With her taste in his mouth, her scent flooding his lungs, her soft skin under his hands, and her pussy squeezing him like a burning-hot fist, he couldn’t hold back. He exploded, filling her with everything he had and biting the swell of her breast to leave yet another mark.
Totally replete, he collapsed on top of his mate. Content. Satisfied. Relaxed. Comfortable. Until she punched him in the arm and ordered him to get off and let her breathe. Instead, he hummed against her neck. “I feel so adored.” She just snorted.
Downstairs, she made cinnamon twists using the ingredients they’d bought when he took her shopping the previous day. Jesse had liked them so much he begged her to make more, swearing they brought tears to his eyes. After some incredible sex in the shower, Harley was sitting on the bathroom counter, applying shaving gel to Jesse’s face. “Lily called last night,” she told him.
“What did she want?”
His protective growl made her a little tingly. “Probably money.” Harley had answered the phone with another fake voice-mail greeting, and the line had soon after gone dead.
“Do you see her much?”
“Not really.”
“What about when you first went to live with Tess; did Lily visit you?”
“Only when she wanted something, which was usually money or for me to visit Clive with her and Shawn. I preferred seeing him on my own.”
Jesse frowned. “Who’s Shawn?”
“Clive’s brother.” He was no steadier than Lily, but there had been some occasions when he’d saved the woman from herself. “Can I shave you?”
The request took Jesse by surprise. Her expression said, “I won’t be offended if you say no,” and he believed her. The thought of anyone—even a trained barber—going near his throat with a sharp implement made him balk. But this was Harley. His mate. The person he trusted on a level he didn’t trust anyone else.
As Jesse moved to stand between her legs and then handed her the razor, her breath caught. It was a gesture of trust—as good as giving her his throat. “You sure?”
“I trust you.” Jesse stayed still as she began shaving one side of his face with short, firm strokes, sure to rinse the razor often. She was pretty good at it. If anyone had told him he’d find it relaxing to have someone shave him, he would have snorted. “Tell me about Shawn,” he said as she swirled the razor in the sink. “I don’t remember him.”
“Medium height. Pudgy. Double chin. Dresses like a biker. He has a goatee that makes him look more like a faun from Narnia than a badass.”
“Oh yeah. He was always hanging around Lily.”
“Still does. He’s head over heels for her—has been for as long as I can remember. She doesn’t see it. She’s too wrapped up in Clive to see another male. I think Shawn likes that my father’s in prison. It means he’s able to be a sort of . . . platonic mate to her—all under the guise of looking out for her on Clive’s behalf.”
“Does Clive know the truth?”
Harley went back to shaving him. “I’ve often wondered about it. He doesn’t miss much, so he probably does know. It wouldn’t surprise me if he gets some kind of kick out of the idea that he has the female his brother so badly wants—Clive can be strange like that.”
“It doesn’t bother Clive that you see him without them?” Jesse asked when she paused to rinse the razor.
“No. He doesn’t like to share my attention.”
Then there was a strong possibility he wouldn’t like her being claimed. “How do you think he’ll react to you being mated?”
“There’s never any knowing how Clive will react to anything.” She smiled and teased, “Don’t worry; I’ll protect you.”
“That’s a true comfort.” He remained quiet for a while, but, curious about her strained relationship with Clive, he spoke when she paused once again to rinse the razor. “Did you visit him in prison when you were a kid?”
“Twice a month,” she said as she moved on to the other side of his face. “Lily would do my hair all nice and put on my best clothes. I hated going there. Hated being searched by big hands for drugs and contraband. Then they’d force me to stand still while they brought sniffer dogs into the room; having a huge dog in your face can be pretty scary when you’re just a kid. The guards were so abrupt and rude, glaring at me like I was the prisoner.”
The thought of a small Harley afraid and intimidated like that . . . It was enough to make his blood boil.
“You know, until I was six, I thought Clive was as amazing as his fans now do,” she reluctantly admitted.
The self-recrimination in her voice made his chest ache. He gently cuffed her wrist to still her hand, massaging her pulse with his thumb. “What happened when you were six?”
She hesitated, finding it hard to explain. “You have to understand that, as a kid, I thought my family situation was normal—all I had to compare it to was the other families in my pride. They were all messed up. But when I was six, I started sneaking onto shifter territories.” Mostly using trees. “Sometimes I’d befriend the pups or cubs there; other times I used to just watch them.”
“And you started to see that your family wasn’t so normal.”
Worse. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but he deserved the same trust he’d given her. “I saw that most other dads didn’t beat their mate and son.”