by Cara Adams
That dump truck the boys had stolen was worth almost a quarter million dollars, and they’d stripped the transmission trying to drive it, as well as smashing the front of it into the gate. Those four young men would be sitting in jail for a while.
Tegan shook her head and paced up and down the wall for a while. It was very quiet now. The day shift had left and the night shift had arrived a couple hours ago. No one thought anything would happen tonight, so soon after the other attack. Besides, the Alpha’s men had made their checking of the walls extremely obvious yesterday. While Tegan had been getting her brains fucked out, the replacement team had marched along the walls both inside and outside the clinic, and left their cars, emblazoned with security company signage, parked out front of the clinic where every passerby could see them.
The Alpha’s idea had been to scare off any copycat young people, and Tegan could only hope it worked. She climbed up her lookout tree and sat for a while, letting her gaze drift through the bushes on the other side of the road, then up and down the road as far as she could see in both directions. Everything appeared quiet and still out there. Good.
She shimmied down again and walked silently on the grass up toward the clinic. Her boots would make a noise this late at night no matter how softly she trod, so it was better to stay on the grass.
Stepping as lightly as she could, she crossed the driveway and walked up the main entrance. The lights were dimmed inside, but she could still see quite clearly that no one was in the front foyer of the building or near the reception desk. Tegan tried the door, but it was firmly locked as it should be. She tried the window, but it, too, was locked. Excellent.
Tegan stayed in the garden bed and stepped close to the clinic wall, searching the ground with her gaze before lifting her head to check the walls and windows as she passed them. Nothing, nothing, nothing. All exactly the way it was supposed to be. This looked like being a long shift, but boring was good right now.
Around the building she went following the walls. This was actually an old farmhouse which had belonged to Dr. Oscar Thorne’s grandparents. Both he and his cousin George had vacationed here as children. When their grandparents had died they’d left the property to Oscar and all their disposable assets to George. The idea had been to split the inheritance more or less equally between their two grandchildren. As best Sierra Bond and a team of accountants had been able to work out, the assets were equal. But for some reason George had decided he wanted the property and wouldn’t listen to reason about it. He’d never said why, just that it was “his.” If only he’d explained his reasoning, Oscar had been prepared to buy him out if it was a matter of money. However, George had been aggressive in his desire to take over the house and land but silent on his reasoning, so here was Tegan, tiptoeing around the building near midnight, checking for punk kids who might do something to harm the shape-shifter patients in the clinic.
Tegan stopped to look in the staff parking lot. There were four cars there, and she recognized them as belonging to the staff. She’d let each of those cars, with their occupant, in through the gate a couple hours ago. So far so good.
Staying on the grass as much as possible, Tegan moved the few more paces that brought her within sight of the back door. The staff entry. It had a lock and a touchpad. Each staff member had their own pass code, so there was always a record of who’d arrived and was on the premises at any time.
Except that the door was ajar. Tegan stepped back into the bushes. Why was the door open? The staff knew to lock it even if they were just running out to their car for something they’d forgotten. Besides, there was no one in any of the cars. Well, no one she could see.
Tegan looked down at her boots and sighed. If she took them off she could cross the concrete much more silently to look in the cars. But if she needed to fight or run, she wanted her boots on. No, her training demanded she keep them on. She’d just have to try to be silent. Tegan circled around a little, staying on the grass as long as she could, before stepping on the concrete. She tiptoed up to each vehicle and looked inside, but no one was lying on the seat taking a nap or looking for something they’d dropped in the foot well or anything else. There was no one around. There was also no pile of clothing there, which may have been left had a shape-shifter gone for a run.
Okay, well perhaps there was a simple answer, or perhaps they had a problem. Time to wake up Harry and let him know.
She moved into a direct line with the slightly open staff door and hunched down behind a tree, before punching Harry’s number into her cell phone.
“Ngugh?”
Whispering, her voice barely audible, Tegan said, “The back staff door is ajar. No one is in the parking lot or the cars, and there’s no pile of clothes around here. I’m about to enter the building.”
