His Rejected Queen

14

Chapter 14

He knocked on my door at five in the morning.

Not training time. Not a summons through Damon or a note slid under the door. A knock, three times, and then his voice low through the wood.

“Aria.”

I was already awake. I had been awake most of the night lying in the dark turning the counter clause over and over in my mind like a stone with an edge I could not find the safe way to hold. I got up and went to the door in my sleep shorts and the oversized shirt and opened it.

Luca was in the corridor in dark clothes with his hair slightly undone from its usual state and the look on his face of a man who had also not slept. He held a mug of coffee in each hand and he held one out to me and I took it and stepped back from the door and he came inside.

He sat in the chair by the window. I sat on the edge of the bed. We drank our coffee in the grey pre-dawn quiet and neither of us spoke for a moment and it was not uncomfortable, that silence. It had the quality of two people who had arrived at the same place from different directions and were taking a breath before they acknowledged it.

“Tell me,” I said.

He looked at me over his mug. “I have been thinking about it all night.”

“I know. Tell me what you decided.”

He set his mug down on the windowsill and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at me directly with those black eyes that had nothing hidden in them this morning.

“I want to invoke the counter clause,” he said. “I want to file a formal Alpha claim before Callum can activate the ward agreement. It voids his document completely and permanently and you are free of the Voss family forever.”

I held his gaze. “And what does it mean for us.”

“It means I have declared you under my protection formally and permanently. It means Black Ridge is your pack if you want it. It means,” he paused, “that whatever this is between us gets a real chance to become what I think it can become.”

The room was very quiet.

“Luca. You have known me for eight days.”

“I know.”

“That is not a normal basis for this kind of decision.”

“No,” he agreed. “It is not.” He looked at me steadily. “But I have spent three years running this pack alone and making every decision from a completely rational position and being completely, entirely certain about all of it. And then you walked into my holding room in borrowed clothes with dirt on your knees and you asked for nothing and looked at me like I was something to be assessed rather than feared.” Something moved through his expression, warm and unhurried. “I have not been completely certain about my rational position since.”

My chest ached.

“I am eight days out of a rejection,” I said quietly. “I am carrying a broken bond. I am not in a state where I can promise you anything real.”

“I am not asking for a promise.” He stood up and crossed the room and crouched in front of me where I sat on the edge of the bed, bringing himself to eye level, and the closeness of him at that angle was overwhelming in the gentlest possible way. “I am asking if you want to be free of the Voss claim. Everything else can be whatever it needs to be in whatever time it needs.”

I looked at his face up close. The scar along his jaw. The black eyes with the gold that came into them sometimes when his wolf was close to the surface. The careful controlled warmth that he kept banked low but never fully extinguished.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to be free of it.”

He nodded.

He did not move away.

We stayed like that, him crouched in front of me and me on the edge of the bed with my knees almost touching his chest and the grey morning pressing in at the window and the coffee going cold on the sill.

“I want more than that,” I said quietly. “Just so you know where I am. I am not ready for all of it yet. But I want more than free of a ward agreement.”

Something shifted in his face that was the most unguarded thing I had seen on it.

He reached up and tucked my hair back from my face slowly, both hands, pushing it back and holding my face and looking at me with an expression that made my throat tight.

Then he kissed me.

Not the way he had kissed me in the office. That had been certain and claiming and it had moved through me like a current. This was slower. Deeper. The kind of kiss that takes its time because it is not going anywhere, because it knows it has the space to be thorough.

I leaned into him and his hands moved from my face into my hair and mine went to his shoulders and I pulled him closer and he came, rising up from the crouch to sit beside me on the bed without breaking the kiss, and the warmth of his body against mine in the grey morning was something I felt in every part of myself.

He pulled back just enough to look at me.

His breathing had changed. So had mine.

“Aria.” My name in his voice at this proximity and in this register did something to my spine.

“I know the timing,” I said, echoing his words from last night. “I know what I am still carrying.” I held his gaze. “I do not care.”

He searched my face for a moment.

Then his mouth came back to mine and this time there was nothing slow about it.

He kissed me deep and certain and his hands were in my hair and then at my jaw and then sliding down my neck and across my collarbone and I made a sound against his mouth that I had no control over. He pulled back at the sound and looked at me with dark eyes and his chest rising and falling and his jaw tight with the effort of the question he was asking without words.

I answered it by pulling his shirt over his head.

He was extraordinary. That was the only word that arrived. Broad and scarred and warm, the body of a man who trained every day and meant it, and I put my hands on his chest and felt his heart hammering beneath my palms and he looked down at me with an expression of such complete and focused want that my breath left me entirely.

He laid me back against the pillows and followed me down and his mouth found my throat and I arched into him and his hands moved over me with a thoroughness that was devastating in the best possible way, learning every part of me with a patience and attention that made me understand the difference between being touched and being known.

I pulled him closer.

He took his time anyway.

His mouth moved down my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, slow and certain, and when his hands slid beneath the hem of my shirt and found skin his exhale was unsteady and raw and more honest than anything he had said out loud.

“You are going to ruin me,” he said against my collarbone.

“Good,” I said.

He laughed. Low and real and surprised, and I felt it against my skin and it was possibly the best thing I had ever heard.

Then his mouth found mine again and the laughing stopped and everything became heat and closeness and the particular overwhelming sensation of someone handling you like you are both precious and wanted at exactly the same time.

The grey morning light turned gold outside the window.

Neither of us noticed.

Afterward we lay tangled together in the early light with his arm under my shoulders and my head on his chest and his heartbeat slowing back to its regular pace beneath my ear. His hand moved slowly up and down my back. Outside the packhouse the sounds of Black Ridge waking up drifted in faintly.

“Callum is expecting a meeting at eight,” Luca said eventually.

“I know.”

“We should get up.”

Neither of us moved.

His hand kept its slow movement on my back. I listened to his heartbeat and felt the warmth of him and thought about eight days and counter clauses and the way rage had woken up in me in the Silver Creek dirt and somehow, through all of it, had led me here.

“Luca,” I said.

“Mm.”

“Whatever face Callum makes when you tell him. I want to be there to see it.”

The laugh came again, low and warm and real, rumbling under my ear.

“You will be right beside me,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

For the first time in eight days I felt something that was not grief or rage or the ghost of a broken bond.

I felt like something was beginning.

But when we walked into that meeting two hours later and Luca laid the counter clause filing on the table in front of Callum Voss, the expression on Callum’s face was not the defeat I had been expecting.

It was relief.

And that was so much more frightening than anything else he could have shown me.