Inked Destiny

One

Etaín stood naked in the shower, hot water and the heat of the men on either side of her eradicating most of the chill that lingered following her rescue from the Harlequin Rapist. “I could get used to this,” she said, eyes closed to savor the sensation of masculine hands gliding over slick flesh.

The truth of their feelings was a hum against her senses. They might have ensnared her equally but their call differed. With Cathal it was raw sensuality and fierce imperative, while Eamon was the attraction of like to like.

Had she once truly believed she was okay with casual sex and lack of permanence? Before Cathal and Eamon had come into her life, true intimacy had been impossible.

Skin didn’t lie to her. It was her gift, her curse, to be able to touch the eyes inked into her palms to skin and not only see another’s memories, but take them. She shivered, because now that gift was changing and her control of it failing.

Cathal and Eamon were safe where others weren’t. She shivered again, harder, at thinking about how close she’d come to having to use her gift on the Harlequin Rapist to save herself.

“It’s over,” Eamon murmured, his hard cock pressed to her ass and lower back while Cathal’s was a heated announcement of need against her belly.

“Thanks to the two of you.”

If not for the tattoos—infused with Eamon’s magic—that she’d put on Cathal’s arms, creating a bond that allowed them to find her, even now her existence would be marked by cycles of torture and rape.

“Parker won’t be able to put off taking a report.” They were lucky no one of superior rank had been among the first responders. As an FBI taskforce member, her brother’s permission to leave had allowed them to escape.

“We’ll find a safe truth when the time comes,” Eamon said.

She opened her eyes, taking in Cathal’s good looks, short dark hair and the ever-present stubble that came with being Black Irish. Opposite to Eamon’s long blond hair and smooth chest.

Until they’d come into her life, sex had been a safety valve, a way to release some hidden buildup of pressure from too much touch, too many bodies inked. And now…

It was so much more. Looking back, she was torn between amusement, for thinking it would be easy to enjoy them and walk away afterward, and fear when it came to what the future held.

Because of Cathal she’d been made an accessory to four murders. There would be a fifth when his father and his uncle caught up with the last boy who’d been involved in the drugging and rape of two sixteen-year-old girls. This wasn’t behind them. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

She slid her hands down Cathal’s naked back, pressed kisses along his throat. His eyes remained closed and she knew the cause. He didn’t want to see Eamon on the other side of her.

I’m not a man to share when I’m serious about a woman.

Then don’t get serious about me.

She’d warned him, but still a fist formed around her heart, squeezing at the threat he might come to regret his involvement with her, that in the end, he might walk away, unable to handle sharing her.

Her hand brushed over his hip on its way to curl around his hardened length. “I want you. I want you both. Let’s go to bed.”

They left the shower.

Cathal took the towel from her, sliding it over her body, lingering over breasts capped with dark pink nipples. Within days of meeting her she’d become the beat of his heart, the relentless, molten pour of lust pumped directly into his bloodstream so that time away from her had become the crawl of eons.

Her lips curved with knowing. “Like what you see?” she asked, echoing the question he’d issued when first joining her in the shower.

“Definitely.” He’d like it even more when sight was accompanied by taste and scent and the touch of skin to skin.

A murmured command from Eamon and a warm, unnatural breeze swirled to life around them, smelling of tropical winds, drying shower-wet hair, though raising chill bumps on Cathal’s flesh. Magic again. Eamon’s again. So casually and easily summoned it made Cathal’s heart race with something other than need for Etaín, with a hard-wired fear accompanied by a sense of foreboding.

“Show-off,” he said, hearing the growl beneath the joking tone he’d tried for.

Eamon’s smile was the white flash of shark’s teeth, his amusement a deadly thing. “Feeling threatened?”

Cathal bared his teeth in response, a reaction he’d been fighting from the first instant Eamon had made his interest in Etaín known.

“Boys, boys,” Etaín said, the label turning the tide of hostility and unintentionally uniting them in common purpose.

“Is that how you think of us?” Eamon asked, hands going around to cup breasts capped with nipples that hardened instantly, the sight of them sending a throbbing pulse through Cathal’s cock. “As boys and not men?”

Her laugh was a hot, fisted squeeze around Cathal’s dick. “Less flattering to call you junkyard dogs fighting over a hunk of meat, even if you’re gorgeous enough to be paraded around a show ring.”

Eamon’s thumbs brushed across her nipples, causing a hitch in her breath, and her back to arch in an offering Cathal could no more resist than had it been a summons. The towel in his hands fell to the floor.

They’d shared her once before. On that night, too, Eamon had stood behind her, hands on her bare breasts. Daring him to join the two of them, inviting him, and he’d crossed the distance like a man drunk on lust, a man compelled…

By magic. He sensed it now, but it didn’t fog his head this time any more than being alone with a naked Etaín did.

