by Selena Scott
CHAPTER SIX
She really had not thought that this night would end up with her sitting on Orion’s bed. But here she was. She felt like a teenager over at a boy’s house for the first time. He was sitting in a desk chair on the other side of the room but he was so large that she felt the presence and heat of him regardless. The only room that they were ever alone in together was her office and she was firmly in charge in there.
In his room? With his flannel sheet-ed bed and black and white photographs of wolves on the walls, well, she wasn’t sure who was in charge in here but it certainly wasn’t her.
No one else had been home when he’d given her a tour of the place and she’d been grateful. It had been both gratifying and deflating to learn that her employees were keeping a secret like this from her. On the one hand, they were keeping the secret because she was a good boss who made it a point to make sure her clients were always safe, with no bent rules along the way. On the other hand, it made her feel strict and unyielding. It made her feel like the heavy. She felt dorky and un-fun and… old. She was only six or seven years older than Ida. Just about the same age as Orion. But still, nobody wanted to be the old, grumpy boss who put the kibosh on the sleepover.
Not that their living situation was simply a sleepover. She’d been thrilled to see that the kitchen was clean and tidy, stocked with everything they’d need. The front two rooms on the first floor were the salon, and Orion didn’t take her through there out of respect for Wren’s space, which she thought was sweet. But the back dining room was cozy, large and packed on one side with a gigantic sectional couch and dining table on the other side. Then there’d been nowhere to go but up the stairs and Diana had followed Orion, asking herself the entire time just what exactly she thought she was doing.
She was following a client up to his bedroom.
She was following a very sweet, very patient, very kind, very attractive client up to his bedroom.
And now she was sitting on his bed, her knees pulled up to her chest, her sandals in a pile on the floor and her eyes bouncing from his face to his walls, having no idea where to look.
She spied the small pile of books on his desk. “Oh. Are you thinking of learning how to read and write?” she asked. When she’d gotten him the moving company job, he’d explained to her that he wasn’t interested in improving his literacy skills at all, so a labor-based job was the way to go for him.
He sighed and dropped his head back.
“Yeah. Dawn says I have to. She keeps giving me those picture books hoping I’ll get into the stories and want to learn how to read them. I’d do anything to make her happy, but it seems like a lot of work to me.”
“Can I see them?” She held her hand out for the stack of books and he leaned across the room to hand them over. She saw immediately that they weren’t picture books, they were graphic novels of varying levels. Some of them were manga and some of them were re-tellings of classics. “Wow. She has good taste. These are very cool.”
She flipped through them quietly for a long minute until something nudged her knee. She glanced up and saw that it was his socked foot. His legs were so long that he hadn’t even had to scoot the desk chair closer to reach her. “Don’t read,” he groused. “Dawn’s always reading. Makes me feel like a toddler needing attention.”
She laughed, shaking her head, unwillingly charmed by him. “Well, you certainly sound like a toddler right now. Here. I’ll read one out loud, that way you won’t be left out.”
He pursed his lips, unconvinced.
“It’s a good one, I swear.” She held up the graphic novel adaptation of American Gods. “It’s one of my favorite books and the artwork in this one is beautiful.”
“Oh, all right.” He leaned forward to see the pages as she started reading but it wasn’t more than a page she’d gotten through before she realized that he was squinting and straining to see the pages from where he sat.
“Orion,” she said slowly. “Have you ever had an eye exam?”
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “At the hospital when Phoenix was still recovering, some doctor gave me one when they gave me and Dawn our, um, what do you call those?” He snapped his fingers in the air, searching for the word. He and his siblings had been fluent in english when they’d come to Portland, it was their first language after all, but a lot of the vocab still tripped them up considering they hadn’t lived in the human world for very long. “The kind of doctor’s appointment where they take your blood and ask you a thousand questions and grab your balls while you cough, because apparently that’s a thing in human culture?”
Diana spluttered and laughed. “Oh, Orion.” She was a sucker for how candid he was. “They’re called physical exams.”
“Physicals, right. I remember being confused about that at the time because I thought they were gonna do stuff like see how high I could jump and how long I could hold my breath and how fast I could run. But then they just got me naked, sat me bare-assed on a metal table and poked me with a needle fifty times. What a world.”
She tucked her tongue in her cheek. “Uh huh. And what did the doctor say about your eye exam results?”
“Oh. That I needed glasses.”
Her mouth fell flat open. “You never told me that! I would have helped you get glasses!”
He quirked a look at her. “Who wants glasses? Ida’s are cute, and Dawn uses hers to read. Why would I need them?”
“I don’t know,” Diana mused. “Maybe to see properly?”
“I can see just fine. And anything I can’t see I can use my sense of smell for. I don’t need glasses.”
Resolving immediately to get him in a pair of glasses if it was the very last thing she ever did, Diana decided to let the matter drop for now. “Well, either way, why don’t you come over here so that you can see the book while I read it.”
The speed with which he rose up, strode over, put one knee on the bed, and crawled over her to get to the open side made Diana think that maybe he’d been wanting to get on this bed with her the entire time.
