by Amy Lane
But it was lovely here—especially on this night, with Bracken and Andres talking companionably in the center of the boat, where Bracken was steering—even though I knew we all missed Green’s presence with an aching pit in our stomachs.
It was my job to get us home.
I turned toward the men and smiled a little. Andres was standing with his hand on Bracken’s shoulder as they leaned their heads together and spoke so softly I couldn’t hear. They both looked out at me, though, with enough heat that I flushed and looked away. In the lights from the tiny open-air cabin I could see his hand brush the bare whiteness of Bracken’s neck, and I shivered. Blood pooled to the slippery flesh between my thighs, and the whole works grew swollen, achy, and hungry.
I wanted to see this. I wanted to see Bracken at Andres’s mercy, eyes glazed, body thundering in time to Andres’s thrusts. I wanted to hold him as he came apart in my arms. Bracken—who was always my rock, the aggressor, the constant state of arousal or sexual empathy in my bed—I wanted to see him lose himself while being fucked into the floor.
It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, so there were still lanterns out in various places around the lake where hardy campers had hiked or boated in. We chose an inlet far away from the lantern lights, covered by the tall trees and smelling like green and red darkness. Bracken killed the motor and dropped the weight that served as an anchor, then moved to where I sat.
His body was warm as he pulled my knees on either side of him, leaving the thin crotch of my bikini the sole barrier between his hardened stomach and my sex, and he grinned unabashedly as I strained toward him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he purred, and I flushed. Without any noise or even any breeze, Andres was sitting right next to me, stroking my face and pulling my hair back as I leaned in and nuzzled Bracken’s chest, left bare by his opened button-down shirt.
“I’m thinking that it’s dark,” I said as Andres nuzzled below my ear and traced my jaw line with his tongue, “which is prob… ab… ly… a good… ah, crap….” Because now he was nuzzling my ear proper, and all my guys knew that just totally did it for me, and….
“Oh, Jesus, Bracken….” He stripped off my bikini bottoms one leg at a time. “This wasn’t supposed to… to… involve me….” Oh Goddess—not only was I mostly naked in front of both of them, but his fingers were working busily at his fly and he was… oh Goddess….
“You were thinking,” Andres taunted as I tried to catch my breath, “that we would leave you out of the sex completely.”
“So. Wrong.” Bracken grunted, checking with his fingers to see if I was as swollen, wet, and ready as he suspected I was, and… and…. Oh Goddess, he sheathed his body inside of mine quickly and carefully. I let out a breathless shriek and took a deep breath, and… and… it stuttered to a halt in my chest.
Andres had punctured his thumb with his own incisor, and he thrust it, dripping, into my mouth. I closed my eyes and groaned, surrounded by the last memory he’d held on to as a human, the memory of him making love to a plain woman in an empty field under the brutal South American sun. I saw her face, lovely and perfect in his eyes, and felt the slickness of her quim around my cock, and… and….
“Christ….” Because Bracken moved back, almost out, and then thrust forward hard once, and… and….
And Andres’s mouth closed over my vein, his hot tongue tasting my skin, and his teeth, oh Goddess, his teeth….
A completely unexpected orgasm ripped through me, so potent and powerful that I couldn’t contain the sunshine scream streaming from my mouth.
I turned my head from Andres—the last sane thought I had!—and poured that fire into the night, thinking sun-warmed wildflowers, thinking hot dusky skin and sex, not thinking at all as Bracken started to thrust inside me with all the force he would allow and Andres suckled from my neck with that potent, skin-buzzing euphoria that a vampire bite—especially this bite—could give.
Then Andres groaned, grinding hard against my hip. I felt him shudder and spend, the wetness in his trousers seeping against my skin as Bracken kept thrusting, and I tried not to lose my fucking mind beneath him.
I failed.
