Page 98 of At Her Will

Her gaze rested on Rev as she said it. Though she’d seemed to enjoy his singing and Bible stories, Vera could tell Cyn had more on her mind on the subject. She’d likely bring it up at dinner. Vera considered slipping a tranquilizer in her drink. Or taking one herself.

Cyn and Mick moved away, Mick giving Rev a friendly nod.

“Tonight?” Rev asked.

“We have a once-a-month dinner, Ros, Cyn, Skye, Abby and me, and their men. Bastion has a standing invite to it, and hecomes every once in a while, but he prefers different haunts. We rotate the location between our houses. Tonight it’s at Neil and Abby’s place outside the city. It’s a bit of a drive, but would you like to go?”

“Would you have invited me if it hadn’t come up just now? I know you a very polite Southern woman.”

“Not that polite. For your information, I told them I was bringing you a few minutes ago. I was debating whether I wanted to do that, or skip the dinner, take you home and do other things with you.”

He raised an intrigued brow and leaned in, hand braced by her head, those gingerbread-colored eyes heated and close. “Maybe we can do both, Mistress. I got a lot of stamina, but if I run out, the Lord will provide.”

She laughed. “I’m moving before lightning strikes this doorway.”

The evening’s mild weather made it a good night to have dinner outdoors, lit torches and the breeze keeping mosquitos and gnats at bay.

Since he and Abby had married, Neil had made some changes to the small house he lived in on the bayou, including a deck built off his boat dock, accommodating a grill area and scattered chairs. He’d also expanded the screened porch for a treated wood table that could seat a dozen people or more.

“I helped,” Abby noted.

“You sure did.” Neil slid an arm around her. “You were cute as a button, with bouncy ponytail, shorts, sneakers, and sawdust on your nose.”

He was able to catch the thrown punch, though only because he had the training to do so. Thanks to Cyn, Abby was no lightweight. None of them were.

“Don’t ask me why I’m hesitant to hand her power tools,” Neil told a grinning Tiger.

Vera sat next to Ros, enjoying the relaxing pastime of watching her closest friends and their men socialize. Tonight that pastime included Rev, but her attention on him wasn’t casual, for several reasons.

She’d meant what she said to him, about being the earthly person he could lean upon. Physically, he’d recovered from the shooting, but he was dealing with the emotional fallout. The hurt he carried over it was deep.

She also watched him because the monthly dinner was a true family gathering. She was surprisingly nervous about it, which had no basis in anything. Everyone here would be kind to him—even Cyn, in her own way—and he was easy with people.

Her nerves were because there was a significance to her inviting him to be here, and they all knew it.

He and Skye were sitting together, and he was trying his sign language on her. Rev took his mistakes with humor, just as he had with the student at the school, and followed Skye’s lead when she showed him the right way to say what he was trying to tell her with his hands.

Skye looked pleased. Though she was proficient with her voice recordings, her reaction to sign language fluency—or the attempts to become fluent—was no different from how anyone in a foreign country felt when they crossed paths with someone who could speak their language.

Tiger, standing at the grill with Neil and Lawrence, watched his Mistress. His look held a million things, light and dark, primal and elevated, all under the heading of love. Desire, interest, protection, regard, respect, hunger, possession. Need.Joy and care. Happiness, contentment. It forged the bond anyone with eyes and a heart could feel when they saw it, and it was expressed with the same elements between all the couples.

Tiger had been part of the Club Progeny world when he and Skye had gotten together. Before that, every woman here had enjoyed sessions with him. Lawrence and Mick were committed alpha submissives, so understood that without confusion. Neil was a unique Dom in his understanding of Abby’s needs as another Dominant, but likely because of her illness and its management, he’d gotten a quicker than usual crash course in how essential every stabilizing bond in her life was, including those with former submissive partners like Tiger.

When Cyn had found Mick, and Vera had become the only one without a soulmate, seeing those ties had made the dinners less enjoyable to her. Not something she admitted to anyone. The gut-deep “they don’t really need me” feeling she despised was a hydra whose heads could never be terminally pinched off.

Tonight, she understood how pathetic that feeling had been. Having a man like this with her, who made her feel the way Rev did, reminded her of the many different ways that love expressed itself, and how strong her ties with the other women were, built on the experiences and times shared.

She hoped, if she did have to give Rev up, that she would remember that, and not let that feeling return.

All that said, having her own man looking her way, often enough to make sure she was doing well or didn’t need anything, was a nice new feeling.

Now Rev was half singing, half speaking a hymn to Skye in a low voice, with lots of starts and stops. She was showing him how to sign the lyrics. Vera imagined him doing it at the church, where the sweeping movements of his large hands would add to the beauty of his voice.

“So how many bodies have you dumped here, Neil?”

Cyn and Mick were sitting on the bench at the end of the dock, Cyn’s leg casually looped over Mick’s thigh, his arm around her back and hand resting on her hip. They were close enough to the grill to listen in on the conversation between Tiger, Neil and Lawrence, but far enough to do their own reconnecting, since Mick had returned a day ago from a special ops consult in Texas. He’d offered his experience to an agency attempting to shut down criminal organizations active at the Mexican border.

However, since they were now bantering with Neil, Vera knew it was a good moment for her to handle something else. She caught Cyn’s attention with a raised hand. “Come sit with me a minute and let Mick supervise Neil, make sure your veggie burger isn’t touching the dead animals.”

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