by DJ Michaels
Her breasts swelled where they pressed against his chest and a low, heavy ache settled deep in her pussy. She surged closer, opening her mouth to invite him in, but he didn’t take her up on her offer. He nipped at her lips, he licked them, kissing from corner to corner, but he didn’t delve inside.
“Rye, please.” She breathed the words out and she could feel the curve of his lips as he smiled.
“Not yet, honey. Soon.”
Tucking his head into the crook of her neck, he gave her one long, hard squeeze and then released her, stepping back and turning her toward the table. “You’d better go say good morning to Dev before he gets too lonely.”
Tansy’s vision was a little blurry and she was sure her steps weren’t as steady as they should be. As she made her way around the table, it didn’t occur to her to disobey. She was so busy worrying about Dev not feeling left out that she forgot about her own embarrassment.
The moment she got close enough, Dev pushed back his chair, grasped her by the wrist and dragged her onto his lap. She let out a gasp of surprise, and Dev’s hand was at the back of her neck in a flash, guiding her mouth to his and sealing their lips together. The kiss was closed-mouthed and intense. There was no way to mistake it for anything but a claim of possession.
As soon as he pulled away, Tansy opened her mouth to speak, but Dev placed his hand over the bottom half of her face. “No, you don’t get to protest. You started this, you asked for our help, you let us touch you and kiss you, and you don’t get to shut us out now.” He removed his hand and gave her another quick kiss. “This is going to take time, Tansy. We’ll have progress and setbacks. There’ll be time for talk and times when no words are needed. But whatever happens we need to keep moving forward together. You’re ours now, for as long as you’ll have us. Unless you pack your things and leave this den, Rye and I are going to treat you like our woman. Do you understand?”
She nodded and slid her arm around his shoulders, tucking her hand underneath his long, silky, outrageously purple hair. “Yes, I understand, Dev.”
“Good.” He gave her a love-tap on the bum. “Now let’s eat breakfast before Rye fades away from starvation.”
She wriggled off his lap and allowed Rye to guide her to the head of the table. Dev sat at her left, Rye took a seat at her right, and the Enforcers proceeded to serve her, then themselves. She ended up with far too much food on her plate but she didn’t have the heart to rein them in.
She’d been so worried about how they’d react to her meltdown the night before. At the time, she hadn’t been in any shape to deal with the Enforcers and they knew it. Dev and Rye had taken her to the lair and Tansy had spent the night tucked safe and tight between Zenbaylan and Fellescend. Being around the blacks seemed to smooth all her rough edges, and to her surprise she’d slept like a baby.
But since waking she’d had more than enough time to fret about how Rye and Dev would react this morning. Half of her had expected them to treat her with kid gloves, the other half had feared they’d shut her out. But in all her scenario-building she’d never quite come up with the notion that they’d kiss her and claim her. And she’d never been so happy to be taken by surprise.
“The stormwatchers have predicted clear skies today, so there’s a big market on in town,” Dev said. “We thought we might fly down and have a look.”
“Oh, okay.” Tansy tried to hide her disappointment. She knew her males weren’t required for duty today, and now that the air had cleared she’d been looking forward to spending time with them. She was bored with her own company and with being trapped on the top of the den. Going to the market sounded wonderful, but the only way to get there was on dragonback. There was no way she’d be able to get into the air, so she’d have to stay at the den and be bored.
“How soon can you be ready to leave?”
Rye’s question froze her in mid-motion, a loaded fork halfway to her mouth. “Ah, I’m not going.” She lowered her hand.
“Why not?” Dev reached out and stroked her arm. “Is because of last night? Are you still upset with us?”
God no. She was so far from being upset with them that she felt as though she should grovel at their feet in gratitude. “No. I was never upset with you. I had a flashback, that’s all.” And that was all. The flashback might have been a doozy, but she’d survived it—and she’d survive the next one too. She’d fight her way through as many traumatic memories as she had to in order to regain a normal life.
Dev smoothed his hand up her back and under her ponytail, cupping the nape of her neck. His palm was rough and warm and her body instinctively leaned closer to him.
“Are you sure? If we did something wrong, you have to tell us so we know not to do it again.”
“The three of us are fine, truly.” Or at least the two males were. She, on the other hand, could be the poster girl for Mental Health Week.
Rye leaned his elbows on the table. “So why won’t you come into town with us?”
Flicking her eyes down to her plate, she took a long breath and tried to unscramble her sluggish brain. She only had a few seconds to come up with a plausible lie and she wasn’t sure if she was up to the challenge.
She won’t fly.
Tansy gasped in outrage. Bloody Zenbaylan and her big mouth.
Fisting her hands in her lap, Tansy sent a sharp, hopefully private message to the nosy battle dragons. Keep out of this, both of you. If I wanted Dev and Rye to know my secrets, I would have told them.
They can’t help you if they remain ignorant.
Tansy ground her teeth together. This is my problem, Zenbaylan. I’ll fix it in my own time.
Rye reached over, scooping her out of her chair and hauling her onto his lap. The movement broke her concentration and she fell out of the link with Zenbaylan, thank goodness. Then Rye snuggled her tight, turning her so she was facing Dev. His full lips were pressed tight and his eyes narrowed as he stared at her across the table.
