The gift left for me outside my bedroom door was a professional-grade watercolor paint set, several pads of watercolor paper, and a wooden folding easel. Smiling a little, I picked everything up, thinking that these treasures were surely from Ryan even though I didn’t see a note or anything indicating this. I hadn’t even told him that I used to be an artist in my former, pre-Chaos life, but since I’d told Jessie and Alicia the day before, I figured maybe Jessie had told Ryan when she’d been clearing the party plans with him and Eric. Maybe Ryan even specifically asked her to tell him more about me or something, I thought, a little thrilled by the thought that maybe he hadn’t been able to wait until we saw each other again to find out more about me.
After putting the art supplies away in my room, I went downstairs for breakfast and found Ryan and Eric already sitting up to the island with plates of leftovers from the night before.
Ryan looked up at me with a half-grin almost devastating in its sexiness. “Hey, beautiful.”
With my insides turning to complete mush, I gave him a smile in return, feeling a little bashful for some reason. “Hey, yourself.”
Soon, I felt my bashfulness disappear when Ryan pulled me onto his lap on his barstool, insisting that if I wanted some “dinner for breakfast,” the “price” was having to share a plate with him. Laughing, I said that was a price I was pretty sure I could afford, and soon, he was feeding me bites of casserole and chicken, saying that a woman as beautiful as I was shouldn’t ever have to lift a finger to do anything.
I wasn’t too sure about that, but I let him feed me anyway, and I fed him a few bites as well. After I’d fed him a bite of casserole, he pronounced me a “damned good cook” and said that he wouldn’t mind eating my cooking every single day. Picking up on some possible sexual innuendo in that statement and wanting to tease him a bit, I asked him if that was a fact.
He said that it was. “In fact, after I’ve eaten your cooking for a few days, I bet I’ll never want to eat any other woman’s cooking ever again. Not when I can lick your casserole dish clean.”
Completely unable to help myself, I burst into laughter. “Oh, my.”
Obviously enjoying my amusement, Ryan cracked a grin with his beautiful green eyes twinkling. “Did I go too over-the-top again?”
Laughing again, I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe just a bit.”
By the time I hopped onto Ryan’s lap again with a second plate of food for us to share, I’d kind of forgotten that Eric was even in the kitchen, sitting right across from us. He hadn’t even said good morning to me, not that he’d had much of a chance to, and now he just sat quietly eating his food and drinking his coffee, seeming just as unaware of me and Ryan as we were of him.
However, while Ryan and I continued feeding each other, joking and laughing all the while, Ryan began caressing my left hip with his free hand, then slowly moved this hand up to my left breast. At first, he cupped it, squeezing it a little, and then began slowly circling a few fingers in the center. With my nipple soon stiffening, I bit back a quiet noise of pleasure, and this was when Eric finally looked up from his plate, now seemingly very interested in what Ryan and I were doing.
Unexpectedly further turned on by his gaze, I leaned back into Ryan’s hard chest with another little whimper of pleasure. “That feels really good.”
After setting our shared fork on our plate, he brought his other hand to my right breast and began giving it the same nipple-stiffening treatment as the left. “How about this? How does this feel?”
Finding myself getting quickly worked up, almost as much by the look of naked lust now apparent in Eric’s eyes as by what Ryan was doing to my breasts, I moaned quietly. “That feels incredible. Please don’t stop.”
Ryan did, but just for a moment or two, just long enough to slide his hands beneath my shirt and bra to stimulate my nipples directly, making me moan again.
He then moved his mouth to my ear and spoke in a low, husky voice. “Sometime very soon, Eric and I want to take an entire night to make you moan like that. We hear there’s a party going on here at the house on Saturday night, and we’re thinking maybe then.”
At that moment, Ryan gave my right nipple a gentle, prolonged little pinch, applying just enough pressure to make me moan yet again, following this sound by breathing the word yes with my gaze locked on Eric’s face. It was now just slightly flushed, and his rate of breathing seemed to have increased too. Licking his lips, he held his fork suspended over his plate, clearly having found something more interesting to look at than food.
Further turned on by his obvious interest and arousal, I began wondering if maybe he and Ryan would be willing to just forget about waiting until Saturday and just take me upstairs right then. I knew they were still dealing with ever-worsening Creeper problems outside the community walls, but maybe their pack members could handle things for an hour, I figured. Or maybe even two or three.
However, just then, as if breaking some spell, a loud knock sounded on the front door.
I groaned, turning my gaze to Ryan. “What is it with you, me, and being interrupted by knocks on the door?”
This time, knocker turned out to be one of Ryan’s pack members, telling him that there was a physical fight going on between two of his other pack members.
“I think it’s over Darcy again, and they’re really ripping each other to shreds out there. You’d better come quick, Ryan.”
Apparently, from what I could gather, not all wolf shifters were as content to “share” a woman as Eric and Ryan and as Jessie’s two husbands seemed to be.
After giving me a quick peck on the lips, Ryan soon flew out the front door. Disappointed that out titillating breakfast had been cut short, I returned to the kitchen, which was where I suddenly realized something.
“Oh, dang it. I completely forgot to even thank him for the art supplies.”
I’d been speaking mostly to myself, but Eric looked up from his plate, frowning.
“How are you so sure that they were from him?”
Suddenly hot-faced, I stammered briefly. “Well…I guess I just figured…I mean, just based on my interactions with him so far, as opposed to my interactions with you….”
