Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Mason
“That was fun,” Yasmine said, as Mason closed Jensen’s front door behind them. “Audrey seems really nice. Is David excited to have her here?”
“He is. It’s hard to read him sometimes, but I know he’s glad she came, although I think he’s a little worried about what it means for interactions with his parents.
She’s still in touch with them even though he’s not.
” Mason walked over and held out his arm for Yasmine to take so he could help her down the stairs.
The heels she was wearing weren’t very high, but it would still be easier for her to get down the stairs of the front porch with someone to lean on. Plus, that’s what he should do as her fiancé. Make sure she was being taken care of and make sure she was safe.
“Well, hopefully, it will turn out okay. Do we know if she’s kinky?”
Fuck. Mason hoped not. The only thing worse than seeing her casually at events like this would be seeing her at the club.
“I have no idea.”
Yasmine snickered, glancing at him as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“You should see the look on your face. Are you worried David would freak out?”
“Yes.” That was something he was worried about now that she’d brought it up. It was definitely a consideration. “Not freak out, maybe, but I’m not sure how he’d handle it.”
“You know it’s not your job to handle everyone’s emotions and reactions just because you’re the team therapist, right?” she teased.
“Then what else are they paying me for?”
They both laughed.
But it felt weird. Something felt strained now that they’d made their announcement to their friends. Things felt off between them, instead of comfortably settled as they had been before.
“So,” Yasmine said as they neared her car. “We did it. We announced it.”
“Yeah. Does it feel a little odd to have it out in the open?” he asked hesitantly. He didn’t want to make her feel bad about it, but her demeanor made him wonder if she felt the same way.
Her shoulders sagged with relief when he said it.
“Okay, so it’s not just me? It feels more awkward now than it did before?” she asked, turning to face him and searching his expression. Her dark eyes were wide, her face lit by the streetlamps above the line of cars. She was stunningly beautiful. Gorgeous, in fact.
The kind of woman who turned heads when she walked down the street.
But he’d never felt the same surge of desire for her that he’d felt the moment he’d laid eyes on Audrey.
Maybe it was time to try to correct that.
“It’ll get better,” he reassured her in a murmur, bending his head down to press his lips against hers, reaching to put his hands on her hips and pull her body toward him.
They’d kissed before. A peck on the cheek, a perfunctory brush of the lips. Both of them knew they weren’t getting into this because of some mad passion or love. That wasn’t what they were expecting. It wasn’t what they’d agreed upon.
But they’d just announced their engagement. They should do something to level up this relationship. Especially if it would help him stop thinking about a certain redhead.
Yasmine stiffened as he pulled her against him, and their lips met. Mason did his best to kiss her with all the passion he saw David kiss Cassidy with. That Drew kissed Naomi with. But she remained stiff against him, though her lips parted. Their tongues touched.
It was…
Not passionate.
That was definitely not the word for what he felt.
He was pretty sure she wasn’t feeling passionate, either.
Swiftly ending the kiss, Mason lifted his head, trying not to let the disturbance he felt show in his expression. He liked Yasmine, dammit. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But it was a relief to see that she looked concerned as well.
“Um.”
“I just thought we should try a real kiss,” he explained. “Now that we’re out as engaged.”
“Right. That was a good idea. I don’t object, I just think I wasn’t prepared.” She didn’t move away from him, but the awkwardness between them was growing. Standing with his arm around her felt odd. As though they were invading each other’s space rather than enjoying the closeness.
“Should we try again?”
“Um.”
Dammit. If he wasn’t feeling so guilty about his attraction to Audrey, he might be insulted that Yasmine clearly wasn’t excited about kissing him again.
Then again, even if Audrey didn’t exist, he wasn’t feeling excited about it, either.
Mason didn’t have a sister, but he imagined this was what kissing his sister might feel like.
Except he would never kiss his sister with tongue.
Obviously, this was something they were going to need to get past. Just not tonight. They couldn’t force things.
“Maybe tomorrow?” he suggested. “We should start trying to get used to the physical side of the relationship.”
“We should. I think I just need to readjust my mindset,” Yasmine agreed quickly. “I know we’ve been talking about marriage and talking about having kids and everything, but we haven’t… done anything. It’s just a shift, going from thinking of you as a friend to, um, romance.”
“Yeah, it is. Like I said, we’ll get better at it.
” He dropped his hands from her hips, easing back.
The distance eased some of the awkwardness between them, to his relief, the expression on her face echoing how he felt.
“It’s a shift for both of us. Maybe next Friday at the club we could try a scene? ”
Even though they were both kinky and both had been members of the Outlands for a long time, they’d never scened together.
Although he wouldn’t have said he had anything against scening with her, Mason hadn’t wanted to risk the curse.
He wasn’t interested in marriage until recently, and the idea of dating her and then accidentally ending up in a relationship that required settling down hadn’t appealed.
“Yeah, that sounds good. We should do that.” She smiled, her shoulders relaxing. Mason wasn’t sure if she was relaxing because he had suggested a scene and she thought the kink would help, or if because they had a week before they had to try romance again.
He was a good kisser. He was a good Dom.
Next week, he’d be able to prove that to her.
Holding the door open for her, he waited until she was in her car to close it. She gave him a little wave through the window, which he returned before returning to the sidewalk. Watching her drive away, he let out a long sigh.
Maybe he should just head home.
But if he did that, it would be admitting that Audrey had gotten under his skin; the only reason he wouldn’t be going back inside to spend time with his friends was her.
Or, more accurately, the guilt he felt over his reaction to her.
