Damaon thought over the immortals who had attended the big party, though it was a pretty long time ago so he couldn’t be sure exactly who had been there. He nodded when he recalled one or two of his contemporaries who could’ve done the deed. The 62
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Ruby Immortal, for one, who was just a hundred years into the job. “Maybe.” He wasn’t inviting that practical joker again, should there be an occasion.
“There you have it, but who animated them in the first place?” The expression on her face turned reflective. “Whoever he is—or was—must possess powerful magic to transform minerals into animated figures.” Damaon could see from her expressive face that an idea struck her. “I don’t suppose they’re battery-operated?”
Damaon shook his head with regret. If the immortals ever had the magic to bring minerals in human form to life, they didn’t possess it now. Needing to take away her disappointment at the unsolved mystery, he said, “I’m going to check the diamond fields later. Would you like to come?”
Her eyes brightened with green light. “Yes.”
* * * * *
Raisa stole a last awed look at the diamond-glass panels of the gigantic palace. Even from a distance, the sharp delineating lines of the entire structure shone with bright clarity. She couldn’t believe she’d been staying there for the past five days. Turning around, she stared in wonder at the blinding pristine whiteness everywhere. Everything made her eyes boggled in stunned disbelief. Before her, a huge field was packed with diamonds of all sizes and in different stages of growth, separated by white picket fences. Damaon had taken her around the field where she’d seen diamonds of all sizes. By far the cutest were the baby diamonds, which were as small as the nail of her fifth finger and littered sturdy shrubs like glistening decorations on little Christmas trees. Workers gave the illusion of busyness as they went about their various tasks—sowing, planting, watering, weeding and harvesting. Unlike Earth, diamond planting and harvesting didn’t seem to be restricted to any particular season. Weeding? Raisa squinted to make sure, but she could only see the workers rooting about in the soil, then throwing something into the sack they carried with them. The soil wasn’t the rich, dark brown color that she was familiar with, but was instead as white 63
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and fine as the sand that she’d seen on some of the luxurious beaches on Earth. Fascinating. To her right, workers fell in line as they walked toward the enormous building at the front center of the field, both hands carrying a heavy basket filled to the brim with diamonds.
Above them, the great sun shone overhead. Damaon explained that each gem demesne had its own unique sun to further the growth of the gems. Apparently, each sun had different qualities necessary for gem growth. If the sun in the diamond demesne had shined in the emerald demesne for example, the baby emeralds, instead of growing, would die from its harsh light.
“It’s…fantastic,” Raisa said, her voice full of astonishment as she tried to take everything in. “I felt like I had fallen into a diamond mine.”
“There’s no comparison,” Damaon said in response to her comment. “This is much more pleasant than a diamond mine.”
She gazed at him, sure that a question was in her eyes. How would he know? Yet he was right that mines were mostly dark and creepy. “I was talking about the abundance of the gems.”
“Even so.” He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “In the mines, you could dig and dig with nothing to show for your efforts.”
“What do you mean?” Maybe he had read about a real-life account of a miner in one of those books that he confessed to devouring.
“I worked in a diamond mine. Before.”
“Before?” she echoed. Startled, she glanced at him beneath the wide brim of the ivory hat they had conjured for her. Rather, at his profile, for he was busy looking at something in the distance. Somehow, she hadn’t thought that he had another life before being an immortal. She’d thought he was the progeny of the previous Diamond Immortal and had stayed in the palace all his life. With his revelation, then maybe Adamas was. “You were hu—mortal?” He was still human, but immortal. 64
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“Hmmm?” He asked in an absentminded way, then turned to her with raised brows. “Sorry?”
She repeated her question.
His face changed, turning stern and forbidding. “Yes. About five hundred and fifty years ago, I had a normal human being’s life span like yours.”
“And you hated the mines.” His words coupled with the hard, bitter tone in his voice led her to this conclusion.
He remained silent for a while, as though battling some demons. “Most of the time,” he finally said. “I’d seen my father and brother die in the mines and I swore I wouldn’t be one of them. Yet, after the accident that caused their deaths, I had no choice but to work in the same mines to provide for my mother and younger siblings. We had no other livelihood in the community, unless I moved away. But then, there was Adamas. He was a cripple, did you know that?”
So Adamas was once mortal too. How the hell did they become the Diamond Immortals then? “No, he never mentioned. But he walked so normally that I wouldn’t have suspected—”
“It was a birth defect, but he was fully healed when he became immortal. Since then, I didn’t want him to do anything taxing that might injure his health.”
“So you confined him to the palace.”
After Damaon had invited her to visit the fields, Adamas said that if Damaon was going to work, he was too. The last image she’d seen of Adamas when she and Damaon left the palace was of him loping off toward one of the rooms they maintained as an office. What work he had to do, she didn’t know. Paperwork?
A rueful smile touched Damaon’s lips. “I wouldn’t put it that way. Much as I love working in the fields, Adamas hated it, so our arrangement suited us just fine. I oversee the actual growing and harvesting of the diamonds, while Adamas puts his brain and the equipment to work on researching the perfect spots where we could plant the harvested diamonds and—”
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“Wait a minute. What do you mean ‘plant the harvested diamonds’?”
