by Amy Star
“That’s got to be the way it goes,” Matthew said after a moment of thought. “It’s just a question of how we do it.”
“Yeah,” Dylan agreed, nodding. “We need to figure out where Alex would have hidden the money; then we have to figure out how to get it to his former patron. After that we have to take out the lions.”
“How much do you know about Alex?”
Dylan shrugged at Nadine’s question.
“We know what our client told us and what C told us last night,” Dylan said. “Most of what our client had to say about the guy involved why he wanted Alex taken out. He gave us some information about his usual haunts, things like that, but not some kind of biography.”
Nadine pressed her lips together. “See? You could totally use a data analyst,” she said after a moment, smiling slowly. “I can help you with this.”
“How can you help us?” Matthew looked from Dylan to Nadine in confusion. Dylan chuckled quietly.
“I can sift through the information, if you can provide me with a few leads,” Nadine said. “And then once we have some places to look…” She shrugged, and the blanket fell from one of her shoulders, exposing her breasts.
Dylan’s attention wavered from the problem in front of them, instead focusing on the sight of Nadine’s mostly naked body. Dylan’s mind flashed onto the night before, and the incredible sex they’d shared. She has no clue, no idea at all, how impossible it is to think about anything other than mating her when she’s so available. Dylan took a slow, deep breath.
“Just so you know,” he said, forcing his gaze up to her face, “if you’re going to work with us, it’s going to have to be with clothes on during business time.”
Nadine tilted her head to the side slightly, staring at him in confusion for a moment; the next instant, her cheeks flushed a delicate pink as she understood the import of what he had said. Nadine groaned, pulling the blanket up around her head and curling in on herself as she slumped onto the couch.
“You two are impossible,” she said through the fabric, not even poking her head out. “One-track minds, both of you. You should be ashamed.”
Dylan laughed, reaching out and sliding his hand along the curve of her thigh.
“You love it,” Matthew said, settling himself on the couch next to her. “You’re the one who agreed to have tons and tons of sex with us.”
Nadine groaned again, the shape of her body shifting underneath the blanket as she squirmed.
“It’s not fair,” she grumbled. “You’re both so good in bed.”
Dylan laughed out loud, shaking his head.
“What’s not fair is the fact that even when you have clothes on, I can hardly think of anything else besides getting them off of you,” he told her. “You smell like sex, honey-lamb.”
“That’s a good nickname for her,” Matthew said, reaching down and rubbing Nadine’s shoulder through the blanket. “Honey-lamb. I like it.”
“You’re both assholes,” Nadine said, her voice rippling with amusement. “Taking advantage of your ability to turn me on at a moment’s notice. It’s not fair!”
Dylan snorted, letting his hand begin to wander. He felt better, now that they had some kind of plan in front of them—even if he wasn’t entirely sure how that plan would come to pass. Nadine’s squirms changed, her body beginning to warm to his touch, her protests shifting into moans.
“We’re assholes?” Dylan heard the low, growling note in his voice. “You’re the one who walked out here naked. Both Matthew and I put clothes on.”
“Hey—I like her walking around naked,” Matthew protested. “Don’t go convincing her to put clothes on all the time.”
Dylan chuckled. “We’re never going to get anything done if she walks around the house naked all the time,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but think of how much fun it would be,” Matthew countered.
Nadine moaned softly underneath the blanket she had hidden under, twisting and writhing under the influence of his and Matthew’s touches.
“Okay—how about this,” Dylan said. “Whenever we’re not on business mode, she can walk around in nothing at all.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Nadine called out, ruining the effect of her protest with a sharp gasp of pleasure. “I’ll do—I’ll do what I want, and dress how I want.”
“Then be prepared for us to want to grope you and fool around with you all the time,” Dylan said. “If you want us to stop, we will…but we’ll be thinking about getting you into bed constantly.”
“Fine,” Nadine said. She threw the blanket off of herself, exposing all of her body to Dylan and Matthew’s interested gazes. “I’ll wear clothes when we have to do serious things.”
Dylan laughed again, and leaned in to kiss Nadine lightly on the lips. He withdrew his hand slowly, letting his caresses linger along her thighs. Matthew ducked in after Dylan pulled back, pressing his own kiss to Nadine’s lips.
“Being a shared mate is going to be exhausting, isn’t it?”
Dylan smiled slowly. “That’s why you get two nights off a week, guaranteed,” he told her.
“You weren’t complaining about it last night,” Matthew pointed out.
“No, I wasn’t,” Nadine admitted. “But I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to constantly be available.”
Dylan glanced at Matthew; both of them could read the seriousness in Nadine’s body language, in the tone of her voice. Dylan found her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“We’ll work this out,” he promised her. “I swear to you, Nadine—we don’t want you to feel like you have to be available to us when you’re not feeling it. We’ll talk about it.” Dylan glanced at his best friend. “Especially since we need to figure out things between us, too,” he told Matthew. “Once we get this whole messy bullshit deal with the lions behind us, we can come up with the rules for our relationship. Is that fair?”
