Marking Melody (8 page)

“I want you, too, baby,” he said, pushing off the door as she kissed him again.

He walked blindly towards the bed, and when his legs hit the mattress, he spun and sat down so she was in his lap.  Their tongues dueled frantically as she tore at his shirt, nicking his back with her nails as she pulled it upwards.  Separating only long enough for both their shirts and her bra to hit the floor, he cupped her face with his hands and rubbed his thumbs along her jaw.  Her hands glided over his back and shoulders, and goosebumps rose on his skin as she tickled her nails up his neck and threaded her fingers through his hair.  He searched out all the secret places in her mouth, learning every soft and hard place within, as his hands stroked firmly up and down her back.  Her body pressed against his with each upward stroke and relaxed on the way down, and he felt as though he might combust just from the friction.

Tracing his fingers down her neck, he walked them across her shoulders and swirled patterns up and down her arms.  Her skin was soft and smooth, and with each inhale, her hard nipples brushed against his chest.  Slipping his hands up her back once more, he fisted her hair with both hands and carefully pulled, arching her back with the motion and putting her beautiful breasts on full display for him.  She relaxed in his arms, winding her hands around his biceps for support, as he bent and drew one tight nipple in his mouth.  She tasted exquisite.  His tongue teased the very tip of her nipple as his teeth gently held it captive.  He drew it deeply into his mouth, and she shuddered, her moans filling his ears as he released his hold and gazed at the swollen, dark peak.  Drawing a line from the top of one breast, down the valley between, and circling the tip of the other, he lavished the untended nipple with licks and kisses and deep, hard pulls.

He wanted more.  To taste her, to feel her come on his tongue, to hear her cry out his name.  With a swift twist, he rolled them until he stood and she was stretched out on her back on the bed.  Her chest heaved and she curled her hands into the comforter until her knuckles turned white.  He ripped the button on her shorts off in his haste, making a mental promise to find the button and get it fixed.  Stripping the shorts and panties off, he threw her clothes and sandals to the floor, toed off his shoes and shoved his shorts down his legs.

For a moment, he paused and looked at her.  Sunlight streamed in through the blinds and cast a golden glow over her skin that was flushed with passion.  He’d never seen a more beautiful woman in his life, and he was quickly falling in love with her.

His hands trembled with excitement as he climbed on the bed and kissed her, cupping her face with one hand and delving his tongue into her mouth.  She clutched at him, pulling him closer, and he lost himself in the kiss until his erection throbbed and reminded him that he didn’t want to get interrupted before they’d even really gotten started.

Rolling to his back, he settled his head on a pillow and crooked a finger at her.  She sat up and went to her knees with a smile.  “I want to taste you, baby,” he said, his voice rough with need.

He didn’t have to ask her twice.  She moved up the bed and kissed him once and then used the headboard for balance as she knelt on either side of his face.  He could see her arousal glistening on her pussy.  He glanced up at her, and she had folded her arms on the top of the headboard and rested her forehead on them.  Their eyes met and held.  He stroked his tongue lightly up her pussy, and she let out a soft sound.  The sweet taste of her overwhelmed him, and he closed his eyes, cupped her bottom with both hands and buried his tongue inside her.

She moaned loudly, and her hips flexed against his mouth as he wiggled his tongue as deeply into her as he could.  He speared her over and over, her moans of pleasure spurring him on.  Her legs began to tremble, and the headboard creaked as she pushed against it, riding his tongue and grinding her sweet pussy on his mouth.  Knowing he could hardly take any more himself, he angled her and sucked her clit hard and fast and she exploded, screaming his name as she shook in the throes of passion.

His hands gripped the soft cheeks of her ass and held her to his mouth as he feasted on her pussy until she said his name with a trembling breath.  Her hand fisted in his hair and she moaned, “Tristan, that feels so good.”

He purred and lapped at her, feeling the loss of her body as she eased herself downward.  He kissed his way up her abdomen and she rose up above him, her face glowing with happiness.  He was hard and ready for her, and she kissed his forehead and both eyelids, the tip of his nose, and then his mouth as her hand skimmed between them and clutched his cock.  Her hot, wet pussy eased down his cock, and his eyes rolled back in his head.  Nothing had ever felt as perfect as the way her body gripped him, and the sleek heat of the pleasure he’d given her.  With a moaning sigh, she straightened as she settled on him completely until their bodies were as tightly wed as possible.  Her hands flattened on his chest as she leaned forward and began to move on him.  He put his hands on her thighs and lifted his hips to meet her.

