“Hey, I know it’s the guy—or guys—who are supposed to fall asleep after sex…” I yawned and stretched. “But we’ve been tramping through the jungle all day followed by mind-bendingly intense three-way sex.” I blushed a little as I said it but I didn’t stop. “I’m tired,” I told them. “Actually, exhausted. Can we…do you think we could just lay down for a little while and take a nap?”
“A good idea.” Drace yawned too. “What do you say, bond-mate?”
“I’d like to rest—with Rylee between us,” Lucian said. “Maybe we could finally rest peacefully instead of tossing and turning as we did last night without each other.”
“Definitely.” I sighed. “Come on, let’s get, uh, untangled so we can get comfortable.”
They slipped out of me and we all crawled under the furs, snuggling like sleepy children with Drace on my left and Lucian on my right. I let out a little moan of pure contentment as I felt the two big bodies on either side of me and then I closed my eyes and drifted off.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Lucian
“Lucian, wake up. Come on—wake up, bond-mate.” A hand was shaking my shoulder and a familiar voice was murmuring in my ear.
“What? What is it?” I sat up, disentangling myself carefully from the sleeping Rylee. At first I didn’t know where I was but then I looked at the fur covered bed and the dim, oval shaped stone room and the events of the last few hours came back to me. Bonded—I was bonded to another Alpha and our shared female and the bond was sealed.
We’ll be together for life, whispered a stray thought in my head. A tingle of joy filled me at the thought. Finally, I was no longer alone. Finally I had a female I loved and a mate I cared for to share her with. It was beautiful…perfect…unspeakably right. I felt whole, complete for the first time in my life.
Then my bond-mate’s next words ruined it.
“The Claw,” he said. “It’s free now. I mean—I can touch it. Look.”
He was standing naked in the middle of the cave-chamber—none of us had bothered with any sleep clothes before our nap. Now he walked to the small pedestal which held the long, golden claw with its four, sharp-tipped points. Earlier it had been hovering in midair, clearly held there by some force beyond our understanding. But now it was lying on its side on the stone pedestal and the glow around it was gone. Drace picked it up carefully and showed me.
“See? No more force field, or whatever it was. It’s ours now—we can have it.”
“Oh. Of…course. That’s good. So we can sever our bond whenever we want to.” The words tasted sour in my mouth but I made myself say them anyway.
“Yeah. Of course.” He looked down at the implement in his hand as though it might bite him. “How…” He cleared his throat. “How do we use it, I wonder?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I didn’t see any directions on the wall.”
“I don’t either but…hey—look!” He came back to the bed and sat beside me, holding out the Claw. “See? Look on the shaft of it.”
I bent to look at what he was talking about. Tiny black letters and symbols in the ancient tongue which decorated the walls were appearing up and down its golden sides.
“What does it say?” Drace asked me.
“It says…” I cleared my throat, reluctant somehow to read them, to speak the fatal words aloud. But that was foolish—we wanted to be parted. It was the point of our entire quest! I made myself go on. “It says:
“To sever a bond the Goddess has wrought
Is wrong and brings nothing but pain
But if you must, put the Claw to your heart
Draw blood and be lonely again.”
Drace cleared his throat. “Um, okay. I guess that’s pretty clear—we just scratch ourselves on the left side of our chest, right over our heart.”
“I guess so,” I said dully. It wasn’t lost on me that the instructions on the claw mentioned the word “lonely.” It was exactly how I had felt all of my life—and how I would soon feel again. “Do you want to go first or should I?” I asked.
“Uh…” Drace didn’t look any more eager than I felt to break our newly formed bond. “Maybe…maybe we should wait,” he said at last.
“For what?” I demanded. “I thought you wanted us to be free of each other? Why else wake me from a sound sleep to show me the instrument of our separation?”
“I just happened to wake up and see it lying there—I didn’t go looking for the fucking thing,” he growled defensively. “Okay then, you want me to go first?”
