by Various
“We’ll be gentle, sweetie.” Liam leaned closer to her. All three of them were within inches of each other.
Bridget’s face and neck turned a deeper red. “What if I don’t want you to be gentle?”
A low rumble came from Gavin’s chest as he leaned even closer and kissed Bridget’s neck. “Mine.”
She started. “That’s just what I mean.” Bridget stood. Before either man could stop her, she squeezed behind Gavin and out from behind the table. Liam expected her to keep running, but instead she stopped. “Mine. Like you own me.”
“Mine, like you’re my mate, the mate I never thought I’d have.” Gavin’s voice sounded tight.
“You’re our mate,” Liam said. “But we’re also yours. If we belong to each other, if you can even use that language, then we belong to you as much as you belong to us.”
She shook her head. “I wish I could believe that.” Grabbing her coat, she headed quickly for the door.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Gavin called. After she’d passed through the doorway, he said to Liam, “One way or another.”
“I think it’s time to track down that lead.”
Gavin raised an eyebrow. “Lead?”
“Don’t give me that. You heard her. She ‘just knows’ that some females get beaten. She’s ‘always felt that way.’ Bullshit. She saw something or experienced something when she was young and she doesn’t remember it but it’s still affecting her.”
Smiling, Gavin clapped his hand on Liam’s shoulder and left it there. “We just need to find out what it was and show it to her. I heard her. But you’re really cute when you’re like this.”
“Cute?”
“For a buff, bad-ass military man, yeah. Cute. Want to go back to the hotel room?”
Liam’s stomach clenched, but it wasn’t from nerves. “Yeah. Hell yeah.”
***
In the car on the way to the hotel, Liam said, “This might be a good time to call Fiona. Once we get there, I’m not going to want to wait.”
“Me, either,” Gavin said. Hell, he didn’t want to wait now. It was all he could do to keep from pulling the car over and marking Liam in the back seat. “You dial then put it on speaker. I’ll do the talking.”
After Fiona came on the line, Gavin said, “We’ve tracked down your family. I’m quite certain it’s them. Not only do all the facts match up, but the three women all resemble you.”
There was a short pause. “You’ve met them all?”
“Yes. We—well.” Gavin glanced at Liam. “Liam and I found our mate. She’s one of your sisters. So we got invited to a big family dinner. And that’s part of the problem—they’re putting pressure on us to explain the investigation. We didn’t tell them anything, but one of your sisters is mated to the pack Alpha and he’s not going to wait long before he starts digging himself.”
“That’s fine. There’s no need to keep it from them if you’re sure,” Fiona said.
“So I can tell them?” Gavin said. “Everything?”
“Yes, go ahead,” Fiona said. “And tell them I’d like to meet them the next time I’m in the U.S.”
“Any idea when that will be?” Liam said.
“I’m scheduled for leave late next month,” she said. “Are they nice?”
“Yeah, they’re good people,” Gavin said. No need to mention Bridget’s issues. “The whole thing with the old Alpha is messed up, though.”
“But he’s gone,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s gone.” Gavin turned into the hotel parking lot. “Banished.”
“So…” Fiona dragged out the word. “You and Liam are mates. I never would have seen that coming.”
Gavin looked at Liam, who smiled. “I think it’s a good match.”
“I agree,” said Liam.
“What about your third?” Fiona said. “Is she a good match, to?”
Gavin again felt reluctant to tell Fiona about their troubles. Although Bridget’s entire family now knew every sordid detail, so maybe it didn’t matter. “She’s great.”
“Then congratulations,” she said. “To all three of you. And tell her, too, after you tell them about me. Now, tell me all the details about dinner and about my sisters.”
Gavin met Liam’s eyes. They’d just parked the car. In a few short minutes, they could be naked. Now wasn’t the time to get into a long discussion.
“We’re going to have to go soon,” Liam said. “First night as mates and all.”
Fiona laughed.
“But we’ll tell you as much as we can in the next five minutes.” Liam opened his car door while Gavin grabbed his cell.
