Then they stopped in the doorway and she froze.
Nolan looked concerned. “Bets, are you all right?”
“I…I cleaned the house today.”
He glanced around, looking confused. “Oookaaay?”
“And did laundry.”
Kenny’s brow furrowed. “Thank you?”
* * * *
The hackles on the back of Kenny’s neck stood up, as if a huge lightning strike were about to hit in the middle of an afternoon storm.
And he was standing there holding a lightning rod.
In the pocket of his shorts, he had the small shark’s tooth necklace for Betsy that he’d picked up at lunch in Sarasota. He’d seen it in a store on Main Street as he was walking back to work, and he’d bought it for her on a whim. It wasn’t expensive, a cheap tourist souvenir, but considering the shark’s tooth she had in her dish, he thought maybe she’d like it.
She was acting terrified, frightened, her body language screaming fear with neon-bright energy.
“Did you want to check what I did?” she asked.
She didn’t even
sound
right, the low, tight tone to her voice sounding nothing like the woman he’d quickly grown more than a little fond of over the past week and a half she’d been living with them.
“Why?” Nolan asked.
Kenny quickly stepped forward, something instinctive in him welling up, protective. His hand slipped into his pocket to find the necklace. Nothing much, just a tooth and some beads strung on a black cord. His fingers closed around it, but he didn’t pull it out yet.
“Bets,” Kenny softly said, “we appreciate you helping out.” He deliberately kept his tone low, gentle, slow, afraid of spooking her in whatever this mental state was that she’d suddenly dropped into.
Tilly had warned them about PTSD. That Betsy might go through it, and that it might trigger in strange, unexpected, and baffling ways, but that they always had to be patient with her when or if it did.
She edged away from them. “If I did something wrong, I’ll do it again.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have any rules about how chores are done. We appreciate you volunteering to help.” He heard Nolan start to speak behind him and he held his other hand up to silence him.
“I…I just wanted to help,” she said, her eyes growing bright. Tears pooled there, spilling down her cheeks.
“We know, sweetie,” Kenny said, slowly bringing his hand out of his pocket, concealing the necklace. “And we appreciate it.”
She looked at him, to Nolan, back to him. He wasn’t even sure at this point if she realized what she was doing. She trembled, her color poor, pale. He was actually afraid she might be close to fainting, but he didn’t want to swoop in, instinctively sure any sudden moves would terrify her, even though he didn’t understand why.
“I swear, I’ll do it over if it’s not right.”
He took a risk and lapsed into what Nolan always teased him was Dom tone. “Bets, look me in the eye, sweetie.”
She finally did. It broke his heart that he couldn’t just
fix
this shit for her.
“Why are you scared,
right
now?” he asked.
Her mouth opened…closed…Then her gaze darted around.
“Bets,” he said. “
Look
at me.”
She did.
“I’m sorry we’re scaring you. What did we do to scare you, sweetie?” And that was the only word for it. Terrified. He didn’t know why, but she was.
“You…you didn’t.” She frowned, and he wasn’t sure if she was frowning at him, or at herself.
He tried a trick Tilly had taught them. “I’m going to ask you something, and you need to answer me without thinking about it first. The first thing that pops into your mind. Okay?”
She nodded.
He took a risk and added a little more Dom tone. “
Why
are you scared of us right now?”
“Please don’t punish me,” she whispered. “If I did the chores wrong, please don’t punish me. I don’t know your rules. We haven’t talked about your rules yet, and I was trying to do the best I could.” She broke down sobbing, her hair hanging, concealing her face as she slumped against the counter.
Rage and sorrow warred inside him. He instinctively shifted to the side to block Nolan when he heard his partner’s gasp of horror behind him and sensed him trying to step forward. He knew Nolan wanted to do exactly what Kenny wanted to do, and that was protect her and take away her fear.
Only she could do that, though. Only she could work through this.
He had to reach behind him and swat at Nolan to hold him back. “Sweetie,” Kenny said, “what did Jack do to you about chores?”
