“Mm,” James hummed, clamping his hands on Ty’s buttocks to get more pressure.
As good as this felt and as wildly as they were rubbing, what he really wanted, more than anything in the world, was for Ty to fuck him. His hole felt like it was burning, his ass cheeks clenching as if that could give his rear passage the friction it was longing for.
“God,” he gasped, his head falling back at the strength of his desire. Right that moment, he’d have paid Ty quite a sum to give him a good reaming.
Despite how much he wanted it, he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask.
“Turn around,” Ty said, his sure hands already moving him. “Brace your palms on the tile. If I don’t fuck you this second, I’m going to go crazy.” It was exactly what he wanted, but he couldn’t accept.
“I should -” James groaned as Ty sucked what felt like a monster hickey on the back of his neck. The sting of that cranked him even higher. “I should really ...
clear this with Olivia.”
Ty’s hand slid down James’s heaving chest to grip the base of his throbbing cock.
“Really?” he said, his upward tug so fierce James’s kinks had to race to catch up to how good it felt. “You think you should
clear
this with your wife?” He sounded angry, and that was exciting too.
Before James could find his voice, Ty’s tip probed between his cheeks. It was broad and hot, and as it searched for a home, sparks shot straight up James’s spinal cord. A gush of what had to be pre-ejaculate joined the last of the soap on Ty’s dove-soft crest. James didn’t have the moral fiber to resist the allure of that.
The need inside him was too brutal.
“
Ty
,” he said, the man’s name tearing from him. “God. Yes. Shove your dick into me.”
Ty shoved, and grunted, and the head of his prick squeezed in. This turned out to be the key to opening James’s personal anteroom in heaven. Ty’s cock was better than a set of fingers. It filled James like he imagined men filled women, stretching and massaging nerves that seemed like they were only then being born.
James arched his hips to let him deeper.
“More,” he moaned, not caring how it sounded.
Ty wrapped one arm across James’s chest and plunged.
James nearly came from that single penetration.
“Shit,” Ty breathed, clearly on the edge himself. His prick was pulsing hard inside James’s ass, suddenly feeling twice as big as before. He dragged it back within him. “Try to hold on for me. I want this to last a bit.” James tried so hard his brain hurt. Ty kept his pace on the slow side, but each thrust felt so good, so thick and alive and hot sliding past those awakening nerves that his slowness didn’t help James much. Ty wouldn’t let go of James’s penis either, though he was more feeling him up and down than stroking. When even that began to seem like too much stimulation, James tried to push him away. Ty wasn’t having it.
“I need you in my hand,” he said, his whisper impossibly intimate. “I want to feel what I do to you.”
With talk like that, it was no wonder James was soon groaning with desire.
This, it turned out, was what Ty had been waiting for.
“I like holding off,” he confided burningly beside James’s ear. “I like it when I need to come so badly my balls feel like knots of pain.” James’s erotic switches were too damn similar. His hands fisted on the shower’s marble cladding, his hips pushed toward Ty as far as they would go. His legs trembled almost too badly to hold him up.
“You’re killing me,” he panted, which made Ty’s next thrust sling in harder.
“Okay,” Ty said, his own breath ragged, his powerful hips drawing back for another drive. “Why don’t we die together?”
When Ty started hammering into him triple time, the fucking felt so insanely wonderful, James thought he honestly might expire.
* * *
Anso had his new favorite. Why shouldn’t Ty as well?
Letting his inner Viking loose felt like flying, as if this man’s ass, and maybe this man’s nature had been created just for him. Ty loved sex, but Anso was the only partner who’d ever felt this in synch with him. Even better, James wanted him exactly as he was. Ty didn’t have to hide a thing.
Ty’s climax shoved against the dam that held it. He was going to obliterate it, going to crash through like a missile. James strong back arched, his hand fumbling for Ty’s hip as he improved his angle for entry a fraction more.
That little movement spelled the finish to Ty’s control.
He came even harder than the night before. He gulped for air as the orgasm broke, clutching James to his front while he drove as deep as possible into him.
His own heat rushed out of him.
