The trail was one he and Eric used to run together, working out being one of the few activities where his brother's habitual silence was considered normal. Rex wondered whether he now ran it with Jared or Nate. He kept in contact with all his brothers when he could, though Jared was the only really chatty one—Nate was eternally working, and Eric preferred to send a picture with a few words as a confirmation that he was still alive. As the youngest, they'd always seen him as their baby, their responsibility, and when he originally enlisted, there was a lot of faux-macho checking in by the three of them to keep confirming his wellbeing. It had dwindled over the years but was still present, Jared's weekly check-in, full of information about everyone in his life, a Netflix recommendation from Nate that Rex knew he'd actively sought out, because his work schedule rarely allowed him leisure time, Eric sending a picture of their dad asleep at the dinner table at family lunch. He hadn't considered the fact that he would be the odd one out of his brothers when he came home. He knew they had great respect for what he did—each had, in their own way, made that clear. But the fact that he had been away for so long had changed things, had made him distant from them in a way he couldn't help but resent. They'd kept him in the loop as much as they could, but you can't invite someone over for an impromptu beer when they're half a world away, and phone calls only went so far. The three men who had once been his best friends had reformed around his absence, and he felt keenly the challenge of returning to the space where he once had been.
Rex thought about mentioning the conversation with Jamie to Al over dinner, but there didn't seem a good time to bring it up. He tried to plan out the words. Evening, honey, and by the way, are you sleeping with me to sow your wild oats with the adventurer recently returned to town?
After dinner, he cleared the table, picked her up to sit her on it with her legs spread to accommodate his shoulders, and took his seat once more to have her for dessert. He stared hungrily up the length of her trembling body, watching as the blinking look of surprise she wore every time he lifted her into his arms to position her melted into excitement. And if, tonight, he dragged her roughly upstairs and fucked her a little harder, let a little more of his wild side bleed through, left fingerprint bruises on her ass until she scratched the hell out of his back, then maybe that was just the way they were always meant to be. Every time Rex hesitated, worried that he was pushing her too hard, she pushed back, accelerating every time he tried to apply the brakes.
"I thought you said you'd never done this before," he murmured into her hair after he'd untied her hands from her headboard, gently rubbing the sensation back into the red marks that ringed her wrists.
"I haven't," Al panted into his chest.
"You're a fucking natural then. I keep thinking you'll tell me to slow down, say I'm pushing you too hard."
"I don't want to slow down," Al said, lips brushing his skin with each word. "I don't want to play it safe and be sensible. Not anymore."
A good girl, Jamie Cameron had described her. Cautious.
No, his Alannah wasn't like that at all.
The bombshell the girl next door had grown into never stopped surprising him. Rex could feel that he was fast falling for her, for all the pieces of her that he might have missed had he not been living in her space. She took her excess vegetable crop to her neighbours, she baked to feel close to her mother, and she hated having the desk and drawing board where she sketched new designs disturbed. She played eighties pop when she was in the kitchen and listened to podcasts while she hung out the washing. Her shampoo smelled like berries, and she laughed uncontrollably when he licked her belly button.
Alannah Green might come across as a good girl, might seem cautious if you didn't know her well. But Rex was struggling to understand how anyone, especially himself, could have ever called her something as one-dimensional as sensible, when, really, that smooth surface came from a patience he could barely fathom. Alannah let the world see little parts of herself, the parts where she was restrained, but once that internal leash came off? His girl was a fucking firebrand. And rather than finding her less attractive as she progressively revealed herself to him, Rex could feel himself more enamoured of her every day.
He knew they needed to discuss where they were progressing from here, acknowledge the possessiveness steadily growing in his chest, but somehow, the issue never came up. He was already living with her, sleeping in her bed, fucking her half-comatose every night. The spare room hadn't seen use in days. He'd washed her underwear. They were practically a couple already, and though he knew it was cowardly, Rex didn't want to rock the boat and risk upsetting the easy balance they'd settled into. Not when these growing feelings felt so inescapably important. He wasn't used to his equilibrium being so dependent on one person, and the last thing he wanted to do was shake her up when she was only just settling into the idea of being with him.
He tucked her close to his chest and tried to ignore the feeling in the organ beneath her cheek as she fell asleep.
Chapter 7
Alannah was partway through drawing up options for feature doors when her phone buzzed with a message.
R: Not quite sure what to expect from tonight. Mum's been texting me all morning. She's inappropriately excited for some quiet drinks, so I suspect a party.
Al made herself set the phone aside and finish the sketch before replying.
A: Gina does throw a great party. Clear your schedule for tomorrow in case consumption gets excessive?
It was only a few moments before she received a reply.
R: Only thing on my packed Saturday schedule was you.
R: What time are you planning on arriving tonight? If I'm being threatened with a party, I'd rather not go it alone.
A: I'll need time to get ready after work, and I've still got a bit to do here before I can leave. You might want to go before I'm ready.
