by JL Madore
My cheeks flush hot and I roll my eyes, sending Kotah a stink-eyed glare.
He bursts out laughing. “What? They knew without me saying anything.”
“You said no one would know.”
“Mama and Daddy are around us enough to recognize the scent. I swear to you the whole palace doesn’t know.”
Maggie shakes her head. “Goddess no. And don’t be embarrassed. We’ll talk tomorrow, kids. Off you go. Love you.”
“Love you.” Kotah kisses Mama’s cheek, tugs me back into motion, and we close the distance between us and our naked mates.
By the time my sweet prince places his hand on the security panel outside the door of our suite, my heart is racing. I’m waiting for the scanner to grant us access, but before it has time, the door flies open and Brant yanks me inside.
There’s no need for any preamble as he pulls me into his arms and crushes me against his broad chest. He can smell my need and he’s naked and hard against my crotch.
His lips are rough on mine, but I’ll never complain.
I love it when my guys are out of their minds and out of control. He pins me up against the wall and my feet are almost a foot off the ground.
“Hey, Bear.” Kotah closes the door and locks it behind us. “Can I make myself useful and relieve Calli of her underthings?”
Brant grunts and pulls his hips back far enough for Kotah to gain access to me from below. My shoes are the first to go, then warm hands skim up the tender flesh of my inner thighs to grab hold of the flimsy strip of silk keeping the three of us from where we want to be so bad.
When that’s taken care of, my cotton sheath dress is pushed up to my waist and I wrap my legs around the thick and muscled trunk of my bear’s hips.
The head of his cock prods at my core but he doesn’t push in. I shake my head at the hesitation, knowing what holds him back. He’s huge and doesn’t like to take me without a few orgasms and playtime first.
He worries about being too much and splitting me.
Yes, it happens, but I’ve explained to him that the invasive fullness of him doesn’t bother me in the slightest. In fact, it’s the opposite. The pleasure-pain of him driving inside me is erotic as hell.
I wrap my heels around his ass and pull him inside. Once the penetration starts, I throw my head back and cry out. The sheer satisfaction of having him pulsing and prodding inside me is worth any momentary discomfort.
Besides, I’m a phoenix. I have miraculous healing.
“Fuck, I needed you, Beautiful,” Brant grunts, crushing me between his massive frame and the wall at my back.
“Me too.” My eyes roll back as I close them and I let the world slip away. Brant starts a slow and steady rhythm of invade and retreat, and my body tingles to life. My phoenix grows stronger and more aware every day.
And right now, she’s lighting me up inside.
“We both do.” Kotah’s naked now and I feel bad that for a moment, I forgot about my wolf’s pleasure. I reach for him and he takes my hand.
He kisses my palm and sets my hand on Bruin’s muscled shoulder. “Let Brant take what he needs, Chigua. I’ll enjoy the show and can take care of things myself for a bit.”
That doesn’t seem to fly with Brant. He pulls me off the wall and heads for the stairs. In a normal, human relationship, a girl might wonder if her man can carry her up a flight of stairs to the bedroom joined while gripping the back of her head and kissing the ever-loving breath out of her.
I don’t have to worry.
Brant is as strong as the bear who lives within him.
When we get to the bedroom, he stops at the end of the bed, lays me back on the mattress, and stays standing.
Hooking his arms under my knees, he lifts my legs and starts a slow and torturous ride. Kotah climbs onto the bed with me and I reach between his legs.
One thing I’ve made really clear—I love sucking cock.
At first, they were all, ‘Oh, no. You don’t have to.’ They’ve learned not to argue. It isn’t an obligation for me, it’s a turn on. As much as having them make love to me, or fuck me, or service me with their tongues, mouths, and toys.
Kotah crawls across the bed and I guide his erection into my mouth. My wolf has a scent to his skin that is uniquely his own. Where Jaxx smells like fresh air and spruce trees, Kotah’s skin smells like earth and wilderness.
It’s addictive.
I grip him against the base of his cock and take him deep into my mouth. After sucking and giving him his welcome. I pull back a little and flick my tongue through the beads of precum leaking from his tip.
