Chapter 40
Forty
Wren
I bring them up to the nest myself this time, and that’s the whole difference, right there.
The first time, my body dragged them into it behind my own back, fever-drunk and mortified, a shrine I’d built out of stolen laundry and shame.
Tonight I take Cal’s hand at the bottom of the stairs and lead all three of them up on purpose, stone-cold sober, terrified, wanting, and that changes everything about what comes next.
The nest’s still there. Of course it is. I never could make myself take it apart. Tonight I’m glad of it, because when I climb into the middle and look up at three big men filling my little bedroom, I’m doing it on my own two feet, by choice, with my whole head switched on for once.
“You’re sure,” Eli says. Not quite a question. A door held open, like he always does. “There’s all the time in the world, birdie. No clock on this one.”
“I’m sure.” My voice only shakes a little. “That’s the point. Last time I couldn’t think straight. This time I can, and I still want it. All three of you. I want to find out it’s real with nobody running a fever.”
Rhett makes a low sound in his chest. “Sweetheart, you can’t say things like that and expect me to behave.”
“I have never once wanted you to behave.”
Cal’s on me first, because it’s Cal. He kisses me like he’s been starving for weeks, which he more or less has, his hands framing my face, gentle, then not gentle at all.
I get my fingers under his shirt and drag it off him, and God, I forgot, or I wouldn’t let myself remember, how good he is to look at.
Sun-warm skin, all that easy muscle he never had to earn.
He laughs against my mouth when I flatten both palms on his chest and just take a second.
“See something you like, sugar?”
“Shut up, Shaw.” But I’m smiling, and he’s grinning, and it’s easy. So much easier than I ever let myself believe a thing this big could be.
They get me out of my clothes between the three of them, unhurried, taking turns, and there’s a beat where I brace for the old shame, the reflex to cover up, to make myself small.
It doesn’t come. Three alphas looking at me bare in a nest I built out of them, and every one of them looks like he’s been handed a thing he never dared ask for.
Rhett’s the one who says it, naturally. “Look at you.” Rough, every trace of the joke gone.
“Fucking look at you. You have got to be kidding me.”
It’s a lot, three men and six hands, and none of it in a rush.
Cal’s mouth works down my neck while Eli’s palms learn the curve of my waist, my hips, everywhere at once and slow with it.
Somebody’s thumb drags across my nipple, and I gasp into Cal’s kiss.
Somebody’s teeth close soft on my shoulder.
I lose track of whose hands are where, and that’s the point, that’s the whole giddy overwhelming point, being wanted from three directions at once with no fever making me do it.
My skin’s on fire, and my head’s clear as a bell, and knowing exactly what I’m doing while I do it turns out to be its own kind of drunk.
“You’re thinking,” Eli murmurs against my ear. He always knows. “Stop. Just feel it. We’re not going anywhere.”
“That’s the problem,” I manage. “You’re really not, are you?”
“No.” He bites the word into my throat. “We’re really not.”
Eli settles in behind me, chest to my back, that coffee-and-rain scent folding over me like the safest place I know, and his mouth finds my throat while his big hands map down my body slow and certain.
Cal takes my mouth again from the front.
And Rhett settles between my thighs, where he’s been threatening to be since the day we met, and looks up the length of me with those dark eyes.
“I’ve been thinking about this since the counter. Sober. Every single day.” A slow grin against my thigh. “Gonna find out if you taste as sweet as you smell, and I’m not coming up for air till you’ve cussed this whole town deaf.” Then his mouth is on my clit, and I forget my own name.
He’s good at it. I love and hate exactly how good at it he is.
He works me with his tongue, slow, then merciless, two fingers pushing into me and curling, and I’m already embarrassingly close, because I’ve spent a whole week telling myself I dreamed how good this was.
Eli’s hand closes over my breast, thumb rolling my nipple, and his voice goes low and filthy in my ear, because the quiet ones always blindside you.
“Let him have it. We’ve got you. Come on his mouth, sweetheart.
We want to watch.” Cal’s kissing along my collarbone, murmuring, sugar, so pretty, that’s it, and the three of them wind me tighter and tighter until I come apart on Rhett’s tongue with a sound I’d die of if I had a single brain cell left to spare.
When I can see again, Rhett’s crawling up my body wearing the smuggest, most wrecked grin I’ve ever seen, and the burnt-sugar smell of him is everywhere, thick and sweet, out in the open, no smoke left to bury it under.
That’s the thing that undoes me. Not the orgasm.
Him, with the mask all the way off, in the daylight version of us, still here.
“You.” I pull him down by the back of the neck. “I want you first. On purpose. So you know I mean it.”
The scared kid under the flirt surfaces for a second, the one who was so sure nobody wanted the real thing. “Trouble—”
“On purpose,” I say again. “Sober. Choosing you. Now get in me before I lose my nerve.”
He kisses me like he’s grateful, which from Rhett is a language I’m still learning, and then he’s pushing into me slow, slick making way for him, inch by inch, his eyes on my face the whole way.
The stretch of his cock, the sheer fullness of him, drags a groan out of both of us at once. “God, Wren—”
He sinks in to the hilt and holds there a second, both of us shaking with it, and I get to watch his careful face come apart at the seams. This is the thing I never got in the fever, this exact look, Rhett Maddox undone in good light with nothing to blame it on but me.
I hook a heel behind him and pull, greedy.
“Fuck, sweetheart.” He breathes it like a prayer, and starts to move.
He sets a rhythm, deep and unhurried, nothing like the fever, all of it on purpose this time.
Every drag of him lights me up somewhere new.
Cal’s kissing me, swallowing every sound I make.
Eli’s hands are on both of us, steady, anchoring, his mouth low at my ear.
“Look at him, sweetheart. You did that. Now squeeze him — there it is. Let the whole street hear you.” And Rhett’s forehead drops to mine, and he says it wrecked, “You mean it. You actually mean it,” and I get to say yes into his mouth, over and over.
He moves in me, and the real him pours out into the room with nowhere left to hide.
“Harder,” I tell him, because I can, because I’m allowed to want things out loud now, and the sound he makes at that is worth every wall I ever tore down to get here. He gives me harder. He gives me everything, and I take it clear-eyed and grateful, loud with it.
I come again with him buried deep and his name a broken thing in my mouth, and he follows me right over the edge with a groan he doesn’t bother swallowing, spilling into me, shaking, his face pressed hard into my neck.
For a second nobody moves. Rhett Maddox, undone and quiet, in the daylight, on purpose.
I hold his head to me and feel him breathe.
“Told you,” I whisper. “Favorite part.”
He laughs, cracked and wet. “You’re going to ruin me, trouble.”
“That’s the plan.”
Then Cal’s laughing low and delighted somewhere above me, saying something about waiting his turn like a gentleman, and being extremely done with waiting. Eli’s still curled at my back, hard and patient, pressing a kiss to my shoulder, in no hurry at all, because he’s never in a hurry.
I’m wrung out and glowing, nowhere near finished. Because it turns out being wanted by three men is a full evening’s commitment, and for the first time in my life there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, no exit I’m keeping warm for later.
“Come here,” I tell Cal, reaching for him. “Both of you. We’ve got all night.”
“All night,” Eli agrees against my skin, and I feel him smile, which almost never happens, and I decide on the spot it’s my new favorite thing to cause.
I built this nest out of the three of them before I’d admit I wanted it. Tonight I’m lying in the middle of it with all three, wide awake, chosen, not a fever in sight, and it’s better than anything my scared, stubborn heart ever let me picture.
It was real the whole time.
Especially Rhett.