Cathal bent, capturing a nipple between his lips and laving it with his tongue. Satisfaction was a hot surge through his cock at her soft moan of pleasure, at the way her hands speared into his hair, holding him against her breast as she pulled away from Eamon in an effort to give herself more fully to him.

It made him harder, hungrier, touching on primal, competitive instincts she’d no doubt claim reached back to the caveman days when strength and prowess and victory determined who fathered the next generation. He wanted it all with her. He’d agreed to come here, tonight, and he wouldn’t lie to himself—Eamon’s presence didn’t diminish the desire. But tomorrow was another day.

It’d grate on his nerves, those nights she spent with Eamon, but he’d welcome those he had alone with her. And he intended to have them.

Etaín could feel the hum of Cathal’s resistance even as she felt the heat of his lust joined to hers. She could know his exact thoughts if she desired it.

Don’t think, just feel, she wanted to tell him. This can work. I need it to work.

Desire burned her from the inside out, a hunger for both men that transcended the physical. She moaned as pleasure moved through her, a coiling turbulent wave going from breasts to clit.

Cathal’s sucks, the pull of his mouth on her nipple, were echoed by the tug and twist and tightening of Eamon’s fingers on the other areola as he kissed upward along her neck, pausing to nuzzle her earlobe.

More. Everything. That’s what she wanted. What she craved.

She reached backward and grasped the long strands of Eamon’s hair as Cathal kissed downward, his tongue tracing the rim of her belly button, dipping in then moving lower. If she had more willpower when it came to him, she would protest, telling him to wait until they were stretched out on the bed. Instead she parted her thighs in invitation, whispered yes the instant his lips captured her clit.

His hands settled against her hips, holding her firmly against Eamon, preventing movement and making her prisoner to sensation. Not just the coil of her own desire or the scorching heat of it, but theirs as well.

She wanted to watch Cathal. She wanted to eat him with her eyes, devour him, but with the first stroke and swirl of his tongue to her clit, he made her helpless. The truth was, she’d been unable to resist the allure of either man though she’d known both would bring trouble.

On a moan she surrendered, closing her eyes and giving herself over to their care. Eamon’s hands were like molten fire on her breasts, but then fire was one of the elements he was most strongly linked to, the essence of who I am, he’d told her as they looked into a mirror taking up a great expanse of wall, the spells woven into it allowing a glimpse into things hidden by skin and physical form.

She’d seen and experienced more evidence of magic, but this, being alive, being with them both at the same time, was the purest of magic, the most addicting of it, better than anything.

Pleasure whipped through her, turning her breath into fast, shallow pants. Her blood pooled between her thighs, and her heartbeat thundered there as if it lived in swollen, wet folds and engorged clit.

She strained, trying to drive her clit deeper into Cathal’s mouth, begging him to suck harder as orgasm shimmered just out of reach. Now! The scream built inside her only to have him abandon her clit.

He slid his tongue through puffy cunt lips and wet channel, teasing her with shallow thrusts so her opening clenched and unclenched. She struggled against implacable male hands, held stationary by firm grips.

Eamon’s tongue mimicked Cathal’s, fucking into her ear canal, hot torment to an area that had turned into an erogenous zone since meeting him. Their twin assault while imprisoning her was very nearly a punishment, sensual torment for coming so close to dying and leaving them behind to wonder at what she suffered before breath ceased and she went still and cold.

She tried to cant her hips, her inner thighs wet with arousal instead of water. “Do it,” she ordered Cathal, channel rippling, trying to grasp and hold his tongue, to pull it deeper into her body and make it a substitute for the thick, hardened cock that rose to press against his belly while Eamon’s felt like satin against her buttocks and back.

Eamon’s husky laugh was all that came of her command, followed by a silky threat. “We’re not the ones at your mercy this time, Etaín. You’re at ours.”

They proved it to her, holding her on the edge of release as she writhed and strained, the vines tattooed on her arms like live things absorbing the lust and heightening it to the point where her heart beat too fast, burned like a small sun trapped in her chest and about to explode. And then it did, consciousness disappearing in a sundering pulse of ecstasy, pleasure sweeping outward and leaving deep, infinite peace.

Magic slammed into Eamon with Etaín’s surrender to pleasure. He nearly came, his cock pressed hard and hot to her flesh, his testicles swollen, tight sacks pulled upward in near agony.

Victory and satisfaction surged through him, along with a sense of camaraderie as Cathal rose from his crouch, features flushed but eyes filled with the same emotions. She was theirs. Safe and whole because of them. Wordlessly Eamon lifted Etaín into his arms, Cathal reaching the bed first, jerking luxurious sheet and comforter downward.

Etaín’s eyelashes fluttered as Eamon lay her on the bed, her lids opening as he stretched out on his side next to her, Cathal doing the same opposite of him.