Kotah’s hips quiver. He’s holding back his urge to pump into my mouth. My sweet prince. Always a gentleman. Growling, I get more aggressive and let my teeth score the heated flesh. I’ve always loved how responsive his body is to my desire.
While I’m getting my groove on with Kotah’s cock, Brant finds my clit and is rubbing the fleshy pad of his thumb over my exposed nerves as he continues to fill me with the ecstasy I only feel with one of my mates inside me.
My orgasm builds as a hot pang, low in my groin. I grind against Brant, coaxing it, fanning it from a smolder until it’s ready to ignite.
“So, fucking beautiful,” Brant says, his voice husky and low. “I could come just by watching you get off.”
Kotah, chuckles. “You have. Many times.”
“Oh, yeah. Right you are, Wolf. Right you are.”
“More, Bear,” I gasp, wriggling against him. I want the twinge of the stretch I get when he drives hard. “Make me ache.”
“You don’t have to ask twice.” Brant’s pace doubles and he presses my legs back. With my shins against his shoulders and my ankles above his head, he gets serious.
I grunt as his fingers grip harder and he’s hammering me in earnest. “Yes… that.”
“Your wish is my deepest pleasure, mate. I can take you like this all week long.”
I have no doubt. Just thinking about that brings on a wave of keening. My inner muscles clench and then I explode.
Kotah’s mouth is on my nipples.
Oh, I lost track of him moving.
Too swept away to try to figure it out, I ride the waves of my release with one of his hands tweaking the tight tip of my breast and him suckling and licking and nipping the other.
My hips buck but Brant never loses his hold on me. He’s a machine and I’m so thankful for his skills. As I come down from the rolling waves pulsing through me, he climbs onto the bed and with one arm around my back, moves me up to the pillows.
He hasn’t lost it yet and honestly, it wouldn’t slow him down much if he had. The refractory time for wildling males is next to nothing. I’m a truly blessed woman.
Rolling me onto his broad, muscled chest, Brant smacks my ass and chuckles when I yelp. “Okay, I’m just messing with you. Now that I’ve taken the edge off and am in better control, how about I make love to my mates?”
I give Kotah a look. “What do you say, sweet prince? Should we let our bear have his way with us?”
Kotah’s smile is the balm to my soul. “He has my vote. But speak for yourself on the taking the edge off part, Bear. My wolf is still pacing.”
I roll off Brant and open my arms. “Then we’ve got work to do. Good thing we have all night.”
Jaxx
I wake dazed and with my jaguar prowling within. It takes a moment for my senses to catch up with reality. It’s the scent of Hawk on my skin that gets me there. Right, the two of us are in the Den of Debauchery. The groan in the darkness has me rolling over to check the bed beside me. Hawk is twitching, his legs kicking, his unconscious struggles coming out in broken groans.
“Hey, Hawk? You okay?”
His eyes flick open and he grabs me and flips me on my back faster than I would’ve thought possible. Maybe it’s because he’s my mate and my guard was down or maybe he’s that good, I have no clue.
Either way, the result is the same.
There’s a s
ix-foot-four, alpha male straddling my hips with his hands wrapped around my throat.
Quick thinking in a crisis is a strength of mine and one of the reasons I joined the First Responders team of the FCO. I don’t panic. Instead, I bring my arm up between his wrists, lock my grip on my other hand, and use leverage to break his hold on my windpipe.
The moment I’m free from his grip, I turn the tables and flip him so I’m straddling his hips and have his wrists pinned to the mattress.
Leaning down, I try to find my mate and lover in those haunted, steel-gray eyes. “Hawk. It’s me. It’s Jaxx. Where are you right now?”
His gaze is vacant and he’s fighting my hold. Unlike when this happened with Calli, I’m not an unprepared female and I’m not afraid. I understand he has violent episodes and he’s not in control. This isn’t him.
This is something bubbling up from his subconscious.
As much as I want to hug it out, I can’t let go of his wrists or he’ll hurt me or himself. With little else to do but keep trying to snap him out of it, I lean into my hold on him and kiss him. “It’s me, tough guy. Hydrogen. You need to stop. That’s our safeword. Do you remember?”
