by Angel Payne
“And we will.” Kell squared his shoulders. “We will, Tait—when we have the support to do it the right way.”
“Sure.” He whipped a glower at the guy. “Because doing it ‘the right way’ helped us so much during the op in LA. You need a refresher on how that panned out, my friend? On how Stock disappeared off the grid less than twenty-four hours after that fun little showdown?”
“This is different and you know it.”
“Why? Because you think Stock will stick around for the money?” When Kell’s silence confirmed that, Tait emitted a scoffing snort. “Sticking around for it and staying exposed because of it are two different things. The guy knows how to sever himself from that poison tree faster than you can say Johnny Appleseed. Then he’ll hide himself in all the other ugly fruit on the ground. Our window on finding him narrows another inch for every minute we wait. When this shit goes down, the only one taking the bullet will be Benson.”
“And Tan.”
“Yeah. Tan. Who’s really the big fish here, right? Which is the real reason we’re waiting on the fucking Fifth. It’s not for Stock, who’s going to waltz free again. Who, less than twelve hours from now, will be sipping something with an umbrella in it while Luna’s ashes still feed the fish in Puget Sound.” Another freezing fist ground into his gut. “It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair!”
Kellan blew out a heavy breath. “T, don’t do this. You’ve finally started to fly on the right side of the envelope again. Now grab the goddamn stick and correct your angle.”
He wheeled around. While his gut was ice cold, his face burned with fury. “Correct my angle?” He slammed it into hard air quotes. “Seriously? When that filth who calls himself a human wouldn’t recognize correct if it chomped off his cock?”
His friend nodded slowly. “I know how you—”
“Don’t.” He surged and grabbed Kellan by the neck of his T-shirt. “Don’t you dare tell me that you know how I feel!”
Kellan’s mien barely changed. His serenity was infuriating. “All right, then let me tell you how I feel. There’s a lot at stake here. People who are still alive, who need us, people you’re willing to neglect for the sake of chasing an empty revenge.”
His arm shook with rage. He twisted his grip tighter. “Not empty.” The words shook. “Not empty!”
Kell clamped a hand around his forearm. “She told you to move on. Lani’s voice, but Luna’s words. She told you to—”
“She died in my arms!” It ripped out of him, a bellow of wrath and grief and frustration. “She used her last fucking breath to kiss me!”
“I know,” Kellan countered. “I know, man.”
“No,” he snarled, “you don’t. You have no goddamn idea what I’m talking about.” He looked down between their bodies to the sand. Why the hell was he clinging to this guy, even in anger? Kellan called him a brother, but he wondered if the guy knew what that meant. The very nature of Kell’s job required an emotional detachment that lots of guys struggled with—but never Kell. Made sense now, didn’t it? With a disgusted snort, he shoved away. “Feelings are convenient accessories for you, Kellan, and nothing more. I’d pay for a full fireworks show if you ever let someone in to the point that they terrify you.”
Kellan’s eyes, already dark in the night, descended to the shade of pure pitch. “Fetch your checkbook, dickwad—if you can pull your head out of your self-centered ass long enough to notice.”
Tait snickered. Then sobered. “Lani? Are you kidding me?”
Kellan stood his ground and spread his arms. “Do I look like I’m kidding? Or feeling anything except fear about how those assholes plan to use her?”
Tait studied him. Everything about the guy screamed sincerity, but acknowledging that meant looking in the mirror at how thoroughly the woman had come to fill his heart too. He fought back by snarling, “I don’t believe you. This is a half-assed ploy to get me to back off going for Stock. You should be ashamed of yourself, Slash-a-drama.”
He’d stomped only a couple of steps back toward the cottage before Kell stopped him short—with a fist to his stomach. “Nah,” the guy growled, “let me show you something I’d really be ashamed of.”
Before Tait could consider a retaliation, Kell slammed a foot against his backside, treating him to a “Kauaˋi kiss,” Barking Sands style. Tait spat dirt and rolled over, tangling his calves around Kell’s ankles, bringing him down. The guy grunted while landing flat on his back, a position worth taking immediate advantage of. With fury tearing up his throat, he dug a knee between Kell’s lungs and swung his fist up. “Shiner blue always was your color, asshole.”
