He’d known all along Mike was protective of his little sister, but in that glint, Ruckus saw just how far the sports reporter would go when it came to her. It made Ruckus like him a lot more.
“And honestly?” Mike’s smile grew lopsided. “I’m not surprised. But I am her big brother, the one person on this planet who loves her more than you do. Got me? So bring Brannum West round here before sunset and we can all sit back, crack a beer, and have a chat.”
Ruckus studied him.
Mike didn’t move. His smile didn’t waver.
“Can you tell her one thing for me?” Ruckus asked, his heart crashing hard against his chest.
“I can.”
“Tell her when it comes to love, when it comes to being together, it’s not a matter of who came first, it’s a matter of who makes it perfect. And she makes the three of us perfect.”
Mike smiled. And then, he reached for the doorknob. “I’ll pass the message on whenever I see her again. Now, time for you to go, Ruckus. Think about what I said. Think about what she needs.”
“I will.” Ruckus turned and walked from the door.
“And Ruckus?”
He paused, giving Mike a look over his shoulder.
“Don’t think about getting your cousin to find her.”
Ruckus dipped his head in a single nod and strode away from the house.
It wasn’t easy, but for the woman he loved, he would do everything Mike told him to. He’d give her time. He’d bring Bran to meet Mike.
And he’d call off Lincoln.
Chewing on her bottom lip, RG stepped away from the wall, where she’d been standing for the duration of Mike and Ruckus’s conversation, hiding behind the door like a little girl.
“Thoughts?”
She frowned. “Do I have to have any?”
Mike snorted. “Sis, the only bloke I’ve ever seen you remotely besotted with just came here and poured out his heart. As much as I think a guy like Ruckus can pour out his heart, that is. You probably should have some thoughts on that.”
With a shaky sigh, she made her way to the living room, gnawing on her bottom lip once again. She’d been convinced Ruckus and Bran would have settled into blissful cohabitation by now. It was clear they were completely gone for each other. She didn’t want to be their third wheel, no matter how much she wanted to be with them.
It was a weird mental and emotional state to be in, wanting something but refusing to surrender to that want. She hadn’t experienced anything like it.
“You going to drag your feet around my place for another day?” Mike walked past her, dropped himself onto the sofa before crossing his ankles on the coffee table and giving her a Well? look. “Or are you going to tell your big brother what’s really going on?”
Before she could stop herself, RG looked at her feet.
Mike snorted again.
Shooting him a glare, she flopped into the armchair opposite him.
He grinned.
“You’re annoying,” she grumbled. “You’re meant to be letting me work out how to move forward. Isn’t that what you told Ruckus?”
“Oh, Ruckus can bloody well wait and like it. Me, on the other hand…” His grin turned devilish. “I don’t wait. Now cough up. All I’ve got to go on so far is you finally realized you’re in love with Ruckus, he’s in some kind of tortured-brooding-mysterious relationship with this guy called Brannum, and the three of you did stuff together I seriously don’t want the details to, so don’t even think about going there.”
“Oh, brother.” She let her own smile turn wicked. “The things we did. The sounds we made. The positions we—”
Mike threw a cushion at her. Given he was one of those freaks who excelled at any sport he played, the cushion hit its intended target—her face—without any problems. “I said I don’t want the details.”
She chuckled, hugging the cushion to her chest as she slumped back into her seat.
“C’mon, kiddo.” His voice was gentle. “Tell me what’s going on. You’ve been here for four days, hiding out. You won’t tell me where you were for the two days before you came here. You’re not eating or sleeping. I’ve watched you killing opponents over and over again with almost feverish joy on some online game I’m pretty certain isn’t the one you created. And you’re crying at toilet paper commercials. And now Ruckus turns up and talks about love? Fill me in.” He held up a staying hand. “Without the details no brother should ever hear.”
RG looked at him, plucking at the hem of the Sydney Swans T-shirt she’d raided from his wardrobe. Lena—her sister-in-law, currently on assignment in the US—had told her she was more than welcome to any of her clothes, but Lena was a pixie and none of them fit RG.
