“So, what’s the news?” Bella asked.
“I met him today!”
“Him?” Tiffany asked with a scowl.
I nodded, a squeal building in my chest. “Well, them actually. But that’s the next part of the story. You know… him. My man. The one we asked the Halloween magic to send us last year?”
Bella clapped her hands together. “That’s awesome! It really worked! Who is it? One of the guys in town? Or—”
Tiffany put her hands up as though to say ‘halt.’ “Hang on a second. Did you just say, them?”
She never misses a beat, that one.
I bit my lip. I still hadn’t worked out that part. “Yeah, well, I’m not quite sure exactly what that was about.”
Bella leaned on the counter.
Tiffany sat on the kitchen stool. “Tell us everything.”
I laughed and explained it all, from the moment Jackson had exploded into my life. How I’d felt and how he’d responded. Then what had happened when the other two guys had walked in an hour later.
“And they were all wolf shifters. You’re sure?” Bella asked, her eyes wide.
We didn’t have much to do with the shifters in the witching community; they didn’t seem to like us for some reason.
“Yeah, pretty sure. Well, two out of three anyway. Jackson, then the other big one. Both went all growly and couldn’t speak when they met me.”
Tiffany shivered. “Oh, that sounds sexy.”
I laughed. “Yeah, it kind of was.”
“And the third guy?” Bella asked.
I tilted my head to the side, thinking about what made him different. “Um… he was something else, I think. He had wolf in him, but he was smaller and… you know what? If I didn’t know better, I’d say he had some warlock about him.”
“Really?” Bella asked, her eyebrows climbing high on her forehead.
Mixes of witch and shifter blood were uncommon, which would mean that if I was correct, tracking down his lineage would probably be quite easy.
I thought about it for a minute. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was, ’cause he had no problems talking to me, even though I had the same reaction to all of them.”
“More to one, than the others?” Tiffany asked, opening up some of the chocolate. Then, once she got frustrated with the packaging, she waved her hand over the counter and magicked up some platters of snacks and arranged everything to her liking.
I grinned. “Um, do you mean, if I had to choose?”
Tiffany shrugged. “I suppose.”
I pressed my lips together. How would I even start to evaluate that? They were all so different!
“Well, I don’t really know them yet, but Jackson… the first guy I met... he is gorgeous! With a capital G.”
I grinned at them, heat flooding my cheeks just from thinking about him.
“And the other two?” Tiff asked.
“Billy didn’t speak at all, but he was hot too. More of the bad boy type, which could be trouble.”
Tiffany laughed. “Sounds like my kinda guy. And the third one?”
“Hmm… he was the one that I think has some witch or warlock in him. He spotted me straight away and had no issues chatting. He’s smaller than the other two, but super sweet. The kind you could be best friends with.”
Bella put both hands out in front of her like she was stopping traffic. “Hang on a second. First of all, you kinda hit the trifecta, didn’t you? The boy next door, the bad boy, and the protective Alpha?”
I hadn’t really thought about it like that.
I giggled. “When you put it that way…”
“Then how are you going to choose between them?” Bella asked again.
I shrugged and picked up a chip, munching on it. “Who says I have to?”
“Ruby!” Bella exclaimed, horror written all over her face.
“What?” I asked, dramatically rolling my eyes. “If they’re all meant to be with me, and that was how it felt, why would I choose?”
“You may not get a choice in keeping them all. Wolf shifters don’t share,” Bella said, shaking her head.
I groaned. “How would you know? We have like, nothing to do with them.”
“I’ve heard about them! Okay! They’re super possessive, especially the Alpha ones. They’ll never share you. Not well enough so that any of you will be happy.”
I shrugged and continued to chomp on the salty and savory sweets before me. I didn’t like the idea of dating all three at once, but at this point I was just enjoying the feeling of success.
I looked at my friends. “Why are you being so negative about this?”
Tiffany waved her hands. “I’m not.”
I looked towards Bella and she rolled her eyes heaven ward. “Because it’s totally unfair! How could you meet three guys in the one day when we haven’t met even one? And how are you going to handle three men, Ruby? You’ve barely dated any!”
She was right. I was a virgin; all three of us were. None of the guys in the warlock community wanted to mess with us, and the humans had a natural deterrent towards our power as well.
“I know, but…”
“Do you think the other two might be for us?” Tiffany asked, grabbing for a can of coke and popping it open with a crack and a hiss.
“Ooh…. Maybe,” Bella said with a grin on her face.
“Dibs on the bad boy!” Tiffany called.
“I want the boy next door!” Bella said.
Then they burst out laughing like it was the biggest joke on the planet.
I dropped my head and stared at the marble countertop beneath my hands, trying to get control of the anger bubbling inside of me. I couldn’t control it.
Fuck, this was bad.
My fingers had turned into claws and green smoke billowed from my palms. My stomach was in knots, and the anger I felt, deep in my soul, was unlike anything I’d ever felt.