Their intern, an eager university student doing his best to grow a beard with fairly limited success, stuck his head around the wall of her cubicle. "Alannah? Fiona wants to see you if you've got a second."
"Thanks, Matt. I'll be right in." Al resolutely left her phone on her desk when she ducked into Fiona's office. "You wanted to see me?"
"Have a seat," Fiona said. "I just wanted to speak to you about the Mansfield project. I've scheduled a conference call with the project manager so we all can discuss your integration with the existing team. The client definitely wants the build done in double time, so they're expecting to have you onsite most days, starting in three weeks."
Fiona continued, and although Al listened and smiled and nodded in the appropriate places, her mind was wandering. Her designs were good; she knew that much. And although it was kind of her boss to talk her through the potential pitfalls of such a major project, Al already had contingency plans for her contingency plans, of which Fiona was well aware, seeing as she'd signed off on them. Al's unfailingly high standard of preparation, she knew, was part of the reason she'd been considered for the job in the first place. She knew Fiona was unlikely to doubt her now, so the checking in was starting to feel less like good preparation and more like her boss thought she couldn't handle it alone, like even the woman who praised her designs and her work ethic regularly still considered her in some way incompetent—meek little Alannah Green who would of course need oversight and assistance when she braved the world outside their little town. As though she hadn't held herself together through sheer force of will after her mother's death, hadn't held back from asking for help to avoid giving the impression of weakness. As if the girl she had been, with her appropriately feminine job and her appropriate, sensible boyfriend and her lack of apparent ambition, made her naïve, when she'd really been trying to avoid going through that kind of loss again.
But then preventing it had become a crutch rather than a strength, and she couldn't recognise the fearless girl she had been under all the cotton wool she'd wrapped around herself. Until all the care she'd taken to keep her heart safe turned into a
chokingly heavy blanket of beige, a relationship that was comfortable without ever challenging her, a life that was neat and tidy and unambitious, with Alannah trapped beneath it.
Take care, my brave girl. Her mother's last words. And she'd finally listened, shaking up her life and her heart in just a few weeks, but this next step would be the true challenge: uprooting herself not once, but twice, to Mansfield and then on to the amorphous adventure she'd promised herself after the project's completion.
It was starting to become very real, this move. She'd organised housing in Mansfield, with the option to extend when the project inevitably ran behind schedule. She had looked into, but not actually booked, her flight out. And then… nothing. It was the most out-of-character thing she'd ever done. The plan that had seemed so ephemeral just weeks earlier was now coming together, and although it was exciting, it was also terrifying to try to retrain the instincts that pushed her to plan and then add backup plans and then backups to her backups. But that was the old Alannah, the beige Alannah, whose whole life could be contained within a circle on a road map no bigger than the ring left behind by a coffee cup.
She sat up straighter in her chair, fixed her attention on the potential issues Fiona was flagging on the Mansfield plans, and resolved to deflect her anxiety about the trip by buying a guidebook. That was a good way to start, collecting information without making concrete plans or reducing her capacity for spontaneity. God, I'm such a square. I'm planning how not to plan. But would a square have been planning to ravage Rex Castlereagh the moment he walked through the doors this evening? Not a chance.
No, she reminded herself, he'll already be gone by the time you get home. The truth was Alannah needed some distance. She was getting far too comfortable with having an unlimited supply of Rex available, not only the fabulous sex but the caretaking that came after, the way he pressed reverent fingers and lips to every mark he made on her skin. Part of her wanted to hand him a wooden ruler and toss her hair in challenge, just to see what would happen, how much she could take. She tried not to picture it, the way his pupils grew every time she bent her head to him, the interplay of shock-pain-pleasure-heat of every strike he laid on her skin, the way he gathered her up against him with such tenderness afterwards, as though she was giving him a gift, when it almost felt selfish to take so much pleasure from him.
Perhaps she was still riding the high of being looked at not as though she was degrading herself by asking for what she wanted in bed, but rather as though he'd been waiting all his life for someone who would desperately beg to be hit harder when he'd already spanked her bottom cherry-red.
That particular instance had won her a hard, brutal fuck that she had still been feeling the next morning, when her not-just-a-housemate woke her with his tongue as if in apology. Thank you for letting me into this sweet pussy, she could still hear him growling against her skin as she rose through layers of sleep, already well down the road to orgasm before she'd even fully awoken. Thank you for making her so wet and perfect for me.
Al could feel her face getting hot just from the memory, which only served to emphasise her reasons for withdrawing now, before she really had to start getting ready to leave Shepherd's Creek. She didn't want to be dealing with orgasm withdrawal while trying to pack—better to wean herself off slowly, so she didn't start the Mansfield job during the worst of the withdrawal.
She still hadn't told Rex she was leaving, either. She'd meant to the night before but had chickened out at the last minute, just like she did every time she thought about bringing it up. He kept doing distracting things, like orgasming her on the kitchen table or offering to water her vegetables.