“Any minute now,” Mike prodded, expectant expression on his face. “Any minute…”
“So I had a threesome with Ruckus and his ex, Brannum West,” she blurted out. “And it was as hot and amazing as I thought it would be, but then I realized how much Bran still loved Ruckus, and how much Ruckus still loved him, and I figured they didn’t really need to have me with them, given they had each other first. And even though Ruckus made me admit I was in love with him, even though he’s the most incredible man I’ve ever met, I can probably fall in love with someone else at some point in time later in the decade, so I left. And I thought if I wasn’t around they’d just get on with their new life together.”
She let out a sigh, plucking more at the hem of the shirt, trying to not look at Mike. Holy smokes, had her cheeks ever burned so hot?
“Okay.” Mike tented his fingers in front of his face, nodding his head as if to himself. “So you’re in love with a guy who also loves another guy, and—from what I gleaned from Ruckus’s visit—both those guys want you to give it a shot as a…a…what’s it called?”
“A threesome?”
“There’s another word for it. One that covers the whole living thing, not just the sex thing.”
“A triad?”
Mike scrunched up his face. “It messes with my head that my little sister knows that term without even needing to Google or think about it.”
She gave him a sheepish grin.
He shook his head, rolled his eyes and then gave her a warm smile back. “I love you, sis. Because you are you. Never forget that.”
“Okay.” A tight lump in her throat tried its damnedest to choke her.
“So you’re in love with Ruckus.” He picked up where he’d left off. “Ruckus and this Brannum guy want you to become the three musketeers, and you took off. You don’t like Brannum that much? Or is he good in bed but a hopeless conversationalist?”
“He’s smart and talented and successful and almost as big a geek as me,” she answered. A smile pulled at her lips and she pictured Bran—in his office at Virt.Real and then as West Wind. “And he’s a serious gamer who I’ve been flirting with for a long time in Hell’s Harbour. His company has also just become the sole world-wide distributor for Hell’s Harbour 2.”
Mike frowned. “So he’s not a dummy. He moves in your…albeit unusual circles, and you get a goofy, gooey grin on your face when you talk about him. What am I missing here? The three of you sound like it’s meant to be.”
“But Bran and Ruckus had a thing first. Shouldn’t I let them have their thing again? Without me? And seriously, when do threesomes in reality work? Do you know any? I don’t. So a threesome in real life might destroy what they’d only just found again, and I’d be responsible which would suck like hell.”
“If they both want you to have a thing with them…” Mike shrugged. “Why shouldn’t you?”
RG frowned. “This is not really what I thought you’d say.”
His eyebrows rose. “What did you think I’d say?”
She scowled. “I dunno. Something about doing the right thing. Something about true love. You’re a corny romantic since you and Lena got your acts together and ripped up the divorce papers, you know.”
“A corny romantic?” Mike considered
the term. “I like it. And hell fucking yeah, I am. Because true love is incredible. Powerful. Undeniable. And if you love Ruckus, and if you’re even halfway in love with this Brannum guy, who the hell am I to tell you to deny that?”
She stared at him, catching her lip with her teeth.
Mike leant forward, elbows resting on his knees, and fixed her with a steady gaze. “Sis, the one thing every person with a heart and a soul longs for more than anything is connection. True, real, unfathomable connection. Some lucky people find it with one person, like I did with Lena. Some poor bastards never find it. If you’ve found it with two people…and those two people have found it with you and each other…” He settled back in his seat and shrugged again. “If you walk away from that, you’re an idiot.”
She wriggled deeper into the armchair and pouted. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Errr…hello? You’ve been hiding out here for four days.” He frowned. “Where were you for the two days before that?”
“I went and got coffee.”
“Where?”
“Queenstown.”
“In New Zealand?”
She nodded.
He laughed. “Oh, sis, when you throw a wobbly, you throw a wobbly.”
