The Dom Tests Her Serenity [Unchained Love 6] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (14 page)

Pete and Josh arrived then and she noticed they’d taken the time to change and likely showered as well. Josh held the door open for Jubilee, who followed him holding a heavy tray of something that smelled rich and chocolaty.

Pete took the tray from her and brought it over to where Leticia was sitting. “From Jubilee,” he said.

“Thank you, Jubilee. You’re wonderful.” Leticia smiled at Jubilee.

Serena nodded. Jubilee was a truly kind-hearted person, and no one would ever say no to fresh-baked chocolate cookies with extra chocolate chips.

Larry and Omar walked in just then. Omar stood possessively behind Ramona, and Larry stroked a hand over Jubilee’s shoulder. Both in their own ways were showing love and support for their women. Neither of them said anything, but no one could deny their actions.
Maybe words aren’t always needed after all.

What was that old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” or something like that?
I need Jubilee to tell me.
But it was true. Omar was big and bossy but also protective. Larry was silent and unobtrusive, but he acknowledged the thoughtfulness of Jubilee’s hard work without saying a word. Serena glanced at her men. Josh had opened the door and Pete had carried the heavy tray. Neither of them had said anything, but both had helped Jubilee without any fuss or expecting any thanks. They were truly good men, her mates. And she loved them.

“All right, people. Donald Thomas, the CEO of DNK Technology, is going to have his research staff check into this for us. Since Drew was the person we identified hanging around DNK’s parking lot, Donald’s convinced it could be a sign of them targeting his company, and he’s prepared to give a couple of his staff all the time they need to track down the hacker or hackers. It may not be Drew of course. Anyone who can hack into a dozen Facebook and Twitter accounts can pretend to be anyone they want to be.”

“MM is very competent. If he’s doing the searching, I’m sure we’ll hear the result sooner rather than later,” said Verity.

“Yeah, Donald said one of his staff seemed to take it as a personal insult and was on the job within seconds,” added Omar.

The barn door opened wide and Noah and Ezra rushed in, the door slamming shut behind them. They raced across the room, side by side, moving like a tidal wave across a beach, impervious to anyone around them. They scooped Verity out of the crowd and stopped in front of Omar.

“This rogue panther shit is never going to stop until all the unmated females are mated. We’ve been planning to mate Verity for ages,” said Noah.

“Summer would have been better since we have to do an outdoor scene apparently, but we’re not waiting that long. Anything could happen by then,” added Ezra.

“We’re also not going to risk another tantrum like Pete and Josh faced. So right here, right now, we’re telling everyone we love you, Verity, and we’re going to mate you, as soon as your Alpha and Larry tell us we can do it. Are you okay with that?” asked Noah.

“Romantic, much?” Autumn giggled.

“Of course I agree. I’ve just been waiting for you to ask,” said Verity.

“Larry, Omar, do we have your agreement? And we need to set a date.”

Omar drew himself up to his full, imposing height. “You have to ask my permission,” he said, looking every inch a black panther Alpha.

Noah and Ezra kept hold of Verity and both men nodded. “We wish to mate Verity. We love her and promise to care for her. Do we have your permission?” asked Noah.

“You promise to love and cherish her? To always care for her?”

“Yes,” said Noah.

“Yes, Sir,” added Ezra.

“Do you wish to mate these humans, Verity?” asked Omar.

“Yes. I love them,” she replied.

“You have my permission.”

Still holding Verity between them they swiveled to face Larry directly. “How soon can we do it?”

Serena wasn’t sure whether she would die of embarrassment in Verity’s position or whether she’d be overwhelmed with their need for her. It was certainly different, no one could deny that.

“What, exactly, do you wish to do?” asked Larry, pulling out his cell phone.

“Have a party here like we did for Verity’s twenty-first, but just with the entire community. A meal, some BDSM scenes, then I’d need one of the private dungeons,” said Noah.

It sure sounded like he had planned everything already, which meant he was telling the truth when he said he’d been wanting to do it for a while.

“Come to my office then and we’ll get it booked,” said Larry.

Serena leaned back in her chair. Well, it sure looked like her twin would be mated very soon. And MM was on the track of the Facebook hacker, so life could go back to normal.

Oh wait!
Where was she going to live now? Pete hadn’t said anything about that. Surely the three of them would be living together now they were mated. Everything in her room was exactly as she’d left it. Pete hadn’t said anything about moving into a house or anything. Did he really expect them just to go back to how they were before, except having sex more often? This was
not
what she’d expected at all.

* * * *

Josh was quite happy to leave the hacker cracking to a professional, but he wasn’t content to not know what had been put on various panthers’ Facebook sites. He hadn’t even seen what Serena’s profile picture had been changed to, although he’d heard her distressed remark about it being a wounded big cat.

He went back to the house he and Pete shared with several other unmated panthers to get his laptop. Well, he supposed it was the apartment he used to share, since he was mated now. But all his things were still in his room. Getting the three of them settled into their new home was a job for later.

It’d been damn hard to keep it a secret. He and Pete had spent hours painting and furnishing their new home but didn’t want Serena to know anything about it. It was supposed to be a surprise. They’d even worked on the idea of “romantic” a bit as well.

He hung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder and ran back to the barn. Fucking hell it was cold outside without a coat. He hadn’t thought he’d need it for a two-minute walk, but he was wrong. Winter was just about here already.

Back at the barn he looked around for Serena and picked up a chair to place beside hers. He caught Pete’s eye and Pete nodded and came over to them. Pete would have seen him leave and return with the laptop. He’d likely already guessed what Josh would say. They often thought alike. Josh suddenly remembered the whole mind-talking thing and asked,
Hey, Pete. Do you know what I’m planning?

