Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Wren
The wave takes me, and this time there are hands to meet it.
Three sets. Everywhere at once. The relief is so total I sob with it, and nobody laughs.
They just move closer. The fever that’s been eating me alive for five hours finally has somewhere to go.
My clothes are gone. I don’t remember losing them.
I’m flat on my back in my own nest with more warm alpha around me than my brain can count, and every place they touch lights up and eases in the same breath.
I’ve never been touched like this. Not by one person, let alone three, and my body doesn’t know what to do with the sheer abundance of it except open.
Eli’s hands run down my sides, slow and certain, learning me by inches.
Cal’s mouth is already at my collarbone, my breast, warm and unhurried like we’ve got all night, which, God help me, we do.
And Rhett kneels between my legs and looks at me spread out, slick and desperate in the lamplight like he’s been handed the keys to something he never once thought he’d get to drive.
“Please,” I’m saying, past shame, past sense, past every careful thing. “Please. I need. I can’t. Please.”
“I know.” Eli’s voice, low against my ear, steadying me like his scent does. “We’ve got you. You don’t have to be polite about one single thing tonight, birdie. Just tell us.”
“I need one of you inside me before I lose my whole mind. That polite enough?”
Rhett laughs, low and filthy, his mouth somewhere down at my hip. “There she is.”
His mouth moves lower, and then it’s on me, and the first drag of his tongue over my clit punches a cry out of me I feel all the way up my spine.
He knows exactly what he’s doing, the smug bastard.
He proved it on my counter, and he does it now with days of pent-up want behind it.
Cal has my hands pinned gently above my head, kissing me quietly.
Eli watches Rhett work me with dark, patient eyes, a man who has never once doubted his turn will come.
I come on Rhett’s mouth in about ninety seconds, and it doesn’t touch the ache. Just sharpens it. More, worse, more.
Then Eli settles over me, big and warm and certain. I get my legs around him, my nails in his back, and when he pushes into me, slow and slick and huge, the relief is so enormous I nearly cry all over again. The empty, screaming ache eases for the first time all day. Full. Finally, blessedly full.
“Better?” he asks, forehead to mine, holding still to let me feel it.
“Move, Vance, or I swear to God.”
He moves.
And the other two don’t just watch. Cal’s stretched down one side of me, his mouth working my breast, one big hand splayed low on my belly like he can feel Eli through the wall of me.
He talks the whole time, wrecked and reverent.
That’s it, sugar. God, look at you. You’re taking him so good.
Rhett’s on the other side, his clever fingers between my legs where Eli’s already got me stretched wide, circling my clit slow and merciless, his mouth at my throat.
“Greedy girl. Look how well you take him. You’re going to soak my hand while he’s inside you, and then it’s my turn, trouble, and I’m nowhere near as polite.
” I’ve got a hand on both of them, greedy, working them in time, and they let me.
It’s too much and it’s exactly enough, and I come apart on Eli’s cock humiliatingly fast, clenching, shaking, chanting “fuck, fuck, fuck” like it’s the only word I’ve got left.
It doesn’t slow a single thing down. That’s what nobody warns you about a heat.
One is nothing. One barely takes the edge off.
I ride it out clenching around Eli, clawing at Cal, dragging Rhett’s mouth up to mine.
And before I’ve even stopped shaking I want more.
Want all of it. Want everything they’ve got.
“Greedy girl,” Rhett breathes against my lips, thrilled to his bones. “Knew you’d be. Knew it the second you scowled at me.”
“Shut up and make yourself useful.”
He grins against my mouth and makes himself extremely, expertly useful, and the sound I make would embarrass a lesser woman.
They work me like they’ve done it a hundred times, like they can read each other without a word, which after six years they probably can.
When I get too loud, Cal kisses me. When I go tense, Eli slows and gentles me back down.
When I drift too far into the fever, Rhett says something filthy enough to yank me back into my own body laughing.
Three of them, not one wasted motion, the whole machine of them turned on me.
I have never felt so thoroughly, comprehensively taken care of in my life, and it happens to involve being railed on a heap of scented tea towels, which is a sentence for another day.
Eli fucks me slow and deep and relentless, the same steady certainty he brings to everything. I fall apart on him twice more, Cal murmuring me through each one, Rhett’s fingers wringing them out of me.
Somewhere in it, I stop being able to just lie still and take.
My body wants to give, too, wants all of them at once.
I reach for Rhett blind, greedy, drag him up onto his knees beside my head, and take him in my mouth.
The groan punched out of him is the most honest sound I have ever heard the man make.
Cal’s the one keeping me anchored, one hand laced in mine, the other stroking down my body, telling me how good I am, how perfect, how they’ve got me.
Three of them, every part of me busy and wanted at once.
It should be too much. Instead, it’s the first time in my whole life I’ve felt like precisely enough.
And then, somewhere in the haze, I feel it start. The swell. Bigger than before. Much bigger, catching at me, stretching me somewhere past what I thought my body could take.
The full one. The real one.
“Eli—” It comes out half panic, half greed. “That’s not the small—”
“No.” Rough, wrecked, that iron control of his cracking clean down the middle at last. “Not the small one. Not in a heat. This is the real thing, birdie. This is what your body’s been screaming for all day.” His hand finds mine, laces through it, holds on. “Let it. I’ve got you. We’ve all got you.”
Then it locks.
Deep. Huge. Unbearable and perfect at once.
It ties me to him so completely there’s no telling where I stop and he starts.
It presses on a spot inside me I didn’t know I had, and the whole world goes white.
I don’t come so much as come apart at the seams. I hear myself make a sound I have never made in my life.