He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from coming immediately as she rode him, and the pain barely registered through the sheer pleasure that coursed through him.  She gripped one of his hands, shifting her body slightly until she was grinding against him.

“Tristan, Tristan,” she chanted with a whimpering tone, her voice breathy and laced with need.

Spreading his legs, he bent his knees to give himself leverage and gripped her hip with one hand, drawing her into him and keeping his body pressed tightly to hers as she rubbed herself against him.  Her pussy gripped him tightly, squeezing and squeezing until he was sure he would die from the bliss.

Just as he couldn’t handle one more tight squeeze from her pussy without coming, she cried out his name, and her pussy rippled around him.  He came hard, snarling her name and grabbing her hips and pressing her onto his cock as he thrust up hard and fast and spilled inside her.

He caught her in his arms as she fell forward and cradled her into his chest.  Kissing her forehead, he wrapped his arms around her tighter as she lay sprawled over top of him.  He wanted to say something profound and perfect, but their hearts were beating fast and their panting breaths filled the air, and he thought that was more perfect than anything his muddle brain could create.

Chapter 9

Wyked splashed cold water on his face from the sink in the tiny bathroom of the camper he and Fate shared with their parents.  He hadn’t slept for shit since Jilly had blazed into their lives and then stormed out within a matter of hours.  Days had passed.  Too many days.  Saturday loomed ahead of him.  The morning sun shone; puffy clouds dotted the blue sky.  It was sacrilege to have such a beautiful day when he felt such turmoil inside.

Fate leaned against the open door, looking as haggard as Wyked felt.  Although he could
feel
Jilly through their blood-sharing connection, he hadn’t been able to find her.  He and Fate had driven all over the last few days trying to get a sense of her through their connection, but found nothing.  Their uncle believed it was because she was fighting the connection, shutting them out somehow.  He didn’t know that was possible.  But then again, he’d never met a female mountain lion before.

“She has to be feeling the same as we are,” Fate said.  “She knows where we are, and she’ll come back to us.”

He pressed his hands against the cold countertop and let his head drop forward.  Wyked wanted to believe that, but after what he’d learned about mountain lions from his uncle’s library, he wasn’t sure if Jilly would even understand that they were mates or know how to process what she was feeling in the first place.  She’d called him a stranger.  And that cut him to the quick.

“I never should have let her leave,” Wyked admitted.

“You had no choice.  Uncle was right.  She was so upset that she was almost violent.  Can you imagine what she must have been feeling?  Her whole life just suddenly revealed to her as a lie?  She needs time to process what she’s feeling.  When she’s ready, she’ll come to us.”

Wyked snorted, lifting his head and looking at his twin.  “You sound awfully philosophical there, brother.”

“I’m trying a new thing,” Fate grinned.

Wyked turned and faced his brother and nodded.  She was their mate.  She’d come home to them eventually.  For his own sanity, he just hoped it was soon.

* * * * *

On Saturday evening, Jilly paced the length of the front room in the home that the lionesses shared.  Layla, the leader of the pride, had called the meeting to discuss the trio that Jilly had seen in King at the beginning of the week.  She’d been right in being suspicious that the blonde female was a lion and mated to the two Harrison brothers, but at the moment all she felt was a strong desire to get in her car, drive to the campground, and throw herself at the twins.

Wyked and Fate.

She rubbed at the back of her neck as the tip of her tongue traced the two little bumps on the inside of her bottom lip.  Their marks.  They’d scarred over, becoming permanent.  Although the scent of them was long gone from her skin, she had dreamed of them non-stop since she’d fled like a lunatic on Monday.

Each day had brought increasingly intense feelings for the twins.  Each night brought more memories.  Things from her past she had no recollection of.  Her father.  Her brother.  Uncles and cousins.  And most frightening of all, being clawed by the females more than once.  She kept pushing the unwanted thoughts away, desperate for relief but finding none.

“Jillian!” Tanya snarled her name and Jilly almost shouted,
Don’t call me that!
but kept her mouth shut for long enough to gather her emotions back under control.

