But I couldn’t deny him anything he asked of me, and so I said, “Come with me.”
34
Miles
Thinking was no longer on the agenda for the evening. When I even came close, the ramifications of what I had done came barreling into me full force. It was too much to handle. Tomorrow was going to be awful enough. All of my things were at a home I was no longer going to be welcome in, I was jobless, and I dragged Parker into this, of all people.
When his lips caught mine, I froze. They were perfect and wonderful and everything I remembered. They were also terrifying. What if they meant he needed me as much as I needed him? Or worse, what if it was a pity kiss? When I finally built up the nerve to kiss him back, he allowed but a brief caress, the polar opposite of his kiss only minutes earlier.
And then he said he loved me. I mean, sure, I asked, but I was so drunk on the taste of his lips against mine that my ability to hold anything back was nonexistent. He asked me if I wanted to be here, and it was all I could do to beg him to keep me for always as he had once promised.
I had to stop thinking for the night. It was all too much.
“Come with me.” Parker’s timbre held more than just authority, it held comfort.
“Yes, Alpha.” I fell in behind him, knowing that whatever he had planned was in my best interest.
Even as a young alpha barely coming into his own, he had always put me first, even as our hormones were swirling, as we learned our new balance as alphas and omegas and adults. And then, we had been so stupid toward the end, using words as bullets. It was probably why so few mated their first love. The young were freaking asshats.
We worked our way through his bedroom into his master bath. I had thought the guest bathroom I used earlier had been huge, but his was freaking palatial. I would have soaked more in if for my eyes hadn’t been glued to Parker. He’d said not a word since we left the foyer, and a part of me feared that he was freaking out that I’d asked him to take control, to take care of me. Let’s face it, what I needed was outside the realm of a favor. I needed him to immerse himself into our old roles, so I could hide like a weak omega. All my years of denial fell away, and I could finally see myself for what I was. Weak.
Parker turned around, finally looking my way, his face tight. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” Parker removed my tie before pulling the borrowed shirt from my pants and began to unbutton it. There was nothing sensual about his movements. This was all about me. One by one, I heard the small pop until even my cuffs had been loosened. At that, he slid it over my shoulders. My instincts wanted to catch it before it fell to the floor so I could hold onto his scent a few seconds longer.
He tapped my arms, and I raised them automatically as he pulled my undershirt over my head. His scent embraced me. He took my hand, leading me to a sink before handing me a new toothbrush and face cloth, instructing me to clean up a bit while he drew me a bath. I was on autopilot, brushing away when he came back.
“I think a six minute brushing would make any dentist proud.” Six minutes? Had it been that long? I hadn’t even wiped the tears from my face. “Come. I even had your favorite.” He didn’t need to clarify my favorite what as we took the few steps to the bath, smelling just like freshly baked cinnamon buns. He did remember. It had been my favorite scent before reaching my maturity, and he used to tease me that we were stuck with each other if my lifetime favorite smell happened to be the scent he came into.
I began to work the button on my pants, ready to dive into the steaming water. “Good call, Parker.” I forced a smile, trying to ease the worry on his brow.
“I try. Here, let me get that.” He began to work the button and zipper of my pants since the simple task seemed far too complicated for my hands. He made quick work of it, pushing my pants and underwear to the floor in one fell swoop and easing my feet, one at a time, up and over the cuffs, all while pretending my junk wasn’t paying close attention to the man on his knees in front of me.
Rising, he offered his hand, easing me into the tub and then removing his shirt. For a slight fraction of time, I thought he might be joining me. The tub was big enough for a baby elelphant. But instead, he pulled up a small stool, grabbed a loofa, and poured a bit of the cinnamon gel onto it before tapping my back gently.
I leaned over as he began to scrub my back, feeling the tension wash away under his touch. Slowly and methodically, he repeated this over my entire body, neither of us speaking the entire time. By some miracle, the silence filled both the air and my thoughts. My brain wasn’t filled with all the things that were wrong with my life and my future. Instead I just absorbed his attention, my worries pushed far back, to deal with at another time.
“I would’ve washed your hair, but it’s a bath.” Parker chuckled, probably thinking about a silly debate we’d once had about hair washing in tubs. I still held firm to the belief that hair washing was a shower only activity. Who wants shampoo swirling around them during a nice soak?
The debate had started on weekend getaway he had arranged for my birthday. It had been on that trip where we’d got pregnant. I hadn’t had my first heat, yet, and we had thought pregnancy was impossible. Even though things fell apart after that, that weekend remained one of the best of my life.
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk too much. We needed to talk, but not tonight. Tonight I needed this. “Thank you.”
“I… it was my…”
I’d never heard Parker at such a loss of words before. Even when I had asked him point blank if he still loved me like a needy loser, he’d had words immediately. But I… I just held mine in like a chicken. He was too important in my life, even if his season with me was over. I owed him the same honesty he gave me.
