Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3)

by Kent, Julia

  And when you could do all three, it was fucking awesome.

  His back arched as he slid slowly in and out of her, Joe behind Darla, their bodies mingled together, sweat making them slippery. Darla clenched so hard around his cock that he couldn’t move even if he wanted to, and his body surged, knowing she was close. Red fire shot through him and his thoughts dissipated, her soft flesh in his anxious palms, hands needing to touch whatever he could of her to cling as they both—all three, actually—fell off the cliff into the cavern of climactic bliss.

  This was what it felt like to be complete.

  He needed them both right here, right now, and especially Darla right fucking there.

  She cried out both their names. The sound of her hoarse, uncontrolled release made him come, the three of them turning into nothing but surging muscle and spasming need, thrusts and friction and joy in one tangled bunch of limbs, curves and hard lines like a relief map of fucking amazing sex, and as Trevor rooted himself inside Darla and she crashed and crashed and crashed like waves hitting a breaker wall, a series of thoughts shot through his mind:

  This is what love feels like. Not inside your heart or mind, but on your skin, musky and slick with fibers buzzing and grasping.

  This is what love tastes like. Salty and free, sweet and sassy, like an orgasm on the tongue.

  This is what love sounds like. His name, shattering the huffing cloud of sighs and groans, called out by a throat so perfect he could only answer Darla’s calls with a kiss to that soft spot on her neck.

  This is what love is.

  Everything was more complete with Joe there, but they didn’t talk about that, either. Love and Joe occupied two very distinct parts of Trevor’s brain, like the two elements were radioactive when they got anywhere near each other, so he kept them in lead-lined box inside his head.

  He couldn’t deny it, though. Had stopped fighting it, mostly. Feeling whole left him with a kind of bliss that made the three of them a force of nature that no one defined except them. And that was good enough for Trevor.

  Darla began to fidget, his clue that she was done and ready to cuddle. Sliding out of her made him shudder, just once, the final impulses of electrical power elicited by sex crawling out of his dick.

  Now he was done, and as Joe took his place on her left side, Trevor on her right, the three settled into what he’d come to think of as The Movie Shot. Imagining them from above, suspended in space, he figured they looked like a group of twenty-somethings who were well fucked and damn pleased with themselves.

  As they should be.

  And yet Joe never was.

  “That was amazing,” Trevor said preemptively, as if he could control the mood by saying something first that would be positive. Like starting conversation on a good note would neutralize anything negative that Joe might say.

  Didn’t work.

  “That’s what you get all the time while I’m in Philly.” The words felt like a cold bucket of ice water all over Trevor’s body, and he hadn’t signed up to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

  Darla squeezed Trevor’s thigh with a warning, but also a tacit statement of agreement that Joe was being an asshole.

  “Whenever you come home, we’re here,” she whispered in Joe’s ear, loud enough for Trevor to hear, but it was too late. His entire body had gone rigid with suppressed rage. Way to ruin a nice moment, he thought. Then again, Joe was good at that.

  He was pretty much the expert, in fact.

  “‘Home’? This shithole is home?”

  “You lived in this shithole before, so what happened? It doesn’t meet your new, snooty Philly standards?” The words ripped out of Trevor’s mouth before he could help it. And Darla’s hand on his thigh couldn’t stop him, either.

  Joe just snorted and snuggled in with Darla more. Trevor didn’t feel jealousy the way Joe seemed to, but the combination of the sneering words and taking casual advantage of her nice, wet, warm body made Trevor sit up and slice the air with quick movement, eyes burning a hole through Joe’s head.

  “C’mon. You can’t take a joke?” Joe’s taunt raised Trevor’s anger level from rage to explosive, and he didn’t do explosive. Darla could sense it, too—he knew from the way the corners of her mouth turned down, and how her green eyes went stormy, that this was as bad as he thought.

  He couldn’t calm down. Couldn’t chill, couldn’t back off, either. Always the appeaser, and generally willing to give himself a few seconds of distance between hearing one of Joe’s wisecracks and reacting to it, he was out of patience.

