Three’s a Clan (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Shelly

The words from Richard’s mouth had just worked their way through the fog in my brain when his fingers released my pleasure zones. The nearly numb nipple and clit flooded back to life. My body began to spasm. The pain and pleasure blended and I couldn’t tell up from down when my pussy was filled once again with cock. The waves of orgasm threatened, but I couldn’t move. Trevor’s arms held me. Richard’s hand pushed me down.

I struggled until I felt the head of Richard’s cock against my ass. The world stopped turning for a brief moment as my body struggled to take them both. Then the world righted itself again and began to spin. I was spinning with it as my men began to thrust. My body flew higher. We all spun out of control, and I felt the impossible hardness inside of me.

It wasn’t just sex. Their warm bodies encased me in love that I never thought was possible. I floated as they thrust. This was home. My body tightened and I felt them both pulse inside me as I clamped down. I didn’t want to let them be anywhere else. Tears slipped from my eyes, and the foundation holding up the walls around my heart cracked. The orgasm lasted for years.

An ache inside me soothed as they both came with me. Our bodies still vibrated as Rick tilted us to the side. Neither man left my body until their softened cocks slipped out reluctantly on their own. I wished I could have held them there forever.

Tears poured from my eyes then as I slipped from consciousness. I wished I could keep
them
. I wished I could hold this moment. But no amount of wishing would prevent me from doing what needed to be done. And even with a lack of conscious thought, my heart began to repair the wall. I had to go.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Rick

I woke up with a hard on. Too bad I woke up cuddled to my Beta instead of the warm body I wanted to sink said hard on into. Trevor woke at the same time I did and we pushed away from each other in that awkward way guys do when their woman isn’t between them anymore.

Maybe it’s not that common of a thing, but believe me, it’s not a comfortable moment.

“Where is she?” Trevor demanded.

I saw the paper on the weight bench immediately. I didn’t need to read it. It was Trevor who picked up the white fold standing like a tent on the vinyl. It didn’t have any names on it. I wondered if she hadn’t wanted to write our names or was in too much of a rush to bother.

He unfolded the unlined white document and I could see the rage climb from his chest, throb at the pulse on his neck, and work its way into the twitching vein in his temple. Shelly was obviously gone. We had thought putting her between us would convince her to stay, but…

“She left anyway.” Trevor finished my thought. This mating had linked us even more. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I stood and my bones creaked after lying on the cement floor. “Maybe if we had taken her in a bed this time, it might have shown some respect.”

“Maybe if we would have held her marks between our teeth again like I wanted to she wouldn’t have been able to leave.” He waved the paper in my face.

I would never hear the end of that argument. Trevor was stubborn enough that he would be like a dog with a bone. Unfortunately, we were both currently without a sweet warm body to bury our bones in.

“She was crying, Trevor.” I reminded him. “We were pushing her too much as it was. Do you really think she could have handled more?”

“I think we just missed our last shot to lay all our cards on the table. I don’t know what you did to block yourself off from us or how, but you should have let us in.” Trevor didn’t look at me, but his words cut through me like the sharpest silver.

I thought about it for a second. “Well, we just go after her.”

“No.
I
go after her. You have to stabilize the Pack. That’s a job I can’t do.”

“You don’t think that you are needed here just as much as I am?”

Trevor was already dressed. The united force we had built to bring down Shelly’s walls used to be a battering ram. Now we were two separate soldiers and didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to bring Shelly back or run away with her.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Just bring her home.”

Trevor grunted. He looked at me and tugged at our bond. I felt his motivation. I felt his drive. And I felt that Shelly was his home now just as much as the Pack was. If the two couldn’t stand together, I’d have to find a new way. There was no guarantee that I would ever see them again. Wolves either fought to take over a Pack, or ran for another. Trevor would never challenge me; I had to trust that he would come back. I had to trust our bond was enough.

There was always a part of me that held itself in check. Shelly wasn’t the only one with walls. I invented walls. I held the patent for walls that could withstand a nuclear blast. So instead of demanding to be in on the recon mission, and demanding that I be with him when he found her, I just let him go.

