“Could we just pretend I saw one and he said there’s nothing wrong with me?” Austin suggested. There was a hint of humor in his voice.
“Better say it’s a woman if you want your mom to trust it,” Jay said. “What with all men being pedophiles and abusers.”
“How did you end things?” Liam asked, and Austin pulled away from Jay and moved to make Liam a cup of tea.
“Okay, I guess. Not great. And I promised I’d go pick up April for Christmas break—don’t ask how she talked me into that one.”
“What?” Jay opened the fridge door with a bad-tempered yank and took out a can of ginger ale. “Well, that’s just great. So you’ll be gone for the day, driving on busy roads, missing one of the last weekends before Liam goes away—”
“I’ll probably have to stay overnight,” Austin said apologetically. “Leave early Saturday, get there after lunch, speak to Ryan and sort things out if I can—”
Jay snorted, his incredulity plain. He popped the can and watched the ginger ale fizz up, bending to lick a few drops off his hand as it spilled down the side of the can. “Oh, that’s going to go well. Because who doesn’t like being told he’s not allowed to break up with a crazy girlfriend by the crazy girlfriend’s gay brother? I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.” Austin poured water onto a tea bag and jiggled it halfheartedly up and down a few times. “Liam, tell him he’s got to stay here. There’s no need for us both to go, and April will behave better if it’s just me.”
“We could all go,” Liam suggested, though it was the last thing he wanted. “Stay in a hotel, let you sort things out with your sister, then Jay and I can rent a car and let you drive back with her. She won’t even know we’re there.”
Austin rolled his eyes. “Oh, she’d know,” he muttered. “Don’t ask me how, but she’d find out, and if Mom got to hear about it, it’d make things worse. I can handle it.” He thrust the mug he was holding at Liam. “I’m going to grab a shower. I feel like things are crawling over me.”
He left the kitchen, and Liam exhaled, turning to Jay, who was sipping from his can, his expression unreadable.
“That didn’t go well, but I suppose it could’ve gone worse.”
Jay gave him a weary look. “You think that was it? Reaction over, everyone moving forward? You don’t know Austin. This is gonna stick with him for weeks. He’ll blame himself, second-guess everything he said and did, agonize over how it’ll affect us…start taking those fucking pills he thinks I don’t know about.” He drained the can and squeezed it, crushing it to a shapeless mass, his hand shaking. “And he’s going away without us,” he added tonelessly.
Liam would’ve preferred yelling. That he could deal with. Helpless, lost, he took the can away from Jay before it cut his hand and pulled Jay to him in a tight hug. “We won’t let him do any of that. The pills, well, if they’re doctor prescribed, they might help him, I don’t know, but we won’t let him blame himself. None of this is his fault.”
“No, it’s mine.” Jay rubbed his forehead against Liam’s shoulder, his hands clutching at Liam. “It was me who dragged us into the bedroom, and that’s why we got caught.”
“Stop.” Liam held Jay firmly, ran a hand up along his spine to his shoulder. “You don’t both get to go to pieces at the same time. It’s your turn to be the sensible one.”
“But he’s going away,” Jay muttered. The heat of his breath seeped through the fabric of Liam’s shirt.
“Only for one night.” Liam slid his hand down to Jay’s arse and squeezed it. It might have been cheating to distract Jay with touch, but if it worked, he didn’t care.
Jay moved against him, pressing closer. “Make me feel better?”
Liam didn’t want to get into anything too complicated; it wouldn’t be fair to Austin, who still needed their support. But it was easy enough to do something quickly that would satisfy Jay. “Turn around,” he said decisively. “Hands on the counter.”
While Jay obeyed, Liam moved to the utensil drawer where he kept spatulas and large spoons. There was a wooden spoon there, a long, sturdy one probably meant to go into soup pots. Liam set it on the counter and reached around to undo Jay’s jeans, yanking them roughly down to his knees to leave his arse bare.
“Five,” Liam said. “If you can keep quiet. As soon as you make a sound, it’s over.”
Jay arched his back, naked arse begging for Liam’s attention.
It felt strange to be doing this when he wasn’t at all turned on, and his intention wasn’t to work Jay up but to calm him down. The first flat smack of wood against flesh was just that, a sound, unconnected to any feelings of desire or pleasure in his dominance or Jay’s submission.
