“Mitch,” I said.
“What?”
“Get in the bed.”
“Is that an invitation or an order?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters for the story I’ll tell later.”
I said nothing. The nothing was deliberate. The kind of nothing that said I had exhausted my word ration for the evening and what came next would be conducted in a language that required no vocabulary.
Mitch grinned. I heard it more than saw it—the sound of Mitch Pruitt being extremely pleased with himself—and then hewas crossing the room, boots off somewhere between the door and the bed, and the mattress dipped under his weight as he climbed in on Caleb’s other side.
What followed was the three of us in a bed that was, objectively, exactly the right size. No feet hanging off the edge. No elbows in ribs that hadn’t been negotiated. Just heat and weight and months of shared tension finally given room to breathe without interruption.
My hands found Caleb’s skin under his t-shirt. Warm. Softer than three months ago, the muscle giving way to something rounder where the twins had taken up residence, and I handled him the way I handled everything that mattered—deliberately, gently, with both hands aware of what they were holding. One palm flat against the curve of his belly, feeling the solid warmth of it, and Caleb arched into the touch with a sound that made my chest do something complicated.
Mitch was not tentative. His mouth found the nape of my neck, teeth grazing the skin there with the particular confidence of a man who knew exactly what that did to me, and his hand slid down my chest to where Caleb’s hand already was, and the coordination of it—three bodies finding a rhythm that shouldn’t have worked and did—short-circuited something in my nervous system that had been holding the line since Nebraska.
Caleb’s breath came fast against my collarbone. His fingers twisted in my shirt, and I kissed him through it, thorough and patient, the way Caleb needed to be kissed—slow enough to feel each second, deliberate enough to mean it.
Behind me, Mitch’s hand worked down the length of my spine with the precision of a man who had been mapping this territory for months and had the topography memorized.
For the first time in a career built on going it alone, I conducted no threat assessment. No perimeter sweep. No calculation of exit strategies or entrance wounds or theparticular arithmetic of risk that had kept me functional for twenty years.
I was simply here. In a bed. Between two men who loved me. Who I loved. Their hands on my skin, my hands on theirs, and the coordination of it was so perfect it bordered on offensive.
We moved together. Caleb under me, warm and yielding, his legs around my hips with a strength that belied the softness of everything else. Mitch behind me, driving into me with the patience of a man who had been waiting for this and was determined to make it count.
The bed held. The wood frame took our weight without complaint, and somewhere in the dark Caleb made a sound that I filed under a category that had no name because names were insufficient.
I came first. My whole body pulling tight, hips driving into Caleb hard, and the warmth of him clenching around me drew a sound out of me that I hadn’t planned on having access to.
Caleb followed, shaking, his hand fisted in the sheets, and behind us Mitch drove through both our releases with the focused determination of a man who had orchestrated this entire evening and was extremely pleased with how it had turned out.
We collapsed. Boneless. Sprawled across the bed in an arrangement that defied several laws of physics but felt exactly right anyway. Me in the middle. Caleb tucked against my side, one hand flat on my chest, his breathing still uneven. Mitch on my other flank, his arm thrown across my waist, warm and heavy and entirely present.
The room held the smell of sex and pine soap and whatever Caleb had baked, and none of those things apologized for taking up space.
“The pantry,” Caleb said. His voice was dreamy, satisfied, the tone of a man who had won every pantry argument and wasextremely pleased about it. “The shelves are deep enough for a winter’s dry goods. Already organized by category.”
“That’s thorough,” I said.
“It’s efficient.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Caleb hummed. The sound was pleased. Warm. His thumb traced small circles against my sternum, and I watched the ceiling and did not examine the particular warmth that lived behind my ribs when Caleb Pruitt discussed pantry organization with the gravity most men reserved for tactical briefings.
“Your office has the east window,” Caleb said. “Like we talked about. The desk is already there. Mitch installed it last week.”
I turned my head. Looked at Mitch over my shoulder. “You put my desk in before I said I was coming back.”
Mitch’s arm tightened across my waist. “We put your desk in because you were always coming back. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“You didn’t know I was coming back.”
