“We’ll come at the same time,” she breathed. “Are you touching yourself?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for?”

Her eyes closed against the building ache in her chest. “You.”

She’d been waiting for him for ten years. Staying away hadn’t spared her punishment, so when she’d been marked he’d come back for the duration. But now that she had him, she sometimes turned him away and sent him home just to prove to herself that she could still live without him. Because one day, soon, she would have to.

“I’m here, angel,” he purred. “Hard and ready. I’m in heat, too. Thinking about you always gets me that way.”

It was her complete trust in him that gave her the courage to say, “I wish you were in my hands.”

“Fuck, yeah. Me, too.”

“I want to hold you. I love how soft the skin of your cock is. How thick the veins are. They make you look so brutal, when you’re really so tender.”

“Trace them with your tongue.”

“What?”

“The veins. Use your tongue.”

Eve’s mouth watered. Alec wasn’t the only one to have an oral fixation. What really got to her was how much he loved it. He was so unabashed in his enjoyment, his hands fisting in the sheets or her hair, his voice hoarse as he cursed at her for stripping him down to base animalistic need.

“I love that sensitive spot just beneath the head,” she whispered. “I like to flutter my tongue across it just to hear you fall apart.”

Alec groaned. “Touch yourself while you’re sucking me.”

Eve’s fingers went to the top button of her jeans and flicked it open. “It gives me a thrill to know you’re so hot for me.”

“I’m beyond hot. I’m about to go up in flames.”

She imagined herself kneeling over him, holding his fly apart so nothing impeded her working mouth. The fantasy was so real she could hear the slick suction noises. Her hand pushed into her jeans, forcing the zipper pull to slide down.

Suck harder.

Eve lost her balance, sinking into an off-kilter crouch.

It wasn’t Alec’s voice she heard in her mind; it was Reed’s.

CHAPTER 12

Eve’s eyes stung with welling tears.

Why Reed’s voice? Why now, when she was deep into an intimate moment with another man? A man she’d loved for as long as she could remember.

The gun at her lower back shifted dangerously, freed from its position by the loosening of her fly. She grabbed for it, then set it down on the dusty floor beside the luggage, her fingers clenching spasmodically around the grip.

“Damn, that feels good,” Alec gasped. “You suck cock as if you were starved for it.”

Her mind was inundated with sensation—the rhythmic drawing of a hungry mouth, a tongue flickering, a fist pumping the thick root. It felt as if she was inside his brain, enjoying their fantasy through his senses. Sweat dotted her brow and upper lip. Heat rippled along her skin in a prickling wave, the Novium burning through her in double time, yet she felt closer to him than ever before.

An orgasm hovered just out of reach. Through no physical manipulation at all, she was about to climax from the feel of Alec’s pleasure. She cried softly, nearly dizzy from the surfeit of sensual perception. “Please . . .”

“Yes, angel.” His voice was sandpaper rough. “Come for me. Let me hear you.”

A pained female whimper yanked Eve back from the edge, cruelly halting her hurtle toward climax.

Her eyes flew open. She hadn’t made that sound . . . could never make that sound with Alec. He was too gentle. Despite the ferocity of his ardor, he always treated her as if she was breakable.

Eve slid from her crouch to a seated position on the floor. A brazen wet sucking noise rent the quiet of the house, followed by a serrated masculine groan.

Unmistakable sounds with an unmistakable cause.

She wasn’t alone. And, worse, she wasn’t unaffected. The knowledge that a sexual act was taking place somewhere nearby ratcheted up the tension to painful intensity.

Alec growled in her ear, knowing her well enough to pick up on her sudden preoccupation. “Don’t stop! Fuck, I’m about to blow.”

“Do it,” she urged, struggling to her feet. He could come and keep going. It was a gift.

“Not without you. Are your fingers inside you?”

“Yes,” she lied. With deliberate steps, she managed to walk carefully to the hallway without her heavy boots giving her away.

She didn’t recognize herself. She wasn’t a voyeur. In her previous life, she would be hightailing it out of there, not salivating for a lewd peek. Especially of Romeo and Laurel. Part of her brain was revolted by the thought; the rest of her brain was so inundated with Alec’s approaching orgasm it couldn’t string a sentence together.

“I can’t hold off much longer,” Alec bit out. “Are you close?”

“Yes.” But her answer referred to her proximity, not her orgasmic state. The fellating noises were spilling into the hall from the farthest open bedroom doorway. Another couple of steps and she would be able to look inside.