Maybe if Jay had moaned—but though his breathing quickened, he didn’t make a sound.
Liam surveyed the faintly pink mark rising on Jay’s backside and put his hand against it. The warmth of the skin wasn’t due to the single smack, but if he placed all five smacks there, Jay would be left with a sore, stinging patch of skin for a while. The idea excited him, drawing an answering throb from his cock.
He’d made Jay write out the definition of a sadist and received page after page of lines. Jay could have saved himself time and written
Liam
a hundred times and been as accurate. He loved hurting him, marking Jay’s skin darkly, deeply, bruising it, whipping it, using heat and ice to evoke whimpers and screams. He hadn’t come close to reaching Jay’s limits, and sometimes he wondered where they were in relation to his own.
Not so far apart, he suspected.
Austin’s submission was reached by a different route, equally satisfying to travel but less direct. In some ways he was more of a challenge than Jay, needing careful, intelligent handling.
Jay’s needs were less complex.
Smiling now, the brief spanking doing as much to settle him as Jay, Liam dealt out four more brisk, hard, accurate smacks, watching Jay’s body jerk as the pain built in that one place.
“One day I’ll do that and keep going,” Liam said, rubbing the spoon roughly across the reddened skin, then tossing it onto the counter and using his fingertips instead. “Beat you just here”—he pinched the hot skin—“until the bruise you get stays there for days and you cry out when I touch it, flinch if I even breathe on it.”
Jay turned in his arms, face lifted, fingers sliding around the back of Liam’s head to draw it down. Liam was too turned on to protest; the feel of Jay’s firm, eager cock against the front of his trousers was maddening in the best possible way, and he made no attempt to hold back when he kissed Jay, who moaned as Liam’s tongue invaded his mouth.
“Cover you with my marks,” Liam told him, tugging his hair to tilt his head, biting at the tenderest parts of his throat. “Get you so hot for it and then leave you to burn, waiting for me.” He pulled back and looked at Jay sternly. “Now compose yourself, and go upstairs. We need to help Austin get past this as best we can.”
Jay pressed his lips together and nodded, reaching to tug his clothes back into place. “Yes, Sir. Thank you.”
“I’ll be there when I’ve finished my tea,” Liam added. He wanted the two of them to have some time together. They were so tactile with each other, always sitting close, touching often, and seeing Austin shrug away from Jay earlier had troubled Liam. He was willing to bet that when he’d poured the tea away—it was tepid now and too strong, the bag still floating in the water—and joined them in the bedroom, they’d be hugging.
He rinsed the mug and looked around the pristine kitchen. No sign of any preparations for supper. Well, that was why takeout had been invented. They wouldn’t be hungry right now, but he’d make sure they ate later.
It was dark outside, the kitchen window reflecting back the lighted kitchen, not the bleakness of a garden waiting for snow to transform it. Liam saw himself, tall, good-looking, he supposed without vanity, but just about old enough to be Jay and Austin’s father if he’d been very precocious. Fifteen years separated him from them, and he felt that gap at times, but mostly it didn’t matter. If their ages had been reversed, he would still be the one in charge. Size, strength, age—none of that factored in when it came to the relationship between a Dom and a sub. He controlled them, he owned them, because it was the way they all wanted it to be.
Sarah, even unaware of that deeper level of trust, would see him as a threat in so many ways, though. Liam screwed up his face in a grimace, then sighed, exasperated and uneasy.
Time to tell Austin everything was fine, put him between the two men who loved him, and soothe him with words and their bodies until Austin found a temporary comfort.
Time to be convincing and lie to them for the first time since he’d met them, because it wasn’t fine; it couldn’t be. Sarah knew, and even if by some miracle she’d greeted the news with approval and understanding, she could still spill their secret with an unguarded word. And if she did, swearing the recipient to secrecy wouldn’t work.
Juicy gossip spread as fast as head lice in a kindergarten in Liam’s jaundiced view.
He had to trust a woman he didn’t know to keep her mouth shut—and set aside her hurt and anger—to protect the son she loved. It wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, he was extremely tempted to contact her himself and suggest they talk, but knew it was a terrible idea that couldn’t be entertained.
It was quiet as he climbed the stairs; the shower wasn’t running, but he could hear Jay and Austin talking. He found them curled up on the bed, Austin underneath the covers with his damp head resting on Jay’s chest. Jay’s T-shirt was dark with absorbed water, but he was clearly unconcerned about it.
