Then Reed, who can barely hold still. I reach down and take him in my hand, hard and already slick at the tip, and I stroke him, slow. His breath punches out of him. His hand finds the place where Bram and I are joined and two of his fingers slide up to my clit, working it in tight circles in time with the Ash’s and Bram’s cocks moving in me.
All four of us are moving together now in one rhythm.
It doesn’t take long for the sheer friction of all three of them to send me hurtling toward the edge. I look down at Reed, my hand tightening on his length. “Reed. Now. Do it now.”
He leans down and buries his teeth low on my collarbone. The third weight drops into place. Fierce. Unrelenting. A wildfire that would burn the whole world flat before it ever let me get cold.
Bram’s knot pulses and floods me deep. Ash shudders and spills with a curse against my shoulder. Reed comes hot over my fingers with a groan that has my name buried in the middle of it.
“I’ll always love you, Luna,” Reed pants against my collarbone, his hands gripping my waist tightly, anchoring himself to me.
“And I’ll always love you,” I whisper back as I turn my head slightly to press a weak, heavy kiss to the curve of Bram’s jaw, then to Ash’s knuckles where they rest against my chest. “All of you. My alphas.”
It’s a long time before the knots finally ease enough to let us separate, and not one of them makes a move to hurry it along. We stay tied and tangled, breathing in a quiet moment that feels out of time, before we all slide together into a peaceful sleep.
46
Luna
- 15 days later
I have become exceptionally good at bottle inventory tracking. But then again, given my background as a librarian, I guess it shouldn’t be a shock.
“Eight forty,” I call out, pressing the last sticker square on the last bottle and sliding it down the bench. “Eight hundred and forty bottles of Hollow Gold, all labeled and straight.”
“I feel guilty you’re enjoying this much so much,” Reed calls out from under the bottling line, where he’s currently losing a ten-minute argument with a jammed conveyor. “We must really be depriving you of healthier hobbies.”
“It’s just one of the rare things in my life where the totals are actually going up instead of down,” I shoot back, grinning. “Alphas excluded, of course.”
“So I’m right, we reallyaredepriving you.” A sharp metal clunk echoes from the machine, and the line shudders back into motion with a triumphant wheeze. “I promise we’ll show you a much better time once we get our hands on that two million dollars.”
I mean... I actually, honestly like the count. We’re almost through the pressing now, which is good news, but it comes with a catch. Because the pressing, I’ve learned, was never the part that ate up the calendar. It’s the weeks that follow, while the cider sits in the dark and conditions, before a single bottle can actually go out the door. So having a high bottle count doesn’t mean we get to coast now. But that’s fine with me, because I like being out here in the cider barn anyway.
“You’re doing the math face again,” Ash says. He’s leaning in the big doorway with the light behind him, sleeves rolled, looking too expensive for the room the way he always does. He’s got the manifest in one hand and that half-smile that still makes me melt. “Want to tell the room, or keep gloating privately?”
“We’re a hundred and sixty short and ahead,” I say. “I’m allowed to gloat.”
The bond gives me a warm pull. They’re all peaceful, happy. I push a little contentment back down it and feel it land.
“Knock knock.” Jenna comes in sideways with a thermos under one arm and a tin held out in both hands. “Back with the doughnut order.”
“You rock, Jen,” Reed says, surfacing from the machine and wiping a smudge of grease from his jaw onto his shoulder,
Bram comes over from the pallet he’s been loading. “Nuh-uh. You will not touch my doughnuts with those hands.”
Reed touches them with those hands. Bram swats him with a rag, though he’s smiling.
Then Jenna sets the tin by my clipboard and pours me a cap of coffee, because she’s probably clocked that I forget to drink. For a second it’s just the two of us at the end of the bench, the line clattering, the alphas arguing about something behind us.
“You look good,” Jenna says. “Quite the contrast with the first time we met,” she smiles, bumping my shoulder with hers.
I look around. The bottles, the three of them. “Yeah,” I say. “I think this place is starting to feel like a second home.” Which is the strange part, after everything. Derek’s still out there somewhere, still not picked up, even with a case against him. A few weeks ago, that would have owned my nights. Now it barely reaches me as I feel completely safe surrounded by my alphas.
Reed’s pager goes off on his belt, a flat electronic shriek, and my heart skips before my brain can catch it.
“Sorry,” he says, probably feeling my surprise through the bond. He thumbs the pager quiet and squints at it. “It’s just a small grass fire by a guardrail. My colleagues have got it.”
***
