by Lora Leigh
Keiley had come to his bed a virgin. Trusting. Innocent. She would never understand her husband's need to see another man cover her, pumping inside her, nor, he believed, would she be able to handle a ménage that would include a man she didn't love.
Keiley would have to love any man she took into her bed, even as a third. But he knew the curiosity was there. He had seen it in the flash of heat in her eyes as she questioned him. But Mac knew that right
now, introducing her into the idea of a ménage or the ménage relationship he envisioned wasn't something Keiley could accept.
Perhaps later. He was counting on later. His new wife was adventurous, fiery, and curious as hell. But her youth held her back, whereas with other women it lent freedom.
Keiley's past experience with gossip, and the destruction that came with it, wouldn't allow for the sexual games and the eventual bond Mac intended to see her forge with himself and Jethro.
Until his wife was more settled, until maturity gained her the edge she would need to overcome her fears, that wasn't going to happen. It didn't mean Mac was going to forget about it. It just meant that for the time being his plans would have to wait.
Moving her back to his hometown would help. The ways of navigating small towns and gossip was something Keiley needed to understand. A ménage wasn't tantamount to the hell she had endured as a child. But until she learned low to handle the gossip, his hungers and Jethro's would have to wait.
"Doesn't work that way, Mac," Jethro sighed then.
"I can make it work." He was confident of that. "I made this damned job work, I can make anything work."
Jethro's jaw clenched, and for a moment, bleak, furious pain and impatience sparkled in the blue depths before it was gone, iced over, and the agent he had become returned.
"Speaking of the job, were you any closer to tracking down that Internet stalker's whereabouts? The director was going nuts over that when I left the office."
Mac shook his head allowing the change of subject. "I turned the case over to Dell Roberts. He knows computers better than I do, and he's just finished up a major case. He has the time to deal with it. I'll help him online if he needs it."
The case was drawing a lot of fire. The stalker found his victims online, researched them, acquired their personal information, and spent months terrorizing them. In the latest case, he had finally attacked and nearly killed his victim. He was escalating dangerously.
"I'm going to miss you, my friend." Jethro lifted his drink in a toast. "To the good ol'
days."
"To the future," Mac amended, tipping his glass to Jethro's, then bringing it to his lips before staring around the room once again.
He had drunk here, laughed here, found friends here. Hell, he had even fucked on most of the tables in the room here. Occasionally a married member had petitioned to allow his wife in long enough to get to know the members he had short-listed to act as a third.
Many of those instances had ended up with the ménage playing out before the couple left the club.
There had been two female members at one time. One had married and dropped out of membership, though her husband still occasionally brought home a friend.
That relationship was working out much better than Mac had ever thought it would.
Most of the married men in the club had found a way to balance those dark hungers with the women they loved.
Just as most of them had learned their hungers through the darkness of pasts they rarely spoke of, or lives lived within the shadowed corners of deceit and lies.
They all had their reasons for the hungers that tormented them, just as Mac did. But for him, the thought of his wife's happiness meant more to him than satisfying the shadowed specter that lurked beneath his surface.
"Keep in touch, buddy," Jethro said as he rose to his feet. "It won't be the same around here without you."
"I'm just a phone call away." Mac grinned. "Call anytime."
But don't visit. Not for a while. Not until his wife could handle the thought of another man in her life.
Jethro nodded, but his gaze was knowing, haunted. He knew what Mac meant.
As his friend walked away, Mac sat back in his chair, gazed around again, and tried to let the atmosphere seep inside him.
A frown tugged at his brow, though. He'd have to remember to remind Dell to requestion the latest victim and her husband. There was something that kept nagging at him about her statement. Something she had left out.
Something he knew he should have asked her, but he couldn't think of what.
He would call Dell from the house tonight, and then put it behind him. Within the next four weeks he would be out of Virginia and back in Scotland Neck. North Carolina was far enough away from his old friends and his hungers to allow him to contain them for a while.
Keiley was worth the sacrifice. There had never been another woman who could make him feel as she did. She completed him, and he hadn't expected that. But from the moment he met her, he had realized there was something about her that warmed the cold reaches of his soul and eased the dark loneliness that had always been so much a part of him.
A man didn't walk away from that, no matter the obstacles. Once he saw his future in a feminine gaze, he found a way to make all parts of that relationship work. And that was what he was doing. Finding a way to make it work for all of them.
Especially Keiley. Her natural desires and adventurous personality had been restrained.
The gossip concerning her father's embezzling from the company he worked for had destroyed her. At seventeen she had lost her home, her father had been imprisoned, and her mother had committed suicide.
There had been no one left for their community to punish except Keiley. They had watched her, gossiped about her lack of morals, predicted her downfall. If he dared let her know how desperately he needed to see her beneath Jethro now, it would terrify her. The rejection of it would be instant, and it would never falter.
He would have to steer her gently toward it. And once she grew to accept a need for those darker hungers that he saw in her eyes, then he would have to steer the relationship gently as well.