If I wasn’t strong enough to hold us together, then what difference would it make if I went with him? I had a Pack to manage. It was the only part of my life I had certainty over right now. So I headed to the shower. I had to get their smell off me if I was going to function with any semblance of authority.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shelly

I was the Protector, but lately I felt more like a damn mother. I was not cut out to be anybody’s momma. There was not a single being on this planet that I wanted to take care of.

“It’s only temporary, Brandon. We will have our own place again soon.” I was not cleaning up after people anymore. Too bad this damn miasma held me prisoner in my position. Unless I wanted to really earn the nickname
Barbie
and have an empty skull too, this was a non-erasable part.

Images of Amber, images of Jake, their baby, Mary, the circle…Richard.
No!
But it was too late. The freaking magical goo inside my head started flipping through the rolodex.

“Did you hear me, Shelly?” Brandon asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Go ahead. Do that.” I waved at him and put my hands back to my temples.

“So you want me to lead a rebellion the likes of which this world has never seen and take out all the gingers?”

“What?” I couldn’t keep up with the youngest member of our Family that I had found.

“Well, they say that redheaded freckled people have no souls.”

It took, even the miasma a minute to get that reference. “No they don’t, dingbat. That’s an episode of
South Park
.”

My head was erupting in another headache. Sure, the headache started at my neck. Technically, it started at both sides of my neck. Damn matemarks.

“We will work on a plan in the morning. There isn’t anyone else the old Matheo sent out hunting that we didn’t round up, right?”

“Nobody else that wants to come back to the Family, Shelly.” Brandon’s words lost his humor. His girlfriend was one of those that left.

I just nodded. I was wondering what the hell I was doing again. There wasn’t a whole Family here anymore. Would it be horrible if I left too? But then what would I be?

Nobody came out of this whole. I had helped kill the Matheo of the Meyers Family. My hands had his blood on them. No matter how hard I scrubbed in the shower this morning, it was still there. The people I was supposed to protect were scattered. I was not going to bring all of them back to the mansion by force, or wherever we ended up since I had handed over the mansion keys to the witches.

A little part of me was tempted to drag a few of the stray vampires in to let it get physical. I wanted a fight right now. It might take my mind off other physical activities that the miasma wouldn’t let go of. The werewolves I ran out on were star players in the movies my superbrain played on repeat.

I could sometimes block the miasma enough that I wouldn’t get flashes and pictures floating in between my conscious thoughts, but it wasn’t easy. The Shelly Cinema seemed to have the werewolf ménage movie on regular rotation the rest of the time.

Richard’s cock breaching my ring of muscles and warring with the resistance of my already-full body sent tremors through me. I felt empty. There was always something missing now.

Brandon and I were sharing one of the hotel rooms. I had no idea where we would go from here, so I had paid for the week. It was the longest rate they would provide me with. At almost a tenth of my total “get us settled in a new non-harvester life” budget, I needed to think fast. The problem was my mind couldn’t stop the movie.

I lay on top of the covers of my double bed. After I put towels over the top, I was grateful I had another layer between my body and whatever could be living in this mattress. I never said the hotel was a nice one. It rented by the hour as well as the week.

I turned one way and watched as Brandon fell asleep. I knew he was out when he flipped on his side and his hands reached out next to him. Brandon’s body moved a bit more. He was sliding over to his side of the mattress. He told me that he was looking forward to sleeping alone for the first time in centuries, but as his body sought the warmth it lost in his lover’s absence, I knew he was trying to build walls as thick as mine. I had noticed him doing the same thing last night.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the higher you build those walls, the harder they fall.

The bricks I had thought were so strong, the façade I thought was so iron-clad, had been teetering. I was hanging on, but it wasn’t by much. I had thought I would get stronger with time, but in the short term at least, I could admit what a fucking idiot I was.

The bed beneath me was relatively soft. The room was a comfortable temperature, kept that way by the wheezing unit blowing air underneath the sealed window. It would never feel right. So I looked at Brandon one last time before escaping out the door. I tucked the flimsy keycard in my back pocket and tried not to run as I left the building. I knew I had to go back in the morning, but tonight I needed the woods.

