“Yeah, but your cousins are going to be in it,” Elijah countered.
Dylan shrugged again, grinning. “Yeah, but Cami’s going to be in it too,” Dylan said. “And as long as I don’t look for your faces, I can just pretend it’s me.”
“Good luck with that,” Elijah said. He turned to face the gazebo once more and decided that it was probably good enough with what he’d done so far; between the flowers and the candles, the bed setup, and the space, he hoped it would give the best chances for the bonding to actually occur.
He headed back into the house to clean up and see how Cami was doing; Nicholas had agreed to work with her on the abilities that she had started to awaken while Elijah and Alistair went about putting their parts of the two plans to keep her away from the Egans into action. Elijah kicked off his shoes at the back door and heard Nicholas and Cami in the living room.
“so, the goal will be to eventually teach you how to manipulate what you are able to sense,” Elijah heard Nicholas saying. “For right now, though, it’s good to just be able to sense them.”
“I’m kind of afraid to try, is the issue,” Cami said as Elijah came into the room. She glanced at him. “Because, for example: if I learn how to turn people’s powers off before I learn how to turn them on or up, that could be kind of an issue.”
“On the plus side,” Elijah mused, “you could use that to be absolutely certain that we aren’t messing with your head.”
“At this point, I’m torn between believing my eyes and thinking that you’ve all been feeding me low dose drugs for the past few days,” Cami joked.
“No drugs last that long,” Nicholas countered.
“If you were dosing me with every meal, they would,” Cami pointed out.
“Yeah, but you would have other symptoms,” Elijah said.
“I guess at this point, I’d probably know I’m being drugged, at least,” Cami conceded.
“How’s dragon school going?” Elijah asked, throwing himself onto the couch he preferred in the room and looking at Cami. She had changed into proper clothes, and he was definitely already excited at the prospect of getting them off of her.
“I can’t even start to transform yet,” Cami replied. “We tried it. Not even the eyes.”
“It’ll come,” Nicholas reassured her. “In the meantime, you’re progressing pretty quickly.”
“Apparently, I can sense abilities in dragons I don’t know and who aren’t even in the room or in the state,” Cami told Elijah.
“Impressive!” Elijah said. “How do you test that?”
Nicholas shrugged. “I had her close her eyes, reach out, and try to find out what she could ‘see,’” Nicholas replied. “A little bit of refining methods, and once she started telling me, I could identify who she was talking about.”
“If you can do that to dragons who aren’t even in the room with you, or even farther away,” Elijah mused, “youare going to be important, regardless of the prophecy.”
“All the more reason to make sure she’s able to stay with us,” Nicholas said.
Elijah nodded. “I’m going to get a shower, and then we can go out and start the bonding ritual whenever Alistair is back and you’re ready, Cami,” Elijah said.
Cami looked briefly uncertain. “I’m still not 100% sure I understand what’s involved in this,” she said. “I know there’s biting involved, but that seems like the least of my worries right now.”
“Bonding with two people is kind of tricky,” Elijah said. “Just bonding with one person requires absolute trust. Two people”
“So, what you’re saying is that I should have just chosen one of you?”
Elijah shrugged, smiling slightly. “If you don’t intend on choosing between the four of us, bonding two at a time isn’t a bad idea,” he said. “When it comes down to it, we’ll do the best we can. We have another two days after this to try and make it happen, and we have a contingency plan.”
Elijah heard the front door close, and a moment later, Alistair came into the living room. “I have good news, and I have bad news,” Alistair said.
“Might as well give it in that order,” Cami pointed out.
“The good news is that I have a way to get into your father’s home,” Alistair said. “I tracked down the executor of his will, and you are written in to have access to his properties and fortune.”
“That sounds like bad news wouldn’t be all that likely,” Nicholas said.
“The bad news is that it’s set with conditions,” Alistair said. “You’re only allowed to take possession of things once you’ve fully activated and become a dragon.”
