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 re-steal 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.”
Her eyes closed, the memory pulling her in, the drugging pleasure and need for the sensations she knew Shane could give her weakening her.
“Don’t do this to me,” she whispered, her lips brushing against his as he teased her with the threat of his kiss.
“I pulled you to me, turned your back to me, and that pretty hand gripped my cock and placed the head there at the entrance of your tight little ass.”
She jerked, the memory of that pleasure, the lashing, burning sensations, destroying her.
“As I pushed inside you, you were crying for me, Alyssa,” he reminded her. “Moving against me, taking every increment with such heat I thought I’d die. Backing to me until my dick was buried to the hilt inside you, and begging Sebastian to fuck you again. And he did.” His jaw flexed with the strength of the tension rising higher inside him. “While you leaned back to me, my cock stretching you until you were crying out your pleasure, until you screamed with each thrust as Sebastian sank into your sweet pussy again.”
Her eyes closed, a cry spilling from her lips at the sudden heat surrounding her nipple. Her knees were pushed back, held in place with his arms, and before she could draw in a shocked breath he’d torn her panties from her hips and two fingers pushed demandingly, dominantly, inside the clenched depths of her sex.
Her orgasm was immediate. Shocking.
It exploded through her senses with a detonation that seared her senses as his lips slammed over hers.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It wasn’t an easy kiss. It was a prelude to the thick, heavy weight of the flared crest of his cock pushing inside her a moment later.
“Alyssa … Ah God. Ah, baby…”
Tight heat, rippling, clenching, flexed around his cock like a silken vise as it pulled the hard flesh inside; her pussy milked and caressed the engorged head of his dick, then inch by inch the throbbing, sensitized stalk.
Holding back his release would kill him. It would destroy him.
No condom. Sebastian had already spilled his release inside her and Shane was desperate to do the same. She’d known he would be here. She’d known he was coming for her. She’d been standing there waiting for him and he’d known it. Her expression soft, filled with remembered pleasure and aching need.
Taking her easy wasn’t an option. As hungry for her as he was, eight years of pent-up, desperate greed was like a crazed instinct now. Get inside her, ride her with the hard, burning thrusts he knew she craved, then spill himself inside the giving depths of her body.
He couldn’t push back the animalistic urge. Had she mentioned it, had she, for even a second, questioned the lack of protection, then he would have donned the condom he’d brought. He’d meant to protect her. But he knew what they’d had in Spain was all the sweeter for feeling her inner flesh rippling around his naked cock, clenching it and tugging his release from him with those spasming little ripples in her pussy.
Pushing in hard, deep, he stilled, some broken edge of consideration digging into him with razor sharpness.
“Tell me now,” he groaned, one hand gripping the back of her head to tilt it back, watching as her eyes drifted open. “Tell me to protect you now.” The words strangled him as he forced them from his lips. “Tell me to protect you, Alyssa, or I swear to God I’m going to come inside you so hard it will burn both of us alive.”
Her nails rasped along his belly before her slender fingers gripped his naked hips, her knees clenching at them while the internal muscles of her pussy rippled over his cock with flexing strokes. He couldn’t imagine losing the feel of her naked flesh clamped on him, but he would, if that was what she wanted.
Dark stormy gray eyes slitted open, a flush rushing from her breasts to her hairline.
“Then make us burn,” she seemed to dare him. “Burn us alive, Shane.”
Levering back, spreading her thighs, and holding them in the wide grip of his fingers, Shane watched as he withdrew from her body, the heavy layer of her juices clinging to the broad shaft stretching her, stroking her.
“Look, baby,” he crooned, flicking a glance at her to be certain she was indeed watching as all but the engorged crest pulled free of her. “Am I hurting you, Alyssa? Be sure.”
He had never understood how he and Sebastian hadn’t hurt her. There had been times in Spain that their hungry lusts had ridden her for hours at a time, exhausting her, leaving her wilted against their bodies as they fought to still the hunger for her.
It had never stilled. It never would still.
“I love watching your pretty pussy take me,” he groaned. “To see your clit, so swollen and red, throbbing, begging for that one touch that’ll set it off.” He looked up at her again. “Stroke your pretty clit, Alyssa. Let me watch. Let me feel you come for me there. Feel your pussy clamp down on me—” A harsh, brutally guttural groan was torn from him as her fingers moved to the little bud.
Graceful, sensual, she stroked the flushed little knot of nerves, her breath catching as her inner muscles tightened further on the stiff erection he pushed inside her again.
Hard. Her juices rushed to meet the impalement as her hips jerked, a cry tearing from her lips.
“Fuck me, Shane.” She was barely coherent, her fingers moving on her clit as he began thrusting heavily inside her. “Give me, before I die for it—”
Give me. Those two words. Give me …
He gave her. He gave her every hard inch, every thick, furious thrust, as he stared down at her, ached for everything he and Sebastian had lost with her. And when she twisted beneath him, jerking, shuddering, and flying into ecstasy with her second orgasm, Shane let himself give everything to her.
He gave her each fierce ejaculation. Each hard pulse of ecstasy ripping through his senses with such pleasure he felt destroyed by it as the spiraling, stormy release overtook both of them.
* * *
Both Sebastian and Shane confused her more than she could say. Curled in the corner of the large sofa that sat to the side in her office, she watched as Shane stared into the night, his back to her, his shoulders tight with tension.
He hadn’t said much since insisting on gently drying the spill of both their releases from between her thighs. He and Sebastian had both always been diligent about taking care of her in such a way. Even in Spain, when exhaustion had weighed upon all of them, one or sometimes both of the cousins had gotten from the bed and ensured she was comfortable after the excesses they participated in.
