“Over our dead bodies!” Max nearly yelled, his wolf snarling and growling at the mention of such an atrocity.
“That man will never touch you!” Eli snapped.
Shelly reached out and took Max’s and Elli’s hand in hers, bringing them to her chest and holding them tightly. She wasn’t even aware that she was doing it.
“He didn’t,” she assured them. “Vera said she was going to burn my mating marks off with silver.”
“Did she, baby?” Max asked, the wolf in him demanding that he pull at the pink T-shirt she was wearing to bare her shoulders to them so they could see if their mating marks were still there.
“No.” Shelly turned her attention away from the fireplace to look at Max and Eli. “What she did was far worse.”
“What did she do, Shelly?” Eli asked, his voice gentle.
“She gave me some herb concoction to make me lose the baby I was carrying.”
“What? No, that can’t be,” Max assured her.
“I know what happened, Max,” Shelly said softly as she released her hold on their hands and stood up to walk toward the fireplace and rested her forehead against the mantle. “The herbs she gave me caused severe cramps. I was violently ill and sick to my stomach. My baby…” She couldn’t finish. The memory of it was still so very fresh in her mind.
Max wrapped Shelly in his arms, looking at Eli with haunted eyes. Eli rested his forehead against the back of Shelly’s head, breathing in her scent and sighing with sadness.
Eli, there was no baby, Max’s confused voice entered his mind.
No. There wasn’t. That day, we scented her fertility, Eli assured him. We were going to make our baby after we swam with her in the lake.
She’s been carrying this unnecessary sorrow for ten years, Max whispered.
“I remember hearing my mates telling someone that they weren’t mated,” Shelly said suddenly. She pushed out of Max’s and Eli’s arms and walked over to the stairway that led to the bedrooms. “I remember hearing them say that they hadn’t gotten close to anyone in Jace Beckett’s pack. They denied me.”
“Shelly,” Max whispered, pain slicing through him because of the denial that she had heard.
She looked at both men, her eyes bright with tears. “I guess I didn’t really lose them,” she said softly. “They chose not to keep me as their mate.” She sniffed softly and wiped at her eyes angrily. “I can’t help that they didn’t want me, but I wanted them. I loved them more than my own life. And I loved their baby. I wanted their baby.”
She turned and walked up the stairs, wandering through the bedrooms that she had memories of inhabiting. Standing in the doorway of what would have been a nursery, she saw the beautiful rocking chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room. She walked over to it and touched the rocker with the tips of her fingers. Whoever had made it had certainly done a good job. The craftsmanship was outstanding. Its cherry wood was polished to a high gloss. The thick purple cushions of the deepest hue that were set securely on the seat and at the back of the chair were stunning. She could picture herself sitting in that chair and nursing her baby.
What baby? There was no baby. Vera had seen to that.
The words were heavy in her heart. The physical pain was nearly as crippling as the emotional pain of losing her child.
Turning, she walked out of the room, knowing she would never fill it with any child. How could she? She didn’t have any mates to create that child with.
When she stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, she ached at the memory of sharing that room and that bed with her mates. Stepping inside and closing the door behind her, she walked over to the bed slowly and sat down. Closing her eyes, she pushed through the pain in her mind to try to remember the men that she now knew that she hadn’t lost. She searched out the elusive memories of the men who had rejected her and had thrown her away.
Chapter 29
“No wonder her mind is trying to protect her from our memory,” Max said, horrified at what their woman had overheard incorrectly and had experienced at the hands of her sick and abusive mother.
“How are we going to fix this, Max?” Eli asked, clearly agitated.
Max looked at this triad partner and saw the way Eli’s eyes mirrored his wolf. Max knew that his own had to be in the same state. His wolf was clawing at his chest to make this right.
“I think we need to give her time,” he said after a moment. “If we spend some time with her, maybe she’ll accept us and allow us to explain.”
