by Dani April
She was amazed that the rest of her day progressed just like any other. Things seemed comfortable at the clinic. She felt good about the decision she had made the night before and more confident than she had ever felt in her life. Some of Jason’s alpha assertiveness must have rubbed off on her.
“Dr. Adams never used that eyedrop on Tinkerbell before,” Mrs. Evans told Arielle after she brought her Persian cat in for a checkup. Mrs. Evans always complained and acted as if the former owner of the clinic was far superior to Arielle.
In the past this would have bothered Arielle and she would have apologized to the old lady with the cat. Today she only gave her a polite smile. “Well, Mrs. Evans, your other cat went blind before you had to have it put to sleep. Tinkerbell still has perfect vision. Just try and think about that, dear.”
Mrs. Evans gave Arielle a quizzical look, but Arielle knew she had put her in her place.
The day progressed with small victories like that all day long, and Arielle started to like the new version of herself that Jason and his brothers had unleashed in her.
Right at 6:00 p.m. Jason was in front of the clinic to pick Arielle up just as he said he would be. She climbed in the passenger seat. It still felt odd to get in on this side of her vehicle. She hadn’t been inside for half a second before he had her in his arms.
“How was your day?” he asked her, and she realized she never got tired of that question.
“My day was fine, but are you going to tell me what you did today and why you needed to borrow my car?”
He nodded into the back. “I went by the store and picked us up some things for dinner. I thought about taking us out to eat tonight, but then you’re such a good cook I decided I wanted to take you back to your place. I want you to fix us some more steaks.”
“You got it,” she assured him. “But that isn’t why you needed to borrow my car, is it?”
“No, it wasn’t. I went by to see an old friend who lives outside Wolf Creek today.”
“Anyone I know?”
“You know him well. Dr. Adams, the old vet you bought the clinic from. My brothers and I have known him for years. He knows about us being shifters.”
Arielle smiled. She was fond of old Dr. Adams. “How is Doc Adams?” she asked.
“He’s fine. He misses running things at the clinic. He misses them so much that he agreed to take the place over for two weeks starting next Monday.”
She gave him another hug. “That’s fantastic, darling.”
“Now you won’t have any worries when I take you up to Shifter Valley. I called Kyle and Luke. They’re going to have the place immaculately clean for you by the time we get there on Sunday.”
She laughed when she thought about the two big men and housework. It also gave her a strange shiver in her tummy when she thought of them now. They did that work for her. She wanted to ask some questions about them, but bit her tongue. It was better if she just went with the flow from this point on. If she asked too many questions, she would only succeed to make herself scared again.
Apparently Jason saw through her brave façade. That night after dinner when they were in the backyard and the sun had just started to set behind the mountains, he became serious with her.
“Are you afraid, Arielle?” he asked her.
He seemed to be able to see right through her so she didn’t even try a lie with him. She nodded her head meekly. “I think of that ranch I’ve never seen up in the valley. I think of all three of you, and I’m terrified,” she admitted in a small but determined voice.
He put his arm around her. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to. The fact that he was concerned made Arielle feel better. Of course there was no way to completely alleviate the trepidation she felt every time she thought about the relationship she was about to enter with the three men.
“What will it be like on your ranch, darling?” she asked as they watched the sun go down.
“Just like the love we’ve had right here in your home,” he told her confidently. “But multiply that times three.”
She started to blush and covered her face in her hands. “I’m so afraid something is going to go wrong. I’m so afraid I’m going to do something wrong. I worry you’ll end up hating me and that your brothers really don’t like me.”
“I will never hate you.”
“What if your brothers don’t want me? I mean, they’re both a little younger than me, especially Luke. He must be six or seven years younger than I am. And both of them are so…” She struggled for the right words. “Well, big and good-looking. I’ve always been a skinny runt. Maybe they were just being polite when they said they liked me. Maybe they only like me as a friend and not as a…”
He stopped her with a kiss. “You don’t know my brothers very well yet.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know them at all.”
“Neither of them is polite,” Jason said and laughed. “When it comes to women, they’re downright draconian. If they didn’t like you, believe me, you’d already know. When it comes to something as important as the rest of our lives, no one in my family is going to be very polite. You’ll never get anything but the unabridged truth from all of us.”
“I don’t know what to do with three men,” she told him.
“That’s okay, because we know what to do with a woman.”
She looked up at his handsome face in the last rays of the day’s sunlight. “I must be crazy to love you, Jason Wildback,” she told him.
“Don’t talk like that, Dr. Banks,” he said, and a wicked smile passed his face.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re going to get a spanking.”
She moaned with desire and moved her crotch against him. Her pussy lips rubbed against his leg through her jeans. “Take me to bed, darling,” she told him. Then she held him back and laughed as she placed her hands on the seat of her jeans. “Only don’t spank me tonight. My butt is still too sore from last night. A girl can only take so much, you know.”
He placed his arm around her and took her to bed. Their lovemaking was gentle and controlled. It was the best yet. Arielle had never felt as close to another human being.
The rest of the week passed in a blur, and Sunday morning and the trip to Shifter Valley finally arrived.