“I’m sorry, Liam,” Austin said when he joined them.
“What for?” Liam asked. “Here, move over.”
Austin and Jay shifted to make room for him. “I feel like there’s always some big drama. There didn’t used to be, I swear.”
“In which case it could be argued that I’m the cause,” Liam pointed out.
“You’re not,” Austin said bleakly. “It’s me.”
“It’s not you,” Jay said. “It’s your mother and April and maybe the situation, but it’s not you.”
“It feels like it is. I mean, I get that I’m not responsible for my mom’s reaction. I just wish I’d figured out how to tell her before she got the wrong idea. Although if I’d known how to do it, I would have.”
“You knew she wasn’t going to like it.” Jay was slowly running his fingers through Austin’s hair, combing it into shape.
“What we have isn’t common, but a ménage à trois is hardly unheard of in history and literature.” Liam shifted on the bed, getting comfortable. He loved being in here with them. A room he’d used for sleeping in, as impersonal as any hotel, had become a warm, inviting space. Jay’s books lay on every flat surface; a crossword Austin was working on, a pencil clipped to it, was on the night table, held down by a half-empty bottle of lube. Austin made the bed daily, using the crisp white sheets Liam preferred, but a body pillow with purple, green, and gold dragons flying across it kept appearing at the head of the bed, no matter how many times Liam tossed it into the spare room or down the basement stairs.
The room smelled of them now, an indefinable, familiar scent. The bed was crowded when the lights went out, with Liam on the left, the other two taking it in turns to sleep beside him, claiming it as a reward. He woke in the night and heard them breathing or turning over, nestling closer to each other or throwing out an arm to anchor him in place.
Liam treasured the intimacy of sleeping with them, but when he looked at the bed, smooth, pillows plumped, his mind usually went not to sleeping but making love, the three of them naked, striving to reach a climax.
God, the things they did…the things they’d taught him…
He cleared his throat, aware that between spanking Jay and his happily lustful thoughts he was both hard and in a better frame of mind. “I mean, the French wouldn’t have invented a term for it if it was a rarity. Look at Lady Hamilton, her husband, and Lord Nelson. They lived together for years.”
“Uh, yeah,” Jay said.
“And then there was the classic example of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere…” he continued blandly, enjoying the sidelong glances they exchanged as they tried to look attentive. “We’re a modern version of a well-established tradition.”
“Maybe you should be the one to talk to my mother.” Austin immediately rolled over and hugged Liam. “Don’t listen to me. I’m insane.”
“No, you’re not. And I won’t.” Liam wouldn’t admit he’d already considered the idea—that would make it seem more reasonable, and it wasn’t reasonable, not even slightly. “Jay, I’m sure you could tell us about some famous threesomes in literature.”
As usual, Jay’s eyes lit up at the mention of books. He curled around Austin, kissing the back of Austin’s ear before warming to his topic. “There’s this book by Poul Anderson about aliens—I think they’re on Jupiter. The woman has to sleep with two men in a row to get pregnant, and then they all live together as a family.”
“My mom would like that better,” Austin said mournfully. “If there was a chance she’d get a grandchild out of it.”
“This isn’t Jupiter,” Liam said. “I was thinking of something a bit more realistic.”
“Realism’s overrated.” Jay’s hand, which had been resting on the covers over Austin’s hip, slid a bit lower over the front of Austin’s thigh. “Most of them are about two guys and a girl, unless you want to talk about erotica. Then there’s plenty of gay threesomes, not to mention vampires, werewolves, and—”
“Fantasy,” Liam said, dismissing it, and leaned in to kiss Jay over Austin. Jay could easily be distracted by a well-timed kiss.
Jay took the kiss as eagerly as Liam had expected, his tongue flirting against Liam’s, the taste of his mouth addictive enough that Liam found it difficult to pull back. Jay’s eyes were gleaming, amused and knowing, as if he could tell how that one kiss had left Liam hungry for more. Oh, someone hadn’t been spanked hard enough.
Time to take control. Sex wasn’t a cure for everything, but it would certainly make for an effective distraction. Liam was damned if Austin was going to spend the evening moping, doubting his life choices, prey to regrets.
They were here, they were together, and there were better things to do than talk.