5. Nate #2
My fantasy dissipates when Cas dabs at my face with infinite slowness.
I stay stock still as Kato gets to his feet.
He stands and watches avidly over Cas’s shoulder, water dripping from his dark hair, making it stick to his forehead like spilled oil.
I want to tell him to look literally anywhere else, but before I do, Cas speaks.
“I think your shirt needs to come off.”
“Huh?” I ask, needing a second to process his words.
“Your shirt. It’s too wet. A towel isn’t going to do much,” he explains matter-of-factly. That he says this without meeting my eyes doesn’t go unnoticed.
“I better take mine off, too,” Kato says, immediately starting to remove his threadbare T-shirt. Cas begins to turn around, but suddenly I don’t want him to. I want his attention on me, not Kato. So, quicker than a whip, I yank my T-shirt over my head, ignoring how the wet material sticks.
Cas’s eyes are bugging out of his head by the time I drop the T-shirt to the ground.
On his other side, Kato is also shirtless, twin crescent-moon hip tattoos out on full display, his chest glistening with moisture.
I expect him to be frustrated that I pipped him to the post, but like Cas, his eyes are fixed on me. Huh.
I peer down at myself, wondering if there’s something wrong with my body.
Not as far as I can see, however. My thick chest is covered in dark red hair.
The muscles I have are solid, earnt through hard work, lifting slabs and beams and all sorts of shit day in and day out.
I admit I take up a lot of room. Perhaps it’s seen as too much, sometimes.
“I think eight-packs should be illegal,” Kato drawls. “It’s not fair on the rest of us.”
I inspect his body. It’s not like I haven’t seen it before, but I’ve made the conscious and deliberate decision to never really look.
Kato might have complained about my body, but he doesn’t have much of a right to.
He’s leaner than a lot of alphas, all whipcord muscle and almost no body fat.
His stomach is defined—not quite my eight-pack, but a solid six, the grooves of which I want to run my tongue along.
His nipples match his lips—pink, far pinker than they have any right to be—and they pebble in the cool air. Or maybe it’s under my attention.
Or, more likely, it’s Cas’s gaze that does it, as he’s turned to take his fill too.
It’s all too much for my restraint to handle.
“I’ll clean up,” I grunt, hoping that’ll be the end of it. “Kato, go get dressed.”
“I’m not the only one who needs to get dressed,” he replies with a chuckle, his chest moving up and down arrestingly with the movement that I work very, very hard to ignore.
He’s not the only one whose appearance has me sweating.
Cas is hardly wearing anything at all right now, his legs bare and only a long T-shirt of Kato’s covering him.
He’s ignored Adrian’s spare clothes, which I know he brought over, because he texted me to let me know I owed him for it.
What I don’t know is why Cas is sticking to wearing our stuff instead.
“We need a new tap,” I say weakly.
“If I go to get one tomorrow, do I get to drive your SUV?” Kato asks with pup-like excitement.
Kato doesn’t have any other means of travelling into the city, but I was told—in great detail—what he did to his own car back in Alaska. I don’t have any special attachment to my beat-up Range Rover, but it’s mine. The alpha in me doesn’t like having to share my toys.
It also means I have to trust him not to drink the second he’s left alone.
It worries me, now that he’s wormed his way under my skin.
He hasn’t drunk anything in the past month, staying on the straight and narrow as much as his instinct to rebel allows.
Still, terrible images filter through my mind of him slipping straight off the road and into a loch, or crashing headfirst into another car on the single-lane roads, or taking one sip of booze and getting so torn up about it that he pulls the saddest solo Thelma I’ve never had that before.
There’s a reason I only bring human hookups to the cabin and haven’t ever brought an omega I’ve been…
interested in before. I’m not sure that’s quite the word to describe how I feel about Cas, or the desire that burns through me whenever I see him fiddling with his ribbons, or the protective instinct that flares when I think about what might have happened that brought him here.
Kato makes the turnoff to the cabin without incident, breaking me out of my thoughts. Even as we’re jostled by the bumpy dirt road, contentment seeps into my bones as my cabin comes into sight.
“Ouch, my butt,” Cas mutters to himself, a moue of discomfort on his face.
My lips twitch into a smile. “You all right back there?”
His eyes widen. “Yes!”
“If your butt hurts, I could always kiss it better,” Kato says as he pulls up to the cabin.
Cas makes a little squeak and climbs out of the car, Kato doing the same as I hide my chuckle.