Chapter 23 Three in the Dark
Wade POV
The house was too quiet for what I’d felt through the bond that afternoon.
I came in from the yard after dark, having walked the western road with Hank until his hip stiffened and I sent him inside.
The kitchen was clean. Dishes done. No smell of Jules’s cooking, which meant he’d fed everyone early and cleaned up while I was making rounds.
Bette’s office light was off. Arvid’s boots were by the back door, his door shut upstairs.
The sitting room lamp was on.
I found them on the old couch beneath the window where Superior’s black water threw faint reflections against the ceiling.
Jules sat at one end with his arm along the back.
Nora sat against him with her legs drawn up, her head tipped onto his shoulder, and her bare feet tucked beneath her.
She’d showered. Her hair was damp and loose, and she wore one of the soft oversized flannels she slept in, buttoned halfway. Jules’s hand rested on her knee.
They weren’t talking. Just sitting together in the lamplight while the house settled around them. It looked like something that had been happening for years instead of weeks.
Nora lifted her head when she heard me. Her gaze found mine in the doorway, steady with hunger.
“Come here,” she said.
I crossed the room. My boots were loud on the pine floor. Jules watched me come without moving his arm from behind Nora, attentive rather than challenging. He knew what was happening before I did.
Nora rose from the couch and met me standing. Her bare feet put her chin level with my chest. She smelled like soap and cedar, and beneath both was the scent of her desire for Jules and me. She’d already decided.
She reached up, slid her hand behind my neck, and pulled me down into a kiss.
She kissed me hard. Her mouth opened against mine and her tongue found me and I tasted the want that had been in her since whatever Delia said that afternoon. She kissed me as if she needed to prove her choice to herself.
Then she pulled back, turned, and drew Jules up from the couch by his shirtfront. She kissed him the same way. Hard and deliberate and certain.
Jules’s hands went to her waist. His fingers curled into the flannel, and I watched the fabric bunch in his grip, watched Nora’s spine arch toward him, watched the small sound she made disappear into his mouth.
Jealousy flared. For one ugly second, I wanted to cross the three feet between us and tear his hands off her.
Then Nora broke the kiss with Jules and looked back at me over her shoulder. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes were wide and dark. She held her hand out.
“Both of you,” she said. “Tonight.”
Now I couldn’t separate the jealousy from the arousal. My wolf stopped fighting and started paying attention.
I took her hand.
? ? ?
We went upstairs. My room was at the end of the hall, its door still open from when I’d changed the sheets and swept that morning. I kicked off my boots at the threshold.
The room was cold. October pressed against the windows and the radiator hadn’t caught up. I didn’t light the lamp. Moonlight off the harbor gave enough, and the dark felt right.
Nora stood between us in the middle of the room. Jules behind her, me in front. Her hand was still in mine, and her pulse beat hard against my palm.
Jules reached around her and undid the first button of her flannel.
Then the second. He took his time, and Nora’s breath changed.
She watched my face while Jules opened her shirt, button by button, and I understood what she was giving me.
She wanted me to see. To watch her respond to him while she looked at me.
The flannel fell open. She wore nothing beneath it. Moonlight caught the freckles across her collarbone, the swell of her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach where her muscles moved with each unsteady breath. Jules slid the shirt off her shoulders and it dropped behind her.
His mouth found the curve of her neck. His hands came around to cup her breasts, thumbs teasing her nipples, and Nora’s eyes fluttered half-closed. A sound escaped her. Low and involuntary and so unguarded it made my chest ache.
I should have hated it. Instead I felt my own desire deepen until it was almost painful, thickening in my blood and pulling between my hips. She was choosing us both, and one man’s hands on her took nothing from the other’s.
I pulled my flannel over my head and let it drop. Nora’s gaze tracked down my chest, paused on the bandaged forearm, moved lower. Her hand reached out and pressed flat against my stomach, fingers spread wide, and I felt the bond flare between us. Warm and bright and greedy.
“Get on the bed,” she said to me.
I sat on the edge of the mattress. Nora stepped out of Jules’s arms and came to me. She knelt on the cold floor between my thighs, and her calloused hands worked my belt open. She freed me, and I was hard enough that the cool air was a relief.
She looked up at me once. Then she took me into her mouth.
The heat of it buckled me. I gripped the edge of the mattress and felt the wood frame creak under my hands.
Nora’s tongue moved against me with the same focused patience she brought to everything, and the pleasure built slow and devastating.
She took me deep, pulled back, found the rhythm that made my thighs lock, and stayed there.
Behind her, Jules knelt. I heard his belt, then the rustle of his clothes coming off.
His hands moved up Nora’s bare thighs, and she made a muffled sound around me that vibrated through my entire body.
Jules’s hand slipped between her legs from behind, and I watched her hips rock back toward his fingers.
She was wet. I could hear it. The slick sound of Jules working her open mixed with the heat of her mouth on me. I tightened my grip on the mattress to keep my hips still. My wolf wanted to grab her hair and thrust until I finished. I didn’t.
Jules positioned himself behind her. I saw his jaw tighten in the moonlight as he entered her slowly, and Nora moaned around my cock.
The vibration shot through me like current.
Her rhythm faltered as her body adjusted to taking both of us, and then she found it again. Uneven and imperfect and real.
