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Although being a dumbass was just a flaw Dane had in general.

  At least her stupidity had been limited to her personal life, not work. Work was going fine, quiet, uneventful in the grand scheme of things.

  After forcing herself out of the shower, she didn’t even return to the living room. She dried off and climbed into bed, naked, and set the TV timer so she could fall asleep with it on. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet.

  I’m fucking pitiful.

  Why did some people seem able to find the perfect partner for them, or at least have long-term relationships that weren’t doomed from the get-go?

  Why was she so broken and damaged that, no matter how hard she tried, all she picked were duds?

  Why, at thirty-six, had she not been able to find a decent guy?

  When she tried to take her time, take things slow, either the guy left, or proved himself an ass in short order. If she let things progress quickly, it imploded. If she let friends meet and sign off on the guy, it epically self-destructed. If she kept things to herself, it rapidly withered and died.

  If she tried not to have any preconceived notions and just see where things went without putting any expectations on the guy, he’d ghost and she’d never hear from him again.

  She eschewed bad boys in favor of academics, turned her back on smart guys in favor of gearheads. Gave up gearheads for party boys for nature lovers for beach bums for intellectuals for dart team dudes for stargazers.

  Nada.

  She couldn’t even blame it on bad parenting or her DNA, because her parents had been happily married for over forty years, and her two older sisters had each been married over a decade to their original husbands.

  This was all on her, and she’d be the first person to admit it.

  She was beginning to think maybe her perfect boyfriend took two C batteries, and a ménage with another boyfriend required a corkscrew on the side.

  If she wasn’t allergic to cats, she’d become a crazy cat lady and go to IKEA to get one of those damn cube thingies to let them sleep in.

  I can’t even do that right.

  Chapter Three

  Mel had waffled all Saturday morning on whether or not to go to the rope class. When Kim called her to ask if she was still going, Mel found herself saying yes. Kim offered to let her come to their place and ride with them, which would help insure she didn’t do something really fucking stupid, like leave with a guy she’d just met.

  Mel’s thoughts, not something Kim said in so many words.

  Although Mel wouldn’t blame her for thinking exactly that.

  Track record, yo.

  Instead of going dressed to participate, she opted to take clothes to change into, a sports bra and pair of long spandex shorts she sometimes wore to work out. Usually with a long T-shirt over them, but in this case, it’d give her some covering without being bulky and in the way.

  That way, she wasn’t committed to doing anything. If she got creeped out she wouldn’t feel guilty about saying no. She’d say sorry, she wasn’t dressed for it, and had only come to watch.

  It’d been Kim’s suggestion. Mel was beyond trying to figure this shit out on her own. Obviously, Kim had her life together in a way Mel didn’t.

  Time to own it, admit it, and try something different. Something new.

  Someone else’s ideas instead of her own.

  When she arrived, Kim opened the door and greeted her with a hug. “I’m glad you didn’t chicken out.”

  “I kinda did. And then didn’t. Several times.”

  “That’s normal, don’t worry. Come on in. Mel’s here,” she called out.

  Cole and Mason weren’t in the living room when they walked in. “They’re getting ready,” Kim told her. “They’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Okay, can I go ahead and ask something really rude and personal now and get it out of the way, because I’ve been dying to know.”

  Kim smiled. “Yes, they sleep with each other and with me.”

  That had been her question. “But I thought Cole was straight?”

  “It’s complicated. He’s bi. He’d always considered himself bi, even though he’d never admitted it to anyone before and everyone assumed he was straight. He’s not involved with anyone except me and Mason.”

  “But Mason’s gay?”

  “Homoflexible where I’m concerned, but yes, he considers himself gay.”

  Melanie was having a hard time keeping up. “What does that even mean? What’s the difference? How can he be gay and be involved with you?”

  “There is no practical difference, because even though he’s my Master, I’d kill him if he cheated on us. But in theory, while he’d been with women years ago, and obviously now me, he’s not attracted to other women sexually. What we have started out as a play relationship. We bonded in other ways before we took it to a sexual level. It wasn’t a case of I had a magic pussy and flipped some invisible bi switch in him. Some people might argue that he’s bisexual, but that’s not the label he puts on himself. Before we got involved, he dated men exclusively.”

  “You’d kill me, huh, pet?” Mason drawled from the hallway.

  Kim lifted her chin and sweetly smiled. “I’d gut you like a fish, Master.”

  Cole had walked up behind him. “Ooh, I’d listen to her, dude. I’ve seen her filet fish. She’s good at it.”

  “That goes for you, too,” Kim added.

  Cole snorted. “Yeah, well, notice I’m not exactly shoving either one of you into playing with others. I’m kind of territorial like that myself.”

  “And I have my hands full with both of you,” Mason said, smiling.

  Mason had returned to work several months earlier, following the attack that’d nearly killed him. An ex-boyfriend had hit Mason with his car. Mason still had pain, and moved with stiffness on some days, but unless you knew what had happened he appeared completely healthy.

