Shared Between Them (17 page)

It was too quiet for the aftermath of an attack on the king. The halls were empty, even the stables were empty of attendants. “Where is everyone?” he demanded.

“Invisible,” Kyra answered in a hiss, as if his question was stupid.

“You can see them?” Draevan asked hopefully.

“No,” she replied. “But they breathe like snoring elephants.”

Draevan frowned, not able to hear anything.

“Keep going,” Taric suggested, helping Draevan saddle the horses and hook the packed-up satchels and supplies to the back.

Kyra had her own horse, but Draevan hesitated to put her upon the saddle. Instead, he picked her up by her underarms and set her on Taric’s then quelled her opening lips with a stern look.

She didn’t look like a happy horse-rider, and she looked uncomfortable in the saddle, like a child might. But she was a good girl; she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t even grump or grumble at them. He tied her horse up to the back of his saddle to direct it with no rider.

They wasted no time with words. Taric and Draevan gave each other a readying glance then climbed upon their horses and took off into the night.

Swii! Swii!

“Fuck!” he brought up his shield, knowing the sound of an arrow whizzing by his ear when he heard it. “Cowards!”

Taric kicked the horse into a fast gallop, “Get into the woods, hyah!”

“Ah, shit,” Kyra was saying, then tried to direct their horses through the thick foliage. “Left! Right! Taric, right!
Right
!”

Taric groaned and obeyed. Since they survived, Draevan followed suit. When he turned his head, he turned his head to the left-path, the one not taken, where an arrow hit the ground and immediately sank.

Draevan gulped.
Quicksand
.

It was suddenly making sense why there were given such specific directions to get out and into the kingdom when they wanted to go hunt for Kyra… The castle wasn’t just hidden—it was sitting in the middle of a giant death-trap!

He stayed closer to Taric’s horse. “Just do what she says, Cousin!” he shouted. “She’ll keep us alive.”

“Well, somebody’s got to!” he heard her cry ahead of him.

Draevan frowned at first, then smirked as they galloped along, taking directions until they were so deep in the woods he doubted even an elf could find him… He wouldn’t know the way back himself. The immediate danger was gone.

He looked around him, just to make sure, and when he turned back, Kyra’s body was turned in the saddle. She was back to her beautiful, ivory-haired self, and she was kissing Taric like there was no tomorrow.

He felt jealousy swarm up inside of him again. He grunted. For the first time in his life, he realized that he didn’t really want to share her… but that it was better than having nothing at all.

Chapter Six

As they settled into a part of the woods so dark she could barely see, the horse stopped. She took a deep breath, thankful to make it out of the kingdom with nary a scratch.

She was grateful and filled with emotion. For starters, guilt.

Everything that the king could have said about her he’d said, and her husbands stood protectively by her side. Taric had risked much to threaten the king like he had.

At first, she was surprised that the king calling her a whore had been the final straw. After all, they called her a slut in bed all the time… But it made her finally realize something that Taric and Draevan had been probably trying to get across to her, only they were truly brutes who couldn’t explain it properly.

In bed, when they called her a whore or a slut, or whatever they said, they didn’t mean it. They wanted her to play a part. They wanted her to be sultry and needy and love every move that they made within her, and she did.

It was an act, really, one they liked because it made them feel more like men, more confident in bed.

But when the king had said it… He’d meant it. He wasn’t playing… And that was unacceptable to her men. They would protect her honor and keep it to themselves that she would occasionally act so wanton.

Any anger and confusion she had about them seemed to melt away with that thought. They were brutes holding flowers, her husbands.

As soon as she could, she lifted her legs up, turned back to her visible-form, and turned around in the saddle until her legs overlapped Taric’s. Her skirt rode up, but she didn’t care. Despite Taric’s wide-eyed confusion, she slung her arms around his neck and kissed him hungrily.

Slowly, he returned the embrace, sliding his hands firmly down her waist until he dug his thumbs into her hips. Their kiss was deep, delving, passionate, but he broke it to brush his lips against her ear, saying, “I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you. I shouldn’t have made you go to the dinner. You were right.”

