I have some werewolf overload going on. I shifted for the first time last night, too. And that part was glorious.
Okay, I have to admit it. My three werewolf guys are pretty glorious, too. I can’t help but think that as I wake up the morning after my first run as a wolf, naked in a forest outside of San Francisco.
I could tell that the air was chilly with morning dew, but I didn’t feel it anywhere except a little on my face and one shoulder. I was surrounded by three giant, snuggling, naked men, all of whom were still fast asleep. They lay on the ground, pressed up against me, their arms wrapped around me.
Dean’s head was on my hip, Owen’s cheek rested on my side, and Liam’s face was tucked into the hollow of my collarbone. Not to mention, all of them were sporting morning erections.
Definite werewolf overload.
Carefully, I pushed my way out, wriggling a little to slide along the leaves on the ground under me, hoping to slip away without any of them noticing.
Fat chance of that.
Dean’s hand clamped down on my hip under his chin. “Don’t go,” he mumbled sleepily.
I reached down and slipped my fingers under his to loosen them. They did, instantly.
“I have to pee,” I hissed, practicality finally overcoming any residual modesty I might have.
Against my back, Owen chuckled. His breath sent feathery little chills racing across my skin, and I shivered.
“Seriously, guys. Let go.”
They all grumbled, but all three of them began moving around, sitting up, and making room for me to stand, as well. I stepped carefully through the clearing until I could move behind a tree.
When I came back, my three werewolves were pulling on jeans. One of them handed me a long shirt of my own.
“How did these get here?” I asked, my voice muffled by the fabric of the t-shirt as I pulled it over my head.
“We had one of the other pack members leave clothes for us here. We figured we’d probably end up sleeping out here after our run. We often do.”
My mind flashed back to the night before.
It had been amazing. The run had been glorious. All three of the wolves I had married—well, mated in a lovely ceremony, followed by a horrific biting scene, that the State of California would never recognize as binding, since polyandry wasn’t legal. Anyway. The three wolves I had faux-married had led the chase for me, crisscrossing their paths, doubling back to lay false trails, and teaching me to recognize where they had been and how to follow them.
Part of me knew they were training me. But my inner wolf didn’t care. She was happy to revel in the chase, to play the game they created for us.
I blinked at the turn my thoughts had taken.
“Why do I feel like my wolf is something that’s a little separate from the rest of me?” I blurted.
Dean, Owen, and Liam glanced back and forth at each other. They all kind of shrugged.
“What? Don’t you guys feel the same?”
Dean waggled his hand in a so-so gesture. “A little? Maybe it’s because we grew up knowing about our wolf side?”
“Or maybe it’s because it’s so new to you,” Liam suggested.
“I have a different theory,” Owen said. “You have to be a genetic werewolf for the bite to change you. Lycanthropy acts as a kind of genetic catalyst—a virus of some sort that activates the genes you already carry. That’s what our scientists tell us, anyway. But I’ve sometimes wondered if, for genetic werewolves who take the bite, it’s like the virus itself communicates with them, or something.”
I gave him a skeptical look. I mean, I hadn’t ever gone to college. And I didn’t pay that much attention in my high school science classes. But that didn’t seem like the sort of thing viruses did.
Owen shook his head. “I know that’s not quite right, of course, since it feels like a complete wolf.”
Not that it mattered. Whether my inner wolf was my destiny released from me or a virus imposed on me, I was stuck with it. Still, it was interesting to consider. “Like maybe the virus opens up a way for the inner wolf to communicate?”
Owen nodded, his smile relieved. “Something like that. Glad you followed my twisty logic.”
I pulled up the pair of jeans that Dean handed me and buttoned them, then slipped on my hiking boots, also thoughtfully supplied by one of my pack members.
As we began making our way out of the clearing, I realized that we were not far from the clearing where we’d held the ceremony the night before. In fact, there were several pack members there this morning, cleaning up from the previous night’s party.
“Looks like the party went on late,” I observed.
“Wolf style,” Owen added, nodding at the demolished remains of what had once been a wedding cake.
“Hungry like wolves?” I joked.
“Hungry like your wolves, anyway,” Liam said.
“Damn. They didn’t even leave us any cake,” Dean complained. “And it was our party.”
My wolves. Our party. Every word they said reminded me of the huge responsibilities I had taken on with that simple ceremony the night before.
I had managed to ignore it all up to now. Even waking up naked with three guys hadn’t bothered me—we’d been in our fur, and then we’d fallen asleep, shifting in the night.
But now I was back in my human skin, and human-me was much more aware than wolf-me of how out of my depth I was.
A sense of creeping dread clenched my stomach.
“So what’s next?” I asked, glancing back and forth among my wolves.
“Well,” said Liam—the calmest of my three wolf-mates, and therefore the one most likely to be voted to deliver news I might not like—“you’ve chosen your mates and you’ve become a werewolf.”
“Right.” I nodded warily.