“You can’t stay here all night, Shane,” she warned him when he didn’t appear to be leaving. “I need to get some sleep soon. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.”
That long day included a meeting in town. Ian Sinclair, the owner of the Sinclair Men’s Club she’d once actually had membership in, had called and requested she meet with him. He’d hesitated to give her the reason for the requested meeting, which only made her more curious. She’d actually forgotten about it until that moment, though. Until she’d needed to find a reason for Shane to leave, to give her the last few hours before daylight to figure this out.
Still dressed in the torn blouse—the bra he’d all but ripped from her had been discarded, as were the panties he’d left in shreds—she wanted to undress and crawl into bed, his scent still lingering on her, his touch still imprinted on her flesh.
“I’m not leaving, Alyssa.” He turned to her and she saw the tight, grim set of his lips, the muscle that flicked at his jaw.
Leaning against the open door frame, he simply watched her, seemingly relaxed.
There was nothing relaxed about him, though. Alyssa could sense the tension and determined arrogance he wore like an invisible cloak.
“What do you mean, you’re not leaving?” There had to be a way to make him see that simply was not going to work. Not now. Not ever—
Her fingers clenched on the edges of her blouse at the “past” part of that thought. Something so dark, so filled with denial, swirled inside her, pulling free long-forgotten dreams of just that. Of at least one of the cousins, either of them, holding her in the dark, sheltering her from the nightmares.
“Exactly what I said.” Straightening, he pulled the door closed, secured it, then tilted his head lazily to the side as his gaze continued to hold hers. “Let’s go to bed, siren.”
She almost rose eagerly to her feet.
The muscles in her legs were actually tightening to do just that.
“No. Absolutely not.” She did rise, but not to lead him to her suite next door. “That is unacceptable.”
The bleak, tight-lipped smile he gave her assured her he believed otherwise.
“Evidently you mistake me for Sebastian.” The lazy drawl in his voice was a warning, and Alyssa knew it. He’d made up his mind, and as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t budging.
“I’ve grown rather used to sleeping alone,” she tried to argue. She had always tried to sway him.
“You still think you can convince me to do something I know neither of us want.” He shook his head, buttoning his shirt as he moved slowly to her. “Since your bed’s so close, darlin’, and attached right to your office, it will be no problem at all to hide the fact that you slept with me.”
The shirt hung loose across his chest, the broad expanse of bronzed flesh pulling her gaze to the hair-roughened breadth.
She wanted so desperately to let him draw her into the suite, to her bed, beneath the blankets, against the heated power of his body where she wouldn’t feel the cold again.
“I can’t do this—”
“Of course you can.” Bending, he had her in his arms before she could protest, cradling her against that heated chest and moving to the connecting door.
“Shane, I won’t let you—”
“Sebastian’s on his way,” he informed her as he moved into her suite, his voice tight, his complete denial of her objections obvious. “Stop fighting, Alyssa; this is a battle you know you’re not going to win.”
Staring at the hard, grim profile, she acknowledged that the fight wouldn’t make a difference. It would take more than she was willing to give it. It would take a force of nature, several law enforcement battalions no doubt, and the National Guard.
“Bossy,” she muttered.
For a second, the briefest second, a memory teased her mind. Summer bitching at her, Shane commanding, and her own muttered “bossy.”
Summer was in so much trouble. That southern charm and wide-eyed innocent look would not get her out of trouble this time. She hadn’t told Alyssa that Shane and Sebastian had been there after Margot’s death. Just as she hadn’t told her how Alyssa had reaquired the necklace. Alyssa had actually thought Summer had stolen it somehow. The wretch.
“Whatever it takes.” Stepping into the bedroom, he moved through darkness to the bed and laid Alyssa gently on the blankets the maid had turned down earlier.
The maid turned them down every night, pulled them up every day. Alyssa never slept in the bed, despite the months she’d spent searching for it.
Light spilled into the room from the small table lamp and she felt Shane pause. Tension mounted inside her as he stared around the room.
“Did Stanhope ever sleep in this room with you?” His voice was harsh, rasping in his throat.
Alyssa shook her head.
Harvey had never slept in any bed with her. He’d never been a husband in any way but name. She’d insisted on it.
She knew what Shane saw, though. A near replica of the bedroom in Spain. The tile floors and scattered rugs. The iron bed and antique tables next to it. The windows behind the headboard.
It was her only concession to moving back to the Hampstead mansion after her mother’s death. The renovations to the bedroom had to be completed quickly. Alyssa didn’t sleep there, though. She slept on the couch in the other room and watched the night outside the windows.
“Alyssa,” the whispered sound of her name had her throat tightening.
“Leave,” she demanded, though her voice lacked any true strength this time.
“Alyssa.” His fingers clenched in her hair, pulling her head back.
She couldn’t meet his gaze, but that wasn’t what he wanted.
He wanted her kiss.
With hungry demands and fierce, arrogant eroticism his lips moved over hers, his tongue stroking forcefully between them to meet hers. It was nothing like any other kiss he or Sebastian had given her. It was nothing like any kiss she’d ever had in her life.
Hot, filled with dominance and sexual intent, it was erotic, spiked with lust and with something more. A something she didn’t want to feel, didn’t want to know.
When he pulled back, his lips slid to her ear and brushed against it softly. “Let it be another dream, siren,” he whispered, the bleak hunger in his voice tightening her chest. “When you wake, we’ll be gone and you can tell yourself it never really happened.”