Lions' Pride

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Jude looked like he was about to come back with something equally suggestive.

  Elissa spoiled the moment of sexy male bonding by bursting into tears.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “I’m all right,” she managed to say through her tears. “I’m just so relieved I didn’t ruin everything. It would have been worth anything to save you, but I didn’t want…and I never imagined…”

  Jude rolled over, taking her with him, so both men could wrap around her.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Jude said, as if he’d actually understood her incoherent attempt to apologize and explain. Maybe he did. He knew her awfully well. “Now go to sleep, my heart. Rafe and I will take turns keeping watch.”

  He yawned broadly on the last few words. “Dibs on the first watch,” Rafe said, adding quickly, “I know protecting her is your job, but you deserve a few hours curled up with your wife.”

  To Elissa’s amazement, Jude didn’t argue, just pulled her closer. It had to be a measure of how bone-deep his exhaustion was, because Jude could and usually did dispute anything, no matter how sensible.

  Cats, she thought, snuggling against Jude’s broad chest. Can’t talk sense to them, but can’t live without them.

  Rafe smiled, kissed them each on the top of the head—then stood back and changed.

  Damn, he was one long cat. It hadn’t struck her at first because the cougar was lighter and more sleekly built than Jude’s stocky lion, but Rafe in cougar form stretched most of the way across the small room. From nose to tail tip, he had to be close to eight feet long.

  “Quick learner,” Jude muttered. “I’d hate him, but he’s too damn nice. And hot, too.”

  “I’m a little biased toward the other form, if you’re going to talk hotness. But he makes a good-looking cougar if you like that sort of thing, which I guess you might.” Why didn’t it feel weirder to be talking with her husband about how hot some guy was—some guy who’d just made love to them both?

  Because this is meant to be, a small, but confident inner voice told her. You and Jude are right, but you and Jude and Rafe are just a little more right. You’re not the first people to fall in love with more than one person, you know. What’s rarer is being brave enough to make it work.

  The voice sounded a lot like her Grandma Josie.

  More likely, though, it was an inner voice, the part of Elissa that was more Clemens than Donovan, that had gone to Cornell and spent time outside the closed world of the traditionalist witch and learned that normies and other Differents managed their relationships in all kinds of ways.

  Even witches who weren’t from the big European clans had other ways of doing things, not that Donovans admitted it. The al-Arabi family patriarch was married to four witches and, considering the five of them were largely responsible for averting World War Three, it wasn’t weakening their magic.

  Her Donovan side was terrified.

  Her Clemens side thought it all made sense. Magically and emotionally, two people who loved each other were greater than the sum of their parts. If three people could love—if this was the beginning of love and not some pleasant anomaly born out of joy at escaping death—why wouldn’t they be stronger yet?

  She lay in the dark, listening to Jude breathe, listening to Rafe’s quiet pawfalls and smelling the warm scent of cat, feeling curiously secure despite the danger that surrounded them. She fell asleep to the sound of purring.

  They must have switched off their guard duty at several times during the night, but she never woke. Sun streaming through the dirty windows finally roused her to a white world, and she found herself curled in Jude’s arms again. He snored softly. Like a sleeping cat, he seemed bonelessly relaxed, yet his muscles twitched under his skin and she knew he’d spring awake at the slightest threatening sound. His color was off, but he looked far better than he had yesterday. The drugs may have messed with some of his abilities, but not with a dual’s innate fast healing.

  The fast healing, Elissa always thought, was proof of Trickster’s very special kind of love for duals. They needed to rebound quickly from injuries because they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time getting hurt, as often as not because the wordy and animal halves each believed the other was in charge of doing the thinking at any given moment. This struck her as a design flaw.

  But that was the only design flaw she could think of in Jude.

  She sang a silent, silly chorus of Jude, Jude, Jude in her head, celebrating that he was safe with her again.

  Okay, hiding in an abandoned house and trying to figure out how to get over the Canadian border when the border patrol was probably waiting to arrest them wasn’t safe, but it was as close as they were likely to get for a while.