She smiled and hugged him tighter. “I’m right a lot.”

He chuckled, kissed her lips again, and then pulled up her skirts since he had realized by now they were bunched up on her thighs in this position. “I’m in need of you again, honey. You’re making me ache.” He nibbled on her bottom lip. Her nipples tingled, and her clit pulsed. She wanted him too.

“No you don’t!” Draevan huffed behind them. “We’re not in a safe location yet, for starters. I see a million little yellow eyes staring at me like I’m a tasty morsel, which would make
her
even tastier. Secondly, you’ve gotten to take her all day, and you already want her. How do you think
I
feel right now?”

She turned and smiled over at Draevan. “Do you want me to ride with you for a while?” she asked.

“Nah, he wants you to ride
him
a while,” Taric corrected with a chuckle.

“I do, but not here and now,” Draevan reminded, riding along close to them. He hooked a strong arm around her, and she was sitting in front of his legs before he knew it. The horse whinnied in protest at the extra weight. “If you know this forest well enough to know where the quicksand is, then how’d you get caught by the king’s men?” he asked her.

“I was having a bad week,” she shrugged. “And finding my kind is the only thing the royal bounty-hunters
do
. They’re very good at it.”

Draevan kissed the side of her neck. “Well, we’re good at killing men like that, and you’re good at moving through this devil forest. Just get us through this. Taric—light a torch. I can barely see a bloody thing in this muck!”

Draevan didn’t seem to like forests; he was superstitious and spooked easily. If she thought he was prone to nervousness when she was tailing them in the forest over a month ago, that was only because she didn’t realize the level of Draevan’s protectiveness. He kept her tucked to his chest, not letting an inch of space ride between them.

She asked if she should go ride her own horse, now that it was safer and they were far enough out of the kingdom, but Draevan’s ‘no’ was so powerful that she didn’t ask again.

At first she thought he was just afraid of their horses falling into the quicksand that surrounded the lands of the elven kingdom and wanted her to closely guide him. He seemed perturbed by the stuff, and she couldn’t help but tease him by saying, ‘You mean you never knew how the kingdom stayed so well hidden? Why people searching for it are never heard from again? Well, now you know what happened to them!’

He didn’t have a sense of humor as dark as hers. Taric chuckled at the solved mystery. “Thank the gods they found
us
and we didn’t have to go finding
them
!”

“They would have done anything for the shield,” she replied. “Even if it meant keeping their word.”

“If it meant so much to them, how’d they lose it to the giant?” Draevan’s voice rumbled in her ear. She loved his deep, strong baritone.

“My great-great-great-great-great… probably add a few greats to that… grandfather was the king’s twin brother… The king was born first technically, but my grandfather was smarter, and he wanted to grow the kingdom. There was a coop, and in the midst of it, he stole the medallion, which held a lot of the kingdom’s power, and he disappeared with his wife and children, and a curse was put on all of his line. When the giant came down to the forest, years later, he was eaten by the giant, and the giant’s had it since last month.”

Taric snorted. “So the king had a hatred for your people because of some family upset that happened to his great-great-great…”

Her forehead wrinkled as she wondered if they were having a sort of communication problem. “No,” she replied, shaking her head. “His
brother
.”

Draevan cleared his throat, and she felt the hand that was resting against her stomach tapping. “Honey, that probably happened nine hundred years ago,” he drawled, as if he were a father telling his child that faeries didn’t exist and wishing on a star didn’t actually work. “It’s not the same king.”

She rolled her eyes to the side. “Of course it’s the same king…”

“Kyra, the king would have to be nearly a millennium old,” Taric educated with enthusiasm, as if aging was a concept she didn’t understand. “Aside from how stupid he is for someone supposedly that age, no one’s that old.”

They didn’t know. How they could not know, it was hard to say. Why would they want an elf-wife if they didn’t want immortality? That’s what all humans wanted! There was no other magic that would truly help them!

