“I’m not going to hate it,” I told him, unable to keep the tremor from my voice. “Can I see?”
Tony rolled his lower lip between his teeth and nodded, pulling the door open and stepping out of the way. I crept forward, bolstered by the warmth coming through the bond, and poked my head inside to look. Tears immediately burned against the back of my eyes. The pile of books I was carrying dropped from my hands as I covered my mouth to hold in the pitiful whimper that wanted to escape.
Beyond the door lay a low-ceilinged room that was easily big enough for half a dozen people, while still seeming utterly intimate. Pretty stained-glass lamps with red shades were dotted around the edges of the room on tables, and fairy lights twinkled softly from the ceiling.
There was hardly a square foot of floor not covered by piles of pillows, beanbags, furry blankets, and low, overstuffed furniture. Only one side of the room was relatively bare, where another of the big fireplaces stood on a raised hearth, surrounded by a protective grate and with yet another heavy fur rug thrown in front of it.
I realized that some of the reassuring scent of whiskey, oak, and baking bread was coming from the room in front of me, not just the men standing behind me. As if in a trance, I walked deeper inside until I found the first item of clothing hidden among the pillows and blankets—a worn henley that had seenbetter days, and smelled like Christmas morning. Unable to help myself, I picked it up and held it to my nose, breathing in.
“Is it okay?” Tony asked, hovering just outside the door.
“I... it’s...” My throat closed up, choking off the words in the instant before the tears I’d been holding back escaped in an ugly sob.
“I’m sorry!” Tony said, his voice going high-pitched and upset. “Seriously, you can change it if you don’t like it—I didn’t mean to—”
“Tony,” Heath said. “They’re good tears. You did an amazing job.”
“That you did, cub,” Gage added. “You ever think about getting into interior decorating? Because this room looks fantastic, and she loves it.”
“Oh.” Tony sounded like all the air had escaped his lungs at once. “Oh, thank goodness.”
“Can we come inside with you, kitten?” Gage asked. “People are always supposed to get permission from you for that, by the way.”
Permission. People had to ask permission before they could come into my nest.
The tears came harder.
“Yes,” I sobbed.
In short order, Tony picked up the dropped books and set them on a table. Heath wheeled Gage in, moving enough pillows out of the way to get him to the nearest couch and help him onto it. Heath took me by the shoulders and eased me down to lie next to him, with my head pillowed on his uninjured thigh. Gage immediately started running his fingers through my hair, a rumbling purr vibrating up from his chest.
Heath lifted my feet and slid in to sit as well, resting my lower legs across his lap. Tony hesitated, then sank down on the pillows and blankets in front of us, resting his head on the edgeof the seat near my stomach. Needing to thank him somehow for what he’d done, I carefully pushed my fingers into his messy hair, mirroring what Gage was doing to me. After a moment, Tony sighed, all the tension draining out of him.
The silence settled over us, warm and heavy until Heath’s quiet words pierced it.
“You’re home, Jez,” he said. “We all are. Maybe now that we’ve got some breathing space, we can figure out the rest of it.”
FIFTY-THREE
Knox
I TOLD MYSELF THATstaying out of the way while the others got Jez settled into her nest was for the best, and that doing so wasn’t a hardship. I’d never been wired for sex or romance the way most alphas were. Not until that fateful night in the hotel bar with Jez, anyway.
I’d gone a good chunk of my life not giving it much thought, or having any specific word for the way I felt. Then someone had bandied around the termasexual, and I’d been curious enough about it to do a brief but fairly deep dive into the label—just like I did with anything I came across that seemed interesting or useful enough to bother learning about.