His brows shot up in surprise. “Where do you think the harvested diamonds go?”
“I don’t know.” Raisa shrugged. “I never really thought about it. I thought you sell it for money to buy things.”
“So immortals grow and harvest diamonds and emeralds and sapphires to satisfy our own material wants?” Damaon laughed, amused. “Our world is not so small, Raisa. We serve Earth, Mars, Ragnon, Elantra, Shenae…” He continued to rattle more unfamiliar names that she finally made him stop.
“So forgive me, but what exactly do you do, after you have the diamonds in your hands?” Her apology was made in such a starchy voice that he grinned.
“We place or ‘plant’ the harvested diamonds leagues beneath the land on each planet in the universe, so that you would have the joy of discovering and excavating a mine full of gems.”
“Huh.” Her brain shrieked as it tried to accept this new concept that overturned years of scientific conditioning. “You mean the diamonds aren’t made by the friction of Earth’s layers of soil or whatnot?”
He took great delight in shaking his head.
“Darn. The sun must be affecting my ability to think.” The statement was partly true, as she was perspiring so much under its heat she was distracted by the damp sweat covering her entire body. Not even on Earth had she sweated this much. The ivory hat wasn’t doing much good. If anything, this gave further evidence that she wasn’t even anywhere near Earth.
Damaon laughed out loud, a hearty shout that she heard for the first time since she arrived. The sound wrapped itself around her heart, making her feel warm in a nonphysical way. “We’ve finished the tour, so why don’t you go ahead into the palace?
I’ll be along shortly, as I still need to check some things that I’ve neglected in the past few days.�
�
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The reason for the neglect burned in his eyes and made her pussy clench in hunger. She turned to go, but was hauled back into his arms for a long kiss. His body was still full of hard angles, but now they cradled her instead of biting deep into her flesh. She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him with all the passion and desire in her. When he lifted his head, she invited in a husky voice, “Come to bed as soon as you can.”
His silver eyes glowed in the afternoon sun. “I will.”
“You’re a good man, Damaon.” She caressed his cheek. Damaon’s revelation of their duties as caretakers of the diamond jogged her brain regarding something that Adamas had once said, causing her to see things from a different angle. “Not that I agree with what you have done, but I’m glad I made the decision to help you.”
His eyes widened with confusion and he seemed incapable of moving or saying anything, so she stood on tiptoes and kissed him once more before leaving for the palace.
“Wait, you can’t leave me like this,” Damaon finally called after her. “What do you mean?”
She stopped walking and turned around, her gaze zeroing in on his perplexed expression. “I’ve wondered why is it that you are in more danger of the heart hardening disease than Adamas, why you only have about one year left while he has several years more. Given that both of you work with the diamonds, you should deteriorate at the same rate, but you didn’t.” Raisa smiled at him across the distance, but his figure was a bit blurry due to the moisture in her eyes. Initially, she had thought him not worth saving, but her opinion had changed. Now, after her blinding realization, all she wanted to do was to wrap her arms around him and keep him safe.
“You may like working in the fields, Damaon, but you also know very well that more contact with the diamonds hastened the pace of heart hardening and eventual death. Adamas would’ve benefitted from working the land sometimes—he’s so pale he looks like a ghost—but you never allowed him, did you?” She shook her head. 67
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“He hated any sort of physical activity—”
“You convinced him that only you have the magic touch because you know diamonds, that if he touched them they’d probably die, so he should confine himself to the palace and make strategic plans, while you sweated under the sun and exposed yourself for the two of you. You sought to protect him at the cost of your own life. Why?” She shrugged. “I’m really not very conversant with how the calling star worked, so I can only guess that maybe you were afraid the star wouldn’t have grown big enough when it needed to be sent or it was late in finding the woman to help you or something. But whatever your reason is, you wanted to give Adamas a bigger buffer between life and death. A noble purpose, yes, but would he appreciate it when he realizes you had effectively taken the choice away from him?”
His big form hurried toward her and he caught her by the arms. “He knew. He knew, damn it ,” Damaon said harshly, his fingers biting into her flesh. “He knew what the diamonds can do. I never deceived him. He could’ve insisted on coming to the fields with me, but he never did.”
She wondered whom Damaon was convincing—her or himself. “Adamas knew,”
she agreed, absorbing the pain of his hold and knowing it was nothing to the pain Damaon must be feeling, “but he’s an honorable man. Knowing he could’ve bungled the growth of the diamonds, do you think he would’ve insisted?” By the flush on Damaon’s face, it appeared he had already thought of this point and used it to his advantage. “That first day, when you were sleeping, we talked. He was anguished that he couldn’t help you, that only you ‘have the touch’. At that time, I thought he was talking about your ability to convince me to have sex with you. Apparently, you’re the charming one and normally you would’ve been able to seduce me out of my skirt. But knowing what I now know, I think my earlier assessment was wrong and my new conclusion is the right one.”
She looked up at him, compassion and understanding pouring out of her. “Adamas thought only you can handle the diamonds and the knowledge that there was nothing 68
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he can do, that every day he was sending you to your death, eats into his soul and sends him into tormented anguish. Is that better than if he’d worked beside you all this time?”
