by Amy Star
“That’s very specific,” he offered dryly. “That definitely doesn’t encompass basically every diner or family style restaurant in existence.”
“You say that like I’m picky.”
“Point taken,” he conceded.
Elizabeth didn’t answer for a moment, and when she did, it was to thoughtfully muse, “No drinking dates. Getting buzzed can be fun if the company’s good, but getting drunk has never really been my thing. And considering where we live, I’m not sure if a ‘go somewhere to appreciate nature’ sort of thing actually counts as a date, since we’re surrounded by nature already. Movies, maybe? There’s a theater in town, isn’t there?”
“There’s a playhouse too,” he pointed out.
She wrinkled her nose. “That sounds expensive.”
“…Seriously?” Ambrose sounded faintly unimpressed with the observation. “On what planet is that actually a concern?”
Elizabeth pondered that for a moment, before she shrugged and conceded, “Point taken.” If he wasn’t going to worry about money, she supposed it wouldn’t really make much sense if she worried about money for him. It wasn’t as if money was something he had in a limited supply.
“Why do you two need to be all fluffy while I’m listening?” Yusuke groused.
With her sympathy falling into the negatives, Elizabeth advised him, “Go back to sleep, then.”
*
It didn’t take long before the car was turning onto the next exit, and from there they wasted no time in pulling into the parking lot of the first restaurant they found. Yusuke woke Mara up by gently but steadily tugging a section of her hair between two fingers until she tried to slap him away, and once she was showing signs of life, he informed her, “We’re getting food. Either get up or starve, because we’re not bringing you a doggy bag.”
They filed into the restaurant—it was part of a chain, and it was nothing special, but it was food—and despite the fact that all of them were more than a little disheveled, none of the staff or the patrons even looked at them.
Before long, they were seated at a table, drinking coffee and waiting for their food. Despite Ambrose’s mockery, everyone wound up ordering something that could qualify as breakfast. Elizabeth ate hers so quickly she hardly even tasted it, and it seemed as if no time passed at all before they were all spilling back out the doors and into the car.
Everything seemed a little hazy, in fact, and Elizabeth remembered slowly that she was more than a little bit tired.
Mara and Yusuke were both awake, and they both seemed like they would be awake for a while, so Elizabeth slumped down in her seat and let her eyes drift shut. With those two awake and chattering animatedly, she didn’t need to worry about feeling guilty about leaving Ambrose unattended.
She didn’t even remember her eyes fully closing, yet it seemed as if she was out cold in a heartbeat.
CHAPTER 12
“Finally,” Elizabeth groaned, when the car pulled to a halt in Ambrose’s driveway. It was after one in the afternoon, and it felt like it was after six. She shoved the passenger door open and practically tumbled out, slumping back against the side of the car once the door was closed again. “This has been the longest day in history,” she declared. “There will never be a longer day than this.”
Ambrose snorted as he climbed out of the car, slamming the door closed with a bang. “Ordinarily, I would say something witty, but in this case, you’re probably right,” he acknowledged dryly. “There will never be a longer day.”
“Besides, you aren’t witty,” Mara informed him as she slid out of the car, only to then immediately declare, “Well, time for me to head home!” before he could try to get any sort of revenge for the comment. A moment later, there was a pile of clothing on the ground beside the car and a very large dog loping into the trees.
Ambrose scowled after her as Elizabeth tried and failed not to laugh behind one hand.
“I mean,” Yusuke mused after a moment, “she’s not wrong.”
Ambrose rounded on him, and with a whoop of laughter, Yusuke turned and bolted. He shifted to his cat form mid-stride, leaving his clothes splayed across the ground as he sprinted away for all he was worth.
“Your friends are weird,” Elizabeth informed Ambrose pleasantly after a moment, finally pushing herself away from the car.
“And to think, you voluntarily let them be your friends too,” Ambrose replied, feigning a mournful tone. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”
“Whatever it is, it’s probably your fault,” Elizabeth informed him blandly as she started picking up the clothing scattered across the ground. Considering Mara seemed to have a ready supply of clothing at Ambrose’s house, Elizabeth was going to assume such rapid departures happened frequently.
With an armload of clothes, she headed for the front door, Ambrose’s footsteps trailing after her. He made a slightly affronted noise when she simply dropped the clothing in a pile on the floor just beside the door, but he made no efforts to pick them up himself, she noted. She didn’t feel particularly inclined to point it out just then, though. Mostly, she wanted a nap, and as his footsteps continued to follow her up the steps and into his bedroom, she was willing to guess that he felt the same way. No surprise, she supposed. He had gotten less sleep than any of them.
Elizabeth kicked her shoes off and shoved them towards the wall with her toes, pushing them out of the way. Other than that, she didn’t bother undressing or changing her clothes. She wasn’t so prissy that she would balk at taking a nap in her clothes for an afternoon. The blinds were halfway closed, and she padded over to the nearest window to open them, and the rest of the windows followed shortly after that. Having spent a few hours locked in a pitch-black closet, she was keen on inviting in as much light as she feasibly could.
