Page 75 of Lost and Bound
Well, Matt had hinted. Arik had poured a cup of coffee while glaring at me, and then said as he stomped out of the room, “Move the fuck out of the house, Jared. If I have to hear you begging for my big brother’s knot in the middle of the night one more time, I’ll fucking bite you. And not in the fun way.”
As if he was one to talk. But Arik scared me a little, brother-in-law—or maybe stepson, and I was still saving that one for the perfect moment—or not, so I didn’t say a damn word. Maybe I’d begged a little louder the next night, because what was family without a bit of hilarious passive-aggression?
And what Arik didn’t know was that I’d already talked to Calder about building our own place near the territory boundary, off in the woods where we’d be alone most of the time. It was kind of a pipe dream, though. We couldn’t afford to build a new house, even a small one. The pack could barely afford the electric bill some months.
Calder rolled to the side and tucked me against his chest, idly plucking at my nipples and making me squirm on his knot.
“Once we’re not stuck, we’re getting in the car,” he rumbled in my ear. “Road trip.”
“Ungh,” I moaned, as he rolled the left nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “I can’t focus. Did you say—fuck, Calder—road trip?”
“Yeah.” He let up on me at last and splayed his hand over my sternum. “Where I was going—last time. I had something to do, and I wanted to go alone. Come back and show you I could do something more for you than this.” He rolled his hips to demonstrate, and his knot pressed on my prostate and made me moan again.
“That’s enough. I might not survive more.”
Calder went still, and pressed a soft kiss to my shoulder. “Don’t joke about that.”
I put my hand over his and laced our fingers together. “Sorry. You know you don’t need to do anything more. You’re already doubling the amount of hard labor we get done around here on your own.”
Since we’d come home for real, Calder had started making more of an effort to integrate with the pack. I hadn’t even had to get up the courage to ask him if staying here was really what he wanted; he’d simply gotten up in the morning and gone to Matt to ask him what needed doing, and then done it. No fuss, no muss, and an implicit assumption that since this was my home, it was his too.
When I found him roofing the garage, all sweaty and shirtless and working for the good of my family and pack, I’d been so overwhelmed with love and gratitude and lust that I’d had to make him climb down and come in my mouth. Twice.
He hadn’t complained. And I’d made up for the delay by climbing back up there with him and showing him how to properly put down shingles. He learned fast and had the strength of three or four werewolves, but he didn’t have any actual construction skills. He’d told me, with breathtakingly sweet earnestness, that he’d get better and be an asset to the pack eventually if I’d teach him how.
Calder didn’t reply for a long couple of minutes, and at last, like usual, my curiosity outstripped his talkativeness. “So where are we going? And why? Do I have to play twenty questions?”
He chuckled against my back. Bastard. I was pretty sure he always made me ask because my impatience amused him.
“About seven years ago, not too long before I made another bad decision in a series of bad fucking decisions and got taken captive, one of my employers had a business deal. A shady one. He’d been buying something, and the goods got lost. He thought they ended up at the bottom of a lake when a boat sank. But I took the case, managed to hide it.” He paused, long enough to make me start grinding my teeth.
I cracked first. Of course. “Didn’t you have a blood oath? I mean, you were supposed to be loyal, right? And what the fuck was in the case?”
I felt him shrug. “The blood oath covered not killing him or his men. I think he assumed I wouldn’t fuck him over in other ways, that the oath covered that. But he was wrong. Letter of the law,” he said, with undisguised smug satisfaction. “He’s dead, by the way, without me having to do anything about it. I looked into it when I left here. Dead and gone.”
Another pause. “I swear to all the gods, Calder, if you don’t get to the fucking point—”
“Long story short, I have a bunch of uncut diamonds buried in an abandoned uranium mine in Saskatchewan. And I want to go retrieve them.”
I blinked at the opposite wall, my mouth falling open. All those words made sense individually, but when you put them together…my brain refused to process that information. “Fucking Saskatchewhat?” was all that came out of me.
Calder’s laughter shook me, but he held me still to keep from hurting the rim of my ass when his knot moved. “Saskatchewan,” he said, voice tinged with amusement. “I buried the case of diamonds in the mine. No one goes in a played-out uranium mine, for a lot of very valid reasons.”
“Uncut diamonds.” Another phrase that had a perfectly clear meaning—except in context. “Uranium—dude, you’re like that meme. The one with the most interesting man in the world, except that you’re just the most insane. Auranium mine? Obviously that’s a placeyou’dchoose to go? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I’m not kidding you.” His knot had finally started to go down, and he very gently pulled out of me and then immediately ruined the effect of his care by slapping me on the ass. “And we’re leaving as soon as we’re dressed, so up and at ’em, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. While he slapped me on the ass. And told me what to do.
I was smiling as I got in the shower, still smiling when I went downstairs for the coffee and toast he’d made me, and smiling even more when he tossed me the keys to one of the pack’s shitty cars and climbed into the passenger seat, the car dipping alarmingly as he did.
He knew how much I’d missed driving, and he didn’t even complain when I cranked the radio and sang along off-key. Over breakfast he’d told me that he’d already let Matt know we were taking off for a few days and cleared borrowing the car.
Which meant I didn’t have a damn care in the world.
Other than the fact that my mate apparently had a case full of uncut diamonds sitting in a uranium mine in an un-spellable Canadian province.
And, as the drive went on, the discomfort of being in a car for eighteen hours at a stretch after my ass had been knotted open that morning.
