by Amy Lane
And waking up with Katy in his arms was a revelation.
She groaned, and he tightened his embrace around her shoulders, his palm sliding silkily over the smooth skin of her stomach. She arched against his palm, shifting her hips and parting her thighs, and he teased his fingertips along the crease of her mound and into the sweet little apex of her body, but he wasn’t quite ready to go there.
“Mmm… Jacky…,” she complained, and he chuckled.
“But I like your breasts,” he whispered, nuzzling the back of her neck and her ear. Actions, he thought muzzily. Actions always spoke louder than words. Her breasts were large and plump, and one of them felt decadent in his palm. Her nipple teased the tender flesh at the center, so he teased it with his fingertips until it stood up, sharp and hard.
Katy moaned again and wiggled against him, and he returned the favor by grunting and pressing his groin against her.
“Hmm…,” she complained. “Too many clothes, Jacky.”
It was true. He didn’t remember how he’d ended up in this bed in the guest bedroom, but he was still in his jeans and T-shirt and the flannel shirt he’d been wearing while he’d waited for Teague to wake up. He pulled away impatiently and started to fumble with his jeans, but then Katy was there pushing his hands out of the way and undoing the buttons herself. He palmed the smooth skin of her shoulders, and she looked at him with exasperation in her warm brown eyes.
“Get your shirt, damn it!”
It was a relief to chuckle in sex play. He did what she demanded, pulling the whole works over his head, getting free just when his jeans and underwear hit the floor with a thump and…
“Gawwwwwwwddd… damn it, Katy, that’s not… oh shit… fair….”
Katy was a direct lover. No teasing, no skating her fingers on sensitized skin, no nuzzling. She had Jack’s shaft in her palm and his cockhead in her mouth and was sucking on him hard enough to turn him inside out.
He was sort of thinking she might succeed.
He growled and dug his fingers into her thick black hair. “Please, Katy… please let me….”
Her response was to glower at him and move her hand so she could take him all the way into her throat and suck harder.
“Aaaauuughhh….” Jack threw his head against the pillow and saw stars. He got it. Katy had seen Teague fall out of the sky and could do nothing about it. She needed control, and here was Jack, all ready to be driven by his dumbstick. He wanted to pleasure her—oh Goddess, he needed to pleasure her—but… but… she dug her tongue into him and snuck her hand back underneath to toy with the place that was usually exclusively Teague’s….
“You think?” he asked, part sarcasm and part desperate arousal. She responded by letting some saliva trickle out of her mouth so she could use it as lubricant.
Oh God, Goddess, what-the-fuck-ever. She really did mean to control him, to be the one in control, and he was torn, because he was used to being… well, not in charge when they were making love, but at least on the leadership team, because he was usually working in concert with Teague.
We’ll do this, Jacky, but we’ve got to treat her like a princess, right?
Teague had insisted. Jack had been the first person to ever unlock the battered steel vault that held Teague’s heart, and Teague hadn’t wanted Katy—who had loved him since childhood—to feel like she was getting a guest pass inside. He’d wanted her to feel welcome.
A princess. Well, right now that princess was swallowing Jack’s cock and fingering his asshole like she had a goddamned right to be there, and Jack was left with one alternative.
“Katy…,” he groaned, trying to be a gentleman. “Katy….”
For a reply she sucked harder and scissored her fingers inside him, and he had no goddamned choice but to—
“Gaaaawwwwddd….”
He curled around her, and she swallowed ravenously as he convulsed and came until his gut clenched and his eyes rolled back in his head and the pressure of her mouth was exquisitely painful.
At last there was nothing left—nothing but Katy sobbing into his groin, and Jack tingling from the nape of his neck to his toes and gasping like a fish.
He recovered first and hauled her up by main strength, where she continued to sob on his chest with great gulping breaths. He shhed her and soothed her, kissing her cheeks and ears and down her rounded jawline, and that was when she turned her head and captured his next kiss.