The thought made her fingers tingle. Made her breath come in a little fit-like gasp for a moment. She rearranged herself so that gravity wouldn’t have her rolling into the crater he’d created with his body and held the book out so that they could both see it. She started back in on the book, pointing to each part that she was reading so that his eyes could follow the pictures.
He was so quiet, his breaths so even, that after about twenty minutes, Diana turned her head to peek at him, just checking to see if he was still awake. He was. His face was closer to hers than she’d thought it would be and he blinked at her with big, alert eyes, apparently as wrapped up in the story as she was.
“You good?” she asked in a husky voice that barely sounded like hers. “I’m not wearing out my welcome, am I?”
“Keep reading, Diana,” he said with a small smile on his face, snuggling down into the bed in a peaceful, relaxed sort of way that spoke of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
So she kept reading.
***
Diana blinked awake at dawn. She knew exactly where she was and exactly how inappropriate it was for her to be there.
She wanted to stiffen and groan and press closed fists to her eyes, but she was terrified of waking Orion up and having to actually talk about the fact that she’d fallen asleep in his bed with him. And her car was parked in his driveway. And it was very likely that at least one, but maybe even two of her employees knew exactly where she’d spent the night.
Good Jesus. This was a mess.
Her only saving grace was that they both slept with their clothes on, the stack of books strewn between them. She peered down their bodies, registering a weight over her ankle and saw that his foot was hooked over hers. But he still had his socks on. All things considered, this was a fairly innocent way to wake up in a man’s bed.
Holding her breath, she braced her arms underneath her and started to slide her body to the edge of the bed,
her eyes on his face, waiting for any tiny indication that he was rousing at all.
He gave no tiny indication. No stuttered breath, no yawn, no rustle, no stretch. He simply opened his eyes, focusing on her, completely alert and awake, as if he hadn’t just been deep asleep.
He growled low in his throat, a deep, almost feral sound. His eyes went wide and he laughed at himself. Stirring for the first time and dragging a hand over his features. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Sometimes I forget I’m not a wolf all the time anymore.”
Now hers were the eyes that were going wide. “Are you saying that that growl was you speaking to me in wolf language?”
She kept her voice at a whisper, mostly because that’s just what people did in the muted dawn light, moments after waking up, but also because she remembered what he’d said about hearing Phoenix and Ida having sex a few rooms away. She wasn’t sure how well sound carried in this house and she wasn’t willing to offer herself as a sacrifice to finding out the answer.
He chuckled. “No. Not really. It’s not like me and Orion and Dawn really spent a ton of time conversing when we’re in our wolf forms. But there’s some level of communicating that goes on. Maybe it’s more of a sibling thing than a wolf thing.”
“What did you say to me? What did that grunt mean?” For a moment, as interested in this as she was, she forgot that she was supposed to be sneaking out of the house right now.
“I just asked if you were all right.”
“And if I am doing all right, how should I have responded?” She did a low grunt in her own throat, trying to imitate the noise he’d made earlier.
He laughed, tipping his face into the pillow beneath his head for a moment before he rolled back and looked at her, just one eye visible. “Yup. That’s it. You nailed it.”
She laughed too. “I obviously sounded like an idiot.”
“A cute idiot.”
And then there was no other way to explain what they were doing than to say that they were laying in bed together and staring in one another’s eyes. Things like socks and jeans and the books between them started to seem dangerously irrelevant.
Diana broke their eye contact and sat up, ignoring the dizzy spinning in her head.
“I’ve really gotta get going.”
He was quiet for a long minute. “Headed into work?”
She’d thought for sure he’d argue with her, try to get her to stay a little longer with him. But then, she realized, that was the way she’d been thinking last night, and hadn’t he just surprised the heck out of her? “I’ll probably do some work at home. But I won’t go into the center today.”
“I’ve got work in a couple of hours,” he said, sitting up and stretching.
Diana tried hard to ignore the three inches of muscled torso that was revealed by the lifting of his shirt. She tried. And she failed.
He turned to her. “You want breakfast before you go? Or you just wanna get outta here?”
Again, she was a little stymied. His eyes moved toward his bedroom door and suddenly Diana got the feeling that perhaps he was hurrying her out.
What the heck was going on here?
“No, no. I’ll eat at home. Sorry I slept over by accident.”
“I’m not,” he said easily. “I liked the company. And I liked that story. Maybe you’ll finish it for me sometime soon.”
They’d made their way about a quarter through the book.
“Anytime,” Diana heard herself say. “Maybe later this week? Tuesday or Wednesday?”
His face split in two, an easy, blunt grin. “I’m free Tuesday. Wednesday I work.”
“Great.” Her palms were sweating. She’d just made another date for them. A reading date. A friend/reading date. Kind of like the one they’d had last night where she’d ended up sleeping in his bed all night.
His eyes flicked to the door again.
“Right.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll get going, then. Ok. Bye.”
She sprang up, collected her purse, slipped her sandals on, and closed the door on his low chuckle.
