by Selena Scott
“Hey!” she whisper-yelled when he gently yanked her up and off the couch.
“Hold your horses. I’m just taking you to bed.”
She planted her feet and halted him from taking even one more step. He turned around and grinned again. She was lucky she didn’t melt through the ankle holes of her pajamas like hot butter.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that I’m not going to let someone I’m allowed to kiss sleep out here on the couch. Please. Just sleep in my bed already.”
“Fine. But just as long as you admit you’re being a freak about this.”
“Gladly.”
She marched past him to his old childhood bedroom. She’d only been in this room once with him in it and the memory was seared into her brain. It had been over a year ago and he’d made her wear his socks because her feet were cold.
Mates.
The word came out of nowhere. She frowned. She’d meant it when she said she didn’t believe in that. He’d been protective of her because he was a freaky little control freak, not because they were meant to be mates.
She went straight to the bed and slid under the covers, yanking them up to her chin out of habit. He smiled at the sight of her in his bed. He strode up to the edge of the bed and traced her eyebrows, seemingly just because he could.
Then he bent down close to her and her breath caught. “Goodnight, Kaya.”
He pressed his lips to hers for the length of half a heartbeat, and then he was pulling away. He wasn’t asking for more than she could give, he wasn’t pushing her or the situation. He was just kissing her quickly, with a hopeful smile on his face, and moving out of her space.
It was her arms that went around his neck and held him fast against her. Her barely audible moan that made him freeze in place. It was her head that lifted off the pillow to press her plush lips against his mouth once, twice, three times, each press longer than the last.
It was definitely her mouth that came open against his. Her tongue that traced the seam of his lips.
She teased his lips apart just enough for him to start moving again. She felt the life come back into his body as his tongue swept into her mouth and his hands found their way to her still-straightened hair. His fingers went straight to her scalp as if they were programmed to seek her warmth.
She felt the bed push down when he put his knee up on the mattress, his elbows framing her shoulders as he leaned over her.
She was in a protective cave made of his body but she wanted more. She tugged at his shoulders.
“More. More weight.” She tugged again and he groaned.
She heard the sound of his shoes kicking off. And then he was more than leaning over her, he was halfway laid out over her. Most of his weight was off to the side, but what he was doing definitely qualified as lying on top of her. All the other times in Kaya’s life that a man had lain on top of her had been tinged with a mild panic and slight disdain. Now, though? No. This was delicious.
He kissed at her mouth as if he were eating the most succulent peach on a hot summer’s day. Kaya felt swept away by this sort of deliberate enjoyment of her. He wasn’t lost and pawing at her, taking from her body, but he was certainly enjoying himself and that just sort of thrilled her.
She’d been so shocked and electrified by their first kiss that none of the details had had time to sink in. But now, lazily kissing on a soft bed, she absorbed the soft bristle of his stubble, the scent of his… something. What was that?
Kaya pulled her mouth away from his and pushed her nose into his neck. “You smell like something familiar.”
He chuckled, low and slightly pained as she trailed her nose down his neck to his collarbone. “I think my laundry detergent is called Spring Fresh or something like that.”
“No. It’s not a synthetic scent. I think it’s just the way you smell. Naturally. Like leather. And fresh water. And…” she took one more gigantic sniff of him. “And dirt.”
He laughed again, a loose, light sound that she’d rarely heard him make. It was a simple sound of complete enjoyment. There was nothing complicated or strained about that laugh.
“I smell like dirt.”
“The good kind! Like, the clean kind. In the forest. You smell sort of muddy. Fresh.”
“I smell like fresh mud.”
“Yes. It’s delicious.”
He laughed again and dropped his head so that their temples pressed together. “I am embarrassingly happy right now. Foolishly.”
“It’s not foolish to be happy.”
“It’s always felt foolish to me.”
“Well, add that to your list of things to work on. Because everyone deserves happiness.”
He lifted his head to look down at her, his eyes dark, and the moment began to change. It was complicated. Filled with happiness, but also fear, trepidation, confusion. The two of them felt the rushing of the situation around them but they weren’t sure if it was because they were about to jump off a cliff together or if they already had.
He leaned down and pressed another kiss to her lips and she knew it was simply because he could. He was like a man who’d just had two casts taken off his legs taking his first wobbly steps into freedom.
“I should go out to the couch. Let you sleep.”
He was just pulling away from her when her arms, for the second time in ten minutes, arced out and held him fast against her. “But if you go out to that couch alone, you’re just going to find some way to make yourself feel stupid about feeling happy, aren’t you?”
He smiled, but there was sadness in it. “Probably so.”
Her heart was clanging in her chest and to her surprise, there was actually a beat of a tremor in her voice, unusual for her. “Well, then, I don’t think you should go out to the couch tonight. I think you should stay here, in the land of the happy people.”
He froze except for his eyes, which bounced back and forth between hers. “You’re asking me to sleep next to you,” he clarified.
