Endless (Clarity Coast Omegaverse Book 1)

I loved the feeling of a purr. The way it resonated through my chest and relaxed me. It made me feel so completely safe, and I missed that feeling.

How long had it been? Longer than I’d let myself admit.

Here in this shadowy, half-awake place, I could give in to the horror of realizing I’d clung to something mediocre at best for so long, and I had been too naïve to see how badly I was treated. Because…

I didn’t know. Was I afraid of being alone? Was I so convinced we were happy I just lived in the clouds? Even if I wanted to know, in the end it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I wasn’t in that place anymore, and that there was an Alpha lying behind me, purring.

Turning over, I reached for whoever it was, wrapping my arms around their neck before even opening my eyes. A rough, rich purr and the delicate scent of cardamom mixed with what was left of what they’d done to me. Traces of my scent on him.

That was so fucking hot.

“I swear I can hear you thinking,” Joel said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m good.” My body felt heavy and sated. I could probably go back to sleep if I wanted to, but I didn’t. The day stretched in front of us, along with a conversation I very much wanted to have. “Your purr is going to send me back to sleep.”

He chuckled. “Does that mean I should stop?”

“No.” My eyes flew open to find him grinning. “Don’t. Please.”

“Good morning.” He kissed my forehead, still purring like he was an engine. “Sleep okay?”

“Like the dead, honestly.”

One hand slid down my side under the blankets until he could curl it around my thigh and pull my leg over his body. “It was my job to tell you there’s breakfast on the veranda and we want to eat with you. But now that you’re awake, and naked, I don’t want to let you out of this bed.”

I pressed my forehead into his chest. Joel cradled me closer, holding me against him, and I savored the feeling of being held. Sometimes this was all I wanted. Just to touch and be touched and feel like I wasn’t so alone. “I like this.”

“Fuck breakfast,” he said. “Let’s stay here.”

“You would?”

Another kiss, this time on the top of my head where I was tucked against him. “I have a gorgeous, naked Omega in my arms. No food in the world is more tempting than that.”

My stomach swooped, a whine breaking out of me. Fuck everything. I was going to soak up every minute of this kind of attention. At the very least, it would show me what I deserved and nothing less.

I would have committed to the plan of staying in bed, but my stomach had other plans. It growled, louder than his purr. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”

“Let’s get you fed,” he said with a laugh. “If you want to come back and cuddle after, we can.”

Sitting up, I looked down at myself. “I need a shower.”

“Hurry, or we’ll want to join you.”

Joel, sitting in the middle of the bed, shirtless, with blankets bunched around his hips, was mouthwatering. “Yeah.” I swallowed. “That would be… bad.”

Laughter followed me into the bathroom. But not laughter at me. If someone asked me, I couldn’t say how I knew the difference, but I did. I didn’t take long, pulling on another bathing suit and a sheer, shimmery cover-up. I didn’t know what we were doing today, and I wasn’t getting dressed more if I didn’t have to.

A table on the veranda held an entire spread of breakfast food, though a glance at my phone told me it was almost noon. I looked at them, trying to ignore the way their eyes skimmed over my body, because if I did, I wouldn’t be eating. “You did this?”

Cade jumped up and pulled out a chair in the center of the table for me. “Well, we told Geoffrey and helped as much as he’d let us, which wasn’t as much as we would have liked.”

A magnolia blossom sat on the plate in front of me. It wasn’t the season for them, but it looked fresh. The entire estate was covered with the trees. Hell, they were all over Clarity, even before we moved to this house. Sometimes my mom joked that I looked around while I was still in the womb and chose my scent for that reason. “This is beautiful, thank you.”

My stomach rumbled again. I reached for the plate stacked with waffles. Because fuck yes, waffles sounded incredible. Too much syrup and butter later, I moaned with the first bite. The food was something I missed. My parents always hired incredible chefs.

Rowan coughed to cover a laugh. “I never thought I’d be jealous of a fucking waffle.”

“Why?” I asked, not even taking my attention from the deliciousness in front of me.

“Because it’s every man’s dream to hear that sound when someone puts you in their mouth.”

My head snapped up, and Rowan just watched me, taking a sip of his coffee with a straight face.

Oh.

“Noted,” I mumbled around my next bite, my face going hot.

“Any regrets from last night?” Rowan asked.

“Is that a trick question?”

Cade shook his head. “No.”

“Not a single regret,” I told them. “And whatever you want to ask me, let’s do that now, because I don’t want to put anything off in the moment. I just want things to happen naturally.”

