An apology started to bubble up in my throat—for what I wasn’t sure—but it died almost as quickly as it started because Perrie didn’t look angry about discovering us in such an incriminating position.
Her gray eyes were wide, sure, but not with shock or hurt. No, judging by the way her pale cheeks flushed and the opening of her glossy bow lips, it almost looked like she was enjoying what she was seeing.
“Pet? Are you all right?” Edison asked, finally releasing me so that he could go to her, his hand outstretched. I didn’t know what else to do with myself, so I followed along in a daze, my body still buzzing from our kiss.
She glanced between the two of us before slipping her hand into Edison’s. “Yes? Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was an implicit acknowledgement that she’d seen what we were doing and had seemingly accepted it. Perrie could have turned and ratted us both out to the rest of the people outside. She had every right to do so as Edison’s new wife. But every instinct I had was telling me that she wouldn’t.
“Rhodes was worried,” Edison told her cheerfully as he drew a finger down her bare spine, grinning over his shoulder at me when he caught my eyes following the digit and the lift of gooseflesh that was left in its wake.
Perrie glanced back at me, her gray eyes meeting mine. During our self-defense training sessions over the past few weeks she’d taken to trying to get under my skin. I knew my lack of expression frustrated the overly-emotive omega and it had been a bit of a point of pride to not let her in.
But I knew that she could see every inch of confusion, jealousy, and need that was coursing through my body on my face and Perrie looked as if she didn’t know what to do about it. It was like the pair had cracked my body open at the ribs and were perusing my soul like a pair of fucking morticians to see what made me tick. I almost would have believed that they’d planned the whole thing except for the fact that they’d barely had a moment alone together over the past three weeks.
“Rhodes shouldn’t be worried about anything,” Perrie said, finally putting me out of my misery and turning back to face the direction we were walking in. We were close to the door that led out into the garden where the reception was being held and I could already hear music wafting down the hall towards us.
“That’s what I told him, pet, but you’ll have to forgive him. It takes him a while to trust new people.”
I followed behind them with clenched teeth. I hated being spoken about as if I wasn’t there and Edison knew it. The bastard was probably trying to draw some kind of reaction out of me, and despite my best efforts, it was working.
We made it to the large double doors and two of the security guards pulled them open for the new couple to walk through and out to the reception area.
“Now, shall we go have our first dance? There’s a bit of a surprise waiting for you at the end of it.”
One of Perrie’s auburn brows rose as she looked over at Edison. “Is it the doves you’ve been muttering about for the last week?”
“Can’t you just let it be a surprise?”
“No.”
Edison frowned down at her. “You’re no fun, pet.”
Perrie straightened her shoulders and tilted her chin into the air, the very essence of a haughty young rich woman that I knew she wasn’t. “And don’t you ever forget it, Husband.”
With that, she dragged a very flabbergasted Edison into the reception, leaving me to watch them go with a shake of my head.
I still wasn’t sure how I felt about any of this, but at least I knew that Perrie would keep the both of us on our toes.
As the crowd cheered their entrance, I brushed my fingers along my lips and got one last taste of that strawberry lip gloss before following them into the reception.
Fourteen
“Make sure she bleeds!” one of the older men at the reception hollered as we walked hand and hand back towards the mansion.
“It’s going to be a long night for you two,” another one whooped.
The heckling was coming from the older members in the crowd and was only a fraction of the disgusting comments coming from the older generation of the Keane family all night.
“Ignore them, pet,” Edison whispered to me before sweeping me off of my feet, much to the delight of the onlookers.
Truthfully, he’d probably caught onto the fact that I’d been limping towards the end of our walk around the reception where we’d spent most of the evening greeting the guests. The sky high white heels that Oona had forced me into earlier were starting to dig into my feet and it was taking me everything not to take them off.
They’d begun to really ache right after our first dance when we were watching the doves fly off into the sunset—the surprise Edison had promised. I was pretty sure that, had he not been the leader of a notorious mob family, the man would be living in the countryside somewhere gardening and caring for a whole flock of different kinds of birds. The man was absolutely obsessed with them.
But his lot in life was to lead his clan and mine was to be his wife—nasty comments and all.
“Is that better?” he asked as we passed Rhodes and the two exchanged a nod before the other alpha fell into step behind us.
Rhodes had made himself scarce after I found them kissing in the hallway and I still couldn’t forget the war of emotions that had crossed his face when we looked at each other.
Over the past few weeks, I’d managed to get him to smile a few times and laugh even less, so to see so much raw emotion on the normally stoic man’s face had thrown me for a loop.
Truthfully, I’d already come to the conclusion that Edison Keane and Rhodes McCreary were far more than friends.
No one exchanged looks that seemed to hold entire conversations the way they did while only being friends.
I’d decided to write it off as not my business until earlier when Edison, knowing full well that I was coming down the hallway, had shown me a scene that had made my entire body flush with heat and had made it my business. The two seemed hungry for each other and I’d watched, open-mouthed as Edison pressed the other man into the wall and kissed him with the kind of ferocity that made my insides twist with need. .
I’d already figured it was happening—but what I hadn’t been counting on was how it would make me feel to see it happening in front of me.
It had been… almost invigorating to watch the two men together. A sense of rightness clicking into place in the deep recesses of my brain where I’d shoved my omega instincts.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the slick. Omega slick was something that was supposed to be natural, but I’d long since stopped thinking I was capable of it. That the treatment for my leukemia had jacked up my omega biology so much that I figured that I was basically a beta with the chance to have a heat—something I didn’t necessarily believe even if my doctors insisted my body was capable of it.
Watching Edison and Rhodes together had quickly proven those doctors right. It wasn’t a lot but as they kissed, Edison’s tongue slipping sloppily into Rhodes’ mouth the same way it had into mine earlier, I felt wetness gush in between my legs and the overwhelming scent of strawberries fill my nose.
