by Lora Leigh
The senator held his hand out to Landra, though he made no comment either way to Sebastian’s claim.
“Davis, you should have told me what happened to Alyssa,” she whispered. “Especially if you knew Sebastian was my nephew.”
She went to him, taking his hand and allowing him to draw her to his chest. His hard, cold gaze remained on Sebastian, though.
“Summer finally got around to telling me a few things a few weeks ago,” he stated. “I’ve let it ride until I could meet them myself.” Anger flashed in his gaze. “Where’s your cousin, De Loren?”
Sebastian crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at Alyssa’s father silently. Shane’s location was no one’s business at the moment.
“Davis, they’re good boys,” Landra protested the air of tension in the room.
“They seduced an eighteen-year-old girl with no experience, and no concept of the pain they could end up causing her,” Hampstead retorted. “They were nearly twenty-five years old, Landra. Old enough to know what they were doing. And they had been doing it long enough to know what she would face.”
“You believe all we wanted was Alyssa in our bed for a few paltry months?” Sebastian could barely believe her father would accept such a simplistic view of the cousins’ relationship with her. “We met her here, Senator, at the Winter Ball Landra threw. We didn’t seduce her then, nor did we pursue her until she came to Spain. By the time she arrived we could think of nothing but her. Neither of us could. She belongs to us—”
“No, Sebastian, not anymore she doesn’t.” Hampstead shook his head wearily. “She might have, until two years ago. Whatever Stanhope did to her changed something inside her. When she woke, Alyssa wasn’t the same. There’s nothing inside her but anger now. Anger and a determination to never need either of you again.”
She might have wanted to be determined, but she still wanted them. With a fiery, feminine heat he’d carried in his dreams for eight years now, she still wanted them.
“We won’t accept that.” He wouldn’t accept it. Ever.
“You waited too long,” the senator stated with a brief shake of his head. “Eight years too long is my guess.”
“She’s still ours.” Her response to him in the gardens had proven that. If he hadn’t felt her, hadn’t lost himself in her for that brief period of time, then he might have believed too much time had passed, too much hurt stood between them. But he had felt her need for him, and he had lost himself in her. “And trust me, Senator, there’s not a chance in hell we’re going to let her go.”
15
Alyssa had known once she’d seen Sebastian’s reaction and realized the past wasn’t as she’d believed that there were going to be problems. Once, she had known them well enough that she had the ability to guess fairly accurately what they would do from one moment to the next in any given situation. And she’d known that she’d have to face Shane next. For that reason, she found herself on pins and needles the day after her father’s party, certain he would arrive at any given moment.
As the day progressed far too quietly instead, Alyssa told herself she wasn’t in the least disappointed that he didn’t show. She hoped that, unlike Sebastian, he was willing to accept the fact that too many years had passed and far too much pain filled the void and the years between them. Bridging that time and the memories that filled them would be impossible now.
As Sunday rolled into Monday and Monday slid silently into Tuesday, she assured herself the faint ache she felt in her chest wasn’t because he hadn’t shown. Yet Tuesday night she was still in her office, next to the renovated suite she’d been stuck in for months two years before, after Harvey’s attack.
Harvey had planned to kill her, she thought painfully, reaching to rub at the scar beneath the blouse she’d pulled from the band of her skirt hours ago. The resulting infection combined with blood loss, anemia, and her weakened system should have killed her.
Without thought her fingers returned to the three gems hanging on the gold chain around her neck. Rising from her desk and stepping to the opened door, she stared into the night beyond the sheltered patio, still worrying the two nearly flawless diamonds and accompanying sapphire.
Summer had never told her where she’d found the necklace. She had frowned, looked at it, and given her one of those wide-eyed little-girl looks and said, “Well, honey, I guess I found it wherever you lost it. I thought it was too pretty not to be worn, though.”
She’d never lost it. It had been stolen from her. She had thought Summer had found a way to resteal it and return it.
Leaning against the side of the open French doors, her head resting against the glass as the summer breeze played over her, she wondered what would have happened if Gregory hadn’t stolen eight years of their lives. Had he been behind the death of their son? Of the last link she’d had to the men she loved with everything inside her heart and soul?
Her baby would have lived. Dr. Brennan’s tests had revealed a drug in her system at the time known to result in miscarriages. Somehow, she’d been drugged, and there were so many of her father’s staff members and employees who worked in the mansion at any given time that there had been no way to determine whom to suspect or the reason behind taking her child from her.
Margot had been certain the order had originated from Shane and Sebastian. She’d been furious, so enraged by Alyssa’s loss that for a while Alyssa had feared what her mother would do. A lifetime of her mother’s distance had ended that night. In the years that passed Alyssa had gotten to know her in ways she’d never imagined possible.
That loss had stolen a part of Alyssa’s soul, though. Taken a part of her so vital, so intrinsic to who and what she was, that there had been no healing from the loss.
The child she had named Shane Sebastian Hampstead—not Stanhope, she would not have allowed their child to carry another man’s name—had been stolen from life with such monstrous cruelty that Alyssa still fought to fathom why, to make sense of the reason for it.