Joel began folding the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. “We’re not going to talk you to death. Just ask if there’s anything you don’t want us to do. Especially if you’re under the influence. We’ll still check in with you, of course, but before we start bending you over tables, we want to be on the same page.”

I almost choked, reaching for the glass of water by my plate. The image of being bent over this table was so vivid, it overtook everything. One of them pushing my sparkly dress up and moving my bathing suit to the side while they finally fucked me. It wasn’t a wide table. If they put me over it far enough, one could stand behind me while one in front⁠—

“What did you say?”

The tick of Hawk’s mouth told me I’d been zoning out to thoughts of them absolutely railing me. “I asked if you have any limits beyond those you already outlined.”

“No.” I took another sip of water. “I was pretty thorough. No permanent damage, no scars, no tickling, no degradation. Other than that, what’s on the list is good for me. But I still want to know which things belong to you. Rowan’s I know.”

“It’s a bigger list than just our preferences,” Vaughn said. “But I’ll tell you all about mine when you come with me to the beach after you finish breakfast.”

“What are we doing?”

“Teaching you to swim.”

My body went cold. I swallowed. “That’s okay. We don’t have to.”

Vaughn’s face went serious. He stood and came around the table, going to one knee beside me. Cade pushed his chair back to make room. “Rowan mentioned it in passing this morning. If I’m overstepping, I apologize. But I promise I’m not going to let anything happen to you. We don’t have to do any lessons, but I’d like to be in the water with you. And if it’s too much, we’ll stop.”

Nothing but earnest truth showed on his face. He wanted this. It wasn’t a trick to humiliate me or get me to do something silly, he just wanted me. “Okay,” I said softly. “I can try.”

“Thank you.”

“But you’re putting the sunscreen on me,” I warned him. “Or Ellie will kill you because one of her bridesmaids looks like the worst kind of contrasting reds because I fry like I’m an ant someone is burning under a magnifying glass.”

Standing and leaning down, Vaughn kissed me. He tasted so good. I smiled into the kiss. Rowan didn’t have to worry. If they all tasted the way they smelled, I would definitely moan when I put them in my mouth.

Vaughn spoke against my lips. “Putting sunscreen on you will be no hardship, Isolde. I might have to do it more than once, just to make sure you’re fully protected. And I know we don’t usually put on sunscreen beneath clothes, but we should be extra safe.”

When he pulled away my body followed him, silently asking for more. I forced myself to stay sitting and finish my waffles, because if I was going in the water, the last thing I needed was to be nervous and hungry.

Cade leaned back in his chair and set his arm across the back of mine like it was the most natural thing in the world. His fingers brushed the bare skin of my shoulder, which felt more like electric shocks. In a good way. “Yesterday while you were out we got a chance to talk to Warren,” he said. “Seems like a decent guy.”

“He is.”

“Then why is he friends with someone like your ex?”

I froze. Literally the same question had come from me, from Trinity, from Ocean, from everyone. I still didn’t know the answer, but I suspected it was a lack of information. “I don’t know. But like I told you, Beau is charming. He probably told everyone the breakup was my fault, or that it went differently than it did. Taste in friends aside, he’s really great, and I’m happy he and Ellie found each other.”

“I’d like to set him straight on a few things,” Hawk muttered under his breath before downing what little was left of his orange juice.

“I wish.”

Hawk’s eyes found mine, filled with heat. All I could think about was the feeling of him behind me, long and hard, while he held me still for everyone else. “I can take him aside and tell him the truth. It would be my pleasure.”

“I don’t want to make this whole thing about me. It’s already focused on me enough. I don’t need to throw a bomb into the middle of the bridal party. Besides, for all I know Warren knows the truth and just decided to stay out of it. I wouldn’t blame him for not touching this mess.”

He didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded. “Say the word, baby girl. I will make sure he knows exactly the kind of person his best man is. A man who would kick a woman out of his home and steal her jewelry for his new fiancée.”

Did Angela know the bracelet was mine? I hoped she didn’t. But I had hoped a lot of things about Beau, and as it turned out, not a single one of them was true. Why should this be any different?

Suddenly I didn’t have an appetite anymore.

“I’m finished. I need to grab a couple of things before we head down to the beach.”

“Geoffrey gave me some towels this morning, and I have sunscreen.” Vaughn pointed to a bag sitting at the top of the Veranda steps.

My eyebrows rose. “You’re prepared.”

“When I know what I want, I make it happen.” The way he was looking at me made me doubt it was the sunscreen he was talking about. Butterflies fluttered around in my stomach, and for the first time in what felt like forever, they weren’t nerves, but anticipation.