Demons Within [For Love of Authority] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More)

by Rhiannon Ayers

  So much for taking it slow. Allen grinned to himself, burying his face in Sidri’s hair and snuggling his arms around her torso and waist. She groaned and twined the fingers of both hands with both of his, turning their arms into an intricate pretzel pattern. Her sigh, so very satisfied and content, settled a blanket of pure bliss over his whole body.

  Perfect. This woman was utterly, amazingly, unbelievably perfect in every way. Her body. Her mind. Her soul. She answered a deep-seated need he hadn’t even known he possessed, just by existing. And now she was his. His.

  Allen’s mind simply drifted for a while, riding a euphoric high unlike anything he’d ever felt before. The woman snuggled in his arms made little contented noises, almost purring, letting him know exactly how well he’d satisfied her. He basked in her praise, wondering how long she would need to recover after such a hard fuck so he could do it all over again.

  With that thought in mind, he promptly fell asleep.

  Chapter 11

  Something was vibrating under Sidri’s left butt cheek.

  Her eyes popped open, immediately alert, though it took a moment to remember where she was. Since she slept in her office often enough—thus, the futon—the view of the ceiling from this angle was nothing new. What she couldn’t remember was why she was sleeping there in the first place. And why was she so hot? Especially since the afghan she always used to keep warm was tangled around her feet. Yet it felt as if she’d been draped with lava, her back and sides smothered under a blanket of blistering heat. A blanket that snored.

  Allen.

  Everything came crashing back. The scene at the elevator. Commanding Allen to strip while she watched. Riding him like a bucking bronco.

  Letting him ride her the same way.

  She sighed contentedly. Allen was obviously deeply asleep, the arm draped over her side dead weight. Well, a hot night of lusty sex would do that to a guy. For her part, her whole body vibrated with sensual gratification, feeling heavy and satisfied, inside and out.

  About damn time.

  Sidri grinned, taking another moment to enjoy the feel of Allen being wrapped around her like a vine. She normally slept on her back, much to Tatum’s annoyance. Of course, his Alpha male sensibilities demanded he spoon and shelter his lover during the night. While she could sometimes fall asleep on her side, tucked against his chest, more often than not she wiggled out of his hold and sprawled on her back like a lioness taking her ease. Tatum grumbled, saying he preferred to wake with her ass snuggled against his morning wood. But then, when she slept on her back, he typically woke with his face buried in her tits, so he didn’t have too much to complain about.

  That damn vibrating started again. Frowning, Sidri reached under herself, surprised to find her cell phone tucked in the crack between the sections of the futon. It must have fallen out of her pocket when Allen pulled her jeans off. The memory made her hum with pleasure as she fished the device out and blinked at the screen.

  Tatum.

  Swiftly, she hit the “Deny” button to cancel his call, then immediately shot him a text.

  “Not alone. Wait a sec.”

  Knowing how crazy that statement would make her long-time lover, Sidri grinned and set about disentangling herself from Allen’s hold. Jesus, he was heavy—like trying to move a sleeping bear. Smiling softly, she kissed his temple, pulled the afghan up over his hips to keep him warm, and stepped naked into the hallway. She moved far enough down the corridor that the sound of her voice wouldn’t wake him but stayed close enough so she could watch over him. Anticipating Tatum’s reaction when she revealed the details of tonight’s victories, she dialed his number and put the phone to her ear.

  He answered in the middle of the first ring. “Tell me it happened.”

  She chuckled. “Would I have told you I wasn’t alone otherwise?”

  His heartfelt groan vibrated over the phone line. “Tell me everything.”

  She did, with great relish. Sidri detailed the first confrontation in her office, her voice growing husky as she described the terror in Allen’s eyes before he ran away from her. Tatum sucked in a shocked breath.

  “So…wait. He ran? Does that mean…”

  “No. Listen. He wasn’t running from me,” she told him earnestly. “He was running from himself.”

