Marking Melody (3 page)

“All my stuff is in storage in Bent Creek, where I’m from.  I was lucky that the females never saw my camera as a threat and let me keep it.”

She told them that she kept her bag packed in the closet of the room where she was locked in each night, and when she finally saw an opportunity to leave while everyone was distracted, she ran as fast and as far as she could.

Micah put a hand on her shoulder.  “It freaks me out that you were running in your shifted form for so long.  You could have been trapped or killed or hit by a car.”

Tristan nodded.  “I’m glad you made it safely.”

“You guys protected me from that bear who kicked me.  It was the last thing I remember before I passed out.  Did I say thank you?”

Tristan nodded.  “You did.  I wish we could have stopped him from hurting you.”

Micah looked at his watch and said, “We should get on the road.  We’ve still got a few hours before we reach King.”

She agreed to call her friend in the truck, and then stopped Micah as he stood.  “Wait.  Before we get back in the truck, I wanted to ask you both about…us.”

Tristan’s heart actually jumped into his throat.  He and Micah both turned to face her at the same time.

She opened her mouth and then closed it, her brows furrowing.

Micah took her hand and said, “This is new to us, too, Melody.  Before we saw you, we didn’t believe that male and female lions could even be mates, because it’s never happened before.”

Tristan nodded and took her hand, feeling his cat prance in his mind at the jolt of electricity that raced through him whenever he touched her.

“I like when you touch me,” she said softly, and then she blushed scarlet and laughed.  “Wow, my mouth needs a time delay.”

He and Micah laughed.  Tristan brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed the top.  “We want you to be our mate, Melody.  Micah and I want to share you, marry you, make a family and a home with you.  You’ve been through a lot recently, and we don’t want to rush you into anything, so we’ll take our time.  And you’re right, that we haven’t known each other for very long, but I can’t deny what I feel when I look at you and touch you.  I never dreamed I would find my mate with a lioness or share her with my brother, but there is no doubt in my mind that you’re mine and I’m yours.”

Micah nodded.  “I feel the same way, Melody.  And whatever happens in King or Ashland, the only thing that really matters to us is that we’re your mates and we want you to be safe and happy.”  Micah told her about the males in the pride who had found shared mates, and their belief that all males were meant to share a female.

She squeezed their hands.  “It never even occurred to me that it might be strange to be mated to both of you, but it just feels so right.”

Tristan agreed.  Every moment since they had freed her from the storage room felt right.

Micah said, “We’ll take things slowly and get to know each other.”

“Will we tell people we’re mates?”

“It would be our honor,” Tristan said and Micah echoed the sentiment.

They stood, tossed their trash, and got into the truck.  When Tristan reached for the gearshift, Melody said, “Wait!”

“What’s wrong?” Micah asked.

“Nothing, I just forgot to kiss you guys.”  She smiled broadly and reached for Micah.  She kissed him and then turned to Tristan, cupped his face, and kissed him.  It was a simple kiss, even better than the first one they had shared.  And that made sense, because the woman kissing him was his mate.

Chapter 3

Melody kissed Tristan and Micah, grinning at their sweet, silly faces as they looked both addled and turned on.  As they left the rest area, she dug her phone out of her pack.  It had been a year, but she still remembered Scarlett’s number and dialed it.

While the phone rang, she gave Micah her camera again so he could look at the pictures.  She was glad that the females hadn’t destroyed her camera.

“Hello?” Scarlett answered on the third ring.

Just the sound of her voice made tears well up in Melody’s eyes.  She could hardly speak, but she managed to squeak out, “It’s me.”

There was a long pause and then Scarlett shouted, “Me?!  Are you fucking kidding me?  Where the hell have you been?  Do you know how long I’ve been worrying about you?”  She inhaled a deep breath.  “Wait, are you okay?”

Melody laughed and wiped a few tears from her cheeks.  “Yeah, I am now.”

“Good.  Then I’m going to kick your ass up and down the state.”

“I’m not in Ohio.  I’m on my way to my uncles’ house in Pennsylvania.”

She gave her best friend a quick overview of the past year of her life, from the females drugging her to her escape to meeting her mates.

Scarlett, who was a chatterbox of the highest order, went quiet again.  When she spoke after a long moment, her voice was filled with anger.  “Your own people tied you up after you helped them?  What the hell?”

