“There wasn’t time. Besides, it was totally worth it. You should have seen how hot you looked, back arched and whining as I fucked that handle into your needy little hole.”
Noah gave him an exasperated look. “Are you-Are you getting turned on right now? While you’re bleeding all over our floors.”
"What? Should I apologize for finding my husband hot?" Adam asked, sounding genuinely baffled by Noah's tone.
He looked over his shoulder at his reflection, noting the smears of blood on his own skin, mentally inventorying all the linens they’d just ruined on the bed.
“Relax. You can superglue it shut after we shower and we’ll change the sheets together. It’s not that big a deal," Adam said like he could read Noah's mind.
Noah stared at him wide-eyed. “You’re such a goddamn lunatic.”
Adam’s slow grin made Noah’s cock twitch, especially when he leaned down to whisper, “And you fucking love it, you little freak.”
He did. God help him. He really fucking did.
August knew to trust his gut. Even before Lucas Blackwell had upended his carefully constructed life with his gorgeous coke bottle green eyes and shocking abilities, August had understood that trusting his gut was just an ambiguous phrase for a very scientifically explainable biological mechanism designed to keep humans alive. Trusting that instinct had saved his life more than once.
But once they’d had children, that survival instinct had achieved a near god-like level. So when his cell phone rang,St. Agnes Prepflashing across the screen, August knew with nauseating certainty that his spawn had—yet again—done something worthy of the last name Mulvaney.
Maybe that was why he chose to answer as he did. “What did they do now?”
“Mr. Mulvaney?” a woman asked.
August rolled his eyes. “Yes, Sister Josephine. We have this phone call at least once a month. Did you not dial my cellphone number?”
She gave a barely there huff before steel edged her tone. “Yes, well, forgive me for being a bit flustered. I’m afraid your children were involved in a rather unusual incident…again.”
“And what kind of incident was it this time?” August asked, affect flat.
More often than not, the girls were simply conducting research that the other students weren’t adept enough to grasp. Last month, they’d dissected a dead frog they’d found on the playground, carefully detailing each body system for their classmates before Sister Sarah tracked them down in the high-school bio lab and put a stop to the lesson.
The month before that it had been an extremely detailed game of cops and robbers on the schoolyard that had resulted in the girls hog-tying one of the boys in their class while screamingACAB.Lucas had laid that one at August’s feet like an offering, telling him he couldn’t—as a former FBI agent—even begin to explain their daughter’s hostility toward local law enforcement without giving away far too much of their personal history.
When Thomas had convinced them to enroll the children at St. Agnes Prep—which was now co-ed—he’d promised there would be safety in numbers, that they could have each other’s backs in a way August and his brothers never had. Instead, in a twist none of them had anticipated but most certainly should have, the Mulvaney cousins had banded together to form a tiny cult with their classmates as acolytes and the Mulvaney offspring as their gods.
And his children were not benevolent gods. They were clever, ruthless, and entirely too much like the men who’d raised them. So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised him when the headmistress of the school requested—no,demanded—that both August and Lucas come to the school immediately to get to the bottom of the ‘ritualistic’ incident involving the Mulvaney cousins.
August was starting to loathe the sound of his own last name.
“Defineritualistic,” Lucas said now that they were in the car together, navigating through traffic. He sat in the passenger seat, already rubbing his temples in that way that meant he was getting a headache. Or a vision. Or shielding too hard. The faint shimmer of tension always followed when Lucas’s psychic senses were overworked, like heat rising off asphalt.
“She refused to explain further,” August said grimly.
Lucas shot him a startled look. “Was someone hurt?”
August’s tone was frigid when he said, “Not yet,” through gritted teeth.
“So…they didn’t hurt anyone, right? Shesaidnobody was hurt, right?” Lucas asked, sounding slightly more frantic with each word.
The tension bled from August as he took Lucas’s hand, threading their fingers together, squeezing until Lucas squeezed back. “Deep breaths,umnishka.They’re children.”
“Our children,” Lucas breathed.
“Yes, our children, who are shockingly well-adjusted considering their parents. They didn’t hurt anyone or kill anyone. They’re just highly intelligent children with active imaginations. Their cousins?—”
“Jett and Jagger too?” Lucas groaned.
“You know the four of them are thick as thieves.”