“As long as I get input,” Nadine said, sounding a little more relaxed. After a moment she took a quick, deep breath and sat up, gathering the blanket around her. “I’m going to put some clothes on. You two figure out what we’re going to eat, and then we should get to work on solving this lion problem.”
Dylan grinned at her. “We’ll call in some room service, and get to work.”
THE FINAL CHAPTER
“Okay,” Nadine said, looking up from her laptop. Dylan and Matthew both turned their attention onto her at the sound of her voice; they had been quietly working on the problem of locating the were-panther that Alex had stolen from in their own ways for the past hour. “I think I have an idea—but I need to run it by you two.”
“What’s the idea?” Dylan put his laptop aside, briefly brushing his palms together and stretching against the back of the couch.
Nadine had been thinking about the problem of how to find someone they didn’t know, and a hiding place belonging to a person they had little information on—someone who was dead, and couldn’t be questioned. She’d spent the previous hour sifting through all of the information she could find about Alex, and trying to compile it into something that made sense, something that they could act on. Nadine knew that she was far from a criminal mastermind—and more to the point, that she really didn’t have any experience in really investigating people. But she had hoped that the skills she’d honed in her previous boring job would transfer into something useful to the life she was beginning to think was something like her destiny.
“Here’s my thinking,” Nadine said slowly. “We have the information from his social media profiles, and we have the little bit of information you got from C and your client.” She licked her lips. “I’ve been going through whatever we can find about Alex, but I think we need to expand our net a bit.”
“How so?” Matthew frowned.
“Well,” Nadine said, gesturing to her laptop. “I’d assume that he probably wouldn’t post anything about any of his hiding spots online—otherwise, it’s not a hiding spot, right?” Both
men nodded. “I was thinking that maybe I could find some hiding-type places near the spots we know he used to spend a lot of time around, and then you guys could tell me which would be the most likely ones.” Nadine looked from Dylan to Matthew and back again, her heart beating a little faster in her chest as she waited to hear their opinion of her tactic.
“That makes sense,” Matthew said after a moment, turning his gaze onto Dylan. “We’d know what to look for better than she would; if she can narrow it down to like—maybe five places?” Matthew glanced at her and Nadine nodded. “Then we could narrow it down to maybe three, and then check each of them out.” Dylan’s lips twitched with the beginning of a smile.
“You know, if I didn’t know better, I would think that you’ve just been waiting all this time for an excuse to become some kind of mercenary bad ass,” Dylan said, meeting Nadine’s gaze.
She rolled her eyes. “Not consciously,” she insisted. “But I guess…if I hadn’t been ready to change things around in my life, I probably wouldn’t have gone along with it, would I?”
She was beginning to gain something like a philosophical attitude about the situation she found herself in, beginning to almost feel comfortable with the decisions she’d made and the fact that her life would never be the same again. My life before them was so boring—how did I not even realize it?
“I think that would work,” Dylan said. “It’s as good an idea as any.” He took another quick, deep breath, scrubbing at his face.
“How’s it coming figuring out who we’re going to get the money to?”
Dylan shrugged. “We have a few people,” he said, glancing at Matthew. “There aren’t as many panthers as there are other kinds of shifters—that makes it a little easier.” Nadine nodded; somehow—though she couldn’t say how—that made sense. “Once we have something to offer, we can put out feelers and find out which one of these guys might be our target.”
“How are we going to get to him, that’s the real question,” Matthew pointed out. “I mean, the lions are probably trying to track us even now.”
“We’ll have to arrange a meeting in a really public place,” Dylan said. “That’s the only way.”
Nadine plunged back into her work, skimming details of the areas around the places that the deceased were-lion kept himself to. It occurred to her more than once that in the process of tracing his movements before his death, she was also closer to figuring out where the were-lions met as a group; that, at least, would help them to handle another part of their convoluted plan. Nadine wasn’t certain that she would actually be able to handle the battle with the were-lions, but she understood that there weren’t any options to keep her out of that fight.
She was surprised at how much she had come to simply accept that she was going to be part of Dylan and Matthew’s life. The sex is great, and there’s a lot of excitement, she thought as she pored over maps of the area surrounding one of the clubs that Alex went to the most frequently. But I barely know them. Nadine wondered, more than once as she narrowed down the possibilities of where Alex might have hidden his stolen money, whether she was out of her mind. Would her relationships with the two men stand up to the stress of a long-term attachment? Or would they lose interest in her—or her in them—as soon as they weren’t dealing with constant crises from the outside?
Until she had met Dylan and Matthew, Nadine hadn’t considered herself particularly impressive. She had known that she was reasonably attractive, and that she was fairly intelligent, but she had thought of herself as more than a little weak, and not precisely formidable.
The fact that two men wanted her enough to agree to share her rather than fight over her was flattering, but Nadine wasn’t sure how they could go about their relationship on anything like a practical level. Then too, she thought, as she waited for Dylan and Matthew to come to a conclusion about the information she had gathered and organized, they come from an entirely different culture from me. There are things about them that I will never be able to understand—and how much about me will they be able to understand?
