Page 68 of Caelum

I’d already lost so many people and letting her in was like asking for more pain down the road. But looking into those amber eyes, how could I avoid her?

Evade her?

I knew I’d have to try, for both our sakes, but it didn’t stop me from reaching and cupping her cheek. When my callused palm rubbed against her skin, her eyes fluttered to half-mast, and she tilted into my touch like a cat demanding more attention.

Christ, I wanted her, but she didn’t understand. I saw that now. Themicrowave was just one lesson in a thousand that she’d have to learn to adapt to our society, and while her body was screaming at me, I knew her mind was on a whole other realm.

Denying myself her unspoken promise wasn’t as hard as I feared. She deserved me to be the best man I could be, and although I’d let way too many people down in the past, I wouldn’t let her down. If I did, I might as well hammer the nails into my coffin myself.

My lips tingled with the need to kiss her, but instead, I reached down and pressed a gentle peck to her forehead.

She smelled like honey and vanilla, and I wanted that taste, that scent, over me everywhere.

But not now.

“Time for bed, Eve,” I whispered roughly, the words mumbled against her skin. When she nodded, my lips rubbed against her forehead some more, and it was a sweet kind of agony that I’d endure for her alone.

“Night, Frazer,” she murmured, taking a step back. “Thank you for the pizza and the microwave lesson.”

Her reluctance to leave was evident when she looked back at me twice, but I just smiled at her.

It was in our best interest that I was a dick to her, that I kept us apart, that no one knew of the budding friendship between us. Whether I was capable of treating her so badly was another matter entirely.

As I watched her go, it felt like I was being torn in two. Knowing that feeling would only grow worse over time, I bottled it up like I bottled everything else up and cleaned up after our midnight snack.

Those moments would be ones I treasured, and as I trudged back to my room, I thought about her soft touch, her scent, and I let them filter through me as I managed, eventually, to fall back asleep.

EIGHTEEN

EREN

“What is it?” Eve whispered.

As we stared into the closed off garden that Dre had long since claimed as his own, I leaned against the doorway that was tagged with the words, “¡Vete a la chingada!”

The spray paint had long since dried, and I knew Dre frequently topped up the charming declaration of ‘fuck off’ in Mexican Spanish.

Dre wasn’t unlike the plants he tended to, and I wanted to show them to Eve in the interest of cultivating some goodwill for my brother.

Even though I accepted Dre was a dick, and I loathed how he was treating Eve, I knew him well enough to understand that his past was making him be like this. That didn’t justify him being so mean, but his childhood… it hadn’t been easy. I was just hoping he’d come around, pull his head out of his ass, and come to see how lucky we all were to have her with us.

In the interim, she didn’t have to put up with him, could lay into him as hard as she wanted, but as mate to Stefan, she’d have to deal with Dre for a long time to come. I was waiting on her to start fighting back, to begin defending herself, but she was still too timid for that.

If he didn’t change… Well, breaking up the Pack wasn’t impossible but, when it boiled down to it, for our safety, she’d need to either understand Dre better or to fight fire with fire. We were a unit, after all. We’d trained for half a decade to be a strong team. Without him? It would be like fighting after losing alimb.

That I’d even think of breaking up the Pack surprised me, but Eve was special. She wasn’t even my mate like she was Stefan’s, and I knew that. Nestor did too. That Dre was being a bigger fucker than usual told me he saw it, sensed it, but was refusing to accept what she would mean to us as a unit.

When Eve shot me a questioning look, I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck and sheepishly apologized, “Sorry. Mind wandered. They’re blue agave plants.”

She frowned at me. “What are they?”

I liked how she always thought I’d know the answer to everything. It should have grown tiresome, but it hadn’t yet. Not even when, the other day, she’d asked me why it took Einstein so long to figure out that E equaled MC squared.

I wasn’t sure what had perplexed Nestor and me the most—the fact that she understood that shit period or that she’d expected me to know the answer.

A scientist I most definitely wasn’t.

But was Eve?

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