“Me too, you know,” I said, his full attention now on my lips. “What you said before about never stopping.” I saw the second when he understood what I was trying to convey, his shoulders relaxing slightly. I vowed then and there to no longer hide from him like I had been. This might not materialize into anything more than a renewed friendship, but my holding things in clearly added to Parker’s stress and that just wasn’t acceptable. He deserved more than that. He deserved everything.
35
Parker
If he had never stopped loving me… Why had he turned me away? I didn’t ask the question now, afraid it would break this fragile, precious moment between us. I gave Miles a set of my pajamas to wear and they practically hung off him. I started to pull him toward my bed, then paused to ask, “Are you okay sleeping in my bed, or would you prefer one of the spare rooms?”
“Yours, if it’s not a bother. I don’t want to be alone right now.”
I heaved a sigh of relief at that. Everything within me rebelled at the thought of being apart from Miles right now.
I pulled back the sheets and he crawled in one side, and I crawled in the other. For the first time, I found myself cursing my king sized bed. There was way too much room between us. He lay on his side with his back to me, and I lay on my side facing him. I shifted a few inches closer, and he did the same. Wordlessly, we crept closer to each other until we were in the middle of the bed, and I wrapped my arm over him, pulling his body tightly to my chest. My body was practically quivering in anticipation, and if he didn’t realize what was poking against his lower back, he was more out of it than I thought. But I squeezed him tightly, pressing a kiss against his hair. “Sleep,” I whispered.
I woke up feeling strangely lonely, and it took me a moment to place what was missing. Miles. My bed was empty. I opened my eyes to confirm and rolled onto my back with a groan. Had I overstepped? I’d done my best to take care of Miles, to give him space to process the blow up with his parents while satisfying my instincts to care for him.
Something crashed in my kitchen, and for a moment, my adrenaline pumping, I thought it was burglars, but then a sudden bloom of hope thrust me out of my bed and I dashed down the hall, slowing to peek around the wall to a sight so satisfying, I felt as though I were
dreaming.
Miles was cooking. Miles had never cooked much beyond macaroni from a box, but he was pulling something out of the oven, and it smelled delicious.
I stepped out and sat myself at the bar. “This is a surprise.”
Miles threw me a victorious grin, and I examined his face for anything negative: regret, worry, anger. He was simply happy, though.
“My roommate in law school was a culinary wonder, and she took my abysmal kitchen as a personal affront. I still can’t cook much, but she made sure I could nail at least one recipe for each section of the cookbook: breakfast, lunch, soup, appetizer, dinner, desert and the best French salad dressing you’ve had in your life.
My stomach gurgled as he closed the oven door. “So what is your breakfast masterpiece?” I asked.
“Quiche Lorraine,” Miles replied. “It needs to sit for about fifteen minutes before we can eat, but I’ve got some coffee ready.”
I grimaced. “I can’t imagine how good it is if you found it here. I ordered a bunch of staples when I first moved in, but I’ve eaten out more often than not, I’m afraid to admit.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Miles said, “but it is pretty terrible. But it’s caffeine. It will do until we can step out for something decent.”
I accepted an undoctored cup and ventured a taste. “This needs lots of sugar and milk.”
Miles made a face. “Even as awful as this is, I prefer it black. It’s insulting to the integrity of the milk and sugar to pollute it with this sludge.”
I laughed. “Feel free to tell me how you really think.”
Miles’s smile faded, and I could see him start retreating into himself again. I reached across the counter to take his hand, and a spark snapped between us. My eyes met his in surprise, but neither of us moved away. “I like it when you tell me what you think,” I said.
A timer buzzed and we both jumped, laughing nervously.
“Quiche is ready,” Miles said. “I was enjoying your balcony earlier this morning. Are you up for eating out there?”
“Sounds great.” My thoughts were still on that spark and the look in his eyes and the emotions I was tired of fighting. “But after we eat, we need to talk.”
Miles’s hand tensed under mine, but he nodded, and I let his hand go so he could prepare the quiche. I went to the fridge and found a couple of fruit cups that hadn’t reached their expiration date. They weren’t fancy, but it seemed like the kind of thing to round out our meal. As Miles plated the quiche, I drained and dumped the fruit cup into little bowls and Miles placed them on the plates next to the quiche.
“There,” he said in satisfaction. “You’d almost think I knew how to cook.”
I was glad to see he wasn’t dreading our conversation so much that he’d lost his sense of comfort with me. I wanted him to feel comfortable with me like I felt comfortable with him. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining living without him in my life again, and that was one of the many things we needed to talk about. I was fast losing my ability to tear myself away from him, and I needed to know what he expected from me. The past that had seemed so insurmountable when we were young hadn’t faded, but it had mellowed. We had grown. A younger me never would have been able to handle the situation with his parents as calmly as I had. It gave me hope that all the things I feared about myself were… maybe not gone, but managed.
But in the end, it didn’t matter what I thought so much as what Miles thought. Could he trust me again? Did he want to? I hadn’t been able to reconcile the fact that he said he had always loved me with the memory of him turning me away. I had a lot of questions, but in the end, they all drilled down to one: Why?