Kellan’s hand seemed to come out of nowhere, latching on Tait’s face like a crazed spider. He landed one finger in an eye and another two in Tait’s nostrils. The impromptu sinus cleanse distracted him for the second Kell needed to unseat him, though he wasn’t going tits-up without a fight. Letting his frustration feed the sound, he threw his buddy over with a vicious roar. Kellan echoed the bellow, turning his action into a full barrel roll. They wrestled through three revolutions one way then two the next, before Kellan tried the spider face attack again.
“Honestly?” Tait spat as they both gained their feet again. “You fight like a fucking girl, Slash-arina.”
“No more than you, Beach Fun Gidget.”
“Stop.”
The plea was desperate and sweet but came from so far away, Tait shoved it from his mind. He drove his head into Kell’s chest before grabbing the guy’s thigh. Time to make this takedown stick. “How ’bout some dirt with your poi for dinner, honey?”
“How ’bout my fist up your ass, dollface?”
“Stop!” There was no mistaking the scream this time. And its beseeching need. And its underline of tears. “Stop it, both of you!”
Tait stumbled backward, thrown off-balance as he and Kell released each other. Kellan’s stability wasn’t much better. He gave a victorious grunt. The guy was definitely breathing harder than him. They were only eight months apart in age, but he never let that stop him from writing Kell off as the old man.
The “old man” Lani chose to run for first.
Another knot of lead twisted in his stomach—until she rammed a punch into Kell’s shoulder. Tait only got halfway into a laugh before she whirled and repeated the treatment on him.
“He aha no la kou ano? What the hell is wrong with you?” She hit Kell again. “Both of you!”
“He started it.” The protest spilled from them in tandem murmurs.
“I don’t care if Saint Peter himself floated down from heaven and started it!” She pushed at them with another chuffed word in her language. He got the upshot of it and was certain Kell did too. “Three hours ago, I was thinking about the future, trying to talk Leo into going to the University of Hawaii. Believe it or not, the kid wanted to talk to the guys at the West Point table. I actually let him! Now, I’ve found out that ‘the future’ may consist of my home, complete with its custom weapons smuggling cave, being sold out from under me to the damn North Koreans. And oh yeah, there’s that part about me being their signing bonus on the package. So where are the two elite soldiers who are supposedly helping to prevent this disaster? Here they are, fancying themselves as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Hupos!”
She threw up both arms before whirling to stomp away. Her huffs didn’t stop the wind from carrying her wrenching sobs back to them.
Tait backhanded some sand off his face. “You know that book we keep thinking of writing?” he muttered.
“Yeah?” Kell grumbled.
“I think I have our title.”
“The Idiot’s Guide to Being an Idiot?”
“I was thinking more Fifty Shades of Idiocy, but yours works too.”
Thankfully, Kell didn’t milk it any further. He did what Tait hoped he would. Went after her. With willing steps but a gut dipped in remorse, he followed.
She tromped back toward the cottage with furious footsteps. He and Kellan maintai
ned a respectful—and careful—distance. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he was going to bruise where she’d landed that punch. He greatly preferred dealing the marks, not getting them. With more pleasurable results for all.
Not the time for thoughts like that, Bommer. No matter how luscious her ass looked in that frothy floral skirt or how delicious and demure the pink sweater set that topped it.
She stomped into the cottage without altering her pace. He and Kellan followed but stopped in the living room as Lani proceeded through to the cottage’s second bedroom. All the complex’s three-bedroom cottages were snapped up for the summer, but that had been all right by Kell and him. They’d resolved themselves to swapping nap sprints on the couch tonight, if either of them was even in the mood for sleeping. The probability of that had dropped into the realm of “highly unlikely,” especially now.
When Lani stood in the open doorway to the bedroom, eyeing them both with her iridescent stare, it was clear she shared that mind-set. A firm fling of her head, all but decreeing them into the room with her, had Tait gaping in slack-jawed shock—and open-season lust. A glance at Kellan showed the same reactions on his face.
