I don’t argue with her.
***
I open my eyes to find the room’s dark now. Someone’s set a lamp on low in the far corner, and the rest is heavy shapes and heavier wood. It’s nighttime, which means I was under a lot longer than it feels like.
And the air. The air is so thick with the three of them I could shut my eyes and point.
It’s the smell of a place I used to invent on bad nights and never once let myself believe was real.
“Hey.” The chest under my ear moves when it says it. Bram. A broad hand spreads warm between my shoulder blades. “There she is.”
And then all three of them are up and careful and quiet, moving around me.
“Water.” Ash, and the glass is at my mouth before I’ve finished deciding I want it. “Small sips, sweetheart.”
I drink. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted, which tells me how long it’s been better than any clock could.
“And this.” Reed, on my other side, a plate held out flat. Crackers. Cheese in slices. A clementine peeled and split into segments. “Eat, beautiful.”
I do. For a minute there’s nothing in my head but citrus and the three of them warm on every side.
Then, the math starts running itself. “Oh, no,” I say, getting up on an elbow. “The cider. You’ve got a thousand bottles due by December 1 and you spent hours in here with me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you should be at the press, not babysitting me while your whole—”
“Luna,” Bram says. “There is nowhere on God’s earth any of us would rather be than this room. We’ll make the time up.”
“But that was a heat spike,” I say. Slow. “Which means the actual heat’s coming. Soon. And it will run like a week. How will you make up the time then?”
I wasn’t due for three months. I tracked it down to the day, but I guess the three of them bumped me up the calendar. Damn.
“You are not an inconvenience, you know.” There’s no give in Bram anywhere when he says it.
“We know about a week,” Ash says. “A week will not sink this.” And he smiles. “We’ve got it handled, sweetheart.”
How, I don’t ask.By squeezing every minute of every day when you’re not fucking me? Seems highly inconvenient.
Mark my words, there’s no way I’m letting them screw their deal up to sate me.
39
Luna
“A month,” I say into the phone. “Bob. I want to be sure the heat spike hasn’t done something to my hearing. You said a month?”
“Yep, thirty days on top of whatever you’ve still got banked.” Bob keeps his voice low and level, the way he’s kept it for thirty years in a building full of people trying to read. “It’s heat leave. It’s statutory, which means I couldn’t keep it from you if I tried... which I wouldn’t, of course.”
I’m cross-legged in the middle of the couch with a quilt pooled around my waist and three of my alphas’ shirts, taking in a frequent lungful.
The heat spike is gone. It took the rolling boil out with it and left me scooped-clean and warm. I’d called my boss to beg. More time off, unpaid if it came to that, hat in hand. Instead Bob is giving mea full month.
“So this pack you found,” he says. “They all proper?”
Across the open room, Ash is at the kitchen island with two steaming mugs and zero intention of pretending he can’t hear every word. Bram sits on the low stone lip of the hearth, forearms on his knees. Reed is sprawled along the far end of thecouch with one sock-foot hooked over the armrest, watching me sideways.
Three alphas. All listening. Not one of them sorry about it either.
“All proper,” I say, and my voice does something humiliating on the second word.
“Good. I mean that.” And I hear that he does. “You take the leave. The library will keep turning without you. You spend this month thinking about you for once, yeah?”
