Every Night Forever (12 page)

Dante stood up quickly and joined them, and Cairo came over, too, so she was surrounded:  the wall behind her and the three of them in front of her, in a half-circle.  “You know exactly what we’re talking about,” Dante said in a low voice.

“No.  I don’t,” she growled.  The scent of them swirled around her.  There was no way she could choose one of them.  And what if she was wrong?  What if they did only want her for fun and not long-term?  The potential rejection made her head swim and she wanted to scream in frustration, or cry in shame, or run away.  Yes, that made the most sense.  They couldn’t hurt her if she never told them the truth.

She took a step to go around them and they clearly didn’t like that.  “For fuck’s sake,” Cairo growled and hauled her over his shoulder.  She screamed in surprise and cried out, “Put me down, Cairo!”  She did not want to be in this position again!

He stomped out of the bedroom and down the stairs as she bumped uncomfortably across his shoulder.  She struggled and he clamped his hand down harder on her thighs and cracked her over the ass with his other hand.  She had to clench her teeth together to stop from letting him know just how much she wanted him to touch her, even like that.  Again.  “Be still, Lys.”

“Fucking let me go!” she yelled and tried to unseat herself from his shoulder, but he was far too strong for her.

Dante barked, “Lock it up, Mason.  We’re going downstairs.”

He said the word
downstairs
like it didn’t mean downstairs exactly, and she caught sight of Mason going in the opposite direction, and then the sound of a heavy door opening.  She couldn’t see much past the veil of her damp hair and being upside down was making her dizzy.  Steel steps covered in shadows were the only things she could really see except Cairo’s tantalizing denim-covered ass.

She counted twenty-three steps and the echoing sound of his heavy boots mixed with Dante’s and then Mason’s, after a scraping sound and the clank of what she assumed was the heavy door slamming shut.  A whirling sound like gears turning filled the space.  Were they locked in down here?

Her heart rate spiked.  Fear.  Excitement.  Shame.  She could smell their desire for her like a cloud of lust.  They didn’t want her for her; they wanted her for what lay between her legs.  They were just like every other man she’d ever been with.  They’d get what they wanted and then she’d be left in the dust, picking up her fragile ego and the shards of her once-more broken heart.  Cairo dumped her unceremoniously on a low bed and the impact jarred her so she gasped and froze.  And then she started to cry.

Chapter 10

Why the hell was she crying?
 Dante wondered.  A glance at his brothers told him that they didn’t know why she was crying either, but the tears were genuine and her sorrow was palpable.  Locking them down here for the remainder of the weekend to seduce her had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now, with her tears scenting the air like saltwater, he realized they’d made a misstep somewhere along the line; more than one, most likely.

He climbed up the low platform bed, which they’d covered with soft furs and blankets just for her while she slept, and pulled her hands away from her eyes.

Her soft brown eyes were bright with tears and she took in a gasping breath and tried to extract her wrists from his grasp.  “Why are you crying, Lys?  You have to know that we’d never hurt you.”

Fresh tears spilled over her cheeks.  “Please don’t do this, Dante.  I’m not a toy.  I couldn’t bear to be cast aside.  Please,” she begged, in a voice that could only be considered fragile.  She started crying in earnest again, but stopped fighting his hold.

Mason came up on her other side.  “Why would you think we would cast you aside, love?  We’re not in the habit of doing that with our woman.”

Shuddering as she tried to hold her sobs back, she looked at Mason with wide eyes.  “What?”

Cairo moved closer to the end of the bed.  “Of course, Alyssa.  Why the hell do you keep saying things like ‘toy’?  We don’t know what that means.”

Dante pulled her up slowly to a sitting position and she clenched the tucked corner of the large bath towel so she was still covered.  Her voice was scratchy and raw and Mason walked over to the kitchen area and grabbed a bottle of water for her from the stocked refrigerator.  She took a long drink, still sniffling and trying to calm herself, and then she told them everything in a rush, starting with her mother, who hadn’t ever really been there for her, abandoning her to chase after an alpha.  Left to her own devices, she’d tried to get attention any way she could, and ended up as a pack toy.

“A toy is a whore for the pack, always available for any single male on the full moon or any other time.  I was one, until a few months ago when a drunken mistake made me reevaluate my life.”

She sniffled, refusing to look at them.  “When I stopped having sex, the males wouldn’t even look at me twice.  I’d been nothing to them, nothing of value anyway.  I was easily replaced and quickly forgotten.  And my friends — or the females I believed were my friends — were angry that they had to pick up my slack.  The sick thing is that I had hoped that someone might like me enough to get to know me, but when I took my body out of the equation it was like I ceased to exist.”

Fury stole through him, and his brothers were no less affected by her words.

She wiped at the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand.  “I looked for jobs outside of Havers.  I thought,” she sighed and twisted the bottle in her hand, “I thought that you would want me to pick between you, or worse, that you’d all want me just once and then I’d be...alone.  I tried to keep you away from me, but then this whole thing with the gym happened.  You can’t want me.  You don’t know the person I was before I came here.  I don’t deserve what you’re offering.”

Cairo said, “You don’t know what we’re offering yet, sweetheart.”

She looked at all of them tentatively.  She had no self esteem.  It was no wonder she thought their flirting, their attempts to get to know her, were just a way to get in her pants.  It’s all she’d ever known.  She took physical attention because she craved affection.  Her mother hadn’t looked back when she left her behind, her sister was selfish to the point of being cruel, and she’d boxed herself into a corner with her behavior both with the males in the pack and the females.  That she felt vulnerable and worthless was understandable.  No one ever wanted her as a whole person; they only wanted the pieces they could carve from her.