Feeling thoroughly stupid, I trailed off without finishing the thought.
Having finished most of the second helpings of food on his plate, Eric abruptly got up and began bringing his plate and coffee mug over to the sink without looking at me. “I changed our deal, Ellie…pretty drastically. I get that. But I’m not the cold, calculating monster that you seem to think I am. I did what I did for the good of my people, so that our community would be stronger.”
With his back turned toward me, he began loudly and forcefully scraping the remaining bits of food on his plate into a trash can beneath the sink, and I waited until he’d finished to speak.
“I haven’t been thinking that you’re a cold, calculating monster, Eric. Well, at least not ‘calculating’ and at least not a ‘monster.’ But you have to admit, you have been a little cold to me. That’s why I just thought that it must have been Ryan who left me the art supplies.”
Loading his plate, silverware, and mug into the dishwasher with his back still turned toward me, Eric didn’t say anything, and I spoke again.
“Thank you for them, by the way. That was really kind of you. Ever since the Chaos started, I’ve missed painting so much.”
Looking distinctly uncomfortable, he closed the dishwasher door and finally turned to face me. He didn’t, however, look me in the eyes, and instead focused his gaze somewhere just beyond my shoulder, moving a hand to massage the back of his neck while he did so.
“You’re very welcome. I had to go into Westin to scavenge a few tools from their hardware store yesterday, and I happened to spot the art things in a crate of odds-and-ends in the back room. I’d seen them before but just never took them, but then I remembered that you’d said you used to paint.”
Touched by the fact that he’d remembered that from breakfast the day before when I’d thought that he wasn’t even really paying any attention to me, I thanked him again. “That really was very kind of you. And, just for the record, I don’t see you as ‘cold’ anymore. I did at first, just because I…maybe I just got the wrong impression of you at first or something.”
Still wearing a slight frown and still avoiding my eyes, he raked a hand through his thick, dark hair. “For a really long time, my primary focus has been on protecting the people who have willingly put their lives in my hands, trusting me to keep them safe. Maybe that’s made me strangely hardhearted or closed-off or something; I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t blame you for thinking what you first thought about me.”
Having a very sudden thought and acting purely on impulse, I dashed across the kitchen, took Eric’s face in my hands, and planted a kiss on his cheek before I could give thought to what I was doing or change my mind. “There. That was just to show you that I’ve officially changed my mind about you, and I don’t think you’re ‘cold’ at all anymore.”
With his eyes a little wide, he just looked at me for a long moment, then lowered his mouth to mine and gave me a tender, lingering kiss before looking at my face again. “That was just to show you what I’ve wanted to do since the first second I saw you.”
I laughed a little, having another sudden thought. “Tell me the truth. Did you really brave the Creepers to go to the hardware store yesterday just because you suddenly needed more tools? Because it just seems like the hardware store is probably pretty picked-over by now.”
He cracked a smile, the first one I’d ever seen on his face. “I didn’t really need any tools. I just didn’t know how to tell you in person that I’m happy that you’ve come to this community, but then I thought of the art supplies, so…I suddenly decided that another circular saw was needed to repair a section of wall. My men thought this was kind of funny, since we already have eleven circular saws, but one good thing about being an alpha is that you’re not often questioned about anything.”
Eric smiled, and I smiled in return, thinking that he had the most handsome face I’d ever seen in my life. Just looking at it, with his eyes lighting up from within, I had the idea that it was maybe a face I could look at for the rest of my life and still get a wave of butterflies every time.
As much as he seemed to not want to, he soon left to lead his men out on patrol, although not without giving me another lingering kiss that sent a current of electricity racing through my body all the way down to my toes.
Despite my best efforts to stay up late that night, hoping to get to see him and Ryan again, I fell asleep before they got home, exhausted from helping other women in the community harvest apples from a small orchard to the north of all the houses but still within the walls. I also spent several hours in the dairy barn nearby, helping Alicia, Jessie, and another woman named Jen milk the cows and take them out to graze.
The following day was Friday, and because of the Creepers destroying part of one of the wooden sections of the wall, Eric and Ryan were again occupied all day. Then, immediately after this section of wall was repaired and reinforced with metal sheeting, another problem arose about seven in the evening, in the form of a gang of two dozen or so men, who attempted to break down the front gate with trucks, probably intending to pillage the community and take any women inside for their own.
They might have even thought they could take the entire community for their own, some people figured. Most of these men were fully human, apparently having not been affected by the chemical weapons that had turned some men into shifters in the early days of the Chaos; however, at least a half-dozen of the men in this group were wolf shifters, probably ones who’d gone “rogue” after being kicked out of various packs, Alicia told me. Wherever they’d come from, they proved to be especially strong and wily, and Ryan, Eric, and others were gone late into the night, trying to hunt them down in order to take them out so that they could never threaten the community again.
Finally, Saturday rolled around, although the cloudy, chilly day, the last day of September, wasn’t exactly ideal for an outdoor gathering. The community picnic went on nonetheless, with shifters rotating guard patrols frequently so that everyone got a chance to stop by, have some food, and meet any new neighbors that they hadn’t had the chance to meet yet. Being alphas and needing to supervise the guard patrols, Ryan and Eric couldn’t stay at the picnic very long; however, they were able to stay just long enough to convince me with little looks and smiles that they were both really looking forward to the party that night and what might come after.