She poked her tongue out at him.
“Don’t make me toss another cushion at you.”
Gnawing on her lip once more, she turned her stare to her knees, and thought of Ruckus.
The bastard had done a real number on her: made her break her one-and-done rule; made her confess she loved him; made her experience the most intense sexual pleasure of her life; made her experience it with the man Ruckus himself loved.
“If I go to them…” She looked at Mike. “If I come away brokenhearted, you know I’m going to be a mess, right? And move in here with you and Lena and annoy the hell out of you and drag my feet all over the place and leave my shit around, and generally be miserable, right?”
Mike pushed himself out of the sofa, rounded the coffee table, and crouched down in front of her, taking her hands in his. “Listen to this, RG. If you come away brokenhearted, I will let you plait my hair and paint my nails and bake cookies with you every day.”
“Your hair’s not long enough to plait,” she pointed out, even as a bloom of love for him threatened to make her burst.
He smiled. “I’ll grow it.”
She chuckled, the sound shaky and wet. God, was she about to cry? Was she? “You wouldn’t really grow your hair for me, would you?”
He snorted. “Hell, no.”
She squeezed his fingers. “I love you, brother.”
He squeezed her fingers back. “I’m partial to you, myself, sister. And just so you know, while I might not grow my hair, I will get my old hockey stick out of storage and kneecap the bastards if they hurt you.”
She rolled her eyes and smiled. And then frowned. “Am I a chicken if I say I’m scared?”
He shook his head. “Love is scary, kiddo. But worth it. Trust me. And as for you being scared?” Another shake of his head. “You are the most fearless, fierce person I know. You took on a world driven and controlled by males and beat them at their own game. You aren’t a chicken and could never be one. You know that. Just as you know, in your heart, what you really want to—”
She jolted to her feet.
Mike looked up at her, lips twitching. “Going somewhere?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed him by the ears, smacked a kiss on the top of his head and ran from the living room. “I’m taking your car,” she yelled over her shoulder as she reached the front door, snatching up his keys from the hall table.
“Okay,” he called back with a laugh. “Why?”
“Mine’s almost out of petrol.” She yanked open the door and grinned at him. “And I’m not wasting any time filling up.”
Buckled into Mike’s Wrangler, engine running, stereo blasting AC/DC with enough volume her stomach shook, she turned her phone back on. Six days of missed calls and messages pinged up on its screen. Six days of Ruckus and Bran trying to contact her, plus a few early texts from Mike wondering where she was.
She didn’t bother reading or listening to any of them.
Instead, she opened Ruckus’s contact page, chewing on her bottom lip.
“There you are.” She grinned. According to his phone, he was almost back at Bran’s place. She was the only person Ruckus allowed access to his location via his phone. He hadn’t turned the Share My Location function off. Good. That made things easier.
Sunglasses in place, she threw the Wrangler into Drive, and turned the music up even louder.
“You want me?” She pressed her foot to the accelerator. “You’ve got me.”
Breaking the speed limit still meant it too her longer to get to Bran’s house than she wanted. Pulling to a halt behind Ruckus’s Range Rover, she studied Bran’s home.
The house sat quiet. So did the Rover.
RG gripped the steering wheel, studying the closed front door. “Okay, kiddo. This is where your life becomes so much more exciting.”
Whispered pep talk over, she climbed from the Wrangler, closed the door, and made her way to the house.
Bran opened it in seventeen seconds.
She flashed him a smile. “Surprise.”
Behind him, his stare locked on her face, stood Ruckus. “Mother fucker, you were there, weren’t you?”
She didn’t bother answering.
Heart pounding, she stepped across the threshold and closed the door.
Both men studied her.
Her heart kicked up a notch. “This is the way it’s going to go.”
Neither spoke. They stepped aside as she strode into Bran’s living room, following her into the opulent space.
Reaching the sofa, she flicked them a small smile over her shoulder. “We’re going to do this. I want to do this. You have no fucking idea how much I want to do this. But we’re doing it by my rules. Understand? I’m in control. Not you.” She slid her gaze to Bran. “And definitely not you.”