I kiss him more, trying to reach him, but I get nothing.
When Brant got through to him it was after he threw him across the room and threatened to rip him to shreds. I can’t do that. I won’t. He’s in there and I doubt violence will help him wherever he’s struggling deep inside.
With that in mind, I reach deep inside myself and access our mating bond. My ties to my mates are evenly distributed between all four. Hawk’s aren’t. Hawk’s are strongest with me and Calli. I need to use that to my advantage.
“Come on, hotness. It’s me. Your jaguar.”
I kiss him roughly, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood. His pupils flare and if this wasn’t such a fucking shit show I’d laugh. Seriously? After all the sex and in the middle of a mental meltdown, me biting him turns his crank?
He’s still fighting my hold, but not as frantically. I kiss him again, teasing the spot on his lip I injured, my cat excited at the taste of blood. Instead of fighting to get away from my mouth, this time his lips respond and my heart slows from a frantic thunder to erratically elevated.
“That’s it.” I lick the blood, my cat letting off a long, languid purr. “Snap out of it. Leave whatever darkness you’re in and come back to me. Hydrogen.”
I know the split-second my message gets through. Hawk’s entire body goes rigid beneath me and his breath locks in his chest.
“Everything is fine.” I allow my purr to rumble on. “I’m here, Hawk. I’ve got you. You’re safe. We’re good. Everythin’ is fine.”
“Fuck me… I did it again, didn’t I?”
“You did nothin’ but get your ass kicked by your jaguar dom. I’ve got you. It’s my job to keep you safe when we’re in here like this, yeah?”
I smell the rush of emotion and I ease up on the vise-grip of his wrists. Rolling us both to the side, I pull his chest to mine and toss the sheet over us. “I’ve got you. Wherever you were just then, let that shit go. You’re safe here with me.”
After a few minutes of me hugging a stiff and reluctant participant, he relaxes in my arms and nuzzles into my neck. “Let me breathe you in for a bit.”
I smile and caress gentle circuits up and down his back from the nape of his neck to his tailbone and back again. “You do whatever you need to do. Release the bad juju. I’m here. I’ve got you, Hawk.”
He shakes his head against my collarbone. “Could you not call me that? Hawk is a name I took on to stay hard and distant. Whatever’s broken inside me it’s from a lifetime of being hard and distant. My mother always called me Bastian. Would you mind? I think… it would help.”
“Whatever you need, Bastian.” I draw a shuddered breath as another of his walls crumbles. I need to keep him talking. I have enough trauma counseling training that I know I can help him. “Your mother… you’ve never mentioned her before. Tell me about her. What was she like?”
He stiffens a bit but I don’t let him pull away.
“I’ve got you, remember? Trust me with what’s broken inside you. I’m a paramedic. I scoop up roadkill and patch people back together for a livin’.”
He chuffs, his breath warm against my neck. “And you think talking about my mother is the key? That’s a little on the nose Freudian, don’t you think?”
I chuckle. “I’m not suggestin’ you have an Oedipus complex, simply that I’d like to hear about the woman who knew a softer side of you. You’ve told us a dozen times about how hard and manipulative your father was, but you’ve never mentioned your mother until now.”
He lays quiet for a while and I listen to his breathing. Whether he opens up or not isn’t a huge deal. Whatever he’s sorting through in his head is much-needed housekeeping and he’s doing it with my arms around him.
S’all good.
After a long while, he draws a deep breath. “Her name was Elizaveta, though her close friends called her Liza. She was tall and demure, and had long, chestnut hair that shone gold in the sunlight.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was. Before she met and married my father, she ran a chain of occult shops. I remember… she loved to work with essential oils, so she always smelled wonderful.”
“And she called you Bastian?”
He nods. “My father hated the informality of it. To him, I was always Sabastian or boy… He used that a lot. Boy, get your ass in here. Boy, what’s this I hear from your instructor? With her, things were softer… sweeter.”
“That’s good. I’m glad you had someone who loved you. Even if it wasn’t for long enough.”
“Yeah. I’ve often wondered how I would’ve turned out if I’d been seventeen instead of seven when she died.”