Her dark, dark eyes were pools of sultry seduction, languid still from orgasm, though sparks of amusement shimmered like the flash of silvery minnows in ocean shallows. “Well, that was a first for me. Not that either of you need a boost to your egos when it comes to sex.”

She took possession of hardened cocks, Cathal moaning, breath seizing in a quick, sharp inhalation where Eamon refused to cede control. “Take him while I watch,” he said, issuing a command, his hand replacing hers, fingers wrapped tightly around his cock when she obeyed, releasing him to roll into Cathal, onto him as Cathal went willingly to his back.

Like a pagan goddess rising from the sea of deep blue sheets, and created of flame, she straddled Cathal. The sun streaming through the window caressed her, the gold of her aura almost that of a pure Elf, the sheen of magic reminding Eamon of water lapping a pristine shore as he wanted to lap her, to probe her wet core with his tongue and taste her essence.

From the very first, Eamon found the sight of Etaín with Cathal arousing. It was more so now as he watched her guide Cathal’s cock to her opening, teasing him by allowing him to experience the satin heat of her channel only inches at a time.

Cathal’s hands palmed her breasts, fingers clamped on nipples as intoxicating as the finest of wines. His hips lifted from the mattress in hard jabs meant to press him deeper into her body, his cock glistening, darkened in his need for Etaín.

“Tease,” Cathal panted, the growl in his voice a warning he wouldn’t let her torment him for long.

“And you’re not? The two of you aren’t?” she said, including Eamon with the slight turn of her head. Her gaze swept over him, the liquid hunger her expression delivered making his hand tighten in a near-painful fist on his shaft.

Dark satisfaction settled in her eyes. In centuries of being alive, he’d never ceded as much to any woman as he had to this one in just days.

Her attention returned to Cathal, her body lifting and lowering, drawing out the pleasure until finally Cathal put her beneath him. He pounded into her, hands held to the mattress, his mouth on hers, swallowing her moans and finally her cry of release before pistoning furiously, muscles cording, his breathing ragged and rough as he yielded to ecstasy.

Eamon had just enough control to allow Cathal to relinquish Etaín by rolling to the side. Cathal’s features were flushed, his eyelids at half-mast. His expression held possessiveness as well as lingering jealousy, yet he didn’t look away as Eamon covered Etaín’s body with his.

A thrust took him home, into a storm of sensation. Magic and woman. A welcome echoed by arms around him and feminine hands on his back. His, though he could share her with Cathal.

Desperation seized him, at how close he’d come to losing her to death. His mouth fused to hers, tongues battling, twining, tangling in a wild, hungry joining that had only one goal, only one end. Ecstasy came with the ripple of her sheath, with her surrender, then his in a shuddering, jagged rush of semen.

But pleasure shattered with the alien grasping of his power. The pull of it through him and into her was like a fiery tornado, a hungry wrenching.

He reacted instinctively, defensively, uttering a knock-out spell as he jerked away from her. Rolling from the bed entirely rather than risk continued contact.

The shock and suddenness of what had happened left him shaken. Only slowly did calm return. But it was calm possessed of wariness. The seidic bound their mates to them, were said to possess them, the boundaries stripped away. Mind thief. Gift thief. They were epithets applied to the seidic.

Here, in his home, untrained and only barely aware of her own power while remaining completely ignorant of what she was, what she would be, she was helpless against his will made manifest or she wouldn’t have succumbed so quickly to the spell. But she wouldn’t remain so for much longer. Intimacy had lowered his guard. He wouldn’t give up the first, but needed to shore up the second.

Cathal lay insensate next to her, his proximity making him a victim to a spell aimed but not limited to a specific person. Just as well, Eamon thought, rubbing his chest where his heart still pounded, a hammer beat of fear, not only of her, but for her.

She was changeling, not yet able to control magic and gift. And he was lord, whose duty it would be to kill her if she couldn’t.

“Sleep,” he said, expanding the defensive action in the lilting tones of a language born in another realm, one created to harness magic and feed it into spells either written or spoken.

It would hold them, at least for a little while, and when they woke, it would be to a new reality. The time for ignorance had passed.

He crossed to the dresser, calling a fine mist to wash away the scent of sex, and then air warmed by fire to dry his skin before opening a sigil carved box and retrieving a small silver dagger. Returning to the bed, he cut a length of Etaín’s hair where its loss wouldn’t be noticed.

He didn’t intend for her to leave the estate, but from the very beginning she’d managed to evade his vision of what the future held, and she still had far too many dangerous ties to the human world. His gaze dropped to the exposed eye on one of her palms, a weapon now to be wielded against Elf or human if she felt threatened.

“You may come to hate me, for a time, because of it. But I will do what I must to keep you safe, from others as well as yourself.”