Their Unexpected Mate [Paranormal Protection Unit] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (10 page)

“I hope you’re right, darlin’,” Trey, aka Scythe, said and then tugged her into the bed-and-breakfast that she had so selflessly created, a haven for survivors.

When they walked into the bed-and-breakfast Mac walked up behind her and then slipped his hand into hers before giving it a squeeze. He needed this connection to their bond-mate as well, needed to touch her and reaffirm that she was there and she was his. When Scythe pulled away to allow him his moment, Mac brushed a curl of her hair from her shoulder and smiled. “Keep an open mind for us, sweetheart. What we have to tell you will be very hard to understand. It will be nearly impossible, love, but know that if you are able to listen and accept us we will give you the world.” They would do anything for her. At all.

“I trust you.” And what was so weird was that she did. Katherine believed in these three men more than she had ever another being in all of her life. “But you guys are making me super nervous.”

“Don’t be, darlin’,” Mac assured her and leaned in. Inhaling the sweet scent at her neck, he nibbled lightly. “Tonight if you accept us you will be in heaven. That I swear.” He would either help her get there or die trying. Question was, would she even let them near her after they told her what they were?

As one, the men led her into the living room and settled her onto the oversized sofa there. Mac took one side of Katherine, Scythe took the other, and Sullivan sat down on the coffee table before her. Taking a deep breath, Scythe began first. “What we have to tell you, it’s going to be very hard to understand, but it is the absolute truth. Please understand that we would never lie to you and we would never, ever hurt you. Ever,” he assured her.

That had her gulping. She wanted to nod but she found it hard to do so at the moment. Looking from face to face, she realized just how attracted she was to these men, but it was more than their large size and handsome visages, it was the very core of the men. It was the very truth of the men who were there before her.

“Honey, keep what Scythe said, all right?” Sully asked, and then, “Trey,” he amended for her. “Keep in mind what he said, darlin’. We will never, ever hurt you.”

Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “All right.” She licked her suddenly dry lips and nodded. “All right, then. Let’s do this,” she told them. “Tell me what it is that you are hiding from me.” At Trey’s look, she said, “You have spent every day for the past three weeks with me. I know you are hiding something.”

“You’re right, baby. I am hiding something. All three of us are. I know that you only just met Mac and Sully, but know this. They care for you every bit as much as I do,” he told her. Taking her hand, he pulled it to his lips and pressed a kiss to her inner wrist. Nibbling lightly with his teeth, he nodded.

“First of all, we will get the most obvious and the easiest out of the way,” he said softly. “We all three want you. You are our mate, darling,” he said gently. “You are the one and only one for us. We all three need you in our lives. Do you think that first of all you could accept a ménage relationship with us?”

“What?” She had noticed that in the small town there were a few ménage relationships, but she had never thought that she would be in one of them. Here, in this town, they were accepted as easily as monogamous relationships, but that wasn’t her worry. Her worry was simple, how could she be enough for three men? Men that were as amazing, as incredible, and as unique as these men? “How can I be enough for you?” She asked what her mind had been thinking.

“Baby, you are more than enough,” Sully said suddenly. “Honey, you are so very, very much more than enough. I can’t tell you just how amazing I think you are, that we all think that you are. You complete us. You make the puzzle pieces fit together, and you make us work. You are ours, honey, never doubt that. We just hope that we can be enough for you,” he stated with so much need, so much love in his voice that it was hard for her to not believe him.

Tears welled in her eyes as the truth and sincerity that were in his words rang in her ears. “Oh my,” she whispered, and swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “All right, so let’s say that I’m completely and fully on board with this type of relationship. Is that all that was worrying you?”

As a unit the men let out a breath that none of them had realized that they had been holding, all three sprouting smiles at nearly the same time. It was then that Kat realized just how alike the men were, mannerisms, facial expressions, and the very, very deadly air that they each had wrapped around them like cloaks.

When they didn’t go to move right away, she sighed. “There is more, isn’t there?” Whatever this
more
was had her stomach in knots, had her head feeling more than a little light, and had her realizing that whatever it was that he had to tell her was going to be very, very bad.

