I decided to take advantage of the open line of communication to ask Callum, “How did you convince her to come back to the totem cave with us?”
“Told her we still wanted to put a baby in her, and she didn’t have to talk to you—or even look at you after we got back if she didn’t want to,”Callum answered over our maul bond, with more Hakuna Matata in his voice than the situation of having a mate who despised her first maul warranted.
I didn’t love Callum making promises I refused to let him keep. Or that both he and Gideon crowded into the back seat on either side of her, as if I were their rideshare driver.
A little over two years ago, they hadn’t known her and I’d been the one to send Lark a three-figure KABU credit while she was going through a hard time.
I really value our relationship.
That text from over two years ago lingered in my mind as I pulled the twins’ truck onto the two-lane road leading back to Bear Mountain.
Settling into the near hour-long drive, I thought about how I couldn’t stop myself from overstepping my own boundary line to take care of her.
How I thought she was maybe going to tell me she loved me when it took her nearly five minutes—which I spent staring at her gray typing dots—to respond.
My chest had filled with disappointment when she came back withI really value our relationship, even though we’d agreed to keep the NSA label after going exclusive.
But then, a new realization dawned about the one and only burnout episode she’d ever talked to me about.
It had probably been around the time of her diagnosis—the ovarian insufficiency issue that ultimately blew up the status quo of our relationship.
Now that she’d arrived in my world—the one I’d kept hidden from her—so many things were rewriting themselves in my head.
Callum never should have made her that promise. We had too much to re-unpack and reexamine.
I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see her sitting in the middle seat between the twins. Gideon had the metal muzzle balanced on the knee closest to hers, and his hand on her barethigh. Callum held one of her hands between both of his in his lap.
Both their maul bite channels were wide open, and I’d never seen or felt Gideon so at peace.
It made my chest ache to see her with my maul brothers like this. It was everything I hadn’t dared to hope for during our three years of assignations.
Yet it felt like I was on the other side of a chasm from the three of them.
“Lark, let me?—”
Her incensed, hate-filled gaze snapped up to meet mine in the mirror, and both twins blasted “Don’t!”into my head. In stereo.
“She doesn’t want to, and she shouldn’t have to talk to you,”Callum said out loud.“And we’re too tentative right now to let you fuck this up even further.”
“Just drive.”Gideon’s voice in my head was all steel and threat.“Or I’ll use those black ops skills you appreciate so much in a way I promise you’re not going to like.”
The part about her not wanting to talk to me clawed me up more than the threat.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up, baby,” Gideon said to Lark, out loud this time, rubbing her bare thigh. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay.” Her hard gaze softened before she shifted it from the mirror back to Gideon. “I run when I’m overwhelmed too. I call it Fire Legs.”
A few messages into our initial exchange, I’d pointed out that she seemed to have a lot of empathy—more than the stereotype about people on the spectrum.
“*Men* on the spectrum. You’re monolithing,”she’d corrected in that direct way of hers.“In my case, pattern recognition paired with affective empathy and lots ofmemorized strategies for interpersonal relationships often comes off as heightened cognitive empathy—which I don’t have.”
However she wanted to categorize it, Gideon’s heart surged with the gratitude of someone who’d thought himself dead inside just days ago, and was now being truly seen and deemed worthy by the goddess he’d decided to worship.
“Fuck, you’re perfect,” he breathed, voice choked. “Come here.”
And… they were kissing again. Wet, smacking sounds were soon accented by a flare of her honey scent.
My dick went hard in an instant, as it always did when I scented her arousal.
