Chapter 15
Luna
The bell above Maggie’s door barely has time to chime before we’re out on the street, the cold air hitting my face like a slap. Behind us, the roar of the locals still cheering our win is cut off by the click of the latch.
“Watch the step, champ,” Ash murmurs, his hand hot on the small of my back.
I miss the step anyway. In my defense, the night was generously cidered, and the sheer mass of the three alphas hemming me in has a gravity of its own.
Reed catches my elbow. “Whoa, easy. Can’t have my new star player breaking an ankle before the playoffs.”
I laugh and let myself tip into his side. “I retired at the top, Reed. You’ll have to find someone else if you’re thinking of hustling the locals.”
He grins down at me, his eyes dark under the streetlamps. The air between us has gone thick. I can feel my own scent pouring out of me in waves, reacting helplessly to the sudden spike from the alphas’.
It’s a potent, biological cocktail. And God help me, I’m drinking it down like it’s last call.
Get a grip, Luna.
No, my omega purrs, stretching languidly in the pit of my stomach. I don’t think I will.
When we finally manage to get to the truck, Bram pulls the back door open for me, his gaze dropping to my mouth and staying there a beat too long before he remembers himself.
I sit in the middle, Reed swinging in on one side of me, Ash on the other.
Bram, who stopped drinking before anyone else, rounds the hood and gets behind the wheel.
The doors thud shut, the cab goes small... and very, very warm.
“Seatbelt,” Bram says, low, to the rearview mirror.
I fumble for the buckle, my fingers clumsy. Ash’s hand covers mine, guiding the metal tab into the slot, then lets his fingers rest against my hip.
My breath catches loud in the quiet. His hand. Their scents. The cider still warm in my blood. It’s too much input, and somewhere in the overload, my omega takes the wheel—because the next thing I know I turn my face into Ash’s neck and breathe him in to the bottom of my lungs.
Ash groans, low and wrecked. The sound vibrates through his throat against my nose, and it’s somehow enough to knock a sliver of sense back into me.
I pull back an inch. “Sorry—I—”
I don’t get the rest out. Because Ash’s hand slides into my hair and he buries his own face in the side of my neck, dragging in a breath, rubbing his jaw slow along my skin in a scenting pass that lights up every nerve I own. A whimper slips out of me.
“Wow.” Reed’s voice, rough at the edges. “You two are gonna sit there, scent mark each other up and leave me out?”
And the second he says it, my omega pivots like a compass needle. I twist toward Reed and press my nose under his jaw, into woodsmoke and musk. He groans, his hand clamping down on my thigh.
Ash’s teeth graze my throat on my other side. A soft nip, right over my pulse, and I moan in pleasure.
“Damn, girl,” Bram says, his voice low. And that’s when I know it’s not enough.
My omega wants the scent threading in from the front seat, too, which is currently maddeningly out of reach.
I lurch forward against the seatbelt, up between the front seats, and lick a stripe up the side of Bram’s neck.
He lets out a huge, broken groan, and his hands flex white-knuckled on the wheel.
“Bram.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Get us back. Now.”
His eyes flick to mine as he turns his head—dark, amused.
“With pleasure, ma’am.” A beat. “But you’ll want to behave yourself back there in the meantime.
Wouldn’t want to leave the deputy feeling left out.
” His voice drops a register. “Get rowdy enough, you might just earn yourself a pair of cuffs.”
Congratulations, Deputy. If the goal was to get me even more worked up, you nailed it.
***
The drive is twenty minutes of the longest foreplay of my life.
Bram takes the orchard road too fast, gravel spitting under the tires, and the second he throws it into park the rest of us come apart at the seams. Doors fly open, and Ash has my mouth before my feet hit the ground.
Reed’s hands are at my waist, turning me, and I’m being passed between them, frantic, mouths and hands and not one coherent thought left among the four of us.
Then I’m off the ground entirely.
Bram. He’s scooped me clean off the gravel, one arm under my knees, one across my back, carrying all five-foot-five of me toward the cottage.
And—oh. Oh, that’s nice. My face finds his chest and before I can stop it I’m purring into him.
Good thing there’s not one soul out here to witness me getting hauled to bed like this.
Reed gets the front door open and shoves it wide. Warmth rolls out, and Bram carries me straight through.
“Upstairs,” I say as Ash finds the lobe of my ear with his tongue, tracing it. By the time Bram is three steps in I’ve got exactly one clear thought left.
But as we pass the kitchen island, my brain stalls out.
Because on it, where this morning there was nothing, is... a bag. And not just any bag.
What. What is it doing here?
“Mm?” Ash follows my stare, his voice thick.
“Put me down,” I say. “Bram. Down.”
I cross to the island, and that’s when I see the rest of it: a single sheet of heavy hotel stationery sitting on the soft leather. The handwriting, I’d know anywhere.
You forgot this.
Three words. That’s all it takes.
Little slut. You think you can just walk away from me?
Derek’s voice, so loud it’s in the room with me.
“What the fuck,” I hear myself say. “What the fuck.”
The fizz in my blood is gone. All that gorgeous heat from the truck, every last drop of it, flashes to ice. The kitchen pulls in at the edges, narrowing down to a tunnel.
He knows where I am.
He was here. He reached all the way out here. How can he be such a psycho?
“Luna.” Bram’s voice, somewhere on the far side of the roar. “Hey. What’s going on?”
I can’t answer. The tunnel’s too narrow for words.
Then there are hands on me: Reed’s, one curling around my nape, one flat between my shoulder blades, turning me into his chest. “Okay, I’ve got you.
” And then a deep rumble rolls up out of his chest and into my cheek where it’s pressed against him.
A purr, pitched to do one thing, calm me.
A second one threads in from somewhere behind me, then a third, all of them layering in and filling the kitchen.
My shoulders come down from around my ears, the fist on my throat loosens a notch, and air gets in.
Then Bram’s huge frame’s in front of me, blotting out the island and the bag, hands loose at his sides.
“Luna,” he says. “What’s going on? Tell us.”
And so I do. I tell them there’s an ex, Derek, that I left him months ago, that I’d agreed to show up at his cousin’s wedding, believing when he promised it’d be the last time I saw him, that I made it through one night before he made me snap and I ran.
Beside me, Ash has gone very still, then a growl comes out of him. “If I’d known it was this guy who knocked at your door that morning,” he says, “I’d have crushed that little snail right there.”
“I’ll bury him.” Reed growls.
Bram fits one hand around the back of my neck, his scent grounding me. “Don’t you worry about it, Luna. This guy has no idea who he just messed with.”
His thumb moves slow against my pulse while he talks, his voice never once leaving that low, certain register.
“Here’s what we do,” Bram says, his voice flat and steady.
“I’ll ask Jenna if she brought this in. If it came by courier, which is what I’d bet on since I peg him as a coward, we’ll pull the delivery logs.
Find out who paid for it, who dropped it off.
” He pauses, his jaw working as his eyes drop to the note.
“But if it wasn’t a courier... if he set so much as one foot on this property, it’s trespassing.
And that’s just where I start. I ride with the county sheriff’s department, Luna.
I will spend every single favor I have to put this fucker exactly where he belongs. ”
“What if he’s—” My eyes cut to the window over the sink. “What if he’s here. Close.”
“You’re safe in our house.” Bram tips my chin back up. “Three alphas live here. If that snake were here, our instincts would pick it up. He isn’t, little men of his sort wouldn’t dare. And trust me, if he ever turns up, we’ll take him in a flash.”
I let out a long breath, a small smile catching on my lips. Looking at the three of them hemming me in, I don’t doubt those words for a second.