Luckily, she made it out of the house without running into anyone, though she did note -with a hearty wince- that Ida’s car was parked directly next to hers. Looked like she might have a conversation with an employee in her future.
She drove home trying not to think about the last twelve hours, and how everything seemed just a little bit different now.
***
That weekend, Orion bought both Ida and Wren humongous bouquets of flowers. He also made them double decker sandwiches that Wren dubbed ‘fit for the queen’. And he spent the rest of the weekend trying not to let his head get too far caught in the clouds.
Because Holy Macaroni, she’d actually slept in his bed. A year of wanting her, waiting for her, being willing to do absolutely anything for her and all it had taken was letting Carl dictate a few documents to him and eating a sandwich with her while not professing his undying love.
If he’d known Carl and sandwiches were the key to her sweet side, man, he would have done this shit a year ago.
Friends.
What a confusing word it was. He couldn’t help but feel like they were using it one way but that it actually meant something else when it applied to the two of them. Because Wren and Ida were his friends but neither one of them had blushed when he’d seen where they lived. Neither one had ever slept the night in his bed either. And definitely neither one of them had held his eye contact while she licked vegan pistachio ice cream off a spoon.
Friends.
Hmm.
Just because he didn’t know what they were or where they stood didn’t mean that he was willing to take any risks with their new, tentative arrangement. So, come Monday he checked in with Carl just like he was supposed to do and even though it practically killed him, he merely waved at Diana through her office door before he jogged out of the center and caught the bus to work.
Friends, he knew, didn’t crowd one another’s time unnecessarily.
He didn’t have a meeting with Carl on Tuesday and only one moving job early in the morning, so this time, he was able to take a shower before he went to meet up with Diana. He called her, but her phone went straight to voicemail, which he knew happened when someone’s phone ran out of battery. But they’d said seven so he decided just to meet her at the center.
He smiled and shook his head when he saw that her car was the last one in the lot. Always the last one to leave and the first one to get there. She was a hard worker, his girl.
He strode into the center and nearly had his eardrums blown out when Diana jumped a foot in the air and dropped her grocery bags all over the place, groceries rolling akimbo and her hands over her mouth, trapping in the tremendous scream she’d just let loose.
“Orion,” she gasped. “You scared the crap out of me. Why’d you come in the back entrance?”
“The front was locked!” He dropped to his knees and started gathering up the groceries that had fallen. Pasta, sausages, tomatoes, some herbs he didn’t know the name of, salad fixings, red wine -thankfully unbroken, bread.
“Fine, but why are you barging in at seven o’clock on a Tuesday? Did you forget something?”
His chin dropped as he stood up with both bags of groceries in his hands. “Did you forget something?” he corrected her.
She stared at him blankly for all of ten seconds before her eyes went wide and she smacked herself on the forehead. “Crap. Crapcrapcrap. I did. I totally forgot we’d said Tuesday. I’d been thinking Wednesday. I’m so sorry!”
Her wide eyes, the genuine regret in her voice, her cute little shift from high heel to high heel all went a long way toward soothing Orion’s ego.
“It’s okay,” he shrugged. “Were you just headed home to make dinner? We never said what we were gonna do tonight. We could just do that.”
She grimaced for half a second. “Actually, I was headed over to my stepdad’s house to make him dinner.”
There was silence for a second. �
��Okay,” Orion said, filling in the silence. “I’ll come do that with you, then.”
Diana stared at him, her brow slowly lowering. “You want to come to my stepdad’s house with me? And make dinner?”
“Sure.” He shrugged.
“I—,” she trailed off. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I can’t promise it’ll be a good time. My stepdad isn’t exactly verbose.”
“Meaning…”
“He doesn’t talk a lot.”
“Oh, that doesn’t bother me. I prefer it that way, actually. Who doesn’t like eating a quiet dinner?”
“Right.” Diana was still staring at him, her expression pinched in confusion.
If he didn’t think that playing things casual with her was working so well, he really might have attempted to explain that there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do as long as he got to do it with her. Except for maybe the dentist. He’d had to get dental work done last year after he’d joined human society and, yeah, even if Diana were there with him, he’d probably skip out on the whole stranger-hands-in-his-mouth-poking-his-teeth-and-gums-with-sharp-objects thing.
Either way, if she was actually about to say yes to him joining her for dinner with her stepdad, he was going.
“Well, let’s get going, then?” She made it sound like a question, like she was giving him an out. But he didn’t take it. He merely hoisted the grocery bags up higher and followed her to her car.
They were just pulling onto the main road when he turned to her. “What’s a stepdad again? Sometimes I have trouble remembering all the different titles people have for their family members. In-laws and foster parents and half-brothers and all that.”
“Oh. It means that he isn’t genetically related to me. He married my mom when I was six.” She cleared her throat. “And then he got custody of me after she died.”
He reached across the console and laid his hand over top of hers for just a moment, wanting to comfort her, not crowd her. “I’m so sorry to hear that your mom died, Diana. I know how that feels. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
