He drifted away from my lips, peppering kisses over my breasts. I didn’t want him to stop what his probing fingers were doing, as first one, then two found a slow, deliberate rhythm inside me, making my head swim. With a faint grasp of how to use my hands, I undid my bra and shucked it to the floor. It was still dangling from my fingers when his hot mouth latched on to one peaked nipple, dragging a ragged sigh from my lips.

He pushed my shorts off, and they fell to the ground with a soft sound. I felt his hardness, trapped in his slacks, against my inner thigh. I let out a moan, drowning in the urgent need to have him inside me again. I had both hands on his lower back, imploring him to come closer, when I had a flash of memory.

For a moment I thought I was remembering our previous times together, and then, as he put a third finger inside me and his tongue swirled around my nipple, I was overcome by a disorienting dizziness. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in bed with Holden.

I blinked, unable to understand where the desk, Desmond and all of my reality had gone. And why it had been replaced with a missing vampire in a satin-sheeted bed.

My hands were on Holden’s lower back and his mouth was at my neck, and I caught my breath when his teeth dragged over my skin. The change in my breathing made my throat tighten, and the sharpness of his fangs pressed over my throbbing artery. Desmond was forgotten, as were all of the worries of my real life. When I touched Holden our bodies created steam where his cool skin rubbed against my own feverish exterior. His touch was as real as anything I’d ever felt, and the only thing my body understood was a growing desire that needed to be fed.

As far as my animal desires were concerned, one hard cock was as good as another right then. I shivered in anticipation of what was to follow and arched my hips against him.

“Yes,” I purred.

I was back on the desk with Desmond, and his pants were now undone. He ran his hands down my waist and grasped my hips as his mouth reclaimed mine for a jarring kiss. Without his fingers inside me there was a pulsing ache that demanded attention. I growled against his lips and nipped at his tongue. The rational parts of me were no longer in control, otherwise I would have been wondering what was happening to me. A wave of tension trembled through his body as he pushed himself inside me. I broke free of the kiss with a gasp, digging my nails into the skin of his back. I’d forgotten what it felt like to have the hot length of him fill me up. My eyes rolled back and then…

Holden’s body rocked against mine, and the heat of Desmond was replaced with a coolness so soothing it felt like a full-body sigh. The vampire drew me upright so I was perched on his lap. He held my hair away from my neck, and his tongue teased the delicate skin until my pulse raced with the breakneck speed of my overeager heart. With his free hand, he brushed his fingers down my back and over my bottom, where he lifted me easily, then lowered me, repeating the action until my hips took up the rhythm naturally, and I swayed with him as we built towards a fever pitch. As my cries grew louder and more frantic, my body shook. Teeth sank into my neck, and I heard myself call out in both realities from the combined pleasure of what was happening on both planes.

I clawed at the desk but felt satin instead. I reached for Holden to push him away and met with the warmth of Desmond. Closing my eyes seemed to make it worse, so I opened them and hazily fixed my gaze on Desmond, who was looking down at me as he moved.

The sensation of him pounding inside me and the way it tasted when he kissed me was almost too much to bear, and I couldn’t help but shut my lids for a moment. In that instant I was back with Holden. He stopped biting me and pulled his head back with a look so satisfied it gave me a chill.

“Soon,” he said, tracing his thumb over my raw lips.

I wanted to reply, but my eyes flew open when Desmond pulled my hips closer to the edge of the desk and found his way deeper within me with a fierce thrust. I gasped, my mind reeling, and when he finished, I let him lay on top of me, breathing softly, while I stared at the ceiling, terrified to close my eyes.

I needed to find Holden Chancery.

Once I was back in my right mind, I felt violated. I buttoned up the dress shirt Desmond had brought me, trying to understand what had just happened. Seated on one of the leather chairs in the study, I was being too quiet, and it seemed to be making Desmond worry. I didn’t want him to think he’d done anything wrong, but he couldn’t know about the weird subconscious threesome we’d just had.

I didn’t know how to reconcile what I’d just experienced, so how could I expect him to understand? If I tried to explain it, I doubted I could make it sound like anything other than I was thinking about a vampire while we were having sex.

Desmond sat down in the chair across from me and gave a tentative half smile. You would think I’d just lost my virginity or something, with how careful he was being.

“Secret, I think I know what’s wrong.”