  She snuggled closer, breathing in his scent. It was still off, with a sweet, sickly undertone, but much better than yesterday. He shared his warmth with her, but her other side was cold.

  Rafe was up. He was wordside again, naked and doing something by the wood stove. From her nest of blankets, Elissa had a great view of his firm ass and the muscled lines of his back. He was even considerately angled to show off the yummy man-dimple at the side of his hip. In a warmer room, she would have happily lain by one gorgeous man and watched the other, but after a few minutes, the lure of the wood stove proved stronger. Clutching her blanket, Elissa eased away from her husband and headed over to the stove.

  Blessed heat! She got as close as she dared. Rafe wrapped his arms around her. She wasn’t sure it was all right—there’d been no time to talk, no time to figure out boundaries when there wasn’t some kind of magical emergency going on—but with the blanket between them, she could pretend he wasn’t naked and enjoy his body heat.

  She saw what he’d been fussing with: a small, chipped red enamel pan full of slightly chunky water. Maybe they really had fucked her brains out last night, because she had to stare at it for a few seconds before it made sense to her.

  “You’re melting snow?” Once she said it, it was perfectly clear. The getaway bag lived in the car, but over the winter they hadn’t been able to keep jugs of water there and they hadn’t taken the time to grab any.

  He nodded. “Thought you might want tea. Or I could make nasty cowboy coffee, grounds and all. Otherwise breakfast’s whatever you have in that bag. I didn’t look much past the caffeine.”

  Despite the situation, Elissa smiled. Duals had strange eating habits in their wordside form—unsurprisingly, they loved meat, but they also developed cravings for the most unlikely forms of human junk food, and they loved their caffeine.

  “We could probably hit a drive-through safely enough. It’s all teenagers at fast-food places, and they don’t notice much.”

  “We’re not going anywhere for a while.”

  Rafe gestured toward the window next to the door she vaguely remembered stumbling through the night before.

  A bit of the Highlander’s green roof stuck up above a snow drift.

  Damn late-season blizzards were always the worst.

  “Or,” she said, starting to rummage in the getaway bag, “we could see what else is in here. I can’t even remember.”

  An odd assortment, as it turned out. Vienna sausages, which fell under the category of unlikely human food that duals—or specifically, Jude—craved. Instant oatmeal. Lots of dried fruit and a couple of apples. Large bags of homemade jerky, beef and venison alike, that Elissa and Jude had been making ever since it became apparent having to flee out the back door and into the night wasn’t just a paranoid fantasy. Chocolate. A summer sausage. Crackers and a can of spray cheese.

  Rafe picked up the spray cheese gingerly. “I always wondered about cheese food. What does cheese eat, anyway?”

  Jude stirred in his mound of blankets, reached out a hand blindly. “You remembered the cheese food? I love you, sweetie. Gimme.”

  Rafe pitched it more or less at Jude’s head—Jude caught it out of the air without even looking—then snatched a sleeve of crackers from the pile Elissa w
as making. “Hey, if it’s good enough for Jude… Wait a minute, is that jerky? Meat in compact, portable form?” Elissa held it overhead teasingly—not like he couldn’t have reached it, but he didn’t try too hard. When he did, she jumped, playing keep-away, then tossed it to Jude.

  Jude, his mouth full of cheese food and cracker, dove on it.

  Rafe grinned and dove on Jude.

  Elissa said to no one in particular, “What the hell?” and joined them in the mound of blankets.

  At first it was good, clean, giggly fun. The clean part didn’t last long.

  Long, slow kisses. Hot, melting caresses.

  Jude and Rafe each on one of Elissa’s nipples, suckling and licking and nipping until she begged for mercy.

  She didn’t get mercy. She got the two men kissing down her body, one on each side.

  They kissed their way down, kissed across her belly.

  Then, just as they reached the swell of her mound, they raised their heads and looked at each other.

