by Honor James
Chuckling, he stood up and began walking toward her. “I much prefer watching you move through the water. You are like one of our Fae legends, the myth of the Siren of the lake,” he murmured as he stopped before her. “She would lure in men, mate with them, and then take them to the bottom in the hopes they were her chosen, but not a one survived.”
That had her shaking her head. “Well, that is just no fun. It’s far better to have them around so that you can be with them as often as you want.” Grabbing one of the other towels that he had brought, she held it out to him. “How about you come out of the lake, my Fae Guard, and dry off so that we can see what other kinds of trouble we can get into?”
Lifting a brow, he smiled faintly and moved closer, knowing she was watching the water line as it receded down his body. Pausing with it right at his navel he tipped his head. “What kind of trouble are you thinking about darling?” he asked curiously.
“Oh nothing too serious,” she said as she watched the water at his navel. Licking her lips, she added, “How about another like three steps forward?” So that he would be completely bare for her to look at. Oh yeah, that was what she needed.
Trying not to laugh, Laighean stepped forward and bent his knees so he kept what she wanted under the water. “How’s this?” he asked, trying desperately to erase the smile curving his lips. “Is this better, my little mate?”
Rimi frowned. “That’s just so not right,” she growled. “You know that I want to watch you, honey. You know how much I love watching you as you walk naked. I want to lick and touch you, and goodness, Lee, get out of the water.”
Chuckling softly, he stopped teasing her and stood. Teasing was good in a relationship but only to a point. After that it was frustration, and that was bad. Walking toward her slowly, he stopped before her. “Better?” he murmured, watching as she licked her lips again, her breasts rising and falling quickly as she sucked in air.
“Oh hell yes, that’s better,” Rimi murmured and licked her lips. “Gods, Lee, you are so incredibly handsome. I swear I will never ever get used to just how beautiful you are.” Beautiful wasn’t the right word. Gorgeous, intense, incredible. Hers.
“Always yours.” He grinned at her and tipped his head slightly. Reaching up, he traced a finger lightly over the curves of her breasts. “And you are all mine,” he murmured, pressing her robe just a little further away from her breast, and rubbed her nipple lightly.
“Every single part of me is yours.” She agreed readily with him, dropping her shoulders a bit so the robe could spill off her shoulders and catch at her elbows. “Have I mentioned how much I love it when we get really intense with our lovemaking and our brands fuse together? I love that feeling.” It was as if in that time they breathed for each other, hearts beat for each other, and they lived in one skin.
“We do in a way,” he said softly. “I did some research since this had not been something I’d ever heard of before.” Not that he knew of any guards that had mated, of course. “I was concerned that it might be harmful to you, so I needed to know.” Laighean ran his finger over the feminine vine around her arm. “Apparently when we open ourselves completely during our love sessions, the vines naturally want to connect, to deepen the bonds between us and, for that brief moment when they are fully entwined and we climax, we literally are of one body. Our breathing is in sync, our heartbeats are as one, and our orgasm is unified, multiplied, and spectacular.”
“Oh, yes, I can totally testify as to just how spectacular it is.” She saw stars when that happened. Literally, it was as if she saw the cosmos bursting behind her eyes. “And I love it,” she admitted to him. “I am very happy that this is something that is ours and ours alone, honey.”
“It is,” he said, softly stroking her fingers over her mating band, and smiled at her shiver. “You like that, don’t you?” he murmured. He knew it was a part of her, as his was, and seemingly tied directly into her sexual pleasure center.
“Yes, I like it a lot,” she whimpered. “It’s like you are stroking my clit, suckling my nipples, and coming inside of me all at once.” It was as if the brand hit every single one of her hot-spot buttons. “Does it feel nice to you when I touch yours?” she asked and lifted her hands, lightly caressing his brand as well.
“Gods, yes,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb over her band. “I can feel you stroking my cock, your hand, your mouth, tongue, everything.” If she kept it up, he knew he could easily come just from what she was doing. Not that he minded. It would be interesting and a new experience for them both.
