He was alone in her bed when he woke up. The smell of her was everywhere. On his own skin, even. He felt like he’d been struck by lightning. Buzzy and numb and utterly confused. Every time he tried to get his thoughts to go forward they just turned around and went right back to the beginning.

The bathing suit. The dancing. The swimming. The man at the bar. The swimsuit. Boyfriend. Lover. The hoodie. Kissing. Kissingkissingkissingkissingkissing. The swimsuit. Putting her to bed. Goodnight. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Goodnight.

And then crawling into bed with her. Everything smelling all faint mint and fresh earth.

“Mmmph,” he groaned and rolled over. “That fucking swimsuit.”

He and Valentina had kissed. Real kissed. Kissed hard.

That was the kind of kiss you couldn’t take back. Just a hop and a skip from fucking. Intimate and irrevocable.

“Shit.”

He pulled himself from bed. He already knew that she wasn’t in the house, it was silent and cold. He’d slept late, he realized as he saw the clock in the kitchen, and on the counter, a note.

-Went with Ruby to do wedding errands.

That’s all. No heart. No x or o. Not even her damn name. He stroked a finger over her almost illegible chicken scratch and then tucked the note carefully into a drawer. God. Even that nothing little note was plucking some chord in him.

She was with Ruby.

He froze. Would she tell Ruby? Was there a chance that John Alec would find out before Kain could tell him?

Oh fuck. His heart froze.

Kain had crossed a major line last night. With both John Alec and Milla. And he needed to talk to them stat. Sooner than stat.

He really needed to have talked to them yesterday before he’d tongue-fucked Valentina’s mouth for half an hour. But that had gone out the window the second she’d looked up at him from the bottom of those stairs, looking like she thought she deserved loneliness.

He grabbed his phone from the bathroom and texted his sister while he brushed his teeth and started the shower. He had to come clean and soon.

 

***

 

That late afternoon, though, he still hadn’t been able to catch up with either of them. Milla was out doing wedding crap with the rest of the girls and John Alec wasn’t answering his damn phone.

Kain was going out of his mind with equal parts guilt and self-righteousness. He hadn’t done something terrible. But she was John Alec’s sister.

His leg jumped as he sat at his kitchen table and waited for her to come home. He wished very much that she’d woken him before she went. He wanted to talk to her, see how she was feeling. Maybe kiss her again. NO! Not until he talked to John Alec.

Kain checked his phone. Nothing.

He rose up, grabbed his keys and was pulling into Ansel’s driveway a few minutes later. And there was Ansel, hauling some boxes around to the back of his house. Kain popped out of the car and grabbed a few himself.

“Hey,” his deep-voiced, squinty-eyed, extremely quiet brother grumbled at him.

“Hey.”

“What is it?” Ansel asked as they dropped the boxes in the backyard and Ansel started stripping them open. It looked like the pieces to build a swing set. Cool. Kain loved doing stuff for Carmen. He watched as Ansel tossed the instructions aside and started pulling stuff out of the boxes. He wasn’t surprised that his brother had instantly caught on that something was bothering Kain. He’d always known that sort of stuff.

“Ah. Nothing,” Kain handed over a monkey wrench. “Just did something kind of stupid.”

“You hooked up with Valentina,” Ansel supplied easily, studying a piece of the swing set.

“What?” Kain blinked. “She told you? Or she told Ruby and Ruby told you? Fuck!”

Ansel grinned. “Nobody told me. But I’m not blind. You’ve got a shine for her. And now you’re all mixed up. It wasn’t that far of a leap for me to make.”

“Oh. Yeah. Alright. We just made out. But I haven’t talked to John Alec about it. And now I can’t get ahold of him. Driving me nuts.”

Ansel studied his brother, watched the way he fiddled with his hat. “So you’re gonna do it again?”

“With Valentina? Uh—I mean, I want to. But not until I talk to Alec. And I haven’t even really talked to her about it. It was just this wild, 30-minute, late night… lightning strike. And now I’m here.”

Ansel squinted and scratched at his stubble. “Are you serious about her?”

Yes. “I don’t know. Too soon to tell.”

In Ansel’s opinion, there was no ‘too soon’. But that was just him. “Then maybe don’t tell Alec until you know.”

“What?”

“Nobody wants to know some guy is feeling up his sister and isn’t sure how he feels about it. Think if it were Mills. Wait, no, that’s not right, Milla would just kick his ass and be done with it. Imagine if it were Inks, then.”

Kain could kind of see the point he was making. “Hold on, are you telling me that I should keep sneaking around behind Alec’s back?”

“No.” Ansel grabbed for one of the pipes he was fastening together. “Course not. I’m saying cool your jets until you understand how you feel about her. And then talk to Alec if things are gonna go further.”

