Chapter 14
The kitchens were empty, as were the servants’ rooms. Other than Jessica and the highwaymen, there was no one left alive in Mowbray’s house.
The three left to dispose of the bodies.
All of the corpses were taken out into the forest. Jessica didn’t know precisely what they planned to do with the remains of the baronet and the Guardians, and it was probably best she wasn’t told what would become of them.
When Tej, Rhys, and Ezra left the house, bearing the dead, Jessica was on her own.
She walked through the empty manor, picking her way around the debris Sir Harold had thrown in her path and investigating the many rooms. It seemed ridiculous that only one man lived here, in these dozens of chambers, when she’d seen the hardscrabble homes of the people who lived nearby.
In what she assumed was the baronet’s study, a room paneled in wood with a globe and seldom-used books on the shelves, she found a bound folio on his desk.
It detailed the many werewolves the Guardians had killed with the Mowbray family’s patronage.
Her stomach turned as she read it. There was an entry marked ten years past, where five werewolves were slaughtered, though one barely escaped.
The murder of Ezra’s pack was one of many, dating back generations. Nausea climbed up her throat, but she swallowed it down to perform her next task.
She walked the folio to the study fireplace and dropped it into the flames. With satisfaction, she watched the fire consume the record of massacres, the centuries of hatred turning to blackened paper and then finally ash.
With this grim document destroyed, she found the ballroom.
She paced the length of the elegant chamber, which sported two crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, and stiff-backed chairs positioned in front of huge, costly mirrors that hung on the paneled walls.
There was no fire burning in the large tiled fireplace, so she kicked apart one of the chairs and used the pieces to start her own fire.
There was a large, plush French carpet spread before the fire, likely dating to when the house was built, and she sat down on it to contemplate the flames.
Ezra, Tej, and Rhys found her there. They’d washed the blood off, and retrieved their clothing, though they were only partially dressed in shirtsleeves and breeches.
Ezra sat behind her, setting her between his legs so that they bracketed hers.
His arms went around her, while Tej crouched nearby, feeding more pieces of furniture into the fire to keep it going.
Rhys disappeared, then returned again a short while later. He carried a large silver tray, and heaped atop the tray were loaves of bread, pieces of roasted meat, hunks of cheese, hothouse fruit, and even a few cunningly iced cakes.
After Rhys set down the tray, Tej slipped out, before coming back bearing two bottles of wine.
“From the good baronet’s excellent cellar,” he said, handing the bottles around.
“Is this what wine’s supposed to taste like?” Jessica took a long draw from one of the bottles. The ruby liquid warmed her and had the flavor of things she couldn’t even name but certainly enjoyed. “Everything I had before this has been pure vinegar.”
“Plenty more where this came from.” Tej sat, then took the bottle she handed him and drank deeply, the length of his neck moving as he swallowed.
“We cannot stay in this house forever.” She glanced around the ballroom, with its vaulted ceilings, its glittering surfaces, and its expectation to be filled with the English elite—not three werewolf highwaymen and a disgraced woman of common birth who’d once provided private security.
None of them would have been welcome in here, not while Mowbray had been alive.
But he was dead. At her hand.
She couldn’t find it in herself to feel distress at that fact. Sir Harold had willingly funded the slaughter of innocents. Her own sense of justice demanded retribution.
“I imagine the authorities will come in the morning,” Ezra agreed. He had gotten up to seat himself opposite her, and now picked up a roast chicken leg and bit into it. “And more Guardians.”
Her brows rose as she plucked a few grapes off the platter. “Didn’t we…?”
“This was only one unit. Others are scattered throughout England.”
“I’d hoped that was the end of them.”
“They’ve existed for centuries,” Ezra said. “Unfortunately, it’ll take more than one pack of werewolves to rid this country of that scourge.”
“Will they come for you, these other Guardians?” Jessica glanced at him, Rhys, and Tej, worry furrowing her brow.
Rhys, also seated nearby with his legs outspread, lifted his shoulders before helping himself to several iced cakes. He licked his fingers, and the sight of his tongue lapping at the icing made her belly flutter.
“They might,” Rhys said. “But there are others like us around England and Scotland, werewolves who’ve been forced into crime, and I imagine they’ll be the unfortunate targets of the Guardians’ interest.”
“Do you ever encounter these other werewolves?” she asked.