When she finished with the windows, Ambrose was sitting on the bed, pulling his shoes off and tossing them aside to land a few inches away from Elizabeth’s. She made her way over, sitting down beside him and leaning against his shoulder. She couldn’t help but to laugh when he looped an arm around her and tipped backwards, sprawling back onto the bed and dragging her down with him.
It took a bit of rearranging, but soon enough, they were both comfortable, and Elizabeth took a moment to appreciate how amazing a blanket and a pillow could be.
Ambrose was out like a light almost the instant his head hit the pillow, and Elizabeth couldn’t blame him. He had been awake since the previous morning, and he had been in a fight. She was pretty sure that she would have fallen asleep behind the steering wheel if she had been in his shoes.
She curled up next to him, her head resting on one of his arms, and her thoughts meandered for a little while. She was tired still, but her head was too busy, as if it were filled to bursting to buzzing bees.
She picked the safest topic to focus on.
She was safe. The territory dispute had ended ages ago, and the remaining wolf problem was officially gone. She could officially go home. And despite her fondness for Ambrose—it maybe went deeper than just fondness, actually, but she hadn’t felt too inclined to really scrutinize the feeling under a microscope before—she found herself looking forward to it. The fact remained that she loved her house, and she liked having her space where generally welcome but still uninvited guests weren’t popping in at odd hours. So, if she had her place and Ambrose had his, and there was an easy way to get from one to the other, then it sounded like the best of both worlds right there, since she doubted Mara and Yusuke would come to her house completely uninvited.
She would need to mention it to Ambrose later on. Not to get his approval but just to keep him apprised of the situation, since she did want to go back to her own house again regardless of his thoughts on the matter (she wasn’t so enamored of him to just give up on the things she wanted for herself), and she doubted he would try to stop her or talk her out of it anyway.
Her eyelids were beginning to feel heavy by then, and she shifted on the bed, squirming c
loser to Ambrose’s side until she was comfortable.
When she fell asleep, she was warm, and she felt safe; it was the best sleep she had managed to have since the very first night she spotted Maxwell outside her bathroom window. Her dreams were gentle and quiet and peaceful, and it was hours before she woke up again.
*
They hadn’t exactly discussed it beforehand, but Elizabeth was fairly sure that when she and Ambrose had lain down, they had both just been planning on a bit of a nap, just something to take the edge off of the exhaustion until they could fall back to sleep at a normal time that night, without any worries of throwing their sleep cycles off. But Elizabeth supposed that at least one of them should have set an alarm if they actually wanted to stick to that plan.
When she woke up, the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of dusty purple and silver. The very first stars were beginning to appear, still more like off white pinpricks against the twilight sky.
Ambrose was still asleep behind her, his arm thrown over her middle and keeping her firmly stuck in place. She squirmed halfheartedly for a moment before she decided that the effort she would need to expend to escape wouldn’t be worth it, and instead she stretched an arm out until she could reach her phone on the side table. She couldn’t just go back to sleep or else she knew she wouldn’t get any sleep that night, and then she would just have to deal with the same exhaustion tomorrow, but she also had no plans on just staring at the wall until Ambrose eventually woke up.
Her phone lit up, casting overly bright, white light across her face, and she set about browsing once she was done squinting at the rectangle of light. She had more than a few text messages to get to, and there were a few blogs she had been meaning to catch up on. She had nothing but spare time just then.
It was nearly a half an hour later before Ambrose woke up, and it happened in stages as he began shifting, until finally he drew in a deep breath and pulled his arm away from where it still rested over Elizabeth’s middle.
Voice groggy, he offered, “Good—what time is it?”
“It’s a bit late to say, ‘good morning.’ We should probably contemplate eating dinner,” Elizabeth replied, setting her phone down. “And the odds of us sleeping tonight are probably already fucked, but if we want any chance of it, we should probably get up.”
“Pass,” he decided after a moment, before he pressed a kiss against the back of her neck.
“What, are we just going to stay in bed all evening?” she wondered wryly, turning over to face him. “You know—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish her statement, as Ambrose pressed his lips to hers, silencing her quickly. “It doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” he said afterwards. “I mean, there are probably worse ways to spend an evening.”
She rolled her eyes, but her tone was fond as she informed him, “You’re incorrigible.”
He didn’t seem even the least bit perturbed by the observation; instead, he simply kissed her again, his hand curling around her hip, fingers slipping under the edge of her shirt in an absentminded manner. As the kiss deepened, his thumb began tracing idle circles against her skin. Soon enough, Elizabeth scooted closer, sitting up just enough to drape herself over his chest without breaking the kiss as it gradually shifted from languid to heated, until their tongues were tangling with each other.