“Likely very different. I can’t imagine losin’ Mama so young. It must’ve been a sad time.”
He nods. “For a long time, I wondered if my father loved her or if he simply acquired her like he did so many treasures in his life. It was hard to tell with him. I think having me was her idea. When she was gone, he didn’t know what to do with me. I kinda just became one of his possessions.”
“That’s sad. I’m sorry you grew up feelin’ like you didn’t matter. That’s shitty.”
He shrugs. “He’d always been more interested in business than us, so when she was gone, he wasn’t prepared to deal with a sad little boy. He pushed harder at work and he also pushed harder at home.”
“Did he hurt you?” I’m hesitant to ask, but I’d like to know what I’m dealing with and how big the hurdles are ahead of us. “You don’t have to tell me anythin’ you’re not ready to share, but it would help if—”
“Not in the way you mean. No. Being broken and unapproachable has nothing to do with any kind of sexual or physical abuse.”
Thank fuck. “I’m not gonna lie. I’m really freakin’ glad to hear it. I’d hate to have to fly to London to track down and kill a powerful billionaire who hurt you in another lifetime.”
He leans back and when he meets my gaze, I can tell he’s gauging how serious I am.
“I’d be on a plane in the mornin’.”
His smile warms the cold place in the pit of my belly. “There’s no need, but thank you.”
I roll onto my side and adjust the pillow we’re sharing. Our faces are inches apart and with our voices low, it feels like we can share any secret. “So, the violent episodes aren’t physical or sexual abuse. Do you think they stem from psychological abuse?”
He nods. “Very likely. My father doesn’t do anything halfway. When he fucked me up and tore me down, he did it with more power and panache than anyone else could. And then, he convinced me it was my fault. It’s crazy what you believe as a kid. I knew he was driven and cold, but it took me years to realize the damage he was doing to me.”
I brush my fingers over the flexing tension in his jaw and lean in for a kiss. “You’re the stro
nger man. You broke away and remade yourself with no help from him.”
Hawk chuckles. “Well, no willing help from him. I did grab two-hundred grand from the library safe the day I left. I may have been determined to leave him and that life behind but I wasn’t stupid.”
I laugh and the tension in my chest eases.
Hawk’s come a long way from the arrogant prick who wanted to sever our connections and deny the guardianship. “I—for one—am proud of you. And I think your mother would be too.”
He doesn’t look so sure, but hey, baby steps. First, we’ll release the toxic energy, and then, we’ll change the tapes that run through his head. I touch the broken skin on his lip. “Sorry, I bit you.”
He frowns and runs his fingers over my throat, looking for the damage he did. He didn’t have me in his hold long, so I doubt there’s even a mark. “Sorry, I tried to choke you.”
I shrug. “Tried and failed miserably. Now, do you want to go back to sleep or snuggle some more?”
He rolls over toward the bedside table and grabs the wrist cuffs we used earlier. When he hands them to me, he shakes his head to cut off my objection. “I’m exhausted, but I won’t sleep unless I know you’re safe.”
“You won’t hurt me. I won’t let you. You don’t have—”
“Please, Jaxx. Do this for me. I want to be held but won’t relax unless I’m sure you’re safe.”
My jaguar growls, but I give in and do as he asks. With his wrists bound together, I shift behind him, position my arm under his ear and the other over his ribs to hug him and spoon him tight to his ass.
“We’re supposed to be sleeping here, Jaxx. No slipping me your pickle.”
I nip the flesh of his shoulder blade and purr. “It didn’t turn out so bad the last time, did it?”
His chuckle is deep and sexy as fuck. “It stands as one of the all-time highlights of my life. There are moments with you that I’m so overwhelmed I feel like Kotah’s right and I might spontaneously combust.”
“Me too. Hydrogen.”
“Yeah. Hydrogen.”
CHAPTER THREE
Kotah
I’m the first one to wake in the morning and leave Calli and Brant cuddled in bed to go start breakfast. I snag a pair of sweatpants off the dresser and pad barefoot out of the master bedroom. After easing the door shut, I cover things up and head downstairs.
