Blayne Edwards (23 page)

* * * * *

Chloe watched Caine from her position on the bed as he swept up the last of the embers and threw them back into the fireplace. She could see him as he crossed back and forth in front of the bedroom door, pink silky housecoat flying behind him each time he turned to gather more debris.

Luckily, he couldn’t seem to keep the damned thing closed either.

Chloe grinned as she caught a good look at what she had suspected he’d been hoarding in those Levi’s he usually wore. And then she frowned. If the way he had angrily put out the fire and then scooped her up and wordlessly plopped her down on the bed before he went to clean up the mess her little oopsie-daisy had caused was any indication, Chloe wasn’t ever gonna get any of that.

He was pissed.

He was dirty and nasty and smelled like smoke and was cleaning up a mess that never should have happened because Chloe knew good and well how to tend a fire.

And he was doing it all while wearing a pretty pink robe.

Ladies, you have got to love a man for times like these.

Chloe could not agree more. She had no earthly idea of how Caine was going to explain the fact that he had evidently been traipsing through the forest while completely naked—thus the need for her pink robe—and had mysteriously come upon her cabin when it had burst into flames. And she doubted that he would be so blatant as to actually admit that he had been secretly watching her and getting his jollies that way or anything. She wasn’t positive, but she could guess that such outdoor experiences served as creative fodder for the man who wrote about such things as naked men chasing women and fucking the hell out of them right in the middle of meadows and on creek banks and while propped up against tree trunks.

The thought of Caine and Luke running bare assed naked through briars and underbrush in order to fuck her on a stump excited her for reasons she couldn’t even begin to understand. Although she would never admit that to either of them or her shrink. But she would admit one thing. To anyone who bothered to know.

She loved this man.

She loved Damon Caine about as much as her mind and heart could stand without it driving her nuts. They would laugh about this someday on a Tuesday afternoon in a September when it was raining too hard and it was much too cold and ugly outside for either of them to want to do anything but stay in bed and fuck like bunnies on Ecstasy.

Maybe then she’d ask him about the robe and his creative muses. And his jollies.

But for now, she had to figure out a way to get him less mad at her for making him her Mr. Fix It, Sweep It, Put The Fire Out, Show It To Me One More Time, Big Boy…

Chloe leaned far enough over to catch another glimpse of his goodies that she bumped her head on the nightstand. Caine was at the door to make sure she hadn’t gracefully fallen out of bed and hurt herself again before the thump even stopped ringing her ears.

“I’m alright,” she insisted, rubbing her forehead and avoiding the look he was giving her that was smacking her around for her obvious and endless talent for being her own worst enemy.

Damn, he was mad.

But not mad enough that he wasn’t going to make sure she was taken care of before he killed her with his bare hands. Chloe didn’t even try to get him to speak as she watched him bring an ice pack into the bedroom and carefully wrap it around her ankle. He straightened the covers and then tucked her in. And turned out the light.

Chloe heard the front door slam on his way out. Hard.

And then she heard it open again. A trail of pink flowed past her bedroom door once again and she saw the glow of the fridge being opened and then closed. The pink trail went past again, toting her six-pack and her Chinese leftovers. The front door slammed once again. Just as hard.

“Well, that son of a bitch.”

The possibility that he’d heard her cuss him was the only thing she could think of when the front door opened yet again and the Great Pink and Pissed One appeared for an encore presentation inside her house. Beside her bed.

She was dead. Chloe knew it.

He loved her as much as she loved him. But he was going to kill her now.

Oh shit.

Chloe looked at the six-pack dangling from his hand and the Chinese carton wedged underneath his arm and tried like hell not to laugh at the way his nipples poked through the dainty pink lace on the front of her robe.

Quick. Hard. No tongue. Just a peck on the mouth.

He wasn’t going to kill her, after all.

He did, however, love the hell out of her.

Well, I’ll be damned.

I mean, darned.

Chloe couldn’t wait to see what he brought her for breakfast.

For now though, the beer he tossed to her on his way back out would do just fine.

* * * * *

Caine slammed the front door and then stopped just a few feet inside his parents’ house.

And pointed at Lee. And then Luke.

“Don’t.”

At the very least, out of respect for their fearless and perfect alpha leader, they could have waited until he got upstairs before they laughed quite so hard.

* * * * *

“I didn’t have any goddamned clothes, remember?”

Luke and Lee sat teary eyed and doing a terrible job of hiding smiles, side by side on the couch in their parents’ garage. The bursts of laughter that occasionally spurted from one or the other made their faces even more red and forced Caine’s anger to lessen just a little more each time he heard it.

