Page 23

Kieran

“How’d it go?”

I was up and out of my seat on the couch the minute Tor walked in. He stopped, smiled, then raked his hand through his hair.

“Terrible at first.”

“What the fuck did you do, Tor?” Mack growled. “We talked about this. Take things slow?—”

“I’m guessing introducing her to my entire family isn’t slow.” Tor sighed. “I thought the fam was at the community hall, that we’d have the restaurant to ourselves. I know the food is good there and Harper liked it, so it was supposed to be a nice night.”

“So what happened?”

I was trying to be cool and failed completely. Everything that had happened since the first day we met Harper seemed to be one screw up after another.

Something my dads had made clear.

I was forced to endure a very long, involved lecture about the topic once they found out how badly we’d fumbled things. One that ended with them insisting I form a sleuth with other bear shifters. In some ways, Tor’s date was supposed to prove to them, to us, that we had what it took to woo Harper.

“Missed the email that a pipe burst at the community hall.” Tor shook his head. “We walked in to find every single tiger shifter in the city there.”

“Bloody hell, did you get Harper out of there?” Mack barked. “You know how skittish she is.”

“I asked her if she wanted to go.” I leaned forward, my fangs grinding together, because I was waiting to hear the words I’d expected to hear all evening. That she bolted, refused to see him, or any of us. “But she said we’d stay.”

“And how did she cope with that?”

That was what I needed to know, the bear pushing hard against the barrier between us.

In his mind, we could take fur, go loping down the road, through the city streets to find Harper.

We’d throw her on our back and run off into the bushes, holding her close, keeping her safe, until she realised we were the bear for her.

“Great.” I blinked, sure I’d misheard Tor.

“My sisters told lots of embarrassing stories and the aunties tried really hard not to ask a million questions. Mum went overboard, cooking every damn dish she knows, and Dad was just cool, calm, and collected. We had a little moment upstairs in the apartment, then I took her home.”

“Without pushing for anything else.” Mack stared him down. “Right, Tor?”

“Harper was the one pushing to take things further,” he replied, “But I worked it out, Mack. Harper…” Was perfectly comfortable jumping into bed with us. It was feelings that sent her running. I finally allowed myself to smile. “I said we’d see her in her dreams.”

Mack and Tor both looked at me, because I was the one who could dream walk. I nodded slowly.

“Give her a taste of how things will be if she accepts the bond,” Mack said, warming to the idea. “Show her how good it could be. We need to plan this dream.”

“That’s not how this shit works.” Everyone was back to staring at me. “It’s a dream, Mack. Your subconscious is in control, not you.”

I watched his jaw muscle flex.

“Alright, well, everyone needs to get to bed.” I snorted because he couldn’t have sounded more dad-like right now. “So Kieran can do his thing.”

Could I?

I asked myself that after I’d showered and got into bed.

The first time it’d happened, it was completely accidental.

My head hit the pillow, and I forced my breathing to slow, but my head felt too full to go to sleep.

Mack, the dads, even Tor, everything they had to say bounced around in my mind until I came to the final person.

Harper and her smile. Harper and the way her head fitted perfectly into my shoulder as she leaned back against my bare chest. The way my mate drank down her rum, eyes wide, sucking in everything we’d had to say. I got lost in the memories.

And that helped me find her.

I emerged from the shadows to see her lying on her bed.

She was the only point of light in all of this darkness, her skin gleaming, her lips parting slightly as she breathed evenly.

Harper seemed too peaceful to disturb. Some instinct had me taking a step backwards, wanting to leave her to sleep, when I heard her voice.

“Aren’t you going to ravish me, Bear Boy?” Her eyes cracked open and then she rolled over. My eyes couldn’t help but follow the graceful line of her body, and when I finally met her gaze, she was smiling. “That’s what you’re here for, right?”

No, I wanted to say. I wanted to talk to Harper, get to know her, hear about her hopes and dreams, but as I told Mack, we didn’t get to control the dream. Perhaps that’s why the other two emerged from the shadows, hard and naked.

She sat up in bed, a sly smile on her face.

“Oh, you brought me all three?”

“Told you I’d be seeing you in your dreams, Harper,” Tor said, prowling closer.

“Something you need, my mate?”

Mack came to a stop at the foot of her bed and stared down at her, arms crossed.

“Looks like there’s something you need.”

Harper looked half tiger herself as she prowled down the bed towards him. When she reached up to touch him, his hand shot out, grabbing her wrist.

“That’s not how this works,” he growled. “Not even in dreams.”

“Scared of what will happen if you lose control?”

Mack smiled.

“You’d know something about that, wouldn’t you, Harper?

That’s why you were so keen to jump into bed with the guys.

If you control the pace of how things progress, then there’s no nasty surprises.

” She grinned as his knee hit the bed, thinking she was about to get what she wanted.

“But that’s not how this is gonna go.” He turned to me.

“Kieran.” With the logic of dreams, I was on the bed and behind Harper in seconds.

My hands twisted her hair up into a loose bun, my lips tracing the line of her neck. “Yes, nice and slow, just like that.”

Was it my idea or his to kiss along the line of her shoulder? I didn’t know or care. Her scent filled my nose, making my head spin, but I kept on kissing her. My hand slid up her neck, turning her head my way before I moved to claim her lips.

“Mm… just like that,” Mack said. “Now Tor.”

“I got this.”

My eyes opened up long enough to watch him saunter over and then crawl across the bed towards her.

“Something you need?” he asked as she slid a hand down his chest.

“Something you need?” she asked, using a fingertip to trace the shape of one of his spines. His breath was sucked in, his chest heaving as she gave one a little tug.

