Page 56 of Knot Your Sugar Rush (Starling Grove #2)

Chapter fifty-six

Cam

T he quiet after Theo and Dane leaves feels different—less like absence and more like a blanket. The window is open just enough to pull in the sea’s cool breath; it lifts the damp hair at my temples and carries the faintest salt. I can almost taste it.

Jamie settles deeper into the chair by my bed, his injured leg stretched out on the ottoman I dragged in, the blanket I tossed over him tucked in at one corner because he’s pretending it doesn’t help and I’m pretending not to notice that it does.

He rotates his ankle once, winces, and then catches me studying him.

“Don’t give me that look,” he says, easy and warm. “I’m fine.”

“You always say that,” I murmur, sliding back against the pillows. “Even when you’re missing a roof and half your common sense.”

“Slender accusations,” he says, mock offense wrinkling his nose. “For your information, I still have at least three-quarters of my common sense. I’m saving the last quarter for emergencies.”

“This isn’t an emergency?”

He glances pointedly at me, then at the window, the door, his leg. “Not when we’ve got tea, a cross-breeze, and a very bossy omega telling me to keep the blanket on.”

I try to scowl. It comes out as a smile I can’t quite hold back. “I’m not bossy.”

“You are absolutely bossy,” he says, delighted. “But in a soothing way. Like a very gentle storm.”

“A gentle storm would be rain,” I say, deadpan. “Possibly a drizzle.”

“Then you’re a drizzle of authority.” He grins at his own sentence, as if that phrase alone might heal his leg and my frayed nerves at the same time. He sobers a little, eyes softening. “How’s your temperature?”

I swallow. There’s still that slow, persistent thrum low in my belly. Less sharp than last night but closer now, like a tide that keeps reaching farther up the shore each time. “Warming,” I admit. “But manageable.”

“Mm.” He pushes the mug I left on the nightstand table toward me with two fingers. “Sip. We hydrate, we breathe, we don’t do anything we don’t want to do.”

The we lands gently. It shouldn’t—he isn’t the one whose body is run by moon-tides and scent and memory—but somehow it steadies me anyway. I take the mug, the porcelain a pleasant heat against my palm, and drink. The tea’s gone lukewarm, herb-sweet and a little bitter. It helps.

We drift. He tells me a ridiculous story about a high school shop class boat he and Theo tried to build out of plywood and hope, how it sank in the marina before they’d even untied the rope.

He paints with his hands while he talks, the chair groaning as he shifts, the blanket slipping just enough to show a familiar scar near his knee.

He taps it once, matter-of-fact. “Bike. Gravel road. Terrible decision. Ten out of ten, do not recommend.”

I laugh; the laugh shivers; the shiver rolls into heat.

It’s not sudden. It’s not a wave crashing.

It’s a tide rising and rising until I don’t notice my breaths getting slower, deeper, my fingers foreign on the mug because they’re too sensitive to be mine.

The room sharpens at the edges—grain in the wood, the scratch in the chair’s arm, the way the breeze tastes like cold metal and salt.

And underneath it all, Jamie’s scent: warm leather and smoke, a human campfire I could fall asleep beside.

He sees it. Smells it. Of course he does. The humor in his face doesn’t vanish; it gentles. “Cam,” he says, “tell me what you need.”

The answer comes before I can second-guess it. “You,” I say, and my voice is too soft to be bold but too certain to be anything else.

His eyes darken, not with surprise so much as with care. “My leg is going to complain if I try to be acrobatic,” he says lightly, lifting a palm, “so I’m probably of limited help in the—”

“It’s not your leg I’m interested in,” I say, and the joke is accidentally earnest. Heat flares in my cheeks, and I press the heel of my hand there like I can cool it through my skin. “I mean—I know what I’m asking. I… I want your help.”

He doesn’t move for a heartbeat. Then he shifts, carefully, like he’s approaching a wild thing he doesn’t want to startle.

“Okay,” he says. “Ground rules. You can change your mind at any second. You say stop and I stop, no questions. If you want me closer, you ask and I’m there.

If you want me to just sit here and breathe with you, I do that.

” A pause, his mouth curving. “I can even be very impressive at breathing.”

A startled sound escapes me. It isn’t quite a laugh. It’s something looser, relief bending at the edges. “Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”

“Good.” His palm opens toward me. “May I?”

I nod. He rises with a hiss of breath and a muttered word at his leg, and then he sits on the edge of the bed, close enough that the mattress dips and I lean into him without meaning to.

His hand finds the back of my neck, warm and steady, his thumb drawing a small circle at the base of my skull.

The touch isn’t demanding. It’s an invitation. My shoulders fall a fraction.

“Breathe with me,” he murmurs. “In for four, out for six.”

We do. Four beats in, six out. Again. Again.

My body recognizes the rhythm before my mind does.

Somewhere between counts the room grows larger—more air, more space, more me.

The heat doesn’t back off; it blooms differently.

Less like a fire I’m trapped in and more like sunlight I can step into on purpose.