  Elissa’s breath caught. She couldn’t get used to this, couldn’t get used to the idea this was happening between them, that it seemed to be all right, that the two men were as caught up in this erotic mystery as she was.

  Like a film clip that should be in slow motion and soft focus, Rafe and Jude stretched so their lips met over her body.

  At first it was a gentle brush of mouth on mouth, but only for a second. Then they leaned in, opened their lips, kissed like they were devouring each other with need.

  She’d been too foggy-headed to appreciate the view fully yesterday, and the interlude in the Otherworld had faded like an erotic dream that left her wet and aching, but without a clear memory of why.

  Now she remembered why.

  Elissa had always found two good-looking men kissing hot in a frustrating way. If they were kissing each other, she’d figured all she’d get out of it was a great view. But watching Jude and Rafe kiss so hungrily was different. More beautiful, for one thing, like two nature gods entangled with each other. It wasn’t every day you got to see two such gorgeous men in the same place, let alone see them naked and kissing.

  What made it even better was they kissed like they were starved for each other, but then turned to her with love and desire for her in their eyes.

  Jude’s green eyes softened. He blew her a kiss and soundlessly shaped the words “my heart”. Then, working together, they nudged her legs farther apart.

  Rafe slipped two fingers inside her and Jude began to lick her clit, his tongue almost instantly finding a rhythm that meshed with Rafe’s, that meshed with her own.

  Pleasure coiled from her pussy and clit, filling her body, filling her heart.

  She melted.

  It felt amazing to have two men working her over so skillfully with tongue and fingers, but the pleasure went deeper than the physical sensations, great as they were.

  Jude and Rafe. These two men. Her husband, whom she thought she’d lost, and the man who’d helped her bring him back.

  Her last semi-coherent thought was one of amazement that she fell over the edge so quickly.

  She screamed and sobbed. She begged for mercy, but she didn’t want it, and that was good because she didn’t get it, just got more licking, more fingering, more insanity-inducing orgasms.

  With her eyes screwed shut, Jude and Rafe blended together into a glorious whole. She couldn’t tell at first whose cock nudged at her pussy lips. Her body didn’t much care, but curiosity got the better of her and she opened her eyes.

  Rafe.

  Jude was poised behind him, the tub of petroleum jelly lip balm from Elissa’s purse in one hand and fierce lust in his eyes.

  Was he…

  Gods, yes. Jude was playing with Rafe’s ass. Elissa couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but Rafe looked like he was about to fly into outer space under his own power—and damn, that was a killer-sexy expression, with his eyes glazed and his lips poutily open and his face darkly flushed—while Jude wore an expression of rapt, joyous concentration, like he was doing something fascinating and delicate.

  Sticking his fingers into someone’s ass, for instance. Opening him, getting him ready for penetration.

  From her limited but memorable experience on the receiving end of anal, Elissa had to say it fit the fascinating and delicate bill.

  But it couldn’t be. Jude would never…

  Well, with her, sure he would. Not often—anal sex took her to a dark red place where pleasure and pain blurred, making her magic feel weird and jagged-edged for a day or two afterward—but they’d done it. And she was pretty sure he’d done it with previous lovers.

  But they’d been female.

  He couldn’t be planning to…

  He was.

  Rafe’s face contorted as Jude eased his fingers in. His eyes grew wide, and he sucked in his breath raggedly, a noise that could have been pleasure or pain or some dark and delicious amalgam of both. Elissa realized her own eyes were just as wide, her breathing just as ragged, her pussy and ass pulsing in empathic lust.

  For a second, they all froze, Jude waiting for a reaction, Rafe breathing around the new sensation and Elissa staring, unable to look away, her heart racing with shared desire and shared nerves.

  Then Rafe let out a surprisingly small whimper of, “More. Please, more. Want your cock.”

  Jude moved—he must have been inserting another finger, because Rafe grimaced and grinned at the same time. Jude said, “Powers, you’re so tight. Tight and hot and letting me in.”

  Rafe growled in response, a noise that couldn’t have come from a human throat. Then he cocked his hips, readying himself for Elissa, angling himself for Jude.