“Can she…errr…do that?” his buddy stammered. “There’s a term for that, isn’t there? Topping from the bottom?”
Tait eyed him. “You really want to go there right now?”
“Excellent point.” He didn’t say anything else as he let Tait lead the way down the hall.
Her bedroom was the larger of the two in the cottage, decorated in comfortable but functional furniture covered in subdued tropical shades. In short, the army’s version of resort accommodations. Though Tait glanced hopefully at the bed, he ordered all follow-up thoughts into retreat. A bed in the room didn’t always trump a woman’s wrath. Even this woman.
She shut the door by backing up against it. After the thing clicked shut, she stayed there, hands behind her back, throwing her brilliant glare between the two of them. Tears still threatened to manifest in her eyes, frying his gut in remorse again.
He guessed a little levity couldn’t hurt. “Well, you can’t order us to go to our room.”
“Shut up.”
Or maybe it could.
Kellan tried his own approach, gentle but firm. “Okay, we’re a couple of jerks. You know it’s just because we both care about—”
Her sharp laugh sliced him short. “You care about me? Really? And this is how you show it?” She shoved off the door, pushed between them, and turned with her fists slammed on her hips. “I was tired of breaking you two up after the first two times I did it.” She nodded hard at Tait. “Though it helps that you can walk a straight line on your own this time.”
It wasn’t a real joke. Wisely, Tait knew it. “Truce declared, okay? We’ll keep our hands off each other.”
She dropped her hands but sustained her suspicious glower. “Prove it.”
He swung back an awkward glance. “Okay, I’ll take first watch outside. Kell, why don’t you grab some dinner, and—”
“No,” she cut in again. “Not good enough.”
He traded a glimpse with Kellan. Let’s make her happy and shake on it. With a resigned breath, he reached out a hand. But Kell never got close with his return extension. Lani grabbed both their wrists and slammed their hands against her body, forcing them into a sudden, joint breast grope. Before either of them could process their shock enough to act, she pushed their grips harder against her beautiful mounds. Tait joined his buddy in a hiss when her nipples instantly beaded and pushed against her sweater.
“Keep your hands off each other by putting them on me.” Her whisper was as urgent as her gaze, jumping between them with the intensity of lightning. “Please, just help me to forget about all of it for a little while. I need the strength of you both…the care of you both…the passion of you both. I just…need you both. Please?”
Chapter Twenty
It was a night for crazy circumstances. And even crazier actions.
Lani was still spitting pissed at both of them, despite how deeply she understood their shoreline antics. Their emotions had been ripped out of the typical sockets today as harshly as hers. Taking out their follow-up rage on the safe targets of each other was a logical progression on the psychological ladder. In the end, it would be a skirmish that meant nothing.
In the end.
An end that was approaching with the subtlety of a freight train. A conclusion to this horrible episode with Benson that would go one of two ways. Tait, Kell, and the guys from the Fifth would either be in time to surprise the Benstock boys and the Koreans, or they wouldn’t. Neither scenario was a promise she’d ever see her ranch—or both her men—again.
This was all the time they had left. Their only remaining moments to stamp the magic of their triad on the ribbon of time and memory.
She let out a tight cry, trying to beat the thought down as melodrama, but one look up at the guys, and the deep purpose in their rugged faces, confirmed it as the bitter truth.
No. She wouldn’t concentrate on bitterness right now. Or goodbyes. She’d only soak up their heat, their passion, and their adoration. Make them fill her one more time. One last time.
She swallowed hard and meshed her fingers tighter with theirs. Before she could take another breath, Kellan twisted his free hand in her hair, yanking her head back for Tait’s crushing kiss. Both the guys groaned as Tait sank his tongue deep. She joined her needy groan to the mix when they both pinched her breasts through her clothes.
“Yin needs a turn too.” Kellan growled it as he drew her from Tait’s mouth and replaced it with his own. He tasted like the wind and sea, musky and salty, a heady combination with Tait’s woodsy scent hitting her from behind as he pressed against her there.