Biting her lip, she grinned. Moving in, she brushed her tongue and then ran her teeth over his brand. “It’s an amazing feeling, isn’t it, darling?” she asked with a desperate growl to her voice. “The feeling of knowing that we belong to each other,” she whispered and nipped his band lightly with teeth.
“Gods it does,” he said with a growl. Pulling her in closer to him, he lifted her arm to wrap it around his neck and brushed his lips over her band. Licking at it, he nibbled very lightly along the vines on her arm.
She shuddered and moaned. She couldn’t fathom it, but she was sure that she was going to climax just from his teeth and lips teasing the band that had wrapped itself around her arm. “Again.” She purred softly, biting the vines around his upper arm.
Jolting at the feel of teeth on his cock, he nipped at her band and pulled her closer. “You keep that up and I’m going to spill all over you,” he warned her in a throaty tone. He was fighting the need to come all over her belly.
“And if I told you that I would be totally fine with that?” she asked breathlessly. “Because I really and truly wouldn’t mind at all.” She was panting, gasping for air, and trying to keep herself from coming as well. “After all it would be only fitting since you seem to make me want to come as well, darling.”
Sliding his tongue over the vine, he bit down a little, adding pressure to it as he rubbed his aching cock to her belly. “Then make me come,” he told her honestly, scraping his teeth with care to the delicate band.
“Gladly,” she whispered honestly against his band. “Only if you make me come, too,” she added with a wicked grin. It was surreal, how just the touch of his teeth and lips and tongue to her mating brand made her whole body shake with need. She poured that need into her, laving the same need over his brand.
Smiling, he gently bit the band again and flicked his tongue to it slowly. Nibbling slowly, he rubbed his aching cock to her belly. Pushing her robe a little wider, he cupped her breast in his free hand and massaged the globe, tugging and rolling her tight nipple a little roughly.
She whimpered and traced his band with her tongue, biting him as she did so. “Come for me,” she growled and pushed against him as well. She wanted desperately to come and was so very, very close to coming, and it wasn’t even funny.
Biting her band, Laighean growled softly, increasing the pressure a little as he let loose and came. Spilling his seed all over her belly, he groaned and shuddered. Pinching her nipple tight, he rolled it hard with a little twist and held her to him.
Rimi felt her body contract and her orgasm come. She felt the liquid racing down her legs and shivered. Moving her mouth from his band, she rested it against his chest and panted. “Goodness,” she whispered. “I never would have believed that a person could come just from the touch of mouths and teeth to a tattoo-type marking.”
“It’s more than that, love. It’s a living and breathing part of Mother Nature, of Gaia and of all we are,” he told her honestly as he shuddered again, more of his seed spilling over her skin. “It’s a live connection to the world around us, to our makers, and to each other. It’s everything and yet nothing, a balance of all that is, could be, and might be.”
“I’m happy that we have them,” she admitted quietly to him and shuddered again. “God, I love that feeling,” she moaned. “So very much.” It was the oddest thing she knew, but God, she loved the way that it felt to have him coming so hard for her and on
ly for her.
“It would only be for you,” he murmured. “No other but a bond-mate can give any of us the true satisfaction of knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no other for us. It’s a connection beyond anything else and it’s so pure and blessed.” Laighean shook his head and leaned back. “And I’ve made a mess of you, love,” he said, only feeling a little bad.
Shrugging, she grinned up at him. “Trust me, honey, that doesn’t bother me at all. We are here by a lake, so all that I have to do is wash up a little and I’m totally good, darling mine.” Plus, she had to clean up the moisture that dripped down her legs as well. “Goodness, that was amazing, honey,” she added with a grin.
“That it was,” he murmured quietly to her. Brushing a kiss to her lips, he stepped back slightly. “Clean up a bit, my love, and we will go home and shower,” he said quietly. “See if we can’t come up with something else to do there as well.”
