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Chapter3 Rejection

Five Years Before

Harper tossed in her bed restlessly.

Dorian and Gwyn had not stayed for long after her shift, saying that they had work early in the morning, however she knew that they were buying time to discuss between them what the double-pronged mate-bond meant, and what to do about it.

Something that she also wondered, she thought fretfully. Connery and her mother were right. Mate-bonds were becoming rarer, and in most circumstances, when they occurred it was a cause for celebration.

But not when the bond was with her stepbrothers, and not when it involved two alpha mates.

She had never heard of such a thing occurring, had not even known it was possible to have two mates at the same time. One after another, perhaps. Some of the greatest werewolf romances involved 'second chance" mates, but two at once… No. Never.

And yet, the bond felt… so right. It felt like a puzzle piece falling into place, she admitted to herself, as if she had been an incomplete picture on her own... And, on the surface there was nothing wrong with a bond with either Gwyn or Dorian. They were siblings through marriage, not blood relations.

Perhaps if the bond had been with one, or the other, it wouldn't have mattered, the pack might have overlooked the by-marriage connection…

But they would never accept her taking both men as mates. And to take just one, with how close Dorian and Gwyn were, it would just lead to problems. A rejected mate having his face rubbed into the situation daily… No, she admitted to herself. It simply wouldn't work. She couldn't take one and not the other. And, besides, she was not sure that she could choose, anyway, or force them to make the decision.

And yet, rejecting such a rare thing as a mate-bond in itself seemed sacrilegious. She wasn't sure she could do it.

She pushed her way free of her bed and dressed into jeans and a t-shirt before creeping through the house with her shoes in her hand. In the garage, she unlocked her car whilst she slipped on her running shoes, and she winced as the engine starting seemed overly loud in the night-time quiet.

She reversed down the driveway and glanced back at the house, expecting the light to come on in her parent's bedroom, but it stayed dark. With werewolf keen hearing, there was no way that they hadn't heard, she thought, but maybe the fact that they hadn't risen to investigate her early hours activity was reflective of her new status as an adult.

She had never driven at this time of the morning and the emptiness of the streets was both exhilarating and alarming. She was so accustomed to the anti-werewolf slogans and posters that she barely noticed where they were pasted to shop windows and walls, but the spray-painted curse words across the front doors of houses made her heart race.

When a police car shadowed her for two city blocks, she began to panic, but their lights turned on and they pulled out around her, racing away, and she began to breath easier.

She pulled into the underground carpark of Dorian and Gwyn's building and made sure that she parked considerately so as not to draw attention to herself, as if she were in a complaint and she was outed as werewolf, her whole family would be implicated.

She used the code to get up to their floor, and to let herself into their apartment. As she closed the door, leaning her back against it, the whiskey glass slipped from Dorian's hand and shattered on the kitchen floor. He had been pacing on one side of the bench, whilst Gwyn perched on a bar stool on the other, staring into his whiskey glass as if it held the solutions to life's big mysteries. A half-empty decanter sat at the midpoint of the marble benchtop.

"Harper!" Dorian recovered quickly, looking down at the shattered glass and spilled whiskey at his feet in surprised dismay. "You should not be here."

"I am pretty sure that I should be," she replied. "Be careful not to cut yourself on the glass," she added as he stooped to pick up the biggest pieces. Predictably, he nicked a finger on the glass, and she exclaimed with him, picking her way across the tiles to take his hand in hers, turning on the kitchen tap and putting his finger under it. "This conversation involves me, after all," she finished.

As she extracted the glass, she felt him lower his face into her hair and breath in, his groan low and brutal, and she drew in a deep breath as she felt the curl of warmth deep in the pit of her stomach, her nipples sensitizing so that the pressure of her bra-cups against them seemed agonizing. She wanted to feel the heat of his palm cupping her breasts, she thought, and felt her body respond to the idea, and his moan as her aroused scent rose from the heat of her skin.

"Oh, f-k," he said unsteadily. "Harper move away, please."

The alpha in his tone had her obeying, retreating to the far end of the kitchen bench.

"This is why you shouldn't be here, Harper," Dorian said without looking at her as he took a bandage from a drawer and used it on his finger. "You don't realise how precarious an alpha's self-control is under the influence of a mate bond…"

'really f-king precarious," Gwyn agreed inhaling and closing his eyes. "F-k, Dorian," he said under his breath.

"Gwyn," there was warning in Dorian's tone. As the higher ranked alpha, he was naturally the more dominant of the two. "We agreed."

"I know," Gwyn blew out his breath. "But she is here, now, and that makes a difference, Dorian."

"Agreed to what?" Harper looked between them. "I am pretty sure that I should be part of the agreement."

"Harper," Dorian was gorgeous, she thought, his dark knit top clinging to his skin, displaying perfectly the muscles that rounded his shoulders and bulked his arms and chest, before tapering into a tight, narrow waist, and set off the bright blue of his eyes, although he was actively avoiding looking at her. "Your presence just complicates things."

"How?" She demanded. "This involves me, Dorian. Mate-bonds are rare, you know that. We can't ignore it…"

"We are leaving the pack, Harper," Dorian replied, bracing his arms against the benchtop and leaning into them. "Gwyn and I are young enough that we figure we can make a good shot of it. We are liquidating our assets, and we have our new IDs… We are leaving."

"Oh, god," she whispered. They were leaving. Leaving the pack, leaving their family, leaving her… "I will come with you."

"Harper," Gwyn said gently. "We don't know if we will ever be able to see our family and pack again, if it will ever be safe to do so. Can you imagine never seeing your mother again? Hmm," he saw the expression of pain that passed over her face and nodded, his face tense. "Yes, it's not so easy, is it?"

"We can't take you with us," Dorian said quietly. "We don't know what will happen if we are discovered. We will not have the pack to call upon if we run into trouble. We will be lone-wolves, Harper. We can't ask you to leave your mother, to possibly never see her again. And that is before we even discuss the complications of two mate-bonds, and the fact that we are your step-brother…"

He closed his eyes again. "I reject you, Harper. I reject the mate-bond between us. I reject you as my mate."

She felt as if he had struck her in the stomach, her breath exploding from her lungs leaving them unable to draw in air.

"F-k Dorian," Gwyn groaned his complaint. "It is wrong to reject a bond."

"Gwyn," Dorian turned his head to look at his cousin by blood and brother by adoption. "You know that it's the right thing to do."

Gwyn swallowed hard, their eyes locked, true-blue to grey-blue. For a moment Harper thought that Gwyn would rebel, and so did Dorian, she realised, a muscle working in the corner of his jaw and his expression becoming more distraught the longer that Gwyn hesitated.

And then Gwyn sighed. "I reject you, Harper. I reject the mate-bond between us. I reject you as my mate," he said so quietly and yet the words carried.

"I…" Harper's throat closed on the words. She should say that she accepted their rejection, and that she rejected them in turn, and yet… "I refuse," she whispered, and both their faces jerked her way.

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