  Finally.

  “Fuck you, Joe,” Trevor ground out like he was chewing rusty nails. There went the shine off the afterglow. Pfft. Gone in one quick sentence.

  “Nope. Sorry. All fucked out. Darla took care of that.”

  Trevor’s breathing was labored, the whoosh of air being pushed in and out by fury as loud as a tornado rushing through his ears. Darla peeled Joe off her and sat up, eyes wide with alarm. He could feel the hair on his body stand on end, as if that same electrical current that had just fueled so much passion moments ago had gone rogue, now turning dangerous. Destructive.

  Lethal.

  He wasn’t going to really kill Joe, of course. But if he could murder that fucker’s sense of entitlement, self-importance, and most of all, the little troll of extraordinary negativity that inhabited Joe like a parasite, then maybe he’d get somewhere.

  Because he just couldn’t take it anymore.

  “How in the hell are you so jealous?” he spat out, knowing it would make Joe take the bait. “We share. We’re a threesome. That comes with the territory of what we are, together. You’re not supposed to be like this when you choose to be with me and Darla, you asshole.”

  A few beats of silence. Trevor stared, hard, at Joe’s face, searching for a crack. A fissure. Some hint that Joe felt something.

  “Not jealous. Just stating the facts,” Joe said, calmly stretching his carved abs, arms reaching up for the pillow beneath his head, Darla involuntarily turning to watch. Joe was dark and tanned, compact and marbled, while Trevor was tall and blond, with more bulk on him. Darla said she loved having her yin and yang, her men as different as could be, giving her everything she needed.

  And Trevor had to agree that the three of them worked well together, like puzzle pieces that fit perfectly, but there was a fourth person in the room right now. Joe’s negativity was an unwanted, interfering stalker, like an ex who can’t let go.

  The blasé attitude Joe exuded was completely manufactured, Trevor knew. He was faking it.

  Joe faked lots of things.

  Trevor knew how to make him be real, though. And that was the most dangerous thing he could do right now—make Joe emotionally vulnerable. Being in an intimate relationship with someone meant you knew every single one of their soft spots, and there was a tacit agreement that you just do not—ever—poke those spots with anything sharp.

  Joe had broken that agreement, except the sharp thing he poked with was his tongue. And not in the good kind of way.

  “Hey, guys, don’t do this,” Darla pleaded. Her voice held a gentle tone that made two layers of anger melt off Trevor’s body. Unfortunately, Joe had made seventeen more appear.

  “Don’t do what? I’m not doing anything,” Joe replied. “Trevor’s the one doing it. I’m sitting here enjoying my first weekend with you guys in three weeks and he’s being an asshole.”

  “I’m the asshole?” Trevor shouted, arms flying forward, hands clenched, an instinctive response. Joe just stretched again, the gesture a little too practiced. Trevor knew Joe was just as on alert, as primed for a ripping fight, and that knowledge made him unleash.

  “Yep,” Joe said.

  Darla put one hot, dry palm on Trevor’s chest, her sweet pressure making him tingle all over, but it wasn’t enough. “Let’s go out for coffee and talk,” she declared, as if it were a done deal, as if she could paper over the fact that—

  “You want out?” Trevo
r challenged. “You want to break this up?”

  The room turned to ice. Darla’s jaw dropped and her mouth made a little O of shock that made Trevor’s balls crawl up into his groin.

  Shit. He’d said it.

  He’d finally fucking said it.

  And man, did he wish he could take it back.

  Because Joe suddenly wasn’t so casual anymore. All the color had drained from Joe’s face, and it gave him a sickly, nothing-to-lose look, his face all hard angles and his lips tight with steely fury.

  Whatever came out of his mouth next would change life as they knew it.

  Leave it to Darla to interrupt, of course. “Don’t you dare say one word, Joe!” she said in a harsh voice, her tone high and thin, panicked and desperate. “You two are insufferable, and I won’t let you keep doing this. You’re going with me to lunch tomorrow and talking to Mike and Dylan about—”

  “What?” he and Joe shouted in unison, the first time they’d had the same reaction to anything since, well…since they’d met Darla.