Another orgasm shredded my nerve endings, and another, and another, until I lunged up and clenched Bracken to me, biting his shoulder in mindless howling pleasure. I tasted salt and then blood, and Bracken groaned loud enough to shake the boat in the water and came, triggering my final aftershock and leaving me shaking, gasping, and trying to assimilate the complete sensual surprise of the last ten minutes.
We collapsed backward, Bracken on top of me facing Andres, who was lapping at my neck to close the wounds. I could feel a trickle of blood running down my shoulder, and Bracken stopped it before it got to the chaos filter—because who knew what that would do!—and began to lick the rivulet across my collarbone and up to my neck.
His tongue tickled and titillated, and I was about to giggle when he stopped lapping like an enthusiastic kitten. With a little turn of my head, I could see that he was licking up Andres’s chin and then into his mouth, and then….
I came again, Bracken’s body still clenched inside me, bucking to come alive for more, just when the two of them met mouths and kissed.
I gasped when Bracken’s hips started to pound again, just as fast and just as furiously as they had before, and I thought No no no no no…. Bracken was supposed to….
But then Andres broke off the kiss, and as I looked up into Bracken’s expression of ultimate arousal, something made his entire body stop. He stayed, cock quivering inside me, just vibrating with the need to move and the opposite, painful, come-shattering need to stay absofuckinglutely where he was.
He groaned, hard and painfully, into the hollow of my throat, and I risked a look over his shoulder.
I could barely see the top of Andres’s head moving rhythmically, doing something… something delicious and dirty to Bracken’s backside, and Bracken was growling obscenities into my skin.
“Goddess,” he spat. I laughed—I had to—my lover was so damned powerful, so titanic in breadth, and between Andres and his treacherous tongue and my slick, throbbing sex, Bracken was….
Helpless. Happy. At our mercy, and grateful for it. Beautiful in his submission. Oh Goddess… I shrieked a little and came around his cock again, and if anything, it seemed to grow larger with the constriction of my body around its length and width.
He swore again, and Andres rose above his back, fingers busy between the two of them. I moaned, knowing what Andres was doing, and Bracken moaned and cried out because it was actually happening to him. Oh, Bracken, was it as dark and earthy and good as I remembered? Andres grunted, thrust, and sighed, and Bracken groaned, “Goddess!” just as Andres started moving at vampire speed. There was a brutal, savage edge to Andres’s pumping that made Bracken’s eyes roll back in his head and his erection fist inside of me as he grunted more desire into the hollow of my ear.
I’d hoped that Bracken would get fucked into the ground—I hadn’t planned on him getting fucked into me…. And oh holy shit and gods and goddesses, it was so much better than I’d hoped.
Andres kept moving, thrusting, pounding, fucking, and Bracken cried mercy into my hair as I nuzzled his shoulder, his neck, his chest, but I couldn’t be gentle. I couldn’t be gentle, and I found I was nipping, crying, scratching… and he was howling, begging for more… and more….
And then he was coming again, shattering, undone by the twin assault of me at his front and Andres at his back, and we were demanding everything from him he could give.
But Andres was high, riding the sunshine of my bite, living the sex he had been dreaming of for a year and a half, and he too was quivering and ready, an open nerve ready to explode, and he screamed shrilly as Bracken tightened around him. Andres came too, plunging his teeth into Bracken’s carotid. Bracken roared, and Andres took a vicious pull, his eyes whirling, every line of his taut brown body screaming sex and fulfillment as he collapsed on top of Bracken,
who had collapsed on top of me.
Andres licked lazily at Bracken’s neck, closing his neck wounds as we lay there panting. For several hazy moments, I waited as the darkness at the edge of my vision began to recede.
“Ohhh, oohhhhh…,” I managed—and it was hard, because Bracken was heavy, and with Andres pressed up against him, he wasn’t holding his weight. “That was not what I expected.”
Andres chuckled, the sound sexy enough to make me spasm again, and Bracken groaned. “Sometimes good surprises can keep us going through the bad ones, little Goddess.”
