Page 7 of Collision of Winters (Hillcroft Group #4)

Wade Winters

N o messages since last night. Quin would’ve let me know if something was wrong with Chris. So in this instance, no news was good news.

I returned the phone and yawned?—

What the…?

I squinted in the darkness and flicked on the lantern on my bedside table, and my heart took a hit at what I saw.

“Kayden,” I whispered, my voice rough with disuse. Christ, he couldn’t sleep in the damn doorway. I dragged myself out of bed and shook him gently. “Kayden, you can’t sleep on the floor.”

He made a sleepy noise that didn’t sound entirely free of hurt. No fucking wonder with floorboards as a mattress.

“Get up, blue.” I hitched my hands under his armpits and hauled him up.

“But, ohhh ,” he whined. “You weren’t supposed to know .”

Uh-huh, because God forbid anyone saw him vulnerable.

I was sure he had it all figured out. He’d sneak back to the couch before I woke up or something.

I sat him down on the bed and cupped his cheek.

He rubbed at his eyes and admitted the storm had scared him “a little.”

I…got stuck on the words on his T-shirt.

Fucking hell. Best stuffie ever?

“And then Tundra and Prince ate the treats and left again,” Kayden mumbled.

What? Was he talking in his sleep now?

It didn’t matter. I went to the other side of the bed and straightened the sheets, and I retrieved two more pillows from the armoire.

“You’ll bunk with me,” I told him, clearing my throat.

Careful, man.

I was going to be careful. Just because I had reacted…too strongly…to his kink revelations last night didn’t mean I was going to treat him differently. He would notice and twist it somehow. My mental war was mine to fight.

But it didn’t help that he let go of his adult filters in my presence. Was he even aware of his behavior changing? Because I was.

“Come here.” I couldn’t shake the image of him curled into a ball on the floor in the doorway, as if he’d been scared to actually enter the room. He should’ve woken me up.

He complied but wouldn’t make eye contact, and that wouldn’t do. When he reached me, two blankets hanging off his shoulders, I stupidly cupped his face in my hands and made him look up.

I should create distance, not close it.

“It’s okay to be scared.”

“Nooo,” he complained. “I don’t want you to think I’m lame.”

“Never have, never will.” I forced myself to take a step back, and I gestured to the bed. “Get in. We can discuss this in the morning.”

He huffed and pouted to himself.

Adorable.

He crawled under the covers and buried his face in the pillows.

“Don’t tell Chris.” His voice was muffled.

I suppressed a sigh and returned to my side of the bed.

He had a skewed impression of Chris sometimes.

We’d both worried about Kayden. The last thing Chris would do was make fun of him.

Yeah, he could be tactless and crass, put his foot in his mouth easier than I could, but he was a good man.

Who was currently in Colombia, trying to intercept the men coming for him instead of waiting for them to reach US soil.

He wasn’t alone, I reminded myself. He had the Beckett brothers with him on the ground, not to mention Quin and Payne in command at home.

After getting under the covers myself, I flicked off the light again and let out a breath.

Chris would be fine. As would Kayden.

I lay there on my back, staring up at the ceiling I couldn’t even see, and acknowledged I might be in way over my head.

Kayden wasn’t too difficult to handle. He was too fucking easy—for me . As long as I didn’t let my mixed emotions get in the way.

I knew how to get through to him, and it wasn’t rocket science. It was just patience and understanding, two things he hadn’t experienced enough from others in life.

Even I had failed, simply because work had taken me away for months at a time, removing any progress we’d made while we’d been under the same roof.

I remembered when Quin had brought Kayden home.

It hadn’t really made the news. Yaya had taken in countless foster children for as long as I could remember, and Quin had followed in her footsteps.

He’d focused on boys with troubled pasts, and often because social workers had noted possible sexuality-related issues.

He’d wanted to help them lose their anger and realize there was still safety in this world—and that they weren’t alone.

Some kids had stayed for a few months, some for longer.

Early on, I’d sensed that Kayden would either stay with us for a couple months, or he’d stay forever. He’d been such an angry young boy, but it hadn’t taken Quin long to dig underneath it to reveal a wounded puppy.

Quin had eventually adopted him, but even then… To this day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Kayden always had one foot out the door. He was full of contrasts, that one. Desperate to belong, quick to run away.

Quinlan and I wondered if he had a mild form of dyslexia, but Kayden refused to admit it or get answers. There might be more too. We had no idea. We didn’t know if his anger stemmed from an untreated diagnosis or his childhood, where he’d been neglected from a young age.