“From time to time.” Tej placed a piece of cheese on a hunk of bread, and popped the whole thing into his mouth, which he chewed with exceptional grace. “We all have our territories, and we respect those boundaries.”
“Yet if you joined forces,” she mused, “and fought the Guardians together, I imagine you could finally rid yourselves of those bastards.”
A laugh cracked from Ezra. “Packs aren’t known for collaboration. We’re rather…insular.”
“Still…” Jessica pressed.
Tej held up a hand. “Pax, Lady Vixen. We’ve won tonight’s battle. That’ll have to do for now. We cannot solve the problems of the world in a single night.”
“I’ll abide—for now. But I still think there’s a solution there. We could fight them, and win.”
“That’s our jewel,” Ezra said warmly. “A born warrior.”
He leaned across the space between them, and cupped her jaw with his broad hand. She closed her eyes to lean into the heat of his skin. When his lips brushed hers, she met his searching mouth with her own.
His kiss was long and slow, purposeful. He tasted of wine and roast meat and the silken depths of night.
There was something in the feel of him against her flesh, an energy released from sorrow.
This had been a hell of a night for him, killing the man who’d murdered his pack, witnessing the death of the man who’d paid for that murder.
Hopefully, that had given Ezra some sense of peace. It wouldn’t bring his lost friends back. Yet perhaps they could rest a little easier, that Ezra could rest, knowing he’d avenged them.
Her heart brimmed, and she poured that feeling into the kiss, letting him know through the feel of her mouth against his that she might not fully understand how he felt, but she would be there for him, just the same. In whatever capacity he needed.
A deep sound rumbled from him, and he took the kiss deeper, his tongue sweeping into her mouth with carnal intent.
He tipped her head so that he could have her exactly where he wanted her.
She let him lead, and in his hum of appreciation, she heard how he understood that she was purposefully ceding to him. This was her decision to make.
She edged closer to him, needing his feel.
As she did, his other hand came up to stroke down her throat, then reached beneath the lapels of her jacket and caress her collarbones, and lower still, under the neckline of her stays to cup one of her breasts.
He thumbed the stiffening tip. She hissed into his mouth as pleasure shot through her.
Sounds came from nearby, and she cracked open her eyes to find Tej and Rhys watching them intently.
Already, both men’s cocks pressed against the fronts of their breeches.
There was a barest hint of indecision in their gazes, their bodies poised as if ready to get up and leave her alone with Ezra—but they hadn’t moved, either.
“Don’t go,” she said huskily. Was she truly about to say what she wanted? “I want you. All of you.”
Her statement was a bolt of lightning streaking through Ezra, Tej, and Rhys. They all jolted with its force, and Rhys even shuddered in unsuppressed excitement.
“Do you toy with us?” Tej asked on a rasp.
She let out a huff of laughter. Impossible that such words left her lips, yet as they did, something fell into place.
“This is not a game to me,” she said. “It’s precisely what I want. And if anyone else finds me crass or wanton or takes offense at the fact that I truly do desire three different men at the same time, well, they can go fuck themselves. But I’d rather fuck you three. If you want me.”
“Jewel,” Ezra said, his eyes hot silver, “the question isn’t whether we want you. It’s whether you can take what we want to give you.”
“Try me,” she fired back.
There was a brief stillness, a hairsbreadth of a pause that seemed ripe with the possibility that anything might happen. And then, in the next instant, everything did happen.
Tej and Rhys moved with incredible speed. One moment, they were sitting nearby, and the next, they were all around her. She couldn’t tell where she ended and they began. She was surrounded by aroused male heat and muscle.
Their hands were all over her body, stroking through her hair, down her back, along her arms, around her waist, and covering her breasts. Their mouths, too, seemed everywhere at once. Anywhere her flesh was exposed, their lips caressed. Her face, her neck, the expanse of her chest. On her breasts.
She blinked, because suddenly, she was no longer wearing her jacket and her bodice was gone, as were her skirts and petticoats.
The shift she’d been wearing was mere scraps that hung in tatters.
Looking into the men’s faces, there wasn’t a hint of repentance anywhere, even though they’d stripped her without her notice.
Ezra, in fact, put away a slim knife. So, he’d been the one to rip her shift.
“You’ll need to replace that.” There wasn’t any anger in her admonishment.