“Ah.” That made more sense. No more make-outs. No hooking up. Just getting to know each other. He had to put the real brakes on this thing. Figure his shit out, and get square with his brother-in-law before he proceeded any further. Oh joy. “Ansel, how’d you know with Ruby? That things were serious?”

Ansel thought for a long minute, propping up the part of the swing set he’d assembled. “Honestly, things were never not serious with Ruby. The second I kissed her I knew I was never gonna stop kissing her. And I knew that I’d do whatever she needed. Whatever pace she needed for however long. Fast or slow. All that mattered was being together.”

The second I kissed her I knew I was never gonna stop kissing her.

The words echoed in Kain’s mind and he pushed them to the side. “Is that why it took you guys so long to get engaged? You were going at her pace and not yours?”

“Eh. Sort of. Lots of reasons, I guess. We were in love from the get. But we had a lot of getting to know one another to do. And we both wanted Griff to get back on his feet before we made any more changes to his life.”

“So why now?”

“Well, Griff’s doing a lot better. You know that, you’re the one who helped him figure out his shift. He’s getting happier and older and he understands that us getting married won’t leave him behind at all. Plus, uh,” Ansel scratched his chin again. “It’s the right time cuz Rube’s pregnant.”

“Ah! HA! Ho-ly SHIT, Ansel!” Kain tackled his brother backward in a strangling hug that knocked the wind out of them both. “You dog!”

Ansel laughed and shoved his brother off of him. “Yeah.”

“How far along is she?”

“Ten weeks. We found out last week. Now she’s all worried about fitting into her wedding dress.”

Kain read his brother’s squinty face. “You couldn’t care less what she fits into.”             

“Nah,” Ansel closed-lip grinned. “She can waddle down the aisle big as a house for all I care.”

“Another Keto baby,” Kain marveled. He flopped back onto the ground and then popped right up. “Carmen and Woods baby #2 are gonna have a cousin. There’ll be cousins in our family!”

The screen door slammed on the deck and Inka and Carmen waved over toward them. Kain instantly rose, drawn to the siren call of his chubby baby niece with pizza sauce all over her cheeks. Ansel caught Kain’s arm.

“We’re, uh, not telling people yet. Just you.”

Honored, Kain nodded at his brother and clapped his shoulder. He looked around then and realized what Ansel was doing. He was building a swing set for his kid. Because he was gonna be a dad.

For one hot second, Kain was jealous.

 

 

***

 

 

Kain was avoiding her, she was sure of it. He’d been in the backyard when she’d gotten back to Ansel’s with all the girls. She’d come to recognize Ansel’s house as the home base that it was for the group. Where everyone convened to eat and catch up, to celebrate and relax.

She hadn’t been surprised to see Matt at the kitchen table, notes spread out before him. But she had been jolted a little bit to see Kain in the backyard, Carmen already in his arms.

He wore dark jeans, a white T-shirt and that black hat of his. His scar was silvery in the bright sunlight, much lighter than the rest of his tan face.

Her stomach fluttered when she looked at him through the kitchen window and she wasn’t at all sure what to make of that. He’d kissed her and cuddled her and put his whole weight on her the entire night and now she was all out of sorts.

She’d never bubbled for someone before but that was kind of happening right now. She felt like an upside down waterfall was pounding through her chest. And she wasn’t sure what she wanted to happen next, but she was damn sure that it wasn’t him giving her a half hug when he came in from outside, barely catching her eye.

“Hey!” Milla called as she brought the final load of groceries in from the car. After the wedding errands, they’d gone straight into doing the regular errands. Valentina thought being a female on Earth was more exhausting than on Herta.

Kain held up one hand across the room and Milla tossed him a Coke from the bag she was unpacking.

“I got your text this morning. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Oh.” His eyes flicked to Valentina and she raised an eyebrow at him. “Nothing. It can wait.”

“Whatever,” Milla shrugged, popping a Coke herself. “The boys are on dinner, by the way. The girls did all the shopping.”

“Fair enough,” Matt said, as he started clearing his notes off the table.

“You heard her,” Kain said as he stepped into the kitchen and behind Valentina. “Girls get to relax tonight.” She eyed him as he lightly took her hips and moved her aside.

The touch was light, almost friendly, but she didn’t miss the way he flexed his fingers right after. But still, he avoided her eyes.

She didn’t like it. She got the very clear impression that he was trying hard to restrain himself. She understood that a little bit. It was like with Ruby’s cookies. If you didn’t want to eat the cookie, you didn’t smell the cookie. Cuz if you smelled the cookie, you ate the cookie.

Valentina slowly realized that she was the cookie.

Because every second she wasn’t looking at Kain, he was looking at her. She could feel it. Finally, John Alec arrived and Ansel came in from outdoors. The family sat in the living room and waited while Matt and Kain made dinner.