“There is a great deal more, baby,” Scythe told her softly. “We all three want you. You are the only one for us,” he told her. “We are all three former Delta Force operatives,” he said softly. This was the easiest part of it. “We have all three served our country for a great deal of time, working our way through the ranks as we did so,” he told her. “When we retired, we joined a private firm, a company made up by our commanding officer, a man that we call Bulldog,” he explained. “It’s my team that wired your home from top to bottom a couple of days ago.” When she began to speak, he shook his head. “Let me finish, baby,” he murmured.

“We take the jobs that no one else wants to take. We take the jobs that no one else can take. We are the ones that keep humanity safe,” he told her softly. “Honey, there is a whole world out there that you don’t have the first clue about. It’s a world that we will introduce you to. The world that we live in and will pull you into, baby, is…” He sighed and shook his head. “Kat, honey, the world that we live in is so much different than the world you live in,” he explained to her.

“Just tell her al-fucking-ready.” Mac growled.

Katherine looked from one man to the other and nodded. “Please, just tell me. You are terrifying me,” she whispered. “I get that you guys have a very dangerous field of work. I think that I understood that the first day that I met you, Trey,” she whispered. “But I’m not afraid of you, of any of you, so please, please tell me.”

Scythe made a nervous movement of scrubbing his hands through his shoulder-length hair before he tried to start again. “We…” God, he didn’t know how to tell her this but he had to. He had to because it was the only way that the four of them would have a life together, period. “Katherine, baby, we aren’t human,” he said bluntly.

She frowned. “Excuse me?” This had to be some weird joke. That was it. “Are you making fun of me?” she asked then.

“God, no, baby. Never.” Scythe stood and looked down at her before he nervously said, “Kat, I need you to know that I will never, ever hurt you,” he stated simply and moved back. “Mac, Sully.” Nodding to his friends, he pulled back even more. “So just keep that in mind, baby,” he said as he pulled off his shirt and then kicked off his shoes.

“Why are you stripping?” Katherine asked with wide eyes. “What the heck?” Katherine jumped and winced as Sully and Mac both placed their hands on her shoulders to hold her down.

Leaning in, Sully whispered against her ear. “Just watch, kitten. He’s getting naked for a reason, not just to make love to you, sweetheart,” he promised her as he watched Scythe stripping off the last of his clothes. The power that Scythe used to shift filled the room, lifting the hairs on the arms of the men holding Katherine down.

Katherine watched the shift through wide and shock-filled eyes. She heard the cracks of bones and the shimmer of what looked to be a glitter shower around Trey and gasped. For several minutes she couldn’t breathe as she watched what was happening, and then she just looked. She had jerked, she had tried to pull away from the men, but they held her close. They didn’t hurt her but they didn’t allow her to jump and run like she wanted to. “Oh God,” she whispered as she watched the large man she knew as Trey shift into a holy-mother-of-God-huge wolf.

She pulled back with a cry when the wolf paced over to her. Even though it was nearly on its belly as it approached her it scared the bejesus out of her. When it put its head on her lap and bared his neck to her, she screamed, a sound that caught in her throat so it was more strangled than voiced.

“Honey, it’s still Scythe,” Sullivan assured her as she all but crawled to get away from the wolf. Reaching out with her hand in his, Sully laid her hand on the head of the large wolf. “We are shifters, baby. Scythe, Trey…” He added the name that his friend had asked her to call him. “Trey is a werewolf. He doesn’t have to shift with the full moon. That is all myth, love, but there is one thing that we do need, and that is our bond-mate. You, baby. You are our bond-mate. We mate only once,” he told her softly. “You are more of a treasure than you can ever, ever know, my love,” he whispered softly to her and helped her to pet his friend. “He loves you, baby. He will never, ever hurt you. Even when the animal is on the outside, on the inside it is always your bond-mate, it is always Trey.”

