by Amy Star
Her eyes prickled and she felt a hot tear rolling down her cheek, thinking of everything she had already lost in her life. It didn’t seem like she would be able to hold onto her job for much longer; she didn’t have her apartment, she didn’t have her routine, and she didn’t have about ninety percent of the things she had owned before everything had happened.
“It wouldn’t take long to train you.”
Nadine started and turned her head at the sound of Matthew’s voice.
“Where’s Dylan?” Nadine frowned, fear rising up in her at the thought that Dylan might be injured or abducted.
“He’s in the lobby,” Matthew said. He came further into the room, limping slightly as he crossed in front of the bed and sat down in a chair next to the window. “He’s fine.”
“You do realize that the two of you were beaten up in broad daylight in the middle of a neighborhood street, right?” Nadine raised an eyebrow at Matthew.
He was healing quickly, but certain kinds of injuries—even for shifters—apparently just took longer to heal than others.
“Yeah, but this is a much more public place,” Matthew said, smiling slightly. “Way less likely for them to try to attack us here. At least—in the lobby.”
“Are you saying that we’re in more danger in the rooms than in the lobby? That doesn’t make sense.”
“We’re not in much danger anywhere on the property,” Matthew said, raising his hands to indicate for her to calm herself. “But the lobby’s a particularly good place for Dyl to get his phone calls done.”
“Who in the world could he be calling?” Nadine frowned, confused.
She and Dylan hadn’t had much to do with each other since they’d fled from one county to another—although they had taken a two-bedroom suite at a Hilton on the outskirts of West Palm Beach, Nadine had felt inhibited by the proximity of the two bedrooms to each other, and she thought that Dylan probably felt the same way.
“Couple of contacts we’ve made,” Matthew said, shrugging slightly. “People who might be able to help us get to the bottom of what’s going on with those lions.”
Nadine pressed her lips together. “Are you sure you’re okay? Most of your injuries are healed but you’re still limping.”
“I’m okay,” Matthew said, dismissing the concern with a wave. “Just tore something in my leg is all. That takes longer to heal, even for us. I’ll probably need to work it out at the gym once things get back to normal.” Matthew paused for a moment. “So you want to become a mercenary?” Nadine sighed, smiling wryly. “Well it’s getting harder and harder to keep my job up,” she pointed out. “And if things get much more extreme, I’ll have to quit just to keep those assholes from attacking one of my coworkers in an attempt to get to me, to try to get to you two.”
“That’s a fair point,” Matthew said, nodding. “But do you actually want to be a mercenary? I mean—I think you’d be pretty decent at it.”
“Why do you think that?” Nadine pulled her knees up towards her chest. She started to rotate her ankle slowly, testing the stiffness, weakness and soreness of the joint; she got halfway through the rotation and a spasm of pain shot through her leg, warning her not to make it worse.
“You’re tougher than you let on,” Matthew said thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen you take more than three half-pills of the pain meds since we picked you up, and your ankle’s probably hurting pretty badly. You didn’t freak out when you saw how badly your apartment got tossed. Also, the whole bit with you fighting off a were-lion was impressive.”
“What is it with you and Dylan and that particular moment?” Nadine shook her head.
Matthew smiled slowly. “Well, we respect strength wherever we see it,” he said, shrugging. “It was pretty hot, too. Like Angelina Jolie or something.”
Nadine snorted. “I do not look the least bit like Angelina Jolie,” she said, shaking her head.
Matthew grinned again. “Maybe not, but you’re hot all the same,” he told her. “When would you want to start learning?”
“Are you offering to give me mercenary lessons or something?”
Matthew shrugged. “I could teach you a few things to start with. Of course, you’ll want to learn how to use a few weapons, too—you can’t handle everything with grappling and hand-to-hand combat.” Matthew’s dark eyes glinted with amusement.
“How are you going to teach me?” Nadine felt her heart beating faster at the thought. There was something thrilling about the idea of abandoning all the old routines of her life—and the drudgery of her old job—in favor of a much more romantic, if unpredictable, life as a mercenary.
