Page 81 of Broken Ice
Emilio winced. “I honestly thought that you were just disoriented when you called me. You were wearing his…I mean, I thought you’d just accepted the last step in courting. It didn’t really cross my mind that you would still want to spend your heats with me.” Emilio fiddled with a crease in the fitted sheet as he talked, eyes cast down.
“You could have still talked to me,” Beau insisted stubbornly.
Emilio huffed a laugh, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Yeah, like we’ve been talking all this time? Beau, come on. You have to know how I…feel about you. I thought I’d just discovered you’d been stringing me along all this time.”
Beau’s heart went into a frantic little drumroll. “I mean, Idon’tknow how you feel about me because you’ve never said anything.”
Emilio snorted incredulously, pressing his fingers to his eyes. “You know, there have been so many times that I’ve thought…‘There you go, Emilio, could you be more obvious?’ I’ddo something so fucking ridiculous that, surely, youhadto know how bad I had it. And then you just…wouldn’t.”
Beau wrinkled his nose. “You’re making it sound like I’m oblivious.”
“Beau, you are literally the most oblivious fucking person I’ve ever met in my life. I could not have been more obvious,” Emilio argued.
“Like what? What the fuck have you ever done that’s been so obvious?” Beau demanded, getting heated now.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that first heat, when I literally wouldn’t let anybody touch you? And you fucking…grabbed my shirt and scented it and I just sat there staring at you for a fucking hour because leaving you would tear me apart?”
Beau opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“Or how about my reaction to that fucking waiter who flirted with you? My scent went crazy and you didn’t realise I was warding him off like you were mine? Or the fucking hand-feeding, Beau? Who the fuck does that without being serious about someone? How about that time in your hotel room when I went fucking insane because you offered for me to scent you, and I almostbit you?”
“I…” Beau’s eyes were wide, the memories Emilio was calling up flickering through his mind, tinged in a different colour now.
“Chasing you in my fucking apartment like it was a Run? Beau. What words could have better said ‘I’m crazy fucking in love with you’ than all that?”
Beau breathed in sharply and then promptly choked on nothing. “Love?” he wheezed.
Emilio rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Pavel was right. All this time, I’ve been thinking you just wanted to take things slow, or, I don’t know, that I was being too much, but you didn’t even fuckingknow.”
“I-I—okay. Donotmake this seem like this is all my fault. You could have said something! Withwords, Emilio. I’m dumb, okay? Fuck. I didn’t even…you almost bit me? That time at the hotel?”
“Beau, I almost bite you every fucking day I’m with you,” Emilio said tiredly.
Beau let that ping around his brain, hitting every dopamine button on the way. “You should do that.”
“Do what?”
“You should bite me. You should fucking pin me down and get your knot inside me, and you should fucking bite me.”
Emilio’s face had stopped working, 404, expression not found. “What.”
“Oh,I’mdumb? I’ve been throwing myself at you and purring and—”
“You don’t even want to smell like me. Using that fuckingsoap—”
“Excuse me for thinking you didn’t want the whole world gossiping about us if you were just helping me out with my heats.”
Emilio went to retort, but Beau’d had enough. He jumped on Emilio, fisting the front of his shirt andpushing.Emilio fell back with a grunt and Beau straddled him, knees squeezing him tightly.
There were going to be no more fucking misunderstandings.
“You know what?I’mgoing to say it; you’re mine. You’remyAlpha. You’re supposed to smell likeme. And you’re supposed to fucking scent me, and bite me, and make sure that everybody knows that no one gets to have me butyou.And in a few years, when we’re ready, you’re supposed to put some pups in me. We can…I can take a year off during the pregnancy, and you can take a year off later or maybe just the away games or—not that I’ve thought about it. But.”
Emilio gripped Beau’s hips tightly, staring at Beau as if he’d just been hit in the face with a frying pan. “Pups?” he squeaked.
Beau shrugged.
“Are you serious?”
