Page 25 of Breaking the Alpha
His heart was pounding, his body refusing to believe there was no imminent threat as he sat down.“Get what?”
“Why you leave.Why you stay at the shop until I close up even if your last appointment ends hours earlier.Why you hole up in your car unless Jocelyn drags you inside.Why you sneak out every night to sleep at the shop.”Leaning back on his hands, he looked to the dark sky.“I get it.”
River refused to respond, his grip on his keys tight.
“I didn’t sleep right for months after Winter was put away,” his brother continued.“I kept waiting for Dad to come back.Kept thinking he’d somehow survived, that it wasn’t him who was cremated and he was going to bust through that door and kill one of you.”He chuckled, but there was no humor in his voice.“Do you remember finding me sleeping on the stairs back then?”
He nodded, and his throat tightened as he thought back to those first months when the threat of their father’s rage was no longer hanging over their heads.“You used to tell me the bat you carried everywhere was for baseball practice.I was too dumb to realize you didn’t play.”
“Yeah, well, it took a long time for me to sleep in my own room.Even longer to stop flinching when you or Grey came into a room too fast.But I had it easier than you did.When I took that prison term and left you two here, I got away from all the memories of Dad in this place and was able to focus on the ones I had with you and Grey.”Birch leaned forward and draped his arms over his knees.“And then I came back and had the chance to make it our house.Not his.But I get it, River.”He slapped hands on his legs and stood.“You don’t have any bookings tomorrow.If you’re going to insist on sleeping in the shop, at least pick yourself up an air mattress.”
His brother went inside, leaving him alone on the porch to collect his thoughts before he took off toward Serpent’s Tongue to see what treat Angelina had left him tonight.
Chapter Eleven
Angelina rubbed hereyes and sat up in bed, listening as the quiet knocking on her door continued.Armed with her phone in one hand and an onyx incense holder in the other, she crept down the stairs to the door.She looked through the peephole, set her makeshift weapon down, and flung the door open when she saw River standing on her veranda.
“River?What are you doing here?”She backed up to let him in, her worry ratcheting up when he didn’t move.“Are you okay?”
He seemed almost dazed as he stepped inside and looked around her living room.“Yeah.Yeah, I’m fine.I just…I didn’t get your number.I can’t call you without it.”
She took his hand and did a quick visual assessment of him as she shut the door and locked it.“Are you hungry?Thirsty?”
Snapping out of his trance, he shook his head and shoved his hands deep into his pockets.“I didn’t mean to wake you.I just couldn’t stay in that house.I thought maybe I’d go for a walk until I was too tired to think about it but…what time is it?”
“Three,” she replied, tugging him toward the kitchen.“Come on.I have a spare room downstairs.”
He followed her down a narrow set of steps and squinted when she turned on the dim lamp light to reveal a small but fully furnished bachelor suite.It was a major selling feature for her when she’d bought the place and she’d had fun doing it up in soft greens and blues.There was a bed in one corner, two armchairs in the other, a tiny kitchen area, and antique chest where an old TV sat.Her intention had been to supplement her mortgage payments by renting the suite out, but she’d been unable to get past the discomfort of having a stranger in her safe space, in her home.The lock on the old door at the top of the stairwell wasn’t nearly enough security to make her comfortable, so the suite sat empty.
Until tonight.
River had a place he could go, but it wasn’t a home.It wasn’t a space where he felt safe.She thought he might adapt, might eventually give up on sleeping at his brother’s store and give his old room a try again.
But tonight she saw how truly hard it was for him to be there.And it only made her more curious about the pieces of his past he still kept hidden from her.
He toed his sneakers off while she turned down the bedding and smoothed her hands over the pillows.“I didn’t mean to come here.”
“I’m glad you did.I worry about you.”
He gave her a flash of a disbelieving eye, but she was being honest.It bothered her to think about him slipping out of his childhood home in the night and sleeping on that small sofa.And she couldn’t blame him for needing to be away from the house where some of his worst memories were still embedded in the walls.There were whole towns two states over that she refused to ever drive through again for the same reason.
She filled a glass of water for him and he turned off the lamp before taking off his jeans and shirt, leaving on only his boxers.With the faint moonlight trickling through the turquoise curtains, she could see the muscled ridges and planes of his body as he moved and the ink covering his chest and arms, extending across his back.
On the outside, he looked like power and strength and perfection.
But the part of him drawing her in wasn’t the illusion he presented.It was the reluctant vulnerability she saw behind it—and the thought that she was probably one of the few privileged enough to be shown that a vulnerable side of him even existed.
He lay back on the bed, tucked his hands behind his head, and sighed with such contentment she couldn’t help but smile.“Comfortable?”
“C’mere.”She sat next to him on the single bed, placed her hand on his, and waited for him to either fall asleep or speak.
“Everything was so normal,” he finally whispered in the dark.“Sure, there’s some shit going down with the shop, but they’re picking paint colors and eating family meals on fancy place mats and tripping over throw cushions and arguing over who didn’t turn the dryer on.Normal shit, like nothing ever happened in that house.And I just…I just don’t get how.”
She grazed her fingers across his covered thigh.“They’ve had the time to make their peace with it over the last few years, time to make new memories.You haven’t had that.”
He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.“I’m not sure I can.Or want to.”He wrapped his hand around hers.“How was your day?”
“I sold my entire collection of gemstone bulls to a woman on a mission.”
