Three Shifters for Sarah (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (4 page)

Sarah sat up in bed and continued to watch them undress. Their sinewy muscles were lit blue in the bright hue of the moonlight, and the three of them were truly a spectacular sight to see dressed down to their birthday suits.

Worry flitted through her mind as she thought perhaps the other men were getting naked for her. Would they both try and enter the bunkhouse and have sex with her? Ryan had honestly told her they wanted her, and though the idea of making love to the two cowboys was not disturbing, having them both come to her bed right now so soon after she’d just had Ryan was too much.

That worry was quickly put to rest. As the cowboys kicked out of their jeans they headed out onto the prairie and not back to her in the bunkhouse. But the mystery deepened. Where in the hell would they all three be going out in the wilds buck naked at this time of the night?

Then the scariest thing Sarah had ever seen in her life took place.

Ryan led the way, and he dropped down onto his hands and knees as if overcome with a seizure. Except that when he landed on the ground, his form had changed. It had contorted in what looked to be a rather painful spasm and elongated. Ryan wasn’t a man anymore. Ryan had disappeared. In his place a large black wolf stood, its snout held high to the moon.

Next the other cowboys changed form. It happened in the blink of an eye. Where three gorgeous nude cowboys had stood a second before, now three monstrous-looking wolfs kept vigil.

The leader of the wolf pack let out a long, mournful howl, and the other two answered with bellows of their own. They set out running through the prairie grass together and were soon just shadows sweeping through the night.

Sarah stood up from the bunk, her heart racing from an unreasoning fear.

“Oh my God,” she sobbed, and tears began streaming down from her eyes.

In a panic she realized she was still naked and her eyes searched the corners of the room for a hint as to where her errantly discarded wardrobe might be located. When at first she couldn’t find a trace of them, she wanted to scream in frustration. Initially she only spied her cowgirl boots sitting obediently at the foot of the bunk, and the image of her running naked across the fields back to her cabin wearing only those boots conjured up a near hysterical laugh.

At last, on her hands and knees she spotted her clothes under the bunk where they had been unceremoniously tossed aside in her capricious rush to get fucked earlier in the evening.

Setting a record time for getting her clothes pulled on albeit in a very haphazard fashion, she opened the front door to the bunkhouse and stepped cautiously into the dark. The silence of predawn hung heavy across the plains. After delaying on the porch for a minute to make sure the coast was clear, she took off running into the night.

Not bothering to take the horse that had brought her out here, she went barreling over the scrub brush and tall prairie weeds. Her heart was in her throat, and sweat was pouring from her brow by the time she ran the mile and a half back to her guest cabin at the ranch.

When she slammed the door behind her and was back in the safety of her own cabin, she finally let out a relieved sigh. Feeling her ire rise for ever having gotten involved with the cowboys, her resolve boiled over.

Outside her rented car was parked and waiting. Hurriedly packing she left the ranch behind forever to fly back to New York a day early. She never wanted to see those three cowboys ever again.

LaGuardia airport seemed a sad, dreary place to Sarah. Dead tired by the time her flight arrived at 4:00 p.m. eastern time that Saturday afternoon, she climbed on board one of the motorized walkways between terminals and let it move her and her luggage forward as more energized travelers ran past her.

Outside the terminal there was smog, there was traffic noise, there were crowds and confusion. Like it or not she was back in The Big Apple a full day early from her aborted vacation.

She retreated inside the first taxi she could find and gave the driver the address of her apartment.

The elevator of her building was out again, go figure, and so toting her luggage behind her, she mounted the stairs wearily. Finally she made it to her ninth-floor apartment, got inside, and shut out the world behind her. She let the handle of her bag drop to the floor and leaned against the door. It felt good to be home.

She should have called someone. She had friends and family that would want to know she was back in town. However, she was just too tired and rather depressed from the letdown as her adventure out west came to an end, and in the morning would make all the necessary calls.

That night she luxuriated under an hour-long hot shower that steamed her tiny bathroom and threatened to warp the paint on the wall. She caught herself, her hand gliding down her wet body and between her thighs, her fingers toying with her clit. With an effort of will she forced herself to stop, but thoughts of the night before out on the prairie with Ryan came back to her mind unbidden.

The sex had been so intense, the best ever. Two climaxes had asserted themselves inside her pussy during the same sexual coupling for the first time in her life. Up to that point she didn’t really know quite how good sex could be with the right partner, and it would be a long time, perhaps never, before she purged that experience out of her memory.

But Ryan hadn’t been the right partner, she reminded herself. There was something wrong with him. He was a monster, as close to a real-life monster as she ever hoped to see.

Then again maybe the problem lay with her. Perhaps she had just imagined what she saw out on the prairie last night. If so, then she had finally lost her mind. She was ready for a padded cell, and they could throw away the key.

Stepping over the shower stall, she shivered just out from under the steamy spray. Her big, white, fluffy towel was of comfort to her as she thoroughly dried off her body, wiped steam off the bathroom mirror, and looked at her reflection.

One thing was for certain. She hadn’t imagined the love hickey Ryan had given her last night. There was now an angry mark on her shoulder. It looked like the bastard had drawn blood with those overly sharp teeth of his.

The muscle was tender to the touch as she gently massaged it with her fingers. It had been sore all day while she traveled home, but she had been too tired to concentrate on the painful irritation.

Her good old bath robe was hanging behind her bathroom door where she always placed it. The robe had been left by its lonesome all week while she played out west on the Circle T guest ranch. Her cabin at the ranch had a huge and very comfortable robe that she had basked in while she was there, but it was good to get back to the familiar feel of her own robe’s fabric tonight.

