Not Bad for an Amateur (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (8 page)

Lily sat back and stared at the monitor. Her life was now as strange as could be. A week ago she could have said the same exact thing. After all what could be stranger than changing into a wolf once a month? Now she knew better than to tempt fate by asking that question out loud it just got stranger.

It was after ten o’clock by the time Lily had extracted and cross-referenced the data from the phone, and the shiny new computer system was now working as it should be. Since there was no reason to believe that her mother would get back with her yet tonight, Lily shut off the monitor and decided to forage for something to eat and drink.

The kitchen was a beautiful mixture of old-time cabinets and new counters and appliances. Lily loved to cook but rarely had any reason to make elaborate meals. This kitchen could inspire a cook of any level. She had her head in the deep refrigerator when she felt someone behind her. She backed out with her hands filled with sandwich material. She knew the foot was behind her when she stepped on it and enjoyed listening to one of the twins say, “Hey, be careful.” When she deposited the meat and cheese on the counter, she turned and found Jim watching her, standing on one foot and rubbing his abused toes.

She was not a big fan of feet. Her own were short and wide with boxy toes. His foot was beautifully sculpted if you could say that about the bones and ankle that he was rubbing. Like the rest of him, his feet were huge, at least half as long as her forearm and fingers. She smirked. “I am so sorry that your big foot was behind me and got hurt. Maybe you will think about what happens when you sneak up behind someone next time.”

“You are a mean woman, do you know that? That’s twice now that you have tried to lame me. I was merely looking for food and you stomped my poor foot like you would stomp on a bug. I will retaliate you know.” Jim leaned down as if he would hug her and snatched the sandwich that she just put together for herself. “Thank you.”

Lily raised her eyebrow at him when he bit into the sandwich. It disappointed her when he didn’t complain about the lack of condiments. She hated the things and never used them in anything but salads. Since her first transformation into a wolf, she had to force-feed herself green vegetables now. Lily refused to give him the satisfaction of listening to her complain about the lost food. She fixed another sandwich and slapped his big hand when he tried to reach around her to snag it. “One is forgiven, two would result in more than a stepped-on toe.”

Joel stomped into the room and began slamming things around. Lily picked up her sandwich and went around to the other side of the counter so she was out of his line of fire. When she looked at Jim, he just shrugged. “Hello, Joel, what has you so upset?”

“You, have some ’splaining to do, Lily.” Joel stomped over to the counter and slapped a thick handful of ham on two pieces of bread and a slice of cheddar went into his mouth. He had the sandwich in hand when he went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. He took the beer and placed it in the crook of his arm and pulled her behind him, walking toward the study. When they entered the room with Jim barely making it inside before the door was slammed shut, Joel pointed to the old-fashioned fainting couch, and Lily sat.

“Imagine my surprise when the two men claimed that your father knows them and we should contact him.”

Lily had nothing to hide, yet she was reluctant to share her life story with these men. It appeared that they would have the information or they looked ready to get the information in other ways. Joel had been so nice and a little boyish before now. Now he looked ready to chew glass as he bit off large bites of the thick sandwich waiting for her to begin. She forgot her own sandwich and began to talk.

“Just over two years ago, I was feeling very listless and I was cold all of the time. I thought I had the flu or something, so I went to the doctor and had blood tests and a physical. He diagnosed a severe case of anemia and had me go to the hospital to have two pints of blood through an IV. Three days later my blood tests came back perfect, no more anemia, no more problems with weariness. I was in perfect health. Three months later I found myself lying on my balcony naked with fur in my teeth.” Lily had to swallow the bile in her throat before she could continue.

“I was beside myself with worry, after it happened again I knew that somehow I must have caught what the myths call a lupine disease. The romance and fairy-tale books claim that you must be bitten or scratched by a werewolf during a full moon to become one.” She looked at each brother to make certain she had the historical rumors correct. “I think that the blood I received when I got the transfusion was were blood. I cannot think of any other way it could have happened.” Lily tried to picture the next words in her mind before she spoke. “Long story short, I have had to feel my way through this nightmare for two long years, The neighbors have fifty posters hanging all over the place asking for information about their cats and missing dogs. I never thought that one species would eat another of its kind.

“Anyway, I started to try to find others like me, and that has been an exercise in futility. I stopped at a biker bar in the outskirts of Chicago. Do you know that the biker women are mean? They let me know that if I didn’t get out of the parking lot they planned to hurt me. I am still not sure they were weres. For all I know they might just be cranky and possessive of the men.”

Lily was no longer paying attention to the men. She was thinking about staying in that cave for three days frightened and hungry. “I tried again the day I drove in town and stopped at a small motel with isolated cabins. The innkeeper was tall and handsome and smelled wonderful. I drove around the area and even researched possible sites for packs of wolves to live or hunt.” Lily laughed halfheartedly. “Instead of finding other weres, I found myself hiding in a cave of rocks for three days and when I finally looked out the wolves were changing into men and I wanted to cry.” Lily looked at Jim. “I watched you change, I was so afraid. When I finally got back to the cabins I had to get out of there, you telling me that if you had caught me then all of you would have raped me scared me worse. I left swearing that I was not coming back.”

“Wait, wait just a minute here, lady, I was joking about the other guys having you. I thought you knew that. If I had you, there is no way I would share my mate with any other man except Joel here, and when I mate with you he will, too. You need to understand that we have ways to know where and with who we belong, baby. Your scent told me two things right away, one was that you were coming into heat, and the other, the other thing is that your scent clouded my mind, made my heart thump. You smell like home. That is how weres find their true mates. I don’t know how to explain it. Joel? Tell her.” Jim had gotten as close to pleading his case as he knew how. How do you explain that innate scent that only she carried so that all he could think of was her?

