Archer probably believed that he’d been awake before her and it was a valid assumption, because he usually was. 

This day was an exception.

Nya hadn’t slept a wink. After all the days she’d dreamt of waking up with him, this should be a happy morning. But it was difficult to enjoy a fantasy come to life when her mind was on overdrive. 

All sorts of possibilities had joined her throughout her sleepless night while she sat cross-legged next to her lightly-snoring lover, caressing his body and wondering about what secrets were contained in his fathomless mind. 

About an hour ago while she’d been making another unsuccessful attempt to sleep, he’d pulled her into his embrace. All he’d done was hold her and being in his arms helped Nya to loosen more than she had all night. She had been just on the cusp of drifting off when Archer grumbled something and stretched.

He was awake. 

The night was over, daylight stained the window beyond the curtains, and she hadn’t reached any conclusions.

Her ass was cushioned against his groin, so he couldn’t see her face, but she closed her eyes anyway. 

Nuzzling into her hair, Archer said her name and began to grind his morning wood into her. Tensing, Nya tried not to make it obvious that she was awake.

Morning sex was her thing; he’d rather go all night. If this was for her benefit alone, he was going above and beyond. Except he hadn’t got any last night, maybe this was his way of calling in the debt.

Nya wanted it to feel good when he fondled her breast and tweaked her nipple; instead it made her feel sick. Not because he was less skilled than he’d been the last time he touched her but because she felt dishonest.

Nya had a secret. She was keeping a secret from Archer and it didn’t feel right. 

“Squirm,” he mumbled into her hair. “Tell me you’re awake, baby.”

“I’m asleep,” she whispered. 

“Yeah?” he sniggered. “Want me to work for it?”

Pulling his hand from her chest, she wriggled away. “Not this morning, Fella.”

“You want to play?” he asked, seeing her objection as a tease, a precursor to the foreplay fun usually reserved for when they were both more awake.

“No, I’m not playing,” she murmured, trying to give him his arm back, but he clamped it around her.

Shaking her body, he forced it against his. “What do you want me to do, baby, huh?” he growled in her ear, snagging the lobe in his teeth. “You want it rough? Want me to force you like the old days, that it?”

He groped her breast before seizing both of her wrists to hold them tight in his fists. “No,” she said and the familiar warmth of her need for him bloomed at the apex of her thighs, where she swelled with anticipation.

“I’ll be whatever you need me to be,” he said. “You want me to be rough and take what I want, I’ll do it. You want me to be gentle and treat you nice, I’ll do that too.”

Turning her head away from his lips that were heating the shell of her ear, she squeezed her eyes closed again. “I said no, Arch.”

He didn’t grump, or swear, or pressure her, despite the edge of lust that made her want to wriggle into his sheets. He must have sensed sincerity because he let her go and sat up. “Fair enough. The morning’s your thing anyway,” he said and she heard his epic yawn.

The bed moved. She flipped onto her back and her hand shot out to grab his arm before he could leave the bed. “Wait!”

Sitting there with one foot on the floor, and the other still curled beneath the comforter, he looked at her hand for a second before twisting to focus on her face. “Wait for what?” he asked and she realized she was just lying there looking at him with the big eyes he’d accused her of using against him.

He wasn’t angry, he didn’t even look particularly turned on, he was just Archer. Nya had spent a whole night trying to stare into him. But now with his eyes fixed on hers, compulsion made her lips part and instinct made her speak.

“I heard you on the phone,” she said and his expression didn’t change. She expected anger or annoyance, expected him to rip his arm away from her touch and berate her for eavesdropping.

Digging her teeth into her lip, she hoped the pressure wasn’t building inside of him because if he exploded at her now while she was naked, vulnerable, and anxious, he might damage her in ways neither of them would be able to undo.

“I know,” he said.

Her lip slid free of her teeth. “What?” she gasped, sitting bolt upright. “How could you possibly have—”

His mouth slanted. “Come on, Squirm. You went from a gal standing in the kitchen telling me to knock her up to a woman faking sleep in my bed. Nothing changed between one event and the other except my conversation with Gio.”