Jules moved behind her. He gripped her hips and thrust at a steady, controlled pace that pushed Nora forward onto me with each stroke.
She braced one hand on my thigh and used the other to hold the base of my shaft, and the combination of her mouth and her hand and the visible pleasure Jules was driving into her from behind brought me to the edge faster than I wanted.
I pulled her off.
She gasped. Her lips were swollen and wet, her skin flushed, her eyes gone black. I almost lost it from that alone.
“Not yet,” I said. My voice came out rough and low. “Come up here.”
Jules withdrew and helped her stand while I shoved my pants off.
Her legs were unsteady. I pulled her onto the bed, rolled her beneath me, and settled between her thighs.
She was slick and hot when I pressed against her, and the noise she made when I pushed inside her was the sound I’d been hearing in my head since the first time in the loft.
I sank into her completely. Felt her stretch around me. Felt the bond blaze open between us until shared sensation flooded my body. Each stroke drove us both higher.
Jules moved onto the bed beside us. He bent to Nora’s breast and took her nipple into his mouth, and her back arched hard beneath me. His free hand slid down her stomach, found the place where our bodies joined, and his fingers worked her clit while I moved inside her.
She came.
Her legs locked around my waist and her fingernails bit into my shoulders and her body clenched around me, again and again, and I felt it through the bond and through every point where our skin touched.
She said my name. Then just sound. Then her body softened beneath me, loose and trembling and open.
I let go. I came, buried in her, and felt every pulse while her hands held the back of my neck and her quick breaths brushed my jaw.
For a long moment I stayed inside her with my weight braced on my elbows. Nora’s heartbeat pounded against my chest. Jules’s hand rested on her hip, his thumb stroking her skin.
I pulled out carefully and rolled to one side. The cold air hit my damp skin and the radiator clanked once in the corner.
Nora turned her head toward Jules. He was hard. She could see it, and I could see it, and the fact that he’d waited without demanding anything for himself moved me.
“Come here,” she said to him, the same words she’d said to me downstairs.
She turned onto her side and drew him behind her. Jules fit against her back, his arm curving around her waist, and he entered her with a slow, careful stroke that made her inhale through her teeth. He held still for a second. Then he began to move.
I stayed where I was, facing her, and drew her against my chest. Nora’s eyes found mine in the dark.
I reached between us and cupped her breast, ran my thumb across the nipple, then slid my hand down.
She was swollen and sensitive from the first orgasm, and when my fingers found her clit she flinched and then pressed harder against my touch.
Jules’s pace was different from mine, deliberate and almost languid. His hips rocked against her from behind, building her pleasure without rushing. Nora’s breath shortened. Her hand gripped my forearm, the good one, and her nails left marks I’d feel in the morning.
I stroked her while Jules moved inside her, matching his rhythm, and watched her face go tight and desperate.
She tried to speak and couldn’t. Her body tensed between us, caught between my hand and Jules’s cock, until her eyes closed, her mouth opened, and she came again.
Harder than before. A full-body shudder that Jules felt too, because his composure broke and he thrust deep and held, and I heard the sound he made against her shoulder as he finished inside her.
Nobody moved for a long time.
? ? ?
The room was cold and smelled like sex and sweat and three people’s mingled scent. I pulled the quilt up over us because Nora had started to shiver. She tucked her face against my chest while Jules stayed against her back.
We fit. The bed was too narrow for three people and we fit anyway, because none of us were willing to be the one who moved first.
Nora’s hand found mine under the quilt. She laced her fingers through mine and held on. Her heartbeat slowed against my palm. Jules’s breathing deepened into the rhythm of a man falling asleep.
The jealousy was gone.
I’d watched another man have the woman my wolf called mate and found certainty instead of the destruction I’d expected. Nora’s hand in mine meant the same thing whether Jules’s arm was around her waist or not.
I didn’t know if it would last past morning.
I didn’t know if the sight of Jules’s casual touch on her hip at breakfast would bring it all back, the possessive fury and the sick twist of watching what was mine respond to someone else.
But for tonight, it stayed away, and the woman between us breathed in a deep, even rhythm.
Across the dark yard, the bunkhouse showed no light. But I knew what Nora’s open rejection bond had carried to Rafe Sutherland: her arousal, each climax, the distinct pleasure of two men inside her one after the other, and her satisfaction afterward.
I felt no sympathy. The man had thrown her away, and his father’s enforcers had attacked my yard. He slept on a borrowed cot only because Nora had shown him mercy. What the bond showed him tonight was the consequence of his choice.
Nobody crossed the yard.
Jules shifted in his sleep and pulled Nora closer. His arm came to rest against mine across her ribs. I left mine there. His skin was warm. His breathing was even. My wolf acknowledged him without bristling, the way it acknowledged Hank or Arvid or Bette when they slept in the same house. Pack.
Nora made a small sound and pressed closer to me, and the bond hummed between us.
Still unmarked. Still mine to ask for and hers to give.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head and breathed her in.
Soap, cedar, and clean sweat, and under it the scent my wolf had known from the road before I ever touched her hand.
The radiator kicked on. The harbor wind pressed the windows. Somewhere far off, a freighter sounded its horn on the shipping lane, the low note carrying across the water and through the glass and into the room where the three of us lay tangled together.
I closed my eyes. After a while, sleep came.