Dylan and Matthew decided on three spots out of the half-dozen that Nadine had picked out as likely spots for Alex to have hidden his stolen cash. Nadine wasn’t sure whether his fellow lions had checked any of those places or whether they had simply counted on Dylan and Matthew to know more than they did; but they had to have something to go on. They had to put this threat behind them—or none of them would ever have any chance at anything like a normal life.
Then they were piling into the car, and Nadine felt her nerves tingling, her whole body reacting to the excitement and the apprehension she felt. “Hey, guys?” Nadine had insisted on taking the back seat for their first trip. There was something about the way that Matthew constantly assumed that post that bothered her, though she couldn’t say what it was.
“Hm?” Dylan looked over his shoulder at her for just a moment, acknowledging her question.
“I know I’m kind of jumping ahead on things,” Nadine said slowly, “but how exactly is a relationship between the three of us going to work?”
“What do you mean?” Matthew half-turned in the passenger seat.
“I mean…like, day-to-day,” Nadine said. “Our routines, things like that.”
“Ah,” Dylan said, and Nadine saw him smile briefly. “You’re worried that we’re going to eventually get bored of you, and after completely throwing your old life away, you’re going to end up with nothing.”
“Not in so many words,” Nadine said, smiling ruefully. “But basically, yeah. I mean—we barely know each other at all.”
“Did you notice anything different about the sex last night?” Matthew held her gaze as he spoke, a softness in his expression that Nadine hadn’t seen before.
“Other than that it was the best sex of my entire life?” Nadine shrugged.
Something inside of her tingled at the question, though, and she licked her lips, thinking back onto the night before. It had been the best sex, but it had also been the most intense—in ways that were difficult for her to put words to. She realized that she felt more connected, in some way, with the two men she had agreed to share herself with than she had before.
“We mated with you,” Matthew said, his tone still soft, but a little more level than it had been before. “The sex…it wasn’t just sex. And before you get upset—we didn’t do it on purpose. It was instinct.”
“What is the difference between mating with me and just sex?” Nadine’s heart beat faster in her chest as her mind reacted with impulsive fear at the thought that she had done something irrevocable.
“It bonds people,” Dylan explained from the driver’s seat. “It’s not as obvious to you as it would be for someone who was raised as a shifter, but you feel it—I can tell you do. I feel it, and Matt feels it. We’re bound.”
“What does that mean?” Nadine looked down at her body as if she expected to notice some mark she had never had before, some kind of stigmata or mole that somehow signaled the two men’s ownership of her.
“You feel closer to us, right?” Nadine looked up and nodded at Matthew’s question. “We’ll get to know each other better over time—don’t worry about that just yet.”
“The important thing,” Dylan said, “is that Matthew and I are never going to get bored of you. It’s not something we can feel, now that you’re really and truly our mate.”
“Why not?” Nadine frowned in confusion. Every time I think I understand a pretty good bit of their lives, they say something that proves that I have no idea.
“It’s instinctive,” Matthew said with a shrug. “It’s not something we can control. We’ve taken you as our mate, so we are bound to you—and you to us. We will always find you distractingly desirable. We’ll always want you.”
Nadine shook her head. “I’m not sure I can totally understand that,” she admitted. But the words had had an effect on her nonetheless, something in the certainty in both men’s voice told her that they weren’t just
making it up—they weren’t just saying what it would take to convince her to stay with them for a little while longer. They really believed—whether or not they were right—that they would never get bored of her.
“You don’t have to understand it,” Dylan told her, grinning at her in the rearview mirror. “All you have to do is enjoy it. You are going to be the most sexually satisfied woman in the county.”
“More than other shifter women?” Nadine grinned back at Dylan.
“Oh, totally,” Matthew said, nodding quickly. “Because your standards started out way lower. So what people like us consider to be just normal, standard stuff is even better to you.”
Nadine laughed, shaking her head again. “Okay,” she said. “I will accept that until I find anything different.”
***
“This is the last place we decided to look, right?”
Matthew nodded in response to Nadine’s question as the three of them climbed out of the car, looking around at the scrubby wasteland. It was a few miles away from one of the places that Alex had frequented; the outskirts of a natural preserve area that Dylan and Matthew both agreed was likely a running ground for shifters in the area. Nadine wasn’t certain it was their best option of the three; if there were other shifters in the area regularly, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to hide something there. But the first two places they had checked—one an abandoned house, the other a spot tucked away near a beach—had proven fruitless.
“Definitely a couple of lions have been here,” Dylan said, looking at Matthew and then at Nadine. Nadine felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and she sniffed at the air, even though she knew her sense of smell was nowhere near acute enough to detect the scents that Dylan and Matthew could pick up on so easily.
“One of the scent marks smells like Alex,” Matthew agreed. “So he’s definitely been here.”
Nadine looked doubtfully at the underbrush and low shrubs, the high grass and tangling weeds that made up the area they’d come to.
“Stay close to us,” Dylan told her, as if reading her mind. “We’ll be able to figure out pretty quickly if there was money here, and if someone’s already taken it, but you shouldn’t be out of sight even for a few minutes. Other lions have been here, too.”