“I hate when Shan is right,” he eventually mumbled under his breath.
Surging forward, his lips pressed to mine and I gasped. He slid his tongue between my parted lips, tasting and caressing, his hand coming to the back of my neck to pull me closer. When he pulled away, I was panting and my cock was pulsing, wanting attention it wouldn’t get. Even if this was what I desperately hoped, we needed to find Freya and couldn’t afford to pause for an orgasm.
Plus, I wasn’t sure what the kiss had been. Not yet.
“Why was Shan right this time?” I asked, my voice tiny.
“He told me you didn’t know I was in love with you.”
The world spun, and my body warmed. “What?” My response wasn’t the most eloquent.
“I’ve loved you for years.”
“I thought… I mean, you were just helping me out and feeding me, weren’t you?” I asked. To know this was real, I needed him to say it for me.
Emmett scoffed, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Sweetheart, I’m demisexual. In my experience, I’m not physically capable of fucking anyone I’m not in love with because I barely get hard. I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on you, so I never mentioned it. Shan figured it out, though, the bastard. There’s a reason he decided you could only feed from the two of us, and it wasn’t just for his own benefit.”
My face went bright pink and I buried it in the crook of his arm. With warm and fuzzy emotions filling me, I wanted to be in his lap but if I tried to cuddle so close to him, I’d end up on his cock. We still didn’t have time. Technically, we didn’t have time for this confession either, but it had pulled me from depression territory.
“Can you tell me how you feel, Cas? You’re not the only one who’s been an idiot for years,” he said. “I honestly didn’t think you felt anything substantial for me until Shan brought it up.”
I giggled, losing it a bit. Fuck, we were both dumb. What a time to figure it out. Freya had figured it out from the one time I’d talked about Emmett — I remembered her questioning me in the diner, those keen purple eyes catching every time I fidgeted or blushed.
“I love you,” I said when the giggles had subsided enough to speak. “I love you so much, Em.”
His relieved sigh was lost when he grabbed me in his muscular arms and hoisted me up into his lap. My ass notched against his hard length but he placed his hands on my hips to keep me still. The way his chest moved as he breathed was comforting, and he retrieved the laptop from where he’d discarded it on the bedspread.
“I love you too, sweetheart. Now we’ve got our oblivious selves settled, let’s find the woman you love so you can make up with your other lover.”
“Does it bother you? Me loving Shan and Freya too?”
I wasn’t trying to deny the L word when it came to Freya anymore.
Emmett chuckled, bringing up a page on our secure server with documentation on Kylan’s known locations in the city and surrounding towns. Shan always made fun of his research skills, and I hated to say the teasing was warranted, but it was. He squinted like an old lady at bingo and always clicked in the wrong place with the touchpad. “One person isn’t enough to satisfy an incubus, and I’d much prefer you sleep with people you love instead of random people. Besides, you have too much love to give. I’d be greedy to try to monopolize you. Shan is a friend and Freya is…”
He paused long enough that I thought he’d gotten distracted by something on the screen as he painstakingly scrolled down.
“Freya is intriguing. I was drawn to her when I first saw her in the club, and I want to learn more. I hate to say it, considering I was supposed to be the level-headed one now that you and Shan are goners, but I might fall in love with her. So long as she never does anything to hurt you.”
Laughing, I reached for a pen and paper from the bedside table so Emmett didn’t have to figure out how to bookmark locations. We would use traditional methods for the old man — who was, shockingly, the youngest of us. Only thirty-five to my one hundred and fifty and Shan’s four hundred plus years as an angel. “Figures that she’d ensnare the entire team,” I said.
“She’s a tempting woman. Write down this address, we’re going to check it.”
We went through the list, skipping anything in the downtown core. Since they knew we would try to scent track, it made sense for them to take her farther away. Hopefully not out of the city, at least not yet.
“Is it possible they took her straight to Bloodshed Brewing?” I asked, looking at the picture of the front of the bar, hidden away in a side alley.
“Anything is possible, but I don’t think they would. They’d want her calmed down before putting her in the belly of the beast. They don’t know she’s the killer and think she’s gone willingly, but they are aware of how damn antagonistic she is.”
I hoped that was the case, because infiltrating the vampire headquarters to save her was a whole new ball game. We’d be fired for trying, if we didn’t die during our attempt. There was a tentative peace between the Next Life Company and the vampire mafia, and we weren’t high enough up on the food chain to be allowed to shift the balance. An attack from us would be taken as an attack from our employers, and they wouldn’t stand for the insubordination.
When we’d gone through every known Jitara building on the list, Emmett closed the laptop and put it on the side table. Then he kissed me like I was the air he needed to breathe, his fingers stroking my skin and pushing away the last vestiges of despair. I had him, and we’d find Freya. We had to. I needed her.
He broke the kiss first, glancing longingly down at the bulge in my jeans. “You have no idea how much I’m going to make love to you once we’re out of this mess,” he murmured.
I went bright pink and pushed off of him, trying to calm the pitter patter of my heart. I’d wanted him to say something like that for years, and now that he was I wanted to hide in embarrassment. How could making love to me be fun for him? Especially knowing he rarely felt sexual attraction to people? “What happened to not being enough to satisfy an incubus?” I asked teasingly.
Putting on my flirtatious persona was getting harder and harder, because Freya had always wanted me to have it off. She seemed to actually likeme, not just being the centre of attention and flirting. Not that Shan and Em didn’t like me, but they recognized it was a defence mechanism and allowed me to act however I wanted. She either didn’t know I wore it like armour, or didn’t give a fuck. I was betting on the latter.