I feel him spill, hot and endless. The knot pulses, and it drags a second orgasm up out of me right on the heels of the first, and then a third, rolling, one into the next, nothing to hold onto but the three of them.
Cal’s says, “Oh my God, look at her.”
It’s like a prayer.
Rhett’s got my face in both hands, watching me shatter like it’s the best thing he’s ever been in the same room as. And for one long, breaking, endless minute, I am nothing at all but sensation and these three men.
When I come back to myself, barely, I’m crying. The good kind. Wrung out and impossibly full and tied to a man who’s stroking my hair like I’m something he can’t believe he gets to hold, with two more wrapped so close around me there’s no cold left anywhere in the world.
“There she is.” Eli kisses my damp forehead. “You did so good, sweetheart. So good.”
“Is it,” I croak, wrecked, “always like that?”
“No.” Rhett, soft now, all the swagger gone, tucking a sweaty curl off my cheek. “That was you. That’s what it’s like when it’s the right ones.”
“Don’t you dare get smug.”
“Bit late, trouble. I’ve been smug since you dropped a tray of scones on Cal’s boots.”
I laugh, and it turns into a hiss as the knot shifts inside me. Eli goes still and soothing. Cal presses a kiss to my shoulder, reaches past me for the water I hauled up all those hours ago, holds it to my mouth, makes me drink. Even now. Even wrecked. One of them, always, looking after me.
“Small sips,” he says. “There you go. Good girl.”
“You’re all impossible,” I tell them, and I mean it as an insult, and it comes out sounding like the opposite.
Eli huffs something that might be a laugh, which from him is basically a standing ovation.
Rhett kisses my temple. Cal beams at me like I’ve just handed out medals.
Three grown alphas, wrung out and stupid-happy, piled into a bakery nest at whatever hour of the night this is, tied to the new girl who spent an entire day pretending she didn’t want exactly this.
If I had the energy, I’d point out how ridiculous all four of us look.
I don’t. I have never been less interested in being sensible.
The fever’s already banking back up. I can feel it climbing, low and warm, the next wave building while I’m still tied to the last man who took me apart. Days of this, Dot said. Days and days.
I used to think that sounded like a threat.
Rhett’s mouth starts wandering south. Cal’s hand slides low and slow. “Not going anywhere till the knot lets go,” Eli murmurs into my hair. “And when it does, it’s somebody else’s turn to take care of you.”
It takes a while. When it finally eases, and he slips free of me, gentle even then, I barely get a second to feel the loss of him before Cal’s there, gathering me up, rolling me into his chest. He’s already hard against my hip, his mouth already at my ear.
“My turn, sugar.” Not one careful thing left in it now.
He hooks my leg up over his hip and slides home in one long push.
I’m so slick, so ruined, so ready that we both groan out loud.
Rhett fits himself in behind me, chest to my back, hands roaming, that filthy mouth at my nape, so I’m pinned warm between two of them.
And Eli, wrecked and sated and not going anywhere, watches over the three of us with dark, soft eyes, one hand carding slow through my hair, telling me in that low voice how good I am, how well I’m doing, how there is nowhere on earth any of them would rather be than right here, ruining me by lamplight in a nest I built out of them.
The heat climbs. Cal starts to move, long and deep and unhurried, and it’s good, it’s so good, and the fever immediately, greedily wants more anyway.
That’s the heat’s whole trick. There’s no finish line.
There’s only the next wave, bigger, and my body has already learned there are three of them and started doing arithmetic I’d have blushed at a week ago.
Rhett’s hard again at my back. He’s not doing one thing about it, being, for once in his life, polite, hands wandering but parked in safe country. And something in me that is thoroughly done with polite reaches back, finds his hip, and pulls.
“Trouble.” His voice cracks clean down the middle. “You want—”
“Both.” I barely recognize the sound of me. “I need both of you. Please. I can’t—” Empty is the wrong word, with Cal seated deep in me and holding still. It’s the only word the fever has left. “Please.”
The room changes. Cal goes rigid under me with the effort of not moving.
The growl starts somewhere in Rhett’s chest and presses against my spine like weather.
And it’s Eli, of course it’s Eli, calm out of the lamplight, one big hand smoothing down my flank.
“Slow, then. The slick’s got her ready, but you go slow, brother, or you answer to me. ”
There is slick everywhere by now, down my thighs, on their hands, and I am past shame about it, past anything about it.
And Rhett, for all the filth in his mouth, is achingly careful with his hands.
He works me open patient as a man defusing something, fingers first, easy, easy, I’ve got you, greedy girl, his mouth at my nape, while Cal holds dead still inside me, holds my face in both hands, and makes me keep my eyes on his.
Then Rhett pushes into me from behind, slow, slow, slower, and the stretch of taking two of them at once whites out every thought I have ever had.
Full does not cover it. There’s no empty left.
No cold left. No room anywhere in me for one single fear.
Cal swears like a prayer. Rhett’s forehead drops to my shoulder like a man at church.
For a long second nobody moves, all three of us shaking with it, and Eli’s voice comes low over the top, “Look at her. There’s our girl,” and I clench around both of them and hear two grown men make sounds neither one will ever admit to.
They find the rhythm the way they do everything, without a word, one rocking in as the other draws back, no wasted motion, the whole machine of them turned on me at last. It doesn’t take long.
It couldn’t possibly. I break so hard the world goes to lamplight and static, and they follow me over one after the other, wrecked, my name in stereo.
And as the wave rolls out and the next one gathers, wrapped up in all three of them with not one careful thing left anywhere inside me, I finally understand what Dot was trying to tell me, and I stop being scared of the number.
Turns out I can do days.