Her hands toyed with my hair after her breathing leveled out, and I loved the tender touch. I wasn’t one for sticking around after sex. I didn’t want to hug or be hugged. I guess, I realized, I was a bit of a shit with women, but they’d all been the practice run for my wife.
Didn’t make me any less of a shit, but the only way I could ever make up for being a bastard was to give her everything she’d ever need.
It should have felt like a hard task, a daunting one, but Christ, who was more prepared for such a challenge as that than one of the original Argonauts?
Nuzzling my nose into her tits, I murmured, “Should have known Tor would take you in the stables. Fucker’s obsessed with his horses.”
“Expect to be fucked in the boxing ring,” was all my brother said. “That’s Lux’s weakness.”
Ella stilled beneath me. “You box?”
“Didn’t google us?” I replied with a yawn. “For shame.” As I sat up, I kissed the cherry closest to me, amused when she wriggled and slapped my shoulder.
“No more. I’m wrecked. You broke me,” she groused, then released a deep moan that broke me when I pulled out of her.
“We filled you up with cum is what we did,” I told her proudly, my fingers sliding between her legs to play with the delicious mess my twin and I had made.
Though she turned pink and her hips rocked, I didn’t tease her for long. She’d be sore after the workout we just gave her, and in the spirit of fairness—which, I can assure you, doesn’t often happen where I’m concerned—I knew Apollo and Achilles would be claiming her next.
The poor girl needed a break, so even though I didn’t want to, I called time out.
Reaching down for her panties, I pressed it to her pussy lips, which were bright pink and pulsing from hard use.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked, rearing up, her thighs clamping together.
“Double loads,” I told her, prouder than a strutting peacock. “What goes in, must come out.”
“Ew,” she grumbled, and Tor huffed.
“Could you be more disgusting?”
With a wink for them both, I murmured, “I try, I try.”
❖
Apollo
The second Ella exploded with orgasm, I felt it.
In the middle of a discussion with one of the assistants under Castor’s direction, everything inside me clenched down then released. Not in the simulation of an orgasm, but as though the universe itself was compressing and decompressing, expanding and narrowing to encompass the existence of this one woman who had been made to have the sun itself, me, revolve around her.
My throat clutched, my heart pounded, and God, the power that surged inside me was enough to have my head aching.
I staggered back, sank deeply into my seat, and ignored the woman on the other end of the line as she murmured, “Sir? Are you still there?”
When she cut the call, I was relieved. Then, I was less so when she rang my number. Damning my staff for their efficiency, I switched off my cell and let myself rock back in my chair as I processed exactly what was happening.
I couldn’t even say how long I sat there, but when I felt her climax again, it made me realize two of my guardians had claimed her.
It didn’t take much to figure out that it would be Castor and Pollux. Until I’d come along, they’d done nothing without the other, and I knew they’d gladly return to that way of life.
Would they be happier when they could be together again?
I thought so.
Not just because of Ella’s presence in our life, but because they’d never have to be separated again… I wasn’t about to take Ella back into the city. I wasn’t about to expose her to the danger that being James DiStefano’s child represented.
Here, in this laidback enclave, she could reinvent herself the second she had my surname. In the city, our marriage would only cause more tongues to wag. The news of who she was would spread through Manhattan like wildfire. More people would know her true heritage through our marriage than the alternative, and there was no way in hell I wasn’t about to claim her as my own.
We’d be married many times over the next few thousand years, but the first time would always matter the most.
Possessiveness swirled around inside me. It was something I’d clamped down on since Zeus had revealed her true identity to me. But now that two of my guardians had claimed her? There was no way in hell she was leaving us. By letting them inside her body, she’d made her choice and she’d have to stand by it.
Relief warred with delight; hunger warred with glee.
Our union had been more than just willed into being by the Fates themselves. Now, she was ours and today was the first day of the rest of our lives.
A knock sounded at the door, and when I didn’t allow the person entry, it opened regardless—Achilles. I didn’t even have to look up to know only he’d have the audacity to walk in without an invitation.
“Stop it.”
I frowned at him, turning my gaze to drift over his lean form. He was handsome even when he was scowling—as he was now. His soft mouth was pursed into an irritated line, and his eyes were narrowed at me. I didn’t have to wonder what Ella would find attractive about him, and I could only hope she’d soften his millennia-long temper tantrum with me. The man could and would hold a grudge better than anyone I knew.
“Stop what?” I inquired, swiveling my chair around to face him better.
“Whatever the fuck you’re doing with the power.”
That had me scowling. “What? I’m not doing anything.”
“The lights are surging. We’re going to have to call an electrician out, dammit.”
Sitting up, I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You are.” He strode over to the window. “You’re doing something to the sun.”
Grunting, I folded my arms across my chest. “I think I’d know if I had.”
He squinted up at the star and grumbled, “I can’t see shit. Come and see. I swear, you’re doing something. It reminds me of 1859. But this is too fast. We shouldn’t see any effects on the grid for another day or two.”
I frowned, knowing exactly what he meant. Unease swirled inside me as I got to my feet and headed toward the window.
