Every Night Forever (21 page)

Dante stayed outside with Chief Layton for another hour.  The area was cordoned off and a patrol was going to stay overnight to ensure that none of Grady’s remaining men tried to get in and tamper with whatever was there.

Mason tended Alyssa’s cut, which was already healing.  She wouldn’t have a scar on the outside of her body, but he was sure that they would all have vivid scars in their minds to remind them that they’d almost lost everything.  Not only Alyssa, but potentially each other.

They headed home and stayed up for a long time, discussing their options for the future.  The police had taped off the wooded area to gather evidence, but it wouldn’t stop the gym from opening once the repairs were made.

Alyssa was inconsolable.  She couldn’t hold them tightly enough.  Mason knew then just how deep her love for them was.  She was positively terrified to have faced the possibility of losing one of them.

Adjusting her on his lap as he sat on the couch, he stroked her hair and cuddled her close.  They’d been home almost three hours and she was just starting to calm down.  Dante was on the phone with their parents and Cairo was pacing back and forth in front of the TV.

“Well,” Dante said, slipping his phone back into his pocket.  “They said they’re glad we’re all safe.  Our dads said that closing the gym would be irresponsible, and I agree.  When the cleanup crew is done in a week, we’ll open our doors again and move forward.  Anyone object?”

The three of them shook their heads.  Cairo stopped pacing and said, “I’m going to drop out of the matches for good.  The guy I was supposed to box next week was backed by Grady, who’s out of business now, so he’s going to drop out for sure.  And even if he didn’t, I don’t want to compete against anyone that was working with that scumbag.”

Alyssa spoke with a voice rough from crying.  “Are you sure?”

Cairo moved to the couch and dropped to his knees, taking her hands in his.  Kissing her palms, he said, “I’m positive, baby.  You don’t need to be at those events, and I’ve been thinking about retiring anyway.  I get requests constantly from young boxers asking me to train them.  I’ve got that training room on the second floor and I’m the only one who uses it.  Seems stupid to let it go to waste.”

Dante leaned over the back of the couch.  “We could open the whole second floor up, redo it to make one whole training floor.  We’ll never have fitness classes again, so that’s just empty space.”

Mason smiled at his brothers, always amazed at how they never let anything get them down.  “I’m sure some of the guys you boxed with would come in as trainers, too, Cai.”

“Just no one who worked for Grady.”  Alyssa shivered visibly.

Cairo laughed, and they all joined in.  Dante tipped Alyssa’s chin back and kissed her.  Mason felt her sigh as her body responded to the gentle kiss.  Pushing aside all the bad memories, they concentrated on Alyssa, ending the night on a positive note, one punctuated with cries of pleasure and whispered words of love.

Chapter 15

Alyssa and Dante sat at the dinner table on Tuesday night.  They shared a bowl of ice cream together while Mason and Cairo slept in what she had come to refer to as the “big bed” in the master bedroom.

“Starting tomorrow, I’d like to spend some time alone with you guys, one of you each night.  The gym is supposed to open again on Saturday and I want to do this before we go back to work.”

Dante swallowed a bite of rocky road.  “For marking?”

She nodded, swirling her spoon through the melting chocolate.  “Yeah.  I know it would be fine for all of us to be together, but I’ve always grown up thinking of it as something private.  Plus, I’m pretty sure my wolf is going to want to mark and then make love, and that would make for a really long night.”

He reached for her free hand with his own.  “You don’t have to explain yourself, Lys.  We know that there will be times when we’re alone with you for one reason or another.  We shared our marking ceremony with you.  Whatever you’re comfortable with, whatever makes your wolf happy, is okay with us.”

She licked her top lip and caught a drip of ice cream.  “We could still all sleep together afterwards.”

“You like being caged by your mates?”  He grinned, showing a hidden dimple in his cheek.  He was so handsome, with his raven hair, brown eyes, and full mouth.  The shadow of stubble from the long day accentuated the olive color of his skin, and her wolf murmured in agreement.

“I love it.”

The following night, she took Mason to bed.  She’d never marked anyone before, but she knew the mechanics of it.  He stretched out on his side next to her and she spooned against him, lifting his hair from his neck and holding him tight, with one leg thrown across his waist and her hand flat on his chest.  Her fangs elongated as her wolf came to the forefront of her mind, and she licked a path from the crux of his shoulder to his ear, enjoying how he shivered slightly.  Her lips traced back down the path, stopping halfway before she pressed a chaste kiss to the heated flesh and then sank her fangs deeply into his neck.  He moaned softly, grinding his hard cock against her foot.  When her wolf was satisfied that he was thoroughly marked, she pushed him to his back and straddled his waist, fisting his cock in her hands and shoving her body down on his with a growling shriek of pleasure.  She rode him hard, claiming his body until his cock exploded inside her and his climax triggered her own.

She collapsed on top of him, breathing hard and seeing stars, and he held her close until their bodies came down from the sky and their vision returned.  She felt him reaching, and opened one eye as he fumbled on the nightstand before closing his hand around something and drawing it close.  He flipped open a small box; inside was a diamond ring.

She let out a small gasp and sat up.  He joined her, pulling the ring from the velvet and picking up her left hand.  “You’re already ours, love, and we’re already yours.  We won’t wear wedding rings because it’s not traditional for hyena males, but the females each get a ring from their mates, chosen individually.”  He pushed the platinum ring onto the index finger of her left hand.  It was a butterfly made of diamonds, with marquis-cut stones as the wings and body.

