by Amy Star
Matthew knew when Nadine had reached her climax; he felt the tension ripple through her body, heard the muffled sound of her cries as wave after wave of pleasure worked through her. He pulled out of her mouth, stroking himself slowly as he watched her give into the sensations, head thrown back, breasts shaking and body trembling at the force of the pleasure that Dylan gave her. He watched as Dylan finished her off, riding through her orgasm, continuing his attentions on her all too willing body until her climax crested and then began to subside. Matthew stopped his hand, breathing in through gritted teeth as he struggled to hold back his own impending orgasm. Dylan pulled back and looked up at him with a grin, licking his lips clean of the last of Nadine’s fluids, and then Matthew watched, torn between envy and desire, as Dylan slithered up along Nadine’s body to kiss her hungrily.
“Time to switch, I think,” Matthew said, trembling from the need to hold back. He knew that Dylan must be in even worse shape than he was, struggling to keep the animal consciousness at bay, to keep himself from covering Nadine’s body and claiming her for himself.
Dylan nodded, looking almost drunk with desire and climbed unsteadily off of the bed. Matthew kissed Nadine briefly on the lips, tasting the faintest traces of her fluids on her tongue, and then moved down over her body slowly, lingering at her breasts while he had the freedom to take as long as he wanted. The heavy, heady scent of their mutual arousal was thick in the air as Matthew worked his way down, kissing, nibbling, and nuzzling Nadine’s warm, fragrant skin.
He moved between her legs, pressing kisses along her inner thigh, and when Matthew felt the weight on the bed shifting he knew that Dylan had rejoined them. He buried his face against Nadine’s soaking wet folds, lapping at the fluids along her inner labia. He devoured her slowly, savoring every gasp, shiver, shudder and moan, sucking and licking more and more hungrily as he sensed her arousal increasing.
Matthew lost himself in Nadine’s body, focusing completely on her reactions, forgetting everything but the desire to bring her pleasure. He teased her with the tip of his tongue, bringing it up to her pleasure center and then sliding back down to her inner labia, over and over again as her hips twisted and bucked underneath him. The honey-lemon-lavender taste of her fluids coated his tongue, and Matthew felt the throbbing ache of his cock as almost an afterthought, something in the back of his mind as he worshiped her body with his mouth.
Everything became a blur of action and reaction as Matthew brought Nadine to another fast, hard orgasm, swallowing down the gush of her fluids and continuing his attentions until he felt her body relax all at once. He pulled back, so aroused he could barely think, his nerves on fire with the need for more, and somehow they were moving together, changing places, Nadine switching from one partner to another without even seeming to care about which of them she was kissing, whose cock she was stroking, who was giving her pleasure. It was more intense than anything Matthew had ever experienced, the tidal flow between the three of them, and he moved from one part of Nadine’s body to another, touching and tasting her everywhere, kneading sore muscles, teasing every sensitive spot on her body he could find. He cradled her in his arms as Dylan moved down between her legs, bringing her ankles up to rest on his shoulders, and guided Nadine’s hand to his cock while he watched his best friend thrusting into the woman he wanted so badly.
Matthew had no idea, later, how long they attacked each other over and over again; one moment Nadine’s lips wrapped around his cock, her tongue swirling around the head, and the next moment he was behind her, holding onto her hips as he thrust into her from behind, watching her take Dylan’s cock into her mouth, and then another time he was kneeling on the bed, holding her in his arms as she rode him, and then he was watching her and Dylan together again. Waves of pleasure ebbed and flowed through his body until Matthew lost all track of how many times he came, buried deep inside of Nadine, or groaning as he watched his own thick, white fluid gush onto part of her body.