  She wasn’t backing down, though. Her breasts bobbed hypnotically as she gestured wildly, and all Trevor could think about, suddenly, was how those nipples tightened with the lightest whisper of touches, how the heft of those globes filled his hands—overfilled them—as if they were made for holding. Like an ornament, but one that was warm and willing. An image of a baby snuggled up tight against her chest flashed through his mind, and he shook his head like a dog that got wet, banishing the unexpected intrusion.

  What the fuck? Where did that thought come from?

  “You two are like old Boyd and Jersey back home,” she spat out with disgust. Trevor was only half paying attention, his brain buzzing from what he’d just been thinking.

  “Oh, great,” Joe drawled in a fake Southern accent that sounded more like a drunk German pretending to speak Chinese. “We git ourselves zome hometown good-ole-boy ztories!”

  Darla’s face fell into a mask of cold anger. “You sound like Hitler on acid when you do that. I do not sound like that.”

  “You sound close enough.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Trevor added, coming to her defense. Her accent was slight. Not as broad as it had been when she’d moved to Boston to join them. It wasn’t even that there was a strong difference in how they pronounced words, but more her lazy use of grammar, her little colloquial sayings, and the tendency to drop the “g” at the ends of words when she got excited or upset.

  As her voice became more cultured he found himself wistful for the broad, open mouth she’d had when they met.

  Except right now that mouth was aimed at him and Joe, and boy was she letting ’er rip.

  “Yes, she does.” Joe stood abruptly and threw on a pair of jeans, tucking his junk down so he didn’t pull a There’s Something About Mary moment and zip himself in pain.

  “No, she—wait!” Trevor barked, eyes on Darla’s face this time, tempting as her tits were. “We’re not sitting at a table across from Thor and Angry Firefighter and pouring out our feelings and shit.”

  “I never said that’s what you’d—”

  Joe and Trevor snorted at the same time, the sound like melody and harmony, in perfect tune. Darla was outnumbered here. Whatever plan she was hatching was so outrageous that Trevor couldn’t even fathom why she’d want him and Joe to get together with—

  Ah. Got it.

  “You think because they’re in a threesome we need to have a therapy session with some old dudes who have been there, done that, fallen off the bed during DP and have the scars to prove it?”

  This time Joe snorted alone.

  “Because I am not talking about what we do with anyone. This is us. This is private. This is”—Trevor’s hands twitched and curled into questioning fists—“this is whatever it is, but it’s not something anyone else has. It doesn’t need to be analyzed or dissected or picked apart, damn it.” His voice went low. “And besides, why the hell would two billionaires give a fucking shit about what their employee’s boyfriends do?”

  He expected Darla to pause, to be shocked into silence, to do anything but what she did next. “See? See there? Right there? Boyfriends. Zzzzz. With an ‘s.’ Who in the ever-loving hell has boyfriends? And I don’t mean the women who fuck two men in serial—I mean who fucks men in parallel and has a relationship that’s all about balance and meeting two men’s needs while—” Her voice hitched and she stopped, eyes shining with unspilled tears, and Trevor’s heart folded in on itself in that moment.

  Fuck.

  “So”—she sniffed, a sob in her throat so loud it made Joe and Trevor share a look of worry—“forgive me for wanting you to talk to the only two fucking human beings on the planet who might have a goddamned clue what to do and how to be like this. It ain’t working right now with Joe’s jealousy.”

  “I’m not—”

  “And quit denying you’re jealous, because you walk around like a puckered butthole that just got bleached and treated to road rash,” she added.

  Trevor’s anus clenched involuntarily at her words. The woman could use vocabulary the way martial artists used nunchucks—with great skill, well-honed instinct, and ruthless efficiency.

  Joe’s look almost made Trevor laugh, and he would have if he weren’t filled with a swirl of emotion. Too many things were being thrown out there like emotional debris after a wrecking ball hit the wrong building, and being naked and watching Darla’s lush, creamy nude body in the middle of the chaos didn’t help either. Trevor had a limit, and it had been reached in every possible way—emotionally, sexually, physically.