She’d never been able to suspect Shane and Sebastian as Margot had, though. And she’d tried to, many times. Now … what a mess she’d allowed herself to be drawn into once again. She’d let herself believe a whisper was a fantasy, a touch a dream, and Sebastian’s possession of her simply a manifestation of hunger. And she’d known better all along. Even as she let him bend her over that bench and surge into her, she’d known better.
Pressing softly against her abdomen, Alyssa reminded herself that she hadn’t been protected and Sebastian hadn’t worn a condom. She’d become pregnant that first week that the cousins had taken her, their cocks bare, spilling semen into her as they cried out her name, as lost in the pleasure as she had been.
“We don’t protect you well enough, sweets,” Shane had breathed out against her neck, his heartbeat racing beneath her cheek as he finished taking her at the kitchen counter, his cock still filling her, still throbbing after releasing inside her. “If you weren’t protected, you’d have already ended up pregnant.”
“And you and Sebastian would be trying to figure out how to hide from Daddy’s wrath.” She’d laughed, only half-joking.
“Only if you were hiding with us.” His voice was strained, his cock immediately iron hard again and moving inside her. “Only if you were hiding with us.”
She would have already been carrying their baby then, tiny, silently, secretly, forming inside her. Her body had defied the medication she’d been taking for birth control and, without any of their knowledge, had created a son.
“I think it’s my turn to have what was taken from us, now.”
Her eyes flared open. Straightening with a gasp, Alyssa stared into Shane’s deep blue eyes. Standing at the entrance created by the house and the evergreen border of narrow, interwoven pines that grew around the patio, he watched her with hooded, brooding eyes.
His statement had her shoulders straightening, her gaze narrowing on him before she turned and walked stiffly back into her office.
> “I don’t think that’s how it works.” Turning to confront him, she found herself confronting his wide chest instead.
“I think that’s exactly how it’s going to work.” His voice was so dark, so deep, that the danger inherent in it vibrated through her senses.
“Wrong.” Her body was screaming yes, though, and she had no idea how to shut it up. “You need to leave and come back at a more acceptable hour and with a more acceptable way of greeting me. We can talk then.”
Alyssa forced herself to meet his eyes; she found herself pressed between the edge of the desk and his advancing body. And her senses were reacting with such strength that she found herself cursing her own awakening sensuality. A sensuality she believed had died a slow, painful death after she’d left Spain.
“Do you really think that’s how it’s going to work?” he growled, hemming her in between the desk and his body. “After everything I’ve learned since Saturday night, do you really think that’s how this night is going to go?”
The cousins’ arrogance had definitely grown in the eight years that had passed.
“After everything you’ve learned,” she murmured, the bitterness seeping into her voice. “How like you and Sebastian to think of it in those terms. How about everything I learned since Saturday, Shane? What about learning that the men I loved beyond anything couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me how my entire world was being threatened?” Her voice rose, though she managed, just barely, to keep from screaming. To keep the throttled rage from spilling out and destroying both of them. “You let me think you no longer wanted me.” A trembling finger stabbed toward him. “You let me marry to ensure you knew I wouldn’t try to claim the child as yours. You let me lose my child alone, and you let me nearly die alone.” She was shaking now, just as she had while confronting Sebastian. “Neither of you could trust me enough to tell me why—”
“Because we didn’t know!” he snapped, moving closer as Alyssa retreated, desperate to keep the cousins from touching her. “We didn’t know about the test you left. We didn’t know about the baby, Alyssa. We did not know about the pictures and the threats sent to you. But just as you accuse us for not coming to you, neither did you come to us.”
“I was terrified—”
“And you think we weren’t?” His expression was like stone; his voice throbbed with anger, with remembered rage. “You were our life. You always have been.”
“You sent me away; I didn’t send you away.” The retort was thick with remembered pain. “No, Shane, you have no right to question why I didn’t come to you for anything. You sent me away believing I was a summer fuck and nothing else.”
“You knew better!” Now his voice did rise. Not enough to be heard far, but it rose.
“And according to Sebastian you knew when I lost my baby.” Fists clenched, she fought to hold on to what little control she had left. What little sanity she had salvaged from the past eight years. “You knew something horrible happened. And you stayed in your drunken stupors until you could bear what you sensed had happened to me. And where were you two years ago?” she sneered. “I nearly died twice and Sebastian said you heard my whisper to you that I was cold?” She had to laugh at that, but there was no amusement left in her. Only the bleak knowledge that they had ignored her every time she needed them. “I screamed for you and Sebastian as I felt our baby die. I screamed for you, Shane. I cried until there were no tears left inside me. And when I felt myself dying two years ago I reached out to you with every fragment left of my soul. Where the hell were you?”
“In this fucking room the night your mother was buried,” he snarled, the fury lining his face now a terrible sight, the words silencing her as nothing else could have. “And we’ve been watching out for you ever since.”
“Like hell—”
“How do you think you came by that necklace that was stolen from you the morning my grandfather had two employees slip in and steal our belongings?” he snapped. “We came to you, Alyssa, and that damned viper Summer Bartlett demanded we give you two years to recover before claiming what was ours. Two more fucking years on top of the hell we had already lived through, and we gave it to you rather than see you suffer more.”
