Triple Dog Dare [Triple Trouble 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read Online Free PDF Page B

was dying, and I never expected to have a baby of my own. I loved your mom like a sister, and I love you more than anything. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before. Would you really have believed me if I told you all this before you met Ain, Brodey, and Cail, and saw what they could do?”
    “I—” She stopped and thought about it. Would she have believed her? Honestly?
    I would have taken her to the doctor and gotten her evaluated for Alzheimer’s. “No, I guess I wouldn’t have believed it,” Elain softly admitted.
    Ain gently squeezed Elain’s hand to silence her again. “Carla, what else did Liam and Maureen say? When you saw we were triplets, you reacted.”
    “Maureen made me promise that if Elain ever started to, you know, to do the wolf stuff, that I would find you three. That you and your brothers lived in Arcadia. That if I asked around, someone would know you or know of you and be able to find you for me. She insisted you would be able to protect her. I just…”
    Carla took another drink with trembling hands. “I honestly put your names out of my head. I spent a lot of years convincing myself that what Maureen and Liam showed me was some sort of daydream or nightmare. Maureen got sick when Liam left. I was too busy working and trying to take care of her to think about anything else. Not to mention all the adoption paperwork. She had me adopt Elain immediately after her birth. Maureen knew she was dying, even though doctors couldn’t tell us why. Once Elain was born, she didn’t even try to keep herself alive. I was suddenly a single mom with a baby to raise. The last thing I wanted to think about was that wolf craziness.”
    Carla’s hands still trembled as she emptied her glass. Without comment, Cail stood, walked over to her and took her glass, and went to the kitchen to make her a fresh drink.
    Carla’s eyes looked bright with tears. “I’m sorry,” she continued. “I did the best I could. Maureen got to the point where she refused medical treatment and wasted away. As the years passed and Elain grew older, like any other normal little girl her age, it was easier for me to just pretend the wolf stuff didn’t happen. That I imagined it.”
    “You asked if we’d marked her,” Ain pointed out.
    “Maureen told me about that the first night. When we were waiting for Liam’s call. She showed me the mark on the back of her shoulder, said that’s what wolves did when they…mated. Said it joined them together forever. She told me she’d marked Liam first, then he marked her.”
    Cail returned with her fresh drink and handed it to her. “Thank you.” She took several long sips from it before continuing. “She told me the basics, that there was a very old blood oath in Liam’s family. That some family named Abernathy wanted Liam’s girl baby because he was the first Alpha in his family line to have one. They said that’s why they came to me. They’d found out through ultrasound in Spokane that Elain was a girl and had to hide.”
    “How did you know Maureen?” Cail asked. “Wasn’t Liam afraid they’d track Maureen through you?”
    Carla shook her head. “We worked together for a couple of years in Spokane and became really good friends. Then I moved to Tampa for a job. After a couple of months, I lost touch with her. There wasn’t the Internet and Facebook back then. Hell, we didn’t have cell phones. I sent her a letter, and the post office returned it, no forwarding address. I tried calling her, and the number was disconnected with no forwarding number. I called my old job. They told me Maureen left with no forwarding info, and none of my former coworkers knew where she went, either. I was shocked when they appeared on my doorstep in Tampa.”
    “Well, that explains that,” Ain said. “They came to you because they knew they could trust you. They’d no doubt heard about our parents and what they did. It was either that or stay on the run with a pregnant wife and