Every Night Forever

by R. E. Butler

  Mason came up on her other side. “Why would you think we would cast you aside, love? We’re not in the habit of doing that with our woman.”

  Shuddering as she tried to hold her sobs back, she looked at Mason with wide eyes. “What?”

  Cairo moved closer to the end of the bed. “Of course, Alyssa. Why the hell do you keep saying things like ‘toy’? We don’t know what that means.”

  Dante pulled her up slowly to a sitting position and she clenched the tucked corner of the large bath towel so she was still covered. Her voice was scratchy and raw and Mason walked over to the kitchen area and grabbed a bottle of water for her from the stocked refrigerator. She took a long drink, still sniffling and trying to calm herself, and then she told them everything in a rush, starting with her mother, who hadn’t ever really been there for her, abandoning her to chase after an alpha. Left to her own devices, she’d tried to get attention any way she could, and ended up as a pack toy.

  “A toy is a whore for the pack, always available for any single male on the full moon or any other time. I was one, until a few months ago when a drunken mistake made me reevaluate my life.”

  She sniffled, refusing to look at them. “When I stopped having sex, the males wouldn’t even look at me twice. I’d been nothing to them, nothing of value anyway. I was easily replaced and quickly forgotten. And my friends — or the females I believed were my friends — were angry that they had to pick up my slack. The sick thing is that I had hoped that someone might like me enough to get to know me, but when I took my body out of the equation it was like I ceased to exist.”

  Fury stole through him, and his brothers were no less affected by her words.

  She wiped at the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I looked for jobs outside of Havers. I thought,” she sighed and twisted the bottle in her hand, “I thought that you would want me to pick between you, or worse, that you’d all want me just once and then I’d be...alone. I tried to keep you away from me, but then this whole thing with the gym happened. You can’t want me. You don’t know the person I was before I came here. I don’t deserve what you’re offering.”

  Cairo said, “You don’t know what we’re offering yet, sweetheart.”

  She looked at all of them tentatively. She had no self esteem. It was no wonder she thought their flirting, their attempts to get to know her, were just a way to get in her pants. It’s all she’d ever known. She took physical attention because she craved affection. Her mother hadn’t looked back when she left her behind, her sister was selfish to the point of being cruel, and she’d boxed herself into a corner with her behavior both with the males in the pack and the females. That she felt vulnerable and worthless was understandable. No one ever wanted her as a whole person; they only wanted the pieces they could carve from her.

  It’s a vast chasm, the difference between sex and love, and until this point, he hadn’t ever known that truth. After only three weeks, he could not deny two things: he loved her more than the breath in his body, and she belonged to them, forever.

  He kissed her temple and asked, “Are you hungry, baby?” He slid off the bed when she nodded that she was, and he motioned for his brothers to follow him to the kitchen. They worked quickly to put a plate together for her, and spoke in low voices.

  “Well, we can’t mate with her, she doesn’t know the difference between sex and love,” Mason said as he cut apart a rotisserie chicken, echoing Dante’s previous thoughts. When hyena clans took their bride for the first time, all three males had to be with her together to bond with her completely. Alyssa was nowhere near emotionally ready for that.

  “If we do nothing after she bared her soul to us, then what is that saying?” Cairo sighed and ran his hands over his head with a growl of frustration. They all looked over at her. She hadn’t moved, her legs curled up to the side and her hand gripped tightly against the towel. He felt like a colossal jackass for not giving her something to wear.

  Dante glanced at the clock over the small sink. It was eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. “Okay, we don’t technically have to leave here until Monday morning to meet the glass guy at the gym. That gives us almost two days to show her that we’re serious about her.”

  “Just how do you propose we do that?” Cairo asked suspiciously.

  “There’s no way that fragile girl over there is ready to take the three of us on.” Dante said.

  Mason let out a slow breath. “What if…we tell her that we want her to be our clan bride, but that we want her to come to us when she’s emotionally and physically ready?”

  Cairo topped off a glass of lemonade. They’d been careful to stock the refrigerator and pantry in the den with things they’d seen her eat and drink over the last few weeks. They wanted her to know they cared, and part of that meant taking care of her right now. In every way.

  Cairo looked over at Alyssa and then back to his brothers. “I will do anything to make sure she knows how important she is to us. If that means waiting to make her our bride until we’re all on the same page, then I’m okay with that.”

  Mason cleared his throat. “Do we have to take sex completely off the table? I mean, couldn’t we still do some things? I have a feeling that she’s never been taken care of intimately before. I don’t think anyone has ever cared about her pleasure. We can show her that we’re different, make this time down here just about her pleasure. When we leave here Monday, she should know that her happiness is the most important thing to us, and that we’re in it for the long haul.”