Elijah sighed. “Well, she is entitled to live there,” he mused. “If we get her in early, there’s not a whole lot they can do, legally speaking; they can’t have made that plain in the actual will they filed.”
“The problem with that is: the Elders are the ones holding it in trust,” Alistair said. “They’re the ones who would be enforcing the rule.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s an issue,” Elijah agreed.
“So, I guess we’d better hope that I can bond with at least one person in this family,” Cami said.
“We can still get you onto the property if it doesn’t work out,” Alistair said. “It’s just likely to cause some contention.”
“I have the distinct feeling that contention is going to be the order of the day on this whole issue,” Nicholas said.
“We might as well get down to it and see what our options are,” Cami pointed out.
“Getting a bit sexually frustrated?” Dylan asked, coming into the room. “I mean, all four of us are too, so at least you’re in good company.”
“If this doesn’t work, I’m going to try one-on-one next, and you are the last person I’m going to try and bond with,” Cami told Dylan, sitting down on the couch.
Elijah chuckled. “I’m going to get a shower, and then we can get started,” Elijah said. He rose to his feet and looked at Alistair as he started for the exit. It was going to be one of the stranger sexual encounters either of them had had; they didn’t exactly make a habit of threesomes, or even seeing each other naked outside of the necessary situations where it just happened. But neither of them was going to back out of a chance to bond with Cami; even if the bond didn’t take, the chance to be the first two in the family to actually have sex with her was a fairly strong counter to any objections they might have made.
Elijah left his cousins and Cami in the living room and hurried up to his bedroom, intent on getting his shower out of the way as quickly as possible. He turned the heat up on the water and stripped out of his sweaty, dusty clothes, stepping in and reaching for his shower gel right away. Wonder if anyone’s told her that her tolerance for heat is going to go up? Or probably already has? Elijah mused as he got to work scrubbing his body and wetting his hair as thoroughly as possible. He smiled to himself as he made quick work of getting clean, lathering shampoo through his hair and rinsing it, then adding conditioner to the ends to make sure it wouldn’t become a tangled mess while he checked to make sure his face didn’t need shaving.
He got out of the shower and dried off just as quickly as he had bathed, squeezing all the excess water out of his hair that he could. Elijah paused for just a moment to think about Cami, getting ready in her own turn for the ceremony to come. He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, seeking the unique imprint that was Cami’s mind within the house. He let her emotions wash through him: curiosity, anxiety, desire. She was definitely—as Dylan had observed—sexually frustrated. While he couldn’t read her thoughts, Elijah was able to surmise that the sex part of the bonding ceremony was definitely to her liking but that the rest of it was much less certain.
Elijah went back downstairs to find Alistair and Cami sitting at the kitchen table, eating together. Nicholas and Dylan had made themselves scarce, either going elsewhere in the big, old house or leaving altogether.
“What are we eating?” Elijah asked, sitti
ng down with them.
“Fruit salad,” Cami replied. “I mean, technically it’s just cut-up fruit. But we can call it fruit salad.”
“I also bought some of the gazpacho Cami likes,” Alistair added, gesturing to the glass bottle set aside on the table.
“Sounds good,” Elijah said. “Mind if I join in?”
“We figured that eating together would be a good start to the whole bonding thing,” Cami said. “And since you’re involved in the whole bonding thing, you should have some too.”
Elijah helped himself, grabbing a bowl and a salad plate and getting up to get the container of sour cream out of the fridge to add to his portion of gazpacho.
“I’ve been telling her that it’s pointless to be nervous about it,” Alistair said. “It’s not going to really hurt, and if it doesn’t work out, we can just try again. Or she can try with Nick or Dylan.”
“It’s mostly that I’m still not completely sure how this is supposed to happen,” Cami said, spearing a cube of pineapple on the end of her fork.
“Fortunately for you, everyone comes first,” Elijah said. “The bonding part takes place during round two.”