She still had ahold of his arm and couldn’t believe that he was smiling. “My God, Archer, did you…? You let me sit here—I haven’t slept a wink—I’ve been lying awake all night!”

“I know that too,” he said. “Every time you sleep in my bed, you sleep like a baby and never move a muscle. Last night, you wouldn’t sit at peace.”

“And you let me?” she said, not sure if she wanted to punch him or kiss him for this calm reaction.

Combing his fingers through the ends of her hair, his hand dropped away. “It serves you fucking right,” he said. “You know I do shady deals. Know I associate with lowlifes, hell, I fucking am one.”

“You’re not a lowlife,” she said, pulling herself closer to him.

He curled his forefinger under her chin. “There’s always gonna be shit going on I’d rather you don’t know about. Not ‘cause I’m worried you’ll judge me or leave me, but just ‘cause I’m a guy who likes to take care of business, you know?”

She did, hence why he took on the responsibility of those he cared about. Not just financial responsibility, but responsibility for their safety and wellbeing, and their happiness. “I know,” she murmured.

“But, babe, you should know by now, if I don’t want you to know something, I keep you far away from it. If I’m on the fucking phone in this apartment, I’m always expecting you to walk in.”

“You wanted me to hear?”

He shrugged. “Ny, I can’t lie to you and you can’t lie to me, which is why even though you tossed and turned all night driving yourself crazy, you couldn’t let me leave this fucking room without coming clean.”

And that was why he was smiling, that was why he was calm, not because she’d listened in, but because she’d told the truth. Maybe he did have something to hide, he could be up to God only knew what. He was smiling because she’d been honest, even if it had taken her a few sleepless hours to conclude she had to talk to him.

“But, hey,” he said, taking his foot off the floor to shift up the bed and sit upright against the headboard so he could look at her. “That’s twice in fucking twenty-four hours you’ve thought the fucking worst about me.” His eyes got narrow and he peered into her. “Are you trying to fuck this up?”

That was the last thing she wanted to do. Swatting his leg out of the way, she pulled back the blankets and clambered into his lap to sit astride him. “No. No, God, please, Fella, don’t think that.” She brushed her thumbs on his cheeks and kissed him. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I love you. You know I do. But it’s just…”

“Whenever your boy, Tag, gets involved you go into ultra-protective mode and everyone’s an enemy… including me.”

She didn’t like hearing it put that way. Except she didn’t think this was about her relationship with Tag. Resting both hands on his pecs, she looked at the ridges of his muscles and tried to figure out what was going on in her head.

“Every guy I’ve ever been with I thought I could trust,” she said, toying with his body to distract herself from his probing eyes. “And all of them screwed me up. My first boyfriend, that was a majorly fucked up situation. He kept trying to get me pregnant, he told me that him and his buddies were having some competition, the loser was the last one to knock up a girl… you know what guys like that are like. White trash who want the benefits that come with a kid. It took me years to figure out he didn’t care about me, he just wanted any woman.

“And then there was the professor. I thought I had it made; I’d found myself a mature guy, you know, someone who wouldn’t mess me around. A guy who’d look after me because he had his shit together… but he wanted a trophy. He couldn’t date a student, it would be too messy. But he liked the way I adored him, he liked trotting me out in front of his friends. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the blonde with the big rack, I was still a kid.”

He nodded like he understood; calm, collected, patient, letting her reveal more of herself on her own time. Archer was always so together and she was always such a mess. “And the next guy?” he asked, brushing her hair away from her shoulder to uncover both her breasts, although he only admired them, he didn’t touch.

“He was a major mistake,” she said. Still, to this day, she kicked herself for getting involved with Mateo. “He was the closest I’d ever come to a one-night stand. I mean it wasn’t, we didn’t sleep together the night we met. But he became obsessed. We went out a few times and we did sleep together, but the truth is… he was a rebound. Tag told me it would be healthy to get the professor out of my system and I needed to stop moping. I’d been depressed for weeks, feeling sorry for myself, you know? So it was nice to just be with someone and have a distraction from that reality.”

“What happened with him?” She exhaled in a kind of awkward laugh because it made her uncomfortable to talk about it. “You can tell me anything, Ny.”

