I’m just getting out of the shower when Moira comes into the guest bathroom, face flushed, holding out my phone.

“I didn’t mean to look,” she says, grimacing.

I haven’t even grabbed a towel yet, so I’m standing here ass naked when she runs in. Generally speaking, I like any morning I wake up and get to see Moira first thing, particularly in the bathroom during or after a shower, but right now instead of focusing on the drops of water sliding down my toned abdomen, she’s avoiding looking at me altogether. What the hell did she see on my phone? There shouldn’t be anything that would cause her to react like that.

With a faint frown, I reach out and take it from her much smaller hand. As it transfers into my grasp, the screen lights up. I tap it one more time and it opens straight to a picture of a very naked Ashley splayed across a bed.

“Aw, Christ,” I mutter, turning my own head for a second before dragging the picture away. It shrinks and I see it’s attached to a text message that reads “Thinking of you.”

Instant dread. She’s fucking haunting me. Why won’t she just leave me alone and go away?

Well, that’s a dumb question. There are a lot of reasons; all of them can be found in my bank account or the appraisal report of my fucking house.

Moira starts chattering nervously again. “I didn’t mean to look. I didn’t read your messages back and forth or anything, your phone lit up and it was right next to mine. Sebastian left early this morning so I thought it might be him, but it was obviously your phone, not mine. I wasn’t snooping,” she swears.

Smiling faintly, I put the phone down on the marble counter next to the sink. “I didn’t think you were. Wouldn’t matter if you did. I don’t have anything to hide.”

She doesn’t respond, so she must not agree.

That’s silly. I hook an arm around her waist and drag her against my body. “There’s no back and forth to read. She sends me messages, I ignore them. Normally not messages like that. She must be getting desperate.”

“She has very large breasts,” Moira states.

“Mm hmm,” I murmur, reaching with my free hand for the comb on the counter and dragging it through my hair.

“I mean, I’ve seen them in clothing before, even a bathing suit, but somehow they look bigger without anything covering them. Like, whoa.”

I smile faintly. “I told her not to get them that big. Maybe they’re ‘like, whoa’ now, but according to the studies, they’re going to be a real backache later on.”

Moira’s nose wrinkles up. “Do you like big breasts?”

“I like them Moira-sized,” I inform her. “I just had a picture of a naked woman on my phone and I didn’t even look at her boobs. That should answer your question about my preferences.”

Still, she hesitates. Fidgets. Looks down at my bare nether regions. “We didn’t really talk extensively about this, but you don’t talk to other women, right? I mean, I know we’re sharing, but we’re sharing exclusively, right?”

“Absolutely.”

Now she looks relieved. “Okay. I was just making sure.”

I shake my head at my stingy little Moira. It’s fine that I have to share her, but she’s clearly not at all interested in sharing me. I like that.

Not that I can even imagine needing to supplement her with someone else. Ashley had a pretty healthy sex drive at our peak, but Moira’s is significantly more active. Beyond the rarest of occasions—vacations early in our relationship—Ashley and I would fuck a few nights a week. It dwindled down to once or twice a week, and then there were the times we went whole weeks without touching.

Whether because Seb trained her that way or it’s just her natural inclination, Moira expects to be fucked every night—some days, twice.

Not that I’m complaining, obviously. I just thought I would get less sex sharing with another man, not more. Moira’s sex drive was a very pleasant surprise.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” I tell her.

“Why don’t you just block her number?” she suggests. “If you don’t want to get messages from her, you don’t have to.”

That’s true. Seb made the same suggestion. “I will once the divorce goes through. Until then, I hate to cut off her only way of reaching me. If I do, maybe she gets more desperate. Maybe she shows up on my doorstep. At the club.” I shrug, putting the comb down and raking my fingers through to give my hair a good tousle. “I’d rather delete some text messages than see her face.”

Moira slinks around to the front of me, wrapping her arms around my neck and gazing up at me in a way that makes my heart beat faster. “I like watching you get ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm hmm.” She drags her lips along my neck, then lightly bites me.

My cock rises. She obviously feels it because her hand snakes down between my legs and she rubs until it’s painfully hard, straining against her hand like a well-trained pet.

Then she drops to her knees, takes my cock into that sweet mouth of hers, and really gets my morning off to a good start.

Once my baser needs are taken care of, Moira hauls her cute little ass downstairs and starts making me breakfast. She really is a one stop shop, that Moira. I would have never believed someone could be so content living her life, but I’ll be damned if she isn’t convincing.

With her gone, I finally manage to get dressed. Even though it still makes me feel faintly guilty that she waits on me hand and foot, I’m eager to see what she’s making me for breakfast. I like having breakfast with her either way, but since Seb is already gone this morning, I have her all to myself. That’s nice sometimes.

I wonder what she’ll do today. I have the morning clear, so I’m planning to stick around and find out. Technically I should probably leave since I’m trying to behave until this legal shit is taken care of. My car is already stashed in the garage though, so as long as no one is intending to come over and we stay at the house, I should be fine to stay with Moira for a bit.

