All Chapters of BREAK ME KNOT: An Omegaverse Quarterback Romance: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Maeve's POVI was not going. I said this to myself at ten o'clock, lying on my bed looking at the ceiling with the note on my phone-stand where I had put it after I got home, still in its envelope, still saying the same two words it had been saying for four hours. I was not going because going would undo the four days I had just put in. Going would confirm that my mother's visit and the text I had sent and the decision I had made in the dorm room on Tuesday with the bond contradicting me from across campus had meant nothing, that I could be moved by two words in a handwriting I had seen once, that I was the kind of person who said can't see you anymore and then showed up at a rink at midnight. I was not that person. I was Maeve Collins. I did not do things I had decided not to do. I said this at ten thirty. At eleven. At eleven fifteen when Alana came in from wherever she had been and took one look at me and changed for bed without saying anything, which was its own kind of state

Maeve's POVThe cabin was small and wooden, and it smelled of pine and old fires. it had the air of a space that had been loved by the same family for a long time. Marcus had given Declan a key and a code for the lockbox and the instruction that anything we broke we replace before Monday, which Declan had relayed to me in the car on the way up with the expression of a man who was slightly worried about what that said about Marcus's estimation of them. "He's not wrong to worry," I said. "We're very responsible people," Declan said. "We broke your lamp," I said. "That was in the throes of the bond," he said. "It doesn't count." We got there Friday evening when the light was going gold through the trees, and I stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the small sitting room with its fireplace and its two mismatched armchairs and its window looking out at the tree line, and I thought, I’d be here for forty-eight hours. This is what the next forty-eight hours looks like. "Kitch

He pushed her onto her back and forced her arms over her head. He’d done it so many times, she knew he didn’t have to think of how much strength to exert to keep them right where he left them. His hands felt like so many things at once: dominance, strength, her anchor. She breathed out a sigh, and her teeth dug into her lips as he laid a palm against her heavy breasts. A finger ran over her hard nipple mindlessly, tracing circles that drove her mad, and she writhed beneath his hold because it felt too much. What a stroke of his finger could do to her. “Stay still.” His voice was leveled with a hint of boredom that made her feel like his touch on her body was nothing but a way for him to pass the time. Like she was something he was using. But the feral delight in his eyes told her otherwise. And if that wasn’t enough, the bulge she could see through his pants said enough. He was fully dressed; a whort shirt rolled up to his elbow, and black pants that betrayed the strength in his t

Maeve's POVThe text from Alana came at seven forty-three on a Thursday morning. I was still half-asleep, tangled in my duvet and dreaming of woodsmoke and Declan’s hands, when the sharp ping of my phone shattered the silence. Don’t open Twitter. I mean it. Get dressed and call me. Naturally, the first thing I did was open Twitter. I didn't even have to search. I was trending. Or rather, we were. The photos were from the grocery store in Vermont. I remembered the moment clearly—we had been standing in the coffee aisle, arguing over whether the organic dark roast was worth the extra five dollars. I had been laughing, my head tilted back, and Declan had been looking down at me with that look. The one he thought he hid. Someone had recognized one or both of us. It was easy enough in a busy aisle when you weren't thinking about being a public figure. When you were just a girl and a boy buying groceries. They were, objectively, innocent photographs. In the first one, his hand was fl

Maeve’s POV My mother called back exactly nine-thirty. In the Ashford household, nine-thirty was when the "soft" morning ended, and the "hard" business began. She didn't waste time on a greeting. She simply began reading a statement in the measured, rhythmic cadence she used for press briefings—the voice of a woman who had already decided how the world was going to view her daughter. “Maeve Collins is a first-year student at Blackwood University, focused entirely on her rigorous academic commitments. Any suggestion of a romantic relationship is speculative, unfounded, and an intrusion into the privacy of a young woman pursuing her education. The Collins family asks for the respect afforded to any student.” “No,” I said. The word was small, but it felt like a gunshot in the quiet of my dorm room. On the other side of the room, Alana’s head snapped up. “I’m sorry?” my mother asked. It wasn't an apology; it was a demand for me to correct my hearing. “I said no. I’m not releasing