“Is Leo still tuning out with his music?” came Tait’s query at her ear. She nodded, not an easy feat considering the man already lifted her skirt, glided both hands beneath her panties, and palmed her ass with his bare palms. “Hmm,” he replied in a sensual snarl. “That’s good to know.”
Kellan’s gaze was a breathtaking gray storm as he pulled away from her mouth. “But not entirely helpful,” he added. “We both know how our girl loves to scream.”
“Won’t that make it fun for her to try whispers and silence, then?” He gave her the challenge just as he trailed a finger at the rim of her anus, causing her to gasp and writhe. “Bite it back, babe,” he directed. “Whispers”—he worked in another finger—“and silence.”
“Damn.” Kellan met her stare directly, brushing the hair off her face. “Look at what that did to these eyes.” He leaned in and kissed her nose. “You like this, Starshine? Does it make you hot to know we control every sound off your lips now, every breath you take in and release?”
Gods. She was going to be a puddle of nothing in just a few minutes. Already feeling like her mind detached from her body, she gave Kellan an eager nod. “Yes. Ohhhh yes, Sir.”
Tait stepped around and stood next to his friend again. After giving her a soft kiss on the forehead, he murmured, “You said that so beautifully, dreamgirl.” A smile curled his lips. “Now we’re going to give you a few minutes to reflect on it.”
Kellan beat her to the punch in an open display of confusion. “What?”
Tait arched his brows at his friend. “Don’t you think it’s time to go get the Boy Scout ready pack from the car?”
Kellan chuckled. “I officially hand over the dominant honor badge to you now.”
Tait turned and took both of her hands in his. “And this is Lani’s chance to earn the matching submissive one.”
She let her smile grow. “I’d like that.”
“And we’re both pleased.” Tait lifted a long-fingered hand to one side of her face. “While we’re gone, we want you to prepare yourself for our pleasure. Make your body ready by stripping naked then washing your pussy and ass for us. After that, center your mind by kneeling in the middle of the bed, legs spread, posture straight, and hands still. Th
is tells us, both your Sirs, that you entrust us with your power tonight. That you know we’ll use it to push you a little…fuck you a lot…and gratify you even more.”
Had he asked for half the pineapples on the island along with that, she would’ve found a way to comply. Luckily, her breathy “Yes, Sirs” seemed to suffice. He and Kellan took turns kissing her before quietly leaving the room, which spurred her into instant motion. She had a minute, maybe two at most, to ready herself as Tait had instructed.
Sure enough, she’d just gotten onto the bed and was crawling toward its center when the guys came back in. She froze in place, feeling fifteen again, caught by Mom as she sneaked back into the house after making out on the beach with Troy Keweha. Only she hadn’t been totally nude then. Or feeling every nerve ending in her body ignite from just the sound of the opening door.
“Hmmm.” She didn’t have to look up to know the dark panther purr was Kellan’s. A new instinct even picked up the tiny bite of sadistic pleasure in it, curling an answering desire deep in her pussy. “What do we have here?” he added to that while walking to the foot of the bed. She watched from the fringe of her lashes as Tait joined him, turning them into a pair of muscled sentinels who drenched her body with their hot gazes.
“Looks like someone who didn’t get into position fast enough.”
Every note of Tait’s tone, so full of predatory serenity, brought out baby bumps of awareness along her skin. Nevertheless, she flashed him a dirty look. She’d be in position, if they hadn’t given her all of sixty seconds to do their bidding.
“But I’m enjoying this position, buddy.”
“Must agree. It’s nice.”
“Look at that perfect curve of her ass…and the silhouette of her nipples…all that hair cascading to the mattress like a waterfall…”
“Roger on everything, man. It doesn’t suck one bit.”
“Maybe that can be fixed.”
Their commentary made her feel beautiful and special, like a precious piece of art—until Kellan’s remark turned her to hot goo. She craved the praise of their flesh, not just their eyes. She whimpered and licked her lips, hoping he was serious about the intent of the words. The man’s harsh grunt indicated that he was. Thank the gods.