“If you like,” I said coldly. So much for bonded bliss—we’d barely been together an hour or so (depending on how long we’d been napping) and we were already going to sever our newly sealed bond.
The prospect made my chest feel tight and I felt a deep unhappiness coming from Drace as well. Could it be, he didn’t want to sever the bond any more than I did? But then why had he called my attention to the Goddess-damned Claw in the first place?
“Neither one of you is going first!”
Drace and I looked over and saw that Rylee was awake and sitting up. The furs were pooled around her waist, leaving her lush breasts bare and her hair was wild around her face. I couldn’t help wanting her and I felt an answering surge of lust from my temporary bond-mate. Hmm—I hadn’t thought of him as “temporary” for a while—the return of that word made me feel melancholy all over again.
“What did you say, baby?” Drace asked her, because Rylee was glaring at us both.
“I said neither one of you is going to break the bond—not yet!” she exclaimed. “What if we meet those damn horse-panthers again when we leave this place? What are we going to do if they decide to go for me because we’re all unbonded and they can somehow smell it?”
I felt a rush of relief.
“Of course, Rylee is correct,” I said. “We cannot break the bond until we bring her safely out of the jungle.”
“You’re right!” Drace also looked relieved. “Damn—can’t believe we almost did that! Sorry, baby,” he added to Rylee. “We weren’t thinking straight.”
“So you’ll hold off—on severing the bond?” She looked at us anxiously. “Because I have to be honest—I feel much safer now that the three of us are linked. It’s like…like we have a layer of protection we didn’t before when we were only sort of half-way bonded.”
“I agree,” I said thoughtfully. “We’re stronger together than we are apart.”
“Absolutely.” Drace nodded. “Fine—we’ll just take the Claw with us and use it…when we decide to.”
“A good plan,” I agreed and then my stomach rumbled.
Rylee grinned. “Hey—sounds like somebody’s hungry.”
“Well, we did work up quite an appetite earlier,” Drace said. “I mean, that was some hard fucking work.”
“No pun intended?” Rylee asked dryly. “And are you actually saying that making love to me was hard work?”
“I was talking about the hike through the jungle and standing off those damn kr’awn,” Drace protested. “Honestly, baby.”
“All right—I forgive you.” She laughed and slapped at his shoulder playfully. “Come on, let’s get some food out of the packs. And please tell me you brought something besides hairy spaghetti and eyeball oatmeal.”
“Actually, I simmed some of the Earth delicacies you call ‘sandwiches,’” I said, answering her question. “Drace was making the clothes with the clothing sim, so I took charge of packing the food.”
“Look at you two, working as a team! In more ways than one.” She blushed, her cheeks going rosy under her creamy brown skin tones.
“Sharing you with Drace was incredible, ma 'frela,” I murmured, reaching over to brush my knuckles over her hot cheek. “I hope you were able to accommodate us without pain.”
“Not a bit of pain,” she murmured, blushing again. “You guys, uh, prepared me really well. But how…” She cleared her throat. “How was it taking turns being the Beta? Did it bother y
ou?”
“Not me.” Drace sounded thoughtful. “I mean, it’s not something that comes naturally to me, like it would a true Beta, but I didn’t mind it. In fact…” He cleared his throat. “It was…”
“Surprisingly pleasurable,” I finished for him, quietly.
“Yeah.” He looked at me in surprise. “You thought so too?”
“Your pleasure is my pleasure, bond-mate,” I said simply. “And Rylee’s pleasure belongs to us both.”
“True.” He grinned at me. “We make a good team, don’t we?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Why don’t we stay that way? Why sever the bond at all? But I wasn’t sure how Drace or Rylee would react to such a radical suggestion. After all, we’d been all over Denaris on a quest that had almost killed us several times and all so we could be free of each other. Drace’s family hated me and mine hated him—well, my mother did—and Rylee had her own life to lead back on Earth. There was no way the other two would want to stay together and try to somehow carve out a life for ourselves in such a hostile environment.