“Ruby… woah… are you okay?” Bella asked.
I closed my eyes and forced myself to take deep breaths. They were just joking. They wouldn’t take my men…
“They...” I cleared my throat, the tone of my voice strangely deep and almost evil in its intensity. “They’re mine. All three of them. They’re mine.”
I didn’t know where the thoughts came from, nor the voice I heard coming from my mouth. But the possessiveness I felt towards all three of them had me wanting to rip my friends’ heads from their shoulders.
My best friends.
The girls I considered my sisters.
“We were joking, Ruby. Promise. We’re sorry.” Bella’s contrite voice penetrated the evil red cloud inside my mind, and I willed the feelings away.
Finally, when I could speak again, I staggered towards the lounge room. “I have to sit down.”
I managed to make it to the couch, but magic still pulsed through my veins, heavy and strong.
I needed to use it, quickly. So, I pulled it inside myself and turned it around to make positive choices. I whipped my hands through the air and all the food from the kitchen magically appeared in front of me, spread out on the large coffee table.
“Come join me!” I called out and my friends snuck into the lounge.
Bella was chewing on her lips and Tiffany had crossed her arms over her chest in a defensive pose.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Tiffany slid onto one of the sofas facing me and Bella knelt on the floor, going for the candy.
“Looks like these bonds are going to be stronger than we thought,” Bella said.
I nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”
Tiffany laughed. “We probably should have looked into that a bit more, but we didn’t care at the time, did we? We all just agreed that it couldn’t hurt, could it?”
I laughed. “And using Halloween magic probably increased its strength.”
Bella giggled. “Well, you got three husbands instead of one, so I wonder what we’re gonna get.”
Courtney relaxed and picked up the bowl of popcorn, placing it on her lap. “Do you really think all three of them are yours, Ruby?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
I knew it the way I knew I loved these girls in front of me.
The way I knew I was a witch.
The way I knew my mother would die for me.
The way I only knew things that were perfectly true.
“So, when are you going to see them again?” Bella asked, reaching for a drink.
I shrugged and settled back into my chair. “They’ll find me. I told Darren that I’d be around tomorrow, being All Hallow’s Eve, so we’ll see what happens.”
Tiffany grinned. “Leaving it up to Fate, huh?”
I matched her smile with my own grin. “Don’t I always?”
But that didn’t mean that Fate was going to make this easy on any of us. Since when did three men get along well enough to share one woman?
Especially shifters.
Billy
I woke up on Halloween morning with a hangover. After finding out my mate was not only a witch, but a woman I’d have to share with my cousin and the part-warlock-wolf, I’d needed a drink.
More than one.
Darren had gone home soon after dropping the bomb, and Jackson and I had consumed every beer in his house, then started on my stash.
It took a lot of get drunk as a wolf-shifter, and even more to be hung over from it. Our metabolisms were super-fast and to even feel the effects of alcohol, it took more than most humans could consume before passing out.
“Oh… God…” I moaned from my place on Jackson’s couch, where I’d crashed for the night.
I tried to get up but found no strength in my gut and instead kind of rolled to the floor. I groaned as the floorboards came up to smack me in the face.
“Yeah, I know…” Jackson said from somewhere in the kitchen. “You want hair of the dog… or water?”
I tried to lick my dry lips and found I had no moisture to even wet them.
“Water,” I managed to croak out.
Jackson placed the glass down on the small table next to me and I finally sat up, though my stomach lurched at the movement and my head pounded with the sound of my own heartbeat.
“Fuck…” I ran my hand through my tangled hair and then sipped at the water.
My stomach threatened to revolt, but I swallowed harder and pushed through the feeling.
I would not vomit.
Jackson collapsed into the armchair opposite me, his hand wrapped around some sort of vitamin water. He looked as pale, and as shit, as I felt.
“We hit it a little hard last night, don’t you think?” Jackson said.
Talk about a rhetorical question.
I pushed myself to my feet, then sat on the couch I’d fallen asleep on last night.
“Do you blame us?” I said, sipping further on the water and wincing at the feeling of my fuzzy tongue in my mouth. Yuck.
Jackson laughed, laid his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes. “No, I don’t. And I don’t really believe it still.”
I stared at him. “Which part? That you finally found your mate and that she’s a witch? Or that you have to share her ass with two other guys?”
Jackson put his drink between his legs so it wouldn’t topple over and scrubbed both hands over his face. “Why do you have to put it like that?”
“Which part? Oh… the ass part.”
I was partial to a tight ass myself, so if we were allocating body parts…
I took another sip of the water before putting down the glass. “I don’t know if it was my imagination but… did she smell like a virgin to you?”
She had to me, which had made my damn wolf shifter practically dance with glee. I had been so hard not to shift in that flower shop.
I’d had to clamp down my jaw and fight with every self-preserving cell in my body.
Jackson didn’t even look up. “Yep.”
I grinned, unable to help myself from teasing him. “Then you’ll only have to share her ass with us. Never anyone else.”