“Yes.” She nodded her head and tried to look authoritative, as if she weren’t making all this up as she went along. “I don’t think the whole kissing arrangement we have going will help you all that much if we don’t do anything to seal the envelope afterwards. Because you’ll just go back into the world and into your hole of self-doubt.”
“You’re saying you want to start sleeping in the same bed?”
“I’m saying that tonight we should sleep in the same bed. On other days, we’ll figure out other ways to keep the world out of our business.”
The look on his face dang near knocked her socks off yet again. It was just as boyish as the look he’d given her in the living room. But there was more wonder in it than hope. He was looking like he’d thought the world worked a certain way and just like that, she’d shown him that it worked a different way.
He cleared his throat and stood up; she wondered if he was going to tell her no.
“Scoot in then, so I don’t have to climb over you when I have to sneak out to the couch in the morning.”
She fake-frowned, even though there were happiness fireworks going off in her chest. “You’re just angling for the warm spot.”
She shivered as she settled into the cold side of the bed and he laughed. She tried not to watch as he shucked off his shirt and carefully folded it. Or when he did the same with his jeans and socks.
Seth was the naturally fastidious brother, the kind of guy who couldn’t sleep if there were dishes in the sink. Raphael was the opposite. His clean laundry lived unfolded in a basket next to his dirty laundry. Jackson was very neat, but in a painfully taught sort of way, as if he’d learned how to take care of his belongings from a rulebook and refused to deviate from it.
But then, Kaya wasn’t thinking about that anymore because he was wearing a pair of tight boxer briefs and sliding under the covers. With her.
“Aren’t you freezing cold?” she asked him.
"Not all of us are genetically related to ice cubes. Are you co
ld?”
“Always.”
He reached over and for a moment, she thought he was going to tug her in and snuggle her. Her heart skipped. But instead, he just pulled the covers even higher, making sure she was completely tucked in.
They didn’t kiss again that night, nor did they touch. They just passed the night, both sleeping soundly, getting used to the weight of everything that had just happened.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jackson and Kaya weren’t the only ones awake and visiting late at night on Christmas Eve.
Bauer stood outside Elizabeth’s bedroom door, a healthy amount of sweat on his palms and about seven thousand ants crawling all over him. He almost turned back, returned to his room, but that would have made it the eighth time he’d done that in as many months and he couldn’t face that kind of cowardice again.
He knew she wasn’t asleep, he could hear her humming to herself in there.
He resisted the urge to practice what he was going to say again. He didn’t need practice, he needed action.
Not letting himself dwell a second longer, he raised his hand and knocked on her door. He winced when the sound was louder than he’d anticipated. The last thing he needed was one of her sons to investigate the noise and catch him lingering outside her bedroom door.
But then he heard her pad across the floor and her door came open. “Oh. Bauer. Everything all right?”
He was momentarily struck dumb by her beauty, which was sort of ridiculous considering that after more than two years of seeing her almost every day, he probably should have been inoculated by then. But there was just something about seeing her pixie-like face, her braided hair over one shoulder, her robe knotted at her waist, all of it framed by the soft glow of her bedroom behind her.
He’d never set foot in her bedroom before and the golden light of it, the lavender-ish scent, the neatly made bed, the candle burning in one corner, all of it beckoned to him. He wanted an invitation into that room almost as much as he wanted an invitation into Elizabeth’s heart.
“Yeah,” he answered her question. “Everything’s fine.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, like, then why are you knocking at my door at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve?
“I—shoot,” he grumbled when his nerves threatened to get the best of him. “I was hoping to talk with you for a minute or two.”
“Oh. Okay.” She frowned. “I think we might wake someone up if we talk downstairs. You better come in.”
She stepped back from her doorway and then there was nothing but open road between Bauer and the most peaceful place on planet Earth, Elizabeth’s bedroom.
He cleared his throat and stepped through. He was old and felt older than he was, pushing sixty and every single one of those years weighed on him like a rock. He felt it in his joints these days. He had a hitch in his step from where he’d taken a bullet for Seth and Raphael a few years ago. That was the day he’d had to admit that he had it bad for this family, that as much of a runaway he’d been his entire life, he might just be staying put. But more than his physical scars, it was his emotional scars that weighed on him. The ones that no one could see.
There was one in particular that still stung, as if it were fresh, and he was sorry to say that he’d inflicted it on himself.
About a year ago, there’d been a threat to the family. A stranger was threatening to expose them as shifters, or even to hurt them himself. They’d never been clear on what his motives were. Bauer’s instinct, honed by years of being on the run, had been to take the boys and run as fast and as far as he knew how. The boys, however, had decided to stay and defend their lives here. To put down roots. To stay as human as they could.
Bauer, however, had left. For a short time. He’d known soon enough that he’d made the wrong decision and he’d hightailed it back. Just in the nick of time to save Natalie’s life. And that was the one silver lining in all of this—he and Natalie had a kinship that he’d never have been able to cultivate otherwise. But he couldn’t help but feel as if even though he’d come back and been welcomed with open arms yet again, the day he’d left had changed something between him and Elizabeth, and it was something he’d never quite been able to get back.
