Chapter 27
“Come here, omega.”
I was shaky, shivery, curling in on myself, until I felt him, then I wrapped my arms around him, holding him viciously tight. Tristan, my heart pulsed. Mate. That was it, what I needed, what eased the pain inside me, and he seemed to feel the same.
“You take the other side, I’ll take this one.”
“It’s going to be cramped, and we wouldn’t want to be pulled over by the police. We don’t have enough seatbelts.”
“Tight is good. Deep pressure is good. They’ve just turned themselves inside out, and now they have to put themselves back together. We need to put them back together.”
“Trust Len,” Jackson said. I glanced up, saw him watching us from the driver’s seat, but I couldn’t maintain eye contact. I stroked Tristan’s hair, felt his mouth trailing messily across my skin. “The man’s gotta fucking black belt in aftercare. If he reckons this will work, this will work.”
And it did, I guessed. We just clung harder and harder, the pressure of being wedged between two big bodies doing some of what he described, but the real deal happened when the car stopped. We both looked up, blinking owlishly as Jackson jumped out, rushing around to open doors.
“You take Tristan, I’ll take Kit,” Len said, scooping me up, and I found myself turning in his arms, nestling down there real fast.
“Shouldn’t I take Kit?” James replied. “Tristan and I haven’t…”
“And you’re not going to start until you do. If you can’t handle this?”
The challenge was obvious in Len’s deep voice.
“Of course I can handle this. I was thinking more—”
“Less thinking, more aftercare, now.”
And with that, we were swung inside, into somewhere warm, dark, and perfumed heavily with the woody scent of alpha.
“In here,” Len ordered.
We moved towards a big oversized couch, my body limp when I was lowered down onto it. Len had sat down first, then held me plastered against his body, all that hot alpha goodness radiating through me until I started to get fractious again.
“Tris…”
“Here, darling,” James said, sitting down next to us, Tris hanging in his arms. As soon as my mate caught scent of me, he was crawling over and raining kisses all over my skin, then working our bodies until I was sandwiched tight between him and Len. And the alpha? His arms went around us, encircling the two of us like it was no big thing. As I listened to the slow beat of Len’s heart and the rapid skitter of Tristan’s, I began to settle.
Almost.
I didn’t quite have everything I needed, the lack like a sore tooth my tongue couldn’t leave alone. I started to shift, little squeaks of sound coming from me, despite my best efforts.
“She needs you too.” The big, deep voice, it was so definite, and I heard someone moving as a result, James settling down beside us. “They both do.”
“Then they shall have me.”
The first breath I took when James put his arm around us was the deepest, and they just got deeper, a strange timeless quality setting in until I heard the whisper.
“Water is on the coffee table, snacks and sandwiches next to it. Want me to grab some blankets?”
I shifted, blindly searching for the source of the sound.
“Don’t worry about that, just get in here.”
“What? You can’t be—”
“You were there, you were a part of it, so get in here. Whatever’s going down, it can be sorted after we ground the omegas. What happened tonight? That’s not supposed to be possible. I’m flying blind here, and having all hands on deck, someone outside the usual alpha bullshit, would be really fucking helpful. I want to mark them, Jacks. Every muscle in my body, every fibre of my being, is screaming for me too.”
“So shouldn’t you?”