“Mmm, I like that idea a lot,” she promised him. “Let’s get ourselves cleaned up and then we will get ourselves home, showered, and maybe watch some TV or something.”
“And food, definitely need food,” he said with a grin, helping her out of the robe once more for another dip in the pond.
She moved away from him and walked into the water’s edge. Leaning down, she began to wash her body off, since she wasn’t willing to get back in for another swim. Once she had most of their shared orgasms off of her body, she moved back toward him and smiled. “All right, love. Let’s get back to our home and get some food in us.”
Chapter Eleven
Standing to the side and just behind his mate and Queen, Laighean tipped his head to the side to see what it was Quincy was showing everyone. The Mage had said he’d found out a little more information about those that had been at Rimi’s house, the reason she’d come to stay at Kat’s originally. There wasn’t much, so this was to be, at least from what he understood, a chat session to see if there was more information there that they’d missed.
Rimi slipped her hand into Lee’s and gave it a squeeze. She had no idea why someone had wanted her, just knew that someone had said that she was the key to finding “unnaturals,” whatever that was. She listened to the Mage as he spoke and felt more and more sick to her stomach as he went on.
“Skittles, boil it down for us before my head explodes,” Talon said to the man.
“All right.” Quincy looked around. “Basically it comes down to humans want to find us, experiment on us, and kill us,” he said shooting everyone a look. “We boys and girls of the paranormal world are what they term ‘unnaturals.’ The mates, like Rimi, are their targets because they know eventually an ‘unnatural’ will find them and claim them. Then they can trap us and do whatever they plan to do.”
Drawing Rimi back against him, Laighean wrapped his arm around her middle and held her close to him. He didn’t like the idea of the mates being used to trap anyone. “How do they know?” He asked the big question hanging in the air.
“That is a very good question. How could they have known that Rimi was going to be a bond-mate? She didn’t even know, not really,” Katherine put out there. “And humankind will always hunt down what they don’t understand.” It was a sad but true fact. “They are constantly searching for the whos, whats, whens, and wheres, especially if it might make one of them a little cash.”
“So the question still stands, how did they know?” Quincy said and grinned at all the dirty looks it got him. “Well, boys and girls, I may have one solution to that. It’s out there, but it’s possible. So—” He turned around and hit the keys on the keyboard. “Bear with me here. This will all seem seriously convoluted, but I do have a point here. We have Kat, who moved here on a whim, sort of. Her father was powerful and had an unusually well-hidden background where he only popped up now and again,” he said to the room.
“Then we have Jackie, her parents, average and relatively off the radar except for her father who is high powered and in the know about us.” He tapped some more buttons. “Talina, way off the radar except for the hospital records for her mother and a few domestic reports to the cops. Pretty mundane and no big triggers. And last, for this demonstration, we have Rimi. Average childhood, mundane adult life, sorry Rim.” He grinned at her. “Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.”
He pulled up another screen and shot everything up to the main large screen on the wall. “Until you start digging,” Quincy told them. Getting up, he moved to the wall screen. “Once you start looking into the ancestry, that’s when you find the curious things. Now, they have to literally be looking at every female and male ever born, huge programs constantly running and spitting out data. If these were changers, I’d say they had an inside track, but these are humans and they are doing their homework.”
Hitting a couple things on the touch screen, he lined up the ancestry charts and blew them all up. “If you will note, here, here, here, and here.” He pointed to each of the four he was using. “What do we see, boys and girls?”
Talon leaned forward and frowned, reading the names, and cursed. “Holy mother of the Gods,” he muttered softly. “Those are all names of some of the first Kings and Queens. Gregorvich is one of the first Dragons,” he said pointing to Talina’s bloodline, which was his basically, given she was his daughter, quite a ways back.