He touched the butterfly.  “When I think about you, I think of how closed off you were when you first came to work for us.  You were like a butterfly trapped in a cocoon, except you didn’t really want to be free.  When you finally did crack that cocoon, when you let us get to know the wonderful woman inside, we saw that the beauty inside of you matched the beauty outside.”  He cleared his throat as he paused, as if the emotion had grown too great for him.  Her own eyes misted as she stared down at the ring and heard the meaning behind it.  “I’m just so damn glad you’re in my life, Lys.  I wasn’t really living until you loved me.”

She hugged him tightly, letting her happy tears fall as he asked her if she would marry him and she promised she would.

The following night, Dante’s marking went much the same way, as she marked his neck and made love to him.  He proposed to her, putting a platinum ring on her finger that had four stones on top.  They were each the same brilliant, round half-carat, representing the four members of their clan.

The third night, as she lay in Cairo’s arms after they made love, he slid a band onto the middle finger of her left hand.  It was a simple solitaire with a large heart-shaped diamond in the center.  “You’re my heart, baby,” was all he said, and that was enough.

She had three rings on her left hand, symbols of the very different men that she was now mated to.  Mason’s sweetly sentimental ring, Dante’s thoughtful ring, and Cairo’s simple ring.  She was all of those things that the rings represented:  their butterfly, their fourth, and their heart.

And they were everything to her.

* * * * *

The next few weeks were a blur.  The gym was reopened after the fire, and the second floor was torn apart and remade into a training floor for boxing.  A crime lab had been able to extract DNA from the cigarette butts belonging to one of the men they had arrested that night.  He gladly rolled over on his friends, and another five men, all part of Grady’s crew, were arrested.  Grady’s gym was shut down, and Alyssa felt like she could breathe easy for the first time since Cairo had been almost-drugged.  It wasn’t that she worried for her own safety so much as she worried about them getting hurt protecting her, or going after Grady’s men and getting in trouble with the human authorities.  With him gone and his people in jail, she locked the bad memories away into a dark corner of her mind and threw away the key.

Cairo contacted five of his friends in the boxing world, three of whom had served with him in the military.  They were eager to train others, and within a month, the gym’s membership had doubled just from the new boxers.  They had lost some clients because of their problems, but had gained so many more.

Alyssa was busier than ever as she dragged Dante’s filing system into the computer-age and finally got him organized.  With the influx of new clients, she began opening the gym with Cairo instead of staying late with Dante, but two of the young men who were training with Cairo couldn’t afford the lessons, so they took shifts each day at the front desk in exchange for their training.  They were sweet and silly, and looked at Cairo like he was their hero.

Alyssa shivered and hugged her arms around herself as Cairo unlocked the front doors and ushered her inside.  They’d come in early so he could put together some new piece of equipment, and rather than drive herself, she’d opted to come in with him.  But what she really wanted to do was snag some precious alone time with him.  Even though she worked the same shift as him, she didn’t see him very much because they worked on different floors.

Stowing her things in Dante’s office, she pulled her panties off and tucked them in her purse, then headed upstairs.  The second floor had at one time contained two separate, large rooms; one for group fitness classes and one for boxing.  Now, two boxing rings sat on opposite sides of the floor, and the center contained all manner of training equipment.

She found Cairo bent over a pile of metal rods, reading an instruction manual.

Licking her lips, she sauntered over to him, loving the way his muscles bunched under his tight shirt.  He could rock cut-offs and look like a god, but he was wearing their new official uniform, a form fitting black top with the gym logo on the front, and black track pants.  She’d gone to bed after making love to the three of them, thinking that she couldn’t wait to get him alone in the morning.

When she first met him, he’d shaved his head.  Now, he was starting to grow it out, and promised he’d let it get long enough on top so she could grip it with her fingers when he was eating her out.  Just thinking about him between her legs, wicked delight in his eyes, made her hot and wet.

She ran her fingertip across his shoulder and hopped up on the edge of the ring, hooking her arms through the bottom rope.  Cairo lifted his eyes from the booklet, his dark gaze finally meeting hers.

She shifted slightly as he stared silently at her.  She would have given anything to know what he was thinking at that moment.  She caught the scent of his arousal just moments before he stood up and tossed the booklet aside.  In two steps he was in front of her, pushing her knees apart and standing between them.

His nose dropped to the crux of her neck, where he inhaled deeply, sending shivers cascading over her skin.  “You smell like trouble, Lys,” he growled, his hands grasping her thighs and pulling her forward until her core rubbed against his erection through his pants.

“We have time to play, Cai.”  She lifted his shirt and slid her hands up his stomach, feeling each muscle flex as she moved higher and higher.

He licked a slow line from her shoulder to her ear, biting gently on the lobe.  “We don’t have time for me to be gentle, baby.  You want me, it’s going to be hard and fast.”  He jerked her legs again so she pressed into him and her breath caught in her throat.

“I always want you,” she purred, desire streaking through her like a forest fire.

He put her arms around his neck and she hugged her legs around his waist as he straightened with her in his arms, stepped around the ring and walked towards the back wall with her.  Their mouths met as he pressed her against the wall in a dark corner, and he wrestled his pants down his thighs as she fed at his mouth.  She felt his cock brush against her wet slit and she groaned, tipping her head back as he pulled her down forcefully onto his cock.  He slammed into her, holding her captive against the wall as theirs bodies met again and again.  She moaned and gripped his shoulders, hugging him tightly with her legs, as he pounded into her.  Each thrust drove him deeper, faster into her, as heat pooled in her belly.