“Stand up,” Matthew said, gesturing.
Nadine raised an eyebrow and climbed off of the bed, settling her weight carefully on her good leg.
“Your ankle’s still pretty bad, right?”
Nadine nodded.
Matthew rose from his chair, stretching slightly and shifting around until he’d gotten into a comfortable position.
“I’m going to come at you,” he said. “I’m not going to put any pressure on your bad ankle. You trust me, right?”
Nadine hesitated for only a moment, thinking of how insane it was to trust someone she’d only known for a handful of days—at most a week—and then nodded.
Matthew moved more quickly than Nadine would have thought possible; all at once he came to a stop only inches away from her.
“Okay, so you’re going to learn how to throw someone who’s coming at you from the front.”
Matthew put his hands on her arms and Nadine’s heart started beating faster still, excitement, doubt, and the first stirrings of desire warring for prominence.
“Put your weight on your good leg.”
Nadine did as she was told, and Matthew coached her through each of the steps. It was oddly like a choreographed dance; Nadine moved the way that Matthew told her, and in a matter of a minute, she had broken his grab, and she was swinging him onto the bed, where he landed with a muted thump.
“But a real attacker isn’t going to come at me that slowly,” Nadine pointed out, looking into Matthew’s beaming face doubtfully.
“No, but the first thing is to learn the steps,” Matthew said, sitting up. “I can show you how it’s done, if you want?”
Nadine licked her lips. She tested her ankle slightly; it ached in a dull, throbbing way, but she thought she could tolerate moving around a little bit as long as she didn’t actually try to run.
“Okay,” Nadine said.
She took a few steps back from the bed, and Matthew jumped up, landing nimbly on his feet. He winced at the pull of the injured muscles in his leg and then his face went back to its normal, slightly smiling expression.
“Come at me,” Matthew said.
Nadine took a few steps and got into Matthew’s space, grabbing at his shoulders the same way he had hers. She felt his hip collide with hers, throwing her balance off the way she had done. Her hold on his shoulders broke, and Nadine let out a delighted, shocked yelp as she went from standing on her own to feet to swinging through the air. She landed on the bed, the resilient surface bouncing underneath her, and Nadine giggled, turning herself around and over to look up at Matthew.
“You make it seem like the easiest thing in the world,” she said, shaking her head. “But if I was ever in a situation where I should actually do that I’m sure I’d forget.”
Matthew shook his head, wagging a finger at her.
“Not if you practiced it until it became instinct,” he pointed out. “Then you would see someone rushing you and you’d move into position before they even grabbed at your arms. You’d have them on the ground, your knee on their chest, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”
Nadine snickered at that image. She propped her chin on her hands in front of her, shaking her head with amusement at the future that Matthew had forecast for her.
They practiced a few more times, and Nadine felt her body beginning to heat up—not because o
f the exercise, but because every brush of her skin against Matthew’s sent tingles coursing through her nerves, making her heart beat faster. She tried to suppress the arousal she started to feel, thinking to herself that since they had never specifically come to a conclusion about whether or not she would be with both Matthew and Dylan, it wasn’t right for her to feel so powerfully attracted to the other bear shifter.
Nadine sprawled on the bed, panting from the exertion of their acrobatics.
“Wait—wait,” she said, holding up her hands. “Let me catch my breath.”
Matthew chuckled, throwing himself down on the bed a few feet away from her. Nadine’s pulse quickened and she tried to suppress it. I am not getting all turned on by the fact that he’s in a bed with me, she told herself firmly. That reminded her of the fact that Dylan was elsewhere.
“Is it just me or has Dylan been in the lobby for a while?”
A fleeting expression crossed Matthew’s face and he looked away for a moment before meeting her gaze.
“I think he might be giving us some alone time,” Matthew said, licking his lips with a look somewhat like nervousness.
“Seriously?” Nadine pulled herself up onto her elbows and looked at Matthew intently.