As they walked to the room, Gavin quickly gave her an overview of her sisters and their mates. “I think you’ll like them,” he said as they reached the door. “But now we’ve got to go.”
“Have a good night,” Fiona said, laughter in her voice.
Liam unlocked the door while Gavin signed off. Then Gavin pushed Liam through the door, kicking it shut behind him. He shoved Liam against the wall in the tiny foyer and slammed his mouth over Liam’s.
Liam groaned as he grabbed Gavin and pulled him tight against him. Gavin could feel every inch of his mate’s muscled body pressing against his own. His cock was harder than it had ever been before. Bridget didn’t know what she was missing.
Their hands roamed over each other’s bodies, gripping and rubbing in a way he’d never experienced with women. Women always had to be handled gently, even when they said they wanted it rough. He had to court and tease and coax a woman. But not Liam.
Liam put his hand over Gavin’s cock and squeezed it through his jeans.
Women were amazing. So was Liam.
Gavin stepped back, shucking his jacket and tossing it on the floor. He walked slowly toward the bed, shedding clothes along the way. Liam stalked him, ripping his own clothes off. First, he revealed his muscled torso, then his ripped abs and his rippling arms. Then his shapely thighs and calves and the jutting proof of his arousal.
“What am I going to do with you?” Gavin rumbled.
Liam got a mischievous look in his eye. “Whatever you want.” He pushed Gavin back onto the bed and crawled on top of him.
Gavin immediately rolled him over. He liked to be in charge. Holding Liam’s head in both his hands, his weight resting on his elbows, Gavin kissed his mate. This time the kiss turned slow, almost lazy, gentle and exploring. Their bodies writhed against each other, but still with the same languid feel as their kiss. Their legs tangled in each other’s while Liam’s hands roamed over Gavin’s back.
They finally pulled apart, though not far. “I want to taste you,” Liam said. “You ready for that?”
Gavin’s cock jumped. Was he ready for that? Hell, yes. “I think I can handle it.” Then, nervous but still excited, he decided to take a chance. “How about sixty-nine?”
A grin spread across Liam’s face. “Absolutely. Just don’t mark me on my thigh. I want my marks where everyone can see them.”
An involuntary growl rumbled through Gavin’s chest. Damn straight he wanted everyone to see Liam belonged to him. And he belonged to Liam. “Me too.”
After a final hard kiss, Gavin rearranged himself into a sixty-nine position. They ended up lying on their sides, top leg bent. Gavin had never seen a man’s cock so close up before. Liam’s cock looked hard as granite, but when Gavin touched it, the skin felt soft and pliable. He stroked it a couple of times with his hand, trying to get up enough guts to take it into his mouth.
Liam didn’t seem to be having the same problem. Gavin let out a shuddery moan when Liam’s mouth engulfed his cock. He pumped it in and out of his mouth in a quick dirty rhythm that felt exactly the way Gavin had always wanted a blowjob to feel.
Gavin found his face buried in the crook of Liam’s leg as he rode the wave of sensation. Time for him to get in the game. Not letting himself overthink it any more, he opened his mouth and took Liam’s cock inside.
The sound of Liam moanin
g as Gavin sucked him was almost as intoxicating as was Liam’s mouth was doing to his cock. Gavin had always kind of thought he wouldn’t like doing this. When he’d thought about having mates, he’d wondered if he’d hate this part of things—sucking another man’s cock. Licking a woman’s pussy was an entirely different thing. But this?
And now he knew how wrong he was. The distinctive taste of his mate, the feel of Liam’s cock jerking in his mouth in response to what Gavin was doing to him, just made Gavin want more. It wasn’t just the taste and scent and feel of his mate, it was knowing he could give him this much pleasure, and in a backwards way, have this much control. Liam was putty in his hands.
But it swung both ways. Because with the way Liam sucked him, Liam had just as much control over Gavin as Gavin had over him.
Gavin didn’t care.