“It that true? Are you afraid to fly?”
“Yes.” Just one more freaky failure to add to her list. She tried to wriggle off Rye’s lap, but he simply tightened his arm, squeezing her until she stopped moving. Giving up with bad grace, she slumped against him and tried to prepare herself for the fallout.
Dev leaned forward, propping his arms on the table. “I know you were frightened the night we rescued you, but I thought that was because of the ordeal you’d been through. If you’re scared to fly, how did you manage to stay calm on the flight home?”
She shrugged. “My captivity was a living hell. I would have strapped on a pair of wings and flapped myself out of Allsgate if I’d thought it would work. Plus I was pretty sure I’d just killed a man. I was so terrorized I was numb and I just didn’t have it in me to be scared once I got into the air.”
And both Rye and Dev had held her tight. She’d been wrapped in a blanket, then wrapped in their arms and held firm against their hard, strong bodies. Relief at being safe and free had overtaken every other emotion.
Rye rubbed her back in long, smooth sweeps. “Is it just a fear of being on dragonback, or is it something else?”
Tansy screwed up her nose. Rye was supposed to be the fun-loving half of the Enforcer partnership, the easygoing pleasure seeker. This was not the time for him to turn into Oprah.
“I can sit here all day, Tansy. And don’t bother to lie, because Zenbaylan will call you out.”
Apparently Rye could also be an asshole with a wide streak of can’t-mind-his-own-business.
Dev leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You are aware that we have the whole day off. How long do you think you can hold out before we make you talk?”
Wow. Assholes in stereo. Wasn’t she just the luckiest girl in the den?
She felt Rye’s whole body lift and drop as he heaved a big sigh, then he rested his cheek on top of her head. “Come on, honey, please let us in.”
She recognized the undercurrent of need in his voice. The compulsion to
help and to heal, a desire that seemed strange coming from a male who made his livelihood from battle.
All the men in her family were strong, but they were regular human men whose first instinct was to fix a problem. She’d learned early on that if she wanted to talk, she went to her mom. But if she wanted someone’s ass kicked, she went to her brothers.
Sitting cradled in Rye’s lap, looking across the table into Dev’s pale-blue eyes, it occurred to Tansy that she was being offered something rare and precious. A combination of emotional and physical strength that went far beyond their connection in the bedroom. And it called to her, deep down inside.
Taking an unsteady breath, she did her best to meet them halfway. “In my other life, I used to skydive. We’d fly up to twelve and a half thousand feet, throw ourselves out of a plane, and after a minute or so of freefall we’d pull our parachutes and gently float to the ground. It was wonderful. It was a rush. When I was in the air, I felt like I could conquer the world.”
She let her eyes drift shut, remembering a time when plummeting toward the earth at one hundred and eighty-five kilometers an hour had been her idea of a good time. When she opened her eyes again, she could see she’d lost Dev and Rye, so she took a moment to explain the concept of skydiving to them. Neither male seemed enchanted by the idea of anything less than a dragon to break a fall, but that wasn’t the point of her story.
“During my last jump, I got tangled in my ’chute. I managed to kick myself free and I deployed my reserve but I’d lost a lot of altitude. The landing was ugly and I broke my leg in two places and fractured my wrist.” And she’d got her ass kicked from one side of the army base to the other by her very unhappy CO, who didn’t like his soldiers being reckless, on duty or off.
“By the time I was fit to get back in the air, I’d lost my nerve. It’s the one time I let my fear win.”
Rye’s big hand kept right on rubbing her back. “I can understand why you would be wary after that experience, but we can work on it together. If you’re going to be happy here in the den, you have to be able to ride our dragons.”
She knew he was right and she wished with everything in her that there was no more to her story. “That’s not all,” she whispered. “That’s not the worst of it.”
Dev swore, and she watched him come around to her side of the table. Pulling a chair close, he wedged himself at right angles to Rye so her legs were tucked into the V of Dev’s. Leaning forward, he cupped a hand over her hip. “We’re right here, honey. You’re safe with us.”
She nodded. Then, to her horror, she felt a hot, fat tear slide down her cheek. It was followed by a second and a third. Dev snatched a napkin off the table and gently brushed them away as they fell. “Don’t stop now, Tansy. Tell us the rest.”
The only way she could tell them, the only way to share her story, was to detach. She forced her mind and body to disconnect, as though her limbs no longer belonged to her and the tears on her cheek were not her own. Separating from herself, she refused to allow the words that came out of her mouth to have an effect on her body.
“The men who took us, Willersby and the others, had some kind of competition going on between them. When the other women and I compared notes, it became clear that our captors wanted to bring us to heel without breaking us entirely. Somehow they’d linked their status and authority in the group with how quickly and effectively they could force a woman to comply.”
The cold numbness seeped into her body, chilling her nerves and freezing her emotions. “At first, Willersby tried deprivation and pain. My control bracelet got hard use and he would withhold food and drink. But it didn’t take me long to work out that kind of punishment couldn’t last if he wanted to win their stupid game. Long-term use of the bracelet would kill me, and no one would respect Willersby if his mistress was thin, haggard and malnourished. So I held out. I endured the pain, I ignored the hunger and I refused to comply.”