“So next, we’ll need to…consummate the relationships.”
Eighteen
“Consummate. You mean, like, have sex?”
My stomach fluttered, the dread inside turning to something much more carnal.
I had, of course, thought about what being mated to the three of them might mean. I’d thought about it in all sorts of ways. But really, especially in terms of sex.
We simply hadn’t talked about it much, so I had no idea what their expectations might be.
Now, all three of my wolves were staring at me expectantly.
I couldn’t decide if whether or not I wanted them to announce that we were all going to have a giant sex party.
“I guess we need to discuss this, then?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a question, but the way my voice squeaked at the end sure turned it into one.
“I know I’d like to have some idea of what all this means,” Liam said with a grin.
“Just to be clear,” Dean said, pointing at my other two mates with his thumbs, “I have no intention of climbing in bed with these two jackasses.”
The look he gave them was so comically disdainful that I burst into laughter. That seemed to dispel the worst of the tension that had been growing.
“Let’s go get breakfast and talk this out,” I said.
Owen and Liam shared a look that suggested they might already have some idea of how to deal with our unique situation. Dean just seemed glad to be headed toward food. Or maybe it was glad to be headed toward a discussion that would clarify exactly how we were going to handle what was essentially their four-way marriage with a woman they had only just met.
Also, there were a few things from before the ceremony that we had never really dealt with. Like, for example, the apparent probability that I would end up having to defend my position as pack alpha through some kind of combat.
I was not looking forward to that part of the discussion any more than I was thrilled with the idea of having to carefully apportion out my sex life with three different werewolves.
I suspected they weren’t all that great at sharing.
“Okay, let’s discuss this,” I said as we sat in the round-ta
ble booth in The Moon Moon, the bar and grill I’d inherited from my uncle at the same time I’d inherited his mantle as pack alpha. We’d been there an hour already, consuming more food than I would have ordered for a dozen people just a few days before. But now, I was ravenous.
“So does shifting always make everybody this hungry?” I was so nervous about the upcoming discussion that I interrupted my own announcement with a question, then answered that question. “Of course it does. The first time I met you guys, you were eating burgers after shifting.”
That first day, Owen and made me two burgers and I had eaten only one of them. Today, I was pretty sure I could eat three. Especially since I’d already had two and I was still hungry.
“More fries?” Liam asked, handing a plate piled high with them in my general direction. I took it and scraped half the pile onto my plate.
“Okay. Before we get too deep into this discussion of consummating our relationships, why don’t you three start by filling me in on the wolf traditions about that sort of thing.”
“When an alpha takes a mate, there are generally two different sides of it,” Owen said. “First of all, last night’s ceremony definitely made us your pack-alpha mates in that we are now all three considered your legitimate seconds in command.”
“But that doesn’t make us your mates,” Liam added. “Right now, we belong to you the same way everyone in the pack does, and we’re your seconds, but we’re not yours. The ceremony last night didn’t complete the bond.
“Nope,” Dean agreed. “Only sex can do that.”
I blushed at his words. I could feel the heat of my flush crawling up my neck, over my face, and to the roots in my hair. My face burned with it. But I ignored the reaction and tried to talk as if I made plans to have sex with three men every day. “So until I have sex with you, you’re my seconds in command but not really my mates?”
“That’s about the size of it.” Dean leaned back, resting his shoulders against the booth.
“Oh, but there’s more.” Liam tapped the table. Our decision to have you choose all of us was brilliant in a lot of ways. For one thing, it builds a kind of wall of protection around you—to get to you, someone has to come through us. But it has also created a couple of issues. Issues that wolf tradition and hierarchy doesn’t really have any way to deal with.”
“What kind of problem?” I leaned on my elbows, put my chin into one hand, and pushed the remainder of my meal—what little there was left of it—away from me with the other hand.
“Usually,” Dean drawled, slumping down a little in his seat and stretching one leg out straight next to the booth, “when an alpha female runs a pack—and it doesn’t happen very often, mind you—then she mates with her second. In this case, you have three seconds.”
“Which is fine as long as we all agree—and mostly we do,” Liam interjected.
“But not always.” Dean shot Liam a slightly irritated glance.
I looked around the table and suddenly realized exactly what kind of problem we had created. “So basically, you’re telling me that there’s some question about how to deal with it if my second-in-command needs to make a decision and you three can’t agree on how to proceed. That about it?”
“That’s it exactly,” Liam said.
“So even though you didn’t have to choose among us to decide which one you wanted,” Owen continued, “you do have to rank us for the pack.”
It was all I could do to keep from wailing. “But each of you brings something different to my—what? Leadership? Rulership? Whatever it is, I need all of you. I can’t do this by myself. I can’t even do it with just one of you.”
“You know that, and we know it, but the rest of the pack doesn’t really get it. And the happier we can keep them, the less likely they are to challenge you.”
“And if I refuse?” I felt like I was getting boxed into another situation I had not created and did not want to have to sort out.