“Be careful. Jayden and I’ll back you up.”
Tegan tucked her cell phone back in her jeans pocket, pulled a scrunchie off her wrist and tied her hair tightly on top of her head. It wasn’t long enough to be a real danger, but if there was going to be a fight with a couple of punks, Tegan wanted every possible point to be in her favor. Now they couldn’t easily get a grip on her hair.
This time Tegan ran across the concrete, moving as lightly as she could, but not wanting to waste any more time. The punks could be unplugging some patient’s oxygen cylinder or causing who-knew-what damage inside the clinic.
Cautiously she opened the door a little wider and slipped inside. The lighting was low, but it was easy enough to see no one was in this hallway. Keeping close to the wall so the floorboards were less likely to creak, Tegan tiptoed the length of the hallway and poked her head around the corner. A man was attaching something to the bottom of the stairs. He had a backpack with tools spread out around him and was concentrating on his task, oblivious to her or anything else.
Tegan slid back out of sight and hurried softly into the staff kitchen, grabbing the fire extinguisher off the wall. Only when she was about to use it on the man and what he was doing did she realize a fire extinguisher would not stop a bomb. If it was a bomb.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled, holding the extinguisher pointed at him.
“Too late. It’s a bomb and it’ll go off before you can stop it.” The man—George Thorne, she recognized him from his pictures—sneered at her.
“Then you’ll blow up, too,” she said, slamming the fire extinguisher into his guts with all her strength.
She dropped the extinguisher, wrenched the box from the bottom stair it was partially duct-taped to, and ran down the hallway, barreling through the doorway into the parking lot. Tegan could hear the damn thing ticking away her life and that of the clinic. She ran a few more steps until she was clear of the building then hurled the parcel as hard as she could, over the grass toward the lake.
It hit the ground with a bit of a pop, and then there was nothing.
“A dud, just like everything else he’s done,” she said, turning to walk back to the clinic.
Behind her was a massive whoooommmph!
Tegan whirled around as a fireball blew up into the sky.
“Okay, maybe not a dud.” She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and punched in 9-1-1, then remembered George himself was likely getting away.
Tegan sprinted back to the clinic and down the hallway. Harry was handcuffing George, and Jayden was on his cell phone. A handful of patients and two nurses were standing in the recreation room watching them.
“What service did you want, please?” came a voice from her phone.
“Fire,” she answered at exactly the same time as Jayden said, “Police.”
“Yeah, them, too.”
* * * *
Harry was almost ill when he learned that Tegan had run outside with a bomb that had then exploded. It’d taken three fire crews to put out the blaze, and there was a five-foot-deep crater in the middle of the grass, and bits and pieces of rubbish and bushes scattered over a wide area as well.
At first Georg
e had said he was just delivering the parcel for a friend and knew nothing about it. The crowbar in his backpack belied his story that the door had been open. Apart from that, a patient had been heading to the kitchen to get a late night cup of coffee and had overheard George tell Tegan it was a bomb. The patient had quickly shuffled away to tell the nurse on duty, so both of them had heard and witnessed enough to implicate George himself. After that, George refused to say anything to anyone.
Jayden had gone with Ambrielle on her motorcycle, and they’d found George’s getaway car—stolen of course—long before the police had sent anyone to look. But it really seemed that this time he’d done everything himself. Either he’d gotten tired of his minions failing, or else they’d been scared off by seeing all their friends end up in jail.
Twenty-four hours later there was a team of wolves guarding the gate again, two teams of landscape gardeners standing by to restore the garden when the crime scene people were done, and Harry was sitting in the same Jacuzzi with Tegan and Jayden as they’d been in just a day previously. Once again the Alpha had arranged everything, insisting they needed a reward for catching George Thorne.
“The Alpha’s going to be broke paying for this luxury for us twice in a week,” joked Jayden.
Tegan spoke thoughtfully. “You know, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear he owned this place, or was a part owner at least. He seems to be very involved in the BDSM community in this town.”