Family.

This was what is was all about. It felt good. It meant laughter and togetherness and fun. Sometimes it was hard for Caine to remember what the point was to his even being alive. For a moment, he leaned on his pool cue and watched his brothers take turns bruising each other’s arms, big, tough, psycho cop Luke having more fun swapping licks than the teenager beside him, and Caine remembered everything.

He remembered that when Lee was little he and Luke had once put a leash on him and taken him for a walk in downtown Asheville and when Lee had needed to pee he had transformed back into a boy because he wasn’t coordinated enough to hike his leg yet. Caine and Luke had stood cracking up at the naked five year old trying to pee fast enough to transform back into a wolf cub before anyone saw that he was a naked, five year old boy wearing a collar and being led around by a dog leash.

He supposed they could have taken the collar and leash off of him, or even taken a set of clothes with them in the first place. But then the memory wouldn’t have been so funny, he supposed. Self-imposed laughter was still laughter, Caine decided. You take happiness when and where you can find it.

He eyed the dog collar that Lee now wore religiously and grimaced. He and Caine had scarred the poor kid for life, most likely. But that was what brothers were supposed to do to one another. Wasn’t it?

The jagged reminder of not so happy times stared back at Caine from Luke’s face.

He hadn’t yet confronted Luke about what had happened between him and Chloe. It was tearing Caine apart. He knew that the situation had most likely pitted his family and his future mate against each other. With Caine in the middle.

Were Caine to completely defend Chloe, he stood the chance of losing his brother. His pack mate.

His twin.

But if Caine was to let Luke’s advances toward Chloe slide, he stood the chance of losing her, even if she did manage to love him for what he was. That thought, unbelievably, was just as painful as losing one of the brothers who sat on the couch.

There was also the issue of his being responsible for the discipline of the pack. And although Caine would love nothing more than to let the past stay in the past, this too, meant family for a Caine man. And it wasn’t a leash so easily removed from around any of their necks.

Caine watched Luke squirt Cheeze Whiz into Lee’s mouth and then up his nose and he laughed with a knowledge that gave him some consolation, albeit a small one.

At least they all felt the same tug.

Chapter Eighteen

Chloe looked up from the kitchen table when Caine walked through her front door like he belonged there or something.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

She glanced around the kitchen for an answer. They had all burned up in the fire, evidently.

“I had to get up to go to the bathroom, Caine.”

“So you came in here to pee in the kitchen sink?”

She rolled her eyes at him and then smiled at the top of his head when he bent to check her foot. For well over a week, he’d fussed and pampered and made himself at home by her side.

Chloe had never been so happy in her life.

“It’s still a little swollen,” he murmured. “You should go have it X-rayed.”

“It’s fine,” she argued as she looked at the ankle that hadn’t even twinged in pain for almost three days and had never been swollen very much at all. “It was just twisted, that’s all.”

Caine stood up straight and looked down at her. And then knelt down in front of her and straightened her buttons without speaking.

“Are you trying to cop a feel of my tits?”

“Did you get a good look at my cock?”

Shit, um, wait, shoot, Chloe hadn’t meant to pick this fight. She turned her head and felt the fires of hell light her face. He was grinning. She could see it from the corner of her eye. So she closed both of them.

She felt his hands slide around her waist just before a wall of very warm man met the very objects she had just accused him of admiring. His lips found her neck. And he whispered up, toward her ear.

“Well?”

Chloe opened her eyes and looked at the thick, black hair on his head. He smelled like pine trees and weekend camping trips and sex today. But then again, the man could have just spread fertilizer and Chloe would most likely have detected the sex part, despite the stench. She bent and kissed his head. And nuzzled his hair to gather his smell.

“Well what?” she asked after her nose was satisfied. He looked up at her and tightened his hold around her waist.

He grinned again and shifted. Chloe felt her legs being parted by the movement and his body finding a path. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him as he spoke.

“Well, how did it look?”

Chloe gave her head a so-so shake from side to side. And pouted out her lip as she rolled her eyes upward. “I guess it would do,” she stated. “In a pinch,” she added quickly.

So he did. Hard. And right on her butt. His fingers found flesh and before Chloe could stop giggling, he had them both on the floor of the cabin. Caine straddled her at first. Chloe lay back on the cold boards of the cabin and stared up at him. Just as she had imagined every night after Caine came to tuck her in and tease her almost to insanity. She imagined him above her like this while she pleased herself with the alpha watching from the glass door.