Then again, maybe that was just the life of an alpha.
“If you refuse,” Owen said, “the pack is going to assume that the order in which you sleep with us is the order of hierarchy.”
“So we don’t tell them,” I said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Owen told me. “There’s an entire bedding ceremony that goes with an alpha taking a mate. And in our case, the pack has decided as a whole that we should do a three-night ceremony. Or rather, three night’s worth of ceremonies. One for each of us. You have to decide what order to do the ceremonies in.”
He paused. “What order are you going to have sex with us in, Sienna?”
Nineteen
I’d heard the phrase “thrown to the wolves” all my life.
This was the first time I truly felt like I understood what it meant.
Or at least how it felt.
“So when do these ceremonies begin?”
Dean shoved the giant bite of hamburger into his mouth and spoke around it. “Tonight,” I managed to make out, despite the muffling effect of burger-bite.
“Tonight?”
I still have twigs in my hair from waking up in the woods.
I was supposed to have some weird wedding night ceremony—part one of three, no less—with no more planning than this?
“I have things to do before we can start,” I said.
“Yeah,” Owen said. “You have to decide how to rank us.”
“There’s more than that,” I insisted. There were things I had to do. Like, go lingerie shopping. I wasn’t a virginal bride, but if I was going to have three separate wedding nights, I needed to have something to make each of them special. Lingerie seemed as good a place to start as anything else.
We hadn’t talked about any of this. I had no idea how my three wolves might react differently depending on what happened in the bedroom.
I didn’t know what any of them liked.
I barely knew any of them.
This was insane.
It was also a little too late to back out now.
Okay. There were two things I needed to discuss.
“Before I decide how to rank you, there’s something I want to talk to you guys about.”
They waited for me to continue.
This was kind of an uncomfortable conversation to be having with the three guys I was about to sleep with, but it had to be done.
I blew out a breath and then steeled myself against possible embarrassment. “What about birth control?”
They all three stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
“Yeah. You know. Like…to make sure I don’t get pregnant?”
Still, they watched me with wide eyes.
Wasn’t this conversation supposed to be easier after marriage?
Marriage. The thought stopped me dead in my tracks for several seconds.
Okay. Maybe it was supposed to be easier. But that assumed that the marriage was a nice, normal one, with only two people involved. Not three werewolves.
Four, I reminded myself. I was a werewolf, too, now.
I tried again. “I’m not on the pill or anything.”
Liam’s mouth fell open. Owen jerked a little, like I’d said something shocking. Dean made a noise kind of like a snort and said, “Why would you be?”
Dean’s words finally clued me in that we were quite possibly having two—or maybe even four—different conversations.
Time to pull up my big-girl panties and say it all straight-out. I almost laughed aloud at the image.
“Let’s start over. I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here.” Three identical frowns. Great. “I am asking about birth control because I don’t want to get pregnant yet. We just met—and even though we’re…mated—” God, I had to get used to that term—“I think we should probably get to know each other a little bit first. Maybe even get me through that challenge you seem to believe is coming my way.”
My three wolves all seemed to relax more the longer I spoke. Which was lovely, except I was getting more
and more anxious.
When I paused long enough to take a breath, Liam reached out and placed his hand over mine. “Sienna. It’s okay. We forgot for a minute that you don’t know much about wolves. You can’t get pregnant unless your wolf is in heat.”
“My wolf? You mean, we’d have to be in wolf form to…” I couldn’t say exactly why, but for some reason, I found the thought of wolf-form sex seriously unappealing.
“No, no, no,” Dean jumped in. “That all happens in human form.”
“It’s just that your wolf self and your human self have to be synced up for you to conceive.” Liam leaned back again, as if that explained everything.
“How do we know they’re not?” I asked.
All three of them tilted their noses into the air and sniffed, then shook their heads. They all spoke at once.
“Nope.”
“No.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Oh my God,” I exclaimed, leaning as far away from them all as I could, given that I was trapped in a booth. “You can smell it?”
I gave them time to quit snickering before I said, “Fine. Forget pregnancy. What about other stuff?”
“Other stuff?” Liam asked. Good Lord, he was sweet—but apparently incredibly naïve.
“Stuff. Like, for example, sexually transmitted diseases? Do we need condoms?”
At that, they finally burst into laughter.
Owen’s the one who finally spoke. “Wolves don’t have any STDs of their own. And werewolves cannot contract or transmit any of those kinds of disorders.”
Understanding finally hit me. It felt kind of like being struck by a bolt of lightning. One that made me feel a little stupid and more than a little angry.
“You mean all those years I spent freaking out over pregnancy or sexually-transmitted diseases were unnecessary?”
My parents and I were due for a very serious talk.
“So. Now that we’ve discussed that—in what order will you take us into your bed?” Trust Owen to get it all back on track. And talk about it
I rolled my eyes. Normally, I would consider birth control conversation more than enough for one meal.
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