I loved him enough to let him embrace me for the first time in a decade.
And then I left him.
I went home.
* * *
CHRISTMAS DAY
Rubi arrived at dawn, dishevelled, as if he had stumbled from his bed with nothing on his mind but the comically large turkey he had commandeered himself to cook.
River was more awake, like he always was so early in the morning. Somehow he made even Saint look half asleep.
Saint, who had not slept any more than I had after we had disobeyed Cam’s wishing not totag-teamhim with?—
“He’d better be awake.” Rubi broke into my thoughts. “I’m not playing dinner lady all day on my feckin’ tod.”
It was a moment where perhaps I could’ve volunteered to help him cook Christmas dinner for eighteen people.
I did not. I left him to grumble into Cam’s oven and sought out my lovers upstairs.
Cam was in the shower, blasting hot water into his face to wake himself up. It was tempting to join him, but I already heard more bikes and vehicles outside. Our time for peace and quiet had come to an end.
I found Saint in the bedroom, lying on the rug, staring at the gold-wrapped present I’d left next to the candle we’d burned down to the wick last night.
He tilted his head.You’re not going to open it?
“Not yet.”
His silence asked the question for him.
Why?
“Jonah is thoughtful. And kind. But I am not sure how well he knows me.”
So?
“So...” I padded to where Saint lay and planted a foot either side of his hips, stooping to peer into his curious face. “He has either gifted me something terrible that I need to find the will to pretend I like,orit will make me feel... things, and I have not found the mood for that yet.”
Saint smiled, with his eyes more than his mouth, but it was his mouth that drew me to sink to my knees and kiss him, entranced by the low-slung jeans he wore and his bare chest. By his light touch as he slipped his hands beneath my shirt and ghosted them up my torso. Fucking on the floor was not my favourite, but with Saint it did not bother me. I was powerless to how he made me feel, and...
I liked it.
Cam cleared his throat. “As much as I love to see this shit, Rubi is gonna come up here and bang pans around if we don’t go downstairs and help him.”
“Rubi will not survive the stairs,” I murmured against Saint’s lips. “Do not worry about such things, biker boy.”
Cam snorted and stepped over us, moving to the drawers, his gaze skimming the gift I’d brought home from London.
With Saint squirming beneath me, wanting up, I relented and rose, biting Cam’s shoulder before I left them to dress in peace.
Downstairs, Orla, Nash, and Locke had arrived. Orla was in the kitchen with Rubi, Locke was on the phone, and Nash was already halfway to a nap, if he’d ever been awake at all.
It left me with River, who seemed to be brimming with energy, feet tapping, one hand a restless mess of rhythm while the other typed on his phone.
River was not a man who spent much time engrossed in a screen, but he seemed... excited by whatever he was doing, joy shimmering in his dark O’Brian gaze.
It was a sight I had not thought I would see when I first met him, and I liked it almost as much as Saint’s smile, though it did not inflict the same heat in my blood—heat I felt to my core when Cam and Saint eventually came downstairs, Saint’s hair more tousled than it had been when I’d left him on the floor.