Jethro craved Keiley. He had seen her first and pushed her at Mac, despite his hunger for her. Mac knew the way to a woman's heart, but he also knew his friend. Keiley had already stolen Jethro's heart.
Not that Jethro would ever admit it or do anything about it. Mac knew that. A committed relationship was something that Jethro shied from as fiercely as Keiley shied from gossip.
His lips quirked at the thought. The woman he loved and the friend that was more than a brother to him. The three of them together would make a hell of a relationship. Once Mac managed to get the three of them together.
Getting there would be the hard part. Waiting would strain his patience to its limits.
And if it never happened?
He would live with it. Ultimately it came down to Keiley. If she could accept it, if she could love Jethro with the same intensity that she loved Mac, then it would work.
If it didn't? If he lost them both, it would destroy him.
Obstacles stood in his path. It wouldn't be easy. But if his hunch was right, then the future that could stretch out before all three of them was one worth fighting for. It was worth risking.
Sharing his wife was considered a forbidden pleasure. It wasn't called that without reason. It was breaking rules, stepping past boundaries, and facing his own fears. His fear of losing. His fear of becoming too controlling.
In the end, either they would all win or they would all lose. Mac was betting, he was praying, on the win.
Chapter 1
SCOTLAND NECK. NORTH CAROLINA, THREE YEARS LATER
"Mac, did you see my comb?" Keiley called from the bathroom, her voice a little sharp with irritation and simmering with impatience.
"I have my own, Kei," he reminded her in the same tone.
She moved from the bathroo
m, naked as the day she was born, water still beading on her shoulders, her cap of dark hair mussed around her face as she began searching the tops of the dresser, the vanity, the bedside tables.
Delicate and fragile. That was his wife. At twenty-six she still captivated him, made him harder than hell, and made him think of fairies on a fantasy night. A sensual, sexy fairy sandwiched between two male bodies and gleaming with moisture.
He shook the image away, frustration surging through him as his control weakened further.
"It was just in there yesterday," she muttered as Mac cinched his belt and considered uncinching it just as quickly.
If he moved fast enough, he could be undressed, have her flat on her back and his cock sinking into the fist-tight heat between her thighs.
He was loosening his belt when her gaze sliced to him.
"Don't even think about it." Hazel eyes were still dark with lingering anger.
"I'm still in the doghouse, then?" Mac grinned as he fastened the belt before sitting down on the end of the bed to pull on the scarred work boots he wore on the farm.
He tended to indulge Keiley whenever he could, but he had to admit, there were times he was tempted to indulge more than just her feminine wiles. That glimmer of confrontation and defiance in her eyes often tempted him to indulge a dominance he had so far managed to keep strictly under control.
"However you want to consider it." She bent down, her delightful little tush sticking up in the air as she looked beneath the bed.
"Keep flashing that ass at me and I'll show you how short that stay in the doghouse is going to be."
He felt he owed her at least a warning. She had good reason to be a shade upset with him, after all. Standing a woman up for an intimate dinner at home, complete with candlelight, because he had become distracted at a horse sale wasn't a good idea.
Especially when he had been warned to be home on time. He hadn't forgotten a damned thing. His control was just that shaky. He hadn't dared show up on time.
She had waited up on him, too. Dressed in scarlet red silk, thigh-high stockings, and heels. She met him at the door, told him good night sweet as sugar, then went to bed.
His dinner had been in the oven. The candles had burned to nubs. She had obviously eaten. And he had managed, for one more night, not to mention the hungers tearing him apart.
"Touch my ass and you'll lose your hand," she informed him as she straightened and looked around the room with an expression of confusion. "That was my favorite comb, Mac."
"Did you look under the cabinet?"
She had so much fussy female stuff in there that he sometimes wondered how she found anything.
"Of course I did." She shot him a frown that warned him he should have already known that.
He flashed her a grin that had better warn her that he was getting damned horny watching her run around naked. He wasn't above seducing her. She could protest until hell froze over, but they both knew
that after the first kiss she was going to cave. It was a given. He knew it, she knew it, and his cock knew it.
She did beat a hasty retreat back to the bathroom as Mac drew in a silent breath of relief.
"You know, you need to get a handle on yourself," she told him, causing him to catch his breath again minutes later as she left the bathroom.
"That waistband is too damned low." He glared at the sight of her lovely hip bones above the elastic band of the shorts. And the so-called t-shirt wasn't much better. It flashed too much belly, and showed her navel ring. A navel ring that had been driving him crazy the past few months.
"Get used to it, Daddy," she pouted sarcastically. "Do I bitch over your t-shirts that stretch over your chest, or your ass in your jeans?"
"My jeans aren't low enough to flash my dick, either. There's not enough material to those shorts to keep yourself decent, Keiley."
Let alone him. He was almost panting now. His balls were tight. He was ready to fuck and he was ready to go for it now. She was tempting a hungry man. And she knew it.