“The thing about changers is, we keep exceptionally well-documented records, and being linked to Magi and Sorcerers like myself, all those documents got put onto the Net as soon as it came into being,” Quincy told them. “It makes tracking the bloodlines much easier instead of having to travel miles to meet with each historian of each clan to find out when there were marriages and matings. All is actively and correctly tracked and documented.”
“Isn’t this stuff classified, hidden, and buried though?” Trey asked from his seat next to Kat.
“Oh it is. In the beginning it wasn’t,” Quincy said softly, “But once we realized what the Net was becoming, we scoured it clean and pulled all the documents back into our vaults. But the Net never forgets, and though I spend nearly half my time finding, copying, and digitally erasing documents just like these out there, there’s always more still to find. And we only clued in to what would occur a few years ago and starting digging everything back up. Really wish one of the seers had figured it out earlier,” he muttered.
“So the humans have all our papers, all the lineages, and have programs set to track and trace the lines of everyone on earth?” Laighean asked with a frown, not entirely understanding how that was possible or what it all meant.
“Essentially,” Quincy said. “They’ve had over forty years to do it before we realized the issues with the Internet and started the recall into our vaults. But they could literally have a copy of every single clan, every bloodline of the changers, Mage, and Fae out there. Once they had a copy saved to their computers, and if they kept them offline only using very specific search parameters, they’d never pop up on our radar.”
“That’s why they aren’t finding them all,” Mac murmured. “Some of the bloodlines are so convoluted not even us changers know how they work or how to track and trace them. They have to limit themselves a bit to parameters that won’t take forever to trace.”
“No,” Quincy said and held up a hand. “Let me explain. The more details you have, the better refined your search engine is. For example, you search for restaurants you’re literally going to get hundreds of thousands worldwide. But you search for restaurants in New York that serve Italian and have tiramisu and serve an ‘88 Chianti, you’ll get maybe a couple or so, unlike the hundreds of thousands you had before.”
Licking his lips, he leaned against the wall. “Same thing for our bloodlines. The more refined they are in the details, the more narrow the search, but time is a huge element, plus the fact there are over seven billion people on the planet that they have to search through. Now, technically, that’s narrowed down a little because third-world countries don’t exactly have great records. Pl
us they will be likely limiting it to certain age groups in the hopes to find those that are young and able to bear children. Talina likely would never have been found though,” Quincy told them.
“While Talon’s name was on the birth certificate, he’s had a few surnames over the years, part of the blending with society thing we do. Yes, we keep track of the names and always link them back to him, but those were not part of the original papers. The Dragons were a hold out,” Quincy told the group. “They had fairly uptight views of the Net and of us having their records. I only could do the trace because Talon finally told the older Dragons to shove it where the sun didn’t shine and gave the bloodline files to me. They, though, have never been on the Internet proper, strictly in our vaults.”
Katherine nodded. “Which makes sense. And I likely wasn’t found because I was hidden so well because of Daddy.” She chewed her lower lip and added, “And I can’t see my grandmother signing up to give a full genealogy, and since all of the Fae were in stasis anyway she likely didn’t feel she had to.”
Rimi looked to Quincy and then Maya before saying, “So it would seem that I’m distantly related to the Magic users? Specifically you, Maya. So the question is, who in the human world has the money and smarts to put this together? Who would even know how to trace all of this?” That was the biggest question.
“Not a clue,” Quincy said and rolled his eyes at all the looks he got. “Look, I can on occasion be a miracle worker, but until about two hours ago, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Now I do, so I will keep digging and hopefully be able to give you all the answer. But right now, all I can say is, whoever this is has huge money, geeks coming out of the ass, and has been working steadily for a long time. I’d say it’s a group of some sort, probably something left over from one of the wars that has survived father to son, mother to daughter through the ages. Unfortunately we shot ourselves in the foot and gave them a way to find our mates. But on the plus side, it tells us that all the mates are descendants of the original lines, which tells us why the bonding works, why we’re drawn to them, and why they can survive all we put them through.”