I’m assessing the structural integrity of the shelf.”
“The shelf is behind me.”
“Then I’m assessing the structural integrity of you.”
His grin spread slowly, dimples and all, and his eyes dropped to my mouth with unsubtle focus. His pupils had blown wider, the hazel shrinking to a thin ring, and I watched his tongue drag across his lower lip in a motion so brief it could’ve been unconscious.
“See anything you want?”
“Several things. None of them appropriate for a bookshop.”
“We own the bookshop.”
“We don’t own it. I own it. You three are tenants at best.”
He leaned closer. His breath grazed my neck and heat pooled between my legs with an urgency that made my toes curl inside my shoes. My pulse hammered, loud enough that he could definitely hear it, because supernatural hearing was the universe’s way of ensuring I never maintained dignity.
Percy’s nostrils flared. He could smell it too. The arousal, the want, the biological broadcast my body was sending on every available frequency.
His hand landed on the shelf behind me, caging me in without touching me. The warmth radiating off his chest made my nipples tighten under my shirt. If I tilted my chin up and forward by two inches, my mouth would be on his throat, and God, I wanted my mouth on his throat.
I wanted my teeth on the tendon that flexed when he swallowed and my tongue tracing the line of his jaw and his hands in my hair pulling my head back so he could do the thing with his mouth on my neck that made me forget how to form sentences.
“Your heart’s going fast,” he murmured. His voice had dropped to the register that vibrated in my chest.
“Your fault.”
“Want me to fix it?”
“Here?”
“Anywhere you want.”
The bell chimed. Solomon walked through the door.
“The plumbing in the back room needs attention,” Solomon said. No greeting or acknowledgment that Percy had me half-pinned against a bookshelf.
He carried a toolbox in one hand and a thermos in the other, and he moved past us toward the storage area with the focused efficiency of a man on a mission.
“Hello to you too,” I called after him.
“The pipe joint is corroded. If it bursts, your inventory takes water damage. Hello.”
I watched him go. Watched the way his shoulders moved under his shirt, the controlled precision of every step, the forearms.
Goddammit. Solomon’s forearms.
The tendons that shifted when he gripped the toolbox, the scar across his left knuckle from the sublevel fight, the veins that tracked from wrist to elbow.
My brain, still overheated from Percy, immediately pivoted to a fantasy involving Solomon’s hands and the counter in the back room.
Those fingers wrapped around a wrench with the same grip he’d used on my thighs the last time we’d been alone.
The way he worked with his jaw set and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, sweat beading at his temple, completely focused, oblivious to the fact that his competence was the single most arousing thing I’d ever witnessed.
I wanted to walk into that back room and press myself against his spine and feel the vibration of his growl through my whole body when I put my mouth on the back of his neck.
Percy caught me looking and snorted. “Love, you’ve got it bad today.”
“I’ve got it bad every day. The babies have turned me into a hormonal disaster.”
“That’s not the babies. You were staring at Solomon’s arms before you were pregnant.”