“I hope so. Do you know when they’re due back?”
“Sometime next week,” Grant replied, arching a brow. “How long you plan on staying?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t decided.”
“Are you clean?” Grant asked, putting to rest any further back-and-forth speculation. Without a doubt, her brothers told Grant and Blake everything, enough to make them loathe the choices she’d made, perhaps even judge her.
There was a sudden chill in the summer air. She crossed her arms in front of her body and rubbed them briskly. “Yes,” she finally managed, noting the somewhat weak and anything-but-convincing reply.
“How long?”
“Damn it, Grant,” Blake said, his open palm falling against the flat surface of the table. The dishes rattled, and she jumped. Both men stared at her blankly, perhaps alarmed by what they saw.
“Has someone abused you?” Grant asked, his eyes flickering with pure fire, intense rage.
“No,” she reported, leaving the table. “I’m glad to see you, but it’s been years since we’ve all sat down and enjoyed a meal together. We’ve changed. It’s like having breakfast with strangers who ask too many questions.”
She was unable to sit still under the scrutiny. The nervous energy made her stutter, and the confidence she’d cherished only hours earlier seemingly vanished without leaving behind a trace.
She could have cut off the hand that fed her for a fix right then. The pressure made her crave the drug from a needle, the smoke from a pipe.
“We’re hardly strangers, Morgan. I want you to answer me,” Grant said firmly, following her to the sink. “Has someone abused you?”
“No,” she lied. “I’m able to fend for myself. I always have been.”
“The Morgan I know could pack a punch when it mattered,” Blake teased.
Grant rinsed off his plate. “The Morgan we knew isn’t the same woman standing before us now.”
Truer words had never been spoken. Sheltered by the brothers who raised her and the men who once loved her, Morgan had witnessed scenes similar to those documented on true crime shows. She’d been privy to information only shared with a drug dealer’s inner circle.
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When she first met her neighbors in Memphis, she’d been feared because of the company she kept. When she left town, she in turn looked over her shoulder because of that same clique of people she once called out as friends.
“How long have you been off the drugs?” Grant returned to his original question again, forever the relentless cowboy, the one determined to press for answers.
She gripped the basin and stared out the window. “Not nearly long enough.”
Chapter Two
Morgan cleared the table, rinsed off the plates, and loaded the dishwasher. Outside, Blake and Grant were in a deep discussion, huddled close one minute and parting the next. One or the other paced in front of the porch. From what Morgan could tell, the conversation was heated at times.
She could only imagine the topic at hand.
As she watched the two men debate an issue, she remembered how each of them previously loved her. Her body tingled, reacting to the physical sensations the men stirred within her. The emotional tug-of-war had begun from the moment they walked into her kitchen, and for good reason.
Not only had Blake been Morgan’s high school sweetheart, he was her first love. When he left for the University of Missouri, she stayed behind to attend NortheastState, a local community college. They’d agreed to see other people, but kept in touch on a regular basis, until Morgan found someone else. Blake probably never dreamed his best friend would fall under the umbrella of alternative options.
With Grant, what started out as a late-night fling turned into a whirlwind romance, and quickly developed into one of the most intense relationships Morgan had ever known. In matters of sex and the lifestyle Grant and Blake independently introduced, Morgan gained an education in bondage and submission.
Blake taught her to submit to her dominant partner, but Grant kicked things up a notch. Through him, Morgan realized she had become dependent on the Dom-sub experience. Her survival relied upon what Grant and Blake trained her to enjoy and need.
Morgan hurried around the kitchen putting away the items used for preparing breakfast—nonstick spray, salt, pepper, cheese, and margarine—and couldn’t help but glance outside once more. Even in her current state of mind, Grant and Blake still tempted her.
A little voice inside her head reminded her of the obvious. She had let herself go. She was an addict on the way to recovery. She had no reason to look at Grant or Blake and contemplate a future. They had too much to give a woman, and she offered nothing in return, at least not yet. She shook her head, pushing aside the twinge of sadness creeping up.
When had her confidence slipped? At what point had she started to believe some of the very garbage Kilo, her drug-dealing boyfriend, pitched her way? She was good enough for Blake Ballantine and Grant Fowler in the past. Why couldn’t she be that woman again? She paused with the thought, clutching a soapy dishrag in hand. Her gaze bounced between men.