Disgraced Cowboys (Lone Wolves of Shay Falls 3) [Siren Publishing Ménage Amour] (13 page)

Movie monsters or not, surely she wasn’t stupid enough to think they ran around during full moons with their tongues lolling out and tails wagging, chasing bunny rabbits and rainbows. There had to be some reason Kade was after them. Some reason they scattered after the trouble at the club, alluding to the fact that Kade would blame the pack for starting the fight. Maybe Kade knew things about Seth and Marcus that Brandi didn’t yet. And maybe it was a far smarter idea to keep it that way.

After tugging her jeans over her hips, she left the zipper flapped open and picked up her purse to ease out her hairbrush. The truth was, she’d stupidly slept with two men she knew almost nothing about—one of whom had to hide in a cave from civilized society. What she knew of them should have sent her running for the hills, not racing to their bed. How stupid could she be?

Taming her sex-and-cot-tangled locks with a frown, she continued her mental tally of insanity points. She’d let a dangerous werewolf drag her to his lair, and no one even knew that she’d gone. There, she’d basically let two virile animals fuck her senseless. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d broken silence on her most guarded secret, the thing she’d never so much as hinted at to another living soul. No, she hadn’t given out the gory details of her deflowering, but she’d admitted enough to Marcus for him to know that her first sexual encounter had been forced. To finish off, she’d blubbered all over him, as though she hadn’t firmly and strictly locked that memory in the past.

Seth shifted in his sleep, and her brushing motions froze for a moment. His breathing quickly fell back into a heavy rhythm, and so did her thoughts. Why did she feel such a surge of
belonging
when she stared down at them? Such a closeness that she wanted to lie beside them and find some tawdry way to tease them awake. But sexual intimacy, as she’d long ago found, had nothing to do with closeness. What she was feeling wasn’t closeness. It was lust. Greedy appreciation, even, for the volcanic climaxes they’d coaxed from her. Feelings she’d secretly wished were possible to experience at a man’s hand. Congratulations to them for achieving the impossible.

Well, they may have brought her to powerful orgasm, but they’d brought her a handful of trouble, too. Chasing off customers, bar fights, and getting her motel door practically broken down were not good omens for a relationship. Trusting either of these men seemed like the wildest thing she’d done in a long, sad history of wild behavior. Despite her traitorous emotions and some of their pretty words and actions, when it came down to it, they hadn’t given her reason to trust.

She needed to stop staring at them, stop caressing their bodies with her wistful gaze while wishing things weren’t so bleak. She had to get back to the true world, where a solid dose of reality would jar her from the notion that sex with werewolves in a cave was a dream come true. She would chalk this experience up to a momentary lapse in sanity and move on with her plan, which was to put aside enough money to buy a little place in Nowheresville and live off the grid.

She stepped into her shoes and dropped the brush back in her purse. The brush handle clicked against the narrow plastic box she carried, and she stared at it. Yes. It would be the perfect way to remand last night to the annals of history. The way to remind herself not to turn this into more than it need be. Best to do it here and now.

Kneeling on the cave floor, she wiggled her jeans down enough to expose her tattoo. She pulled the box from her purse and flipped it open to examine the odd collection of items inside—a fine-tip marker, the remainder of a cut-apart ink pen refill, a lighter, a tiny pair of scissors, and a long needle whose dull end was wrapped in tape and gauze.

Shifting closer to the fire where the light was better, she used the scissors to snip off the tip of the ink refill. She squeezed the narrow tube until a single drop pooled on the inner box lid. One drop was all she needed.

She twisted her hip closer to the firelight so she could see what she was doing. Eyeing the tattoo carefully, she used the felt pen to mark two tiny guide dots, continuing the spiral. That was a first—two conquest dots at the same time. She grimaced. What a tramp she’d become.

Next, she picked up the needle and lighter, running the sharp end of the needle through the flame until the metal glowed orange. The wrapped end kept the heated needle from burning her fingers while she sterilized it. Finally, she dipped the needle in the squeezed-out ink and steadied her hand right over the first guide dot. Self-done tattoos hurt like a bitch, though two dot marks weren’t exactly torture—or high art, but that wasn’t the point.

