Blurred Memories (8 page)

“
Always so warm,” he
murmured as he mouthed kisses along her cheek and jaw. “So
soft…”

A tiny, almost mewling sound
rose from her throat as she turned her face toward him, seeking his
mouth. Marc flicked his tongue over her lips to appease her then
raised his head to look at Blake.

Still kneeling between
Marc’s thighs, Blake hadn’t moved at all. He was watching Marc and
Kate with a wide-eyed look, his expression and scent reflecting
emotions so fleeting that Marc could have thought he was imagining
them if they hadn’t been the exact same things Blake always felt
when he watched Marc and Kate together.

The fear, especially, was
getting harder and harder for Marc to swallow.

“
Are you just going to
watch?” Marc asked, and the words came out as a rumble.

A shiver shook Blake’s body.
He licked his lips, and his fingers curled over his own thighs as
though he were trying to stop himself from reaching out. His eyes
were still wide and needy. Wary.

Marc struggled to stifle his
growing anger. He was angry at their situation and the demons that
had caused it, but he knew Blake would think the anger was directed
at him if he noticed it, and that wouldn’t help
anything.

“
Kate said she didn’t want
you to stop,” he pointed out, keeping his voice as level as he
could muster. Blake was already beginning to lean toward Marc’s
cock again when Marc added, “But I’m sure she wouldn’t mind it if
you used that talented mouth of yours on her instead.”

Each word was carefully
measured. No orders, not ever again, even if it would have been
easy to fall back to what was only normal: a Sire directing his
Childe. If things had been different and Blake had never been taken
from them, this might have been a game they would have played: Marc
guiding Blake’s hands, mouth, and cock as he pleasured Kate. It
would never happen this way now, but Marc could make suggestions—or
at least he hoped he could.

Blake froze again, his eyes
flitting between Marc’s face and Kate’s. He didn’t say a word, and
that was never a good sign; from what Marc guessed—and Blake
refused to confirm it or talk about any of it—his jailers had
forbidden him to talk unless asked a question.

It was Kate’s turn to shiver
against Marc. “He doesn’t need to do that,” she said in an entirely
unconvincing murmur. “That’s not—”

Marc shushed her with a
kiss, and while she was too distracted to protest, he pulled her
closer, dragging her higher on the bed with him as he sat up and
leaned back against the pillows.

“
What are you doing?” she
mumbled when he broke the kiss, and rather than answering, he
demonstrated his intentions.

It had always amazed him
that Kate could fight demons as well as she did when she was only a
few inches over five-feet tall, her body slim and toned from
countless hours of training. Now that he pulled her to lie on top
of him with her back to his chest, she seemed to weigh nothing. He
held her to him with an arm curled around her waist, his fingers
entwining with hers. His other hand stroked her hip and thigh,
guiding her legs apart.

With her temple pressed
against his cheek, Marc could feel her skin grow warmer against
his, and he had no trouble imagining what she looked like, blushing
and open, her body cradled against Marc’s and the length of his
cock pressing against her folds. Better than imagining, though, all
he had to do was look at Blake’s face and the hunger reflected in
his gaze, to know what a tempting tableau they made.

The only question that
remained was whether they would be tempting enough. Blake was still
only looking at them, and Marc didn’t dare say anything more that
Blake might interpret as an order.

“
Blake?” Kate said in a
tiny voice, and in that simple word she still managed to cram all
her desire—and all her sadness. Her fingers tightened over Marc’s.
“If you don’t want to…” Her throat made a wet sound as she
swallowed hard. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do
anything.”

Marc was beginning to wonder
if trying to nudge things forward had been a mistake. He couldn’t
bear Kate’s frustration anymore, and taking things slow with Blake
didn’t seem to help much. What other choices did they
have?

Blake’s eyes closed for a
second or two. When they opened again, the ghost of a once-familiar
smile brushed his lips. “Who said I don’t want to?” he said, his
voice deep with echoes of his old cockiness.

A flash of hope ran through
Marc, quickly followed by renewed lust when Blake’s tongue ran
along Marc’s cock before darting past it to Kate’s
folds.

The choked-up sound that
rose from Kate’s throat was gratitude and need all wrapped in one
word: Blake’s name. She reached down, and Marc could see her hand
hesitating above Blake’s head, just like Blake hesitated before
touching them again.

“
It’s okay,” Marc whispered
for both of them, brushing a kiss to Kate’s temple. “Everything’s
fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

He had never hoped to be
right as much as he did in that moment.

Chapter 7

I can do this. I can do
it
.

The words went round and
round in Blake’s mind until they lost all meaning and his thoughts
shut down, replaced by sensations.

Kate caressed him, touching
his hair, his forehead, and even, it seemed, the very core of him,
for all that he was the one giving her pleasure. Her hands were
familiar, and Marc’s were even more so. Blake had felt them touch
him together before. There had always been a line, however,
unvoiced, unacknowledged, but nonetheless very real. Even if the
three of them had been in a bed at the same time, even if they had
touched each other, they hadn’t been together in that way. Blake
had watched Marc and Kate together, and he had taken his Sire’s
offered body while she watched, but that had been the extent of
what they had done since his return to this world.

To touch Kate like this now,
small flicks of his tongue and caresses from his lips where she was
so sensitive, both thrilled him and scared him. She wanted it; he
could smell it in the sweet headiness of her scent, taste it in
every drop of need he lapped from her folds, feel it with every
press of her hand pushing him closer to her. She wanted this, and
he wanted to offer it to her.