* * * *
Kyle Wildback had just finished scrubbing the kitchen floor. He looked into the formal dining room of their house. He hoped to see Luke at work in there, but his younger brother was nowhere to be seen.
“Where did you go, Luke?” Kyle called through their large turn-of-the-century mansion. Luke came down the winding stairway in the entrance hall at a run.
“I was upstairs putting on some of that new cologne I bought,” Luke said to Kyle as he joined him in the formal dining room. “You know, I think this was a bad idea to do all this work ourselves. We should have hired some cleaning people. The house is just too big. I don’t know how our parents ever kept it all straight.”
“Never mind that, Luke,” Kyle said. He felt nervous. It was Sunday morning. Their mate would arrive soon with Jason. This was the biggest day of his entire life. He wanted everything to be perfect. They would get two weeks to convince her to stay with them. He knew things weren’t set in stone with her yet. This was the time to make a good impression. “I wanted us to do all the work ourselves. It seems more personal somehow. What if she asks us about it? Are we just going to say we let other people work on our house for us and let Arielle think we just sit around on our rear ends all day and do nothing?”
“But we have the ranch to work,” Luke protested. He still didn’t see why they had to spend all of this time when they had the money to pay other people to do the work for them.
“The place needed a good cleaning, and it’s about time we learned how to do more than just be cowboys.” Kyle checked around the formal dining room and examined for dust bunnies in the corners of the large room. “Did you use the minivac in here like I told you to?”
Luke sighed. “You know I did. I went over everything twice.” Luke patted his brother on the back. “I’ve never seen you so wound up before.”
Kyle nodded that it was true. “This is the big day,” he said.
“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was awake thinking about it all night. That’s when I decided to come downstairs and vacuum again.”
“Good man,” Kyle said and gave him a smile.
“What if she doesn’t like us?”
“Don’t be stupid. She’s our mate. Of course she’s going to like us.” Kyle gave his brother a sly grin of encouragement, but he spoke in a tone of bravado that he really didn’t feel. “She’s going to do a lot more than like us after a while.”
“But she’s not a shifter,” Luke reminded him. “We’re probably going to seem awfully strange to her at first.”
“That’s why Jason told us it’s going to take some time. Besides, Jason seems to be doing pretty well with her so far from what I hear. He got her to agree to come out here and give it a try. We didn’t even know if she’d do that at first.” Kyle tried hard to instill some confidence into his younger brother. He thought he did a pretty good job, too, since he didn’t feel all that confident about it himself.
“I haven’t known a woman yet that didn’t like Jason. You and I aren’t exactly alphas like he is.”
“Hey, you and I do all right with women, too.”
“Those are ordinary women,” Luke said and looked down at the calamander wood floor of the dining room. “Arielle is special.”
“Stop whining like that or she’ll think you’re a baby,” Kyle told Luke.
“Thanks for bringing that up,” Luke said and looked more dejected than ever. “She’s six years older than me. She might think I’m a kid. She might not take me seriously.”
“She’s a year older than me. So what?”
Luke sat down in one of the chairs surrounding the formal dining set. There were twelve chairs around the long table. Their voices echoed in the big room. Kyle sat down next to Luke. “I feel like I do when I go to the dentist,” Luke said and moaned.
“Don’t you want us all to have a mate?”
“Yeah, I do. But I just didn’t know it would be this hard. I thought we’d meet her and start making love and live happily ever after.”
Kyle was about to say something. Then the sunshine on a vehicle outside the twelve-foot window caught his eye. The Suburban had just turned onto the circle drive in front of their house. Kyle reached across the table and tapped Luke on the arm.
“There she is,” he told Luke. “Time to stop worrying about if she likes us or not and start winning her for ourselves.”
“How’s my hair look?” Luke asked him. They both got up from the table and hurried down the corridor to the front door.
“Your hair always flops over like that. She’s going to love you, Luke.” Kyle gave his last words of assurance to his brother.
Both men came outside the house and onto the veranda. They waited until the Suburban pulled to a stop in front. Then they ran down the front steps. Kyle was the first one there. He got the door for Arielle who stepped out of the passenger side of the vehicle.
“Welcome to the Wildback Ranch, Arielle,” Kyle said to her.
“Thank you, Kyle. It’s good to see you again.” She reached up to him. She had to stand on her toes because he was almost a foot taller, and placed a kiss on his cheek. Kyle wanted to take her in his arms right then and do more than kiss her, but he restrained the lusty shifter side of his nature. He didn’t want to scare her off when she had just arrived. He gave her a peck back on her cheek.
“I want to take you inside and show you around our home,” Kyle said to her, and chanced a hand on the small of her back as he led her up the front steps.
“This is a fantastic home you have, Kyle,” she told him. He thought she was genuinely impressed. He hoped she would be. He and Luke had worked hard enough to get it cleaned.
He held the front door open for her, and she entered ahead of him. A glance over his shoulder told him Luke and Jason were only a couple steps behind. Kyle didn’t wait for them and entered after Arielle. He had a chance to check out the designer jeans she wore while her back was to him. She had a knockout figure. If they succeeded with her, they would truly be lucky men.