That got him to look at me, his lips pulled tight and down. “That’s not reassuring.”
I had to smile at that one.
Jackson was an Alpha, one of the few in our pack. And it was a hard gig. We didn’t give the Alpha’s any real importance anymore, nor extra responsibilities.
We considered ourselves to be above such hierarchical bullshit, and yet, Jackson still had the genetics of an Alpha. The size of one. The need to claim, and protect, and dominate.
Sharing a mate sexually must frustrate the shit out of him.
“Not a great time to be an Alpha, huh, cousin?” I shot at him.
Jackson got to his feet. “Shut up. I need breakfast. You wanna come to Milly’s?”
“Yeah. I think I need to.” I forced myself to my feet and dragged my sorry ass out of the house and after him.
Milly’s was one of the few shops we had in our version of a town. Due to the fact the main town was only a fifteen-minute drive away, we only had the essential four shops: a gas station, a clothing shop, a doctor’s office, and Milly’s.
Milly’s was a café that served the best, greasiest burgers and breakfast around.
If the folks in town knew about Milly’s, I was sure they’d come and eat out here rather than going into whatever diners they frequented.
We walked the two blocks in silence. Once inside the diner, we found a booth and ordered up the biggest breakfast possible.
“You guys are hungry this morning,” Toni said, one of the girls I went to school with who waitressed there. She ran her gaze over both of us and frowned. “You look like you could both use a coffee too.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Toni picked up our menus and left to place our orders.
I sighed. “What are we going to do about Ruby?”
I tried to stop myself from shuddering with tingling pleasure at the sound of her name, but if Jackson’s annoyed look was any indication, I didn’t achieve it.
“I don’t know. Obviously, we have to go claim her, but then what? I don’t want her living out here. And I doubt she’d want to anyway. All the Witches stay in town. They have their community, and we have ours.”
My jaw dropped. Was he serious? “You want to live in town?”
Jackson shook his head and huffed out a laugh. “God, no.”
Hang on a second. I was missing something here. He didn’t actually mean that he wanted to live separately to her, after we mated?
I couldn’t be right.
“And you expect her to want to stay in town?” I repeated.
He nodded.
The reality of my cousin’s stupidity hit me like a ton of bricks. If he thought that he was going to be able to just walk away from this woman, he had another thing coming.
I rolled my eyes at him. “You really don’t want her to be your mate, do you?”
Jackson looked down at the table and ran his finger over some invisible crack obviously he could see.
I needed to know what the real issue was. “What’s your problem now, cousin?”
Jackson had always been a strange one in our family, so strong and sure and capable. And yet he ran from responsibility and had never shown any signs of wanting to settle down—except when it came to building his house.
That had come as a shock to everyone. He’d been the only one in our whole pack to want to build a big family home, for himself. No mate. No family. And no plans to fill it, if his screwing around over the past ten years meant anything.
“I don’t have a problem,” Jackson said, puffing up his chest at me.
Toni arrived with our food and I sighed with relief, even though my stomach rolled at the sight of the bacon, fried eggs, and sausages. I knew I’d feel so much better after consuming it all.
“Really?” I asked, picking up my knife and buttering
the toast. “You want to claim the virgin witch, but you’re gonna leave her in town, while we live and work out here? I don’t think so.”
I certainly wasn’t going to do that. If that woman was mine, she would be sleeping next to me every night, and I’d be sinking my cock into her as often as she’d allow.
But that was just me.
Jackson dug into his plate of pancakes first, pouring maple syrup over the stack, then setting to it like a starving man.
I glanced around, for the first time ever wishing the warlock-wolf would pop his head up. He had an uncanny ability to be where he needed to be, at the exact moment he was needed.
Not this time though.
“Who are you looking for?” Jackson asked between bites.
I stabbed a sausage and put it to my lips, the greasy oil dripping off the end before I could take a bite. “Darren. Thought he might have a plan that might actually work.”
Jackson growled at me, a deep, threatening noise that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It horrified me to realize that every wolfy part of me wanted to submit to that noise. To kneel, expose my throat, let the Alpha know I was no threat.
But I wasn’t doing that. So, I shrugged and looked down at my plate.
It took a lot of conscious effort to go up against Jackson when he was in this sort of state.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll go find him after breakfast.”
I kept eating, annoyed at the fact I could barely lift my head with the Alpha glaring down on me.
He shouldn’t do that. He had no right to force me to submit to him. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
And the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. My hands curled into fists as my wolf barked inside my mind.
I clenched my teeth and lifted my gaze to glare at the Alpha sitting opposite me. And I was just about to tell him where he could shove it, when a hand landed on my shoulder.
“I was wondering where you guys were. Shove over, Billy.”
I’d never been so glad to hear Darren’s happy voice.
The tension eased out of me as I focused on him. Hopefully Jackson would back off too now.
I nodded in response to Darren’s request and moved over on the booth seat, pulling my plates of food with me.
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