But even so, the past didn’t
relinquish its hold on him, cruel talons digging in and tearing
chunks of his mind to shreds. He was here, in this room, with Kate
and Marc, but he was also there, in that cell, with people who
looked so much like them that it made little difference to his
confused mind. His lovers allowed him to touch them and stayed
still as he licked them, one after the other and at times together.
They shared kisses, sometimes, and their moans entwined like their
hands at the back of Blake’s head. But those people in that cell,
in his mind, the ones he now knew had not been the real Marc and
Kate, acted much differently—and there was no place Blake could
hide from them.

The woman, the
Kate-who-wasn’t-Kate, a stranger even though she had looked,
smelled, sounded, even tasted exactly like the woman Blake loved,
had sometimes pleaded with Blake, begged him to help her, free
her—kill her. Blake had known better than to try to help her, or
even talk to her; she would have been hurt more if he had tried
again. This lesson had been seared into his mind, and he wouldn’t
forget it. He also wouldn’t forget that any blow that fell on her,
from hand or whip, was punishment for something Blake had done. She
never seemed to understand that he was the last person she should
ask for help, that he was to blame for her pain and
suffering.

The man, the
Master-who-wasn’t-his-Sire, so much like Marc and yet—

“
Blake?”

Blake shuddered at his
Master’s voice. He looked up, ready to be chastised…and abruptly
remembered it was Marc lying spread in front of him. Marc whom Kate
clung to, her chest heaving with fast breaths, flushed with the
pleasure she hadn’t quite reached yet. Marc who was looking down at
Blake, his nostrils flaring, his eyes worried. Marc who would stop
everything if he guessed the strange path Blake’s mind had
taken.

Without a word, Blake
returned to his task. He pushed away thoughts and memories, digging
his fingers into Marc’s thighs as though it might help him hold on
to reality.

Kate wanted this, he
reminded himself. And he wanted to give her whatever she
wanted.

Before he had started losing
the thread of his own sanity, he had teased Kate and Marc equally,
his tongue caressing each of them with the same intensity. Now, he
focused on Kate, intent on making her come, and touches to Marc’s
cock were mostly accidental.

He laved her folds
studiously, slurping away every bit of her wetness he could find
with greedy noises that weren’t exactly elegant, but that drew low
moans from her. Each of those moans urged him onward. It had been
so long since he had caused those moans, but every one of them
reawakened memories—the happier kind, memories from the few weeks
they had spent as lovers before he had been taken. He nudged her
clit with his tongue and her entire body jerked, then a second time
when he did it again.

“
So close.” It was Marc who
whispered it, the words shaking from his own need. “She’s so close,
Blake. Can you taste it on her?”

Had Blake been able to
speak, he would have said that of course he could taste her need,
even her rising pleasure, and that he had never tasted anything as
sweet, as intoxicating. Words were beyond him, however, and all he
could do was hum against Kate’s folds. She shuddered, and without
Marc’s arm around her holding her, tight and snug…
Too
tight, and in a moment she’d start struggling and gasping for
breath and—

“
Blake,
please
…”

But it wasn’t fear that
caused Kate’s voice to shake now as she pleaded. She wasn’t clawing
at Marc’s hand or digging her fingernails into Blake’s scalp
because she was trying to escape.

She wasn’t trapped; if
anything, she was only seconds away from soaring, high and free.
All Blake had to do was help her fly. A touch of his fingers or
cock would have been enough, he was sure of it. He also knew that
he couldn’t touch her like that, not now, not yet. All he had was
his mouth; all he could do was redouble his efforts and try not to
stumble again before it was over.

* * * *

Blake was hurting. Marc was
sure of it. He could practically feel it. But he didn’t know how to
help.

Over the last few months, he
had learned once more to be attentive to the smallest changes in
Blake’s scent. This bitter scent used to mean that the old walls
were closing in on him again and becoming too tight. These days, it
meant that Blake was falling yet again into the nightmares he
pretended didn’t haunt him.

At that moment, Blake’s
scent was shifting back and forth between need and fear, tittering
on the edge but not quite falling yet. How close was he to losing
himself, Marc wondered, worry muting his own desire. As close as
Kate was to finding pleasure, maybe?

Marc lifted his hand off
Blake’s head and rested it on Kate’s left breast instead, his
fingertips caressing her nipple. He had let Blake pleasure her so
far, but maybe if he helped she would come sooner, and Blake would
be able to pull back from that dangerous edge. Kate moaned Blake’s
name again, then Marc’s, and Marc froze.

The thought ran through him
like a jolt of electricity. He was going at it the wrong way. Kate
was close. She would come soon whether Marc intervened or not, come
at Blake’s hands—or mouth, as it were—for the first time since that
dreadful night. Would it help Blake to see her pleasure, the
pleasure that he alone had given her?

It had to help. What else
was there if it didn’t?

Marc took his hand off her
breast again and rested it on her stomach instead, holding her as
she bucked against Blake’s mouth.

“
You’re beautiful,” he said
in a choked whisper, looking down Kate’s body to where Blake was
fucking her with his tongue. “Both of you, so
beautiful…”

Kate’s orgasm started with a
low, keening noise that soon blossomed into a wordless cry. Her
body turned rigid against Marc’s, and he wondered if her fingers
were as tight in Blake’s hair as they were clutching Marc’s hand.
After a couple more seconds, Blake pulled back and looked at her,
his mouth and chin shiny with Kate’s desire, his eyes glowing gold
with his own.

For a short but beautiful
moment, Marc forgot how far they still had to go before he could
get more than glimpses of the Childe he remembered and missed so
much. That reality, however, slammed back when Kate breathed out a
shaky, “Kiss me. Please, God, kiss me.”

The words were for Blake,
Marc was certain of it. And he was just as certain that Blake would
not
kiss her, not when his eyes suddenly became so wide and
startled and his nails dug harder into the skin of Marc’s thighs,
drawing blood. Could Blake even make himself let go?