Or so I told myself.
“We do make a good team,” I said instead, smiling back at my temporary bond-mate. “Come on—let’s get some of those Earth delicacies and eat. I’m starving.”
Drace
We left the magical Chamber of Bonding the same way we had found it. Rylee insisted on straightening the furs on the bed and we made sure not to leave a speck of trash anywhere. In fact, the only change we made was the fact that I had the Claw tucked neatly into my pack when we stepped out of the egg-shaped room and back into the underground temple.
I didn’t really like touching the damn thing—it felt wrong and somehow dangerous in my hands. But we’d come all this way for it so I felt obligated to pack it away, though I was careful to wrap it in several layers of clothing first.
We’d been a little afraid we wouldn’t be able to get out the way we’d gotten in. But after climbing the steep and narrow staircase that seemed to go on forever, we finally found ourselves at the secret monolith door. Rylee had only to press the Tanterine Key to its surface once and it slid aside, letting us out into the jungle.
Though we’d been afraid the pack of supposedly extinct kr’awn might be waiting for us, the huge predators were nowhere in sight. Possibly because they could no longer smell Rylee after Lucian and I had sealed our bond with her between us.
Speaking of my bond-mate, I felt much more connected to him than I ever had before and it was a good kind of connection. Feeling his emotions no longer grated on me, even though the emotion I felt most from him was sadness.
Well, no—that’s oversimplifying it. On the surface, he was happy—we all were. But underneath it was a deep sorrow, a feeling that this happiness was fleeting and would be over all too soon.
I understood Lucian’s emotions because I was feeling the same way myself. But despite the unhappy choice to go our separate ways which was coming in the near future, for now we were all feeling pretty great and I believed it was because of our newly sealed bond.
I’d heard it said all my life how amazing it was to be bonded with a male you respected and a female you both loved—how wonderful it was to share her and take care of each other. But all the empty words I’d ever heard paled in comparison to the reality.
When I tripped over a vine in the forest, Lucian’s hand was under my arm, catching me before I could fall. And when a poisonous gareth got too near his face and was about to strike, I severed its head with my brush cutter—what Rylee called a ‘light-saber’ for some reason—before it could spit the venom that would have blinded him. When Rylee took a false step and started sinking in a hidden pit of suck-sand, my bond-mate and I worked effortlessly as a team. Without even having to talk about it, we grabbed her under her arms and pulled her out before her first gasp of fear had even stopped echoing through the jungle. Together the three of us were like a well-oiled machine, anticipating each other’s wants and needs without even having to think about it.
It was fucking beautiful.
The way we worked so well and so smoothly together made me think. And what I was thinking was, Why are we in such a fucking hurry to sever our bond? When we’d first been bonded, Lucian and I had been desperate to get it done—to be free of each other. But that was before Rylee and before we started to know and understand each other.
Of course, we came from radically different backgrounds and opposing clans and once that had seemed like a good enough reason to cut our bond. But now I understood that despite our differences, Lucian and I had something important in common, something that transcended anything else that might come between us—we both loved Rylee desperately and I was beginning to think I would rather die than let her go.
I wondered if Lucian felt the same—if he did, it was an emotion too deep for me to read or feel through our bond. I realized the only way to know would be to ask him—ask if he felt the way I did, that we should let our bond stand and just learn to live with the world’s hostility towards our union.
But he had a lot more to lose than I did. I was just a lone artisan and if my family hated me for mating another Alpha, well, that was just too bad. Of course I didn’t want to cause my parents pain but even if I did, it wasn’t like it would affect my whole family on a more than emotional level.
For Lucian, things were different. His family was wealthy and influential. His fathers were the leaders of their clan. If it came out that Lucian was mated to another Alpha and an off-worlder girl, his parents’ social standing would be ruined—their empire toppled. There was a lot more at stake for him…which was why I couldn’t bring myself to ask if he’d stay with me.