36
Miles
The logical side of me knew he was right. There were so many things to discuss from what next when it came to me and my living/job situation to patching up what happened up all those years ago, if they could be patched or for that matter if he even wanted them to be patched. I pushed it all down, forcing myself to be the happy host, even though technically I was the guest.
His balcony was exhilarating and at the same time peaceful. Exhilarating because it was high and my active imagination thought of all the ways someone could plummet to their death from it, especially children. Not that we had kids or that we were even together, but if we did, there something about that balcony was going to drastically change, like its existence.
It was peaceful because we were outside above the fray. The noise of the cars below us was mellow and none of the exhaust smell reached this far. We were higher up than any of the neighboring buildings, making it feel even more isolated than any city life out door space could be. I’d spent far too long sitting out there in the morning as I decided what to do next.
The responsible side of me wanted to go home and apologize while begging for my job back so I could save money by both getting my things and not having to pay rent. Jobless, clothingless, and homeless were not the best combination. That was also the weak way out.
The rest of me shouted to run, that no concessions to them would be worth the consequences. I couldn’t allow them to pimp me out during my heat, probably agreeing to allow him to stealth me for grandbabies because they know best and whatever crazy notions they got into their heads lately. Not that they hadn’t been pushing me to embrace my omega role as defined by them for years. Since that fateful day when one little word on a piece of paper altered their view of me completely.
The morning sun was fully up as we walked through the door and to the little table and chairs sitting nearby. We sat, both of us nibbling on our fruit cup. It was the gross kind my mom used to get for school lunches but sitting in a pretty little dish it tasted somewhat edible. It wasn’t until I scooped up my first bite of the quiche that Parker mimicked me.
“This is delicious. You need to make this every Monday.” He snapped his mouth shut as soon as Monday escaped his lips.
Shit it was Monday, shouldn’t he be in work or at least working?
“I’m keeping you from work. I can go hang out at the library or something. I need to get my resume ready. At least it is in the cloud.” I was babbling and I knew it, but his face was unreadable and I didn’t want to stop talking until I sensed his response so I could prepare myself. “And if you have to work late, I can make my way to the coffee shop because, let’s face it I made us swill this morning.” That earned me a genuine smile and I shoved another bite of the quiche into my mouth before I ruined the moment with something stupid.
He was right. This thing was delicious. Rooming with Belinda was one of the better decisions I’d made in my life. It was official.
“I let them know last night that I wasn’t coming in.”
“I thought you went to sleep when I did.” The last thing I remembered was his arm wrapped around me so securely as his cock pressed into my lower back, but like a gentleman he did nothing about his obvious discomfort. He was cocooning me in his embrace this morning, so I assumed he stayed that way the entire night. Looked like I was wrong.
“Almost.” He reached out, grasping my hand across the table, his warmth settling my nerves almost instantly. “But I made the decision to play hooky and messaged my assistant shortly after you fell asleep.”
“So yesterday, when you said that to my parents about calling off a meeting and losing money, that was true.” I crossed my toes it wasn’t. No family dinner anywhere was worth that kind of money, especially one that ended with a blow up fight.
“Truth to an extent, I mean I didn’t lose money, I just failed to earn it.” Word mincing was on the menu along with the quiche, it seemed.
“I’m sorry.”
“And you will stop apologizing.”
He wasn’t asking. Why was that so sexy on him and so vile in all other people? Because he was mine, even though he wasn’t, but he could be or should be or… arg. I needed to just let things play themselves out.
“Did you ask me to cancel work?”
I didn’t wan
t to answer his question, knowing he was right. I never would ask something that costly of him. As it was I planned to repay him for his kindness by filling his very pathetic refrigerator and pantry. “In essence, since I asked you to come to dinner.” I was an attorney by trade, I could mince words with the best of them.
“During a time most people aren’t working. Have I mentioned how delicious this is?” So subject change it was, much to my relief. In some ways it was like we’d never been apart, especially when he did something as classic as a transitionless subject change.
“Yes.” I was so getting the last word, which had been classic me back then before I let my position in society integrate itself too far into my subconscious. “But I agree. I owe Belinda for her tutelage.” Just wait until he tried her famous lasagna recipe. Please let us be headed in the direction that made that possible.
“As do I.”
Now was time for our talk. I was finally ready, bolstered by his love of my food and the smile that reaching his eyes.
“So, we need to talk.”
37
Parker
Even though the one question, “Why?” was practically burning a hole in my soul, I was still too afraid to ask it. So I’d composed a mental bullet point list of the things we needed to discuss. From what Miles had said, he didn’t have the money to support himself or he wouldn’t have been living with his parents in the first place. Selfishly, I wanted him to stay with me. Even if he didn’t want to stay in my bed beyond last night, I had more than enough room for him to feel like he had control of his own space. And after last night, I hoped he felt comfortable enough to take advantage of what I could offer.
Reclaiming His Omega Page 12