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Chapter Five
Adamas smoothed his hand over the gentle rise of her butt. Silky. Soft. The texture a delight to his sense of touch. He couldn’t resist giving her a slight pat. She mumbled in her sleep.
He’d never been partial to Damaon’s backside, but the sight of hers was enough to make his breath catch in his throat. His cock stirred to awareness and he imagined himself taking her from behind while he stared down the long, graceful line of her spine, feel the urgent grinding of her hips against his—
A sound made him glance to the side, to see Damaon lying on his side watching them, the mercurial silver of his eyes sleepy and unguarded. He was stroking Raisa’s arm, which lay near him. After twelve days of Raisa’s healing presence, Damaon had lost his hard edges, almost reverting back to the Damaon he once knew before they had become immortals. Something that the other women hadn’t been able to do. Not only that, but Damaon had become…more restful. He was content to spend time with them, even if that time was mostly spent in bed. The eagerness to get back to the fields had been muted. Adamas knew love of the land still burned in his mate, but it didn’t claim him anymore. Perhaps standing so near death this time had awakened Damaon to the more important things in life.
He hadn’t known he was asking permission until he saw Damaon nod. Just that one slight forward dip of his mate’s head and his cock sprang to aching rigidness, creaming in his excitement.
Hell’s gems.
He didn’t need much convincing to give in to the rising desire within him. He kissed Raisa’s unblemished back. Soft, so soft and smooth. He licked the skin at her nape, teasing and arousing her until she moaned and arched her body. He worshipped 70
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every inch of her, her sighs and whimpers stealing across his body like a caress. His cock tightened to the point of pain. He squeezed her fleshy buttocks and opened her up for his marauding tongue. He breathed in her womanly scent and tasted the heat of her channel, savored the salty sweetness of her cream and reveled in the orgasmic cries that were wrung from her throat.
He wanted more.
He positioned her, placing a pillow under her so that her buttocks rose high in the air. A deep, swirling arousal clenched him tight in its grip at the sight of the long, clean lines of her back and the enticing swell of her ass. He drew in a shallow breath as he opened her wide and eased himself into her heated wetness. She lured him further in, tilting her ass to enable him to bury his entire length in her pussy. Ah! The incredible sensation of being surrounded by her. Though his body urged him to move, he forced himself to remain still and savor the feeling of being held in her femininity. Inside Raisa, the thought ricocheted within his mind, reflecting off prisms and making him see a wondrous kaleidoscope of multicolored splendor. Raisa.
He released his breath in a quiet sigh of satisfaction. She moaned and her hips thrust up against his, commanding him to move. He bent over her and rained gentle, passionate kisses at the base of her nape. His arms snaked around her body and he filled his hands with her breasts, firm, heavy globes of flesh that he squeezed and teased until her nipples burgeoned into tiny, hard buds. He wished he could see them. Still, the thought of their pale loveliness incited him to withdraw and plunge back in.
“Yes…more…” she pleaded.
Securing his hold on her, he pistoned in and out of her and his drives gained speed as the seconds ticked by. His hands shifted to her waist, tension gripping him fast and low. Her inner muscles pulsed around him, closing in, her clasp like that of a man hanging on for dear life.
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Her low s
hout of pleasure triggered his orgasm. He let go of control to explode in her soft warmth even as he absorbed the shudders of her uninhibited delight. Her grip on him was strong and sure, so tight he could die.
In the clutches of extreme pleasure, he was aware of a missing ingredient. Damaon.
Adamas turned and hauled him closer, then kissed him with all the unbridled passion within him. Damaon’s response inflamed him and the eroticism of exchanging a torrid kiss with his mate while buried inside Raisa roused his semihard cock. He surged within her again and again until he’d shot all of his load into her in tandem to her shattered cry.
Never, ever had he felt so satisfied, so utterly boneless. His hand fell away from Damaon. Adamas hid his face in Raisa’s nape, his weight forcing them deeper into the bed. He kissed her damp skin, sucking a bit of flesh into his mouth. She trembled and her inner muscles rippled with bliss.
He allowed himself a few seconds to taste her and to regain his strength, then lifted his weight from hers and withdrew with reluctance.
“Hmmm…That was lovely.” She yawned and stretched with a sensual languorousness that affected him more than he liked, seeing as he’d just had his release. Two of them, in fact. “Sleepy…”
“You have to get up soon,” he said, amused.
“Why?” The word was mumbled into her pillow.
“We have a party scheduled tonight.”
She moaned. “Can’t we skip it?”
Damaon laughed, something he wouldn’t have done twelve days before. He was rubbing his erect shaft with languid strokes, but he seemed in no hurry to seek release.
“I’m flattered that you’d rather spend the time in bed with us, but I’m afraid we can’t, shikima. The party is coming to us.”
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Raisa burrowed deeper into the bed, if that were possible. Adamas sensed there was something more to her reluctance than insatiable lust for their bodies. No matter how good he and Damaon were, after twelve straight days of nonstop sex—except for necessary functions and that one trip to the fields—she had to be eager to see other faces. “What’s the matter, Raisa?”
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