For years he and Jethro had trained together, worked together, and shared their women together.
Until Mac met Keiley.
“She’s heard the rumors.” Mac sipped at his drink, wishing he could just toss it back and let the fiery burn blaze through the regret in his gut.
“And?”
“And I told her it was in the past.” He looked around the room again before meeting Jethro’s gaze. “It’s going to stay in the past. For now.”
Keiley had come to his bed a virgin. Trusting. Innocent. She would never understand her husband’s need to see another man cover her, pumping inside her, nor, he believed, would she be able to handle a ménage that would include a man she didn’t love.
Keiley would have to love any man she took into her bed, even as a third. But he knew the curiosity was there. He had seen it in the flash of heat in her eyes as she questioned him. But Mac knew that right now, introducing her into the idea of a ménage or the ménage relationship he envisioned wasn’t something Keiley could accept.
Perhaps later. He was counting on later. His new wife was adventurous, fiery, and curious as hell. But her youth held her back, whereas with other women it lent freedom. Keiley’s past experience with gossip, and the destruction that came with it, wouldn’t allow for the sexual games and the eventual bond Mac intended to see her forge with himself and Jethro.
Until his wife was more settled, until maturity gained her the edge she would need to overcome her fears, that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t mean Mac was going to forget about it. It just meant that for the time being his plans would have to wait.
Moving her back to his hometown would help. The ways of navigating small towns and gossip was something Keiley needed to understand. A ménage wasn’t tantamount to the hell she had endured as a child. But until she learned low to handle the gossip, his hungers and Jethro’s would have to wait.
“Doesn’t work that way, Mac,” Jethro sighed then.
“I can make it work.” He was confident of that. “I made this damned job work, I can make anything work.”
Jethro’s jaw clenched, and for a moment, bleak, furious pain and impatience sparkled in the blue depths before it was gone, iced over, and the agent he had become returned.
“Speaking of the job, were you any closer to tracking down that Internet stalker’s whereabouts? The director was going nuts over that when I left the office.”
Mac shook his head allowing the change of subject. “I turned the case over to Dell Roberts. He knows computers better than I do, and he’s just finished up a major case. He has the time to deal with it. I’ll help him online if he needs it.”
The case was drawing a lot of fire. The stalker found his victims online, researched them, acquired their personal information, and spent months terrorizing them. In the latest case, he had finally attacked and nearly killed his victim. He was escalating dangerously.
“I’m going to miss you, my friend.” Jethro lifted his drink in a toast. “To the good ol’ days.”
“To the future,” Mac amended, tipping his glass to Jethro’s, then bringing it to his lips before staring around the room once again.
He had drunk here, laughed here, found friends here. Hell, he had even f**ked on most of the tables in the room here. Occasionally a married member had petitioned to allow his wife in long enough to get to know the members he had short-listed to act as a third. Many of those instances had ended up with the ménage playing out before the couple left the club.
There had been two female members at one time. One had married and dropped out of membership, though her husband still occasionally brought home a friend.
That relationship was working out much better than Mac had ever thought it would. Most of the married men in the club had found a way to balance those dark hungers with the women they loved.
Just as most of them had learned their hungers through the darkness of pasts they rarely spoke of, or lives lived within the shadowed corners of deceit and lies.
They all had their reasons for the hungers that tormented them, just as Mac did. But for him, the thought of his wife’s happiness meant more to him than satisfying the shadowed specter that lurked beneath his surface.
“Keep in touch, buddy,” Jethro said as he rose to his feet. “It won’t be the same around here without you.”
“I’m just a phone call away.” Mac grinned. “Call anytime.”
But don’t visit. Not for a while. Not until his wife could handle the thought of another man in her life.
Jethro nodded, but his gaze was knowing, haunted. He knew what Mac meant.
As his friend walked away, Mac sat back in his chair, gazed around again, and tried to let the atmosphere seep inside him.
A frown tugged at his brow, though. He’d have to remember to remind Dell to requestion the latest victim and her husband. There was something that kept nagging at him about her statement. Something she had left out. Something he knew he should have asked her, but he couldn’t think of what.
He would call Dell from the house tonight, and then put it behind him. Within the next four weeks he would be out of Virginia and back in Scotland Neck. North Carolina was far enough away from his old friends and his hungers to allow him to contain them for a while.