“If we wait, she’ll think we’ve kept the truth from her,” Eli pointed out. “She won’t trust us if we wait to tell her what happened with Randall. We need to tell her now.”
“Maybe,” Max said softly as he looked up the stairway and heard the door of the master suite closing.
“No. Fuck that, Max! Maybe isn’t going to cut it. We have to tell her.”
He took the stairs two at a time, standing outside the bedroom that they had shared with their woman. He knocked softly and waited for the gentle voice that called out to him to come in. Opening the door, he walked into the bedroom and knelt before the bed, glad to see that Max was right behind him and quickly knelt beside Shelly, too.
“Max and I want to tell you about our mate, Shelly,” Eli said gently.
Shelly looked at both men and nodded. She felt their sorrow. She felt their upset. Pressing out her omega abilities, she did her best to soothe them. She didn’t want them to be upset. They were so kind. She could sense it in them. She could also sense their deep caring and concern for her. That was nice.
“Our old alpha came to Beckett’s land and threatened to hurt our mate,” Max continued for them. “He also threatened to hurt our parents who had just come to this pack. Jace and Jackson offered them a place to live without fear.”
“Why did they have to be afraid?” Shelly asked, confused.
“Our parents were part of triads,” Max explained. “One of Eli’s fathers, and one of my fathers, had been killed in an accident. When we lived on Randall’s pack land, Randall didn’t know that our parents were part of triad matings. He didn’t believe in triads. He told his pack members over and over again that a triad mating was unnatural. It was his intention to wipe out every pack that lived with that mating lifestyle.”
“Does Jace know?” Shelly asked, horrified. “He needs to know.”
“He knows, sweetheart,” Eli assured her. “Randall attacked their mate’s son and Suzie Robinson. Jace challenged him. He won and spared Randall’s life, but Randall was not an honorable wolf. He tried to kill Jace when he turned his back on him.”
“What happened?” Shelly whispered.
“Jace had no choice but to kill him,” Max said, his voice hard.
“What about Laurie’s son?”
“Dean was injured pretty badly,” Max told her gently. “He needed immediate surgery. Everyone was concerned that he wouldn’t make it, but his mate claimed him after everyone had left Drew’s clinic.”
“Dean and Suzie Robinson’s brother Mitchell are triad partners,” Eli explained. “Their mate came forward to claim Dean without anyone’s knowledge. She saved his life by giving him her mating bite. He healed quickly because of it.”
“She sounds like a very courageous woman,” Shelly said softly. “I hope I can meet her.”
“The thing is, baby, no one knows who she is,” Max told her, laughing softly. “Jace thinks that their mate was afraid to come forward because Dean wasn’t twenty-one when she claimed him. Dean and Mitchell refuse to reveal who she is. Dean says she’s his sexy wolf babe.”
Shelly couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ll bet she’s not happy about that nickname,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling.
“I think he does it just to tease her,” Eli said, smiling at the joy that lit Shelly’s beautiful blue eyes. “It’s obvious that Dean and Mitchell really care about her, but they’re young and still need to get through college.”
“I hope they get b
ack together. I want them to be mated. They deserve to be happy in a triad,” Shelly whispered. “Every mate should be happy in their triad.”
“We think so, too,” Max agreed, looking at Eli and nodding. He knew Eli was right. They had to be honest with their woman. They had to tell her everything. He just hoped that she would be willing to listen. He also hoped that she would be willing to forgive them.
“We loved our mate very much,” Eli began. “We still do. She was our gift. We mated the day she turned twenty-one and was presented to her pack as an adult. She was beautiful, inside and out. We’ve never met a kinder or a more loving woman.”
“What happened to her?” Shelly asked gently, gripping her hands together in her lap as she sat on the bed. Her stomach felt as if there were a thousand butterflies flitting through it.
“We didn’t know until just recently that she overheard something that we said to Randall when he came to force us to go back to his pack,” Eli told her gently.