He couldn’t see her face through her curtain of hair. “If…I tried so hard. In the beginning, he told me how good I was. I tried harder. Then…it was like every day, even if I did stuff exactly the way he told me, he’d find something wrong. Or change it. Until I never did anything right, no matter how many times I tried to do it, it was always wrong, even if it was right before.”
He had to force his breathing to stay slow, steady. “And he’d punish you for it?”
She nodded.
He took another deep breath. “Sweetie, here is our rule about chores, and it’s the
only
rule we have about chores—we will
never
punish you about chores.
Ever
. Understand?”
She nodded, but tears still spilled down her cheeks and onto the counter, her body wracked with silent sobs.
He edged forward, slowly, not wanting to spook her. “Not even if you do them badly, not even if you don’t do any at all. You have our word, absolutely no punishments about chores. Understand?”
She nodded again.
“Is that why you got so scared when you asked if we wanted to see what you’d done?”
More nodding.
“
Tell
us.”
“As…as soon as he got home from work every day…usually…that’s what he did first thing. Find out what to punish me for. The…the first…in the beginning, he always made it seem like he felt badly about it. Like he didn’t want to punish me…but later it was for fun. I could tell. Fun for him.
Why
did I let him do this to me?”
“Look at me, sweetie.”
She finally did.
He opened his hand and held it, palm-up, showing her the necklace. “Do you trust us?”
She looked from it to him and back again, nodding.
* * * *
Holy…fuck.
Nolan was desperate to shove Kenny out of the way, to get to Betsy and hold her, but then came the revelations and he realized exactly why his partner had stood firm and not let him pass.
He felt ill, physically sick. And angry.
And protective.
No, June wouldn’t get a chance at the fucker if Jack got out of jail.
He’d make sure he took care of Jack himself.
“I found this for you today,” Kenny told her in that warm, soothing, but at the same time firm and commanding tone.
Fuck, it even made his cock stir despite the circumstances.
“If you’d like,” Kenny continued, “you can wear it as a symbol. A symbol of our promise to protect you and to never punish you. Something you can touch and hold onto when you’re afraid, when the fear hits you. Would you like that?”
She stared at it, then at Kenny, then past Kenny to him.
Finally, she nodded.
Kenny held his other hand out to her. “If you trust us, come to us.”
Nolan watched as she sucked in a deep, ragged breath before she stepped forward, still crying. Then she reached out and took his hand.
“Good girl,” Kenny whispered.
She looked up into his eyes, startled, but now her tears renewed as she folded against him.
He held her, turning so Nolan could step in, too, engulfing her between them in their embrace.
“Such a good girl,” Kenny soothed. “You’re our
very
good girl. We’re so proud of you for trusting us.”
Nolan wasn’t sure if this was exactly the right way to handle this, the healthy way to go with her fragile emotional state, but if it helped her, he wouldn’t argue with it.
She mumbled something against Kenny’s chest.
“What was that, sweetie?”
“Is that my collar?” she asked.
Now the men’s gazes met.
Nolan honestly didn’t know what to say. Kenny had gotten them this far, so he’d let him answer it.
“What do you want it to be?” Kenny asked her.
“I want to feel safe again,” she whispered.
“What would make you feel safe?”
Nolan wasn’t sure if she’d answer at first.
Then, “I want to be under your protection. Both of you,” she said.
Kenny gently turned her to face Nolan and unhooked the clasp on the necklace. Nolan reached up and held her hair back while Kenny fastened the necklace around her neck.
“Then you wear this for us,” Kenny said. “When you don’t feel safe, you touch it, you hold it. You think about us protecting you. You think about how you trust us, and how you trust Tilly and June and Eliza, and our other friends, and how they’ll protect you, too.”
Nolan didn’t miss that Kenny didn’t call it a collar.
She nodded, looking down at it, touching the shark’s tooth with her finger.