Maybe what he needed wasn’t distance from Audrey—which he’d gotten plenty of all afternoon, and it hadn’t helped—but exposure therapy.
Most people tended to annoy him after a while. If he spent more time around her this evening, surely she would do something annoying, then he could get back to his planned future with Yasmine without Audrey taking up space in the back of his mind.
Audrey
As Cassidy and Audrey came up behind Audrey’s grandmother, to her shock, Mick pulled up his shirt. Not that he was looking at her and Cassidy. Nope. He was looking at her grandmother and grinning as he showed off an admittedly impressive set of abs.
“Ooh, you really do have a six-pack!” Grandma said, reaching out and putting the hand that wasn’t holding her drink on them.
“Brenda!”
“Grandma!”
Cassidy and Audrey reacted at the same time. Grandma lifted her head away from Mick’s abs, turning to look at them, but she didn’t move her hand.
“You two should come feel these; they’re great,” she said, grinning widely. “Mick has a very impressive body.”
“Thanks, Brenda,” Mick replied, winking at her, still happily holding his shirt up for her convenience. Audrey was starting to have more sympathy for David’s dramatics about their grandmother’s antics.
“Mick, pull your shirt down and find someone else to talk to,” Cassidy ordered. “We want to talk to Brenda about book club.”
“Maybe I can talk about book club, too,” he said, obediently lowering his shirt. “I can read.”
Grandma pouted and shot Cassidy a dark look as she was forced to remove her hand from his stomach.
“Her book club is all women.”
“Oh, okay then.” Mick shrugged and winked at Brenda again as he started to walk away. “If you want a ticket to the gun show later, just let me know.”
“The gun show?” Audrey asked, confused.
Immediately, Mick halted and lifted his arms, curling his fists in to show them off—although since he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, it didn’t have quite the same effect as if his arms were bare.
“These guns.”
“Mick, what the hell are you doing?” Jensen called from across the room, causing Mick to chuckle and drop his arms, heading for his brother.
“I’m definitely going to the gun show later, and you can’t stop me,” Grandma told Cassidy.
“You know he’s, like, at least thirty years younger than you, right?”
“I’m a cougar. Rawr.” Grandma made a clawing motion with the hand she’d been feeling Mick up with before taking another sip of her drink. She was still giving Cassidy a dark look. “You’d better be careful, Cassidy. I’m starting to think David passed his butt stick on to you.”
“His what?” Audrey felt like her brain was melting.
“I think Audrey should come to book club,” Cassidy said, ignoring Grandma’s diversions, which was probably the best way to handle things. And it gave Audrey a moment to realize that Grandma probably meant David had a stick up his butt, and he’d passed it on to Cassidy.
That seemed like something she would say.
Thankfully, Cassidy’s statement had the exact effect she’d probably intended. Grandma perked up immediately.
“You absolutely should come to book club. Our next meeting is in two Sundays—not next Sunday, but two Sundays from tomorrow. How fast do you read?” Grandma’s entire focus was on Audrey now, eagerness lighting up her expression.
“Um, it usually takes me a few days to finish a book, but I’m going to have a lot going on with the bakery opening soon—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Milking Mina isn’t too long.”
“Milking what?” Yup, back to her brain melting.
“Milking Mina. It’s a hucow romance.” Grandma said it so matter-of-factly that Audrey was starting to feel like the crazy one for not knowing what a hucow was. She looked at Cassidy, who shrugged.
“I wasn’t joking about the hucow thing,” Cassidy said, giggling.
“But what does being a human cow mean?” Audrey asked plaintively. She really had thought Cassidy was kidding, so she hadn’t asked for more details.
“Like pet play but with cows.”
“What’s pet play?”
Cassidy and Grandma exchanged a glance. Grandma appeared amused, while Cassidy was more concerned.
“Um, how much do you know about kink?” Cassidy asked gently.
“Kink?”
“Oh, dear,” Cassidy muttered.
That began a very quick discussion of the kind of romances Audrey’s grandmother liked to read. Audrey had heard of Fifty Shades of Grey, briefly, but she’d never read it. Her mother didn’t approve of reading romance, although Audrey had managed to sneak a few into her repertoire now and then.
None that had sex in them, much less the kind of things Cassidy and Grandma described.
Pet play was people actually pretending to be pets.
Crawling around on hands and knees, acting like animals, and wearing plug tails.
Audrey decided not to ask what a plug tail was.
If it was what she was picturing, that was not a discussion she wanted to have with her grandmother.
She could ask Cassidy later. If it wasn’t too awkward to ask the woman, she was pretty sure would be her future sister-in-law.
“Great. Okay.” Book club with her grandmother talking about kinky books. Sounded… interesting.
“Claudia and Naomi have joined, too,” Cassidy told her, a little smile on her face like she knew what Audrey was thinking. She probably could guess pretty easily. “Brenda is still working on trying to get Ashley and Jennifer to join.”
“Who else is in it?”
“Some of my friends.” Grandma smiled serenely. “They’re fun, you’ll like them.”
“Great. So, um. What was the name of the book again?” Audrey pulled out her phone to order it. It turned out it was part of a series, though she was reassured she didn’t need to read the whole series to jump into that one, which was good because it was a long series.
As she was putting her phone away, the front door opened, and Mason walked back in. Alone. His gaze scanned the room and clashed with hers, and Audrey’s traitorous heart did a little flip.
Dammit.
He’s taken, stop it.
Tearing her gaze away, she looked over at the dining room. It was definitely time for a cupcake.