Leah's Triplet Mates (14 page)

Hardy was in his panther form, high up in a large tree with an excellent view of the Lutterworths’ brownstone. It’d been nerve-wracking getting into position from where Bram had dropped him out of the car, several blocks away, but just because they’d been told the Lutterworths were leaving tonight didn’t mean it’d happen. One thing he knew about rich people was that their travel plans changed easily. They didn’t have to worry about the cost of cancelation fees, especially when they had friends with private jets who’d give them a ride wherever they wanted to go anyway.

But so far, so good. The lights had been on all over the house. It seemed they didn’t have to worry about the cost of electricity either, as no one had bothered to turn the lights off for hours. But finally, one by one, the lights went out except for in a few downstairs rooms. A limo service arrived, the driver got out and loaded half a dozen large suitcases into the trunk of the limo, and then Mr. and Mrs. Lutterworth climbed in and the limo departed.

Hardy continued to sit in his tree, maintaining watch. No one suspicious passed by. No one came into the street here to look over the back fence. No one appeared to be watching the house at all.

Hardy just hoped Lutterworth hadn’t had time to check on the jewelry or the stamp albums. They’d only been home a day, not even a night as well. And judging by the amount of luggage they’d packed, organizing it all would have taken a lot of their time.

Only when he was absolutely certain that the place was uninhabited and unwatched did he make his way from branch to branch down the tree, leaping the last section to the ground and padding silently through gardens and under trees, back to where Bram had left the car.

Bram opened the back door, and Hardy slunk inside, relieved not to have been noticed. He shifted back into human form, closed the door, and pulled his jeans on.

“Have you got any idea how much I hate doing that? We’re much too big to be housecats. I keep expecting someone to call Animal Control and to find a tranquilizer dart in my ass.”

“Don’t stress so much. I bet if someone said there was a panther prowling around in this neighborhood Animal Control would be sure that person had been drinking or trying out some illegal substances. No one is going to believe a panther is wandering around Richmond, Ohio.”

“So you say.”

They returned to the warehouse where Saxon was waiting for them outside the compound, a large backpack at his feet. He climbed into the back of the car with Hardy, and while Bram drove, Saxon passed out thin latex gloves, balaclavas, tiny flashlights, and some tools he stuck in his own pocket. The wrapped parcel of fake ceramic figures made up the bulk of the backpack’s contents.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Bram. “The amount of time it’s going to take us to unwrap the figurines, replace each one exactly in the wrapping of its counterpart, and then make sure we’ve checked them all.”

“This bag is white. The fakes are in the white bag. I have an empty brown bag. We’ll be putting the real ones in the brown bag as we rewrap them. We each only touch one figurine at a time. We see how the real ones are wrapped and memorize it, replace it with the fake, put the fake in the Lutterworths’ wrapping, and the real one in the brown bag.”

“It sounds easy when you say it fast.” Hardy groaned. “And we have to find that book as well.” He could imagine a thousand things that might go wrong. There was absolutely no guarantee they’d even find any of these things in Lutterworth’s house. Just because they’d found the jewelry so easily that didn’t mean the figurines would be sitting around waiting for them to find them as well.

“Ten dollars says the book is on the bookshelves in his study. Up high, above a person’s line of sight, but not hidden, just sitting there looking like it belongs,” said Saxon.

“In that case the figurines will be in the china cabinet in the main room,” said Bram. “I’ll look there first.”

Hardy didn’t believe it. They’d be too easy to see. Someone would be sure to notice them, maybe even know whom they belonged to. The book was different. Hardly anyone read the titles of old books these days, especially ones stuck up high, out of reach.

“Let’s just hope they haven’t noticed anything missing or likely they’ll have realized how easy that bathroom window is to open from outside and will have put a lock on it,” he said.

Bram shook his head as he parked the car and took a permit sticker out of the glove compartment, resting it prominently on the dashboard. “Same thing as before. It’s on the second floor. People think no one is going to climb up and look.”

Just like normal, they split up, walking past the house from every direction, each of them assessing that it was safe to enter before they met up at the back fence. Hardy boosted Bram over fence and then helped pull Saxon up. They were all exactly the same size, but Saxon did seem to be just a little stronger than him.

Saxon boosted Bram up to open the window. Hardy had his back to them, watching in every direction for any hint of trouble. His was the most important task right at that moment. If the shit hit the fan he had to give the others enough time so they could all get out of the property before the police arrived.

Saxon tapped his shoulder, and he scrambled up onto his brother’s back and then his shoulders, slinging a leg up and into the open bathroom window. He leaned out and gripped Saxon’s wrists, helping him climb the wall, and then they were all inside.

It was a risk leaving the window open. Someone might know the Lutterworths had already left and notice that the window was open. But on the other hand, if they had to leave fast, the seconds they’d save by jumping through an open window instead of having to open it first might mean the difference between escaping and getting caught.

Everything was a balance. There was no right or wrong answer. It was all a gamble.

Hardy smiled to himself. In many ways he enjoyed the adrenaline rush of the danger and the risk. But once they were mated, it’d be time to settle down and stick with the completely legal side of the pack business. No more robbing houses then.

Bram went straight to the stairs, likely to do as he said and check the china cabinet in the main rom. Hardy followed Saxon to the end of the hall where Lutterworth’s study was. There was one wall covered in bookshelves. They extended from the floor to the ceiling. Hardy wondered if the stolen book would be on the floor level. He didn’t think anyone would look there for a book to read, but maybe the maid would notice when she vacuumed the rug or something, making it a less desirable hiding place.