“This is an old home,” Kyle explained to Arielle. Their footsteps echoed off the twelve-foot ceiling. “Our family has lived here since the eighteen nineties. Our great-grandfathers built it. Over the years each generation has added on to it as time and the good fortune of the ranch allowed. Our grandfathers built the north wing around the time of the Great Depression, and our fathers added the south wing back in the seventies.”
“It’s magnificent. I love that spiral staircase,” Arielle told him.
“Would you like to see the upstairs?” Kyle asked her.
He watched as she looked back at Jason. He thought he read a moment of trepidation on her face. But Jason nodded for her to go with him. Kyle wondered if he laid it on too thick for her, but decided he didn’t know any other way to do this but to give it his all.
“I’ll have Luke bring in your bags,” Jason said to her. He came up to her and put his arm around her. Kyle looked at them with envy. He hoped one day he would be able to do the same with her, and a whole lot more. “You go with Kyle and let him show you around.”
“All right,” she answered Jason. She looked up at him. A silent communication appeared to pass between them. Then she smiled at Kyle. “I’d really like for you to show me around this beautiful old home,” she told him.
He knew he had to get involved with this woman the moment she smiled at him. Her smile put a hook into his heart. She had him captured. Now if only she wanted him, he thought.
Again he chanced a hand at the small of her back as he led her up the winding staircase. “It seems like a big place at first,” he explained to her. “But after you’ve had a chance to live here for a couple of days, it won’t seem so big anymore. You’ll start finding your way around, and it’ll seem homier. That’s the way it seems to us.”
“True, but then again you’ve lived here your entire life,” she countered him.
“That we have,” Kyle admitted.
“It may take me more than a few days to find my way around this place. It’s huge. How many rooms does it have?”
“Well, let’s see,” Kyle made a quick mental count of all the rooms in the house. “I guess about twenty-five.”
“My goodness. You guys could have quite a party here.”
“We have friends over a few times each year. Other ranchers who live in Shifter Valley mostly.”
He led her down the long corridor of the north wing on the second floor. He tapped on the hardwood floor with his cowboy boot and pointed it out to her. “This is calamander wood. They brought it over all the way from Asia. It’s the toughest wood you can make a floor out of.”
“The house certainly seems well put together for such an old place,” she told him. “And everything is so clean and well taken care of. Do you have anyone to help you with the household chores?”
He gave her a smile and tipped his hat to her. “Arielle, thank you for noticing that. Luke and I spent all week, after we found out you were coming, getting this place spick-and-span for you.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to that much trouble, Kyle.”
“Oh, you’re wrong there.” He looked down into her eyes. She had beautiful brown eyes. “There’s no trouble we wouldn’t go to for you.”
“Thank you,” she said, and favored him with another smile.
“Do me a favor?” he asked her. “Let Luke know that you noticed the cleaning. He worked hard on the entire house. He was up all night with the minivac.”
“Of course I will.” He thought maybe she was nervous, by her actions and tone of voice. He wanted to put her at ease, but then realized he was just as nervous as she was.
He took her to the end of the
hall and opened a door. “This is your bedroom,” he said.
He watched as an uneasy blush suffused her face. She took a quick glance in the room, but didn’t even walk inside. “My room?” she asked him, and cleared her throat. “I wanted to ask you, Kyle, what are the sleeping arrangements going to be like here?” She was crimson with her blush and looked down onto the floor, and fiddled with a thread on her jeans. “I’m sorry, Kyle, this is really embarrassing. I’ve never been in a relationship like this before, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
At first Kyle was taken off guard. He didn’t know what she meant. Then he realized this was about sex. Jason had told him she didn’t have much of a history on this ground and was apprehensive about it.
“This is your room, Arielle,” he repeated. “My room is across the hall. Luke’s is next door, and at the end of the hall is Jason’s. We have seven bedrooms in this house. So there’s room enough for everybody. No one has to feel out of sorts.”
She still looked down and still blushed. “Thank you, Kyle,” she said. “Sorry if I embarrassed you. This is all so new to me. I guess I’m still nervous about everything.”
She was so vulnerable when she was like this. He wanted to touch her, but didn’t want to scare her and kept his hands off. “That’s all right, Arielle,” he told her. He knew she needed reassurance. This was strange, he thought, because he had just reassured Luke on some of the same issues a few moments before she arrived. “This is a new relationship for all of us. I’ve never been in one like it before either. I guess we’ve all got a lot to learn. But I’m happy you’re here.”
“Okay,” she said, and cleared her throat again. “Thanks, Kyle.”
She still didn’t make eye contact with him. He could practically feel the tension in every bone of her body as she walked down the hall at his side. This unique situation had her positively scared. He would have to find a way to put her at ease. He knew he was the best of the three brothers to do this. Jason dominated people but wasn’t good at encouragement. Luke meant well, but had too many emotions of his own to deal with, a quick temper foremost among them. Kyle resolved to have a talk with Luke and tell him to take it easy on their new mate until such time as she adjusted to her new life.