Even if I had asked and he agreed, there was no guarantee that Rylee would stay too. And she was the glue holding us together. We both loved and cherished her—wanted to please and pleasure her—wanted to protect her from all harm. Without her to share between us, what did we have? Nothing.
So I kept my mouth shut and just kept cutting brush.
I didn’t know what else to do.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Rylee
The trip back to civilization seemed to take a lot less time than the trip to the temple. By mutual consent, we didn’t visit Drace’s family again—Kess was wonderful and the kids were cute but nobody wanted to deal with Twyla and Porgy, especially now that the bond between the guys was completely sealed. Instead, we went straight from the jungle, back to the parking area.
Even though it was a long hike, it was totally worth it. Almost before we knew it, we were back in Lucian’s ship, freshly showered, and relaxing in our jammies, feeding each other grapes and nubu—a Denarin fruit with a fuzzy green outside and a juicy red center. It had a flavor like watermelon and coconut and strawberries and cinnamon all mixed together—delicious.
“Mmm, this is so nice,” I sighed, lounging on the sleeping platform between my guys. Tonight, Drace had simmed me a gorgeous, simple lace and silk nightgown in a warm cream tone that went really well with my skin. It was sinfully soft and practically see-through but I didn’t mind, even though I could feel their eyes on my body all evening as we talked and relaxed. “I love spending time alone with just the three of us,” I told them.
“I love it too,” Lucian admitted.
“Me too,” Drace said, his voice a soft growl. “Here, have some more nubu, baby.” He pressed a slice of the juicy red fruit between my lips and a drop of juice ran down the side of my jaw. “Oops, let me get that for you.” Leaning forward, he licked me, his tongue making a long, hot trail from the vulnerable side of my neck up to my chin.
“Mmm…” I moaned softly, my body lighting up at his touch. Despite the hot three-way sex we’d shared the night before, I still felt ready for more—still wanted my guys.
“Very nice,” Lucian murmured. He had a hot, lazy look in his eyes, as though he enjoyed watching me and Drace together. “It’s good of you to help our female clean up, bond-mate, but I fear you might hav
e missed some. Just…here.”
Leaning over me, he tugged down the top of my lace gown, baring my breasts. I gasped but didn’t protest as he rubbed another ripe slice of the nubu fruit over first one nipple and then the other. The chilled fruit was cold against my tender nubs and I felt them get tight and achy immediately, begging for attention.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Drace growled, looking up at me. “What a mess—we’d better clean that up, baby.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice coming out in a breathless whisper. “You…I think you’d better do that.”
Keeping his eyes trained on my face, Drace leaned over me. Starting at the bottom curve of my breast, he lapped upward, capturing the sticky juice on his tongue until he came to my tight left nipple which he sucked deeply into his hot mouth.
I expected Lucian to do that same to my right nipple but he was watching Drace with a thoughtful look on his face.
“I can’t help noticing that you seem to have an excellent oral technique, bond-mate,” he remarked in a low, aroused voice. “Every time you put your mouth on Rylee, you make her moan.”
Drace let my left nipple slip from his lips and looked up with a wolfish smile. “It’s in the way you swirl your tongue—watch.” He positioned his mouth over my right nipple, still dripping with nubu juice, and demonstrated his tongue-work to Lucian.
“Oh!” I gasped, arching my back to press more of my breast into his hot mouth. God, I swear these two were driving me crazy!
“Hmm, very nice.” Lucian nodded. “Tell me—do you use the same motions down below?”
“You mean when I taste our female’s sweet pussy?” Drace stroked my thighs through the thin creamy lace gown, making me bite my lip to stifle another needful moan. “Sometimes…and sometimes I use a variation. Want me to show you?”
“I think that would be up to Rylee,” Lucian murmured.
They both looked up at me and the naked lust in their eyes made something low in my belly clench with desire. But still, I wasn’t sure…