Dev gathered her hands in his. “How did he respond to that?”
“He got inventive.” She shuddered and clung to the emotionless cold. “He tried several different techniques. He bombarded me with random acts of cruelty until he hit on the one thing guaranteed to break me.”
“Your fear of flying,” Rye said.
She shook her head. “My fear of falling. At some point he hit on the idea of taking me up to the roof of the Residence, wrapping me in a force field and throwing me over the side of the building. Sometimes he’d engage the force field straight away, sometimes he’d wait until I was almost at ground level before he switched it on. Over and over, night after night. Until I broke.”
A rough, hiccupping breath escaped her and her chest squeezed tight. She tried to stay numb but the humiliation burned inside her, hot enough to thaw the cold.
She peered through watery eyes at Dev’s blurry form. “I’m so ashamed.”
“No, no, honey. Don’t say that.” He moved closer, pushing himself against her so she was wedged tight between them. “Willersby Lockmehdyhn is an evil, morally bankrupt dead man walking. The shame is his. The damage is his. The blame lies at his door and no other.”
She nodded because Dev seemed to need it, not because she was without blame.
“How did he make you choose?” Rye asked.
“I don’t think I can.” The mere thought of it made her want to puke. She had no idea how she was going to hold it together if they made her say it out loud.
“You’re safe here, Tansy,” Rye said. “Dev and I won’t judge you, but if we’re going to help you properly we need to understand. You have to tell us everything.”
Could she? Did she have that kind of courage left in her?
Her stomach roiled in a vicious snarl and her voice came out little more than a rasp. “He would take me up to the roof and drop me over and over until I begged him to stop. And he would stop, as soon as I promised to be his good little whore. Then he would take me downstairs and…”
“Go on, you’re nearly done.”
Rye pulled her closer and she curled up between them. “And he’d make me choose. I could choose to suck him off, or I could go back to the roof. I could choose to lie on the bed and spread my legs, or I could go back to the roof. I could debase myself in front of his friends or—”
“That’s enough, Tansy.” Rye pressed his lips to her head and kept them there. “We get the picture. And baby, I’m so, so sorry that happened to you. If there was any way we could take that experience from you, we would.”
Of course they would—they were warriors to the bone and they would always want to defend and protect.
“This doesn’t change how we feel about you,” Dev said. “It makes me admire you and respect you even more than I did before. You are not in any way less in my eyes.” He moved so his arms wrapped around her and Rye, and Dev laid his head on the nape of her neck. “You are more. You are ours. You are everything.”
And that was when the cathartic tears finally came.
Chapter Eight
After her storm of cleansing tears, Tansy took a leisurely bath, using the time to pull herself together. It was more than an hour before she got to finish breakfast in company with a quietly comforting Dev, and she was just finishing up when Rye entered the den from the exterior door. He wore dark-gray leather pants and tunic with black, knee-high boots. His autumn-blond hair was pulled back neatly in a low ponytail in what Tansy always considered his “work look”.
“I thought you and Dev were off-duty today,” she said, laying her utensils on her plate and pushing it away from her.
“We are. I had an errand to run and we thought it would be easier if it seemed official.” Rye came over to the table, pulling out a chair and positioning it so he sat at right angles to her. “Dev and I had a discussion while you were in the bath and we came up with a temporary fix.”
“Maybe,” Dev added. “If you want.”
Tansy leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “Too cryptic. Just spit it out.”
&
nbsp; Rye grinned and threw a small, neatly wrapped package onto the table. “I’ve just been to see a friend of ours, an apothecary. I didn’t give him the who or why, but I did explain to him what we needed.”
She frowned at him. “Still cryptic.”
“What we have here,” he said, gesturing to the package, “is a special blend of herbs. They’ll send you to sleep for a little while and when you wake up you’ll feel alert and refreshed.”
She stared at him. Then the package. Then back at him. “You want to drug me?”
“No,” Dev replied. “What we want is to give you some normalcy. We want to take you to the market for some sunshine and fresh air, and dragonback is the only mode of travel.”
Rye nodded, his lavender eyes sparkling. “One moment you’ll be in our den, then after you sleep for a bit you’ll wake up in a field on the outskirts of town. It will seem like you’re part dragonet, popping out of one place and into another.”
“And it’s safe?” As soon as the question was out of her mouth she knew she was stupid to even ask it. Her Enforcers would never put her at risk.
“Yes, it’s safe,” Rye replied.
Dev pulled her up out of her chair. “It’s also temporary, so don’t get too used to it. This is a short-term measure until we can figure out a way to tackle your fears.”
“Which ones?” Tansy muttered, allowing herself to be pulled in to the strong heat of Dev’s chest.
He stroked his hand down her back. “All of them. Just not all at once.”
And thank god for that.
Rye stepped in behind her, sliding his hands under the silk of her tunic to rub her bare stomach. “Go get changed into something conventional.” His hands crept up to cup her bra-covered breasts. “And for the sake of my sanity, wear a proper bloody corset.”