Wild and Free (The Three #3)(138)

Her weight pressed into him as sleep claimed her.

Only then did he succeed.





Chapter Twenty


You Want That, Don’t You?

Delilah



I wandered naked out of the bathroom and saw my man in bed, his back against some pillows shoved up against the headboard, one leg straight, one leg bent, also naked, totally hot, eyes on me.

I went to the bed, put a knee in and then the other, and walked on them to him as he watched. When I got close, I swung a leg around him, straddling him, and rested against him, tucking my face in the side of his neck, wrapping one arm around him, laying the other hand on his chest.

Abel curled both arms around me.

Post-morning-sex snuggling.

The best.

“I think Moose wants his own vampire,” I told his throat.

I felt his body move with his amusement and I gloried in the feel.

“Your dad’s been sharin’,” he guessed.

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“Hook caught the eye of one and there’re tons of ’em around. Probably won’t be hard for Moose to get his own.”

Using my index finger, I drew mindless patterns on the warm silk of his skin, muttering, “That’d be good. Might keep him around and out of trouble.”

He gave me a squeeze and whispered, “You worried.”

Absolutely, I worried. We’d lost Snake. I didn’t even want to imagine losing someone else I loved.

I thought this.

I said, “Yeah.”

“He’s home now,” Abel pointed out.

“Yeah,” I repeated.

Abel started drawing his own mindless patterns on the skin at the small of my back.

I had no idea, but I’d put up a good argument that he did it better.

“What’d you do before me?” I blurted, not knowing where it came from, just knowing it came out.

His fingers stopped. “What?”

I pressed my hand flat on his pec, lifted my head, and looked down at him.

“Before me, before this,” I began to explain. “What did you do to make your way in life? You know, your business that wasn’t messy.”

His eyes shuttered as his mouth muttered, “Cuddled close, sneak attack.”

That didn’t sound good.

“Abel?” I prompted.

He looked at me as he slid a hand over my hip to my belly, up between my breasts, and up where he curled it around the side of my neck.

“Did whatever I could do,” he stated cautiously. “Someone needed somethin’, I got it for them. Someone needed somethin’ delivered, I delivered it. Someone needed information, I got it.”

“I…” I shook my head. “For money?”

“Depending on what it was and who it was for, money or markers,” Abel explained, still watching my face closely. “Xun, Wei, and Chen did their bit, getting a lock on the lay of the land, so by the time I showed, we knew who was who and how they fit. If it was a big player who it would be good they owed markers, that’s what we asked for. If it was somethin’ else or dangerous for a mortal, but it wouldn’t be dangerous for me, we asked for money, and not a small amount of it.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

“You gotta have it all, bao bei, so I’ll tell you that, outside the information which I couldn’t help but knowing, I didn’t get involved. I didn’t know what I was delivering. I didn’t pay attention to what I was finding. I did the job. I didn’t take sides. We were free agents. We worked for anyone. We kept out of it. And if needed, I made a statement when someone would try to drag us in.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“They needed the hurt put on them to make the point, I did that too.”

“Oh,” I mumbled again, that syllable a lot more tentative.

Using his hand at my neck, Abel gave me a squeeze and a shake.

“It’s the only thing I could do to take care of my family,” he declared fiercely. “We moved around a lot. Jian-Li could cook, as could her mother before her, but it takes time to establish a restaurant. By the time things would be rolling with that, we couldn’t enjoy it long before we had to leave. It’s not easy to set up house and a restaurant every decade or so. And I don’t die. I couldn’t be on the grid in any way. I have no social security number. No birth certificate. I couldn’t go to college, be a doctor, a lawyer. You live out in the open like that, people could cotton on. I could take money under the table. Be a day laborer. But they make shit. We needed more. So I did what I had to do to take care of my family.”

I had no reply mostly because there wasn’t one. I could see this. I could even understand it.

Abel took my non-response the wrong way.

“I knew the information I found and shared. I knew the men who asked me to deliver shit were not good citizens so I could guess what I was delivering wasn’t food for the needy. But I did what I had to do.”

“Became an outlaw,” I said.

“Yeah,” he grunted.

“We all do what we have to do, Abel,” I remarked, and his head twitched. “I mean, my mom isn’t the greatest mom in the history of momkind, but she’s my mom. And to be healthy, I don’t see her much. I know she doesn’t like this. She isn’t the greatest mom and it isn’t good that she wants me around mostly to bitch about Dad and make me feel like I’m nuts. But in her way, she also loves me, likes my company, so she feels our break. It isn’t healthy to be with her so I struggle with that being the wrong choice, but I feel in my heart it’s the only one.”