He tried to keep it simple, keep it warm but not hot, but she opened her mouth and shuddered against him, and he realized her body was still revving, hot and unsatisfied, and she truly needed to climax or this horrible pain/worry/sex/death spiral would never be over for her.
This time he took over. It was a stretch, but he was bigger and stronger, and he had all the tender purpose in the world. He flipped her to her back and lay on top of her, knowing she was a werewolf and stronger than she looked. She groaned and spread her thighs for him, and he kissed his way down her soft, soft body, tasting it, finding it salty and sweet.
He stopped at her breasts and the tightly pearled plum-colored nipples, and he suckled on her, finding comfort and—surprise!—arousal in having her flesh in his mouth and drawing passion from the way she writhed beneath him and clenched her fingers in his hair.
When she was crying out wordlessly, making pleading whimpers into the cool air of the alien room around them, he kissed his way down to her mound and spread her thighs even farther. Her labia, puffy and swollen, were spread slightly and glistening, and he blew on her softly because he knew it would tease.
“Jacky!” she pleaded. Her hands were clenching in his hair, and he felt a little of that power back. Very gently he took her hands in his and placed them over her own breasts. She gasped because there were usually three bodies writhing in their bed. Katy usually had no chance to pleasure herself—Jack and Teague had made it their jobs to pleasure her.
Jack grinned at her from the apex of her thighs. She smelled like woman’s musk, and it hit something visceral in his stomach. Teague’s musk did the same thing, but Teague had to be coerced into being pleasured.
Katy spread her thighs wider, and one of her hands snuck under her bottom, her fingers dark against her pink flesh as she spread herself for Jack and begged some more.
Who could resist such a pretty offer?
He tasted her, slid his tongue inside her and listened to her breathy gasps keen and squeal. He parted her with his thumbs and licked her from core to tiny hooded nerve bundle, and then back again. She groaned, low in her stomach, the sound seemingly ripped from the hard-beating heart under her ribs.
He was good at this. Teague had once whispered instructions to him while sheathed so tightly inside Jack’s ass that Jack could almost taste him. Jack had licked and sucked, probed and plumbed, stroked and rubbed and teased until Katy had screamed and Teague had shot until he was shaking, and then Jack had climbed up on top of Katy and buried himself so deeply inside her that she could probably have tasted Teague.
He imagined Teague’s harsh breathing in his ear as he pleasured Katy, as she arched and screamed, her hands tightening on her own nipples to the point of pain. He felt Teague’s hands on his shoulders, damn near felt his ass tingle with Teague’s thick invasion as he placed his palm under Katy’s ass and licked her some more. His own cock hardened again, grew thick and aching, and his hands shook with the need to pound inside her as she begged him to fuck her, oh, please, Jacky, please, please please she needed needed needed—
“Goddess, yes!”
Jack lunged up and into her, feeling her flesh wrap around his body and rocking into it with all his power. Katy was a wolf, they had done this as wolves, and her body was as strong as their passion. He had no fears about hurting her. The only way he’d hurt her would be by holding back.
His hips rocked back and forth, driven by the piston of his fear and his anger and his love, and she took all that into her body and shaped it into strength. She reached that ultimate climax women can achieve, the
kind that rocks and trembles their bodies and their wombs for long minutes after it erupts from their very cores, and Jack was sucked into it with her. She came off the bed into his arms and screamed, sinking her teeth into his shoulder in an effort to anchor her crazed emotions, and Jack howled back and clutched her to him as he convulsed within her.
They lay there panting, shaking, groaning softly into the cooling quiet of an early morning, and Jack’s dazed, wandering vision took in the room in which they’d awakened.
The paneling was dark mahogany, as was the hardwood of the floors. The bed they were sleeping on was as big as their bed in Green’s hill—king-sized to fit the three of them, of course—and covered in a dramatically colored black-and-yellow comforter. The furniture all matched the paneling—chairs, a desk, a chest of drawers—and there were bags of what looked to be new clothes set on the built-in window seat that overlooked the same view as the big window in the front room.
“Jesus,” Jack breathed. “We just made all that noise and we don’t even know where we are!”