She paused, frowning. What
was
the point? She’d been so driven to make these marks. Seth’s theory whispered in her head, but she shook it off.

Gritting her teeth, she prepared for the stabbing, burning pain.

“What the hell are you doin’?”

She whipped around toward Seth’s voice, almost dragging the ink-loaded needle across her skin in the process. He was propped on one elbow, staring at her through eyes that were narrowed with more than just fatigue.

“Jesus, Seth,” she whispered, flicking a glance at Marcus to make sure he hadn’t stirred as well. His eyes were shut tight. “You scared the hell out of me. I almost dropped the needle.”

“You ain’t doin’ what I think you’re doin’.”

The note of threat prompted her to rise rather stiffly from her knees and look down at him. “And why not? It’s no big deal. You know what the dots mean.”

He was on his feet with a speed and grace she couldn’t even fathom as a dancer, and he had grabbed the wrist holding the needle before she could so much as blink. “I do, which is exactly why you ain’t gonna do it.” His voice was lowered to a faint whisper, too, but no less deadly serious for the lack of volume.

“Let go of me.” She twisted her wrist, trying to loosen his iron grip. “I’m holding a needle, you know.”

He plucked it right out of her fingers and tossed it into the fire pit. “Not anymore, you ain’t.”

She scowled at him. “Most guys said it was a turn-on to watch me mark them on my skin. What’s your problem?”

The gold in his eyes brightened to an unsettling red-gold. “My problem is I ain’t most guys.”

“You’re acting like Marcus now. I thought you said you aren’t the jealous type. I thought you were okay with my past.”

He grazed his fingers lightly over her tattoo before tugging her jeans back into place. “I don’t care about your past, Brandi. But I’ll be damned if you think that’s where you’re gonna stick me and Marcus. We’re here now. And that’s where we’re stayin’.”

“I can still add your marks to the tattoo later, you know. It’s my body, my choice.”

He grabbed her arm. “Not anymore.”

“Take your hand off me. What did you think? That I was going to live in a cave with a pair of murdering dogs?”

He flinched and dropped her arm like it had burned him. “
Murderin’
dogs?”

“Of course. I’m not stupid, Seth. I don’t believe for one minute that werewolves sit on their tails around a campfire, howling show tunes at the full moon. There are tons of stories about what your kind is capable of. You’re monsters.”

His expression darkened. “What we’re capable of and what we do are two different things.”

“What’s goin’ on?” Marcus said. The question had a sleepy, almost boyish quality to it.

A pang of guilt washed over her as she and Seth studied each other for a moment before turning to him.

“Nothin’,” Seth said. “Brandi was just tellin’ me what she thought of last night.”

A slow grin spread up one side of Marcus’s face. “The dream I was just havin’ was tellin’ me the same thing.”

The teasing glint in his eye rapidly faded as he glanced back and forth between their expressions. He stared off into space for a moment, lost in thought. Then his eyes found hers again, and his smile turned grim.

Apparently, sleep had not only covered over her conversation with Seth, it had made Marcus forget her ridiculous outburst, too. His male subconscious had ignored her pain and focused on the wild sex portion of the evening. She’d love to ignore it, too. She’d love to ignore a lot of things. But she couldn’t.

“I need to get back,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at a scowling Seth. “It’d be helpful if someone could point the way to my car.”

“You can’t stay at that motel,” Marcus said, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. “It isn’t safe for you there anymore.”

“Kade will be back,” Seth said. “He knows who you are to us. He knows we won’t leave you alone for long.”

“Oh, you’d both better leave me alone.” She gathered up her tattoo kit, snapped the box shut, and dropped it into her purse before zipping it tightly closed.

“What are you talkin’ about?” Marcus asked,

“She thinks we’re animals,” Seth said, eyeing her with a frown.

“We are animals.”

“I mean the bad kind.”

That gave Marcus pause for a moment. “You’ll be safer with us,” he said.

