Keiley was worth the sacrifice. There had never been another woman who could make him feel as she did. She completed him, and he hadn’t expected that. But from the moment he met her, he had realized there was something about her that warmed the cold reaches of his soul and eased the dark loneliness that had always been so much a part of him.
A man didn’t walk away from that, no matter the obstacles. Once he saw his future in a feminine gaze, he found a way to make all parts of that relationship work. And that was what he was doing. Finding a way to make it work for all of them.
Especially Keiley. Her natural desires and adventurous personality had been restrained. The gossip concerning her father’s embezzling from the company he worked for had destroyed her. At seventeen she had lost her home, her father had been imprisoned, and her mother had committed suicide.
There had been no one left for their community to punish except Keiley. They had watched her, gossiped about her lack of morals, predicted her downfall. If he dared let her know how desperately he needed to see her beneath Jethro now, it would terrify her. The rejection of it would be instant, and it would never falter.
He would have to steer her gently toward it. And once she grew to accept a need for those darker hungers that he saw in her eyes, then he would have to steer the relationship gently as well.
Jethro craved Keiley. He had seen her first and pushed her at Mac, despite his hunger for her. Mac knew the way to a woman’s heart, but he also knew his friend. Keiley had already stolen Jethro’s heart.
Not that Jethro would ever admit it or do anything about it. Mac knew that. A committed relationship was something that Jethro shied from as fiercely as Keiley shied from gossip.
His lips quirked at the thought. The woman he loved and the friend that was more than a brother to him. The three of them together would make a hell of a relationship. Once Mac managed to get the three of them together.
Getting there would be the hard part. Waiting would strain his patience to its limits. And if it never happened?
He would live with it. Ultimately it came down to Keiley. If she could accept it, if she could love Jethro with the same intensity that she loved Mac, then it would work.
If it didn’t? If he lost them both, it would destroy him.
Obstacles stood in his path. It wouldn’t be easy. But if his hunch was right, then the future that could stretch out before all three of them was one worth fighting for. It was worth risking.
Sharing his wife was considered a forbidden pleasure. It wasn’t called that without reason. It was breaking rules, stepping past boundaries, and facing his own fears. His fear of losing. His fear of becoming too controlling.
In the end, either they would all win or they would all lose. Mac was betting, he was praying, on the win.
1
SCOTLAND NECK, NORTH CAROLINA
THREE YEARS LATER
“Mac, did you see my comb?” Keiley called from the bathroom, her voice a little sharp with irritation and simmering with impatience.
“I have my own, Kei,” he reminded her in the same tone.
She moved from the bathroom, na**d as the day she was born, water still beading on her shoulders, her cap of dark hair mussed around her face as she began searching the tops of the dresser, the vanity, the bedside tables.
Delicate and fragile. That was his wife. At twenty-six she still captivated him, made him harder than hell, and made him think of fairies on a fantasy night. A sensual, sexy fairy sandwiched between two male bodies and gleaming with moisture.
He shook the image away, frustration surging through him as his control weakened further.
“It was just in there yesterday,” she muttered as Mac cinched his belt and considered uncinching it just as quickly.
If he moved fast enough, he could be undressed, have her flat on her back and his c**k sinking into the fist-tight heat between her thighs.
He was loosening his belt when her gaze sliced to him.
“Don’t even think about it.” Hazel eyes were still dark with lingering anger.
“I’m still in the doghouse, then?” Mac grinned as he fastened the belt before sitting down on the end of the bed to pull on the scarred work boots he wore on the farm.
He tended to indulge Keiley whenever he could, but he had to admit, there were times he was tempted to indulge more than just her feminine wiles. That glimmer of confrontation and defiance in her eyes often tempted him to indulge a dominance he had so far managed to keep strictly under control.
“However you want to consider it.” She bent down, her delightful little tush sticking up in the air as she looked beneath the bed.
“Keep flashing that ass at me and I’ll show you how short that stay in the doghouse is going to be.”