“What did you say?”
“When Randall asked us if we had mated, we told him that we hadn’t,” Eli said without hesitation. He was determined to tell Shelly everything so they could get beyond this misunderstanding and resume their mated life. “Randall asked us if we had any connection to anyone in this pack. We told him that we didn’t.”
“Why did you do that?” Shelly asked, horrified that Max and Eli had denied their woman just as she had been denied by her own mates.
“We would have told him anything that we needed to tell him in order to keep our mate and our parents safe until we could get to Jace and Jackson to warn them that Randall and his men were on their pack land,” Max explained.
“We heard our woman being beaten,” Eli continued for them. “We were held down by Randall’s men. Silver ropes were wrapped around our necks, and Randall was using a whip with silver tips to make us weak. We couldn’t get to our mate. Her screams of pain still wake me up at night. I’ll never be able to get the sound of them out of my mind.”
Shelly’s entire body froze. Memories of that awful night swamped her. She did her best to push them behind the veil. They hurt too much. The pain was too much.
“Our mate was given herbs to make her lose a baby that she wasn’t carrying,” Max said gently.
“What?” Shelly whispered.
Max reached out and held Shelly’s hands gently within his own. “You weren’t pregnant, Shelly. Eli and I scented your fertility that morning. You told us that you didn’t want to know when you were fertile because it would make you too nervous to think about making a baby or not. You wanted to make love without the pressure of worrying that you could or couldn’t get pregnant.”
“We were supposed to meet you at the lake to swim with you and Janine after you had lunch with Martha,” Eli told her, reaching up and touching their mate’s cheek lightly with the backs of his fingers. “After that, Max and I had plans to bring you back here to our home and love you senseless. We were going to make our baby. Our love was going to create our beautiful little girl. Remember our Allison? We’re going to call her Allie. Matthew would be next, and then Luke. We saw our three children in this home in our shared vision.”
“We didn’t know that you had heard only part of our conversation, baby,” Max said sadly. “We understand now why you left. You thought that we had denied you. We didn’t. We said what we did so we could protect you and buy some time.”
“We tried to talk to you through our link but we couldn’t hear you,” Eli told her, the worry and pain of that day still raw in his heart. “We felt that you were alive, but we were cut off from you.”
“I was unconscious,” Shelly whispered. “When I woke up, I heard you denying me. I was devastated.”
“We were trying to protect you,” Max told her again.
“Then I felt sick. I had cramps in my stomach and I bled,” Shelly told them as she looked at them. Her blue eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I lost our baby.”
“No, sweetheart. There was no baby,” Eli assured her.
“You went to Jace and he drove away with you in his truck,” Max told her, the pain at her leaving still as deep and as cutting as the day it had happened. “We saw you look at us and make the choice to turn away from us as we watched in our wolf forms. We saw your sadness. We didn’t understand until now why you had left. Please, baby. Don’t ever leave us again. We love you. We want you. Always. We want to live with you here, in this home, where we knew such love and kindness with you. We want those beautiful babies with you.”
“Being without you for all of these years has been the worst time of our lives,” Eli whispered. “Now that we have you back, we can’t let you go. Please, sweetheart. Search your heart for the truth. We love you. We want you. We need you. We would never deny you.”
“Never,” Max said emphatically.
Shelly couldn’t breathe. The guilt and the sorrow were screaming in her mind. It was too much. In an instant, the veil that shielded her mind from the horrible memories of the past crumbled. Everything had been her fault, after all.
Her eyes rolled up into her eyelids, and she fell backward onto the bed. The silence of the darkness protected her from the pain that she had caused.
Her last thought before silence swallowed her up was that it didn’t matter if her men forgave her. She would never forgive herself.
Chapter 30
“I swear, those men are driving me crazy!” Kaley told all of the women who were sitting in the living room of the main lodge. She looked at her sister Meeka and was annoyed by her smothered laughter. “Don’t even start, Meeka.” The warning was clearly evident in her voice.