  She explained the scene at the elevator, earning an appreciative “Fuck” as she described running her hands all over Allen while forcing him to face his fears. And when she got to the part about hearing him admit he wanted both of them…

  “Jesus Christ,” Tatum breathed. Followed by a string of curses and suggestions for some rather interesting, though anatomically impossible, sexual positions.

  “You have no idea,” Sidri purred, loving his reaction. “I seriously thought my heart would explode when he told me that. It took everything I had, Tatum, every ounce of persuasion I could muster, to convince him he wasn’t a freak, that we both wanted him, too. And when he finally, finally started listening, when he finally started to believe me, God, that first kiss…”

  She hummed, remembering, eyes locked on his still-sleeping form in the darkness of her office. She went on to describe the striptease she’d ordered him to perform, pausing a moment as she got to his tattoos.

  “There’s more going on with him than we thought,” she admitted, rubbing the frown lines between her eyebrows tiredly. “Serious demons, Tatum. I get the feeling there’s a lot our little background check on him didn’t uncover. Getting him to accept his bisexuality may be the very least of our worries.”

  “I gathered that,” Tatum said grimly. His sigh echoed through the phone. “Tell me the rest.”

  She did, falling into a silky, sexy whisper as she described making herself come on top of him, still clothed while he lay naked. Tatum groaned, and Sidri would have bet a year’s salary he started jerking off with her first description. And when she got to the part about making Allen remove her panties with his teeth…

  “Jesus fuck, you are sex incarnate.”

  She laughed but didn’t stop her narrative, continuing on to describe the way Allen had held onto her desperately while she rode him, glossing over nothing. By the time she finished, Tatum was panting over the phone, his fist probably strangling his throbbing dick. She wished he was here, where they could get each other off, but settled for the knowledge he would be there soon. Her pussy aching, she was just starting to consider hanging up so she could ride Allen like a rollercoaster, when another memory from that night made her pause.

  “There’s something else,” she said at last, heaving a sigh. Tatum murmured questioningly. Sidri closed her eyes. “I told him, Tatum. He asked about the condom, and I told him the truth.”

  Tatum’s silence spoke volumes. They’d been together so long, she knew exactly what he was thinking, could picture his expression of shock laced with understanding.

  She’d never told anyone that truth about herself before. Not once, in all the relationships they’d had with other men, had she told them the real reason condoms weren’t required. Usually, they explained the lack away as them being clean and her being on the pill.

  She’d never told anyone she was barren.

  Tatum knew, of course. He knew everything about her. He was there, as always, when it happened, twenty years ago. Despite her best efforts, memory rushed in like a tidal wave.

  They were eleven. Tatum’s parents were off in Europe, schmoozing some client for MM&M. As co-owners of the company, the McKennas and McAlisters had made a pact. When one of them had to be away, the other would watch the children. So Tatum had been staying at her house for a couple of weeks, and they’d enjoyed some of their typical childhood antics.

  He’d told her later he knew something was different about her. Puberty was settling in for both of them, so obvious changes were taking place. They just hadn’t expected things to change quite so fast.

  Sidri still remembered waking up that morning to find blood in her panties. She’d raced downstairs, scr
eeching at the top of her lungs. Not with fear, though—elation. “I’m a woman!” she’d shrieked happily, throwing herself in her mother’s arms. Congratulations from the family had followed, with Tatum turning an adorable shade of red when he finally understood his best friend and playmate had had her first period. Then Sidri’s mom took her upstairs to show her how to use a pad and to explain the birds and the bees. Sidri, for her part, couldn’t have been happier.

  Three hours later, everyone knew something was terribly, horribly wrong. Sidri was bleeding too much, too fast. After going through an entire box of pads in just a few hours, her mom was beginning to panic. Sidri herself was deathly pale, her body ice cold, and she as having trouble staying awake. She lurched around the house as if she were drunk, unable to stop shaking. Hysterical, her father called an ambulance. The last thing Sidri remembered was the kindly face of the elderly male EMT as he introduced himself—then she blacked out.

