She nodded. “Good. I don’t want to see either of you for a while.”
I walkedMax back to his office to find the others waiting for us there.
“What did Thornton want?” Gabriel gestured to the two mugs of coffee on Max’s desk. “Those are yours.”
“Thanks.” I picked up a mug and leant against the wall while Max sat at his desk. “She’s given us a couple of weeks holiday.”
“Nice.” Gabriel smiled. “You have some things to discuss, I imagine.”
Dathal snorted. “Yes, because talking is what they’ll be doing.” He eyed Max and then me and grinned. “Enjoy your time off.”
“Oh, we will.” Max looked up at me, the sudden heat in his eyes making my breath catch.
I wanted to leave right there and then.
Thank fuck none of the others had shifter senses.
Gabriel cleared his throat. “You, um, might as well leave now. We’re practically done for the day.” He gave me a pointed look, and yes, I’d forgotten about his newfound fae magic.
“We are, aren’t we?” I set my mug down on Max’s desk, then plucked his out of his hands and set that down too. “Let’s go.”
We madeit back home in record time.
Max paused as he got out of the car, one hand on the door as he stared at our house.
“What?” I walked around to join him, reaching for his hand. “We’re not going inside?”
He drew his bottom lip between his teeth before letting out a sigh. “It’s not the same, is it?”
“No.” I swallowed thickly, trying not to lose myself to images of Max lying broken on the floor of our living room. “It’s not the same.” Elliot had organised for our house to be cleaned and put back together, and we’d stayed at Rys’s for a few nights while it happened, but I’d still caught traces of Xen’s scent when we’d come back yesterday. Maybe it was all in my head, but the result was our house no longer felt like the warm and cosy sanctuary it had before.
And apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought that.
“We could move,” I offered. “Make a fresh start.”
“We could.” He tugged me closer, closing the car door and wrapping his arms around me from behind. “Rys already offered us a cottage in his woods.”
“So did Elliot.”
We had options.
That wasn’t the problem.
Making a decision on which pack we wanted to be a part of…was. I relaxed into his hold, letting him take my weight. “What do you want to do?” I asked, quietly, sliding my hands over his.
His soft sigh hit the back of my neck and I shivered, a tickle of desire racing up my spine. “Honestly? I’m torn.” He kissed that spot below my ear. Then he inhaled, moaning into my skin. “You smell so good.” More kisses followed, and it would’ve been so easy to close my eyes and give in to the feelings Max teased out of me. But we’d put this off for long enough. We needed a pack, and making this decision wasn’t going to resolve itself.
I turned in his arms, putting a little distance between us.
Max groaned. “We’re doing this now, huh?”
“I think we need to, don’t you?” I kept hold of his hands, thumbs stroking across his knuckles. “I feel like we can’t move forward until this is sorted.”
He met my gaze, the warmth in those dark brown eyes all I needed to get the next words out. “And I want to do that. I want to put all this behind us and get back to doing what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted.”
Max grinned. “Marrying someone elsewasa little inconvenient.”
I laughed. “It was, wasn’t it?”