She pointed him toward an armchair in the corner of the room, under a reading lamp, where she had a bit of knitting out on the small table next to it. She bundled away the knitting and sat on the edge of her bed, facing him, only three feet between the ends of their bent knees.
Instead of inquiring again if everything was all right, or questioning why he was there in her room, Elizabeth simply folded her hands and waited. Which was part of the reason why he was even here in the first place, because as pushy as she was, she was also terribly patient and there was something about that combination that had just gotten under his skin.
Though he’d practiced this speech in his head at least twenty times in the last hour, he couldn’t make the first words come. “Are you happy?” was what he asked her instead.
She looked surprised by the question. “For the most part, yes. I have my boys. All three are healthy. Two of them are happy.” Her eyes looked far away for a second, no doubt thinking of Jackson. “One of them is working on it. I have the girls. My friendship with you. There’s not much more than that I need.”
He tried not to get too caught up on the word ‘friendship’. “Not much more you need, huh?” He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Is there more that you… want?”
“What do you mean?” She moved a little, agitating the air, and he caught a light scent that he sometimes smelled on her when she came back downstairs after getting ready for bed. He wondered what it was.
“You said that you’re happy for the most part. I’m wondering what it is that could make you happy for the whole part.”
She frowned and looked out her dark window. But she didn’t answer him.
Suddenly, Bauer realized that he was taking the coward’s way into this conversation. He was trying to get her to answer the complicated question, do all the heavy lifting. It should be him providing the answers here. Wasn’t that what he’d come up here to do anyhow?
“Elizabeth… do you ever think of the night that I left?”
Her eyes snapped to his and her cheeks went a lovely pink color. “Not as much as I used to.”
He knew her answer was honest, but it threatened to wilt him just a little. Because he knew what she was telling him. That he had most likely missed his window.
The night he’d abandoned Elizabeth and her family, thinking it was the only way, was the only time he’d ever come close to telling her how he felt about her. He’d told her that if he was the kind of man who knew how to stay, he’d kiss her. But as he wasn’t that kind of man, and she deserved that kind of man, he was going to keep that impulse to himself. She’d accepted that information as stoically as possible and that had been that. There’d been no kiss, he’d skipped town, and when he’d come back, rather dramatically, neither of them had ever brought it up again.
He’d gone back to being her boarder, living in the room downstairs, training with the boys and eating dinner with her each night, falling asleep in front of the fire while she read her paperbacks.
He’d desperately wanted to bring it up to her again for months now. But he’d figured that she simply agreed with him. She deserved a man who knew how to stay. He assumed that they both knew he was not that man, that he didn’t deserve her, and so he’d let sleeping dogs lie.
But…
“It’s been a year since then.” His voice was gravelly and, to his chagrin, nervous. “And I’ve wanted to have this conversation with you every night since then.”
She tugged the sides of her robe even tighter over her chest, as if she were cold. “What conversation? What are we talking about here?”
He had to stand up now. His nerves were too much. Creakily he rose from the chair and paced to the window and back. “I knew I needed to wait, to gain your trust again. To show you th
at I know how—that I’m capable of sticking around. And like I said, it’s been a year. I’m wondering if that’s been enough time. Because I’ll keep waiting if I have to. I don’t want to rush you.”
“Enough time for what, exactly? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
No. He wasn’t. Because he was bumbling around like an idiot and not saying anything at all. He was confusing himself and confusing her and it really didn’t have to be this hard.
He let out a deep breath, limped over to her bed and sat down next to her. He took her hands in his and rubbed some heat back into her cold fingers. Slowly, gathering his courage, he lifted his eyes to hers.
“I’m saying that I love you. I—I’m in love with you.”
Her eyes dilated and she inhaled a quick breath. She said nothing.
“I’m not trying to make this your problem,” he told her. “And I’m certainly not trying to mess up the situation we have going here. You and me as friends, me working with the boys. I just, I needed to tell you. Because you deserve to know that somebody feels that way about you. You’re a special woman, I’ve never met one like you. And I know how lonely you’ve been, always putting your boys first your whole life, accepting that you’ll never have what other mothers have. A partner. And accepting it with grace.”
He was rubbing her hands between his hands now, warming her up and giving himself something to do with his nervous energy. For once in his life he couldn’t seem to stop talking.
“I wanted you to know. That I’m working on learning how to stay. I’m working on being the man that you deserve. A man with roots. And I wanted to give us both some time to get over… me leaving. But I realized that part of being the man that you deserve is telling you how I feel. Is… making sure you know that you’re loved.”
There. He’d done it. He’d said the whole thing. And though his voice had been scratchy and nervous and he was sweaty and he felt as if he’d just talked for nine full hours, it was over.