  She woke in a hospital bed, surrounded by beeping machines with all sorts of plastic lines and wires hooked to her body. Tatum sat in a chair beside her, holding her hand, looking small and scared as he stared at her. She’d tried to offer him a hug, to reassure him, but her body wouldn’t work right. She frowned, glancing around, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Right then, her mom stepped into the room, rushed to the bed, and grabbed Sidri up in a fierce hug. Her father followed, restraining himself to a kiss on her forehead as he took his place beside his wife. And then came the doctors—all six of them—dressed in pristine white lab coats and carrying clipboards covered with papers.

  The senior physician present had introduced himself as Dr. Michaels. Then, without giving Sidri any time to process what was going on, he’d launched into an explanation of what happened to her.

  A defect, he said. The tissues in her uterus were malformed, something that hadn’t been detectable until she reached the age of adult female menses. Because of that malformation, her body didn’t function properly when it came to menstruation. In the normal way of things, the blood lining the uterus was nothing but a layer of nutrition, meant to feed a developing fetus. When it went unused, the body purged it. It wasn’t the same as the blood in her veins, and expelling it should have had no effect on her vascular system whatsoever.

  But, in Sidri’s case, the opposite was true. Instead of purging unneeded blood, her uterus opened a direct line into her blood stream, leaking the life-giving fluid out like a faucet. There was nothing they could have done by the time she made it to the hospital to stem the flow and correct the defect.

  They’d had to give her a hysterectomy.

  Sidri had looked at her mother for confirmation. It was a big word, but one she knew—she was ever a precocious child—so it wasn’t the definition she needed help translating. She just didn’t understand what it meant when it was being applied to her.

  Mom explained it, simply and concisely, with aching sympathy in her face. It meant Sidri would never go through menses, never have a menstrual cycle like other women. The rest of her body would continue to develop, and the doctors assured them all she would have a happy, healthy sex life otherwise. But Sidri would never know the joys and sorrows of pregnancy, never see her own face in the face of a child held in her arms.

  She would never have children of her own flesh and blood.

  “But hey,” one of the youngest doctor’s had quipped, “No PMS either, am I right? So there’s a silver lining here.”

  Sidri hated him instantly.

  After the doctors and her parents left, Sidri was startled to find Tatum still in the room, still holding her hand. The moment her eyes acknowledged him, he’d climbed up on her bed, wrapped his arms around her neck, and whispered, “I’m so, so sorry.”

  It was the last time either one of them ever had spoken of it. No words were needed, after all. He knew, without being told, just how devastated she’d been when she realized she would never get pregnant. But that knowledge had remained, hidden deep under the surface, even as they embraced their somewhat-hedonistic sex lives.

  And now she’d told the secret. To Allen. And after seeing the love in his eyes, hearing the compassion and understanding in his voice when he claimed her for his own, she knew she would love him until the day she died.

  Clearing her throat, Sidri returned to the present and the man waiting patiently on the other end of the phone line. “So, yeah, he knows. And he’s okay with it.” She laughed hoarsely. “I couldn’t very well demand he tell me the truth at all times, no matter how much it hurts, without being willing to reciprocate, now could I? But anyway, it’s water under the bridge. We need to move on to the next challenge.”

  Tatum sighed quietly, telling her he wanted to discuss things further, but had decided to allow her to let it drop. “All right. So what’s next?”

  Sidri rubbed the back of her neck, eyes distant though still aware of the gorgeous man who slept on not fifty feet away. “We need to talk, obviously. I got the sense his fear of being bisexual wasn’t self-inflicted. And you know what that means.”

  “Bible thumpers,” Tatum answered grimly.

  She sighed, nodding even though he couldn’t see her. “Probably his parents. Which would make sense,” she mused thoughtfully. “He ran away from home young enough that he might have been confronted with his sexuality and chose to run rather than face their condemnation. He certainly expected me to heap ridicule on his head when he realized I understood what he was getting at. I need to break him of that, and fast, before we spend time with you. Otherwise…”

  “He’ll run from me faster than he ran from you,” Tatum finished with a growl of frustration.