Melody appreciated her friend’s fierceness.  She could picture her, eyes flashing to the amber color of her wolf and her lips peeled back in an angry snarl.  “Scarlett, calm down.  I’m okay now.  You remember what my dad told us about how the female lions usually act?  How I’m unique because I was never around them?”

“Yeah.”  Some of the anger was leaking away from Scarlett’s voice.

“The lions in Ashland assumed I was like the females and were just protecting their family and pride.  I don’t hold it against them.  Besides, if I hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have found my mates, so I’m not upset anymore.”

“You said
mates
.  Do you mean two?”

“Yep.”  Melody peeked at Micah who was looking at pictures on her camera but smiling.

“Lucky bitch,” Scarlett chuckled.  She sighed deeply.  “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Me, too.”

Scarlett asked when Melody would be coming to get her things, and she told her that she didn’t know.  Before she left for King, she had listed her father’s home for sale and packed the majority of her possessions into a storage unit.  It had occurred to her at the time that showing up with a truckload of belongings like she expected to be taken in by her uncles was probably not a good idea, so she’d packed only a few things in her travel bags, expecting to come back to Bent Creek for her stuff.

Her father’s home had sold three months after she left, and because Melody had disappeared, the estate lawyer handled the transaction and put the money from the sale into an account for Melody.

She promised to come to Bent Creek with her mates as soon as possible and ended the call with her best friend.

The remainder of the drive to King passed quickly as she talked with her mates.  Micah and Tristan were the sweetest guys she’d ever met.  Tristan was older than Micah by thirteen months, but they were clearly very close.  They both worked at a home improvement store and lived at the boarding house.  She was worried about them losing their friends in the pride because of her, but they assured her that they felt as if they had gained more in a day with her than they’d had in their whole lives.  Their words humbled her.

King, Pennsylvania, was a small town in the mountains.  The original pride numbered more than one hundred males and females who had lived in King for many years.  For as long as anyone could recall, the females and males had never mated because the females refused.  Typical females were cold towards the males, agreeable to sex but not relationships.  They didn’t care about the children they bore except wanting the young females once they were old enough to shift.

“Dad said he always thought that the females did something to the young females to change them into the cold creatures they become,” she said.

Tristan hummed in his throat.  “No one really knows, but they must do
something
, because I remember when John’s daughter, Jilly, was a baby.  She was the cuddliest little girl and gave kisses to everyone.  She was three or four maybe, when she started to change.  It was gradual, but eventually she pulled away entirely and refused any sort of contact with the males.  Did your dad say why he decided to leave with you when you were a baby?”

“He said that when the doctor handed me to him when I was first born, because the female who bore me didn’t even want to touch me, he looked at the female and asked her how she could be so cruel as to carry a child for nine months but not even care whether I was breathing or not.  She told him that she was a vessel for carrying on the mountain lion race, and eventually I would become a vessel, too.  He said that he knew in that moment that if he stayed in King, he would lose me.  He left with me that night and settled in Bent Creek.  He made friends with the local werewolf alpha, who is Scarlett’s father, Quentin, and he promised that if the females ever showed up looking for me, he would make sure that I was safe if my dad couldn’t.”

Tristan asked, “Would you like to live in Bent Creek?”

She chewed on her bottom lip.  “You think that I won’t be welcome in King or Ashland?”

Micah hedged, “We can live wherever you want.”

“That’s not what I asked,” she said as she folded her arms.

“Don’t be mad, sweetheart,” Micah begged, pulling her arms apart.  “We just don’t know.”

Tristan sighed.  “James left a message that they were sorry for not believing you and that you were welcome to join the pride with us.”

“Really?”

He nodded but she didn’t think he was really happy about it.  She waited for a moment, and he finally glanced at her before sighing deeply.  “He said you were welcome as long as you don’t start acting like a female.”

Ouch.

“So they’ll be watching me.”

Tristan nodded.  His jaw tensed and his knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

“I don’t blame them.”

Tristan snorted and looked at her in disbelief.  “They don’t even know you.  They have no right to judge.”

“You don’t really know me either,” she pointed out.

He snarled.  “I know you’re my mate and that means you’re different than the females.  That should be enough for them.  I won’t have you feeling like your every move is being monitored or your every motive questioned.”

She opened her mouth but closed it when she realized she didn’t know what to say.  The Ashland Pride was welcoming her conditionally and who knew how the King Pride would react.  She leaned her head on Tristan’s shoulder, wrapped her arm around his, and reached for Micah’s hand.  “As long as we’re together, I feel like everything else will work out okay.  No matter where we are, we’re mates and no one can take that from us.”