“We… Don’t die… of old age…” she drawled. “You realize that, don’t you? The only reason my line doesn’t live that long is because it’s hard living out here! Not to mention that we’ve been hunted down by the kingdom all that time. I don’t think any untouchable, my kin, have lived past forty… But that’s just because our ends have all been pretty horrible. The king, however, doesn’t have anything around to kill him… Until you men came along.”

She turned her head to look back and forth between them, even though they were hard to see in the low light of the torch Taric held up. She could see Taric and Draevan exchange censored glances, as if she’d just said something so crazy that they were worried about what to do with her.

“I’m serious!” Kyra exclaimed, throwing her hands up. “You have to believe me. That’s why it was a big deal for the king to offer you any woman you wanted—because this,” she brought up her wrists and showed them to her husbands, “brings you
immortality
. We become as
one blood
.” She threw her arms up in the air when they still looked far less than convinced. “Why else would you marry one of us? If you just wanted sex, then you could have just taken me in the forest and had done with it! Why go through the hassle of marrying me?”

“Because,” Taric replied slowly. He was hedging for a moment. He still obviously didn’t believe what she was saying, but she was suddenly wondering what their other excuse was, “We want you to have our children.”

She put her hand to her eyes. “Stop the horse,” she said, putting her other hand on Draevan’s thigh. She turned to look at Draevan and Taric again once the horse stopped walking. “I like both of you, very much,” she said slowly, trying to press down her nervousness. “But as the king said—I cannot have your children. You’re human and I’m elf kind. It’s never been tried before, but it’s likely to never happen.”

“As you said before,” Draevan said, patting her consolingly on the hip, “We are of one blood. We must be melded. You’ll have our children, wife, just as soon as we get some on you.”

Her forehead smoothed as the words, ‘we must be’ struck her. They both were very confident. “And what if I
can’t
‘get your children on me’?” she asked, openly mocking the way Draevan put it.

Taric was quick to answer, his voice no-nonsense and firm, closing the argument. “Then we’ll keep trying until you
can
.”

She swallowed, feeling pressure. She hoped that it was just a game, breeding her. Much like it was a game to make her play the part of their slut while in bed… Because she would never have their children. It simply wasn’t possible.

Not that they could be told that. They traversed the forest for a full two weeks, cutting straight through the heart of the Blue Forest to the Crystal Mountains, and wherever they found a safe plot of land they would stop to put down their bedrolls and at least one of them would take her.

The first night they had traveled until late noon the next day; she thought she wouldn’t be taken just then because of how tired she and the men were. But apparently, weariness didn’t matter. Draevan pulled her off her horse, and she was promptly pushed down on her hands and knees onto a thicket of grass afterwards. He pushed her down to the ground by her shoulders and then pulled her ass up into the air, rolling her skirts over her waist to bare her. He dipped two of his fingers into her folds and found that she was so wet that her juices were beginning to drip down her inner thighs. With no words or warning, he had pushed his whole length into her and immediately began to thrust his whole length in and out in very hard, nearly bruising thrusts.

She found that she loved it; every time his tight bullocks slapped against her they patted her clitoris until she was moaning and gritting her fingers into tendrils of grass before her outstretched arms. Somehow, in the wide-open, surrounded by all this nature, with only Taric standing by to witness and thumbing his own erection, it felt for a moment like they were both merely animals—ones who badly wanted to mate and get in touch with their own dark instincts. She screamed Draevan’s name, sweating despite the cold air nipping on her skin, and came. Draevan hissed in a breath, and she felt him flow liquid heat deep into her, filling her full with pulse after never-ending pulse.

He caught his breath afterwards and slapped her on the bottom as he pulled out of her. “Keep that ass in the air,” he told her firmly. “I don’t want one
drop
of it to fall out of you.”

She sighed, knowing why it was important. He wanted his seed to take. She languidly rolled her head over to see Taric, who gave her a sexy grin as he pulled his saddle from his horse. “Get that worried look off your face, elfling,” Taric told her. “Your days of fretting are over. That’s our job, now.”