Katy laughed—a little hysterically, it was true—but she laughed into his ear and tightened her arms around his shoulders, and they shivered together for another few moments.
He was the one who pulled the comforter up and shifted so he was no longer inside her. They had left the bed sloppy with their sex. He didn’t mind doing that at home, but now he felt acutely embarrassed.
“Jacky,” Katy said as he grimaced at their mess, “you know these peoples have to be tight with Green. If they’re tight with Green, they know Green’s people, right?”
Jack blushed and buried his face into the hollow of her neck. “We’re certainly Green’s people now,” he said soberly.
She looked back at him. “I always was.”
It was true. She had accepted Teague’s place in Green’s hill far more easily than had Jack himself. “Well, now I am too,” he said softly, watching the emotions shift over her heart-shaped face. He knew the moment she settled on a topic and braced himself for the pain he saw in her dark eyes.
“I….” She grimaced and chewed on a full pink lip. “I don’t know if I can be enough for you, Jacky,” she said softly. “If next time no one catches him, it’s gonna be you and me. What if I can’t hold you down here, and you just fly away?”
Her voice broke completely, and Jack swallowed tightly and rubbed his wet face on a fold of the comforter that rested on her shoulder.
“You think I don’t worry that too?” he choked. “That if it’s just you and me, it’s not going to be just nothing? Just pain and a big gaping hole where Teague should go?”
Katy nodded and covered her eyes with her free hand. He pulled her hand away and kissed her cheeks, and she kissed him back. Then they were locked together, comforting, weeping out their fear and the horrible, horrible pain of knowing the one they loved best had a calling that might pull him away at any moment.
Eventually they were still, their faces wiped clean on the comforter, their eyes red and their throats aching with the aftermath of the tears.
“You know what?” Jack whispered, thinking of something, anything, that could comfort Katy.
“What, Jacky?” Very delicately, she traced his high cheekbone and jaw with the tips of her fingers.
“If you think we’re alone in this bed, I think you’re wrong.”
She closed her wide brown eyes and swallowed hard. “I could almost smell him,” she confessed, and he settled his head on the pillow beside hers.
“I could feel his touch.”
“We gotta take faith from that, don’t we, Jacky?”
“It’s what we’ve got, beloved. It’s the only promise we have.”
Katy shook her head. “Naw, beloved. We all said promises, right? In front of Goddess and Green and everybody? You’re right. He’s….” She swallowed and tried to say the words and make them true. “Even if he leaves us, he’s not leaving us, right?”
Jack nodded. He had a sudden vision of Green and Cory’s Adrian wandering the garden looking for his lovers, and his throat closed again. He had to force his next words through it.
“I’ll try to be enough,” he told her, feeling broken. For perhaps the first time in the two years since he’d first laid eyes on Teague Sullivan and yearned, he understood how Teague would be afraid to love, based on this fear alone.
“Me too. I promise. Me too.”
They stopped for a moment, took stock, and looked around the room again.
“Jacky?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m so hungry, I could probably eat the feathers in this pillow and call it a duck. How about you?”
Jack couldn’t help it. He giggled. “Maybe we should go see about making Teague a sandwich, yeah?”
Katy tried a little damaged grin on her full mouth. “And dream about the days when he can be our sandwich, right?”
“Absolutely.”
They both got up and started rooting for clothes that looked like theirs, then looked for the shower.
Mending
TEAGUE WAS not feeling wonderful when the two of them wandered in from wherever they’d been taken, but seeing them helped.
He closed his eyes against the gold light bouncing off the big blue sea out his window and breathed in. He’d heard them. Their sex noises had woken him up as the first bit of sun brightened the heaving seascape. It had soothed him, given him some peace after one of the worst nights he’d had since he’d been a kid, surviving from beating to beating.
His body… ached was not the word. Every throb of his heart seemed to rip asunder nerves that were still raw and stretched from being knitted up again. He was good at pain, had always been good at pain—he wouldn’t have survived his first few years if he wasn’t.