  Rafe thrust into her, a hard, delicious push that opened and filled her with one movement, spearing her.

  She cried out as sensation surged through her body, as if the penetration released thousands of tiny champagne bubbles into her bloodstream. Pure joy and pure heat.

  As Rafe entered her, Jude entered Rafe.

  She shouldn’t have been able to feel it, but she swore she did.

  The keening cry she heard might have been Rafe, but she was sure it was her last few synapses snapping.

  —

  Too tight. Too much.

  Too damn good.

  Jude and Rafe had talked about it in the night—talked about what Rafe wanted and what Jude finally admitted he wanted, too, reluctantly at first, then with growing excitement.

  Rafe had woken him for a shift at guarding the house. In cat form, Rafe had nudged him, the solid, furry head and carnivore breath comforting, familiar. Then Rafe changed, and he’d been naked in the dark with Jude, but what came out of it wasn’t so much a surge of lust as a surge of words. Or rather lust expressed as words and silentspeech, so they wouldn’t wake Elissa by falling on each other like they wanted to.

  Jude didn’t understand everything he felt for Rafe, why Rafe brought out desires no other man had. But when Rafe had told him what he’d been dreaming about ever since they’d met, he understood that part.

  He understood need. He understood hunger. While he didn’t know what it was like to crave a man inside him as Rafe did, he knew what it was to burn for something you thought you could never have and suddenly realize it was within your grasp.

  It had been like that when he’d first met Elissa, when he’d thought a Donovan would never want anything from him and he’d thought he might go mad from desire, and then she’d come to him.

  He’d just not realized, until Rafe opened for him, he’d felt that way about Rafe, too. He still didn’t understand why, but the whys didn’t seem to matter.

  He understood this gripping heat around his cock, this sense of urgent power and equally urgent need.

  Fucking, Jude understood. The lion got it, the wordy got it—there was absolutely no disagreement here. Got the way Rafe pushed back on his cock then pulled away to plunge into Elissa. Got the noises both the man and the woman made underneath him. Got the heated
pleasure rippling through his cock and the thrill of the forbidden, or at least the titillatingly out of the ordinary.

  The game itself wasn’t entirely new. Elissa liked ass-sex once in a blue moon, and he’d had other lovers who’d enjoyed it, back in his tomcat days.

  But it was different with Rafe. Partly because he was a bigger person, so Jude didn’t worry so much about hurting him. Partly because Rafe knew what he was doing, knew how he wanted it, felt free to snarl, “Yes, harder,” and to move to take in more of him. Probably it was something to do with having a prostate, but Rafe seemed more excited than Elissa or his other lovers had ever been, not just enjoying the I’m-doing-something-naughty head game, but going crazy because he had a cock inside his ass.

  Trickster’s balls, there was nothing quite like the feeling of a tight, hot asshole contracting around his cock. Not as sweet and wet and rippling as Elissa’s pussy, but different and just as delicious.

  He was fucking Rafe.

  Fucking a man who was fucking his wife, and apparently doing a great job of it. He knew those Elissa-noises, those breathy yelps, those wonderful cries.

  He knew what Rafe’s cock must be experiencing now, the fierce grip of her inner muscles as she came on him.

  He wasn’t so sure about what Rafe’s butt was experiencing, but Elissa’s slender finger felt pretty damn amazing when she slipped it inside him and a dick must be a thousand times more intense.

  Lucky Rafe.

  Lucky Elissa.

  And lucky, lucky, lucky him. Twenty-four hours ago, he wasn’t sure he was going to live out the day. Now he was as alive as he could be.

  Rafe came before he did, surging into Elissa, crying out so eerily it must have been his cougar vocalizing through the humanoid body. His ass tightened spasmodically on Jude’s cock.

  Jude bit his lip, trying to hold off long enough to savor an experience he and Rafe might never share again once they left this strange half-world where normal rules didn’t apply.

  But it felt too damn good.