The Dom Claims His Cougar [Unchained Love 7] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (5 page)

Noah placed his finger on the little sticking-out wedge of land Verity had remembered. “There. We could build our house there.”

Larry frowned. “That’s movie studio land. You’ll need to talk to Nicholas and Curtis about using it. They may already have plans for it. I know they were very keen to get every inch of space they could have, although fronting the road on two sides as it does, it may not be valuable to them.”

“Are they here today?” asked Ezra.

Larry picked up his phone. “Lucy, are Nicholas and Curtis here today?”

“Autumn is. I’ll check with her,” replied Lucy, his personal assistant.

Nicholas was another werewolf. Autumn was a half-blood panther from Verity’s pack and Curtis was a human. The three of them were mated, too, disproving the old theory that cats and dogs couldn’t get along peacefully together.

“They were in the barn. They’ll be with you in five,” came Lucy’s voice through the phone.

“Thanks.”

Almost before she’d finished speaking there was a knock on the door and the men were standing in the doorway. Nicholas’s curly brown hair was a tangled mess and Curtis’s bright-blue eyes sparkled with mischief as he looked over Nicholas’s shoulder.

“Hi, Larry, you wanted us?”

“Come in, sit down. Noah and Ezra want you actually.”

Nicholas raised an eyebrow at them and Verity smiled. These two men had together made a success of their small boutique movie studio then sold the land to a developer and transported everything here, where they were rebuilding, so Autumn could be kept safe.

“You know that I work in public relations and marketing?” asked Ezra.

Both men nodded.

“Well, as part of that I entertain a lot. Mostly up until now it’s been at restaurants, movie premieres, art galleries, and so on, but once we’re mated Verity wants to hold parties for me in our own home,” said Ezra.

“But I thought you were going to live in the main house with us,” said Curtis.

“Yeah, well, that’s what we thought, too, but Verity changed our minds. So we need a house.” Noah put his finger on the little wedge of land. “See here? This is your land. We asked Larry if we could build our house inside Carnal Connections, but he was concerned about security issues. But if you let us use this piece of property here, it would be the perfect size for the house we want to build.”

Verity sat back and watched as the men measured and calculated and commented about the land.

Nicholas and Curtis had drawn up really detailed plans of where their scenery sets would go for them to get the best range of photographic shots. Movies were incredibly deceptive, she’d learned. What the viewer thought was endless grass was often just a cleverly painted backdrop, and Raegan, the studio’s scene painter, was extremely good at that kind of work.

“I’ll just go and get the plans. I think that’ll be okay, but I need to be sure,” Curtis said.

“I’m almost positive we didn’t want to start our filming that close to the main road as it’d be too likely a car or something would go past in the middle of a scene and we’d end up having to reshoot all the time,” added Nicholas. “Mostly we have our buildings there. The main studio is here, and the equipment barn is here,” he said, pointing to places on the map between the main road and the access road. Both of them were near the wedge of space, but neither was on that little sticking-out piece of land Verity was beginning to think of as hers.

Verity was interested to look at their maps when Curtis brought them back. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but there was a lot more involved in filming a movie, or even an advertisement, than actors, a screenplay, and pointing and shooting. Every nanosecond of film had to capture just exactly what the moviemaker needed to show the audience and nothing else. Anyone could tell that a car racing past on a road in the middle of cowboy story likely wasn’t going to be good, but it was so much more than that. Nicholas and Curtis must have spent days, even weeks, planning the layout for their buildings to give them the maximum amount of freedom for their filming. Even the parking lot was going to be dirt, not paved, so they could use it if they needed to.

Finally Curtis gave his decision. “All right, I’ll make you a deal. That piece of land wasn’t going to be a whole lot of use to us, but it was ours and it could have been used for an extra parking lot or another storage barn or something. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes we do need to use the inside of a real house for a scene. A regular bathroom or kitchen or something that’s difficult to fake in a studio. You can build your house there, but you’ll let us film in it, at a mutually convenient time of course, whenever we need a private house. How about that for a deal?”

“That sounds fine by me. Ezra? Verity? Do you agree?”

“Absolutely. It’ll be worth it to have our own home,” said Verity.

“I agree. Also, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned it yet, but we’re planning to have an internal courtyard. That might be useful for you in a shoot in winter sometimes,” added Ezra.

“An internal courtyard? How do you mean?” asked Larry.

Verity watched as Noah pulled the paper Nicholas’d been drawing on over to himself and sketched their house, the four modules in a hollow square with a space in the middle.

“If the road goes past here and here, I think these rooms fronting the road will be our entertainment areas, and these two at the back will be our private living quarters. We’re going to put a clear roof over the courtyard to keep the snow out and use it for outdoor entertaining,” explained Noah.

“Oh, I like that idea. A garden should grow really well there protected from the extremes of weather but with sunlight through the roof,” added Larry.

Nicholas nodded. “That would be great for filming when the weather is bad. Shall we shake hands on the deal?”

While Nicholas, Curtis, Ezra, and Noah were all shaking hands, Larry phoned Lucy again. “Can you get JB to join us, please, Lucy?”

“No problems. Do you want coffee as well?”

Coffee sounded good to Verity. She nodded wildly at Larry. He grinned back at her. “Yes, please.”

While they waited for JB to arrive, Verity tried to imagine her home. Having the kitchen and dining room on the side road would be best, with the great room running along the main road. It’d be good to have a second bathroom for guests, too. She didn’t want a thousand people traipsing through her bedroom all the time to use her bathroom. A girl needed some privacy after all. Besides, their bedroom may well have sex toys and BDSM gear in it, and that might shock some of the businesspeople Ezra worked with. So the bedroom definitely needed a lock on the door.