Startled, I looked up at him, and my breath caught in my throat. Had he been able to feel it too? Had he seen what I’d seen? God, I hoped not.

“You still need to see Lucas, and this unexpected…delay is making you feel guilty.”

“Oh.” I looked down at my hands and debated his words. Lesser of two evils. “Something along those lines, yeah.”

He knelt on the ground in front of me and wrapped me in his strong arms. I hesitated, scared to close my eyes, but when I did I found nothing there but darkness. So I let myself indulge in Desmond’s embrace. I breathed in the smell of him as deep as I could, and the wolf part of me stirred, like a dog stretching after a long nap. It had been a long time since I’d felt her as anything more than fractured senses or abilities. Or animal needs.

To know she was still there, a whole entity, a being unto herself who could still feel things through me, gave me both a chill and a shock of delight. It seemed like I could only feel my wolf as her own entity when I was with Desmond. When I was with Lucas, she merely felt like liquid heat bubbling below the surface. Desmond awakened the animal within.

I pulled back. “Thank you.”

“For what?” He brushed a hair back behind my ear.

“For being so damned understanding all the time. I don’t know how you do it.”

“I do what I need to do in order to keep you.” The sadness in his voice was heavy. I think it was the first time I let myself appreciate that neither he nor Lucas liked the situation they had found themselves in any more than I did. Who wanted to share their soul mate? They were no more interested in sharing me with each other than I was interested in being soul-bonded to two men.

As if love wasn’t complicated enough without the supernatural getting involved.

“I do need to go see Lucas,” I said.

“I know. I called one of the cars while I was getting the shirts. It’s a bit of a drive, but if you don’t get too distracted, you can make it there and back well before sunrise.”

“Thank you, Desmond.” I kissed his cheek, then his mouth. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Ha,” he said with no humor, looking me in the eyes with that serious expression of his. “Can I ask you something for next time?”

“Of course.”

“Next time I want all of you here with me. I don’t want your mind off somewhere, or with someone else.”

I swallowed hard. He thought I’d had Lucas on my mind.

“I want that too,” was all I managed to say.

In the car, I tried not to think about what had transpired in Lucas’s penthouse but found it impossible. It wasn’t so much the sex part that was bothering me, because I had to admit it had been phenomenal, if bizarre. Rather, I was getting more and more concerned about the connection Holden and I seemed to share inside my mind. It was no longer restricted to dreams, and that made it unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

I was immune to the thrall, so it couldn’t have been that. Was there some other kind of vampire magic I was unaware of that could let Holden enter my dreams and my waking mind without permission? The dream I’d had in Elmwood could have been dismissed as one of my typically weird nocturnal ramblings. But what had happened tonight was something new. The part of me with Holden had felt as real as the physical part of me with Desmond. And when the vampire had bitten me…

My hand went to my neck, and I half-expected to feel something there, but the skin was as smooth as ever. There was nothing to indicate I had ever been bitten.

I sat back in the leather seats of the town car and sighed.

“Almost there, miss,” the driver announced, obviously misunderstanding my sigh as one of impatience. The driver was human. I couldn’t smell anything lycanthropic or otherwise on him. Lucas must have kept him around for jobs requiring legitimate ignorance.

“No rush,” I lied.

The drive to upstate New York took a little over an hour and a half, and much of it was through picturesque wooded areas and nice-looking towns and small cities. These were the places people went to escape the bustle of the city. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed Lucas’s family mansion would be somewhere in the Hamptons. The more I considered it, though, the more ridiculous that option showed itself to be. If the mansion was where pack business was worked out, and where the pack went to meet on full moons, then having it on a tiny, overpopulated peninsula in Suffolk County was just about the stupidest idea ever.

The mansion we pulled up to was as secluded as one could be within driving distance of New York City. It was a good fifteen minutes beyond the last house we’d seen, and twenty-five minutes or more since the last settlement anyone could call a town. Yet it still wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

The house rested on top of a hill, and around it were acres of plain, sprawling lawn, interrupted only by meticulously landscaped English-style gardens. I guess I’d thought the getaway spot for a pack of werewolves would have more trees. Not that there was any shortage of woods surrounding the estate. It seemed like the entire lot across the highway from the mansion was nothing but forest. Yet the lawns of the giant mansion seemed to go on forever and offered nothing in the way of hiding spots.