1859 had been a very bad year.
I’d lost a wife as had Pollux. Dan Sickles, the bastard who’d killed one of my ‘sons,’ had been acquitted on temporary insanity, and two composers who I’d worked with directly, Auguste Mathieu Panseron and Bettina Brentano, had passed over.
Death, death, and more death.
It had become too much when Achilles had been injured in one of the stupid Napoleonic wars in Italy. He’d been run through with a sword, and it wasn’t as though private jets had existed back then.
Lux and I’d had to haul ass from New York City and over the ocean to get to his side. He couldn’t die, even if I’d wanted to kill him myself, but he’d been suffering greatly by the time I’d reached his side. The wound had been majorly infected, and when I’d healed him, had seen all the myriad wounds he incurred in what would now be considered self-harm, I’d accidentally started a solar storm.
Accidentally being the keyword.
Achilles loathed me. That I knew. I’d highlighted his biggest weakness, had shoved him into the depths of the Underworld, and he’d never forgiven me for it. By comparison, he’d never blamed the twins for instigating the Trojan War. The way they’d met their first wives, kidnapping them away from their betrothed, had resulted in Paris, the Trojan prince, being left alone with their sister, Helen of Troy. Lo and behold, a war had started. All because the Gemini twins hadn’t been able to keep it in their pants.
Of course, the cluster fuck was all my fault, and if I was being honest, I was getting pretty sick and tired of the whole world’s ills being my fault.
But in this, he wasn’t wrong.
I wanted to lambast him, but couldn’t.
The sun was flaring,
and because its source of power was tied to me, there was only one person to blame.
Grimacing as I saw the solar flares as well as the sunspots, I knew, dammit, that a CME—coronal mass ejection—would be winging its way to Earth within the next few days.
Apparently Achilles had turned into a mind reader, because he glowered at me. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” I rasped, but there wasn’t much I could use by way of defense. “I felt when Ella joined with the twins.” I reached up and tugged at my shirt collar. “It might have caused a slight power surge but I—”
He grabbed hold of my shirt and dragged me against him. “Stop it. Make it calm down.”
“You know that isn’t how it works,” I ground out, shoving him away from me, hard enough to have him staggering back a few feet—he’d have fallen over too if he hadn’t tumbled back into the wall.
“It isn’t like the nineteenth century anymore, Apollo.”
“Gee, ya think?” I snapped.
“You blew out the telegraph system last time. What the fuck do you think will happen with the way the humans depend on the electric grid now?”
Because he wasn’t wrong, I felt my skin blanch.
Running hands through my hair as I weighed out what I could do, I turned to look at the sun. Its rays didn’t hurt me. My eyes didn’t water as my guardians’ would. I saw the spots, saw the flares flickering to life, and all because I’d felt something other than desperation in too many years to count.
“Could Ella help?” Achilles asked quietly, but I could hear the concern in his voice.
What I’d inadvertently triggered back in the eighteen hundreds had caused the aurora borealis to be seen the world over for days on end. A phenomenon that was unique to the northern hemisphere, to the most northerly parts of that hemisphere, had been visible down in Mexico and Queensland. It had been bright enough for people to mistake as mid-dawn.
More than that, it had disrupted telegraph systems the planet over. The power poles had sparked. Because the world wasn’t so reliant upon the telegraph, upon electricity, the effects hadn’t been too damaging, but if that were to happen today?
There’d been other power surges. Some that had caused issues with the grid. In the late eighties, I’d inadvertently cut the power in Quebec—but that had been thanks to the Cold War, not deaths that had hit my circle. The Gods never did well when humans were at war.
Zeus had a habit of raining lightning down on armies in the middle of battles, and during the Second World War, Poseidon’s rages over the Battle of the Atlantic, had resulted in fierce storms that had tossed the navies of both the Allied Forces and the Germans.
“I’m going to get her. Maybe she can help.”
Achilles’ statement broke into my thoughts, and I turned from my perusal of a darkening sunspot to see him retreating from my quarters.
I rarely left these rooms when I was at Achill. I lived, worked, and slept in here, only leaving to walk on the grounds, work out in the gym with one of the twins, or to eat in the dining hall.
That would have to change when Ella took her place at my side. She couldn’t live out of these rooms, luxurious though they might be.
Of course, now was not the time to think about interior decoration. Still, I tried to imagine her in these rooms and could easily envisage it. So much so that when she burst in, I smiled.
“You move in here tonight.”
My demand had her braking to a halt, and Achilles grunted under his breath behind her.
“Excuse me?”
I smiled at her, and because I had worded it as an order, I held out my hand to her and sent her a beseeching look that had her treading carefully toward me. The second our palms brushed alongside the other’s, she sighed and sank into a loose embrace that saw my arms looping around her waist and her pressing her forehead to my chest.
The easy affection stunned me, but equally, it sank into my bones, filling me with liquid warmth.
She stank of sex, of my guardians, and I had to wonder if there was a better scent in the known universe.
“Achilles said you’ve done something to the sun.”