“Is that a fact? Funny, because I think I’d be a lot safer far away from you.”

Marcus looked like he’d been slapped.

Seth took a step deeper into her personal space. “What the hell are you sayin’?”

“No, she’s right.” Marcus got to his feet, brushing dust from his jeans. Her eyes widened.

“What do you mean, she’s right?”

“We are a danger to her as long as we have unfinished business with Kade.”

Seth watched him, his hands settling on his hips. “And between us.”

Marcus actually flinched. “That business is
out
of business. You know we can’t finish it.”

“So you keep sayin’, and yet you came back for more.”

“Because you were fuckin’ around with my woman.”

Seth snorted. “
Your
woman?”

Marcus’s eyes shifted quickly to Brandi, whose mouth was already open to fire off a reply. “I just had to make sure you were okay.”

“Well, I’m not okay.” She hefted the purse onto her shoulder and crossed her arms. “Okay was three days ago, before you came strutting your cowboy stuff into my club.”

“That ain’t the only reason you came here last night,” Seth said, stalking toward Marcus. “Admit it. You couldn’t even sense Brandi yet—you hadn’t fucked her. It was my hot, grindin’ lust that you felt. You couldn’t resist, could you? Couldn’t stay away. This wasn’t about bein’ jealous that Brandi was with someone. You couldn’t stand knowin’ that
I
was.”

Marcus’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared, but he didn’t respond.

“You can’t fight this forever,” Seth went on as he pressed forward, his voice falling into a hypnotic eroticism that had her stomach doing little flips. “It’s impossible to deny what’s between us.”

Marcus shook his head. “It ain’t impossible. Other mates have managed to stay apart.”

“Not without a shitload of sufferin’ I ain’t willin’ to face.” Seth was inches away from Marcus now, and he reached out to run a hand along the man’s sleeve. “And I know you’ve been sufferin’ as much as I have.”

She saw Marcus swallow hard, felt the air in the cave come alive and crackle with the desire bouncing back and forth between them. One minute she’d been determined to leave. The next, she was cemented in place, buffeted by enticing waves of eroticism.

“The sufferin’ don’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. It’s tellin’ us that this is wrong. Kade was wrong.”

Brandi actually felt Marcus’s body respond, and a glance down at his thickening crotch proved it. His control was slipping.

Shit. So was hers.

“You know how hard it was for me to keep my hands off you all night?” Seth went on, his strokes moving to Marcus’s chest. “I felt it from you, too. You wanted me. I ache all the time now, and even sinkin’ myself in Brandi’s luscious body can’t fully quench it. This math don’t work without you in the equation.”

She felt a brief pang of something—jealousy, perhaps? Rejection? But she had to admit, she knew what Seth meant. Even in the midst of his incredibly skilled lovemaking, she’d found herself thinking of Marcus.

“I ache, too,” Marcus said, sounding hoarse. “But a smart man can’t always follow his cock. It too often points the way to trouble.”

With that, the hand Seth was running along Marcus’s firm chest plunged down past his waistband to grip the long, hard shaft clearly outlined in his jeans. “It’s pointin’ the way to me,” Seth said. “And stayin’ away from you would require a reason far more compellin’ than the word of a man who rejected us.”

Before Marcus could respond, Seth kissed him.

A jolt of arousal coursed through Brandi’s spine as she watched. Marcus stiffened, his fists clenched at his sides, but Seth pressed on, nipping and licking Marcus’s lower lip. She knew the exact moment when Marcus’s resistance caved. When it did, it was like a sexual dam had burst. He grabbed Seth’s arms and plunged his tongue into the other man’s mouth. Seth moaned and rubbed the front of Marcus’s jeans harder.

Her mouth fell open as she stood there, all but forgotten. Still, while the men might no longer be focused on anything but each other, that didn’t mean she was completely isolated from the action. Lust flooded off them in waves, surrounding her, penetrating her in every way imaginable. Her purse hit the ground as she felt her body respond powerfully. Her nipples tightened, butterflies ricocheted around her stomach, and a wet gush of heat flooded her cunt.