“You did.”
“I’d marry you again, cielito, a hundred times.”
Embry smiled, rain sliding down his cheeks. “I’d marry you every day.”
23
ALEXEI
Lena Gordon.
A face to a name I had known for a long time now, and of course she was so beautiful I could not stop thinking about the heady nights they’d shared with her, imagery that kept me company as I left my soul on Whisper Farm with Cam and Saint—and her—and rode alone from Cornwall to Bristol.
It was a pilgrimage I had not made in a while, and I had no regrets. My penthouse apartment was as sterile and unwelcoming as it had always been, but perhaps I noticed it more since I’d spent so much time living differently.
Either way, I shivered as the door shut behind me, rubbing eyes that had been open too long, missing Saint’s silent presence. It had been a long time since I had been here without him. Even longer since Cam had been here. My first love did not like this place. He had never said, but I knew. The empty fridge, the unused oven. The sheets so crisp and cold. My home was everything Cam was not, and maybe that was why I couldn’t be here anymore.
I moved through the barren space, collecting the few personal effects I had amassed in my life, the weapons I’d once stored beneath the floorboards long gone. Most of the rooms did not mean much to me, but I paused in the bedroom, remembering the very first night I’d brought Cam home—a night we had both felt so reckless it could’ve been the end of us, not the beginning. He had seemed young to me then. Burdened by life, and yet somehow untamed. I smiled now, thinking about it. I had not known the meaning of such wild words until I metSaint.
My gaze fell on the bed, recalling how I had slept in his arms there as rain had lashed the windows, a perfect storm until Cam’s nightmares had woken us—as they still did from time to time, wrenching my heart, all the reminder I ever needed of how profoundly that night had changed me.
And how I knew I would never come back here. That I no longer needed to. I’d thought I would die in this place, but as I turned my back on the bed and walked away, only life filled my heart.
* * *
It was a long ride home, and I arrived to a compound thrumming with the crowd congregated to observe the Christmas lights being illuminated. Many faces I knew, and plenty I didn’t—a scenario I did not like or wish to participate in, and on my third day without sleep, I was not in the mood to pretend.
Unnoticed, I parked my bike and made my way to the chapel, where I found Nash, and with bustle in the yard in full swing, his presence surprised me. Nash wasnice.He liked people. And he was good at being around them. Lurking alone in the dark did not fit his personality.
“Something is wrong, zolotoy mal’chik?”
Cam’s vice-president grimaced, leaning hard against the counter of the chapel’s tiny kitchen. “Some kid hit my leg with a scooter.”
I edged closer, eyeing the appendage Nash had come so close to losing last year. “Can you move it?”
“Yeah. Nothing’s broken. Just took the wind out of me.”
“You are very pale.”
“Amazing.” Nash shut his eyes. Opened them again with a slow breath. “Think I need to puke, then I’ll be all right.”
My lip curled of its own accord. “You must be sick? Really? Why are you all like this?”
“Like what?”
“Always, if something happens, one of you will have your head in the sink.”
“What can I say? We’re fucking sensitive.”
That was one word for the visceral reactions these men could not seem to subdue. I filled a glass of water and set it on the counter. Then I left him, because for all Nash McGovern was a people person, observing him recovering from his injury had taught me he was a man who sometimes needed a moment to gather the enduring strength he possessed.
So I moved to the table, taking a seat and opening the laptop I’d swiped from the neglected corner of the compound still absurdly referred to as Cam’s office. A desk and chair I had not seen him frequent since the day I’d come to find him after our first encounter. It was ironic perhaps that the troubles he had revealed to me then still haunted him now.
I opened the accounts for the parent company owned by Cam, Orla, Nash, Rubi, and River. Poked at the hole their sentimental idiocy had left in the figures. I had the money to make it go away, but I had already been toldnoby Cam, and I was happy to oblige. For now, at least. I did not mind Cam’s belief that he could somehow contain me, but I wouldn’t let it hurt him.
Nash shuffled in from the kitchen, favouring his uninjured leg. He fell into the seat beside me and cast a glance at the numbers on my screen. “That looks horrible.”
“It could be the code to eternal happiness and you would not like it.”