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“You could say that.” I gave Michio Are you okay? eyes with a lift of my brows.
He nodded once, but his jaw remained rigid.
Blocking my view, Roark kissed my lips, opening my mouth with his.
I pulled back. “Don’t taunt him.”
“He needs to learn, love. Ye both do.”
“I don’t—”
“Ye love three men.” He lifted my chin and stared into my eyes. “That’s a big deal, considering when I first met ye, ye didn’t even love yourself.”
He’d saved me the night I stumbled into that bar, my belly and soul empty, my chest ripped open from an attempted mastectomy. I’d come a long way since then. With his help. But he was right. “Loving three men is…” Foolish. Selfish. Impossible to balance.
And certain.
“Love us equally.” He placed a hand over my left breast. “And I vow to guard every portion of your heart with the whole of my own.”
This…this was why I loved him. Maybe it was because he struggled with the dichotomy between me and his god, but when he looked at me, he saw me. And what he saw, he accepted.
“Thank you.” For believing in me. For protecting and understanding me. “For being such an amazing man.”
As his thumb brushed over my lip, the delivery truck roared to life, filling the street with a hearty, hopeful echo. I bit my cheek, waiting for it to sputter and die.
But the purr of the engine grew stronger, revving every cell in my body and tingeing my inhales with exhaust.
Georges dropped the hood and whooped. “C’est bon. She’s ready, Monseigneur.”
Standing from the curb, Jesse rolled up his maps. “Never doubted you, Georges.” He caught my eye and jogged over, grinning.
Roark stepped from between my legs and propped a boot on the bumper. “Your Lakota looks unfashionably happy.”
It was a good look on him, too. He still exuded his usual fierceness, with the bow and arrows on his back, the wild mess of fuck off hair, and the aggressive square of his shoulders. But that smile… yeah, that smile made me think of cozy campfires and tangled blankets.
Jesse perched beside me on the hood and lowered his mouth to my shoulder. For a maddening second, I thought he might kiss me there, but he paused just before making contact. “Still pissed at me?”
What was he up to? I narrowed my eyes, our breaths mingling. “I’m suspicious.”
“What if I told you I found the animal safari on one of my maps?”
“No shit?” I jumped off the hood and landed on feet that felt sturdier than they had three seconds ago.
Roark joined me, his jade eyes darkened by the ink of night. “Where?”
“Four-hundred miles south of here.” Jesse leaned back on his arms, his smile glimmering.
We could be there by morning and cure the nymph by lunchtime. Hope burst through me, tingling my skin and energizing my blood.
“Jesse Beckett…” I started toward the truck and turned, walking backwards, unable to contain my grin. “You get us there, and I’ll let you teach me how to use that bow.”
He slid off the hood, following me with a smirk on his face. “I’ll remind you of that after we find the nymph, when you’re kneeling at my feet and yielding to my better judgment.”
Roark threw his head back and laughed. “She’s not the kneeling, yielding type, lad.”
Maybe I wasn’t. But I could be. I would do almost anything for their happiness. The more they laughed and smiled and worked together, the more optimistic I was about the journey ahead and our future beyond that.
The future I wanted…God, I didn’t have a word for it. But it looked like my guardians, smelled like them, felt like them. The future was theirs. That was what I wanted.
The four-hundred mile drive ended up being a gruelingly slow trip through the night. We took turns sleeping and driving, and stopped twice to refuel with the gas we carried. And we weren’t alone. Through Virginia and North and South Carolina, the hissing snarls and scraping of feet and nails joined the static that traveled through my insides.
Despite our attempts to avoid infested urban towns, aphids skittered out of the darkness, cluttering the lonely roads and chasing the rumble of our truck. Several times, we had to angle out of the windows to shoot, stab, and smash them off the hood.
The constant attacks, the lack of human life, the mystery surrounding what we’d find at the animal safari, all of it had me on edge. The short naps I managed to grab in the back of the truck didn’t ease the burning in my eyes or the tightness in my shoulders.
About fifty miles outside Atlanta, the sun peeked above the horizon. Warm air flowed in with the light and caressed my face. I shifted to my other hip in the V of Roark’s thighs and resettled my head against his chest. With his cassock back on, the row of buttons dented my cheek. Beside us, Georges and Tallis snored softly, their necks crooked at awkward angles.