The forest wasn’t a luxury afforded in this highly populated area. My heart ached for a ground heavy with detritus. I had to settle for mulch. I probably looked crazy, but I didn’t give a shit. I was lying down beneath the branches of a carefully pruned evergreen because it was all I had to work with.

The statuesque trees were spaced evenly apart. Nothing random or remotely natural about them, but at the feel of the ground against my back, my mind eased just a bit. I let the miasma take me where it had been fighting to go all day. I relived my claiming. When we hadn’t had time, or a bed, or anything but a need to be together, I had everything I ever wanted. So what if I was a freak who needed two men? They needed to share me as much as I needed both of them. And for a few days, I had it all. I had purpose, I had love, and I had Family. Now I had time and I had to decide where to go. I had to decide what to be. For once my miasma slowed.

I took in a breath to inhale the scent of the smell of the earth. It was wrong. It wasn’t where I was supposed to be. My men weren’t holding me on the ground this time. Those heavy warm bodies weren’t surrounding me. Those cocks weren’t barreling into my body to send me higher than I thought was possible without the aid of batteries. I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest.

“I want it all. I want their love, I want my life, I want my power, and I want them to hold me at night when it’s too much. Gods. I am a greedy bitch. I don’t deserve it, but I want it.” My words went out into the universe unanswered.

I huffed a laugh at myself. I knew it wasn’t enough to want things in this life, or any other lifetime you might jump into. You had to do it yourself. I had to do it myself, but first I had to decide if I was worth it.

I wasn’t so sure.

Ironically, I am unable to sleep like the dead. Even at my most depleted, I will be up with the sun. No, I don’t sparkle. No, I don’t burn at the touch of the sun. I simply am a bit weaker by the light of day, or in really high temperatures. For some reason, the moon allows the power and magic that we have inside us as vampires to move more easily. They say warm blood moves faster, but the blood that I carry inside me prefers cooler temperatures. None of this is scientific or even remotely proven or written anywhere, for obvious reasons. It’s just how I’ve observed my own body working after all this time. Something else I noticed about myself was I hate doing what I am supposed to do to fit in.

We were all out to breakfast. The small diner we chose had waitresses wearing regular street clothes and aprons of questionable cleanliness. They had just a handful of booths filled with even fewer people, and there wasn’t a soul there who was interested in what we were doing. The heat of the grill warmed the room so much they had windows rolled open.

No, we weren’t eating. We had coffee and doughnuts sprawled across the table in our booth. We were surreptitiously tossing the food evenly between the birds outside and the trashcan behind us. Anytime we stayed somewhere more than a day or two, we went out to eat. It was an obnoxious but necessary part of playing human. I ran my tongue along my canine and felt it lengthen.

There was a little girl with bouncy blonde curls using the booth three down from us as a trampoline. She was in the middle of attempting a flip as her mother tried to soothe her with some eggs and bacon. The little girl wasn’t right. The little girl I wanted to see would have Amber’s red hair. I wondered if the baby would carry any of Jake’s features or if Amber’s DNA would barrel through the conception process just like her personality barreled through everything else.

I was set on my course to live without a home for eternity. We were always taught we couldn’t have a home. So this ache in my chest was something new.

Home
. The word was foreign, because my father made sure that the word
home
was synonymous to weakness. We never aged. We couldn’t stay static. He didn’t understand that home wasn’t a place. It was people.

I had run away from my home.

My neck started to itch. I tugged at the scarf I had taken to wearing.

Brandon leaned back in the booth and tossed the rest of his doughnut behind him. “When are we heading back there?”

The small group all looked to me for the answer.

“What are you talking about?”

He just snorted. Snorting is very unbecoming of a vampire. He waved a hand through the air at the distaste showing through my curved upper lip.

“You know exactly what I mean, Shelly. We are biding our time here until you figure out what to do with us so you can go back to your mates. We may not be wolves, but none of us are inept enough to not recognize a matemark when we see one.” Brandon took a deep breath. “But I doubt from those wine colored marks on your throat that they made you leave. It’s only a matter of time before they find you. We might as well go back.”