Lifting her chin, she loved how he could read her, loved how he sensed her discomfort without her having to verbalize it. “He was infatuated with me. We went on a few dates, got intimate, but I broke it off when I decided to focus on myself for a while. I’d gone from one relationship to another, I hadn’t been without a man and I knew Mateo was just a rebound. I wanted a better job; those were the days when I was young and idealistic enough to believe that I could maybe have a career and a nice apartment… a normal life. I was over the professor and Mateo had done his job in helping me move on. I was free of my father and my childhood. I was in my early twenties; I could be anyone I wanted to be.” She smiled because that kind of optimism was so distant a memory that she almost couldn’t recognize herself. “We kids had nothing but potential, that’s what all the chat shows said… I noticed him, sometimes in places I was, bars and restaurants, but I didn’t think too much about it. We’d gone to these places together, maybe he liked them, it wasn’t like he approached me.”

“You were young and dumb. It was no accident he was on your tail.”

Yeah, no doubt about that. “It started to get creepy. It stopped being just at night. He’d show up at cafes I’d never visited with him. I saw him standing outside job interviews or on the other side of the street outside my apartment… Tag would confront him and they’d scream at each other. I begged Tag to leave it alone because Mateo never got violent, he was just everywhere. I went on a date… and this was about six months after we’d slept together for the last time… he called me crying, told me how devastated he was. Anyway, it went on like that. He never tried to hurt me or even threaten to. He just didn’t want to let go. Sometimes I was creeped out, sometimes I was angry, but mostly I just felt sorry for him because it wasn’t really about me, he just needed someone to love and I needed to be free… or so I thought…”

“You thought?” he asked.

Reflecting on that time in her life since meeting Archer, the man she was meant to love, gave her a better understanding on the journey of her life. Turning her lips into her mouth, she slid her ass down his thighs a bit so she could lie down on his slouched body, resting her torso on his. He wrapped his arms around her and held her for a while, saying nothing, just playing with her hair and kissing her head.

“Then I met Damien. He got rid of Mateo, I don’t know how. I wasn’t looking for another relationship, but when I met him it was like a meteor crashing into me. He looked at me and I just… I could feel him everywhere. It was my turn to be obsessed… and that was the next five years of my life.”

“Why have you never told me this before?”

“I don’t know, because I don’t like talking about my mistakes. And given that I hate thinking about you with other women, I don’t want to give you an image of me with other guys.”

“Don’t worry about my ego,” he said into her hair. “Yeah, I fucking wish you’d been lily-white when I met you, ‘cause I don’t want any other guy touching you. But there isn’t anything I don’t want to hear. Fuck my reaction, fuck what it does to my head, fuck my feelings, what’s important is that I’m here for you.”

She sat up. “You’re a guy who takes responsibility. We sat in this room and you told me… you told me you had no interest in hos. Does that mean every woman you’ve been with you’ve loved? Like you love me?”

He ran his fingers into her hair to sweep it away from her face so he could cradle her jaw. “There’s only one woman I love now. One woman I plan to love.”

“Tell me about them,” she said, touching his lip. “Tell me about the last woman you were with before me.”

He sealed his lips and inhaled through his nose. “I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to know…”

“Know what?” she asked when he didn’t finish his sentence.

So many possibilities ran through her mind. Did Archer still love the woman? Did she still love him? Had something terrible and tragic happened and she’d been lost to one of his marks in a deal gone wrong? Was it a forbidden love? Was it—

“Stop it,” he said, reading her again. Something in her eyes must have conveyed to him the dozens of scenarios flashing across her mind’s eye. “All I was gonna say was, I don’t kiss and tell. Sounds dumb, right? But just ‘cause those relationships are over doesn’t mean I don’t feel protective towards them. I mean, fuck them, it’s not that I’m in love with any of the women from my past. They gave me something or did something for me, you know, changed something about the way I think or I shared an experience with them that changed us both.”

“Everyone we meet has an impact on our lives,” she said.