Since the mark on her shoulder kind of looked serious, she took out a bottle of antiseptic from the medicine cabinet behind her mirror and applied a small dab to the troubled black-and-blue area on her skin.

The rest of her body actually looked pretty good. She had gotten sun and plenty of exercise and good food on her vacation. The sweet romance she had started with the cowboys had been like a much needed breath of fresh air, not to say anything of the out-of-this-world sex.

If only, Sarah thought. If only she hadn’t seen those men turn into God only knew what last night, her whole experience out west would have been one of the most satisfactory of her entire life. If only…

Her shower finished, Sarah walked back into the other room of her small efficiency. After a week spent pampering herself in Montana and being pampered by the cowboys, this place suddenly didn’t seem as much like her home on her first night back in the city. Her cabin at the Circle T had literally been four times bigger than her apartment here was. Of course that had been on the boundless prairie of the west and her place here was scrunched in between two other efficiencies, an alley’s brick wall, and a fire escape.

Briefly she allowed dumb bleeding-heart nostalgia to overtake her, and she stared aimlessly out her single window at the dark shadows of the metal fire stairs leading down to the cement below. Last night at this time there had been mountains in the distance, a clear view of the Milky Way overhead, and three sweet cowboys surrounding her with adoring eyes.

A siren from an emergency vehicle speeding past outside brought her mind out of its funk, and she turned away from the window.

What a difference twenty-four hours could make. But she knew in time she would recover and forget the Circle T and its three special guys.

* * * *

“You’re a million miles away,” Ruth told Sarah over crab rangoon.

“What?” Sarah knew she had spaced off. Ruth had taken her to their favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch. She was her best friend. The two of them worked together, and she had been on the top of Sarah’s list to call that Sunday morning to alert that she was back early from her vacation.

It finally came to Sarah what Ruth had been asking. “No,” she responded. “My mind is only about two thousand miles away in Montana.”

“So are you going to let me in on why you came back a day early?”

“No.” Sarah was honest and could always speak freely with her friend. “I don’t understand it myself yet. When I figure it out I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

“Well did you at least have a good time while you were there?”

Sarah had to think about it for a moment. A couple of cars got into a honking match out on the street as Sunday afternoon traffic swirled by the window reminding her that she was very much back in New York. Montana had been such a contrast. Beautiful. Wonderful. Crazy.

“Yes, I had a very good time while it lasted.” Sarah found herself smiling at the memories.

Ruth was direct with her next question. “Did you meet a guy out there?”

“I met three of them.”

Ruth’s eyes went wide.

“They were the owners of the ranch I stayed at.”

“Were they cowboys?”

“As a matter of fact they were.”

“Were they cute?”

“Oh yes.” In spite of how tired she still felt and the post-travel blues, Sarah caught another smile curling her lips.

“Are you going to fill me in?”

Sarah shook her head that she was not. Of course there was the incredible sex with Ryan that made her pussy weep every time the images reemerged in her mind, but that was too much even to share with Ruth.

“Are you at least going to friend these cowboys on Facebook?”

“I don’t think so.” This reminded her that she never had a chance to get the contact information from the men or give them hers. It was just as well because now all ties were severed, but it still stung to realize she had no way to ever get in touch with them again.

“Do you at least have some pictures for me to drool over?”

“Nope. Didn’t get any of those either.” Sarah looked out the window at the Sunday afternoon foot traffic. New Yorkers were out finishing their weekend shopping, looking for a bargain and trying to stay cool in the summer heat. The Circle T was such a foreign place compared to the rush of all those people outside, and the two thousand miles that separated it from here seemed too far to contemplate. She would never see her three cowboys again, and it was almost as if the whole week with them had been a fantasy.

The waiter served them platters of Mongolian beef and Sichuan chicken. Sarah took a sip of her iced tea as she waited for the steaming plates to cool. This was familiar territory. She was back in her town enjoying some delicious food. In a way it felt good to be back, yet still her heart was not in it, and she knew the reason for that was because she had left it behind in Montana.

“Oh my God!” Ruth shouted over the din of the crowded restaurant.

Sarah had been caught daydreaming again and looked up at her friend from her melancholy.

“You got a tattoo while you were gone?”

Self-consciously Sarah pulled up the bands of her shoulder-skimming knit top. “No. I absolutely did not get a tattoo. You know I don’t like them.”

“What’s that on your shoulder you’re trying not so successfully to hide?”

Sarah massaged the sore tendons. “It’s just a bite.”

“Honey, that’s the weirdest bite I’ve ever seen. It’s shaped like a star.”

Sarah tried to look down her neck at the offending place. It was just out of reach of her vision, so she would have to take her friend’s word, but this morning when she had examined it in her bathroom mirror, she knew it did look awfully strange.

She tried laughing it off. “What can I say? The cowboy who was my special friend out there was a biter.”

“That’s pretty sophomoric, don’t you think?”

“It might seem like that, but believe me there was nothing sophomoric about this guy.” Another wistful smile played over Sarah’s features, and she found her mind drifting across the country to the bliss she had found in Montana.

“Are you sure this guy didn’t have rabies?”

“Actually, I wasn’t sure about anything with him. That’s one of the reasons I decided to call it off a day early and quit while I was ahead.”

Playing the mother hen, Ruth was leaning over the table and shoving down the white shoulder band of Sarah’s top so she could take a better look at the damaged skin and make clucking noises with her tongue.