Joel came and crouched down in front of Lily. He tried to form the words that needed to be said and hoped he said them right. Reaching out, he took one of her hands and let his thumb rub lightly over the knuckles. “I asked my father how he knew that Mom was the mate for him, after all many of us never find a mate to love, let alone one that is a bonded mate. He told me to be careful where I stuck my penis and make damn sure that if I didn’t use a condom then I better be prepared to marry the woman, bond or not.

“Dad told me that the first time he scented our mother, he was out hunting with the pack. They had visitors at the house, but he had not gone home before going out for a long run to check the northern boundaries and caught the scent of a female that he didn’t know. The party that had come to visit was from the Nicollet pack, and was made up of seven weres. Three of them were unmated females, one mated female, and two Alpha males. It seemed they had stopped the vehicle to take a quick run before coming here to the compound.

“By the time Dad got home, he was fur brained with her scent. When he walked into the house and took a shower, the scent was still with him. He came into the room where she stood and told me that he just knew she was the one. Dad told me that mom kept staring at him with her nostrils flared, and she smiled at him. They were formally mated on the full moon less than a week later.

“Mom always said she knew him the minute she walked into the house. His scent was like home to her. Our mother blushed when she said that. She bonded with him as soon as we kids were all grown. She knew that he was dying, yet she said she loved him from the day they met and she would love him into death. She would have bonded with him the day they mated, but they planned to have children and if something happened to one of them the kids would need guidance and at least one parent until we were old enough to take care of themselves.

“That is how I know and Jim knows that you are our mate. We will not force you, because if you really have no feeling or attraction to us then you will be free to go anywhere you want to go. We have decided to mate with one female to keep the peace of the pack. At least two times different factions have tried to pit us against each other. The last fight was exactly that, the last fight. Our children will have two fathers and one mother. No fighting, no arguing about who should lead the pack. If we are blessed with twins, then we will be a perfect example to our children.”

Joel leaned in and kissed Lily on the lips then pulled back. “It helps that I am so fur brained that I can hardly think anytime you are near. You are beautiful and courageous and everything I could ask for in the woman I love.”

Jim cuddled up to her side. “Everything he said and more, I had the privilege to meet you before Joel did, so I can claim to be struck by love and lust at first sight. Not to mention I am as fur brained as Joel is, hell, Lily, I took the bedding off the bed you slept in, and Joel and I have been keeping them just to keep your scent in the rooms when we sleep at night. It helps to dream of you, knowing that you are out there somewhere. And if we were patient enough, you would come back. And here you are.”

“That’s the reason? And here I thought I was nuts not to go with the other pack in Wisconsin. I didn’t go with them because they, well, they smelled good, but not like home. I though Jim smelled divine when I met him, even when I was out of range I could still smell him.”

She put the sandwich down next to her, no longer hungry. “Early last month I was in northern Wisconsin, trying to make contact with weres again. I keep hoping I will find a female that didn’t want to kill me on sight. I was running through the woods and came up on a human male with a rifle shooting at a small pack of wolves.” Lily told them the rest of the story and received sharp, admiring looks from both men. “I recognized the forest ranger as one of the men you guys captured today.”

Lily finished her story, and the twins added what they read from her report. “I think that Demetrious works for Fensile or someone as bad as they are. The last message on the ranger’s phone is very graphic, and I recognized his voice telling the men that I shouldn’t be very hard to tag.”

Joel admired the feisty shewolf. She admitted to being afraid, but she never gave into that fear. The other were pack smelled okay, but not like home. She loved the scent of Jim when she first met him. She was home whether she realized it or not, and he was going to reinforce that in just a few minutes.

“From everything you have told us, I have to say you have taken on the role of shifter quite well. Not bad for an amateur, and it makes me admire you that much more. Beauty and brains combined with that sexy little body of yours makes it hard to concentrate whenever I am around you,” Joel told her.

Lily started talking again, and Joel exchanged looks with his twin. Jim had picked up on Lily’s confession, too. She was theirs, no question, and they would do what needed to be done to keep and protect her.

“When I heard the voice mail, I sent a message to my parents. Jackson had a very important position before he retired and set up protocols years and years ago. He loves me and there is no way that he would send those men to hurt me. You have read the reports, the government knows about shifters, or at least they have reports of firsthand accounts from viable witnesses. Maybe they tracked down the people that received the blood and found out I was one of them. I did call Jackson in when I found the information. And I broke a few federal laws to get it. Even if they were thieving from other research facilities, including the federal government.”

Lily stood up and stretched her back. “I am too tired to worry about it tonight, it is after midnight and all I want to do is take a shower and go to sleep. I feel itchy and like my skin is too tight. I hope a shower will relax me enough to sleep.

“I should get a reply from my parents in the morning, so there is nothing else to do but wait for now. This has been one of those days that make you wonder why you got out of bed.”

She hoped they would take the decision from her hands whether to continue exploring this mating thing. Lily had been lonely for so long with no one to call her own and now she was faced with the prospect for not just one but two amazing men that made her feel like knocking them down and claiming them for her own. Her brain was in sync with her heart about that. Could she be enough for them? She stopped rationalizing the reason for coming here. She knew that a phone call and an e-mail would have informed them of the threats to their pack members.

No, on the drive over here, all she could think about was the wide shoulders and shaggy brown hair topping the most masculine man she had ever encountered. Lily could now admit to herself that she came to take her chances with Jim. And since Joel was also as sexy and determined that she was their mate, there was no question whether she was just as attracted to him as his brother. How to tell them of her decision was the dilemma.
Oh, guys? I want to wallow around on that big bed in there with you both naked and fuck you both until none of us can move for a week
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