  She sighed, aching with sympathy. “Yeah. I need to get him to accept that his feelings are natural, normal, before he’s confronted with his lust in the flesh, so to speak. But I think enough has happened to him in his life that he’ll be able to embrace that part of himself much more easily than he probably realizes.”

  Sidri held the phone to her cheek, wishing she could look Tatum in the eye. “It will work out,” she whispered fiercely. “I promise, baby, it will work out just fine.”

  A long silence. Then, “I trust you. You know that. Let your instincts lead, and keep me updated. But I should warn you”—and here his voice took on a wicked glimmer—“I took an earlier flight.”

  Sidri stood bolt upright, gripping the phone with both hands. “Does that mean…”

  He laughed. “Yep. I’m at the lake house, in bed, right now. So when you bring him to the house tomorrow, I’ll be waiting for both of you.” He paused, finished with a tired sigh. “So don’t come home until you’re sure he won’t run, okay? I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it, otherwise.”

  She closed her eyes, aching for him. “All right. I’ll text you when we’re on our way. Maybe you could…”

  But she trailed off, a noise from inside her office having interrupted her train of thought. She paused, listening. A rustling of fabric, thrashing of limbs, little moans and mumbled words, came from the darkened room.

  Sidri sucked in a breath. “Tatum. I have to go.”

  “Okay. Why? Everything all right?”

  She looked toward her office, where shadows moved jerkily around the futon where her lover slept. “I think Allen’s having a nightmare.”

  Tatum’s voice was firm, insistent. “Go. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  Tatum snorted. “Don’t tell me. Tell him.” And he hung up.

  Sidri closed her eyes, pressing a kiss to the blank phone screen, wishing she could comfort him. But knowing she could do nothing for the lover who was miles away right now, even if he was back in the same country, she could only worry for him. Heaving a deep sigh, she pushed her oldest lover’s troubles out of her mind and went to find out what was troubling her newest lover’s dreams.

  Chapter 12

  The suckiest part about reliving bad memories in the form of dreams is knowing you’re dreaming
in the first place.

  Allen watched, a helpless, dispassionate observer, as his younger self slunk down a dark street in the very heart of Houston’s Third Ward. It was a depressing, dilapidated part of town, home to criminals and drug lords and every other bottom-feeder in Houston’s dark underbelly. At least, that’s what he’d always been told. Having grown up in the prestigious, über-rich subdivision of River Oaks, he’d never had much experience with the harsher realities of life in a sprawling metropolis. And all he really knew at that moment was he was starving, freezing, and terrified out of his mind.

  He’d been on the streets for two months. At first, it hadn’t been too terribly bad. He’d slept on friends’ couches, taken showers in real bathrooms, and gotten at least one meal a day he didn’t have to steal. But eventually, the hospitality grew thin, and he knew he had to move on before some bleeding-heart soul decided to call his parents and send him straight back to hell.

  And so he found himself here, miles from anywhere he’d ever traveled in his former life, completely lost and utterly devoid of hope.

  His last meal was a three-day-gone memory, a gift from a kindly restaurant owner who’d let him camp out in the loading area behind the restaurant for a couple of days. Allen had shown up at closing time, offering to wash dishes in exchange for whatever scraps he could glean while cleaning plates. He must have looked pathetic enough in his tattered windbreaker and holey sneakers that the proprietor took pity on him. He’d sat Allen down in a booth, fed him steak and mashed potatoes, and told him he could sleep in the shed out back for a night or two. Allen had gratefully accepted the assistance, washing dishes with a will so the invitation wouldn’t be withdrawn. But after a few days, the owner’s eyes had gone hard, obviously rethinking the wisdom of sheltering a runaway on his property. Allen had taken off before the man took it into his head to call the police, disappearing into the endless maze of Houston’s inner-city streets without so much as a backward glance.