“Perfect timing,” she announces, flashing me a smile over her shoulder as she plates our breakfast.

I watch her fondly as she puts my plate down, then takes her seat next to me. “Thank you, it looks delicious.”

Moira gives me a light-hearted wink. “I aim to please.”

“You certainly accomplish that,” I assure her, grabbing my fork. “Were you like this before Seb?”

“Like what?” she asks, looking up curiously.

“As… um…” I pause, not entirely sure how to word it. “Sexual?”

“Oh.” She flushes faintly, smiling and looking down at her plate of eggs. “No, not at all. I mean, I had sexual partners, but none as demanding as him. My first boyfriend had a healthy sexual appetite, but not on Sebastian’s level. My second boyfriend had a slow libido, I guess, because we almost never had sex. Or, I guess it could have been because he was too busy cheating on me to fuck me,” she adds, on a faint laugh. “Then after that dickweed was Sebastian, then you.”

Somehow I’m still faintly surprised to hear myself on her list of lovers—ridiculous, given I pounded her into the sofa and the mattress last night, so clearly I’ve made the cut.

“So, four lovers total.”

Moira nods, reaching for her orange juice and taking a sip. “That’s right.”

“No one-night-stands or anything in between?”

“Not really my style,” she answers. “If I’m going to have a sexual relationship with someone, I want to be able to get comfortable with them and open up. To be honest, had I known I would end up with Sebastian, I would’ve just waited for him. I didn’t think men like him existed in real life.”

“He would’ve enjoyed corrupting you,” I tell her, imagining her dressed up in lacy, virginal white, spread across his bed, waiting for him to pounce.

She nods, almost remorseful. “I would have enjoyed letting him. Plus, I would have liked if you two were the only men who’d ever been inside me.”

That shouldn’t be so hot, but fuck, it is. Now I sort of wish that, too.

“You’re the only two to find my G-spot, though,” she says, brightly. “So maybe we can just say the first two don’t count.”

I can’t help rolling my eyes. “Lazy assholes. We’ll definitely say they don’t count.”

Glancing across the table at me, she swallows a bite of her eggs and asks, “What about you?”

I grimace. “You don’t really want a number, right?”

Seeming to reconsider, she grimaces. “No, probably not. More than four?”

I start to laugh, then shift it to a cough when she levels an annoyed look at me. “Yes, slightly more than four.”

“How old were you the first time? That’s probably a safe one.”

“Fifteen.”

“That’s so young.”

I shrug. Didn’t seem young to me. “I think my fifteen and your fifteen were probably a lot different.”

“That’s true,” she murmurs, a little sadly.

I lift my coffee and take a sip, regarding her newly solemn expression. I can tell it makes her sad to think about my childhood, and I hate for Moira to be sad. “No reason to look like that,” I tell her, lightly.

“I just wish I could fix it. I know I can’t take away the pain, but I wish I could’ve at least been there to help you guys through it.”

I shake my head, dismissing the notion. “I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but hardship forms a man. Maybe I come from rough beginnings, but I’d rather go through all I went through and come out a full-grown man than be coddled and grow up to be the cheating little bitch who couldn’t even find your G-spot.”

At that, Moira grins. “True. No one wants to be like him.”

I shake my head. “He doesn’t get to touch you anymore and he incurred your sister’s wrath.

“Bad luck all around.”

“Not luck,” I disagree. “He made his own shitty choices and he paid for them. People who have it too easy in life don’t have to grow. They can rest on their laurels. Men like me and Seb, we learned early to hustle and make our own way. Hell, if I lived a stable life, who knows what kind of asshole I would have grown up to be.”

“I don’t think you could have ever grown up to be an asshole,” she puts in, loyally. “You’re noble and sweet and good.”

I don’t see what she sees when I look in the mirror, that’s for damn sure.

“That’s funny,” I tell her. “That’s not how I see myself, but it is how I see you. Always have. I thought you must have had either the worst possible life, or a completely fucking magical life to come out the way you did.”

Moira smiles faintly, watching her orange juice glass. “No in-between, huh?”

“None.”

“Well, it wasn’t magical,” she informs me. “I can’t say it was the worst, though. Yours was obviously worse than mine since you had no one.”

I shrug one shoulder. “Not necessarily. Sometimes it can be worse to be stuck with the wrong people.”

After a minute, she looks up at me. “Did you ever see the movie Matilda?”

“The girl who could move stuff with her mind, right? Liked to read a lot? Born to a family of morons? Yep, I saw it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have said the family of morons part, but I related to her more than anyone when I was a little girl. We had an old VHS copy of it and I would hide out in the basement and watch it. That’s actually why I started reading. No one in my family did, but I watched this movie with this little girl who didn’t fit into her family either, who got pushed around and made fun of by the people who should be taking care of her, and I thought, ‘hey, that’s me.’ So, Matilda didn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself. She went out and discovered the world on her own. She found her own place since she didn’t fit into the life she was dropped into.” She smiles now. “I loved that.”