Eve hugged the opposite wall. The panting and groaning grew in volume, as did the erotic sound of hard suckling.

The couple came into view and she stumbled. Her free hand covered her mouth, stemming the low moan of torment that rose up unbidden. Her chest constricted.

Reed.

He occupied the center of the master bedroom, standing with head back and eyes closed. Izzie kneeled before him like a supplicant, the bobbing of her pigtailed head betraying the enthusiasm with which she sucked his cock. His fingers were shoved into her restrained hair with white-knuckled force, pulling the blonde tresses in a way that caused her pained whimpers. He moved her as he wanted, his hips thrusting at a breathtaking pace. His neck was corded by straining muscles and his handsome face twisted with a carnal grimace of pleasure and fierce concentration.

Eve was bombarded by a dark and cold desire, as if the walls between them had stemmed a tide that the open doorway now freed. His struggle to climax rushed at her like an oncoming tsunami, carrying her back, beating her against the wall.

Ravaged by jealousy and the aggressiveness of the Heat, Eve watched with horrified eyes, understanding that the sensations she had thought were Alec’s were actually Reed’s. They traveled to her through their growing emotional link, hitting her in real time with Izzie’s movements.

But it wasn’t Izzie he pictured behind his closed eyelids.

“Angel?” Alec’s voice was strangled. “You’re fucking killing me. If you were here, I’d have my mouth between your legs, tonguing your clit until you went off for me.”

Alec’s intrusion triggered an emotional flood—remorse and longing, sorrow and love. It was so potent, it was tangible. The hairs on her nape prickled.

His breath caught. “I can feel you.”

Reed gasped and straightened. His gaze found her, his lips moving without sound. I can feel you.

And she felt them. Both of them, pushing into her, inundating her with their desire and raw needs, seeping into every pore, every memory, every hidden thought. She was bared in a way only a true . . . possession could make possible.

Two men. Inside her at the same time.

They swirled around her like billowing smoke, battling within her, shoving at each other like children over a favored toy and inadvertently discovering her tragic fascination with both of them in the process. Triumph and pain, joy and misery, envy and passion, love and hate—the way they responded to the revelation was destroying all three of them.

The roots of her hair grew damp with sweat. Her skin burned as it had when the dragon killed her, a blistering pain she hadn’t survived the first time. Alec and Reed were overpowering her, too focused on their endless rivalry to realize how their centuries of memories and bickering were drowning her.

Sucking in air, Eve pushed her hand into her open fly and cupped her sex. The subsequent flare of pleasure and relief was like a beam of light in the darkness. The two men recoiled from each other and she took the advantage, pushed them backward, slipping into them the way they had come into her.

They each wrapped around her, their mental embraces as heated and passionate as their physical ones. But she was divided and untrained, torn by guilt and confusion. She lacked the sheer strength and knowledge required to see into their souls the way they’d seen into hers. Still, Eve tried to probe their minds even as her fingers delved between her thighs. She moaned as she pushed two fingers inside, feeling how hot and swollen she was, how desperate and greedy. Both men growled in unison, feeling her pleasure as she felt theirs.

It seemed as if there was no separation between them. She felt Alec’s strong fingers wrapped around his cock, pumping with unrestrained ferocity. She felt Izzie’s lips and tongue around Reed, felt the rhythmic suction and drenching heat.

But mentally, she was the deliverer of both forms of pleasure. The two men saw her in their minds’ eyes, a revelation that caused tears to blind her.

Eve . . .

Which one spoke, she couldn’t discern. The voice was too guttural, too coarse from the knife’s edge of orgasm. Suddenly, the hand between her legs wasn’t hers. It was theirs. Both of them. Together. Spreading her, stroking her, filling her.

Her resulting climax devastated her, bringing a cry to her lips that was lost in the conjoined roar of their orgasms. In that moment, at the height of pleasure, there was no distinction between them. They were one, a triumvirate of souls. She melted, crying both inside and out, her skin so hot her sweat steamed off it.

It wasn’t until the first brutal surge had passed that she realized their transient embraces weren’t meant to cherish but to restrain. As she struggled to explore them while the singular connection existed, they bound her tightly. Too tightly. Preventing her from looking deeper. Their history was behind her, an open book. But their futures—their hopes, dreams, and motivations—were beyond, and they wouldn’t allow her to see them.