“Who says they are even looking for me?” I asked. “Maybe they realize this was a mistake and will thank me.”

Brandon motioned behind me. “Or maybe one of them is over at the doughnut counter looking like he is hungry for something a lot less sugary than pastry.”

I wasn’t careful of my speed and I heard that same little girl squeak in surprise with how fast I stood and turned. Trevor was here. I felt pressure in my chest that seemed a lot like the emotions I was trying to tamp down. I also felt the left side of my neck begin to ache. Almost as fast, I wondered why Rick wasn’t here. Did I break up the Pack? What was he doing here when I had left such a mess for them to clean up?

Trevor walked at a human pace until he was inches from me. He smelled amazing. “Your friend’s right. What I am hungry for is more spicy than sugary. She’s got a rough edge, but it’s worth whatever scrapes I get along the way.”

I couldn’t move. He was so much bigger than me, and had such heat in his eyes that I could see some of the men in the doughnut shop looking at each other wondering if they should intervene. All of them together couldn’t take down a werewolf. He might be the Beta, but his quiet strength was still nothing to mess with. He couldn’t cover it right now. He might defer to Alpha Paulson, but it was a choice. It was a respect, and in his own way, it was a love.

He had a different role, but where I had seen him before as submissive to Alpha, I saw it differently now. After his bite had held me and completed me, I saw. He was just as strong as Richard. He held power over his emotions that lent him to the role of Beta in the Pack. He could control his temper, and he could help others do the same. He had always been in control when we were together.

Not now. Not today.
This
was Trevor. This was the man who had given up everything he wanted in life to do what he thought was right.

This was the man who knew what he was couldn’t be handled by a mortal woman. This was the man who saw in me not only someone who could bring together the love he always had wanted, but one he never thought possible. There was a lot of responsibility in taking him. Because he wasn’t going to settle this time. The scary thing was, I wasn’t willing to settle anymore either, and we both had to give the other everything in order to make this work.

It was all waiting for me in a little town in the Midwest. Yet I couldn’t get my feet to move. The only thing scarier than realizing you had the opportunity to have everything you ever wanted was being afraid you weren’t enough to keep it.

“Come on guys. Let’s go load up the cars.” Brandon stood and took the half dozen vampires to toss the uneaten food and still full coffee cups in the bins by the front doors.

I put a hand on his shoulder and held him as he tried to push at the metal bar on the glass door. “We aren’t sure where we are going yet.”

Brandon looked behind me. “Either way, we have to go somewhere. I’ll pack your bag too.”

I let them go. Not because I was ready to jump on the happy vampire train back to the mansion, but because I couldn’t resist the pull that was coming from behind me. Trevor was reaching for me without moving a muscle. I scratched my neck and turned to address him. “We need to get out of here.”

He grinned. Arrogant bastard. “I don’t have a room up here. Where did you want to go?”

“I am not talking about that.” I left money for the server. “I am talking about having a discussion in a place where we can use grown up words and I can take this horrid scarf off my neck. You make me itch.”

As we left the small shop I heard him mumble, “Well you make me burn.”

I ignored him.

We walked in silence until I got to the small park where I’d lain last night. His nose twitched. Freaking werewolf senses.

“Yes, I was here last night.” I told him before he could ask.

“Why?”

I lied. “I needed to think.”

He ducked down by the trees and sniffed. “You think better laying on the ground?”

Time to change the subject. “Why did you come for me?”

He looked at me like I was a simpleton. “When one’s mate goes somewhere, one follows one’s mate. Part of the whole forever thing that goes along with the mating.”

“Where’s Richard then?”

Trevor just cocked his head to the side and watched me. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of fidgeting.

“He had to work with the Pack. The hybrids needed help too. Some wanted to stay, some fell in rank with Amber. Some needed the structure of the Pack to gain control.” He shoved his hands in his pocket. “I came because I am not the one who would be leading them.”