Ty would never tell, but James mewled like a cat when he went over.
“Oh God,” the man said, the last of his climax dripping down Ty’s hand. “Are you sure I’m still alive?”
Ty laughed, pulled free of him with a wince, and let him turn around. They’d moved farther from the spray than they’d started, to the edge of its clouds of steam. As James blinked his dazed eyes open, Ty got one of the bigger shocks of his life.
James’s eyes were no longer hazel. From swollen pupil to clear bright white, they were the drowning blue of the best sapphires.
Vitul blue.
Anso’s blue.
The sense of betrayal that squeezed Ty’s throat was worse than any he could recall. He hadn’t claimed James; Anso’s majestic genes had already marked the man.
“What?” James said, his hand flattening gently over Ty’s breastbone. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
There was no point in not telling him.
“Come,” he said, leading him to the one of the bathroom’s three marble sinks.
There, he cleared a circle on the steamy glass and waved for James to see for himself.
“Holy crap,” James said once he’d leaned close enough. “What the hell happened to my eyes?”
“This is the mark of mates. Apparently your genetic makeup thinks it belongs to Anso too.”
“Too?” James turned to him uneasily.
“Olivia’s eyes are certain to look the same this morning.”
“Oh my God,” James said. “How will we -” He stopped talking with a strange expression on his face. He clamped his jaw, a muscle ticking hard in it. “I need to see my wife.”
“I’m doing nothing to stop you,” Ty pointed out.
“Did you know this would happen?”
“To your wife, yes. Your transformation has caught me by surprise.” James’s newly blue gaze held his, seeming to search for some answer. Ty would have paid good money to know what he was looking for.
He said what he did next because it was fair. “Anso hasn’t done this to hurt you or her. The process is an involuntary one.”
“You said it’s genetic.”
“With some magic thrown in.”
James’s mouth twisted as he turned away. Ty noticed he was no longer denying magic existed. “All right,” he said. “We’ll find some way to handle this.”
* * *
Her body had fully accepted their mating.
“What?” she asked, her sleepily smiling face an inch from his on their shared pillow. They had the bed to themselves, which was a miracle in itself. In that moment, they could have been any two new lovers.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, brushing the tip of her nose with his.
She bit her lower lip and grinned.
Enjoying that, he slid his hand down her side to the dip of her waist. She was his now. No one could deny it. No one could take her away. “How do you feel this morning?”
She thought about that with her nose wrinkling adorably. “Very good,” she decided. She stretched and wriggled, which had a predictable effect on his lower parts. “I must have slept well. I feel like someone peeled ten years off me.” Actually, it was more, but he felt no need to enlighten her right away. “I told you Oceana would be good for you.”
“You did.” Her deep blue eyes had gone serious, simply staring into his. The back of her hand came to rest lightly on his bare chest. “Why do you move me?
Why do I feel like I could happily gaze into your eyes all day?”
“Because I’m your mate. Because I love you.”
The words came naturally to him. She didn’t protest, but her eyes turned worried before the fans of her lashes dropped. She was biting her lower lip in a different way from before.
“It’s all right,” he said, chafing her shoulder through the robe. “I hear these things take time.”
“Is there coffee?” she asked shyly.
“There can be. I’ll tell Harrison to call for breakfast.” She nodded and rolled out of the bed. His body seemed tied to hers by a string. He followed her to one of the porthole windows where artificial daylight poured in.
“Those sunbeams look real,” she said, craning her head to see upward. “How far above us is the surface?”
“Many leagues.” This line of inquiry made him uneasy. “Olivia, it isn’t out of the question for you to visit the upper world. It simply isn’t advisable right now.” She turned to look at him, and his head reared back in surprise.
“What is it?” she asked, startled by his reaction. “Do I have something on my face?”
Her pupils had shrunk dramatically in reaction to the bright light, revealing a second color on the inner ring of her irises. The narrow striated circle was bright yellow.
The same yellow as his best friend Tykon Otari’s eyes.