“No, he doesn’t.” At Mack’s response, Tor found himself moved out of her grip, now pressed into her other side. “We aren’t like the men you dated before. A pretty smile and a willingness to jump into bed quickly isn’t enough to keep us at bay.”

“Maybe you need to learn a lesson.” I tried to warn Mack.

This was a dream, not real life, so suddenly he was lying down on the bed as Harper crawled closer.

Right then it was as if she was the shifter and he the hapless human, because she hung over his body, staring down at him.

“That you don’t get to control everything. ”

That hiss, the way his jaw locked tight, made clear that Harper had found his knot.

Tor and I traded grins as Mack fought a battle he was never going to win.

We moved as one, smoothing our hands over Harper’s back.

For a moment I got lost in the silken slip of her skin against mine.

I was moving, kneeling up to slide my hands around her body, finding the swell of one breast. The way its softness gave under my fingers was enough to transfix me, but I had another purpose in mind.

“You’ve got Mack at your mercy.” My sleuthmate was lost right now, to the rhythmic pull of her hand. His breath came in gasps as she worked him higher. “But where does that leave you?”

She turned then, wide eyed, not stopping for a second, but then Mack’s gasps became an echo of her own.

Tor and I worked well together on the work site, and it turned out the same could be said for the bedroom.

Both of us covered a breast with one hand, pulling those tight little nipples until her hand stopped moving.

The others slid between her legs. Tor found her clit, rubbing along the sides, warming her up, while I traced the shape of her entrance.

I wanted in there so damn bad my balls ached like a sore tooth, but Mack had it right.

We needed to convince Harper that committing to us would make everything better, starting with this.

“When you accept the bond.” I didn’t allow for the possibility that she might reject us. “It’ll be so good. This spot here.” She let out a whine as my fingers hooked, rubbing hard against a rough spot inside her. “That’s where my baculum will lock down.”

“Yes…” she hissed.

“It’ll lock us together, Harper, force me to rock over and over until you can’t cry out for more.” Her strangled groan made clear how she felt about that. “You’ll come and keep on coming.”

“Yes… Yes…!”

“And then when you’re exhausted.” Her neck moved of its own accord, falling to one side, the skin bleached by the dream moonlight.

“And can’t take anymore. Can’t run anymore.

” She was moving, we were moving, like some multi-limbed organism.

Mack’s groans were a match for her own. “You’ll beg me to mark you. ”

I could right now. This was just a dream, so she wouldn’t wake up and find herself marked.

My lips peeled back, revealing my fangs, saliva pooling in my mouth.

Maybe this would ease her into the bond, make clear how good it would feel.

A snarl built in my chest, the bear at war with me.

He knew exactly what we needed to do and I…

The muffled sound of a child crying had me jerking my head back, searching the darkness for its source.

A door had formed where there wasn’t one before, and for some reason that had me pulling free.

I padded over, the sound of crying growing louder the closer I got.

It soon became obvious why. As I opened the door, I saw a little girl with a familiar halo of dark hair.

Harper. She clung to her pillow, shoving her face deep into it, hoping to mute her cries.

But not muffling them enough, it appeared.

A woman with Harper’s eyes strode into the room, a bathrobe hastily wrapped around her.

“What’s going on?” There was no softness in the woman’s face as she surveyed the room. “Why are you making all that noise?”

But she wasn’t. Even when Harper peeled the pillow from her face, revealing a tear-streaked mess, her sobs were mostly silent.

“Harper…”

For a moment, I thought the woman would act appropriately, because she walked over to the bed and sat down, then wrapped an arm around the child. Child Harper scrambled closer, pressing her face into her mother’s shoulder.

“Da—Daddy…”

Harper was hysterical and unable to hold any of this back anymore. The floodgates opened and her sobs grew in sound and intensity. The woman, who I assumed was Harper’s mother, shook her head and held her daughter close.

“I know, sweetheart. I know.” She rubbed big circles on her daughter’s back, her dressing gown getting more and more sodden as time went on.

“I want my daddy!”

The woman held Harper closer, rocking her back and forth, so the little girl was spared the look in her mother’s eyes. They stared into the darkness, unfocussed and yet hardened.

“He’s not coming back, Harper, I told you that. He’s just not.”

I don’t know how long the crying went on for. Grief had a weird timelessness about it, misery stretching on and on. Then a masculine voice came from beyond the door.

“Honey, are you coming back to bed?”

When the mother pressed a kiss to Harper’s forehead, I discovered just how hard it was to control dreams. I couldn’t keep her where she was, comforting her child.

I couldn’t step forward and tell him to piss off.

Instead, the woman pulled away from young Harper, even as the girl tried to claw her mother closer.

“Go back to sleep, Harper,” she said in a firm voice as she stood in the doorway. “Everything will be better in the morning.”

But it wasn’t, I was willing to bet. Child Harper curled up tightly in her bed, wrapping her limbs around herself, hugging her own body in the absence of a caring adult. She didn’t sleep, her breathing didn’t even out. Instead, she just lay there, wide eyed and alone in the darkness.

I couldn’t even stay with her. The sound of my alarm had me sitting up in bed. With a blink, I reached for my phone and turning the alarm off, only to find a message had come in overnight.

Remember, the fair is on tonight , Mum said. Come and bring Harper. Your dads are about ready to stage an intervention.

Maybe we had it all wrong. Maybe introducing Harper to our families was a smart thing. Her mother’s treatment of her had my teeth grinding together. Maybe if she saw she had a whole massive extended family network to step into, that might have her letting her guard down.

Only one way to find out.

I tapped out a quick message, inviting Harper to the fair the bear community was holding to raise money for the shifter school we had built.