She suspected it pleased him as well.

Chloe felt herself being rolled over and shifted so that she now straddled him. Caine slid her body down and nestled the very topic of their conversation between her legs. And then grinned again.

“We could try it out if you’re not sure of how you feel about it, you know?”

She laughed at his creative way of asking her if she was ready for him to take her to bed.

She was. But she couldn’t let that happen. Not yet.

Chloe felt the smile slide from her face as she leaned forward and gently kissed the man she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. And she considered for the first time since they’d met that perhaps what she wanted might possibly interfere with Caine’s needs. Their time together had forced her to think about how seriously her relationship with him could affect his life. And it made her fear what would happen between her and Caine if he didn’t know that she and Luke had been together.

But more importantly, she had to consider what would happen between Caine and Luke if she stayed in one of their lives.

She wasn’t sure that it would cause conflict between the brothers, but the risk was big enough that she had to be certain she could be in one of their lives without hurting the other one. Chloe was afraid of what her own needs and desires would cause her to do if she ever found herself within reach of feeling the way Luke had made her feel that night. To be in love with Caine, but to want his brother if only physically, could do irreparable damage to their lives were Chloe ever to bend to that desire.

Caine adored his family. He talked incessantly about them. He loved his parents and adored his youngest brother—the wolf cub’s namesake, Caine had informed her—more than Chloe had known such family love to exist.

Chloe had come from a broken home. And so she knew that siblings were sometimes all a kid had. And Caine worshipped his twin.

The man would be devastated that Luke had made love to her. Chloe suspected that she might never tell Caine about the incident with his brother, but only because she had no desire to hurt him.

Even if it meant she couldn’t be with him.

Chloe knew that she was supposed to be with Caine. She knew she loved Caine. But she also knew what she had felt seething from Luke when he’d made love to her.

It had been the exact same thing that had been seething from herself.

It was a much more primitive attraction than she felt when Caine teased her lovingly and gently. It was something that one of her female wolves would feel toward a male who was not her mate, but who appealed to what her instincts said smelled like something she would be willing to and pleased by having mount her. It was just that base. And it was the kind of attraction that she knew could make her do and want things that she was afraid to admit.

Chloe still wanted that. The strong sexual urges Luke had shown her when he’d been in her bed had been just that. Sexual. Animal. And Chloe knew that sex with Luke Caine had most likely been the most raw and feral thing she would ever encounter.

And although it wasn’t love, the hunger she had for Luke’s ways of making love and the craving that he obviously had to fuck her again weren’t something Chloe knew for sure that they could both keep under control were she to stay in Caine’s life. Luke had shown remarkable restraint when she’d asked him to stop the second time, but she had felt something brewing inside the man that she knew might one day prove detrimental to her own resolve.

Chloe knew animal nature. She knew the sexual urges of animals unable to control their physical reactions to one another.

But most importantly, Chloe knew herself. She knew her fantasies. And she knew that if Luke Caine was to try to fuck her again, this time, the less human part of Chloe, the part of her that remembered how he had felt inside her, how he hadn’t been able to keep his true nature from showing, might not have the strength to say no.

She felt Caine’s arms tighten around her, waiting for her answer. She smiled into his eyes and felt her heart constrict at what it felt when she had this man pressed against her.

Chloe wanted to let her own wild and primal instincts out when she made love to Caine. But he wasn’t giving her the indications that he could be as tolerant of such behavior from a woman as his brother could.

Chloe wanted to joins hands with this man and, once and for all, completely let go.

But that hadn’t happened, although Chloe was quite sure the man had it in him to be as brutal as his brother—Caine had given her a taste of his more deviant side the first night they’d met—she also knew that men were oftentimes reluctant to let their true impulses control them in the bedroom. Because so many of them feared being seen as perverse if they acted upon their impulses.

Chloe still wanted that part of her fantasy. She wanted the man she spent her life with to feel free to follow his urges and lose control when he was with her. Most importantly because Chloe wanted to do the same. And had Caine admitted to having just a little more of his twin’s animal-like instincts, or had he been just a little more helpless to control them, Chloe would have been sure that the man in her arms would always be enough to keep her out of the fantasy world in which she had always loved.

Until then, however, Chloe wasn’t about to break the man’s heart or break up his family.

“Today’s not exactly a good day for intimate activities,” she explained quietly as she managed to blush.

Caine nodded. Silently.

Almost as silently as he shifted her off of him and stood up before walking out of her house.