You want her to check her Facebook account properly in public so she can get it in perspective faster than if she did it alone? She only looked at the profile picture before she closed it up before.

More than that. If we analyze the changes we may get some clues about the perpetrator, especially if there’s a bunch of similarities in the ways various women’s pages have been changed.

Good idea. Hang on while I get a notepad and pen so I can take notes while people look. And brainstorm.

Josh put his arm around Serena and felt her lean on him. Ah, that was so nice. His woman. His! At last.

When Pete joined them he said, “Serena, you need to look at your Facebook and Twitter properly.”

“What?”

“You need to take your courage in both hands and look deeply at your Facebook. See what has been altered and how. That way, we may get leads on the person or persons who did this. It’ll tell us things about them,” added Pete.

“My Twitter wasn’t touched. I hear what you’re saying, but it’ll be hard.”

“Nothing worthwhile is ever easy,” said Jubilee, sitting on the arm of the chair Serena was in. “It may be simple for me to say since my Facebook page wasn’t violated, but this creep needs to be caught. We humans are all here to help our panther, cougar, and puma friends.”

Gaynor, Jill, and Diane the accountant joined them. “We’ll even hold your hand if you like,” joked Jill, a human and longtime resident of Carnal Connections.

Oliver nodded to Leticia. “She’s right. It might be easier for you if Serena goes first, that way you’ll be more eased into the concept.”

“You mean this time I might not have a brain snap and scare half the panthers into migraine headaches!”

Everyone laughed and Serena took Josh’s laptop. Josh was scared for her but at the same time proud of how calmly she tapped out her new password and opened the page with hardly a flinch. He tilted the screen back a bit so more people could see it.

He must remember to have them all change their passwords on their bank accounts, too. There was no telling what the hacker might target next and what information he may have found out about them after he’d hacked their Facebook accounts. Damn. They may need to change a lot of things, not just bank accounts, but anything with identifying personal details.

The profile picture was horrifying. It was a large cat, maybe even a lioness, with its belly ripped open. He looked away, trying not to show his distaste, and checked her profile. Instead of mentioning her hobbies, it’d been changed to add links to porn sites.

Serena flicked through her photo albums. In each case the opening picture had been changed, mostly to porn, but one was to a scene of a Rwandan mass murder site.

“Wait. That picture has been used on my Facebook page, too. Open another browser,” said Autumn.

Serena did and Autumn accessed her Facebook page then showed her photo album. Instead of being pictures of craft projects she’d made, it was scenes of the same Rwandan war graves, over and over again. “I bet he snatched them straight off some website. Oh, I hope your geek gets him and gets him good,” said Autumn.

Diane tapped the screen. “You know, I bet that profile picture up on Serena’s page is off some wildlife conservation website. I think our perpetrator may have overextended himself. He ran out of fresh ideas and just kept repeating the same old ones for all of you.”

“That makes me think it’s one of the other rogue panthers then. Drew and Charlie seemed to me to be quite intelligent,” said Ramona.

They all looked at Verity’s page and Ramona’s, but there were no more clues until they got to Leticia’s page. She hadn’t had any photo albums, so the hacker had splashed some pictures on her wall. All were linked to a porn site, the same site mentioned on Serena’s page.

“It does look like he ran out of ideas, doesn’t it,” said Oliver, giving Leticia a gentle hug.

“I’ll take the notepad, Pete, and show it to Larry so the information can be passed to the hacker cracker,” said Oliver.

Josh grinned. “Hacker cracker?”

“What else are we to call him?”

“Good point.” Pete gave Oliver his notes while Josh closed up the laptop.

“We really ought to go and eat. All we’ve had this morning is a chocolate chip cookie. Which was most delicious, but a man needs a meal now and then,” said Pete.

“I’m starving. Let’s do that,” agreed Serena.

* * * *

With the community at Carnal Connections constantly growing bigger, Larry had hired a housekeeper who was a motherly, middle-aged woman named Alyce. She cooked a lighter midday meal and an evening meal each day and supervised the team of community members who kept the main building sparkling clean. When the panther pack had first taken refuge at the community, because there were far more men than women, and few of the men liked to cook, the younger men had taken charge of the less-skilled preparation and clean-up duties.

When she’d arrived she’d quietly stood by as they held races to see who could peel the most potatoes in five minutes and who could juggle the most oranges without dropping any. Josh wasn’t at all sure how it happened, but every one of the young panthers was now perfectly capable of cooking a meal. She certainly hadn’t forced any of them to learn, but clearly they all had. Many of them now enjoyed whipping up suppers in their shared apartments.

A large whiteboard was affixed to one of the walls in the kitchen, and people signed it if they wanted meals prepared for them and if they took food out of the freezers. Josh noted Pete had fortunately had the forethought to sign the three of them in for lunch and dinner today.

According to the menu board, lunch today was a thick, beefy stew with homemade sourdough bread, and dinner would be chicken and rice, followed by angel food cake.
Yum
.

However, lunch was still almost two hours away and his stomach considered the chocolate cookie a distant memory. He followed Pete and Serena into the large room and sniffed. Something smelled good. Really good, and it wasn’t just the aroma of coffee, which he was also more than ready for.

They all sat down at one of the long tables, and Pete walked over to the counter. Josh watched as Jill carried a steaming cauldron across from one of the cooktops and set it on a thick mat. Luke followed her with a pile of bowls and container of spoons.

“Soup. How perfect,” Serena said.

“Alyce is a magician. I wonder how she had soup ready like that. She couldn’t possibly have prepared it in the time since Leticia found out about the hacker.”