He nodded slowly. “I think he’s been waiting for me to make a move on you,” Matthew said quietly.
Nadine sighed, letting herself fall backwards onto the bed once more.
“Do I even get a say in this at all?” She turned her head to look at Matthew.
He smiled. “Of course you do,” he said, inclining his head towards her slightly. “If you don’t want me, I’m not going to push myself on you.” Matthew’s dark eyes warmed, holding Nadine’s gaze. “But unless my brain is wrong, you want me. At least a little bit. You’ve been fighting it for a while.”
“It’s wrong,” Nadine said, pulling her arms out from under her body to cross them over her chest. She was suddenly keenly aware of the fact that she was in little more than a tee shirt and a pair of jeans—she hadn’t put a bra on earlier in the day, and the panties she’d put on were next to nothing under her jeans. “Would you even want to share a—a girlfriend with Dylan?”
Matthew shrugged. “You wouldn’t exactly be just a girlfriend,” he said. Nadine’s eyes widened. “There are some things you don’t understand about our kind, I think.”
“There are a lot of things I don’t understand about your kind,” Nadine said sharply. “And even more things I don’t even know about. Explain this one though—it seems pretty important.”
“Bear shifters like us…” Matthew pressed his lips together and considered. “We have girlfriends, obviously—or boyfriends, in the case of female shifters. But the big goal is to find a mate. Someone to be with permanently.”
Nadine’s eyes widened and she stared at Matthew in undisguised shock as the import of his words filtered through her brain.
“Mate? Permanently?” She opened her mouth to say more and realized that her brain seemed to have gone numb.
Matthew smiled more broadly. “You’re not, like, going to marry us or anything—not at first, at least,” he said, waving that idea aside. “But were-bears mate pretty steadily through life.”
“Mating is…” Nadine swallowed against the dry sensation in her mouth and throat, closing her eyes for a moment to try and steady her nerves. “Mating implies having babies.”
“It can be about that,” Matthew agreed. “At least, when people belong to clans—sleuths, in the case of bears, or prides in the case of lions, packs for wolves.” He shrugged. “But I’m not suggesting that Dylan or I would be pressuring you to get knocked up as soon as possible. It’d mostly be a sex thing.”
Nadine closed her eyes again, shaking her head slowly. “Wow,” she said, taking a quick, deep breath. She licked her lips and shook her head again. “And you—you would be okay with…with sharing me with Dylan?” She opened her eyes and met Matthew’s intent gaze.
“We share a lot,” Matthew explained. “I’m not saying you have to do this. If you don’t want to be shared between two men, you don’t have to do it. Neither Dylan nor I would ever want you to feel like you’re—owned, or something like that.”
Matthew moved slightly closer to Nadine on the bed, and she felt her heart beating faster with a mixture of apprehension and desire. There was something pleasant about the way that Matthew smelled—something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on. It was subtly different from the scent that clung to Dylan’s skin and clothes, but oddly similar at the same time. There was something comforting about it.
“So if I’m not okay with—with being shared,” Nadine said slowly, exhaling sharply and shaking her head to herself at the idea the words implied in her mind. “Then you and Dylan will just…”
“Dylan seduced you first,” Matthew said. “If you want to stay with him, if you want to be with him, I’ll step aside and find someone else for myself.” Matthew held her gaze, and Nadine wondered if there was some kind of supernatural hypnotic ability that came with being a shifter. “I think you like me more than a little, though.”
“That’s—I don’t want to say that’s not the point,” Nadine said. “I just don’t understand how this would work.”
“We’d take turns with you, for the most part,” Matthew explained. “We already agreed that you should probably have a couple of days a week to yourself. But we’d agree on a schedule, with your input, and you’d spend time with both of us, separately and together.”
Nadine stared at Matthew in faint disbelief.
“And that would really work? Neither one of you would…like…start getting jealous?”
Matthew shrugged. “That I can’t exactly promise, since we’ve never tried this before,” he admitted. “But while I envy Dylan for having you in his bed, I’m not exactly jealous about it, if you get the distinction.”