Over the past year his fiery wife had become a sexual force to be reckoned with.
"That's too bad. I'm sure you would get a lot of notice if they were." She eyed the bulging crotch before glancing back at him with sparkling amusement. "Arrested, too, most likely, but it would definitely be interesting."
"Change clothes."
"Not on your life."
She slid her feet into a pair of sandals and walked sedately out of the bedroom, her ass twitching in those damned too-tight shorts, flashing it at him like a matador flashes a red cape at an enraged bull.
She'd been doing that a lot lately. Tempting him. Defying him. Pushing the boundaries he had allowed her to set when they first married.
A part of him had watched the progression with anticipation. He knew what was coming. She was tired of waiting on him to push her sexuality. She was pushing it herself now.
Her boundaries and his.
Did she intend to go out in public like that?
Mac jerked his shirt on, working the buttons as he stomped through the hallway and downstairs to the kitchen.
"Where are you going today?" He asked as he came to a stop in the doorway, watching as she put coffee on.
"No place, unless you start demanding I change clothes first. Then, I don't know. Main Street shopping, or if you prefer, hooking the street corners." She blinked back at him innocently.
"Smartass."
"Don't start, Mac." Her frown said it all.
"You might as well go ahead and forgive me, Keiley," he warned her.
"Why should I do something that stupid?" she asked incredulously. "This is three days in a row that you've come home late from some sale or meeting. Normally I'm in the bed asleep before you ever walk in the front door. If I did that to you, you would have a fit."
"I'd paddle your ass," he muttered.
"Don't tempt me, McCoy. I still have the baseball bat." Tense, narrow-eyed, and now spitting mad, she faced him like an enraged little fairy. All she lacked was the little gossamer wings fluttering for effect.
"Did you find your comb?" He changed the subject quickly.
She wasn't fooled, but at least she let it slide.
"No." Ruffling her fingers through her hair, that little confused look filled her face again before she turned back to the coffeepot and flipped it on. "I must have moved it without thinking."
Which wasn't like Keiley. Then again, the atmosphere between them had been more than a little strained lately. He shouldn't have stayed out late, no matter how hard he was trying to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He just had to do it again the next morning anyway. And it wasn't as though he could forget the hungers that raged through his mind.
The missing comb bothered him, though. His mind refused to let it go.
"Have you lost anything else?"
"You're not an FBI agent anymore, Mac," she reminded him as she took cups out of the cabinet. "You are now a farmer and horse and cattle breeder. Remember?"
"You know what they say, Kei, you can take the boy out of the agency—" He shrugged.
"Well, un-agent." She pulled the refrigerator door open and collected eggs, butter, and bacon. "I've just misplaced the comb without thinking. That's all. I'll find it before long."
Maybe he was going a little overboard, Mac thought, but it felt funny. Keiley didn't just lose things. For all her fussy feminine girly stuff, she was so organized she made his back teeth clench at times.
"I've been distracted lately," she finally admitted. "It's been a long month."
He heard the note of censure in her voice and felt an edge of guilt. Guilt wasn't something he liked feeling in his marriage. It meant he was failing her. That he had hurt her, and the last thing he wanted to do was hurt Keiley.
Hell, he had said one could take the boy out of the agency, but this had nothing to do with his work as an agent. It had to do with his sexual past. One could take
the man out of the club, but the club still lingered in him. The needs were beginning to eat him alive.
But if he wasn't wrong, Keiley's were now eating at her, as well.
Restraining the dominance knotting his gut was becoming harder by the day Restraining his sexual hungers was becoming impossible. And it was giving his delectable little wife the impression that his back was made for her delicately shod feet to walk right over.
"I'll try not to be late again," he promised, watching her back tense as she laid bacon in a pan.
"Doesn't matter. I'll just make certain I don't make any more plans to surprise you."
Damn, that one hurt. Mac winced. He liked her surprises. When she met him in silk, stockings, and heels and smelling of a faintly musk and floral fragrance that made his dick pound and his hands ache to touch her.
No more surprises meant no more wild sex on the coffee table, the couch, or the chair.
That didn't suit him at all.
"I could always surprise you instead," he suggested.
"You could." She nodded. "You could start by telling me what has you wound up tighter than one of your studs during breeding season?"
She glanced back at him too fast for him to contain his reaction. Hell, he had been out of the agency too long. He knew she caught the flash of guilt in his eyes, the telltale wince of his expression. The tightening of his lips.
"It's been a busy month, Kei." That was his story and he was sticking to it. For now.
Until he knew for certain where she was headed with it. In the past three years he had watched her grow in sexuality and confidence. He'd pushed the boundaries needed to help her deal with the gossip and the people of a quickly growing community and helped guide her toward the friends he knew would aid in that. Now, Keiley was making her own steps. For the past year, she had been pushing herself and him.
And it appeared she was beginning to reach for an even higher goal.
His dick tightened painfully at the thought, every muscle in his body tensing in preparation for it.