“Our main question is where will the driveway be and where will people park. We don’t want them on our land necessarily,” Curtis said to JB almost as soon as he sat down.

“That should be easy enough. The shape of the block makes a semicircular driveway possible.” JB took the pencil from Noah and sketched a driveway in, shading an area where guests could park. “Here we can plant a garden, which should discourage people from trying to get into your land. There’ll be a fence, but we don’t want a high security fence and most people will avoid trampling through a garden bed when it’s so much easier to walk down the road.”

Nicholas and Curtis left then, and JB talked about the modules. Verity made sure he understood what she needed and he nodded. “Commercial-grade kitchen is no problem. We’ll get a blank module and fit it out ourselves. Your great room will only need to be an empty module as well, and we can use the kitchen space of the regular module as your guest powder room. That’s just a matter of making sure the unit is facing the correct way when it’s set onto its concrete pad. Then we can put a locking door across the hallway here to keep people out of your private area.”

Verity sat back and relaxed. All her worries about a home were now settled. She needed to visit Diane, Carnal Connections’ accountant, and check she had enough money for what she wanted in furnishings, but she was certain there was more than enough for her needs. It wasn’t like she wanted gold-plated bathroom fixtures or anything.

There was still the issue of whether she should mate with the men before the house was ready or whether it would be better to wait until they could move into their own home. Could she be happy living in one room for months on end? Did the men truly understand her needs? They’d responded really fast so far, but were there other gaps that could break them apart later on in their relationship?

But the overwhelming unanswered question, and one which had only just struck her since she’d come into Larry’s office today, was would she ever be safe in this house knowing Sam Brooks hated the panther women and that Drew and Charlie and two other rogue panthers were still out there somewhere? Could she ever enjoy her house knowing a knock on the door or a rock through the window could bring a man determined to spoil her happiness, or something even worse?

It was time for him to leave work, but Noah was still sitting at his office desk. Just this once Noah wished he was a panther or a wolf so he could go for a long run while he thought about what he needed to do next. His heart wanted him to push on with the mating, which was all organized to take place in less than two weeks. But his head was telling him this wasn’t a good plan. Verity had completely derailed all his assumptions when she’d said she wanted to host their business parties.

He sighed. For well over a year now he’d called them “their” parties, but in fact, they’d only ever been Ezra’s parties. He’d gone along to help chat to the guests, maybe do a little networking of his own, and he always helped Ezra host the parties and make everyone feel welcome, but the hard truth was that they were Ezra’s business associates and it was Ezra who needed to hold such gatherings. Yet it’d never occurred to him to add Verity to the mix. Did that make him selfish? Did it show he lacked empathy? It certainly indicated that as a Dom he didn’t understand her nearly as well as he should have. If he’d been a better Dom, a more perceptive Dom, he’d have known she wanted to be involved, that he wasn’t protecting her, he was cramping her, preventing her from exercising her abilities.

Ah, fuck!

Go ahead with the party or postpone it? Now or later?

Noah rolled a pen between his fingers, twisting it and threading it in and out, in and out. Now? Later? Wait? Go boldly ahead?

The only really time-sensitive part of the ceremony he’d planned was the snow. And if he was realistic about it, there’d be snow for months yet. So yes, postpone it. JB had said about two months until the house was up enough to live in. Finishing touches like painting the walls would take another couple weeks, but the sooner the better as far as he was concerned. Walls, a roof, and heating. The rest could wait. They could always eat in the main building and shower in the barn if they had to, if the plumbing and tiling wasn’t complete, after all.

Sighing, Noah phoned Lucy to change the bookings for the barn and the dungeon. There were other people who needed to be informed once he’d set the new date. Well, he only had himself to blame for all the extra work. Verity was a person, and he’d better get himself organized to know her better.

That was when he had a truly brilliant idea. A quick search of the Internet told him it took six to eight weeks.
Perfect!

* * * *

Noah may have thought he was acting perfectly normally, but Ezra knew him so very, very well he could sense the undercurrent of excitement and anticipation. He and Verity were waiting for their Dom’s first instruction as they always did, standing in the middle of the dungeon, naked, hands behind their backs, eyes down, and feet shoulder-width apart. The dungeon was heated, but that didn’t make it particularly warm. The temperature was set low, anticipating people down here would be actively participating in activities, so standing still, naked like this, was fucking cold.

“Verity, come over to the chains.”

Ezra watched out of the corner of his eye as she walked across to where several long chains hung from the ceiling. First, Noah locked the cuffs around her wrists, then he spread her legs as far apart as they could stretch and locked her ankles into the floor manacles.

He’d left her standing with her feet flat on the stone floor, which was unusual. Ezra felt his cock grow harder as he wondered what Noah would do next.

“Come here, Ezra. See how much you can arouse her just with kissing.”

Oh God.
How was he supposed to do that, for fuck’s sake? Ezra approached her as close as he could without touching her body then began by kissing her forehead, her nose, her right earlobe. He would have liked to suck it into his mouth and bite it a tiny bit, but those were not his instructions, unfortunately.

Next he kissed his way along her jawline to the other ear and gently kissed the rim of her ear.

Verity made tiny movements with her head as if to nudge him toward her mouth.
Good.
That meant she was wanting more, so this was a great start.

Taking a deep breath, Ezra kissed his way over her cheekbones and up to her eyelids, pressing soft, sweet kisses all the way.

The chains clanked a little, so Verity must have moved. Ezra could only hope that was a good sign.

Now he traced slightly damp kisses down the midline of her face, nose and chin, skipping over her mouth. This time she definitely tilted her head to try to catch his lips.