It’s a vast chasm, the difference between sex and love, and until this point, he hadn’t ever known that truth.  After only three weeks, he could not deny two things:  he loved her more than the breath in his body, and she belonged to them, forever.

He kissed her temple and asked, “Are you hungry, baby?”  He slid off the bed when she nodded that she was, and he motioned for his brothers to follow him to the kitchen.  They worked quickly to put a plate together for her, and spoke in low voices.

“Well, we can’t mate with her, she doesn’t know the difference between sex and love,” Mason said as he cut apart a rotisserie chicken, echoing Dante’s previous thoughts.  When hyena clans took their bride for the first time, all three males had to be with her together to bond with her completely.  Alyssa was nowhere near emotionally ready for that.

“If we do nothing after she bared her soul to us, then what is
that
saying?”  Cairo sighed and ran his hands over his head with a growl of frustration.  They all looked over at her. She hadn’t moved, her legs curled up to the side and her hand gripped tightly against the towel.  He felt like a colossal jackass for not giving her something to wear.

Dante glanced at the clock over the small sink.  It was eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.  “Okay, we don’t technically have to leave here until Monday morning to meet the glass guy at the gym.  That gives us almost two days to show her that we’re serious about her.”

“Just how do you propose we do that?”  Cairo asked suspiciously.

“There’s no way that fragile girl over there is ready to take the three of us on.”  Dante said.

Mason let out a slow breath.  “What if…we tell her that we want her to be our clan bride, but that we want her to come to us when she’s emotionally
and
physically ready?”

Cairo topped off a glass of lemonade.  They’d been careful to stock the refrigerator and pantry in the den with things they’d seen her eat and drink over the last few weeks.  They wanted her to know they cared, and part of that meant taking care of her right now.  In every way.

Cairo looked over at Alyssa and then back to his brothers.  “I will do anything to make sure she knows how important she is to us.  If that means waiting to make her our bride until we’re all on the same page, then I’m okay with that.”

Mason cleared his throat.  “Do we have to take sex completely off the table?  I mean, couldn’t we still do
some
things?  I have a feeling that she’s never been taken care of intimately before.  I don’t think anyone has ever cared about her pleasure.  We can show her that we’re different, make this time down here just about
her
pleasure.  When we leave here Monday, she should know that her happiness is the most important thing to us, and that we’re in it for the long haul.”

Dante liked how Mason thought.  After a little further discussion, they decided that they would initiate kissing and light touching, letting her decide how far she wanted to go, short of actual sex.  And then when the time was right, they would all come together as a clan, and they would mate their bride and they would be hers forever.

They put the plate in front of her on the bed and he and Mason sat on either side of her, Cairo sat on the floor, holding the glass for her.  They urged her to eat and she picked at the food, casting wary glances at them.  How do you get a woman to trust you, when you’re battling her past in the process?

He reached for a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders.  Was that a glimpse of gratitude in her eyes?  Hopefully.  He brushed a lock of her soft brown hair from her shoulder and said, “Alyssa, we made a mistake.  Well, several of them.  We led you to believe that we were only after one thing with you, and that’s far from the truth.  You see, baby, we want you to be our clan-mate, our bride.  We want to marry you and take care of you, make a family with you.”

She started to choke on whatever bite of food was in her mouth, and Mason thumped her back a few times until she put her hand up, clearing her throat and swallowing.  Gathering the blanket around herself better, she looked at the three of them and took the offered glass, draining half of it.

“Run that by me again?” she said incredulously.

Cairo grinned.  “You’re our mate, Alyssa.  Haven’t you felt a connection to us?  It’s why we were trying to get to know you, to spend time with you.  Clearly we fucked up; otherwise you wouldn’t have misinterpreted our advances as something as shallow as a one-night stand.  We don’t want you for one night; we want you for every night, forever.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” she said finally, pushing the plate aside.  Dante put it down on the floor, out of the way.

“We could ask you the same thing,” Dante pointed out.  “I think all of us are a little at fault for the last three weeks.  I was afraid to trust my own feelings.  But when you were being held by those men, Lys, I knew it would kill me if something happened to you.  That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what?” she whispered.

“That I’m in love with you.  Because I can’t live without you.”

“I love you too, Alyssa,” Cairo said.

Mason squeezed her hand.  “I love you, too, sweetheart.  I’m so sorry.  For everything.”  He looked a little bright-eyed, like he was trying not to cry.  He was tenderhearted but he always tried to be strong when he was around others.  He looked at tears as a weakness, even though neither he nor Cairo did.

She looked at him for a long moment and then she put her arms around him and hugged him, kissing his ear.  “It’s okay, Mase.”

She pulled away from him slowly and he sniffled and scrubbed at his eyes.  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

“We want you to be happy.  We’re locked in down here until Monday morning.  This time is yours,” Dante told her.

“We’re locked down here?”

“Technically, yes.”  Mason could unlock the door from a menu on the TV in the sitting area, but she didn’t need to know that right now.  “This is our den.  In the winter, we spend almost all our time down here. Cairo goes to the gym to train, I go in once a week or so for paperwork, and Mason does his tech stuff from here and does the fun stuff like laundry and cooking.”