I huffed. “You make it sound like I did it on purpose.” I shot my dour guardian a glare, and saw he’d been bracketed by the twins.
Their edginess almost had me smiling. Their panic was necessary, I supposed, but there was little point in fretting—if anything, it was vital I remain calm.
“Did you break it?” she inquired, and though I heard the laugh, I also sensed it was forced.
“No,” I assured her. “Just… well, it might go crazy for a while.”
She pulled back at that, making me mourn the contact instantly. Achilles cleared his throat and she slipped her arms around my waist in turn, tugging us into a tighter hug.
“Did you tell her to pacify me?” The notion was amusing, but also, I didn’t want her to touch me out of any other reason than desire. Not for sex, but for touch.
Humans often failed to realize the importance of affection, but it was everything — the physical manifestation of love itself.
She might not love me yet, not properly, but she would. I’d see to it that she adored me if it was the last thing I did.
“He said your feelings were turbulent and that we had to calm you.”
“I’m not a horse with colic.”
“You might as well be,” Achilles ground out. “Sort out the sun before the Earth feels the effects of it.”
His demand made me want to bristle, but how could I when he wasn’t exactly wrong?
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I defended myself.
“That doesn’t mean you won’t blow out the grid, Pol,” Ella chided, but she loosened one arm from around my waist and slid her hand over my back in a motion that, I had to admit, soothed me.
My throat bobbed as my body responded to her touch. Not just in the most obvious of ways either. Sure, I got a hard-on, but I felt like a man who’d been dropped in the middle of the desert with no water, and whose third mirage turned out to be a glorious oasis.
She was my home. My haven. I needed her more than she could ever know, and it seemed the Earth needed her too.
“What can we do to help?” Lux asked, and I shot him a smile. Lux was the edgiest of my guardians. Filled with nervous energy that he usually burned off in the boxing ring.
“Nothing,” I told him. “I don’t think there’s much I can do.” Turning to stare back out of the window, I felt Ella move with me, her gaze on the sun as well.
Before I could chide her, she gasped. “Oh my God, there’s a big black spot on the sun!”
“You can see that?” Tor demanded, striding across the room to look out the window. When he squinted, then winced, I knew he couldn’t see anything. Which meant Ella could.
The spot, while large, wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
Hmm.
When had that happened?
Through my healing?
I reached up to cup her chin and sent my healing warmth through her body. She gasped and squirmed against me when I found the sore tissues between her legs and healed her. There were little marks on her nipples, too, and though there were small blood vessels the twins had burst by sucking on her throat like a pair of vampires, I left them. I liked seeing them on her, even if they made me want to gift her a few of my own.
“Jesus, Pol, warn a girl!” she gasped, but I ignored her squirming, ensuring that she was healed from the tip of her toes to the crown of her head.
There was no damage to her eyes, and… I tilted my head to the side as I checked on the aneurysm.
“Huh.”
“Huh?” Tor spat. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I hummed as I gently sent my power throughout her brain, realizing what the aneurysm had done the second it came into contact with my healing gifts.
“The aneurysm has changed.”
“Aneurysm?” Achilles ground out. “Why is this the first I’m hearing of it?”
“Because he’s eradicating it,” Lux retorted. “There was never any need to fret.”
“Fret? I don’t fret,” Achilles retorted, sounding like he was… fretting.
I sensed him storm over to us, and when he pressed a hand to Ella’s shoulder, his fingers kneading the muscles there, because my focus was on healing her, on healing that area, I saw the way the aneurysm responded.
It didn’t turn a different damn color, nor did it oscillate in greeting, but it changed. Morphed, somehow.
Was it responsible for the way she could look at the sun?
Uncertainty filled me, and where healing was concerned, I wasn’t accustomed to being uncertain.
I’d have expected physiological changes after we’d bonded, but not so soon after the twins claimed her.
My healing had done this, and because I’d had to work on her brain with the aneurysm, I’d changed her, and her proximity to all of us had done the rest. That link that bound us together, that fluttered into being every time we touched? It triggered change.
The aneurysm wouldn’t cause any problem now. Not that she’d been in danger from the moment I’d touched her, our connection blaring to life as a result. Still, it was a relief to know she wouldn’t be in pain.
Ella leaned her head back against Achilles’ chest and stared up at me. I could see the concern in the shadowy depths of her eyes, but she kept her tone calm as she asked, “What’s going on, Apollo?”
There was no easy way to phrase it, so I didn’t try to. “You’re becoming my queen.”
❖
Achilles
Wanting to curse the man, I held my tongue. His words settled into the room’s atmosphere with as much presence as the CME would trigger a chaotic effect upon the Earth’s magnetic field.
“Becoming your queen?” Ella repeated, and I had to hide a smile. There was danger in her tone, and I far preferred that to the concern of moments before.
It hadn’t been ideal breaking the lock and bursting into the stable offices, finding her laying on the desk, Tor slumped close by in the chair, and Lux using her as a mattress.
The Sun Revolves Around Apollo (The Gods Are Back In Town Book 2) Page 17
