“Looks like the party went on late,” I observed.
“Wolf style,” Owen added, nodding at the demolished remains of what had once been a wedding cake.
“Hungry like wolves?” I joked.
“Hungry like your wolves, anyway,” Liam said.
“Damn. They didn’t even leave us any cake,” Dean complained. “And it was our party.”
My wolves. Our party. Every word they said reminded me of the huge responsibilities I had taken on with that simple ceremony the night before.
I had managed to ignore it all up to now. Even waking up naked with three guys hadn’t bothered me—we’d been in our fur, and then we’d fallen asleep, shifting in the night.
But now I was back in my human skin, and human-me was much more aware than wolf-me of how out of my depth I was.
A sense of creeping dread clenched my stomach.
“So what’s next?” I asked, glancing back and forth among my wolves.
“Well,” said Liam—the calmest of my three wolf-mates, and therefore the one most likely to be voted to deliver news I might not like—“you’ve chosen your mates and you’ve become a werewolf.”
“Right.” I nodded warily.
“So next, we’ll need to…consummate the relationships.”
Chapter 2
“Consummate. You mean, like, have sex?”
My stomach fluttered, the dread inside turning to something much more carnal.
I had, of course, thought about what being mated to the three of them might mean. I’d thought about it in all sorts of ways. But really, especially in terms of sex.
We simply hadn’t talked about it much, so I had no idea what their expectations might be.
Now, all three of my wolves were staring at me expectantly.
I couldn’t decide if whether or not I wanted them to announce that we were all going to have a giant sex party.
“I guess we need to discuss this, then?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a question, but the way my voice squeaked at the end sure turned it into one..
“I know I’d like to have some idea of what all this means,” Liam said with a grin.
“Just to be clear,” Dean said, pointing at my other two mates with his thumbs, “I have no intention of climbing in bed with these two jackasses.”
The look he gave them was so comically disdainful that I burst into laughter. That seemed to dispel the worst of the tension that had been growing.
“Let’s go get breakfast and talk this out,” I said.
Owen and Liam shared a look that suggested they might already have some idea of how to deal with our unique situation. Dean just seemed glad to be headed toward food. Or maybe it was glad to be headed toward a discussion that would clarify exactly how we were going to handle what was essentially their four-way marriage with a woman they had only just met.
Also, there were a few things from before the ceremony that we had never really dealt with. Like, for example, the apparent probability that I would end up having to defend my position as pack alpha through some kind of combat.
I was not looking forward to that part of the discussion any more than I was thrilled with the idea of having to carefully apportion out my sex life with three different werewolves.
I suspected they weren’t all that great at sharing.
* * *
“Okay, let’s discuss this,” I said as we sat in the round-table booth in The Moon Moon, the bar and grill I’d inherited from my uncle at the same time I’d inherited his mantle as pack alpha. We’d been there an hour already, consuming more food than I would have ordered for a dozen people just a few days before. But now, I was ravenous.
“So does shifting always make everybody this hungry?” I was so nervous about the upcoming discussion that I interrupted my own announcement with a question, then answered that question. “Of course it does. The first time I met you guys, you were eating burgers after shifting.”
That first day, Owen and made me two burgers and I had eaten only one of them. Today, I was pretty sure I could eat three. Especially since I’d already had two and I was still hungry.
“More fries?” Liam asked, handing a plate piled high with them in my general direction. I took it and scraped half the pile onto my plate.
“Okay. Before we get too deep into this discussion of consummating our relationships, why don’t you three start by filling me in on the wolf traditions about that sort of thing.”
“When an alpha takes a mate, there are generally two different sides of it,” Owen said. “First of all, last night’s ceremony definitely made us your pack-alpha mates in that we are now all three considered your legitimate seconds in command.”
“But that doesn’t make us your mates,” Liam added. “Right now, we belong to you the same way everyone in the pack does, and we’re your seconds, but we’re not yours. The ceremony last night didn’t fi
“Nope,” Dean agreed. “Only sex can do that.”
I blushed at his words. I could feel the heat of my flush crawling up my neck, over my face and to the roots in my hair. My face burned with it. But I ignored the reaction and tried to talk as if I made plans to have sex with three men every day. “So until I have sex with you, you’re my seconds in command but not really my mates?”
“That’s about the size of it.” Dean leaned back, resting his shoulders against the booth.
“Oh, but there’s more.” Liam tapped the table. Our decision to have you choose all of us was brilliant in a lot of ways. For one thing, it builds a kind of wall of protection around you—to get to you, someone