  Joe spoke. “You can be such a—” The room turned to a freezer. Joe was about to call Darla a name, and Trevor jumped in front of her as if he needed to physically shield her, protect her from the B-word, as if he could take it into his own chest and let his body act as armor against what he knew Joe was about to unleash and could never, ever take back.

  “—busybody!” Joe ground out. He flinched as Trevor appeared in front of him, and Darla’s hand on Trevor’s back was shaking. She squeezed. Did she expect it, too? When had the world become so charged, so unsafe? They were each other’s sanctuary, the three of them, and somehow everything spiraled out of control within minutes of sharing their bodies and hearts.

  Weren’t you supposed to be able to share until the outer limits of what defined you were stretched beyond recognition, yet still come back more whole than ever before? Wasn’t that the entire point of love?

  “Why are you jumping in front of her like a spider monkey on crack?” Joe snapped. “You’re acting like I’m some sort of…like I was going to…” His brows knitted in confusion and pain. “What the fuck did you think I was about to do, Trev?” He planted his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, the power of his chest expanding in a way that felt threatening suddenly.

  Trevor moved closer, eyes boring into Joe’s. “I thought you were about to lash out at her and do something you’d regret.”

  All the anger in Joe drained out of him, leaving eyes that were bleak and vulnerable. It made Trevor go cold with regret.

  “Darla,” Joe said softly, “do you think I’d…do that? Hurt you?”

  “God, no. Not physically! No!” Trevor rushed to explain. “You just look like—”

  “No.” Darla’s single word thundered through the room, the declaration a thunderclap of certainty that Trevor welcomed. He and Joe shuddered, as if her word recalibrated them, and Trevor felt his body tense in one big, long chain of muscles, like an orgasm without sex, as if he clenched and realigned every bone, every muscle, each tendon and fiber now back in place.

  She had that effect on them.

  And only Darla could do that.

  “You can make fun of me for being a hick,” she said, holding up a hand to stem the inevitable protest that Joe started to put up, “and you can be a crabby jerk because you’re too uptight to admit that you hate law school and hate the life you’ve chosen at Penn, but don’t know how to find
your way out of the straightjacket of your parents’ expectations for you,” she said to Joe in a calm, slow, deliberate voice that made her seem timeless and wizened, mature and all-knowing. It made Trevor relaxed and self-conscious at the same time.

  “But,” she added, eyes combing over Joe, then Trevor, then back to Joe. The gooseflesh she left on Trevor’s body came from the timbre of her voice, the cadence of a rock-hard declaration that neither of them dared challenge. “But—you do not get to ruin what we have just because you’re afraid of what you don’t know.” Her eyes flashed and flicked between the two of them. I mean you too, she was saying to Trevor.

  And he knew it.

  “We’re going to Jeddy’s tomorrow,” she said, pulling on Harvard-logo yoga pants and one of Trevor’s oversized flannel shirts, eyes locked on Joe while she did the buttons. “And you’ll sit across the table from Mike and Dylan and ask them how the fuck they figured this shit out ten years ago when they met their first woman. Because those two know something. They know something you two don’t.”

  “What’s that?” Joe croaked out. It made Trevor cringe.

  “They know what it’s like to fall in love in all the weird ways love gives you, and they know what it’s like to have it all taken away not by someone’s stupidity, but by the cruel randomness of cancer.”

  Trevor just blinked.

  “They lost Jill and didn’t have a choice. And then they got a second chance with Laura. Look at ’em. A happy family.”

  Trevor flashed back to the image of a baby at Darla’s breast, and he held his breath. Her green eyes caught his, one corner of her mouth crooking up as if she read his mind.

  “You want…that?” Joe choked out.

  Trevor and Darla both looked at him. Trevor’s mind seized up.

  Darla took two, three, four measured breaths, unhurried and unworried, her placid outer self scaring Trevor more than anything she was about to say.