For two long seconds, Anso was incapable of any response but shock. Then resentment came. And fear - because how could she belong to him when another male had marked her? Finally, and most unexpectedly, a glimmer of the rightness he’d felt last night returned. He wasn’t sure the feeling would last, but he clung to it.
He pulled Olivia’s smaller hand into his and rubbed it. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”
A full length mirror hung beside his bedroom door. Olivia grabbed a robe on the way - his robe, as it happened. The sleeves dangled quite a ways past her hands. This inconvenience was forgotten when she got a look at herself.
Her gasps of revelation at her changed reflection were what he’d have predicted. She was disbelieving, and suspicious, and then simply confused. She peered at her face from one angle and then another.
“My crow’s feet!” she accused. “What did you do with them?”
“Your genes are different now, sweetheart. Their clock got turned back and slowed down. You’ll age as Ty and I do. Chances are you’ll be healthy right to the end of your life.”
“I can’t do that,” she said, surprising him. She turned from the mirror, wringing her hands in plea. “I have to be a normal person. I have to grow old with James.”
Anso truly didn’t know what to say to that. Most females seemed to prefer staying youthful, or why did humans buy all that wrinkle cream? Now that the issue was on the table, he realized of course she’d want to age at the same rate as her husband. Anso was being self-centered to think he’d come first with her.
He was spared from stammering more than a moment by Ty and James’s emergence from the bathroom. Her husband had his own news to share, which led to another round of gasps and exclamations. The dilemma Anso had just discovered existed seemed not to after all. James’s eyes weren’t the only part of him that was different. He looked younger, just as Olivia did, though thankfully he hadn’t lost the friendly crinkling around his eyes. At Anso’s gentle request, he submitted to having his irises exposed to the porthole’s light. When his pupils shrank, the same yellow ring that had appeared in Olivia’s eyes showed in his.
Ty’s mouth went slack with amazement. Anso was childishly glad for the company.
“I don’t understand this,” Ty said, his face fighting not to show his strong inner emotion. “I’ve never heard of two people marking the same person, much less doing it twice.” Ty looked at Olivia and blinked rapidly, most astonished at having affected her. “I don’t ... understand what to make of this.”
“I expect it means there’s a bond between all of us. Maybe -” Anso rubbed his jaw and spoke carefully. “Maybe the four of us are meant to be together.” James was flushed - and recently ravished if Anso’s heightened senses were to be believed. No matter what had transpired between him and Ty in the shower, he held Olivia’s hand as if it were his lifeline. “How do we know you two didn’t manipulate this change in us? You’re asking us to take your word that this mystical mumbo jumbo means what you say it does.” Olivia squeezed his tense fingers. “James, you usually know when people are lying. Does it feel like Ty and Anso are conning us?” He turned to her, his expression helpless. Anso could tell he wanted to deny it all. Olivia lifted her free hand to stroke his cheek. “I know, honey,” she said. “I know this is difficult.”
James bent and embraced her. He whispered something in her ear as she hugged him back, maybe about his recent activities in the shower. She patted him.
“We’ll figure it out,” she murmured.
When James straightened, they both seemed steadier. James squared his shoulders, which might have been a teensy bit broader. He looked ruggeder than before - and handsomer, which should have troubled Anso more than it did.
Seeing his own blue eyes in Olivia’s husband’s face, feeling the primitive tug on the parts of him that were wired to respond to that, should have set warning bells clanging. Never mind his theory about the four of them bonding. It
couldn’t
be a good idea to fall for both members of this couple.
Risking one heartbreak was quite enough, thank you.
“Olivia looks like your mate now,” James said.
“Yes,” Anso agreed cautiously.
“I know a few things about PR. If you and Olivia were seen in public, and her eyes could be caught on camera, you might counteract the lies your cousin is planning to spread.”
In spite of everything, James’s devious turn of mind made him smile. “We might,” he said. “Perhaps we could discuss it over coffee.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JAMES
loved solving other people’s image problems, especially unearned ones. Kidnapping aside, James’s assessment of Anso’s dedication to his subjects ran in line with Olivia’s. The king’s sense of responsibility seemed deep enough to call old-fashioned.