  Dante liked how Mason thought. After a little further discussion, they decided that they would initiate kissing and light touching, letting her decide how far she wanted to go, short of actual sex. And then when the time was right, they would all come together as a clan, and they would mate their bride and they would be hers forever.

  They put the plate in front of her on the bed and he and Mason sat on either side of her, Cairo sat on the floor, holding the glass for her. They urged her to eat and she picked at the food, casting wary glances at them. How do you get a woman to trust you, when you’re battling her past in the process?

  He reached for a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. Was that a glimpse of gratitude in her eyes? Hopefully. He brushed a lock of her soft brown hair from her shoulder and said, “Alyssa, we made a mistake. Well, several of them. We led you to believe that we were only after one thing with you, and that’s far from the truth. You see, baby, we want you to be our clan-mate, our bride. We want to marry you and take care of you, make a family with you.”

  She started to choke on whatever bite of food was in her mouth, and Mason thumped her back a few times until she put her hand up, clearing her throat and swallowing. Gathering the blanket around herself better, she looked at the three of them and took the offered glass, draining half of it.

  “Run that by me again?” she said incredulously.

  Cairo grinned. “You’re our mate, Alyssa. Haven’t you felt a connection to us? It’s why we were trying to get to know you, to spend time with you. Clearly we fucked up; otherwise you wouldn’t have misinterpreted our advances as something as shallow as a one-night stand. We don’t want you for one night; we want you for every night, forever.”

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” she said finally, pushing the plate aside. Dante put it down on the floor, out of the way.

  “We could ask you the same thing,” Dante pointed out. “I think all of us are a little at fault for the last three weeks. I was afraid to trust my own feelings. But when you were being held by those men, Lys, I knew it would kill me if something happened to you. That’s when I knew.”

  “Knew what?” she whispered.

  “That I’m in love with you. Because I can’t live without you.”

  “I love you too, Alyssa,” Cairo said.

  Mason squeezed her hand. “I love you, too, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. For everything.” He looked a little bright-eyed, like he was trying not to cry. He was
tenderhearted but he always tried to be strong when he was around others. He looked at tears as a weakness, even though neither he nor Cairo did.

  She looked at him for a long moment and then she put her arms around him and hugged him, kissing his ear. “It’s okay, Mase.”

  She pulled away from him slowly and he sniffled and scrubbed at his eyes. “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “We want you to be happy. We’re locked in down here until Monday morning. This time is yours,” Dante told her.

  “We’re locked down here?”

  “Technically, yes.” Mason could unlock the door from a menu on the TV in the sitting area, but she didn’t need to know that right now. “This is our den. In the winter, we spend almost all our time down here. Cairo goes to the gym to train, I go in once a week or so for paperwork, and Mason does his tech stuff from here and does the fun stuff like laundry and cooking.”

  “Do you want to be down here with us? Are you still scared?” Cairo asked with concern.

  “I’m okay now. I just don’t know what to make of all this.”

  “Then let’s watch a movie and relax,” Mason offered, standing and holding out his hand for her.

  She stood, the towel slipping away as she draped the blanket around herself, took his hand and followed him over to the large leather couch. He and Cairo took her sides on the deep couch and Mason flipped through the large selection of Blu-rays. After he asked if she liked sci-fi and she said yes — and both he and Cairo groaned — he extracted his all-time favorite, Stars Wars, Episode IV - A New Hope.

  “You don’t like this one?” she asked, looking at him with amusement in her eyes. He was just glad to see something there besides fear and self-loathing.

  “I did like it. Until I had to watch it a hundred times last winter.”

  Mason plopped down on the couch next to Cairo and cued the movie. With the remote he had personally tweaked, Mason lowered the lights in the den so that the sitting area was in darkness and only low lights on the wall near the floor illuminated the main areas – bed, kitchen, and the short hallway to the large bathroom.

  “Would you like me to get you a shirt, Lys?” Dante asked.

  “I’m okay for now.”

  Good.

  * * * * *

  No other woman on earth smelled as good as Alyssa, and Cairo was as close to her as he’d been since that kiss in the locker room, which had haunted his dreams every night since. He wished he had done something besides just letting her walk away and act as if nothing had happened. She had clearly known all along that they were attracted to her, but she hadn’t known about their mutual desire to be with her as a group. He wondered if it might have mattered to her if they’d told her about their particular mating habits, and decided that considering how fragile her self esteem was at the moment, that it probably would have made things worse. Yes, they slept with women alone, but when it came to their mate, they would all want to be with her. Not every time. But sometimes. And definitely when they made love to her the first time.

  Honey. Alyssa smelled like heated honey. He felt like he was drooling just scenting her, and wondered what she was thinking about that was making her smell so much stronger and better. She certainly smelled like she was turned on, that heady mix of her honey and pure woman’s scent.

