“Nothing will happen now,” Hunter told her. “Except I’m a foot man. Always have been. Rubbing your feet like this always makes my cock raging hard.”
Morgan looked down in the waters between his legs. She gave him a smile. “I’ve noticed,” she said.
“The only thing that’s about to happen now is that we’re going to make love to you again,” Drake assured her.
“You get to pick. The bed or the tub?” Hunter asked as he started kissing along her calves and up behind her knees.
“I don’t think I can make it all the way back to the bedroom with the way I feel.” Morgan had closed her eyes. The steam from the hot water and the hands of the men had taken her mind away to a fantasy land. All her worries had momentarily been suspended. “I want you both now in this tub. I can’t wait.”
The men obliged her.
* * * *
Hunter and Drake had to go to work and keep an eye on their business. Their time away from home gave Morgan a chance to work in her studio. At night when they came back, she always had a home-cooked meal waiting on the table for them.
Each night it was a new thrill when they would walk through the front door, a cold winter wind chasing inside with them. Morgan would meet them and give them both a welcome home kiss. They, in turn, would take her in their arms and ravage her with kisses of their own. Sometimes Hunter couldn’t wait and would sweep her in his arms and take her down the hall to the bedroom.
But on this night, they were both tired from a hard day spent helping their men plow out the snow from their lumberyard. They complimented her on her dinner, and the three settled into happy conversation around the dinner table.
Morgan had an agent now in Chicago handling her work. She would go out into the white-covered forest most days. Her new work was centered on winter landscapes of the mountains.
“How’s that new agent up in the city working out?” Drake asked her.
“He’s very good at what he does. He thinks he can sell the last group of paintings I sent to him.”
“I said you were going to get rich off your work,” Hunter boasted to her.
“I’ve been working on something new, and I’d like you two to see it.”
The guys looked at each other. Morgan normally refused to let them see her work before it was completed.
“This is different,” she told them. “I’m not going to sell this one.”
Morgan got up from the dinner table and reached out for her men. They each took one of her hands in theirs. “Come on. I’m going to show it to you.”
She led them down the hall and back to her studio.
“This is getting to be my favorite room of the house,” Hunter reminded her. The two of them had made love countless times in her studio, usually in very unique positions. Morgan smiled when she thought of all the forbidden things he had showed her in there, but she turned around to him and gave him a stern look that was meant to tell him to be serious.
The painting she was working on was of the three of them. She was painting it not from real life but from images in her mind. Her love of the men had inspired her to create this piece.
She was in the middle. The men were on each side of her and off to the front so she could look at them both at the same time. She hoped the expressions of the love they felt for one another were clear on the faces she had created. Hanging around her neck in the painting was the pendant the men had given her. She never took it off now, not in the shower or the bathtub. Never. It was a constant reminder to her of what she had built with them.
“It’s very good, Morgan.” Drake seemed to have a
but
in his tone.
Morgan looked over her shoulder at him. “Only what?”
Drake pointed to the center of the painting. “This spot is empty. It’s a real big area of the canvas.”
“I’m not sure what to put there.” She knew what he meant. There was a blank spot. Though she had tried to gloss it over with colors, it was an obvious missing piece nonetheless.
“Remember, this is coming out of my heart and not from any reality,” she reminded him. “I guess my heart was confused about how to fill up all that space.”
“I think it is wonderful.” Hunter grabbed her by her waist and lifted her up into the air. His arms were around her, a hand fondling her butt wickedly, making her squirm under his touch.
Their lips locked.
“It’s just something I felt like doing,” Morgan said after Hunter had put her down. “I wanted to portray our relationship because that’s such a big part of my other work. Even though that other work is just mountains and trees, in order to see the world as a beautiful place I always think about us.”
Now it was Drake’s turn to give her a long, sensuous kiss on the mouth. It was a promise of what he would do later that night to her in bed.
“Your work is a lot more entertaining than managing a lumberyard and handling labor disputes,” Drake told her.
“But it doesn’t pay me as much.”
“You don’t ever have to worry about money again,” Hunter assured her.
She turned off the light, laced fingers with both of them, and led them out of the studio. “Sorry, guys. Maybe I got ahead of myself in showing you that piece. Come to think of it, I don’t think it’s finished yet.”
Hunter went down the hall to take a shower and get cleaned up from his hard day. Drake took her in his arms and whispered his love in her ear and interrupted her from picking up the dishes off the table and washing them.
“What would you have liked to put in that empty space of your painting, sweetheart?”
Morgan tried to shoo him away so she could get the last of the dishes loaded in the washer. But his arms felt awfully good around her body, and she was losing the battle to resist.
“I don’t know what’s missing,” she told him. “Everything is almost perfect for this one little period in our lives. Possibly I’m just not good at painting people. I think I’ve always been better with inanimate objects.”
“You know Hunter and I will always be there for you?”
She reached up and brought him down to her lips. “I have complete confidence in you both.” She heard Hunter finish up in the shower. Wanting to lighten the mood, she patted Drake on his all-too-cute behind. “Now it’s your turn to go get cleaned up. When I’m finished with the dishes, I’ll meet the two of you out in the dining room for a game of poker.”
“Strip poker?”
“You’re on. I can’t wait to get the two of you naked again.”
Much later that night, they all ended up back in her bed, entwined in an erotic ball, writhing and sucking and loving until the wee hours of that cold winter night.