Eventually, they were all utterly spent, panting and gasping for breath, their bodies tangled together on the bed as they struggled to recover from the acrobatics of their mating. Matthew stared up at the ceiling, caught between shock and satisfaction, smiling to himself as he realized that at that moment, more than ever before in the short time they’d known her, Nadine well and truly belonged to both him and Dylan. He turned his head and saw Dylan’s arm draped over Nadine’s chest, and saw his own arm sprawled over Nadine’s legs, and let himself slip into a reverie as his heart rate gradually slowed. He felt as if someone had replaced the blood in his veins with warm honey, thick and sweet, as if he had never been quite as thoroughly satisfied in his entire life, or quite so completely relaxed.
“Okay,” Nadine said, her voice still slightly breathless.
Matthew opened his eyes without being entirely sure of when he had closed them and turned to look at her. She had the same almost drugged-looking grin on her face that he was sure he wore, her cheeks still slightly flushed, her eyes hazy with pleasure and satisfaction.
“If this is what it’s going to be like for you two to share me, I think I’m kind of okay with that.”
Dylan laughed and Matthew snorted, shaking his head in slight disbelief.
“If we do this every night none of us is going to be worth a damn during the day,” Dylan said.
“We’ll switch off,” Matthew suggested, turning fully onto his side and looking up at the two members of what he now considered his new sleuth. “Save times like this for really, really good nights—celebrations and shit.”
“Wasn’t there a thing earlier about me having a couple of nights a week to myself?” Nadine smiled lazily. “Because I think I came like…ten times in all this, and that’s definitely not something I’m up for every night of the week.”
Matthew laughed, burying his face against Nadine’s leg.
“Yes,” Dylan said. “We can give you a couple of nights a week to yourself to recover.”
“Do you two have refractory periods at all? I feel like you don’t.” Matthew shook his head, grinning.
“Maybe a couple of minutes,” he said with a shrug. “We’ll keep in mind that you’re a frail creature.”
“Hey!” Nadine aimed a weak swat at his leg and Matthew chuckled.
“You’ve got to be feeling pretty sore,” Dylan pointed out. “Even if you did spend most of the last…four hours being soaking wet.”
“Four hours?” Matthew looked at the alarm clock in the room and shook his head in disbelief. “Christ.”
“I really want a shower,” Nadine said musingly, “but I kind of feel like I don’t actually have any bones in my body anymore.”
“We can carry you, and hold you up,” Dylan suggested. “And then after that we’ll order some room service and then we’ll all sleep.”
“If we don’t fall asleep in the shower,” Matthew said. He felt deliciously exhausted, every ounce of stress he had ever felt in his life miraculously gone. “And tomorrow—or later today—we’ll deal with all the other bullshit. None of it for the rest of the night.”
“Deal,” Nadine said, raising a hand in approval. “Now, someone needs to help me get up and get clean.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dylan walked slowly from one end of the living room to the other, looking at the carpeted floor underneath his bare feet. Nadine and Matthew were still asleep in one of the bedrooms; but the problems in front of them had pulled Dylan out of his dreams an hour before, intent on figuring out the best possible course of action. The problem with the lions—the ones that remained—wasn’t going to go away. The longer they had to wait to collect the money that Alex had hidden, for one of them to rise to the top of the ranks under the were-panther Alex had been working with, the more desperate they would become. Eventually, Dylan knew, they would track himself, Matthew, and Nadine to the hotel; it was inevitable.
Dylan paused in his pacing, crossing his arms over his chest. Instinct told him that the quickest, most efficient w
ay to tackle the problem would be to find the place where the lions met up with each other and take them out all at once. If they could do that successfully, there wouldn’t even be a question of the lions continuing to come after them. Of course, the panther in charge of them would still want his money—but he’d have to find it on his own, Dylan thought. He didn’t have any real illusions that whoever Alex had stolen from, the man would continue the search for his money long after his employees had been taken out; he might even send other shifters after the three of them in the hopes of gleaning some information.