I tried to chuckle and didn’t have enough air in my lungs. “Bracken,” I wheezed, and he shifted and then looked over his shoulder with a grunt.
“Brother? If you could….?”
Andres chuckled again. There was an audible pop as his body pulled out of Bracken’s, and dammit if I didn’t clench some more.
“Would you stop that?” Bracken begged. I giggled, and our bodies did all sorts of interesting things while still locked together, and he groaned into my shoulder. Andres stood, and I got a look at him naked, his sex still partially erect and reasonably impressive. It was his lean chest and shoulders, though, that would have attracted me, and I had a moment to think that someday, maybe, I would get to explore that masculine beauty. He turned and caught me admiring him, and in spite of the wantonness of my current position with Bracken wedged securely between my naked thighs, it was his wicked smile that made me blush.
“We will have other chances,” he reassured softly, “when your flesh and your spirit might not feel quite so full.” And in spite of my beloved’s solid weight between us, I could be enchanted by the promise. Andres’s grin grew even wider, and then he gave Bracken a solid thwack on the tightly muscled backside. “Come on, brother. I would like to go swimming, and I simply can’t walk away from you two when you’re still like that! Not when I’ve had one of you and want you both!”
Bracken laughed, but he pulled out too, because experience had taught us that when I was as sexually high as I was right now, I could rev all night.
But Andres planned to be in Redding when the bar closed—he didn’t have all night.
I shivered as Brack pulled up my bikini bottoms—I was dripping right through them, so it was a good thing I was going swimming—and then stood to pull up his own swimming trunks.
I stopped him, mesmerized as always by the beauty of his body, and ran my hands up the insides of his thighs. It was his turn to shiver. I stuck out my tongue and tasted him after spending inside me, and tasted again, and then engulfed him in my mouth while he hissed and knotted his fingers in my hair. I pulled back and gave his little head a chaste kiss before pulling up his trunks and tying the lace in the front. He kept his hand knotted in my hair, his fingers cupping the back of my head and massaging my scalp. We met eyes and smiled dizzily, and then he helped me to my feet. As I was standing, I looked up and caught Andres watching us thoughtfully, and I blushed.
“You two are very sweet,” he said softly, pulling his boxer shorts from his khakis and sliding them on while standing. He gave a little hop when they came over his hips, and I had to smile. “I can see why your heart is full of him.”
“Not just him,” I said truthfully, nuzzling Brack’s hand on my shoulder. Andres conceded with a nod of his head.
“Between Bracken and Green, little Goddess, I’m grateful your heart is big enough to even consider me.”
Then he turned before things could get awkward and opened the gate on the boat’s railing, which guarded the ladder into the water. He must have been able to see easily, because his dive was clean and fearless into the sparkling, unfathomable dark.
Bracken moved into the gap next, the better to leap in and then let me make my painstaking way down the ladder like the phobic freak I felt like. I stopped him, though, and stood at the opening nervously, my hands on either side of the gate.
“So,” I said randomly. “That… that thing we just did. You and Andres planned that?”
“Uhm, yes?” Bracken clearly had no idea what I was about.
“You and Nicky do that—have strategy meetings. I, uhm, like the outcome.”
Bracken’s hand, warm in the faint breeze, came up to my shoulder, and he bent and spoke closely, making our words personal. “I’m glad to hear that, beloved. What are you doing?”
I swallowed and remembered my earlier high, trying to get that buzz through my veins to push out the fear. I was faintly surprised that it worked.
“I’m planning to be strong,” I said—and then, rushing on the same breath, “one-two-three-jump!”
The water was fresh and exhilarating as it closed over my head, and there was no panic in me as I hauled my way to the surface. I broke for air, scraped the water from my eyes, and looked around our tiny corner of the lake.
The running lights from the boat and the fragmented moon gave me just enough light to see Andres frolicking like a child toward the wider mouth of our little inlet, and then Bracken breaking the water next to me. The surface of the lake was covered with floating mustard flowers, poppies, and lupines, all left over from my sunshine scream.