“Round two,” Cami said, raising an eyebrow.
“It does have to be done during sex,” Alistair said. “It’s just that it’s important to have had one orgasm beforehand.”
“In that case, I am much less nervous,” Cami said. “About everything but the biting part.”
“The biting part isn’t that bad,” Alistair said.
“They’re love-bites,” Elijah added. “It’ll be good in the moment.”
“We will see,” Cami said, finishing off the piece of pineapple and going for a grape. “So, how do we start?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Cami
The water swirled around her, caressing her skin; the steam rising off of it told Cami that it was hot indeed, but it felt perfectly warm, not scalding. “What temperature is this water?” she asked the two men in the hot tub-cum-lagoon with her, looking around for some indication.
“Just under boiling,” Alistair said, sighing in appreciation as he leaned back.
“What?” Cami brought her hand up, expecting to see the telltale redness of first-degree burns, but her skin was only slightly flushed, the same as it was whenever she took a bath.
“You’re becoming a dragon,” Elijah pointed out. “Tolerance to heat is one of the first things.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it yet,” Alistair said. Cami shook her head in a mixture of disbelief, amusement, and mild annoyance. “Don’t you remember? You grabbed the coffee pot itself earlier and didn’t even flinch.”
“I wasn’t really paying attention, given everything else,” Cami said tartly. She took a deep breath, still expecting to feel the symptoms of her skin burning at any moment, but the water didn’t feel harmful—just intoxicatingly warm, soothing, and delightful. She looked at the two men, letting her thoughts wander from potential dangers of such hot water to the fact that they were both all but naked, wearing nothing more than their underwear. Of course, she had stripped down to her panties, and before too much longer, she wouldn’t even have those on.
The differences between the two cousins were even more pronounced up close and with them naked; Alistair’s long, lean frame had a kind of ascetic allure, with his hip bones visible and his ribcage just barely showing under his smooth, soft-looking skin. His long legs had a toned rather than muscular look, and as he relaxed in the water, the delicate flush that graced his cheeks made him look androgynous—not quite feminine, but pretty.
Elijah’s build was stockier, his skin less pale, and there was no denying the muscles that rippled under his skin across his chest, along his upper arms, through his thighs. He didn’t have a six-pack, but there was no sign of even a potential beer belly on his flat abdomen; Cami fully believed that Elijah could pick her up and carry her without effort.
“You’ll notice things more and more,” Elijah said. “Little things, mostly; you’ll be able to play with fire with no risk of getting burned and make noises you’re not used to making without knowing why.”
“It’s probably a good thing that we don’t intend for me to be out in mixed company while I’m getting used to all this, then,” Cami pointed out.
Alistair chuckled, and she noticed that while the two men had been careful to give her space when the three of them had first gotten into the hot tub, they were both gradually moving closer to her.
“Are you two going to just keep hinting that you want to bang me and get this started, or are you going to make a move?” Cami asked, looking at each man archly.
Elijah laughed. “I was taking my time,” he said. “Making a whole event of it.”
“I didn’t want to invade your space,” Alistair said. “I mean, the trust thing is important here.”
“Well, you have my permission to make your respective moves,” Cami said, her heart beating faster in a way that had nothing to do with the hot water. She’d been waiting for this all day, dreading and anticipating it in equal measures; the idea of being bonded to two men she only barely knew was scary, but she couldn’t deny that both Elijah and Alistair were so attractive in their different ways that it almost wasn’t fair.
Elijah moved first, gliding through the water and reaching for her. He pulled her close and tilted her face up, and when Elijah’s lips connected with hers, Cami let herself give into the kiss immediately. A tingle worked through her body at the contact with Elijah, and when she felt Alistair’s hands touch her back, another tiny frisson of tension worked through her again. Cami shivered as both men touched her, thinking about her dream from before and the role that Nicholas—and Dylan, though less actively—had played in it.