Ruckus’s jaw bunched as she arched an eyebrow at him. “What rules are they?” he asked, voice calm and steady.
A shiver rippled up her spine. Such a sexy goddamn voice—low and deep and scratchy.
Lowering herself onto the sofa, she stretched her arms out along the back, draped one leg over the other knee, and swung her foot back and forth. “Nothing but honesty. Truthfulness. If someone is feeling slighted or jealous for even a moment, they let the rest of us know. Got it?”
Bran’s Adam’s apple moved up and down his throat. She’d kiss that throat later. It was entirely too smooth and perfect not to.
“Also,” she went on, studying the toe of her boot—Kermit-green patent leather Doc Martens, “no more of this secretive past, mysterious broodiness allowed. The second thing we’re going to do is sit right down and have a nice long chat about ourselves. Get all our skeletons out of our closets once and for all. We do this, we do it right. We do it as a threesome, a triad, in every sense of the word. Capisca?”
“What’s the first thing we’re going to do?”
She smiled at Ruckus’s question, uncrossed her legs, and leant towards them. “Fuck like rabbits. Until none of us can stand.”
Bran’s swift inhalation sent a hot lick of delight into her core.
“Until none of us can stand,” Ruckus echoed. “I’m okay with that. Brannum?”
“I’m okay with that too.”
RG grinned, settling back into the sofa again. “Good. Now, let’s begin. Bran? Get the rope.”
Ruckus’s jaw bunched again. “Who’s getting tied up?”
She swung her foot. “You, big boy.”
“Oh God, yes,” Bran whispered.
He hurried from the living room.
Ruckus stood motionless. “Are you sure about this?”
She pushed herself to her feet and closed the distance between them. “I love you, Ruckus. I can’t fight it. And I love that you love Bran as well as m
e. It doesn’t faze me or freak me out in the slightest.”
“Then why did you leave us?”
She let out a sigh. “Long story short: because I thought you probably would have been better without me.”
He shook his head. “I’m better with you, gorgeous. And the very fact I’m better with you, makes me better with Bran as well.”
“I can see that.”
Ruckus studied her for a moment. “What’s your brother think of all this?”
“He approves.”
Ruckus’s eyebrows rose. A fraction.
She grinned. “And told me to remind you he expects us all at his house so he can meet Bran. ASAP. As soon as we finish fucking.”
The edges of Ruckus’s lips curled. “Which will take how long, exactly?”
“Until none of us can stand.”
His smile stretched wide. “Damn good thing we all bloody fit, isn’t it.”
Before she could respond, Bran walked back into the room.
Ruckus drew in a sharp breath, his stare tracking Bran as he strode towards him.
Body thrumming with an urgency she couldn’t deny, she stepped a little to the side. “Remove Ruckus’s jeans, Bran.”
Ruckus’s eyes fluttered closed, but not before she saw his pupils dilate.
The unmistakable sound of a zipper lowering played with her senses, followed by a low groan deep in Ruckus’s chest.
“I don’t think I could ever get sick of your dick, Ruckus,” Bran murmured, trailing his fingers up and down Ruckus’s thick, hard length, now jutting free of his open jeans.
Ruckus groaned again. A muscle ticked just below his eye.
RG couldn’t help but smile. Her lover was having a very tough time restraining himself.
“Me either, Bran,” she said as Ruckus opened his eyes to meet her gaze.
Her pulse quickened. The junction of her thighs grew damp. The raw hunger in Ruckus’s eyes, the carnal lust…
“Lick Ruckus’s cock, Bran,” she ordered, holding Ruckus’s stare.
Bran smoothed his hands beneath Ruckus’s jeans, and inched them down over his hips.
They fell to the floor in a puddle of worn denim.
That muscle in Ruckus’s cheek ticked again as Bran lowered himself to his knees and took Ruckus’s erection in one firm hand.
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