The horror deepened inside her. “What about her helping them with their business?”
Mark nodded. “She did tell them she thought they should make paddles. But I was there helping them at a large con one weekend up at Tampa, manning the booth. Lydia spent more time boozing and shmoozing than she did actually working. And she was skimming cash off the till. If you call that work, then sure. I saw that with my own eyes. That was the last straw, and when they decided to move her out. They did it the way they did to have the least amount of drama. If they’d tried to evict her any other way, they knew she’d try to play the law against them to force them into court and out of their house. They knew if they moved her out lock, stock, and barrel into someplace else, without giving her a chance to fight them, she wouldn’t fight them. Hell, she wouldn’t be able to afford to fight them.”
“She didn’t help them build the business?”
The three brothers laughed. “No. She’d whine if they gave her money to go ship a box for them, even when she wasn’t working. She never lifted a finger to help them build anything. With those manicured nails of her? Screw that. She did toss ideas around and take credit for anything they did. She’s great at that.”
“Why didn’t they tell me all of this?”
Ted shrugged. “You’ll have to ask them.”
“Max and Sean,” Josh said, “are great guys. They hate drama, and they don’t go talking about people. Everyone who knows them knows they’re good guys and Lydia’s a bitch. It’s a small community.”
“Why would she tell me all of that?”
“Because she’s a goddamned cunt,” Essie said. “And I don’t toss that word around lightly in relation to other women. But that’s the only word that truly fits what she is. Cunt.”
“They told me about the ex they had who got them together. Is that her?”
Ted held up his hands. “I wasn’t privy to what they told you, so I refuse to give any answers. All I know is all I know. Lydia is a liar. If she told me the sky was blue, I’d stick my head out of the goddamned door first. If Lydia told me anything about anyone, I’d start out with at least seventy-five percent doubt about the veracity of the facts as she’d stated them.”
Her stomach churned. The breakfast she’d eaten earlier threatened to come back up. And she’d paid for the woman’s meal!
“Why didn’t you tell me that night at the club?” she asked Essie. “When I talked to Lydia. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Honestly? I figured you’d talk to your guys about it. I wasn’t a firsthand witness to any of it. All I knew was she was their ex, and what little my guys knew. And I knew that Max and Sean don’t like to attract or feed into drama. You’re my friend and I love you, but you also know I’m not a person to gossip, especially if I don’t know all the facts.”
“What do I do now?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
Essie grabbed her hands. “They were right to tell you to talk to others. Max is wicked smart. But do you think you need to hear it from someone besides us? I know my guys. I know my guys don’t lie. And I’ve never seen Max and Sean be anything but upstanding guys. Considering Lydia is the only one with a beef with them, my guess is she’s jealous as fuck about them finding someone younger than her, who is really helping their business grow, and who genuinely loves them.”
Cali trusted Essie. Without question. And her guys.
Everything Essie said only made her feel worse, not better. She’d basically nuked her relationship with Max and Sean based upon an anonymous note, then by talking to someone who was suspect.
And she had snuck out behind their backs to meet with Lydia.
That, of everything, made her feel the worst.
“What have I done?”
“The question is,” Ted said, “where do you go from here? Do you need to talk to anyone else? Do you need other third-party confirmation?”
She swallowed hard. “No.” She knew her friends. She knew they wouldn’t lie to her. She’d seen them stick up for others. There was no reason they’d change that pattern of behavior just for Max and Sean.
No, Lydia was the common denominator.
Essie squeezed her hands again. “If you need to, you can move back in with us. So take your time, think things through. Don’t act rashly and do or say anything you can’t take back.”
Now Cali’s tears started again. “I think I already did,” she whispered.
* * * *
When she finally walked home an hour later, she dreaded it even more than before when she’d thought the men had betrayed her trust and lied to her.
She was the guilty one now. When she tried to find a single case of the men not doing or being what and who they said they were, she couldn’t.
Unlike with Shane, where the clues were there all along.
Lydia had cunningly played her, hoping to break up Cali’s chance for happiness for her own bitter reasons.
The men were in the garage, working on making new stock. They shut off the equipment when they saw her standing there in the doorway from the house.
She couldn’t look them in the eyes, kept her hands clasped in front of her so she didn’t nervously twist her fingers together.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
They walked over to her, not touching her yet, but waiting, listening.
After a deep breath, she said, “Now that it’s out, please, I want to know the whole story. I want to be with you, and I want to be the person you need.”
“We’ve never asked you to be anything or anyone but yourself,” Max said. “That’s all we ever wanted. That’s the only thing we want.”
“And to be ours,” Sean added.
“We know you don’t want a label. And I thought we were pretty clear about how we feel.”
“You were,” she said. Shame filled her. She never should have trusted what Lydia said. She was so raw over Shane that she’d willingly believed Lydia, thinking everything the woman had said made perfect, logical sense. Because, at the time, it had.
Then again, most psychopaths did seem to make sense in their own minds.