  “Sorry.” Melanie felt her face heating. “I…I just wanted to know. I mean—”

  “It’s all right,” Mason assured her as he made his way over to the couch. “This is a whole new world for you. We’re on the complicated end of the spectrum in terms of poly groups.”

  “Poly?”

  “Polyamorous. Sometimes, it’s two guys sharing a woman. For example, brothers, or friends who are completely straight. Or sometimes two women sharing a guy. Or sometimes all three of them are involved with each other.”

  “They’re okay with that? People are okay sharing someone, even if they’re not involved with each other?”

  “Sure. Not everyone is rabidly jealous.” He shot a playful glare at Kim, who settled next to him on the couch.

  “I’m not rabidly jealous, Master. I’m rabidly territorial. There’s a really huge difference there.”

  “Anyway,” Mason continued. “I’m not saying it’s perfect or easy all the time. It’s not like in the books where you wave a magic wand and everyone magically gets all the time they want together, and there’s no jealousy. We have to communicate and make time for each other, paired off and together as a group. We squabble and bicker like anyone else, but we’re invested in making this work for the rest of our lives, so the work is worth it. We love each other.”

  “It sounds like the woman gets the best end of the deal.”

  “In some cases, she does. In cases like ours, where two or more of the men—”

  “Or more?”

  “We have one group of friends that makes our complicated dynamic look like Ozzie and Harriet by comparison. Three men and a woman, and they all share her and ended up together with each other, even though one of the men identified as straight and two as gay before they did that.”

  “I’m guessing they weren’t brothers?”

  The other three laughed. “No,” they all said.

  “Is everyone like that?” Not that having two guys was a problem for her. Great fantasy, actually. But she’d had hideous enough luck trying to find one guy. Finding two would be like landing on a unicorn stand
ing in a leprechaun’s pot of gold at the end of a rainbow while it shit winning Powerball tickets out its ass.

  The unicorn, not the leprechaun.

  “No. We know plenty of monogamous couples, gay and straight. But be prepared to keep an open mind. And while many of our friends are willing to talk openly about their dynamics, ask us first before plowing into those kinds of discussions.”

  “No problem.” Right now, she was still trying to process everything Kim had told her about her relationships with the men, and the men’s with each other.

  She wasn’t even sure she’d want to ask about more complicated relationships right then.

  All she wanted to do was find one nice, decent guy who wasn’t a sleaze, and who had half a brain and a kind, good heart. Who wasn’t a troll. She didn’t even care if he was well-off financially as long as he was honest and a hard worker and wasn’t blowing his money on fantasy football or online poker or bullshit like that.

  Just…a nice guy. Okay, a nice kinky guy. A nice kinky guy the good side of Dexter, but maybe the darker side of Charlie Brown.

  Somewhere in between.

  That was a wide swath of real estate. And if her friends couldn’t help her out, then she might need to start looking into hypoallergenic cats.

  And get an IKEA family discount card so she could pick up one of those cube things.

  * * * *

  Riding in the backseat with Kim, while Cole drove and Mason rode shotgun, Melanie kept replaying this decision in her mind. Logically, her brain screamed at her that she was crazy, nuts.

  Wrong.

  Then she tried to silence that voice, because to date it had a one-hundred-percent horrible track record.

  Obviously, it wasn’t functioning properly and shouldn’t be listened to.

  Out of order.

  If she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, she needed to do something different.

  This was definitely different.

  If it didn’t work out, okay, no harm, no foul. She tried.

  Somehow, she had a feeling this would be her best shot. There was a quiet, easy way about Cole and Mason that drew Melanie in. Confidence without swagger. Strength without bravado. They were men who obviously did things, they didn’t just talk about doing things. They lived and led by example.

  It was an example she wanted to follow, because Kim was the happiest Melanie could ever remember seeing her, not counting the obvious time while Mason was in the hospital.

  She’d never realized her friends were even into kinky stuff until then, when she’d heard about Kim and Cole’s “friend” and had dropped by to give Kim some support and visit with her.

  That’s when the truth had come out, without a lot of gory details, at that time.

  Those were slowly revealed to her later, once Mason was home, the three of them were living together in what had been Cole’s house, and Melanie saw how Kim doted upon Mason in more than a friend or even girlfriend sort of way. Which was weird, because Kim had been Cole’s girlfriend, but Cole was suddenly married to the guy.

  And obviously caring about and for Mason the way a husband would care about and for his spouse.

  This worked. It worked for them.

  Cole and Mason were, as far as she could tell, two great guys. Hell, if they could even help her find one damn guy a fraction as good and nice as those two, she’d be a happy woman.

  At this point, she wasn’t even so concerned about physical attraction. She’d done that, too, and had failed miserably. She wanted a guy she could connect with emotionally and mentally, talk to, trust.

  Trust was the biggest factor, because she’d been fucked over in many ways, all of them painful no matter how stupidly they’d been uncovered and the fact that she could laugh about many of them now.

  Even dumbass Dane just this week.

  Done.

  Moving on.

  Moving forward.