He leaned on his left arm, the other hand gripping Liam’s cock around the base. Now he wanted to try something a little different, so he slid his left hand under Liam’s thigh and, still leaning his weight on it, positioned his hand so it could squeeze and roll Liam’s balls.
Liam’s legs curled up as soon as Gavin’s touched him, a loud groan reverberating around Gavin’s cock. Shit, that felt good.
Liam pulled back enough to say, “Can’t last much longer. But I don’t want to stop.”
“I can’t last much longer either.” Gavin’s eyes met Liam’s. “We’ve got all night. How many times you think we can do this?”
Liam grinned. “Let’s find out.”
Both men immediately dove back in. Gavin felt the pressure building, the urge to come getting harder and harder to resist. But he couldn’t.
“Stop,” he said. He pulled away from Liam, one of the hardest things he’d ever done. But if he didn’t, their marks would end up on their thighs. Gavin clambered around so they lay face to face again. Without a word, they took each other’s cocks in hand, stroking them hard and quick.
Both of them breathed heavily. Liam’s eyes strayed to Gavin’s shoulder. “I want to mark you.”
“Soon.”
“You care which shoulder?”
That was about the last thing he cared about right then. “No.”
Liam inched closer to him, his eyelids half-closed. “Have to mark you.” His voice had the growl of the wolf in it. He leaned forward and closed his mouth over Gavin’s shoulder. He didn’t bite down yet, just held his teeth against Gavin’s skin, his warm breath heating Gavin’s flesh.
Pressure, more pressure. Gavin couldn’t hold back. He lunged forward and sunk his teeth into Liam’s shoulder, immediately feeling Liam’s bite break through his skin. Then he knew nothing, just felt wave after wave of sensation as the most explosive orgasm of his life wracked through his body leaving nothing but shaking muscles in its wake.
The orgasm seemed to last forever, but finally they released each other’s shoulders and relaxed onto the bed, gazing into each other’s eyes.
Gavin smiled.
Chapter 4
The next morning, Liam rolled over in bed. He could still feel the tightness on his neck where Gavin had bitten him. He wondered how Bridget would feel knowing they’d gone ahead without her. But what could she expect? They didn’t have to all be celibate just because she was. Especially since her comments had clearly shown she felt the mating urge every bit as much as Gavin and he did. Except they weren’t afraid to go through with it.
They needed to do something about her. Just as Liam pulled himself out of bed, the door opened and Gavin strolled in. Gavin paused to look Liam up and down, a smile on his face. For the first time in his life, Liam didn’t feel self-conscious being naked in front of another man. No, he felt aroused.
“Want to do something about that?” Gavin said.
Liam chuckled. “I do, but right now I have other things on my mind.”
Gavin dropped a newspaper on the foot of the bed. “Such as?”
“Figuring out what’s bugging our mate. It feels like we’re not complete.”
“Because we’re not.” Gavin wrapped his arms around Liam and kissed him. “Good morning.”
“Morning.” Liam loved the feel of Gavin in his arms, even if it was through two layers of clothing. Gavin hadn’t even taken his coat off before kissing him.
Still holding Liam, Gavin said, “In addition to some detective work, we need to let the sisters know about Fiona. And we have to corner our little mate for the date she promised us.”
“I can’t wait.”
Gavin kissed him again, just a quick press. “It won’t be too much longer. Could you smell her arousal last night? I’m surprised she could walk away, as turned on as she must have been.”
“I smelled it. It was all I could do not to crawl under the table and stick my head between her legs,” Liam said. One great thing about having a male mate was being able to be crude and not having to watch your language.
“Wouldn’t that have surprised her,” Gavin said with a laugh. “Although keep that in mind. Maybe what we need to do is seduce her. It wouldn’t be hard.”
“As long as she wouldn’t hate us afterward.”
“There is that.” Gavin let Liam go then shrugged off his coat. “While you get ready, I’ll call Deirdre and let her know we want to talk to her and her sisters. Then I’ll call Bridget and ask her to lunch. We’ll see what she says. Then I’ll get to work on researching her past.” He sat down at the little desk and picked up his cell.