Or is that a sociopath?
“I’m sorry I fucked things up,” she said. “I should have trusted you guys.”
“Yes, you should have,” Sean said. “If you didn’t trust us, you could have gone and talked to any of our friends about her for the truth as soon as you heard it, instead of accusing us of something we didn’t do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“We did,” Max said. “Last night, as a matter of fact. We just never mentioned her by name because I make a point of not using her name.”
More horror filled her. “Lydia is the one who did all that to you?”
“Yeah.”
Now she felt even worse, something she hadn’t thought possible.
“I’ll start looking for a place tomorrow,” she said.
“What?” Max sounded horrified himself. “Um, nooo, that’s not how this works,” he said. “Besides, someone promised us six months.”
She couldn’t be hearing him right. “But…what about this? About what I just did?”
He pulled her into his arms. “It was a fuck-up, sure. It’s not something we can’t get past, is it? Lydia’s a fucking snake. While we’re not happy that you didn’t trust us, it means we all need to back up a few steps and work harder to strengthen that weak point.”
Sean joined them, his arms around them both. “Yeah. You just put an interesting bend into things. You didn’t break it.”
“But how can you trust me now?”
“How can you trust us?” Sean asked.
She stared at him. Now with the full story, she felt like an idiot. Had they told her it was Lydia, as soon as she’d seen the woman at the restaurant she would have given her a piece of her mind.
Max spoke. “We’re back to the same point we started at. You can come up with a thousand and one different reasons for us to end this now, or you can trust us to kno
w that who we want is you. We have the benefit of seeing this from a different angle. Are we upset? Yeah. Are we pissed off? At Lydia, yes. We’re disappointed in you because we thought you trusted us more, but we don’t not trust you.
“We’re also disappointed in ourselves that we didn’t do a better job earning your trust. Yes, we should have made sure you understood Lydia is our ex. Honestly? I thought everyone knew that. I didn’t realize it wasn’t common knowledge. I take full blame for that miscommunication. We understood how badly you were hurt by Shane. We get it. So we’re fine with backing up a few steps and letting you catch up to us. We’re not going anywhere, and we don’t want you going anywhere, either.”
“It can’t be that easy.”
“It is that easy,” Sean insisted. “If you let it be.”
“But I want to know one thing,” Max said. “Why did it piss you off so much, besides the whole Shane thing? When Lydia talked to you. Why did it strike a nerve so hard and so fast?”
“The truth?”
“Of course.”
She took a deep breath. “Because I’ve already fallen in love with you both,” she whispered. “I thought I fucked up again.”
Sean gently took hold of her chin and made her look at him. He wore a gorgeous, sexy smile. “Good,” he said. “Because we’ve already fallen in love with you, too. We’ve been afraid to say it because we didn’t want to spook you.”
I. Am. An. Idiot.
She broke down crying, sobbing.
They still wanted her, even after she’d failed them.
And they loved her.
“Is there anything else I need to know?” she managed to choke out. “Anything else that might come out? Because I don’t want to fuck up again.”
Max tucked a stray hair behind her ear. “Lydia fucked us over emotionally. Yes, we moved her out. After we realized she was using us, we sat down one day with each other and started comparing notes. She’d started trying to turn us against each other, playing us, divide and conquer when she realized forcing us to be bi wasn’t going the way she thought it was. That we weren’t humiliated the way she’d planned it. She was trying to get us to split up. We don’t know the full extent of her plan there, but our guess, based on her previous activities, is that she was going to pick whoever had the most money to leave with.”
Sean spoke up. “She never did chores. She treated us as her slaves, and not in the fun, happy, get-your-rocks-off kind of way, either. When she found out we were enjoying the forced bi stuff, she stopped it, because it wasn’t hot for her anymore. She got off on the humiliation, on using us. Some people are just like that.”
“And the business? Mark said she stole money from you.”
“She did,” Max said. “And she didn’t do jack shit with the business. Did she help us come up with the website name? Yes, that she did. Did she say we should start a business? Yes, she did. All talk. We paid to incorporate. We paid the web URL registration and hosting fees. We paid for supplies. We did the labor. We did that. Not her. She loved using the implements on our asses, so if you count that as contributing to R&D, sure.”
“Why did you let her do that to you?’
The men exchanged a glance, Max answering. “We loved her. Why did you help Shane for all those years and end up with nothing to show for it?”
Point taken.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. It’s done. The question is, can you move past it? Do you, and can you trust us again?”
She nodded. “I do trust you. But now I’m not sure I trust myself to make sound decisions.”
The men hugged her between them. “Talk to us,” Sean said. “We want you to trust us but we get it. That’s why we’re not in a rush to press you for more than you’re ready for. We love you. Maybe if we’d said that earlier it would have been easier for you to trust us. I don’t know. I’m not willing to let you walk out the door without a fight. Even if it means we need to go to counseling or whatever it takes.”
She looked up in his face. “You mean that?”
“Yeah.”