Alyssa felt herself stumble.
Sometime after the infection that raged through her finally responded to the antibiotics she was given, Summer had asked her if she remembered anything that had happened before she woke.
Alyssa hadn’t remembered anything but the darkness and scattered remnants of what she’d believed were dreams.
“We replaced the promises we made to you, Alyssa.” His voice was lower now, the bitterness in it thicker, though. “We made certain Gregory couldn’t hurt you and we came back to you—”
“And it was too late then, just as it’s too late now.” Her hands lifted helplessly as she stared back at him.
Shane was so still, so silent, his blue eyes like lasers boring into her as the tension and air of dominance strengthened around him.
“Too late?” he repeated softly. “Do you really think either of us will accept that now?”
“I don’t care if you accept it, Shane.” Shaking her head, she realized that allowing him to confront her alone might not have been the wisest course of action.
He wouldn’t hurt her, but her ability to deny herself once the cousins touched her was already proven to be completely ineffective.
“I really don’t care if you accept it; that’s how it will be.” Unfortunately, the conviction she felt wasn’t nearly as deep as she hoped.
The hard, less than amused features shifted, became more sensual and far too hungry.
“Keep telling yourself that. See if you can convince yourself of it while I’m working my cock inside you,” he suggested, the low rasp of his voice sending a shiver of remembered pleasure up her spine.
She couldn’t do this again. She couldn’t risk what she could feel it doing to her, weakening the shields she’d placed around her emotions, around her ability to be hurt.
“And you really think I’m just going to give in to that fantasy as easily as Sebastian managed to fool me with it?” Anger rose inside her again, swift and hot.
“At least you admit to wanting us,” he pointed her error out, his smile hard, his eyes filled with lust and rage. “Eight years of that hunger, Alyssa. Six of those years knowing you had married another man, slept with another man. And lost our child while married to another goddamned man!”
The fury slipped free. Shane had never had the same control of his anger or the ability to channel as Sebastian did. It rolled through him now, though the hands that gripped her hips, tilted them, and lifted her until her rear rested on the desk weren’t hurtful.
Sexual dominance and determined lust did fill them, though. That leashed, forceful hunger had always made denying him impossible. Not that she’d been able to deny Sebastian’s charm, either.
“This isn’t the time for this—”
“There’s no better time for it,” Shane informed her, the guttural sound of his voice slicing through her anger, eight years of pain and need pushed aside as she felt her body refusing to obey the demand that she tear herself from him. That she put enough distance between them to be able to think.
“Shane, this isn’t a good idea,” she tried to object again.
“Do you know, Alyssa, of every woman I’ve been with, there has been none that I’ve hungered to fuck as I’ve hungered to fuck you. None,” he snarled. “That gave me such pleasure as I received while watching your tight little ass open for me, watching it stretch and burn my cock as you whimpered, gasped, and begged for that mix of pleasure and pain that only comes while your lover’s taking you so intimately.”
Taking her so intimately. And that was what it had been. An intimacy, a trust she’d never known with anyone else but him and Sebastian.
Alyssa fought to breathe as her body clenched, her sex heating and instantly so wet that her response began dampening her panties.
> He and Sebastian both had always seemed surprised at how eagerly she came to them, no matter how they took her. That particular act had been like throwing gas on a conflagration.
“You have no right to come here like this—”
“The hell I don’t.” Gripping her jaw, Shane forced her to stare up at him, forced her to see the emotions burning in his gaze.
Emotions she had fought herself for so long were now reflected in the haggard features staring down at her.
“I knew the moment Sebastian touched you,” he whispered, the rage in his eyes softening, sensuality and lust flickering in the brilliancy of the color now. “I felt your pleasure, Alyssa. Just as we would each sense it each time the other took you and we weren’t there, in Spain. I sensed the ever-present pain locked in my soul ease, felt you aching, desperate, then felt all that pleasure whipping inside you.”
“Shane!” The buttons of her blouse scattered over the floor as he tore the edges apart to reveal the minuscule lace bra she wore, the cups barely covering her engorged nipples.
“Eight years we ached for you.” His voice dropped, became thick and rough. “Eight years, Alyssa, and all I could dream of was taking you. Tasting your kiss. Sucking those pretty, sweet nipples until you came.…” He cupped one swollen mound gently. “Do you remember the afternoon we took you to the private beach in Sebastian’s boat?”
She did. Oh God.… “I won’t—” She didn’t want to remember, but she remembered.
“I sucked those pretty, tight nipples while Sebastian pulled you down where he sat in the cockpit seat?”
Her breath caught, her vagina clenching, knowing Shane caught the response as he watched her carefully. “You were begging him to fuck you hard, to make you burn,” he whispered as he leaned closer, easing her to her back on the top of the desk. “Then you begged me.”
“Stop. Stop—” She tried to cover his lips, to make the words stop.
“Sebastian was groaning your name as he came inside you,” Shane reminded her. “But we were going to take you together, remember? Before you rode his cock into orgasm, he had your sweet rear ready to be fucked. And you were already primed for it.”