Dylan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, beginning to pace once more. If they could take out the big man in charge of the whole operation, that would solve the problem at its root; but that would open up far more problems for the three of them. When word got out that Dylan and Matthew—along with a one-natured human—had taken out a prominent member of the underground, Dylan was fairly certain they’d be driven out of the area, either by a lack of clientele or actual hostilities. It wouldn’t even matter if their actions were essentially self-defense; they would have disturbed the power structure in the area. They would create a vacuum—even if it were a small one—and whoever rose to take the place of the man they took out would be ruthless. Whether it was a bear, a lion, a panther or a wolf, the first thing the new man or woman in charge would want to do would be to take out Dylan and Matthew.
Dylan heard a soft sound of movement and stopped in his steps, listening more intently. The noise came from the bedroom. After a moment, he identified the source: it was Nadine, climbing out of the bed, walking across the room. He smiled to himself and looked up to see her quietly stepping through the door. Nadine was just as naked as she had been when they finally fell asleep together.
“Careful,” Dylan said, pitching his voice low. “Looking like that it wouldn’t take much at all to convince me to spend the rest of the day making you come over and over again.”
Nadine rolled her eyes and looked around for just a moment. She walked to one of the couches in the living room of the suite and plucked a soft, plush throw off of the back of it, draping it around her shoulders to cover herself.
Dylan tsked, shaking his head. “Such a shame to cover up.”
“You’re the one who just basically told me I was a walking temptation,” Nadine said, raising an eyebrow at him. She yawned, padding around the couch and then sitting down, looking up at him intently for a few moments. “What drove you out of bed so early?”
“Thinking about the situation we’re in,” Dylan said. He scrubbed at his face. “It’s going to be complicated, how we deal with it.”
“Maybe I can help you sort through it?” Nadine shifted on the couch, pulling her feet up under her, adjusting the blanket until she was comfortable. “Sometimes talking through something helps.”
“If you’re awake anyway,” Dylan said, smiling slightly. “Might as well accept the outside input.”
“Matthew will probably be up in a little while too,” Nadine said. Dylan nodded. “So go ahead and tell me what you’re thinking.”
Dylan took a deep breath and sat down on the coffee table, a few feet away from the woman he knew he was coming to actually love. That adds another layer of complications to this, he thought wryly. The fact that he had taken Nadine as his mate—really and truly taken her—the night before, and that he and Matthew had shared in that moment, both of them claiming Nadine in ways she couldn’t even understand yet, meant the tenuous bond between the three of them was much stronger than it had been before. Get through this and then explain it to her, he told himself mentally.
“There are a couple of options on the table,” Dylan said slowly. “The first one—the obvious one—is to find the lions’ den and take them all out.”
Nadine nodded. “But you don’t think that will finish the business.”
Dylan shook his head. “If they’re working for someone else, whoever it is they’re working for is probably going to keep going with it until either he dies or he gets his money back.”
Dylan cursed Alex mentally for being so thoroughly crooked that he’d gained himself no fewer than three major enemies, meaning that the people who took him out would become targets themselves. “So if we take out the lions, then we have someone else to contend with.”
“So the second option would be finding this one guy and then taking him out, I guess?” Nadine raised an eyebrow.
Dylan nodded. “That’s a possibility, but it’s got its drawbacks too,” he said. “If we take him out, we create a power vacuum. C seemed to think the guy was a pretty big deal—and I’m inclined to believe him on that. So we get rid of him, and whoever takes his place in the underground is going to want whatever money is hanging around unclaimed. They’re also going to want to make a statement that they’re a bigger deal than the panther we killed—so then they’ll come after us, probably.”
Nadine pressed her lips together, and Dylan could see the thoughts working away in her mind, flitting through her big, dark eyes.
“What if we find out where the money is?” Nadine’s eyes regained focus and she met his gaze. “I mean—forgive me if that’s a little too obvious. But if we found out where the money is, and gave it to the…panther…” She shook her head, smiling slightly, and Dylan knew that she still wasn’t quite used to the fact of shifters existing—even if she had accepted his and Matthew’s existence.