Max nodded. “Anything.”
Shane had always pooh-poohed counseling as a waste of time and money. She’d wanted to go a few months before he left, seeing how much he was drawing away from her.
Retrospect…
“What I want you to do is make love to me.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “I want you to make me quit thinking about what an idiot I am and show me again how much you love me. How lucky I am that you guys forgive me.”
Sean looked at Max. “Can we show her the surprise now?”
“Yeah, it seems as good a day as any.”
“What?”
Max stepped around her to the door and held out a hand to her. “Follow me.”
Chapter Seventeen
She didn’t usually go to the play room on a daily basis. In fact, they kept the door closed to keep Baxter out of there, also using it as storage.
When Max opened the door and stepped aside, she spotted the surprise sitting there.
Sean wrapped his arms around her and nibbled on the nape of her neck. “Well?”
“Oh…my.” Her pussy clenched, clit throbbing, juice flowing. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Mm-hmm,” Sean said. “Built just for you.”
“And adjustable so any of us can fit in it, of course,” Max added.
She walked over to the padded metal frame, imagining herself strapped into it. It had moveable joints, so that whoever was attached to it could be positioned in a number of ways, open and accessible however the person strapping them into it wanted them to be.
“We’ve been working on the design for a while,” Max said. “This is our prototype. We need to make a couple of modifications for production, but we can sell it for three hundred, make a good profit, and there’s nothing quite like it out there. Takes six hours, start to finish, to make one. If they want it powder-coated, they can tack on fifty bucks, but we have a buddy who’ll do it for thirty, because all the pieces come apart into plain tubing.”
“Holy shit.”
“And,” Sean said, “it’ll break down and transport in a large suitcase. Totally discreet.”
She stripped off her shirt. “Well, let’s break it in, then. I think I earned a paddling for my behavior this morning.”
Cali didn’t understand why Max didn’t return her grin. “Honey, all joking aside, that’s not how we want this dynamic to work. Funishment is one thing. But if we have issues, we sit down and talk about them.”
“I want a paddling,” she said, draping her arms around his neck. “I want to think back to this morning and remember this moment and remember how much I love the two of you, and how damn lucky I am you put up with me in the first place.”
He finally smiled. “Well, when you put it like that, sweetheart, get naked.”
Sean rushed out, presumably to get implements. By the time he returned, Max was naked and had her strapped facedown onto the frame, her knees bent but thighs spread as wide apart as she could get them. Her arms were also immobilized, and her head was strapped securely into a padded cradle, the height adjusted perfectly for her to suck a cock.
The frame’s construction allowed unfettered access to her breasts. Max reached under her and played with her nipples. “I think someone’s wearing nipple clamps for this session,” he said, pinching them hard enough to make her gasp.
She felt her juices running down her thighs. She felt open, vulnerable, exposed.
Hornier than hell.
Sean put something down. From her position, she couldn’t see him or what he’d brought back. “Whoa, that’s even better than I thought.”
“I know, right?” Max said. One of them reached out and stroked her ass. “And the accessory clamps will fit perfectly here and here, just like we talked about.”
She wasn’t sure what clamps they meant, but heard and felt them doing something to the frame.
“See?” Max said. “Positioned perfectly there, so it’s not hitting her clit. Torture, without getting her off. If someone wants to move it, they can, so it hits the woman’s clit.”
“Or clamp balls and a cock,” Sean said.
Max laughed. “I know, I lost rock-paper-scissors. You can test that on me later. For now, we test it on her.”
With her legs spread, it left her ass open and exposed. Sean leaned in and rimmed her, grabbing her ass cheeks and holding them wide open.
“You’re in for a treat today, baby,” Max said. “We were going to save this, but since it’s a special occasion, we’ll use it.”
He knelt down and showed her. “Inflatable dildo,” he said, smiling. “Time to start your training.”
She whined, trying to wiggle to get her clit closer to the vibrator and unsuccessful. The frame held her securely in place.
Sean slapped her ass. “Oh, baby, this is just the start.” He slid a finger into her pussy, along the vibrator attachment, and wiggled it around. “We’re going to fill your ass with our cocks while you’re strapped down to this.”
She heard the squirt of lube, then felt it, cool against her rim. The start of something being pressed against her ass, wider, wider still, making her moan until the widest point of the butt plug finally passed through her ass and settled into position.
One of them tapped on the base. “That’s staying in,” Max said, “while we redden your ass.”
Sean affixed the nipple clamps to her, making her whine again while still driving her need higher. The Hitachi was now annoying, because it was making her horny without providing relief. But then it was shut off and disappeared, almost prompting her to beg them to return it.
Two fingers effortlessly slid into her pussy. “Oh, yes,” Max said. “She’s ready.”
His fingers withdrew. Immediately, they inserted something else. She heard the sound of them pumping, and the dildo began inflating. It quickly grew from interesting to wow to almost unbearable, where they stopped.
Crafty Bastards [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations) Page 12