Bringing up her feet, Nya tucked them in behind his hips, giving him an opening to stroke his palms from her ankles to her ass.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, and I want you to know that even the women who fucked me over, I still wouldn’t give them up.”

So that was why he didn’t talk about the women from his past, why he wasn’t forthcoming about who they were and his time with them, because that sense of responsibility didn’t leave him even after the relationship was over.

“So you don’t trust me with their secrets,” she said and was surprisingly reassured.

Yes, she wanted to know every detail, but she also had major respect for Archer being this honest with her. That he held onto respect for the women from his past also spoke to his unyielding integrity, which was something Nya valued a lot.

Archer gave her more than just reassurance with his next confession. “I can tell you that whatever this is, I’ve never had anything like it.”

“Me, you mean?” she asked with a timid hope because she didn’t want to scare him with her exuberance.

“Yes, you… and I’m still trying to figure out why I’m hooked on you.”

Picking up her wrist, she offered her brand to his lips and he kissed her. “Can you tell me about the call? Why were you talking to Gio?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said and she refrained from huffing, but again, he knew her thoughts. “I’m not withholding anything. I can’t talk about it while your boy is here.”

“He’s in the bathroom,” she said, “two rooms away. I’ve been chained to that pipe. Trust me, he can’t hear a thing.”

“Go downstairs and get yourself cleaned up. I’ll make breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” she asked. “Is it breakfast time?”

“Maybe, who the fuck knows,” he asked. “You have to go to the club today and I have to talk to Derren.” Climbing off him, Nya intended to do what she was told, but this time it was him who grabbed her. “I’m only doing what you asked me to do… I would never do anything to disappoint you. You believe that, right?”

Coming back to the bed, she sat down to kiss him. “I do.” They were still nuzzling and kissing when she yawned. “After breakfast, you’re gonna sleep for a couple of hours,” he said, “right here.”

“But the club—”

“I’ll take care of the club and Derren will take care of Tag. You’ve got to take care of you.”

There was too much going on for her to think about rest. “I can catch up on sleep any time.” She stood up. “We have to think about…”

He linked their fingers, “Is this how you’ll be when you’re pregnant, not looking after yourself?”

And that made her confront another truth. “That was the wine talking,” she said, watching their fingers twine and curl. “Forget I said anything, it was a stupid idea.”

“So you don’t want to carry my kid?”

“You didn’t want one,” she said, sinking to a crouch when he turned to sit on the edge of the bed, putting his feet to the floor.

His fingertips touched her jaw. “I told you to give me time.”

“You told me to wait until we had a dream that can’t possibly come true… your way of letting me down gently.”

He tilted his head. “Is that what you think of me, Squirm? If I mean no, I say no. And if I make you a promise, I follow through. Like I said last night, just give me time. You have to show me you can take care of you ‘cause you’re the priority now.”

“I’m not pregnant,” she said.

“Yeah, well, one day you will be and unless you want me on your ass twenty-four-seven, watching every move you make, you’re gonna show me you can take care of you, ok? No more crazy risks or no baby.” His thumb rubbed the front of her jaw as he clasped it and dipped to kiss her. “Now fling your shit on.”

“I can go down in your tee shirt—”

“Ha, not a chance,” he said, his protective nature extended into her wardrobe choices.

“I don’t want to put on my dirty clothes,” she said.

“But you’re dirty.”

Rising, she sat on one of his thighs and looped her arms around his neck. “Yeah, but I’ll just feel more icky. If you’re worried about my feet you can give me socks—”

“I’m worried about the fucking neighbors.”

She was running down a single floor, it would take less than a minute, and she probably wouldn’t see another soul. “The guys on this floor know I’m yours. Paul next door, saw me with your cock in my throat a couple of weeks ago, you didn’t care about that.”

“That’s not the neighbor I’m talking about.”

Levi. “You have to stop thinking about that.”

He rubbed his eyes. “After seeing another guy standing that close to you, I don’t think I’ll stop thinking about that sight, not ever.”

“Well…” Nya melted down off his lap to settle on her knees between his legs to take hold of his dick. She grinned up at him. “Since I’m down here anyway, let’s see what I can do about giving you a new picture to think about.”