Ambrose drew her as close as he could as the kiss stretched on, until it seemed that it was inevitable and undeniable where the evening was going to go next.
Elizabeth began discarding her clothing first, breaking the kiss and sitting up from where she was draped over Ambrose’s chest. She crossed her arms over her front, wrapped her fingers around the hem of the shirt, and pulled it over her head. It snagged on her hair for a moment, reminding her that she hadn’t been able to brush it in a while, but she forgot about that all over again once she tossed the shirt aside. Her bra followed it a moment later, and then she finally had to shimmy away from Ambrose just enough to squirm out of her pants and panties, and they landed on the floor in a pile with everything else.
Ambrose simply watched at first, enjoying the show as more and more of her skin was revealed. Once she was naked, though, she settled cross-legged on the bed and leaned forward, hunching with her arms folded over her legs, effectively blocking most of the view.
“You don’t get to appreciate the goods until you’re naked,” she informed him primly. “I’m feeling very exposed here; that’s rude, and you should never be rude to a lady.”
“You’re so right,” he agreed, feigning an apologetic tone. He shifted to the side to get to his feet; then, he reached over his shoulders, caught the back of his shirt, and tugged it over his head. It landed on the carpet at his feet, and his hands traveled to the fly of his pants next, popping the button and tugging the zipper down. He shoved his pants and his boxers down his thighs to his knees, where he let them simply fall to his feet. He stepped out of them and kicked them aside, and turned a slow, contemplative look on Elizabeth.
She had about half a second to realize he was plotting something and begin scrambling backward on the mattress before he lunged. She squealed in feigned terror as he pinned her to the bed, sprawling flat on her back as he loomed over her. He captured her hands, one large hand managing to hold both of her wrists, so he could pin them to the bed above her head.
She grinned up at him, toothy and daring. “Something in mind?” she wondered, trying for a tone that sounded innocent, though she missed it by a long shot.
“I might be thinking of something,” he mused in return, and while it wasn’t a complete success, his attempt at sounding coy was at least better than her attempt at innocence. Not that it lasted for very long, as he shifted, stretching her arms farther above her as he bracketed her legs in with his legs, one knee planted on either side of her thighs. He was tall enough to easily stretch over her, and that knowledge always gave Elizabeth a tiny thrill every time she had a reason to think about it. She spread her legs slightly wider in invitation, until her thighs were pressed up against his knees.
“Looks like you’re pretty eager,” he observed with a wry grin before he leaned down for a kiss. He grinned against her mouth when she lifted her head to meet him as close to halfway as she could get, and her fingers wiggled as her wrists strained against his hold to no avail. Even if she had actually wanted to, she wasn’t getting out of his hold. Luckily for her and for him, she had no plans of actually trying to escape, and at that moment, there was nowhere else she wanted to be.
Holding firm to her wrists still, he began trailing lower, pressing kisses along her jaw and neck as he went. He paused once he got to one of her collarbones, and Elizabeth gasped as he bit her. Not enough to draw blood or even to truly hurt, but enough that she would definitely have a mark to remember it by the next morning. She couldn’t say she objected, though, and she rolled her hips slightly to encourage him onwards.
It was only when he couldn’t get any lower without letting go of her wrists that he stopped, sitting back up and taking a moment to simply look at her, as if he was appreciating a masterpiece. His other hand traced absentminded patterns along the side of her ribs, as if he wasn’t fully aware he was doing it but couldn’t bear to stop touching her regardless.
She was getting ready to tell him to get a move on—it might have ruined the moment, but her patience could only be expected to hold out for so long—when he finally began to move again.
He was still holding her wrists, and with his other hand, he got as sturdy of a grip around one of her hips as he could manage, so he could begin rearranging her on the bed, tugging her towards the headboard until her knuckles were brushing against the bars of it. She got his point fairly quickly after that, curling her fingers around two of the bars and then keeping her hands there once he released her wrists.
His hand trailed down one of her forearms, her upper arm, her shoulder, and then along one of her collarbones until it reached the middle of her chest. He
traced a line between her breasts with one fingertip, feather light and slow. As she squirmed beneath him, he seemed almost gratified, his smile growing broader and broader as his hand slid further down her body.
She knew where she wanted it to go, and she was even pretty sure it would eventually find its way there. ‘Eventually’ was the keyword there, though, as she had no idea how long it might take him for his hand to make its way to where she very much wanted it to be.
“I feel like you’re getting a bit impatient,” he observed eventually, grinning down at her as he said it. His hand paused on her abdomen, just shy of her belly button. “Is there something wrong?” No doubt, he could feign innocent concern with the best of them.
Elizabeth hitched her hips up off of the bed, so she could press her abs more firmly against his fingers. It worked for only a fraction of a second, though, until he lifted his hand until just the pads of his fingers were once again pressed against her, as delicately as he could manage. With a pout, Elizabeth slumped back down on the bed, limp save for the way her fingers curled around the rungs of the headboard.
