Page 86 of Triple Threat

“Excited to be goinghome,” I murmured and the smile that broke over his face turned him positively angelic.

God, I had missed that smile.

“Champagne?” the flight attendant asked, holding out a round silver platter with two bubbling flutes.

“Yes, thank you.” Kyle handed me one and took the other. He clicked glasses with me and said, “To going home.”

“To going home,” I murmured and sipped. We took a pair of seats and buckled in for takeoff and I felt a knot in my chest loosen as soon as we started to move.

As we left the ground of St. Henri’s behind, hands loosely clasped between us, sipping the bright champagne, I left some of my uncertainty behind with it.

“You trust me, Shady?” Kyle asked me suddenly a few minutes into the flight.

“Yes, why?” I asked, startled out of my own reverie.

“I need to know that you trust me as well as love me,” he said and I think it was one of the first times I had ever heard him so… uncertain.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you, Kyle,” I said softly, gripping his fingers tighter.

“I’m not Roan,” he said his dark eyes traveling over my face. “I’m not good at all the hearts and flowers bullshit.”

I felt my face soften and searched his guarded expression.

“I-I don’t love you for the hearts and flowers,” I told him, and it was true, I didn’t.

“Then why do you love me?” he asked, brushing his lips across my knuckles. It was a good question. Why did I love this sharp edged, difficult man?

“Because you make me feel safe,” I confessed. “Because you’ve never lied to me, and yes, you’ve said harsh things and made me feel less than sometimes, but that doesn’t have anything to do withyou, that’s ameproblem…”

He cocked his head and swept me with his gaze, like I was doing something particularly fascinating.

“You may not hold me close and whisper sweet lies in the dark about how everything is going to be okay… but you hold me close and it’s what you don’t say that matters.” I swallowed hard. “Just like when we were teens, you didn’t say much - it was always what youdid.”

He smiled brilliantly then, and I realized in that moment that Kyle Lachlan loved me so much that he invited his best friend to love me too because he knew he was broken, knew he was damaged, and knew that he couldn’t give me all the things I needed to feel whole. That he would be the first to defend me, the first to extract retribution for anyone who dared try to hurt me, but that he knew I neededmore.

He knew I needed hearts and flowers, and that sometimes I needed the sweet whispered lies and he knew that Roan was the man for that job… and he knew that Roan needed me just as much.

My heart gave a dull, fractured ache to what had led Lach here. Born drug addicted, a life spent in the system labeled difficult, labeled troubled… and yes, he was all of those things and more but those things made the man beside me, clutching my hand, sweeping my face with his eyes themosthuman male I had ever met.

“What am I to you?” I asked, quietly and his eyebrows went up in surprise.

“Everything that I lack,” he said honestly, and I felt my heart throb, those broken pieces grind together.

He didn’t give me a chance to say anything to that, his lips descending upon mine his hand finding the seatbelt in my lap and unhitching it.

“What are you doing?” I whispered against his lips only to feel them smile against my own, his fingers slip under my skirt, nudging my thighs apart.

“Indoctrinating you into the mile-high club – in style,” he whispered and then he positively devoured my mouth with his. I arched unbidden against my seat, parting my legs to give him access as his tongue plunged past my lips and teeth to stroke against mine.

“Mm!” The sharp sound of utter surrender slipped unbidden from my mouth to his. His fingertips grazing my sex making my pussy throb with want and heat. I felt my nipples tighten beneath the thin satin of my dress as he broke the kiss, removed his hand from up my skirt and undid his own seatbelt all in one seemingly fluid motion.

“Come with me,” he muttered and stood, cock straining at the front of his tan, linen beach pants, his untucked white linen shirt doing nothing to disguise things. He set his champagne flute aside and took mine from me, doing the same before hauling me to my feet.

He took us to the back of the plane and opened a door there and ushered me through before him. I blinked in surprise at the bed there. The quarters were tight, like the back of a motor home, but much,muchnicer.

“Up you go,” he said, and I crawled up onto the black satin sheets, he stepped in further behind me and shut the door.

I twisted, leaning back as he captured my ankle in his hand and slipped first one sandal then the other off my foot, letting them fall to the floor at his feet.

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