Cami let herself be passed from Elijah to Alistair, and as she kissed the second of the two men, she felt Elijah’s hands roaming over her body, touching and exploring, moving up to cup her breasts as his lips pressed to the nape of her neck. She tried to keep track of which of the two men was touching her where, but as Alistair deepened the kiss, it was absolutely impossible to focus. Cami’s body heated up more and more, and she felt a kind of knot of tension forming deep down between her hips as the combined attentions from the two men turned her on more intensely than any encounter she’d had before it, save the dream with the other two Overton men.
At some point, she was kissing Elijah again with Alistair behind her, tugging her panties off and casting them aside before they had even gotten out of the water. Cami stopped even trying to pay attention to which man was doing what and kissed whichever pair of lips was nearest to her, playing her hands over whichever body was closest, twisting and squirming and writhing between the two men. She could feel the slick heat between her labia that had nothing at all to do with the water, and then felt fingers sliding along her folds, pressing lightly, seeking her pleasure center.
“We should get out of the water, I think,” Cami murmured, a brief moment of self-preservation rising up in the midst of the hot fog that wrapped around her mind. “There’s a good chance one of us could end up drowning if we go at it in here.” Someone—Cami thought it was probably Elijah—chuckled in response to that, and then she was being lifted out of the water by strong, sure hands. Someone kissed her, and Cami realized that same person was carrying her the short distance from the hot tub to the gazebo set up for the bonding ceremony; she wondered what the other man was doing in the meantime, but not enough to open her eyes or break away from the kiss.
Then, she was on her back on a soft pile of mattresses, pillows, and blankets and opened her eyes to look up and see Alistair on top of her. Somewhere along the way, he’d obviously gotten rid of his shorts, and Cami glanced down to see his fully erect cock, flushed almost purple-red, pointed directly at her. She looked around and saw Elijah, also fully naked, moving to join them on the makeshift bed; the differences between the two men in build, Cami noticed, extended to their erections: where Alistair’s cock w
as longer by maybe an inch, Elijah’s had more girth, the flesh a deeper color. Taking a cue from her dream--though Cami knew full well her actual body was much less flexible than it had been in her dream--Cami half-turned to face Elijah as he settled on his knees next to her, reaching for his dick with one hand even as Alistair began kissing and nibbling her neck, working his way down her body.
She stroked and rubbed Elijah’s erection as Alistair slithered down her body slowly, stopping at her breasts for a while to suck and lick her nipples, worshipping them with his mouth. Elijah moaned as Cami worked him with her hand, reaching down as Alistair moved on to play his lips in a trail down her abdomen. Elijah teased her nipples, pinching and twisting them, cupping her breasts, sending little jolts of sensation directly to Cami’s pussy as she moaned and gasped in reaction.
Alistair shifted down between her legs, and Cami let out a little cry as he buried his face against her, spreading her labia apart and immediately getting to work with his lips and tongue. Cami’s hips bucked as Alistair’s tongue slid up and down along her folds, tasting her thoroughly before he found her clitoris and began to focus mainly on that. He sucked the bead of nerves between his lips and began to swirl his tongue around it carefully, making Cami wetter and wetter, more and more turned on by the moment. Elijah made himself busy as well, playing with her breasts, letting Cami guide herself to his cock to bring it to her lips.
Cami let herself be trapped between the two men, reacting to Alistair’s attentions while she lavished her own on Elijah, the tension growing deep down between her hips every moment. Elijah’s salty-bitter taste spread across her tongue as she took first the tip and then more of his erection into her mouth, not quite mimicking what Alistair was doing but mirroring the attention she received from one man onto the other. All three moved together, Alistair holding her hips where he wanted them, Elijah supporting her shoulders and neck as Cami worked him with her mouth and one hand, the other tangled in Alistair’s hair.
House Of Dragons (The Cami Bakersfield Saga Book 1) Page 16
