Page 69 of The Alpha's Gamble
“Oh, shut up. Seriously, though. I wanted to…”Make you proud. Get your attention. Prove I was worth more than my ass.“…help you. Spend time with you.” That sounded a little less pathetic, anyway. Sort of. Fuck.
“I wanted to spend time with you, too,” he said quietly. “So much that I couldn’t get anything done with you there.”
That was nice, but— “Can’t help but notice you haven’t apologized for the really important part of this, Declan. Not that I’m angry!” I lifted my head, suddenly frantic to make sure he understood. His troubled gaze met mine. “I’m not angry. I get it. What Mark said, Walter had been supporting you, or pretending to, before you even got the Morrigan back, right? But I was telling you the truth the whole time.”
“Yeah,” he said, jaw tight. “Yeah, you did. But remember how I compared you to the boy who cried wolf, before? You get that, don’t you? I am sorry. You have no idea how much I regret not dealing with him before he took you. But from my point of view, I had a liar telling me not to trust someone who’d never let me down. I had a lot of doubts about it, though,” he added, as I started to protest. “I did. Once I’d started to realize you weren’t exactly what I’d thought you were. The doubts simply didn’t build up enough to change my mind until it was almost too late.”
I’d have preferred a little more groveling, but all right. I couldn’t help thinking about when Walter had confronted me and Declan had told us both that no one had anything to apologize for. That the matter was settled.
Declan would never be anything but carefully even-handed, and I simply had to get used to it.
I loved that about him, anyway. I loved everything about him.
“Fine,” I said grudgingly, and rested my chin on his chest, peeking up at his face. “At least you figured it out in time to come for me. I honestly thought you might shrug and let me go. Walter did a good job of making it look like I was there of my own free will. He had spell bags in my clothes, I think. To make me go outside where I’d be vulnerable, and to make me—with his partner in crime.” I shuddered, the visceral memory of how it felt to kiss that fucking asshole henchman of his coming back to me with irresistible force. “Gods, that was gross.”
Declan petted me, soothing me, rubbing a circle at the base of my spine. His knot had started to shrink and slip out of me. It should’ve felt unpleasant, but instead I simply basked in the stickiness, letting the intimacy of it calm me more than Declan’s touch, even. He wasn’t getting up and going to the shower, leaving me alone.
“Better? I could feel your heart racing.” Declan smiled at me. “Blake, I never would’ve bought that you were kissing that motherfucker of your own free will. Believe me.”
“But how did you know? I mean, my body language—everything. I couldn’t control any of my actions at all.”
Declan’s smile grew into a grin. “Didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out, baby. Just someone who knows you. I looked really damn closely at the security footage. He was wearing pleated khakis, and on top of that, he had a cheap shitty haircut. You would never.”
I couldn’t help bursting into laughter, leaning in to kiss him, savoring how it felt to choose to do it rather than being magicked and manipulated. Declan’s lips distracted me for a while, long enough that when I finished thoroughly tasting him, I’d calmed down enough to settle with my head on his shoulder, content to let everything else go.
This time I’d turned to face the window instead of the wall. The lights of Las Vegas shone in with distant blinkings and flashings, like the world’s largest slot machine, the moonlight having to compete to be seen even this many floors up above the Strip.
In the morning, the sun would shine straight in on my face, and dollars to donuts Declan would’ve already gotten out of bed and gone to do something productive.
“I love you,” I said. “Even though you never bother to close the blinds. And you’re a morning person.”
He laughed and held me impossibly closer, snuggling me into his chest and into the cradle of his hips, enclosing and protecting me.
“Then that makes me a lucky man, darlin’,” he said without hesitation. As if he believed that down to his very bones.
I closed my eyes, sinking into the warmth and safety of his embrace. I’d let him believe he was the lucky one, but I knew better.
Or maybe we were both luckier than we deserved.
Epilogue
You Don’t Want a Choice
“Mr. Castelli,” Laura said, and smiled warmly. “Go right in. He’s never too busy for you.”
“You know it’s Blake.” She shook her head, laughed, and went back to typing.
I hadn’t yet given up on trying to convince Declan’s assistant that I didn’t deserve any particular formality; after nearly four months of trying, though, I’d started to fear it was hopeless.
I set the double latte I’d grabbed on my way at the edge of her desk—if she insisted on calling me Mr. Castelli, I’d at least make sure she said it with affection—and stepped into Declan’s office.
He glanced up from his laptop and then immediately back down again, which I knew meant “I’ll forget what I was typing if I don’t do it right now.” At first that’d hurt my feelings. Shades of being treated like an unwelcome and disliked inconvenience at Castelli Industries, of so many times I’d been called on the carpet in my father’s office only to be ignored until he deigned to notice me. But I knew it wasn’t the same thing—not even close.
I’d finally, haltingly, told Declan about my father, one night a week after Walter tried to kill me. I’d woken up screaming and thrashing from a nightmare involving both my father and Walter. Declan hadn’t taken no for an answer. After I’d told the whole story, not hiding any of my own culpability, I’d had to physically prevent him from booking a plane ticket to Boise to beat the shit out of my father personally.
I’d been tempted, not going to lie, but I’d stopped him. Mainly because of Brook and how much another scandal would fuck him over. One of these days I knew I wanted to try to reach out to my brother, but that could wait.
Unlike me. I wasn’t good at waiting.