“We’d still have the lions after us,” Dylan said slowly. “In fact, they’d probably be more pissed than ever, since we would have kicked the rug out from under them.”
Nadine shrugged. “But we wouldn’t have the guy in charge of them after us too,” Nadine pointed out. “You’re the one that said actually taking the lions out wouldn’t be impossible—kind of tricky, and I trust you to know that—but on its own it’s not impossible for you and Matthew.”
“You’d be involved, too,” Dylan countered. “I don’t want to risk you, but you’d have to be with us. You’d see us in our bear forms, and the lions probably in their animal forms. Can you handle a situation like that? Because we can’t just leave you somewhere.”
Nadine swallowed, and Dylan caught the hint of fear pheromones, the uncertainty in her posture, for just a moment.
“Well,” Nadine said slowly, “if I’m going to join you and Matthew in being a mercenary, then I have to start somewhere, right?”
Dylan smiled slowly. “You want to be thrown into the deep end of the pool right away?”
Nadine shrugged. “You can’t just leave me somewhere—you said so yourself,” Nadine said.
Dylan smiled wryly. “I did say that,” he admitted.
He sighed. It was a good way of approaching the situation; it would cover the problems each of the two options he’d come up with included. He didn’t know if the panther would come after them for taking the lions out, but if he was as big a man in the underground as C had suggested, then Dylan didn’t think he would miss the remaining lions.
“I don’t want to put you in danger,” Dylan said after a moment’s thought.
“You kind of can’t avoid it,” Nadine said. “I mean, if there’s nowhere really safe for me to stay away from the fight, then I’ll have to be there. Just—I guess—I should probably be as heavily armed as possible.”
Dylan chuckled. “No guns,” he said, shaking his head. “Someone who dies of a knifing, or being mauled by wild animals, doesn’t get investigated as much if someone stumbles across their body. Knives are harder to trace—there are so many of them.” He licked his lips and considered. “Someone gets shot, and if the police ever do get notice of the body somewhere, they trace the bullet…and the gun it came from.”
“I have a lot to learn about being in the shifter world,” Nadine said with a sigh. “And about being a mercenary.”
“Do you really want to do that?” Dylan held Nadine’s gaze. “You don’t have to be in this life to be with us.”
“Your work is dangerous,” Nadine said matter-o
f-factly. “I can’t really see myself driving to and from an office job on a nine-to-five schedule with the two of you working weird hours, especially since I’m the weak link.”
“Weak link?” Dylan frowned.
“I’m the non-shifter,” Nadine pointed out. “Anyone who wanted to get to you or Matthew would come after me. That much is obvious—hell it’s how we ended up getting together in the first place, isn’t it?”
Dylan smiled ruefully. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re throwing your whole life away,” he said. “I know how that feels.”
“Well, I could be your data analyst,” Nadine said with a shrug. “The important thing is that I can defend myself, right?” Dylan considered that for a moment before nodding. “So you and Matt teach me how to do better at that, and give me a cut of what you make.”
“Oh no,” Dylan said, smiling slowly. “Now you’re going to negotiate.”
“Hey! I think that’s fair,” Nadine countered. “You’re splitting everything fifty-fifty now, right?” Dylan nodded. “So now we split it in thirds.”
“What would be the point in that?”
Dylan looked up at the sound of Matthew’s voice. The other were-bear came into the room, and Dylan noticed that Matthew had taken a moment to pull on a pair of pajama bottoms.
“I mean, our money is your money anyway, if you’re our mate.”
“I should have money of my own,” Nadine said firmly. “I want money of my own, and I’ve always earned money of my own. If I start working with you guys, I would want to earn my own pay.”
“Is it settled then?” Matthew looked at Dylan. “You’re going to work with us?”
“That’s what we’ve been debating,” Dylan explained. “Nadine came up with what’s probably the best way to tackle the lion situation.” He outlined Nadine’s idea to his best friend, and Matthew nodded slowly.