“I’m not doing anything,” Meeka protested, unable to keep the soft giggles from escaping her as she saw her sister’s frustration.
As far as Meeka was concerned, Kaley deserved to be a little crazy. She was denying Nathaniel and Brett. They were good men who weren’t giving up on her. And their humor was exactly what Kaley needed. She was way too serious about life. Oh, sure, Kaley had every reason to take life seriously. She had been the one who had taken care of the both of them since the time they had been kids. She had also been treated horribly by the man she had chosen to date. But that wasn’t the case now.
Nathaniel and Brett valued her. Yeah, they teased her unmercifully, but Meeka understood why. They were both trying to get Kaley to loosen up. They were also trying to keep her calm. They didn’t want her to perceive them as a threat. Since Kaley had come to the Circle Three Ranch, they had been biding their time and giving her the space that they felt she needed, but Meeka could tell that the men were becoming increasingly worried and sad that Kaley wasn’t open to their mating.
“Aunt Kaley?” Eric called to his aunt as he walked over to her and climbed up onto her lap as she sat on the end of the huge couch in front of the fireplace.
“What, sweetheart?” Kaley asked, gathering Eric into her arms and pulling him carefully against her to settle him comfortably.
“I want you to have wolves like me and Mommy do,” Eric told her quietly. “It’s good to have wolves.”
Kaley’s heart hurt at the sweet request of her nephew. She may present to the world that she didn’t want to be with Nathaniel and Brett, but she did. She was drawn to the men so fiercely, she actually had trouble breathing whenever they were around. The dreams she was having about them were incredible. Yeah, some of them were pretty sexy and hot, but most of them showed her the happiness that she would share with the men if she would just push aside her fears and give them the chance.
That was the whole problem. She didn’t have the courage to give them the chance. What if they physically hurt her? She was no stranger to that type of abuse. Hadn’t her last relationship shown her that men couldn’t be trusted? The physical pain she had experienced had been only a part of it. The emotional trauma that still haunted her had seated deep fear within her. She was too afraid of so many things—the biggest of which was having her heart broken and he
r spirit crushed. She couldn’t see those incredible men wanting to spend the rest of their lives with her.
Child, a triad mating is for life, a woman’s voice spoke to her gently. Nathaniel and Brett have already committed to you in their hearts. They will never want another. It is the way of destined mates.
Kaley hugged Eric tightly against her chest. The woman’s voice had been speaking to her more and more often in the last few days. Kaley was actually fearing for her own sanity.
You are not losing your mind, Kaley Martin, the voice said firmly. Ask the women here if they have heard me talking to them. My relationship with this wonderful group of shifters is protective and filled with love. I will watch over all of you. I will be with you always. You must realize that the more you push your men away, the deeper you will hurt them. Please, child, give your men a chance. Your future happiness is awaiting you.
Kaley looked around at the women who occupied the many comfortable chairs and couches in the huge living room. She saw their happiness in their lives here on Beckett’s pack land. Each of them was in a triad mating that had given them such love and acceptance. Her own sister Meeka was happily mated to Reece and Wade and was pregnant with their baby.
Martha Gregg sat in one of the large recliners beside the fireplace. Kaley had come to know and love the older woman so much. She was the one person every woman in the pack went to when they needed advice or help. She was also the one who looked out for their comfort after their matings. It would have been embarrassing to Kaley if she hadn’t known how important family was to this group of people. There was no embarrassment involved in looking out for the comfort and safety of their pack family.
As she looked at Laurie Young, Nikki Sinclair, Abbey Tyler, Suzie Robinson, and Meeka, she realized that each woman glowed with happiness. They were also pregnant, each of them in different stages of their pregnancy, but every one of them thrilled by the life that was growing within them.
Shelly's Forbidden Mates [Beckett's Wolf Pack, Triad Mates 6] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More) Page 29