“Hmm.” Jack tucked a wild curl behind his ear, and let his fingers linger there, stroking. “Because now I have you, Arden. Completely.”
Arden blinked those big grey eyes at him. “What a prize,” he said flatly.
“Indeed. One beyond compare.”
“There’s no need to be cruel.”
“I can be a hard man. I can be ruthless. I am never deliberately cruel.”
“Whether or not you intended?—”
“Arden,” Jack cut him off. “I’ve wanted you almost as long as I’ve known you.”
Arden pressed his lips together. “Bollocks,” he said.
Jack burst out laughing.
After a moment, despite his anger, Arden joined in.
“You don’t believe me,” Jack said.
“Of course I don’t believe you! How could someone who has a lover as magnificent as Beckett even see me, let alone want me?”
“Magnificent, hmm? I’m going to tell him you said that.”
Arden paled. “Please don’t. That poor boy.”
“That…?” Jack stared at him. “Poor boy?”
“Yes!” Arden said passionately. “He must hate me. First you are obliged to marry me, meaning you can’t marry him?—”
“Thatpoor boywouldn’t have agreed to be my duch if I’d held him at sword’s point,” Jack said.
“—and then he had to service me because I couldn’t stop sneaking around the house and peeking at him every chance I could get like some awful voyeuristic little…mouse, or…rodent?—”
“A voyeuristic rodent?”
“—yes, amouse, and now?—”
“Yes?” Jack prompted when Arden ran out of self-loathing puff. “And now?”
“And now I don’t know,” Arden said glumly. “I have wedged myself into the life of a happy couple and there’s no getting me out. You could always send me to one of your other properties, of course?” He brightened for as long as it took for Jack to shake his head. Then his little face turned determined. “Yes, Jack. That’s the answer. I…I knew it all along and I should have insisted that you sent me somewhere else to start with ratherthan asking to come here. I suppose that silly romantic part of me wanted to pretend…for a short time anyway.”
Jack let him ramble on. There was no point in trying to talk over him when he clearly had things he needed to get out into the open.
“Well?” he prompted Jack when Jack didn’t say anything.
“Well what?” Jack asked. He was gazing at Arden’s legs. He couldn’t help it.
Beckett’s legs were long, thanks to his towering alpha height, and thick with muscle, thanks to his energetic nature. Arden’s muscles were lean and graceful, but while his legs were average in proportion to his body, they were still endearingly short.
Jack wanted, with a sudden fierce pang that the suppressants translated into a roiling nausea and a few unsteady, rapid pumps of his heart, to feel those legs wrapped around his waist. Slung over his shoulders. See them bent to Arden’s ears.
He wanted to feel that body beneath his, yielding.
He wanted to find out exactly how silky that skin felt, sliding against his.
“Jack?”