“Did you follow in her footsteps?”

“Well, my path was a little less dramatic, but she started my journey. My house was always unpleasant and it made me feel depressed to be there, so as often as I could, I would go to the library after school. I would go on the computers there, peruse books and magazines. I expanded my own horizons. I learned about life outside of my own tiny window of experience. I learned to look at things from other points of view. I met new people—people more like me, sometimes. People completely different. It didn’t matter. I read everything that caught my interest. I fell for roguish heroes, befriended young women facing troubles I would never encounter in my lifetime, read beautiful poetry written by the saddest women, went on boring fishing trips with fictional old men. My world grew and grew, and no one even knew. I could live hundreds of lives in the space of a year, and everyone thought I was just boring old Moira.”

I reach across the table, catching her hand and twining our fingers together. “There’s nothing boring about you.”

Her eyes sparkle with mischief. “I know that, but it was my little secret.”

“I’m in on it now,” I inform her.

She grins. “That’s okay. You and Sebastian are allowed to know every inch of me, just no one else.”

It’s strange, hearing Moira describe a self-imposed prison of her own. Hers was nothing like ours, but it was a prison all the same. I’ve been there; I recognize her description of the invisible bars. “Did you have many friends?”

Shrugging like it’s insignificant, she says, “Not many. When I was young, I kept to myself. When I got older, the girls didn’t like me. The guys did. That made the girls like me even less.”

I nod my understanding. “It usually does.”

“I always had Gwen,” she offers. “Gwen didn’t fit in either, but as you may have noticed, she’s much more take-charge. Much more assertive. She was the lion and I was the lamb. I liked my peace and quiet. I avoided what I hated and surrounded myself with what I loved. Gwen fought tooth and nail and wore herself out. Our teen years were really hard for her. Lots of fighting, lots of tears. I tried to convince her of the virtues of pretending to roll over and play dead, but she didn’t have it in her.”

Since she’s been dancing around it, I ask, “What were your parents like?”

It takes her a minute to come up with an apt response. “Comfortable, I guess. Not for me, but with themselves, even when maybe they shouldn’t have been. You know how you said people who don’t struggle don’t have to experience growth? They just rest on their laurels? Well, my parents did have struggles, but they still never grew. They blamed everyone for everything instead of facing their own faults. I think you missed a crucial part. The struggle isn’t enough to change people. If there’s going to be any profound change, you have to accept responsibility. Otherwise you can fuck up your whole life and never learn a damn thing.” She meets my gaze plainly. “That’s what my parents were like.”

Her words are so much softer than my worldview, than Seb’s, but in a lot of ways, we believe the same things. It’s strange how we traveled such different paths and wound up in the same place.

“Is that what drew you to Seb?”

She cocks an eyebrow, not quite understanding.

“I’ve never met a more accountable man,” I state. “I’ve strived to be like that since I met him. I guess he shaped me a bit, in that way.”

Running her finger over my thumb, she says, “I think if we’re doing life right, we learn something from everyone who is important to us.”

It was partially trying to be accountable that landed me in the hot water I’m currently in, actually. I haven’t really talked to her about the problems popping up with my divorce, and I figure this isn’t the right time.

Luckily, she answers the question I asked a moment ago and saves me from considering it further. “I don’t think any one thing drew me to Sebastian, though. It was everything. His whole package. After spending my childhood fending for myself emotionally, I met this incredible, dominant man who gently wrested control from me and kept it in his pocket. He led me around like he already knew exactly where I wanted to go. It was a relief. He took so much pressure off me. He gave me the break I didn’t even know I needed. I’m human, I didn’t always make the best decisions, but he did. It was the strangest thing. He always makes the right call. I’ve never met someone and trusted them so quickly, but he was so capable, how could I not? It was like the entire world was his own personal yo-yo, and he wanted me.”

The look on her face now is exactly why I call them newlyweds, even after years together. She’s still so impressed by that lucky bastard; she gets hearts in her eyes just talking about him. I get it. He struck me as someone to watch as soon as we met, and he was little more than a kid, then. Now he’s a man full-grown, and I can see why he impresses the hell out of his wife.

Moira goes on. “As for what first drew me to you…”

“Seb,” I answer, since that’s easy to guess.

But she shakes her head. “No, that wasn’t it. That came after. First it was your strength. I could feel it. It rolls off of you in waves, the same way Sebastian’s dominance rolls off him. You have the look and feel of a man who could walk through a natural disaster carrying a person over each shoulder and never miss a step. He controls everything, but you… you don’t have to. You can survive anything. You’re smart and strong and capable in your own right, but more than that, you’re loyal. You could take on the world by yourself, but you choose to stick by Sebastian. You take care of your own. You love each other. You take care of one another. I love that.” Her smile warms and she squeezes my hand. “I love you. I love you both. I’m the luckiest woman in the world.”

A little smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. “Seb says that all the time, that he’s the luckiest guy in the world.”

“He is,” she says, her tone teasing. “He has us, doesn’t he? Now we’re the luckiest threesome in the world.”