  Ever since he’d hauled her downstairs like a caveman, he’d not been able to get over the feel of her skin or the delicious light weight of her body against his shoulder. And that smack on her ass had been heaven for him — he was fairly certain a little shiver of excitement had woven through her, too.

  She shivered suddenly and made a small noise that could only be described as pleasurable. He looked at her and then Dante, who looked like he was being devilish. Dante said in a loud whisper, “I was just telling our mate that you like to eat pussy, Cai.”

  Holy fuck!

  She licked her lips and met his eyes. Even in the flickering light of the television he could see the heat in her gaze. “D-do you?”

  He turned on the couch to look at her. “I do. And I’ve never wanted to touch anyone as much as I want to touch you, taste you.” He snagged a finger under her chin and made sure she was looking into his eyes. “Can I show you?”

  Her eyes widened and a little shiver wove through her. Her voice was a bare whisper. “Here? In front of everyone?”

  He glanced at Dante and he nodded once. Cairo let out a slow breath. “Lys, when we said we want you to be our bride, that means that sometimes we’ll want to share you together. Do you get what we mean by that?”

  There were those wide eyes again. He stopped her panic before it could grow further. “Right now, we’re not talking about that, okay? We just want to make you happy. If you, for example, would like it if I went down on you, then I’m very happy to do that and I don’t expect anything in return. But if you aren’t comfortable with that, we can just sit here and watch the movie or talk. We don’t want anything from you, we don’t want you to do anything to us, we just want you to be happy, however we can do that for you.”

  “We want you to fall in love with us, baby, to be able to say it back to us without a doubt in your mind that we love you. You’ve got a fucked-up past and you don’t trust us completely, but in time, we’ll show you that we’re not going anywhere. That we want you forever. And we don’t want to make love to you until it’s real for all of us, and that means you, too.” Dante said.

  She looked past him to Mason, who had been quiet. Mason reached his hand out and caressed her cheek. “Whatever you want is fine, sweetheart, we swear. Tell us what you want and we’ll do it.”

  She blinked and swallowed hard. The scent of her arousal spiked on the air like someone had opened up a vat of honey and poured it all over them. Dante pulled her back against him, tilted her face up to his and kissed her. Shifting between them, she dropped her grip on the blanket and cupped the back of his head.

  Dante lifted from her mouth and waited until she opened her eyes. “Tell us what you want, baby, say it out loud.”

  She went very still, and although the light was low from the flickering screen, he thought she blushed. Then she cast her eyes to him, and leaned over, skating her fingers around his neck and pulling him to her mouth. Pulling away from the drugging kiss, she looked into his eyes and after a long pause said, “Go down on me, please.”

  Five more erotic words in the English language had never been spoken before, he was certain, and he kissed her once more and slid down onto the floor in front of her, Dante maneuvered her lower body to the edge of the couch by moving behind her and settling her in the V of his legs. Mason scooted over to them and took her hand, kissing the tips of her fingers, desperate for any kind of contact.

  She pulled him over for a kiss, but it didn’t last long because Dante began to open the blanket slowly, parting it like a curtain, until her gorgeous body was laid bare for them. Cairo drank in the sight of her as he lifted her knees and spread them on either side of Dante’s legs so he could have easy access to her pulsing core. He looked up at her as his hands rested on her knees.

  Her breasts were firm and large, with nipples that just begged to be teased and touched. Her flat belly, a smooth expanse of lightly tanned skin, led to her completely bare pussy, glistening with her honey. Their sweetheart waxed. Awesome.

  “Tell us what you like, love.” His hands tightened reflexively on her knees, itching to part her fully and touch and explore.

  Dante was kissing her neck, one hand cupping her left breast while Mason touched her right breast, and she let out a soft breath and squirmed under their attention. “I don’t know,” she said finally and they all paused.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Mason asked.

  Now he could see her blushing, but he could tell it was from shame by the way she averted her eyes. “I’ve never had anyone go down on me before.”

  He couldn’t have been more surprised if she said that she liked to go hang gliding for fun. He was angry
that she’d been mistreated for so long. He’d wanted her pleasure before, but now, it was even more important. They’d prove that they were different than the wolves. Far different.

  * * * * *

  Mason asked what he was pretty certain his brothers wanted to know. “Has no one ever just taken care of you, just you, without asking anything in return?”

  He held her chin with his fingers and her eyes got shiny like she was reliving the past again. Damn those wolves! Who had sex with a woman and didn’t make sure she came? What’s the point?

  “No,” she said finally. “I haven’t…come in a long time, at least not with anyone but myself. I think I’m broken.”

  That was the most awful thing he’d ever heard anyone say. Especially someone as sweet and wonderful as their mate.

  Cairo drew her attention back to him and when he had her gaze he said, “You’re not broken, love. I’ll prove it.”