This was a new sort of pain, and it had awakened him in the black hours of the night with shortened breaths and clammy skin and a chest screaming for oxygen.
And then he’d looked on either side of him, and they’d been gone.
He knew what they would have looked like if they’d been there.
If he’d turned his head left, he would have seen Jacky—shaggy dark bangs falling across his forehead as he slept, dark lashes fanning across his pale cheeks. If Jacky was awake, he’d see those deep blue eyes peering at him and the hopeful, expectant look that said Jack was waiting to see if Teague would greet him sweetly, but that he was ready if the night terrors had left his lover shaky and needing.
If he’d turned his head right, he would have seen Katy—dark cloud of hair tumbling over her soft brown face, full lips curving into a smile even as she slept. Even if he woke up like a sprinter gasping for breath, the smile would be there. No scary monsters here, papi, only us.
But he’d awakened in pain, frightened, and alone in this alien place, looking out at a cloud-lit ocean. He’d had to work like a marathon runner to still his breathing, to ease the tightness in his chest, to consciously will the pain to a place where he could endure the next heartbeat, and the next one, and then the—
“Oh Goddess, sir werewolf! Why don’t you just cry out or something? Your psychic screaming almost had me sending Joshua outside to see what sort of broken thing had stumbled into our protective geas!”
“I’ll be fine!” he snapped, too focused on pain control to be diplomatic, and Cinnamon scowled at him as she put her hand on his forehead and closed her eyes.
More of that blissful, cool elfin magic stole down his body, and the whole of him sagged into the sweat-soaked sheets at his back.
“Shit,” she swore as Joshua appeared at her elbow like a ginormous wraith. “We need to change the bedding. Someone thought he’d be a hero and power through the worst of it, and now he’s going to stink up the place.”
Teague suffered through the sheet changing in silence—and it was suffering, since every movement jarred the shattered bones in his spine, hips, and legs.
By the time they were done and Cinnamon had soothed his pain one more time, he was shamed in
to asking through gritted teeth, “So how long’s this gonna last?”
Cinnamon smoothed her hand on his forehead again and touched the faint dimple in his cheek. “Another day or two, and the worst of it should subside,” she said gently. “You’re sturdy, werewolf, but not invincible. You need to remember that the next time you feel like you should swallow down on all that pain, right?”
Teague grunted. She looked away, the darkness shadowing her pale skin, and she gleamed faintly from the moonlight bouncing off the sea.
“That’s not going to happen,” she sighed. “I’ll tell you what. You try your hardest to ask for help in the next two days, and I’ll give the okay for your mates to sleep with you as soon as the worst of it has passed, yes?”
It hurt to feel so much naked hope, and she patted his cheek. “Green told me,” she said. “He told me you’d break my heart, and here I am, the damned thing bleeding at my feet. Give them a full night’s rest, sir werewolf, talk with them honestly tomorrow, and I’m sure at least one of them will sleep on the couch if you ask….” She trailed off and grunted in frustration. “What am I saying? I’ll ask them to sleep on the couch tomorrow. Of course I will. You won’t. What am I thinking?”
Teague’s breathing evened out another notch, and she sighed and shook her head.
“Is there one person on this planet besides your mates that you talk to?”
“Cory,” he grunted immediately. Cory knew him. She’d known him since he’d first shown up at the hill, distraught about Jacky and worried shitless. “And Green.”
Cinnamon blew out a breath and absent-mindedly pleated the gauzy skirt of the brown Victorian night thing she was wearing. “Well, Cory’s going to need a friend in the next week. I’ll have to make sure you have a phone nearby when nobody else is around. If you won’t talk to me, and you won’t talk to your mates, somebody has to hear your pain, or it will fester inside you and blow like a boil!”
“Ewww.” Teague’s grimace of distaste was enough to make the curious woman pat his cheek again.
“You don’t like the imagery, don’t be the boil! Next time your body hurts, say my name twice in the dark—or the light, I guess, but I won’t be sleeping in the light, so it will be easier to get a hold of me.”