“We can’t make you a lot of promises right now,” Kenny said. “But these two promises, we can make and we will keep. We
won’t
punish you, and we
will
protect you.”
She looked up and met Nolan’s gaze.
He remembered exactly how he’d felt the first time he’d looked into Kenny’s eyes and knew he loved the man. The visceral shot of adrenaline, the warmth spreading through him, the soul-deep certainty.
Fuck.
Falling in love with her was dangerous. She had a long road ahead of her, and she might not even want them like that when she got to the end of it.
Unfortunately, he knew.
He also knew he’d keep those two promises, too.
“Here’s our only other rule right now,” Kenny continued. “Never lie to us. We’ll never lie to you, and you never lie to us. Okay? No punishments, and no lying.”
“Yes, Sir,” she answered, still staring into Nolan’s eyes, and he wasn’t sure if she even realized what she’d said, what she’d added to the end of her response.
She leaned in and hugged him. Nolan looked into Kenny’s brown gaze and saw the mix of love and murder boiling there, too.
They were screwed. So,
so
fucking screwed. She didn’t even know it.
She was living with two men who absolutely would, right or wrong, kill or die for her, who were falling headlong in love for her…
And who couldn’t dare admit it to her unless she made it to a healthier point in her healing and told them first.
* * * *
After dinner, they let her help them do the dishes. Nolan noticed how after she’d recovered from the episode, she seemed lighter, happier.
And she frequently reached up and touched the necklace.
After dinner, they settled in on the couch to watch TV, Betsy snuggled between them, chatting, and talking, and then…
Then she went quiet. When Nolan looked, he realized she’d fallen asleep.
His gaze met Kenny’s.
Wow
, Nolan silently mouthed.
Kenny sadly nodded.
He’d meant all of it, from her breakdown to how she’d literally passed out sitting there. Exhaustion, most likely.
Neither man had the heart to move and disturb her, but finally, around eleven, Nolan gently spoke. “Bets, sweetie, it’s bed time.”
She didn’t stir at first. He didn’t want to startle her by moving, but he and Kenny couldn’t spend the night on the couch with her, either. They had to work in the morning.
Kenny grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. “Sweetie, it’s time to go to bed,” he said.
She finally stirred, looking out of it.
“Bed time,” Nolan said.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
He wasn’t even sure if she was really awake.
Moving carefully, the men extricated themselves and stood, both holding a hand out to her.
She stared at them for a minute as if disoriented. For a moment, Nolan wondered if her concussion was having a sudden delayed effect on her.
“Did you both mean it?” she asked.
“Mean what?” Kenny asked.
“That the only rule is no lying?”
The men nodded.
“And no punishments?”
“No punishments,” Nolan said. “Maybe one day in the future if you ask nicely there might be funishment
play
, but never,
ever
any real punishments. Not from us. We don’t get off on that. If it’s not consensual, it completely kills the chubby,” he added, trying to lighten the mood.
That earned him a sleepy smile. She took their hands and let them help her up, then they escorted her to her bedroom door, but didn’t go any farther.
“Try to get some sleep tonight,” Nolan said.
“Thanks. You, too.” She reached up to the necklace. “Thank you for this. Both of you. It means a lot to me.”
They waited until she’d closed the door behind her before going to their own room. Inside, Nolan fell back onto their bed and stared at the ceiling.
“Holy. Fucking. Crap.”
Kenny collapsed next to him. “You can say that again. Who’d have thought a damn five-dollar necklace would bring her out of that?”
“You know we basically collared her tonight, right?”
“I didn’t call it a collar.”
“I know that and you know that, but I think for all intents and purposes, we just collared her. At least we did in her mind.”
Kenny rolled on top of him. “Would that be the worst thing in the world?”
Nolan couldn’t stop what he said next. “It is if she leaves us in the future even though we’re both in love with her already.”
Kenny stared down into his eyes, looking ready to refute that statement when he winced and sat up, straddling him. “Fuck,” he whispered. “I
am
in love with her. When the fuck did
that
happen?”