Whoa there, girl. Slow your roll. You are still in a meeting.
She pushed her attention back to Fiona, who was now going through the minutiae that even Matt the Beardless Intern probably knew could be an issue during a build.
Then there was the other reason Alannah was organising her evening to avoid arriving with Rex. If the whole town was going to be at the Local—and they probably were, given Rex's "prodigal son" status and his mother's inclination toward large events—then that included Harry. If she arrived late enough, Alannah figured, she had a chance of appearing without making a splash, and hopefully her ex would be too cheerfully sauced by that point to make an issue of it. With any luck, Rex would be so busy being welcomed by everyone and their dog that he wouldn't be able to do more than wave at her over their heads.
Okay, so that was a lot of ifs, but as long as everything went according to plan, the whole night could go smoothly, and she'd start the process of weaning herself off Mr. Orgasms On Tap tonight.
Well… maybe tomorrow.
Rex's mother had always been good at throwing parties. As kids, the Castlereagh boys had always had wicked birthday parties, with jumping castles, a piñata the size of the birthday boy, more helium balloons than they knew what to do with. Their annual Christmas party was on the more adult end of the spectrum, with enough booze to launch a ship and a world-class buffet spread, and Rex remembered more than once helping with the enormous hangover brunch the next day. Gina knew how to indulge, and Andrew knew better than to get in her way, so Rex thought he knew what to expect from his parents getting involved in what would otherwise have been a quiet affair that at its most extreme tumbled into a big breakfast at Carter's Café the next morning.
He didn't count on the tension of being in a familiar room with familiar people turning into a kind of claustrophobia that crawled up his spine and made a knot at the base of his skull. Eric noticed, because Eric noticed everything, and Rex had never understood his brother's monosyllabic tendencies more than when he found himself wishing everyone would just leave him some room to breathe. It was Eric who offered up the possibility of stepping outside for a smoke, Eric who produced a battered packet of cigarettes so old that Rex suspected they were either a prop for similar moments or had recently been unearthed in an archaeological dig. He accepted one gratefully, revelling in the stale taste—he was leaning toward the archaeology theory—and the warmth radiating off the building at his back as the evening began to cool into night.
"You good, man?" Eric asked eventually. He hadn't lit one of his own but leaned on the building with his hands in his pockets, looking like it would take an earthquake to shift him. He had a disconcerting habit of watching people out of the corner of his eye, looking without appearing to look, and Rex couldn't remember if he'd done it five years ago or if it was a more recent development.
"Yeah, all right," he said. "Better. Too loud in there."
"It works even better if you're rolling your own. Takes longer. No one questions it."
"Anyone ever notice you don't smoke anymore?" Rex asked.
Half of Eric's mouth jerked upward in a smile, and he met Rex's gaze. "Nah."
"Ever tempted to start again?"
Eric shook his head, but he'd gone back to his peripheral vision trick. "Quit because someone died. Lung cancer."
"I'm sorry, mate."
Rex recognised Eric's half-shrug as the same one he did himself. "Happens."
"Still." Eric pushed off the wall. "You need company out here, let me know. Sometimes the noise is too much."
Rex nodded. "What do you do if you can't get away? I thought Lucy Barker was about to suction herself to my arm. Couldn't leave the conversation."
"Stop giving a shit about being rude," Eric said evenly. "Hurt someone's feelings. They'll get over it." He straightened. "You good?"
"Are you so keen to get back in there?" Rex asked.
"Not even a little bit. Dad's on the warpath. Eligible females."
"I thought he chilled out when Jared and Ivy got hitched. Hope for grandchildren abounds."
"It's been five years, no kids. I think he's giving up hope, so he's back on Nate and me. Let me know when you're ready to take the spotlight." He clapped a hand on Rex's shoulder and ducked back through the door.
Somehow, Rex had forgotten their dad's campaign fo
r his sons to populate Shepherd's Creek with descendants. Rex's parents had met in high school, married early, and had children in quick succession, but Jared was the only one of their sons who had shown any chance of doing the same on a similar timeline. By the time Andrew was Rex's age, Jared and Nate had already been born. Eric was on the way within a year, then Rex barely eighteen months later. Though he'd never come out and said the words, Andrew had made it clear to his sons that he was keen to turn his attention to subsequent Castlereagh offspring.
Given that Nate spent more time with his head in a book of legal precedent than interacting with other people, and Eric wasn't exactly chatty by nature, Andrew's attention was now, Rex expected, likely to land on him. The idea had hot, vaguely nauseating discomfort coiling in his stomach. The awkwardly close-quarters conversation with Lucy Barker, who he could objectively say was inoffensive and not unattractive, had prickled down the back of his neck. Now, at least, he knew his father had probably pushed the two of them together, but he'd been trying to avoid looking over Lucy's shoulder the entire time in case Alannah arrived. As though she could ever fly under his radar, as though his attention could have possibly been caught by anything else when she was in the same space as he was.
He Comes Home Page 10