When dinner was served, on plates on laps as people sat wherever they could on the couches and floor, Valentina talked for a while with Inka. Inka took the first shift of occupying Carmen during dinner and she stared unabashedly at Valentina’s plate. Valentina took pity on her and held her arms out for the warm little baby.

She’d held Carmen often and every single time she felt a piece of her heart fly right out the front door. There was just something about that tuft of black hair. Her smart, green eyes, her constant nonsensical baby chatter.              

“You look just like a bird,” Valentina said in a perfectly serious voice. “But maybe that’s just because you’re always squawking. Aren’t you, you little squawker.”

“She’s not a squawker, she’s a squeaker,” Kain corrected her in a silly little voice, leaning his head over her shoulder and kissing the baby’s cheek. He brought his hand around Valentina’s shoulder and she realized that he was passing her a cup of after-dinner tea that he’d brewed for her. He plucked up the baby with his free hand.

“And now I think this squeaker needs to check out the swing set Uncle Ansel just built. It’s very mysterious. And only for squeakers. No squawkers allowed!” He continued speaking gibberish phrases as he elbowed his way out the door to the backyard.

Valentina was left just staring down at her cup of apple cinnamon tea. That he’d made for her. Because he liked her. But hadn’t stayed to drink it with her. Because he really liked her. It made sense in a way. And she wondered how much longer it was gonna go on for. This strange attentive avoidance.

She’d never been a very patient person.

She finished her tea slowly. Watched all of them talk and mess around with each other. Matt pulled Inka onto his lap, rubbed her round stomach in big, slow circles. Valentina’s brother had his feet propped up on the coffee table and one hand on his wife’s knee. Alec’s eyes were closed as he listened to something she was telling him, a smile on his lips. He looked so much like their dad it hurt.

Griff, who’d come in during dinner, also sat back and watched the crowd, though it wasn’t long before Ruby had pulled him into conversation.

How could one person’s heart be so full and so lonely at once? Valentina asked herself this as she rubbed a hand over her chest and finished her tea. She felt that bubbling, fluttering feeling deep inside but he wouldn’t even look at her.

Valentina and Carmen just about cracked at the same time, in very different ways, of course. Kain brought a wailing Carmen back inside the house.

“Sounds like someone’s ready for bed,” Matt said, holding out his arms for his little girl.

“That makes two of us,” Inka yawned. “Making a baby is super hard.”

Kain handed over Carmen, but he wasn’t taking this kind of rejection on the chin. Kain stared at his crying niece even as he pulled up a song on his phone and had it playing through the speaker on the side.

Carmen didn’t stop crying but she looked over at the phone. The song was poppy and upbeat, and to Valentina’s untrained ear, utterly stupid.

“That’s right, squeaker.” Kain caught her eye with a waving hand and started right into a tight little cha-cha. Carmen’s mouth closed. Valentina’s dropped open.

“Here he goes,” Griff muttered, as if this were something they’d all seen before.

And sure enough, none of them were surprised when the cha-cha transitioned into a little tip-toed strut complete with swinging arms and his hat pulled low over his brow.

What the hell was happening? Valentina’s blood was racing in two directions at once. She felt lightheaded while she watched Kain throw his back to his niece and drop his booty straight to the floor.

Carmen let out a stingy giggle at that one and it obviously fueled Kain. Next he crawled toward her, a growl on his lips. One knee with each beat of the song. She let out a yowling giggle then, reaching her hands toward him.

But he didn’t reach back. Instead he swung his head from one side to the other. He jumped suddenly to his feet, startling her into a belly laugh and he grinned, popping his hips and rolling his hands in front of him, turning a little circle, toe-out toe-in and all the way back to the front. He caught Valentina’s eye on the way around, shot her a little wink and then grabbed Carmen back into his arms.

She screamed with laughter as he turned the same circle with her in his arms.

“Dance her right out to the car, would you?” Matt requested as he raised his arms above his head and stretched, dragging his wife to her feet.

Kain followed directions, making the baby wave goodbye to all of them as he danced her out the front door.

“Night, all you pretty people!” Inka called, both hands arcing in a full wave.

A chorus of goodnights echoed back to them but Valentina was frozen. She didn’t know this feeling that was seizing her tight, squeezing the breath out of her. She’d never known anything like it before. But when Kain came back through the front door, she rose and went right to his side.

He tossed an arm over her shoulder in a natural, friendly way, but he still didn’t make full eye contact with her.

“Anyone for poker?” Milla asked and got some yeses.

But Valentina tugged at Kain’s hand before he could agree to sit down with the rest of them.

“I want to see the swing set,” she told him. And then tugged him with her no matter if he was going to protest or not.