Micah pressed her hand to his cheek, and although they seemed to relax fractionally, she could tell that they were worried about what would happen when they arrived in King.  Her father had wanted her to go to his brothers, so she was going with the assumption that they would be happy to see her, not try to run her out of town on a rail.

* * * * *

King Automotive was a large brick building with three garage bays and four gas pumps.  According to Tristan, the garage was owned by Brad Fallon, who was a cousin of several of the males in the boarding house, and her uncles worked for him.  Tristan pulled the truck in front of one pump and turned off the engine.  Micah opened his door and held out his hand to her.  Her mouth was dry and her heart was pounding in her chest.  She didn’t know what she’d do if her uncles rejected her because she was a female.  Although she believed that her dad had been in contact with them all these years, she didn’t know for sure.  She hadn’t called them after her dad died because she wanted to tell them in person.

She took Micah’s hand and climbed out of the truck.

“Fill up?” a man’s voice said to her left, and she looked at the man who had spoken.

He froze mid-stride.  “Melody?”

The man had her father’s light brown hair and green eyes.  She didn’t know which uncle he was, but she didn’t care.

He closed the distance to her in two long strides, snatching her up into his arms and crushing her against his chest.  “Shit, baby girl, we thought you were dead.”

Her feet weren’t even on the ground as he hugged her tight.  She could feel him shaking as he tried to rein in his emotions, but she didn’t mind him losing it, because she was losing it, too.  She was crying right along with him, twisting her hands in his work shirt.

“Holden?  What’s going on?” another man said.

Uncle Holden lifted his head from her shoulder and grinned down at her, his green eyes bright with tears.  Not taking his eyes from hers, he said, “It’s Melody, Jax.  Where have you been, baby girl?”

Uncle Jackson, who went by Jax, came up to them, stared at her for a few heartbeats and then hugged her, too, sandwiching her between them until she could hardly breathe.  Seeing her uncles again reminded her how much she missed her dad and how important family was.

“It’s a long story,” she said, looking at her Uncle Jax who was scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Come on into the office,” Jax said.

“Wait, my mates.”  She felt a little weak-kneed when Holden put her down, and Tristan and Micah raced to her side to support her.

Holden and Jax both looked at her with curious, suspicious gazes.  “Mates?”

She chuckled and tears slipped over her cheeks.  “I think you know Micah and Tristan Harrison.  They’re my mates and, well, we have a lot to talk about.”

Jax, the older of the two, narrowed his green eyes at her mates and said, “Thank you for bringing Melody to us.  Let’s go talk.”

Holden said, “Pull your truck around to the side and then come inside.”

Tristan kissed Melody’s cheek and went to move the truck, and she and Micah followed her uncles into the garage.

They walked past a counter with a cash register, a set of double doors that led out to the bays, and several storage rooms with shelves full of automotive supplies.  Holden opened a door and stepped into a small office.  It contained a metal desk with a worn office chair, metal folding chairs, bookshelves stuffed with books on automotive repair, and in the center of the top shelf she saw a picture of her father and her uncles.

She left Micah and moved to the shelf, picking up the wooden frame and brushing away a light layer of dust.

Jax spoke softly, “It was the only thing we kept out for people to see.”

She turned around, unsure of what he meant.  Jax gestured to the folding chairs, and she sat down.  Micah sat in the chair next to her, and Tristan walked into the office, shut the door, and stood behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder.

“Bradley had been talking about leaving with you for several weeks before you were born.  No one had ever left the pride before, not with a baby, so we encouraged him to reconsider.  The night you were born, when we came to the hospital and he told us what your birth mother said, we realized that he was right.  He had to get you away from the females before you were corrupted by whatever it is they do to turn the young girls away from their families and other males,” Jax said.  He sat down heavily in the desk chair and ran his hands through his dark hair.

Holden leaned against the wall behind the desk.  “I was a senior in high school so I couldn’t leave, and Bradley refused to take Jax with him and leave me alone.  He disappeared and promised to stay in touch.  Every few months he would send a package to us.  Sometimes just an envelope, sometimes a box.  The postmarks were never from the same place, and he never said where you two had settled.”

Jax nodded.  “The only things we knew for sure were that he’d made friends with a wolf pack for extra protection and that you were happy and loving, and unlike any other females.  He did the right thing by taking you away.”