“Still with me?” he asks quietly.

“I’m with you.” It feels true in my bones.

His forehead tips lightly against mine. It’s nothing more than that—two points of contact, a shared breath, the barest hum of something alive in the air between us—but I could cry from how careful it is.

I don’t realize my fingers are clutching his sleeve until he covers my hand with his and eases my grip so I won’t cramp.

“May I kiss you?” he asks.

I nod. “Please.”

He kisses like a promise he intends to keep.

Gentle first—soft press, retreat, return—letting me find the pressure I want and the angle and the yes.

The room presses in around the small sounds I’m making; the window’s breath lifts the hair at my nape; the bed’s quilt is a familiar scrape under bare fingertips.

When he deepens the kiss, it’s only because I lean forward to follow him.

Nothing in me feels trapped. Everything in me feels chosen.

When we break for air, I hear us: the soft sound of it, the in, the out, and the faintest hitch when his thumb finds that place at the hinge of my jaw. He kisses there, then lower, careful as a prayer. His mouth is warm and patient; his stubble is a rasp that turns my breath to a tremble.

“Tell me if anything’s too much,” he says against my skin. “Tell me what helps.”

“More,” I manage. “You. Just—stay.”

“Staying,” he promises, and the word lands like a weight on the scale, tipping it toward yes.

We move slowly. There’s a lot of laughter tucked between the wanting—because his leg decides to complain precisely when we attempt anything ambitious, and because I can’t stop making fun of his heroic grimace, and because he keeps apologizing to the blanket when it tangles around his bandaged leg.

He makes a face at himself, and I lose it, forehead to his shoulder, shaking with silent giggles that shake into something else entirely when his hand skims the small of my back.

“See?” he says, voice a scrape of warmth. “I can be helpful.”

“You’re infuriating,” I tell him, breathless.

“True and yet beloved,” he murmurs, and I swear I can feel his smile against my skin.

Heat builds; I stop fighting it. It’s different with him—less like surrendering to a storm, more like being walked into the ocean hand in hand and told where the drop-off is and that he’ll stand between me and the pull if I need it.

He keeps asking quietly— here? like this?

—and I keep answering, and somewhere in the asking and answering the room narrows to the rhythm of us and the window’s breeze and the bedframe’s occasional sigh.

I make sure he’s comfortable on the bed before removing my clothing slowly, his eyes filled with desire and admiration, fawning my confidence. Then, I help free his cock. It’s hard, at attention, and slick. For me.

“This is more than I’d ever hoped for,” he admits, vulnerable.

I straddle him, slowly impale myself on his hardness, holding his eyes with mine as his hands explore my breasts, gentler than Dane but just as triggering. Every inch of my body is on fire, every cell demanding to be quenched.

I push down, moaning, and throw my head back. I take the lead, pumping up and down, to a very appreciative alpha.

“Cam,” he moans, taking hold of my hips and pushing me down as he buckles up. “Is this okay?”

“Yes,” I gasp out, his already swollen knot fighting for entry. He doesn’t need more permission and pushes me down. I cry as it enters me and fills me. As it completes me.

When the tide crests, it is not a jagged thing. It’s a long, bright arc that leaves me shaking and laughing into his shoulder, folded over, all the fear washed thinner than I thought possible. He wraps his arms around me and holds me until my breathing evens, gently stroking my hair and my back.

“Still okay?” he says at last, hushed.

I nod against him. “More than okay.”

“Good,” he whispers, and presses a kiss to my temple like he’s sealing something.

We lie there waiting for his knot to shrink, the breeze combing over us, the sea’s salt somewhere far and kind. My heartbeat slows. His does, too.

“Do you want water?” he asks after a while, the caretaker slipping back into his voice.

“In a minute,” I murmur. “Just… this first.”

“Just this,” he agrees, and we let the quiet have us again.

When I finally sit up, he reaches for the mug before I can, scolding my attempt at independence with an arch look that makes me grin.

He sips first, makes a face, and declares the tea undrinkable at its current temperature.

I tell him he’s become a diva since nearly being crushed by a building.

He says he prefers “connoisseur.” I say I prefer “alive.”

He sobers at that, eyes shining in the thin light. “Me too.”

We tidy nothing. We promise nothing. We build small, ordinary moments and stack them like smooth stones on a windowsill: a shared laugh; a quiet breath; his fingers smoothing my hair behind my ear; my hand over his, thumb tracing the scar near his knuckle.

Outside, gulls wheel and complain. Inside, the floor creaks a question and the breeze answers.

The heat is still there, banked and warm. It feels less like a thing that will break me and more like a thing I can meet, especially with someone who makes the word help feel like I’m the one offering it back.

“Thank you,” I say, and I mean a hundred things.

He squeezes my hand. “Anytime.”

I insist we move to the lounger. I’m worried about his leg, and I know he has to keep it elevated. I dress and help him back there, and curl beside him once he’s comfortable. He covers me with the blanket and holds me like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And, right now, it is.

The tide has ebbed away from me, and he’s the nest I currently need.