The Alpha’s Desire 2(21)
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. More, I’m sorry for my part in your terror and confusion,” he mumbled, but hugged me tighter to him until I could barely get a thin strip of air into my lungs.
I didn’t mind a bit. A song my mother used to listen to when I was young, something from some musical I think, ran through my head. My dad sang it when he’d gotten really drunk after her death. But the line that stood out to me then, but now with wonder and understanding, ran through my head. Someone to sit in your chair and ruin your sleep to make you aware of being alive…
“Back to this story of yours. I want to read it,” he said, and then planted a kiss on my forehead.
I tilted my head up to kiss him full on the lips. I’d never tire, never not surrender, when he cupped his hands around my cheeks and pulled me into his kiss, bruising my lips in the best way possible.
“Well, I need some coffee. So, I will get it for you and then start a pot. I have to say that someone knowing my secret, that I write, it is just one of the many gifts you’ve brought to my life.”
“Come here,” he groaned through his smile as he pulled me back down to him when I’d only raised part way up to get out of bed.
He kissed me again. He embraced me. I curved into it. I let my heart pound and flutter. I let my breath be stolen. I let him make me aware of being alive. So alive I wasn’t sure I knew how to handle it.
“Okay, go get that story,” he barked, tapping his hand on my ass again.
“You tease,” I said with a shake of my head as I struggled to get off of him.
“Coffee,” he demanded as he helped me off of his body and into a standing positon on the floor.
The sun shone brightly through the sheer curtains in my bedroom as I grabbed for a robe. When I walked into the living room, the same was true of the stream of light coming in through the sliding glass door. I’d neglected my usual ritual of closing the blinds last night before I’d gone to bed. Stretching and grinning like a fool at the way Mother Nature agreed with my mood this morning made me feel like a woman in one of those sappy coffee commercials as I padded to the kitchen to make some.
The simple ritual didn’t heighten my happiness as it usually did, only blended in with it. I wondered if I could be happier, if such a thing were possible. I’d only grabbed the coffee can from the cupboard when his voice boomed behind me.
“The story first,” he demanded, though no true power laid behind the stiff tone he’d forced.
“Wow. Sorry. I’m not thinking straight, and for once, I love it. You are the best distraction to my life ever,” I said, walking by him and kissing his cheek as I went.
Grabbing the story, totally willing to share it with him, still I took a deep breath and released it before I let the paper slip away from my fingers. I stood there a minute watching him glance at the first page.
“It’ll be alright, my love,” he grinned. “I love it already.”
“Right,” I muttered, then turned on the ball of my foot to head back to the utmost important task of making coffee. A distraction.
While the coffee perked, he read. While we both sipped at our steaming mugs, he read. When I went to indulge in the much welcomed warmth of the fall sun, he followed me out to the balcony, and he read. Those words he devoured were the last part of myself he didn’t know, the exact inner workings of my mind. Especially that story, the one I’d written about him.
“I exaggerated the story a bit, too. Embellished if you will, to make it one of those love at first sight things. I didn’t know at the time why you felt so familiar, like I’d known you all my life, at the time I wrote it,” I mumbled. “Still love at first sight, though, just not feel. That would only make sense to you, of course.”
The idea of what he read, the more I thought on it with him sitting there perched on the edge of his chair hunched over my paper, had begun to make me antsy. I squirmed in my chair for the hundredth time in a half an hour. I’d already had two cups of strong coffee to his barely touched first cup. So, maybe the indulgence in caffeine had gotten to me, or the fact that my soul lay bare before his eyes. A fate worse than being naked and chained to a post, I mused.