  She’d looked up the place, a club named Venture. They had a website and everything, and Kim and her men had assured Melanie that the place was fully legal, insured—all of that.

  Located in an industrial complex not far east of I-75, it was an unassuming unit with a plain-lettered sign over the door reading VENTURE.

  Not KINKY CLUB or SEXY FUN TIMES.

  There were probably two dozen cars parked in the lot, and considering that the other businesses were closed, she assumed the other people were there for the class, too.

  A couple, a man and a woman, walking toward the door looked like maybe they were going to a spin class. Well, the woman did, dressed in workout clothes, while the guy wore jeans and a T-shirt and carried a duffle bag slung over one shoulder.

  Not exactly what she’d pictured a Dom wearing.

  Then again, I apparently pictured a lot of things wrong in my life. Why would this be any different?

  “Ready?” Kim asked with a smile once Cole got them parked and shut off the car.

  Melanie nodded. “Ready.”

  Terrified, and hoping this was the right thing to do, but ready.

  More than ready.

  Chapter Four

  If Davis hadn’t learned to master and control his emotional outbursts by his early teens, that particular ride with his brother would have surely driven him to a full-blown nuclear meltdown.

  Fortunately for Kirby, Davis possessed far more self-control than Kirby usually gave him credit for.

  As he sat and tried to tune out Kirby’s repetitive list of points, he finally interrupted his brother.

  “You realize me having an eidetic memory means you’re only nervously restating things because you’re worried I’m going to fuck them up, right?”

  That shut Kirby up.

  Briefly.

  “Look, yes, I’m nervous.”

  “I won’t cock-block you. I’ve never cock-blocked you.”

  More irritated silence from Kirby.

  But that was likely because Kirby knew Davis was right.

  “Am I not the one who brought home Jennifer that night our junior year in college because she wanted to have a three-way with us?” Davis asked. “That lasted nearly two months, until the end of the term and she graduated.”

  He noticed that Kirby’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Yes,” Kirby muttered.

  “I introduced you to Shaelee.”

  Kirby let out an aggravated breath. “Yes, you did.”

  “And it’s not my fault you ended up breaking up with her six months later, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Those are the first two examples that come to mind. Should I continue?”

  “Look, I’m nervous. I’ve never done this before and you damn sure haven’t. I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to start there?”

  “You’re killing me, bro.”

  “If it’s going to make you that nervous, I can drop you off and go back home and return for you later.”

  “No. Let’s stick to the plan.”

  “Is that because you want to make things easy on me, or you’re worried I’ll be an hour late picking you up?”

  “Both.”

  Davis considered that answer for a moment. “Fair enough.” He fell silent, hoping Kirby would finally do the same.

  Yes, Davis understood his brother got nervous. So did he, in his own way, but he handled it differently than Kirby did. Processed it differently. Sometimes, he even visualized his emotions as colors, something his mother had helped him learn years ago, a technique she’d apparently picked up from a friend of hers who was also on the high end of the spectrum.

  Davis had thought it one more thing “wrong” until he’d admitted it to his mom when he was ten. She’d assured him it was a natural coping mechanism he’d developed on his own. That it might be helpful to explore those cues when trying to decipher his interactions with others. That was when she’d explained her friend had used a similar method with great success.


  Today, everything felt a light green. Lively. Slightly anticipatory. Not uncomfortable, because he was simply going to observe, and observing never really bothered him. There were no pressures on him to interact with people. He might learn something, and that was always interesting to him. Light green was never an emotion that caused him discomfort. It was the light green of fresh plant growth, of germination. Increasing his knowledge.

  He wasn’t a caricature. He was neither Sheldon Cooper nor Rain Man, and one of the few things that truly did irritate him was when his brother forgot that primary point and started treating him as something akin to a child.

  Although he did sometimes envy Kirby’s flexibility when it came to social situations.

  Apparently, interrupting Kirby had the desired effect, because his brother remained silent until they pulled into the parking lot. Kirby shifted his car into park but didn’t turn the engine off.

  An annoying tactic, because Kirby knew damn well Davis wouldn’t unbuckle his seat belt or get out until the car was shut off.

  Technically, that was their mother’s fault for inadvertently drilling that little nugget into his brain as a child, but oh, well.

  “I don’t want to reveal a lot of personal information about ourselves just yet to people we meet either, okay?”

  “All right, but why is that?”

  “Because I want to be cautious. Neither one of us have morality clauses in our work contracts, but I don’t exactly want to advertise what we’re doing.”

  “Do you honestly think I’d go into work Monday morning and just randomly announce to coworkers that I attended a BDSM club with my brother? Most of them probably think I step onto the mothership and get beamed out of the solar system every Friday evening just to arrive back on Earth Monday morning in time for the staff meeting.”

  Kirby stared at him for a moment before he burst out laughing.

  Good. Finally.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, dude, you’d think I’d have a handle on being your brother by now.”

  “You’ll get absolutely no argument from me about that. Now, are you going to shut the car off, or continue to hold me hostage all afternoon because you’re afraid your ‘weird’ brother will embarrass you?”