Harry grinned. He’d been thinking exactly the same thing. But he had more important things to discuss. “Now that our job is done, we need to concentrate on our future. We’ve agreed we’re in a relationship. We’ve said we’ll commit to each other. And I know you’ve both admitted mentally at least that we all love each other. The next step is to work out how we’re going to grow our love and be together. I think you should both work for me full-time. I can easily expand my business. I already have more work than I can accept, and if the Alpha agrees to release Tegan to work with me, he’ll be sure to keep sending us some jobs as well. But are you both okay with that? I’m already your Dom. Will me being your employer as well be too much for you both to handle?”
Harry kept his face bland and mildly interested, his arms loosely by his sides under the water. But inside his guts were tied in a knot of tension. He wanted them both. Jayden was the best partner a man could have. Trustworthy and honorable. He never needed to worry about his back or the quality of the work when Jayden was on the job. And Tegan, well Tegan was still under his skin and in his blood, but now he’d recognized that it wasn’t either hate or lust, but love. He cared for her in a way he’d never cared for anyone else in his entire life. He wanted her with a passion so deep he didn’t know what he’d do if she said no to him. And she was a damn good operative, too. She’d found the freaking spiders and the stolen car and stopped the bomb from leveling the clinic to the ground. She was truly a woman worthy of any man in the world. It was just that he hoped she was ready to admit she wanted him and Jayden, not anyone else.
“From my point of view it’s the perfect solution. We won’t always be working the same cases, either. Because we’ll be working with different cases at least some of the time, that means we won’t be living in each other’s shadow or anything like that,” said Jayden.
Both men turned their faces toward Tegan. She was lying right down under the bubbles, the water up to her neck, her eyes closed and her head tipped back on the side of the tub. If it wasn’t for the slight smile around her mouth, he might almost think she was asleep.
“I’ll only agree under certain circumstances. I’m not your personal slave outside the dungeon. If you want food purchased, we negotiate. If you want laundry done, you can do it yourself. And I will never, ever pick up your dirty clothes from the floor, for either of you. I’ll be an equal partner outside the dungeon. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jayden.
“I agree we all share the chores. I’m actually used to looking after myself,” said Harry seriously.
Then he caught the slight twitch of her lips. Harry dived across the tub and hauled her body to his, sending a tidal wave flowing over the side of the tub and flooding the bathroom floor. He didn’t care. He had her in his arms and smacked her ass hard. She wiggled in his grasp, but it was a happy wiggle. She wasn’t trying to escape.
“You little witch, you were teasing us,” he said, paddling her ass again.
She opened her eyes, her green gaze full of laughter which she no longer tried to hide. “To some extent, I’m serious. If we’re all working, we all share the chores. And I’m not mopping the bathroom floor here either. You made the flood, you can clean it up.”
“Whatever. The next step will be to work out where we’re going to live,” he said, prepared to ignore the floor for now. If his plans came good he and Jayden would be fucking her in this tub quite soon, and likely there’d be even more water on the floor.
“Aren’t you forgetting something? We still don’t know why George wanted the clinic. And until we find out, the issue isn’t closed. He’ll get out of jail one day and likely he’ll have friends who can carry on his attacks even though he’s in jail himself.”
“Fuck,” groaned Jayden.
Tegan slid around and grabbed his cock and Jayden’s, one in each hand. Her palm felt so good on his flesh Harry almost lost all power of thought. But there was an important thing still to do. “First we have to verbalize our relationship. I love you, Tegan, and I respect you, Jayden.”
Jayden slid across the tub and joined them. “I love you, Tegan, and I’d be honored to have you as my Dom, Harry.”
Tegan gripped both cocks tighter. “I love you both very much. Now can we get on with the fucking?”
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cara Adams adores erotic romance, especially ménage, BDSM, and shape-shifters. One day, someone said to her, “Why don’t you put them all in one book?”
So she did.
For all titles by Cara Adams, please visit
www.bookstrand.com/cara-adams
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com