He stood at the opposite end of the wall from Saxon and looked for a brown leather volume. Unfortunately, in the muted light, colors weren’t easily discerned. Giving up, he took a chair from against the wall, stood on it, and looked more closely at the books. That made them much easier to distinguish. He’d checked three rows without finding it when Saxon gave a soft sigh and came across to take the chair from him. Hardy jumped lightly down, and Saxon moved it, climbed up, and came down holding a book. Hardy replaced the chair exactly where he’d found it, rubbing his gloved hand over the seat so there wouldn’t be boot marks on the fabric.

Then he followed Saxon downstairs. The door to the china cabinet was open, and Bram was hunched right over almost underneath it. Hardy didn’t know if he was just looking for a clue or if he’d found something. When Bram began poking and pushing the base of the cabinet Hardy understood Bram was looking for a hidden shelf or secret drawer. That all seemed too hard and unlikely to Hardy. He walked across to a big display cabinet and stared through the glass doors. He saw nothing like looked like the missing figurines, so he opened the lower wooden doors, but the shelves there were full of plates and bowls.

Damn. This was harder than he’d expected. They had the book, but they needed the fucking figurines. Life was so much easier when they were looking for a painting or a laptop. They tended to be pretty obvious to find.

Behind the plates was a cardboard box. Hardy was about to shut the doors to the cabinet when he realized a cardboard box was very much out of place here. Everything was very classy. These people wouldn’t store anything in cardboard. Everything was on display to be used. Carefully Hardy pushed the plates to one side and lifted the cardboard box out of the cupboard. It was surprisingly heavy, and his heart began to beat faster. He opened the lid, and there, stored in the box, with pieces of egg carton between them, were the figurines.

He carried the box into the other room and laid it on the floor. His brothers turned to him, smiled, and they began switching the fake ceramics over from their wrappings to the box.

Hardy had just replaced the box in the cabinet, checked he’d arranged the plates exactly as they’d originally been, and walked into the hallway when he heard loud noises at the front of the house.

He looked into the main room. Bram was closing the china cabinet while Saxon was shrugging the backpack straps over his shoulders. Hardy scanned the floor carefully, but they hadn’t dropped anything or left anything behind so he hurried upstairs to the bathroom. Bram ducked head of him and began climbing out the window as the front door opened and a shrill voice screeched, “You raving lunatic. All my hard work. All my efforts to get us accepted and you had to proposition his wife. His wife, you idiot.”

Bram had vanished, and Saxon was out the window. Hardy lowered himself onto Saxon’s shoulders and gently pushed the window closed as Lutterworth said, “How was I supposed to know she was his wife? She looked twenty years younger than him.”

Hardy would have liked to listen to the rest of story, but he jumped to the ground and ran to the fence. His pocket was vibrating, which meant there were no watchers, so he leaped for the top and threw himself over it, sprinting down the road toward their car. He saw Saxon ahead of him turning the corner into the next road and knew they were all safe.

* * * *

After the near-miss at Lutterworth’s house, Bram thought the trip to Detroit was dead boring. Hardy’d gotten his own car back in time for the journey, which was good. The three of them took turns driving and followed the two women all the way to Detroit. They stood in the room as the expert checked the stamp albums, agreed there were several stamps worth a few hundred dollars each, and promised to speak to his buyers immediately.

Bram was proud of Leah when she told the agent they’d photographed every stamp and every page of the albums, but the man simply nodded and said, “Of course, of course.”

As they left the building, he said, “Leah, Maia, please can we take you to lunch now? We need a break before driving back home. It’s a long trip.”

Both the women shook their heads. “We brought sandwiches and water with us. We need to stop for gas though. We’ll wait if you want to go and grab some takeout food for yourselves.”

So that was the end of any hope of holding her hand or touching her over lunch. They followed the women home again, left them at the church parking lot, and headed back toward the warehouse.

“We’re agreed the reverend and his wife know we’re panthers, right?” asked Bram.

“Yes. So what?” asked Hardy in a grumpy tone of voice.

“I want Leah, and I can’t wait much longer to have her. If they know we’re shape-shifters and didn’t try to prevent her being with us, I don’t see why we can’t ask their permission to mate her. We know Leah wants us, and we want her. It’s time to do it.”

“I don’t think so. Remember she said her father would want her to marry only one human, not three panthers,” said Hardy.

“But no human has been dating her. Hell, there are three fucking lovely unattached young women in that family, and none of them have boyfriends. The people attending that church must be blind,” said Bram.

“It’s more than that though. Leah and her sisters are necessary to help make the ministries happen. It’s their free labor that makes it possible. If they married someone and left the area their father’s ministry would fail and none of them would let that happen. Leah said they need to find more sponsors. The whole point about her father selling those stamps he loves is because they don’t have enough money to keep running the programs. We need to help them find sponsors,” said Saxon.

Bram sighed. “I want her. I want her now.”

“We all want her now, but we’ll have to wait until their finances are sorted out,” said Hardy.

“Not necessarily. Let’s think this through. Leah’s mom had ideas of where to look for sponsors, knowledge of people who might be willing to help, but they’re too busy with the day-to-day running of the programs for her to follow up on that. We need to help them out and free Leah and her mom to go out and get sponsors. Or maybe her mom and dad. Whatever,” said Bram.

“How does that get us Leah?” asked Saxon.

“Once the program is better funded, they’ll be more willing to let Leah live with us. Once they get to know us they’ll see how much we love her and know we’ll always put her first. Of course she’ll keep working at the church if that’s what she wants, and we’ll need to get her a car of her own, but she can live with us and spend every night in our bed. Our beautiful mate.”

Bram rested his feet against the back of Saxon’s seat and stretched. Damn it felt great to have solved their problems.

“Get your feet down, Bram. This is the freeway. There’ll be police around,” said Saxon.

“There’s not enough space here in the backseat for these long drives.”