Liam sauntered into the bathroom, aware of Gavin’s eyes on his ass. God, it felt good to belong to someone. It’d been too long that he was alone. And now he’d never be alone again.
Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved and dressed, he pulled the small easy chair over to the desk. “What can I do to help?”
“I made the two phone calls. We have a date with Bridget at noon, and the family will meet us there at 1:30 to discuss Fiona. So, a short date. Bridget felt more comfortable that way.” He scowled.
“Maybe we can get her to agree to dinner, too.”
“Good luck with that.”
Liam smiled. Gavin was probably right. But that didn’t mean Liam wouldn’t try. “What about the research?”
“You weren’t in the shower long.”
“No need to get defensive.” Liam tapped Gavin on the shoulder. “So you’re just getting started. What can I do?”
They had a few hours until lunch. Unfortunately, they hadn’t brought much with them since they hadn’t planned to stay even one night. Gavin had his laptop—which was never far from him—but Liam didn’t.
“I’m not sure what you can do without a computer,” Gavin said. “At some point, we might have some phone calls to make, but right now we just need to dig.”
“What about a library? It would probably have a computer I could use.”
“Good idea.”
“Except neither of us has a library card for Marysburg.”
Gavin closed the lid on his laptop. “But we can get one. Or sweet talk the librarian into letting us use my Fairfax County library card. One way or another, we can make it work.”
Half an hour later, after prolonged negotiations with a librarian who was neither sweet nor pliable, Liam sat in front of a computer. He’d been told he could use it for thirty minutes, no more. Gavin sat nearby in an empty cubicle working on his laptop.
Liam had been tasked with hitting the online search engines to see what kind of a footprint Bridget had left online. Gavin was looking in more oblique databases, including a few somewhat shady ones, if Liam understood correctly. His mate wasn’t above breaking the law to uphold it.
Bridget had a page on three of the major social networks. Liam looked through all of it, soaking up every bit of information he could find about his reluctant mate. She liked to read romances. Steamy ones, it looked like. And she did scrapbooking. She liked to shop.
He could only see so much, though, since he wasn’t a “friend.” He couldn’t see all her pictures, for instance, although the one
he could see—a profile picture showing her and her two sisters laughing, their heads all touching—made him want her even more. How could a woman who loved her family like that not want a family of her own? What he wouldn’t give for her to love him like that.
What he didn’t find was anything suggesting some sort of trauma in her early life. Nothing at all.
When his thirty minutes were up, the librarian bore down on him like a fearsome general, so Liam shut down his browser and joined Gavin at the cubicle. “I didn’t find anything,” Liam said. “You?”
“Not a thing. Not that there’s not bad shit that’s happened to her, cause there is. But nothing to explain why she doesn’t want mates.”
Bad shit? “How bad?”
“Her sister running away, her parents dying. Both those things were in the papers. Her sister’s back now, so who knows how that drama played out.” Gavin closed up his computer. “Let’s head over to the restaurant. We can get a table and be waiting when she arrives.”
“Sounds good.” Liam didn’t like the idea of bad shit having happened to his mate. Worse, he had the feeling Gavin had only unearthed part of it.
***
When Bridget walked into The Weeping Widow, she could smell that her mates were already there even before she saw them. She passed the busy hostess and ducked her head into the dining room. Sure enough, they sat in the far corner in a circular table with a booth. And they were both staring at her.
As she walked across the room toward them, their gazes didn’t waver, although hers did when she saw Gavin put his hand over Liam’s and squeeze. Getting awfully friendly awfully fast. When she got closer, she saw something else—a bite mark on each of their shoulders, near their necks.
Bridget stopped short. They’d marked each other. They’d done it without her. An awful sense of betrayal and abandonment washed over her which she immediately dismissed. It was ridiculous. What did she care if they marked each other? She didn’t even want mates.
She headed forward again but more slowly. The feelings still churned in her stomach even though she tried to ignore them.
Gavin and Liam both stood, closing in on her from either side. One put his hands on her hips, the other on her back.