According to the social worker, Kayden hadn’t been abused in a…traditional sense, and I understood why they’d used that term, but fuck, abuse was abuse in my book. You couldn’t fucking leave a young child on his own for a weekend because you and your drunk hubby had a coupon to an Indian casino.

His case file had been filled with those types of stories, along with bullying, because Kayden had been “too sensitive” and “expressing too much interest in boys his age.”

Under the circumstances, he’d adapted well to a family that gave a fuck, and I wasn’t sure he gave himself enough credit for that. He tended to focus on his issues. When others succeeded in something, he felt like shit for not measuring up.

He’d be the last person to mention that he’d gotten an A in social studies and that he’d taken his high school swim team to Nationals. If Chris dared compliment Kayden on his piano playing, the kid would mumble and walk out of the room.

He’d learned to accept Quin’s affection, and it was certainly reciprocated. Kayden just had his own way of showing it.

He had a good relationship with Yaya too, but she never asked anything of him. She lived next door to Quin, and she let Kayden get away with excuses and deflection. If he became uncomfortable around her, she never pushed. And at the end of a dinner, she went home again.

Then there was me.

I scrubbed a hand over my face.

Was I ready to analyze the ins and outs of our dynamic at this hour?

Did I have a choice? Had I ever been able to stop my brain?

Things had changed for me some four years ago, when I’d found him flipping between kinky porn and Wikipedia’s BDSM page on Quin’s laptop.

To say Kayden had been mortified would’ve been the understatement of the century, and I’d done the right thing based purely on the fear of him running away if I just buried the matter.

I’d told him it was okay, I’d told him exploring was natural, and I’d admitted—thinking he’d find it easier if he wasn’t alone—that I was involved in kink too.

I’d been forced to view him as an adult ever since.

I’d also forced myself to be there for him whenever he had kink-related questions, which was both a blessing and a curse. But what he’d confessed tonight…? That was something else entirely. I’d had no idea his kinky identity ran so deep.

It screwed with my head.

And no. I couldn’t fucking tackle this in the middle of the night. My thoughts were too jumbled to make heads or tails of anything, and I wasn’t sure I wanted clarity.

Goddammit.

I folded the pillow around my head and tried to shut out the sounds.

The smell of fresh coffee refused to be ignored.

So did Kayden’s sweet giggles.

What was he doing?

I supposed he still had some battery left on his phone. It sounded like he was watching a video—all while clanking around in the kitchen.

Well, he definitely didn’t have service up here, so he must have some media downloaded for offline viewing.

“Ouch,” he whispered. It was followed by a hiss. “Damn butter!”

I smiled sleepily into the pillow, unable to help myself. He was in the splash zone of sizzling butter, no doubt.

Considering the winds hadn’t let up, I guessed we were having breakfast early. There wasn’t much else to do indoors.

I’d woken to the front door slamming shut, so I assumed he’d brought in the cooler from the porch.

“Kayden?” I muttered groggily.

“Yessir?”

Don’t call me sir.

I lifted my head off the pillow as he emerged in the doorway with a cute smile. And barely any fucking clothes. He couldn’t walk around wearing only a pair of briefs like that. And those crystal-blue eyes. And that bed head.

I felt horrible for thinking it, but I needed the scowling punk who refused to help out to reappear. He was much easier to handle.

“Don’t use the steaks in the cooler labeled for the 22nd,” I said. They were for his birthday.

His smile widened, and he spoke before he left again. “I saw them. Interesting date!”

A lot of things were interesting around here lately.

I had to talk to Quinlan at some point.

After the storm had moved on.

Kayden giggled again.

“What’s got you in stitches out there?” I called.

He let out a guffaw. “My favorite episode of South Park !”

I groaned internally. He and Chris had that in common.

“It’s the only thing I have on my phone,” he explained. “I would’ve traded it for SpongeBob or Transformers , but this works too! Oh! Or Ninja Turtles !”

Safe to say, I wasn’t getting any more sleep.

I forced myself to sit up, and my feet landed on the floor.

I scratched my chest.

It wouldn’t take much of an effort to charge my laptop and download the Transformers movie for his birthday. I was fairly sure I knew which was his favorite.

I’d actually bought Push Pop lollipops for him too, but now I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to give him that. What if he mistook it for encouragement to be more little with me?