“How you doing?” he asked with a pleased grin.
“I’ll let you know when I panic,” I told him, smiling back. But I probably wouldn’t panic. I could feel it in my marrow, because—at least for tonight, with sex and blood and joy thundering through my veins—I could do anything.
Nicky: Flying
MY FOLKS weren’t really talking to me—or apparently to each other—but we were all still awake, playing games out on the picnic table with the other shape-shifters, when the three of them came back from their boat ride.
I expected the sex and sensuality to be obvious, rolling off them like waves of Ripple wine, but it wasn’t. I could tell that something had happened beyond a vampire bite, but while Cory and Bracken moved together with their usual skinless sexual grace, Andres didn’t quite… fit.
I could see them holding hands from a distance as they watched Bracken situate the boat, and it occurred to me that maybe she hadn’t slept with him after all. I wondered what in the hell was wrong with her. I would have taken him up on that offer in a hot minute.
But then, we loved her precisely because she did the things we wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
I would have spared the girl who had attacked Green—not from mercy, or because I truly felt she deserved it, but because of weakness. I couldn’t have borne having those pathetic whimpers on my conscience, and that was the end of it.
I would have, Goddess help me but I would have, killed the little vampire girl that first day as she slept, without even trying to find a cure or the culprit, because I am that much of a coward.
I would have kept clinging to every strength I had, whether it meant eternal binding or not, just to try to keep myself alive that horrible night when we’d been tied together by bonds too complicated to name. She’d pushed me away, hoping I could escape the ties that bound us, and now I was grateful. If she hadn’t, I never would have bonded to Green, and given how much pleasure that gave me, it was a damned good thing I wasn’t in charge now, wasn’t it?
I’d called Eric as they’d left, and we’d joked a bit about Andres and how damned cute the guy really was, and then we’d rung off, and I’d fought the urge to cry. I missed him. The thought of him alone with his law textbooks and his spreadsheets in that big tan apartment made my chest ache.
And dammit, I missed Green too—and I wondered at the strength Cory had, to leave him when he’d been hurt, but I shouldn’t have.
We’ve already covered that she was a better person than I was.
The three of them came up to us, and Andres gave a little bow and escaped to change—I think he was wearing his underwear for form. Cory came around the table, completely mindless of my parents’ disapproving gazes, and bent down to nuzzle my cheek.
“Who’s winning?” she asked throatily. I looked sideways at her and smiled.
“
Renny.”
We both looked at Renny, who, although a girl in a T-shirt and nothing else, was sitting as daintily as a tabby shorthair and smiling smugly. Katy gave a disgusted shake of her head.
“You don’t even know she’s got Uno, dammit—suddenly she’ll just walk away from the table and we see she’s got no cards!”
Teague snorted, and Katy rounded on him. “And you’re second for damned near the same reason. I’m tired of you people that don’t talk playing games with us—it’s like a superpower or something!”
Mario grinned at her, throwing down a card with studied insouciance. “That’s okay, Mami, you and me, we’re like their archrivals!” Tanya—who had been sitting close to him for most of the night in a shy, tentative way—hid a laugh behind her hand, and that was his undoing.
Max chuffed. “Then you’d better learn not to monologue, Captain Obvious, because you’ve only got one card left—now draw!”
Mario’s good-natured groan echoed through the hills, but he flashed a magic grin at Tanya and kissed her on the cheek. “Chica, you’re good luck and bad, you know what I mean?”
She grinned pertly. “Yup. I am bad—you know what I mean?”
His throaty laughter echoed too, and I wondered idly what everyone else made of the lot of us, staying up late every night and sleeping past noon. Then Cory rubbed her cheek against mine, and I found I didn’t care.
“Want to join us?” I croaked, turning my nose to her neck and trying not to scent her skin too obviously. Andres had bitten her—I could smell that—and in spite of the lake water cooling her limbs I could smell Bracken inside her, mostly because I knew that smell as comfortably as my own.