Mac nodded. “He will always be yours,” he assured her and ran his hand over her hair. “We will always be yours, baby. Not a single one of the three of us would ever hurt you,” he told her as he watched her finally starting to move her fingers through the thick fur of his friend. “Shifters come from the very core of the Earth, from the essence that is everything, honey.” He took over the explanation since Trey currently couldn’t speak to Katherine, at least not until they all bonded. “Do you want the story that is us, darling?” he asked her gently. He wasn’t sure what else she could take. She looked so freaked out. She looked as if she were ready to pass out from information overload, but it was what they had to tell her.

With tears in her eyes, Katherine nodded. “Yes, please,” she whispered quietly to him, her fingers moving through the silky fur of Trey’s coat. “God, he feels so soft, like silk.”

Mac smiled. “I know he does, baby.” His hands continued to pet her, gently loving on her as they did so. “We love you, kitten, all three of us. When you walked into that bar, I swear all three of us nearly lost our minds and shifted then and there.”

“Oh God, you are both wolves as well?” she asked with wide eyes.

Laughter came from the men. “No, baby. We aren’t wolves,” Mac told her.

Then Sullivan said, “We are bears.”

“Bears?” She gulped. “You mean that you are bigger than Trey?” she asked with wide eyes. “Oh God.” She shook her head then. “All right, tell me your story.” She thought, right, fold up the thought of bears and wolves and put it in her pocket to deal with later. Right now she needed to think of this moment, of the story that he had to tell her. That they had to tell her. Bracing herself and anchoring herself in running her hands through Trey’s fur she simply thought for a moment. She simply allowed this all to come through, allowed the story to be told.

Mac began to speak after he had moved slightly so that Katherine was more in his lap than not, adjusting his placement on the sofa so that Trey could jump up and join them in his wolf form. “When the Earth was created it wasn’t like anything any scientist or religion has stated. The dinosaurs that are found are not truly dinosaurs, but I suppose that you can call them relatives of the shape-shifters, early prototypes. I guess, now that I say it, Darwin had it closest,” he murmured. Shaking himself out of his own thoughts, he continued. “Men were created. They were just as they are today, unable to truly understand much beyond what is theirs.” Mac paused before he continued with, “When man was created, the Earth Spirit, Gaia, also created beings who could wield magic. Men and women who could make the elements do their bidding, make the earth shake, air move, fire dance.” Mac paused and swallowed before he continued, “However, she also created others. Shifters. Men who were part beast, part man. All manner of beast,” he told her softly. “Reptiles like snakes, avians such as hawks and eagles, wolves, bears, feline species such as lions, leopards, jaguars, and so on.” There were all sorts of were shifters. He was only giving her a small portion.

“There are also those that history has made out to be more mythical than what they are, in reality,” he said with a smile as he thought of Bulldog. “There are also dragon-shifters, baby. So don’t wig out when you see one. We will always protect you, I promise,” he assured her. “All right. I got off track,” he said when Trey growled in his mind to continue.

“That is what we are, baby. We are part of the Earth Spirit,” he explained. “Shifters can only be born. We can’t be created or turned, just as magical beings can only be born and…” They were giving her so much right now. They were telling her so much more than she could possibly handle, but she had to handle it. She was theirs. She was their bond-mate, and Gaia would never, ever send a woman to bond with an Alpha trio such as him and his brothers if she wasn’t able to handle what they were.

“What?” she whispered and felt as if her world were closing in on her. She felt her vision waver and go gray. It was clear from the look on her face that her mind was on overload and that they had told her far too much.

Trey shifted from his wolf form and back into his human form so that he could speak. “Dammit, you scared her.” He then moved so that he was straddling her lap, cupping her face in his hands. Trey looked her in the eyes. “Kat, come back to me, darlin’. He’s telling you the truth, but he’s telling you because you have to know, baby,” he murmured. “Before you can become our bond-mate, before we can claim you as our own, honey, you have to know this. You have to be able to accept not only us three overprotective, over-the-top Alpha males, but you also have to be able to accept the animals that we have inside of us. Kitten, I swear to you that no matter what, you are ours and we will protect what is ours, now and forever.”

“Do I have to make love with animals?” Katherine asked with tears shimmering in her eyes and fear clear in them.