“So, you want me to stay?” Clio asks.
Adelaide’s shaking her head. “You can head home. I’m safe. I promise.”
“I mean, I can stay close, hang out in the reception area.”
Adelaide shakes her head. “I love you, and I think I’m okay. Go home and rest, but if anything happens, I’ll call you. I give you my word.”
Clio nods. “Okay, but if you change your mind, you call me. I don’t care what’s happening in here, who’s naked. I’ll break down that door.”
Luca snorts softly, while Ace drags a hand over his mouth as if he’s concealing a smile.
Then she glances at us three with that narrowing gaze that promises retribution if we hurt her friend. I grin and nod at accepting her threat.
Adelaide actually laughs, and the rest of us stay quiet because it’s not about us convincing her or forcing our thoughts on Clio. Adelaide knows we would never harm her, and I appreciate that more than she’ll ever know.
Clio gives her a bear hug, holding her for a long pause, then pulls back. “Okay, love you, babe. Don’t have too much fun.” Then she turns and leaves, pulling the door softly shut behind her. And just like that, the room belongs to us four again.
Adelaide turns to us with a sly grin. “Best friends, hey?”
I laugh. “It’s great she’s so protective of you.”
She strolls over to us by the bed and suddenly curls slightly forward with the force of her heat. Her scent floods the space between us, rich and desperate and impossible to ignore.
Adelaide glances up at us, tightness clinging to her expression, and says, almost angrily, “You need to stop making me feel this agony.”
And before any of us can answer, she reaches for me. Her hand fists in my shirt, then hauls me down, and her mouth clashes with mine, both of us back on the bed.
The kiss is hot and immediate and full of everything she hasn’t had words for. Hurt. Need. Relief. The desperate edge of finally being done with distance. I growl against her mouth, one hand planting beside her so I don’t crush her, the other finding her waist and holding there, trembling with the effort not to do too much too fast.
Her other hand reaches blindly, urgently, finding Ace, then Luca, dragging them closer too.
That’s the ending of the distance, and the beginning of everything else.
And in this pink room, under painted reef fish and soft light, with every lie finally stripped away, the four of us close the distance for good and let the rest of the world burn outside, for all we care.
26
ADELAIDE
North’s mouth crashes against mine, and every thought I have shatters.
There’s no gentleness, just hunger. His hand is already at the back of my neck, fingers spread, holding me exactly where he wants me while his lips move over mine. I melt against him, lost in his fire, the hardness of his body crowding into mine, and when his tongue slides against mine, it leaves me moaning.
Luca’s mouth presses to my shoulder at the same time, scorching hot and open against my skin, while Ace’s lips drag slowly along my jaw because he knows exactly how to make my knees weaken without even trying. I am trapped in heat and hands and mouths, in North kissing me like he means to brand himself into my memory, in Luca’s hand spanning my waist, in Ace’s fingers curling at my hip, and my whole body goes liquid with it.
A broken sigh spills out of me, and that only makes North kiss me harder.
Oh, this is bad.
The suppressants are nothing now. Useless. My body has been clawing at me for too long, and their hands on me only make it louder, hotter, sharper. Every inch of me is awake andaching, and I don’t know where to lean first because all of them feel right and none of it is enough.
I don’t want to survive this, but disappear into all the ecstasy they’re offering.
Part of me is still reeling and trying to catch up to the truth they just laid in my lap. That part of me wants space and quiet time to sit with all of it until it stops feeling like my world is spinning.
But none of that changes what happens when these Alphas touch me.
How my body surges toward them, yet under all of that, deeper than I want to admit, is the terrible, beautiful truth that I’ve been wanting them for too long, missing them terribly, craving this too fiercely to pretend otherwise now. The war inside me is real, but so is the hypnotic gravity toward them. And the longing is winning.
