More Than Pride

up. Two sets of eyes were focused on Chester. He gulped, feeling like prey to larger, more dangerous predators. He’d already experienced that once today but for some reason in human form it was much sexier. He wouldn’t mind being pounced on by the sexy men before him. 1“Um, thanks for the clothes.” He focused on Dillon, who unsettled him less than the owl shifter.
Dillon’s smile brightened the room. “You’re very welcome, kitten.”
Chester growled. “I’m not a kitten.”
Evin smiled. “You are almost more of a kitten in your human form.”
Dillon laughed.
Chester walked over and kicked Evin in the shins. It only made him grin. Chester scowled at the owl shifter.
“Eat your stew.” Dillon pointed back towards the bowl. “You look like you haven’t eaten in a while. I’ll get you some too, Evin.”
Returning to the fridge, Dillon put together another bowl of stew and popped it into the microwave. The kitchen remained quiet with nothing to be heard but the sounds of the microwave and the scrape of Chester’s spoon across the bottom of his bowl.
Chester didn’t argue with Dillon’s assessment of his hunger, but he also wasn’t going to explain his captivity and how he’d barely escaped with his life. His brother hadn’t been so lucky. He swallowed back the tears along with the stew. He couldn’t focus on Garfield now.
He needed to keep focused.
Dillon wrapped an arm around Chester and pulled him protectively into his arms. “Are you all right?”
Chester nodded but didn’t speak. He couldn’t talk through the lump in his throat. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had shown him any tenderness. His parents had died when he was young, and Garfield had been a good brother but was not a warm person.
The ding of the microwave saved him as Dillon felt the need to play host and fetch the food for Evin.
Chester put his bowl in the dishwasher as Evin polished off his food with lightning speed. Chester obviously wasn’t the only one who hadn’t eaten for a while.
“Don’t smother him,” Evin muttered after putting his own bowl in the dishwasher.
Dillon roared like the big-ass lion Chester suspected he was.
“Hey, big guy, I’m just trying to help,” Evin said.
Chester glanced up to see that Dillon’s fangs had dropped and now extended past his lips. 1Damn that was sexy. Before his brain could catch up with his body, Chester walked over to Dillon, went onto his tiptoes and kissed the lion shifter.
A low rolling growl vibrated his lips.
“Mmmhmmm,” Chester agreed. Heat poured through him like a warm furnace and his cock hardened as he rubbed against the large shifter’s body. His conscience tried to whisper that he wasn’t in any condition to mate with someone but his body overruled his pesky brain. It had been so long since he’d felt the slide of someone inside him. Too long.
An odd sound snapped him out of the passionate haze caused by warm hands and a man who knew what to do with them.
“What?” Chester whimpered when Dillon lifted his mouth to snarl at the owl shifter.
“D-don’t touch him,” Evin’s rough voice sounded as if he’d gargled rocks.
Chester turned around in the shelter of Dillon’s arms to face the other man.
Evin’s skin had tiny feathers fanning around his eyebrows and cheeks, and his face had the fierce cast of his owl form.
Dillon wrapped an arm across Chester’s front keeping him tight against his body.
“What’s the problem, Evin?” Dillon kept his voice level as if he didn’t want to trigger the other shifter’s change.
“Mate.” Evin’s neck bobbed as his bird half tried to break past its human guardian.
“Oh, hell no.” Dillon’s grip on Chester tightened almost painfully. “He’s mine. You’ve got feathers in your head if you think you can have him.”
Oh, crap. There was no way this was going to end well.
Dillon let out a full lion roar. Chester clamped his hands over his ears.
“What the hell is going on in here?” A new voice entered the fray and this one had Chester’s spine snapping to attention.
Taking a deep breath, Chester dared to peek around Dillon’s wide chest.
Talan.
Pictures of the man didn’t do him justice. Where Dillon was large and muscular, Talan was even more so. The leader of the lions was a beautiful man. Chester could almost feel the man’s aura of command wrap around him and demand he submit. Adrian stood beside the lion. Chester would’ve thought the smaller wolf shifter would appear diminished beside his 1larger mate, but instead it was almost as if he were part of the whole. As if Talan would be missing something if there weren’t a wolf-shifter-sized shape standing beside him.
“Mate!” Evin insisted, his voice ending in a hoot as the man tried to fight back his bird nature.
“Who’s your mate?” Talan’s eyes raked over Chester and he froze like a mouse spotted by a hawk.
Evin moved his head in that boneless way again. Chester gave an involuntary shudder.
He’d seen The Exorcist and Linda Blair had nothing on Evin. If he spewed up a mouse pellet, Chester was out of there.
“I-I don’t know,” Evin replied with a soft hoot.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Dillon growled. “How can you not know?”
Evin glared at Dillon. “When you stand together, I can’t tell which one of you is my mate.”
“Dillon, release the cat shifter and step to the side. I want you apart so Evin can sense you separately,” Talan ordered.
Evin twitched as Dillon released his hold on the kitten. The big lion had a majestic masculine beauty. Evin could almost imagine the man in lion form prancing around the grasslands. Chester fidgeted beneath Evin’s stare. He didn’t know if it was his owl features showing, or whether the younger man truly held a grudge from Evin grabbing him earlier, but he appeared intensely nervous over being watched.
“Can you tell?” The alpha’s tone indicated that he thought Evin was an idiot for not being able to know his mate right away.
“Not all of us can tell at first sight,”