The summer air was cool in the dim light an hour after sunset. The whole lawn was blues and greens. She marched him through the yard and back to the guesthouse that she knew was unoccupied right now.

“The swing set is back that way.”

“I don’t care.”

She didn’t bring him inside the guest house, though–she just dragged him around to the far side, where they were hidden from the main house. She pushed him up against the dark siding.

“Val—”

“I don’t care.”

She jumped straight into his arms, her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck.

He caught her easily and immediately turned so that her back was pressed against the house.

“We can’t.”

But even as the words came out of his lips, his tongue was hot in her mouth, tasting the tea on her tongue, drinking her down like he’d been dying of thirst.

She grabbed his hand off her ass and guided it up under her shirt. His hand convulsively clenched around her breast, his thumb strumming across her nipple.

“Val—” he tried again, tearing his mouth away and breathing hard.

“I. Don’t. Care.”

She wiggled down from his arms and both of his hands went to the wall behind her. His eyes widened when she tore her jeans down her legs. And her underwear, white and perfect. All of it hit the ground. Then she tore at the button of his pants. He stilled her hands.

“Seriously. We cannot—”

She slipped her hands away and tugged his pants down to mid-thigh, his boxer briefs next. She made a little, helpless, curling sound when she saw what he had between his legs. Long and blunt as his fingers. He looked brutal and magnificent.

She dragged her eyes away from the sight and found the moon in the sky. “We’re safe, I can’t get pregnant this time of the cycle.”

“Wait, Val, we can’t. Shit. Fuck.”

She jumped onto his waist again and now she was lowering herself down onto him. His eyes crossed as he forced himself to pull his hips back, but she chased him forward and took him in an inch.

“Fuck. We can’t,” he whispered into her ear, but he sank all the way into her, his hands clamped at her ass and her back jammed into the side of the house.

She didn’t wait to catch her breath after the largest thing that had ever been inside her practically stopped her heart. Instead she just lifted up and took him fast.

Some small voice in his head was telling him to stop. This was exactly the wrong thing to be doing right at that moment. With his family just across the yard. But he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t stop. God, she was perfect heaven paradise smelling so good and making those cute little noises.

She was riding him with these quick little strokes that were gonna take him over the edge way too soon. He stilled her hips and she pulled right off of him, slid down his legs.

Was she stopping them? Was that what he wanted? Could he stop, too?

But she just turned around and braced against the wall, looking back over one shoulder at him with those honey-brown eyes and tilting her ass to him.

Oh, thank God. He didn’t waste a second before he stepped forward, took her by the hips and sank into her from behind. She made a little, hoarse sound that had him clamping one palm over her mouth. She bit at his hand as she pushed her hips back onto him and he saw stars.

Kain knew he should stop. Had to stop. He was fucking her against the wall of his brother’s guest house and this was the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing. This was wrong. Super wrong on so many levels. He had to stop. He had to pull out.

But he felt her tightening around him.

Well. No reason she couldn’t pop before he stopped. His hand smoothed over her hip and down until he found the tight bundle of nerves. Kain quickly pulled his hand back, licked his fingers for more wetness and dropped it back to her clit.

He worked her there, feeling her breaths on his palm and the tremble of her thighs against his. When she was so close she was all the way up on her tiptoes, Kain slammed into her and held there, pulsing deep without thrusting and circled her clit until her body bowed and her hands scratched at the wall. He’d fully intended to just pull out and tuck himself into his pants. He needed to get her home and talk about this.

But her pussy squeezed him so hard all he could do was jut forward and ride her through her orgasm and straight into his own. His vision faded as he grunted and emptied into her. His entire body was tight and his head thrown back. When it subsided and he sucked in much-needed air, he realized that both his hands had moved to her shoulders, on either side of her neck, and he’d bent her further forward. Pinning her against him.

He immediately straightened her up, hugging her to him even as he pulled out. His hands searched for her skin and he was inordinately irritated with all the clothing they still wore. He tucked her braid to one side and gave loose, open-mouthed kisses to her neck, smelling her hair.

“Mmm,” she leaned her head back onto his shoulder, her eyes heavy-lidded and dreamy. “That was—”

“Not over.” Now he was the one cutting her off. He licked at her ear and had her gasping before he dropped down and guided one foot into her underwear and then the other. He kissed every bit of skin he saw as he put her back together. Putting her clothes to rights and then his own. “Let’s go.”

“We’re not going back in?” she asked, stumbling after him. Obviously she was used to that kind of haphazard quickie and the thought burned him.

“No. I’m not taking your sexed-up ass back into a room of shifters who would know exactly what happened in about two seconds.”

“Oh. Are we going home?”

He spun her around to him, pinned her against his chest. “Yes. I’m taking you home and then I’m finishing what you started.”