Nadine considered that. She took a slow, deep breath, trying to work through her mind the implications of how such an arrangement would work.
“I really don’t know how to feel about this,” she said, once more meeting Matthew’s gaze. “I mean I guess I should feel flattered that two guys like me enough to agree to share me as their lover.”
Matthew grinned broadly. “That would be my interpretation,” he said approvingly.
“But it’s also more than a little weird.”
Matthew shrugged. “There are some clans where it’s the norm, and some where it’s punishable by exile.”
“But you and Dylan don’t belong to a—a clan,” Nadine said.
“Since we were exiled, no.”
Nadine took another slow breath, looking down at the wrinkled, rumpled sheets. She licked her lips, coming gradually to a decision.
“Can—would you hold it against me if I wanted to…to try and see if I…” Her cheeks burned. “If I want to be with you, as well as Dylan?” She braved a glance at Matthew’s face and saw that she hadn’t offended him; on the contrary, he was almost smirking.
“You want to take me for a test drive before you decide whether or not you’ll be a shared mate?”
Nadine hesitated, not certain she liked the flippant phrasing, but then nodded; even if she didn’t like the way he’d said it, Matthew had gotten to the root of what she wanted.
A moment later, Matthew rolled over on the bed, closing the distance between them. Nadine barely had time to react as his arms coiled around her, holding her tightly. She looked up at Matthew’s face and saw the darkening of his eyes as he leaned in to kiss her. Nadine melted against him as Matthew’s lips covered hers. Kissing him was nothing like kissing Dylan; Nadine tried to push any comparison out of her mind, pulling her arms free and draping them around Matthew’s shoulders, beginning to explore his body slowly through the fabric of his clothes. Matthew deepened the kiss, moving more slowly than Dylan had, nipping her bottom lip playfully and sliding his tongue against the sensitive skin there until she opened her mouth to let him in.
They stay
ed like that, kissing and touching each other lightly, for what felt like hours to Nadine. Her arousal built up, her whole body tingling with hot and cold flashes of sensation as she became more and more turned on. She could feel the heat forming between her legs, the slickness of her fluids beginning to flow along her labia, making her quickly soaking wet. Nadine moaned against Matthew’s lips, twisting and writhing underneath him as his hands began to touch and caress her with more and more erotic intent, slipping up underneath her tee shirt, tickling along her ribs on their way to her breasts. She moaned again as his fingertips wrapped around her nipples, rolling and twisting them slowly, sending electric jolts of sensation shooting through her body, seemingly directly to her already wet pussy.
Matthew broke away from her lips, tugging Nadine’s tee shirt up. She threw her arms over her head and lifted her back up, helping Matthew to undress her. Any thought of whether what she was doing was right or wrong—or whether it was a betrayal of Dylan—was a million miles away. She pawed at Matthew’s tee shirt, struggling to get it up along his back, wanting nothing more than to feel the press of Matthew’s skin against hers, the heat of his body sinking into her.
Their clothes fell away one by one, and in a matter of moments, Nadine realized she was all but naked underneath Matthew, wearing nothing but the pair of thin, almost see-through lace panties she had put on that morning. Matthew pulled back, looking down at her, panting slightly with desire as he took in every inch of her body with a desiring, hungry gaze.
“I can definitely see why Dylan had to have you four or five times that first night,” Matthew told her, his voice hoarse with need.
Nadine chuckled breathlessly, shaking her head. “Can we not talk about him right now? It’s going to make me feel weird.”
Matthew raised an eyebrow but nodded, kissing her once more. He slid one hand up between her legs and began to stroke her through the fabric of her panties. Nadine moaned out, her hands tightening on Matthew’s shoulders, her fingernails digging into his skin. Her hips began to move as if with a mind of their own, twisting and bucking under the impetus of Matthew’s touches. Matthew worked her slowly and steadily, rubbing his fingers up between her labia, somehow managing to find her pleasure center by touch.
