AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And?”
“So far so good.”
She gave him a small smile before taking another bite out of her egg salad BLT. Nova had told him they only had it in the cafeteria one day a week and it was her favorite. Best of all, she’d granted that it maybe wasn’t so awful that Linc had dragged her out of her office.
“I’m assuming that being Little is part of that balance for you.”
“Yes. I—”
There was a dot of mayo on the corner of her lip and without thinking Linc swiped it off with his thumb.
“Sorry,” he muttered in response to her surprise-widened eyes.
“It’s… I… it’s fine.” Nova’s dark brows gathered and she looked thrown for a moment, but then she swallowed and seemed to collect herself. “I was just going to say that it’s nice to give up control for a while, and not feel responsible for, well, everything. I love my job but it takes a toll after a while, you know?”
Then she tipped her head, and he wanted to lean over and bite the graceful length of her exposed neck. Gorgeous woman had no right walking around like she wasn’t the most perfect creature on the earth.
“Or do you know? I don’t think you’ve told me what you do. Or where you do it. Where precisely will you be caveman-carrying this new wife of yours off to?”
Linc was dreading this part of the conversation after his conversation with Taylor last night. What was Nova Marchand with her C-suites and fancy suits and six-figure jobs going to think about how he lived? Then again, he’d never known her to be judgy. But Nova seemed rooted enough to not pursue something with him if he was still drifting around like a tumbleweed, and he had no idea how she’d feel about Enclave.
Clearly she wasn’t as much of a city girl as Taylor what with living in Montana and all, but there was a big difference between living at Rawhide where a person could drive to pretty much anything they needed and an isolated Alaskan island you could only reach by boat or bush plane. He supposed he’d find out pretty quick.
“I swear I’m not being an asshole when I say I do anything anywhere,” he told her, and then dragged a fry through a puddle of ketchup and popped it into his mouth. “Since I graduated—barely—I’ve been wandering around doing odd jobs, mostly trying to make enough to feed myself, keep my truck in working order, and take a girl out once in a while. I’ve been all over. Mostly in Alaska, actually, although I’ve wandered back down to the lower forty-eight from time to time.”
“So are you one of those van-life people?”
Linc shook his head and chuckled. “Nah, my legs are too long for that. I usually rent a room if I’m gonna be somewhere for a bit. And now I’ve found a place where… not sure if I’ll call it home forever. Not sure if I’ll ever do that, actually, but it’s a good place with good people, and I can’t see myself checking out anytime soon.”
“Where is this magical land?” Nova teased, her mossy green eyes sparkling.
Her Mediterranean coloring—hair so dark brown it was almost black, olive skin that tanned easily, and those eyes—was a gut punch to him somehow. Her whole look knocked him out.
“An island in Cook Inlet, Alaska. Bunch of ex-military guys bought an old fishing lodge and an abandoned family hunting preserve. Doctor friend of mine in Anchorage got in with them through a kink club, and now he lives out there with his Little girl. Oh yeah, they’re all kinky fucks,” he added with a grin. That would probably be a perk in Nova’s eyes given that she’d taken a part-time gig here when she could’ve been earning six figures anywhere else.
“So you also live at a kink playground?”
“Uh, kinda. Everyone there is definitely real comfortable with kink, especially DDlg and ageplay stuff. But we don’t have all this.” He gestured to the very well-equipped cafeteria. “No restaurants, no grocery store, no nothing. We cut our own firewood, hunt and gather most of our food, build anything we need or want. It’s rustic as hell but comfortable.”
“But do you have Wi-Fi?”
He couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not, but he was gonna go with not given what her livelihood was.
“Probably? I dunno. The other guys have computers and shit. I just got this a few years ago.”
Linc held up his phone.
“Huh. And what do your parents think about that?”
“They don’t know. I don’t really talk to them anymore.”
He hadn’t much since he left home, actually. Like most people, he felt an obligation to keep in touch with his folks even though they’d been abusive and neglectful. But one year, he decided to not call on Thanksgiving and he hadn’t been struck down by lightning. He’d actually enjoyed a holiday without his parents yelling at him about what he was gonna do with his life and telling him was good for nothing in one breath and asking for money in the next.
“I’m sorry,” Nova said, and laid a hand over his.
It was his turn to shrug. “Nothing to be sorry about. They’re pretty terrible people and I’m better off without them.”
He didn’t expect her to be one of those people who went on about how blood was an unbreakable bond and how they’d probably done the best they could, and couldn’t he just try harder, and all the other bogus reasons people had given him to subject himself to his parents’ shit. He braced for it anyway because defending family connections was a very basic human thing in his experience. People just couldn’t help themselves, as though they were compelled to defend blood-related family ties. Maybe because they were still in touch with people they wished they weren’t and misery loves company. Who could say.