Morgan was well satisfied and very happy with the two men and with her life. If she could have, she would have just stopped the progress of time and stayed in that moment forever.
Morgan had slept late. She rolled over in bed. She was alone. Both the men had gone.
Next to her bed the sun was shining brightly in her window. It was March now, and there was still a thin residue of white outside to make everything radiant.
Hunter and Drake were going to drive into Wolf Creek and attend to business this morning. They said they wouldn’t be long. Then they were coming back home. When the snow cleared, they had promised to take her on a long hike in the woods, and it was sufficiently melted now for such an outing.
A rustling out in the living room told her they had made it back early.
She rubbed some sleep out of her eyes. She felt lazy for having overslept. She felt responsible to get up and make them breakfast or at the very least a hot cup of coffee. The sex had just been too good last night, and every joint in her body was stiff and wonderfully sore. Hours later, the afterglow still put a smile on her face.
Pushing back the covers, she sat up and stretched and yawned, life returning to her body. At the foot of the bed was the underwear she had been wearing last night before the men pulled it off her. Naughty thoughts filled her mind unbidden at the thought of what the men had done last night. Those guys were so wild in bed. She loved what they did to her and knew they would never get boring.
Jumping out of bed, she pulled on her bathrobe and cinched it around her waist to cover her nakedness and slipped her toes into her house shoes.
One of the guys was now out in the kitchen, rummaging in the refrigerator from the sound of things.
“Don’t mess up my kitchen!” she yelled down the hall to them. “I’m coming to get our breakfast.”
On her way out to them, she opened up the curtains in the living room to let the morning sun inside. It was going to truly be a beautiful day out, the kind of day that only living in the heart of the mountains could provide. She could hardly wait to go out hiking with the men later that afternoon. Maybe they could even stay out and watch the sun set and build a fire. It would be a nice trip.
“I said I’m going to get breakfast started,” she called out to scold whoever it was rummaging through her kitchen again.
When she got out to the kitchen, she stopped dead in her tracks. For a moment she saw only a stranger in front of her. Then she brought the man into focus, and she knew what was happening.
“Nathan?”
The man standing before her had a beard and long hair. He wore tattered clothes and looked as if he had not had a good meal in about a year. He looked wild and unkempt, but he was very definitely a man, and he was very definitely Nathan.
“Morgan.” He spoke her name in a whisper, as if speaking of a deity and not a person.
For a long, terrible moment she didn’t know what to do with him standing there. The house was his, after all. He had come home to it and to her.
For months all she had thought about was this moment, his homecoming and what it would be like. Now that it was finally here, she felt gripped with paralysis. This was not how she imagined their next meeting would be in her mind.
But her heart went out to him. The look on his face told her he had been through hell. It was like he was a soldier returning home from fighting his own private war. Words failed her, and she could neither speak nor move. In a nervous gesture, she clasped her bathrobe more tightly around her waist.
She stared at his eyes, his wild, hurt-filled eyes.
“Do you know what today is?” he asked her in a husky voice grown hoarse from long lack of use.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Her gut was churning with all sorts of powerful mixed emotions, and she found it difficult to even stand up. But she shook her head, not understanding what he was talking about.
“It’s been a year.” He took a tentative step toward her. She felt like backing away but held her ground. This was Nathan. “One year ago today you made me promise to be home to you in a year. Do you remember that?”
“I remember.” Morgan’s voice was far away. Tears streamed her cheeks as the pain of the memory hit.
“I’ve spent the last year trying to fulfill that promise to you, and today I have kept it.” He reached an uncertain hand out to cup her face. His flesh smelled of the forest and the mountains.
Morgan was frozen in place. She allowed him to bring her up into his arms and place an adoring kiss on her forehead.
“You’re all I’ve thought about for the last year, Morgan. You’re what brought me back. I love you with everything I have.”
Nathan was back with her. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight unable to believe it, unable to grasp what came next.
* * * *
Nathan made a fire and stoked it with a log. His favorite chair was in front of the hearth, and he sat down, happy to be back in his home. The big bay window of the living room looked out onto the panorama of the mountains. He had lived out there for the last year.
His wolf had served him well. The ability to shift into the wolf and stay had allowed his human body to recover from the disease. Now he was weak, but he was healed.
Morgan brought him in a hot cup of coffee and sat it on the table next to him. Nothing had ever tasted or smelled so good. Then he looked across at where Morgan had taken a seat. His woman was still there waiting for him. She was the best woman any man could ever hope for. She made everything in this house a home that was special.
“I found out you were sick.” She seemed so sad, almost removed from the conversation. It had been a long time. Nathan knew she must have suffered a lot while he was gone. Even though he knew it was irrational and there was nothing he could have done to prevent it, he blamed himself for what she had been through. But time would heal the distance between them, just as it had healed his body.
“You didn’t tell me you were sick and that you might die,” she persisted.
“I’m sorry.” He looked down onto his lap, feeling guilty. “I made a decision to not tell you because I didn’t want you to worry. There was nothing you could have done for me.” He looked back up at her and wanted to take her in his arms. However, he sensed it was better if he waited. “You did everything I asked of you. You waited for me. Thank you, Morgan.”
He reached across to her. There was a moment of hesitation on her part, but then she took his hand in hers. Their fingers entwined. The comfort he got from this single touch went a long way to heal the weakness that still gripped his body.