“I’m sorry, what?” she said with as calm a voice as she could muster.

Layla’s brow was raised, and the other females looked at her in confusion.  Layla cleared her throat, “I asked where you cast your vote.”

Vote?

Jilly paused long enough that Tanya sighed exaggeratedly and said, “We’re voting on whether we should just kill the stranger or capture her and find out what’s different about her.  Which do you think?”

There was a time, Jilly was certain, that she would have felt as dispassionate about choosing the fate of another lioness as the females in the room with her.  But now, with emotions rioting in her mind for the first time in years, she was anything but detached.

But she knew that letting the females know that she’d been marked and claimed by the twin panthers would land her in a heap of trouble.  And judging by how harshly they were planning to deal with the strange lioness, she had no doubt that they would deal even more harshly with her.

“Capture.”  It was the lesser of two evils, but not by much.

Several females nodded, and a discussion began.  Layla got up and joined Jilly.  “Are you unwell, Jillian?”

She hated being called Jillian.  “I’m just tired.”

Layla looked at her calmly but suspiciously.  “You have not been sleeping well, and you’ve been distracted.  Are you feeling a craving for a male?”

Her mind blanked.  “What?”

“Sex.  You haven’t taken a male since you first shifted at sixteen.  There are humans in town who will service you if you have cravings for sex.”

Her stomach tumbled over at the thought of anyone but Fate and Wyked touching her.  “I’ll think about it.  I just want to go lie down for a while.”

“If you decide you need sex, I’ll have Hannah make the arrangements.”

Jilly nodded and walked out of the front room and to the bedroom she shared with two of the younger females, Claire and Penny.

Instead of changing for bed, she stuffed clothes into her backpack, grabbed her cell and keys, and then stuffed pillows under the blanket on her bed to make it look as though she was sleeping.  Opening the window of her first-floor bedroom, she climbed out, walking quickly to her car that was parked on the street in front of the house.  She didn’t care if the females found out she was gone.  She had no plans to return.

* * * * *

Fate stared into the fire that crackled in the stone-lined pit outside the camper.  Wyked was pacing again.  Fate had already paced a path around their campsite until his legs ached and his lungs burned.  Utterly numb, he was now simply staring into the flames and listening to the crackle of the fire as it licked the wood and destroyed it.

It had been a hell of a long day, and now his cat was going crazy in his head.  Prowling and yowling.  He wanted to jam sticks into his ears and poke the fucker to shut him up.  But he had a feeling that his cat wouldn’t be happy until Jilly was with them.  And when he finally did see her again, he would ask her how she’d managed to stay away from them for so long, because he was a basket case.

A twig snapped and he straightened as Wyked spun on his heels.  With a soft snarl, Wyked darted off into the darkness and Fate frowned, watching him disappear.

What.  The.  Fuck?

Then his cat purred and a sweet scent filled the air as Wyked stormed back into the campsite with a sobbing Jilly in his arms.

“Are you hurt?” Fate demanded as he joined them, putting his hands on her arm, desperate for any contact.

She lifted her head from Wyked’s shoulder and hooked her arm around Fate’s neck.  “Not now.  I was hurting so bad before.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.”  She sobbed and pulled him closer.

Wyked’s voice was deceptively calm as he spoke, “You’re here now, little kitten.  That’s all that matters.”

* * * * *

Jilly felt as though she’d died and gone to heaven as Wyked and Fate held her between them.  All the twirling emotions settled down inside her, and she could breathe deeply for the first time in a week.

Wyked carried her into what turned out to be their parents’ camper and set her down on a couch.  He and Fate sat on either side of her, squeezing close, and both holding one of her hands.  Before she’d met them, she would have been scratching and screaming to get away from two males touching her so intimately, but it felt right and she didn’t want to be anywhere but right there between them.

Dionne came out of a back room tying her robe closed.  “Jilly!  Are you alright?”

“I wasn’t.  But I think I am now.”

“Good, honey,” Dionne said.  She smiled as her husband Dag joined them.

“You came back,” Dag said.

“I feel like I didn’t have a choice.  Being away from Wyked and Fate was making me insane.  Now that I’m here, I can’t believe how long I waited.  I feel so foolish.”

Wyked’s voice cracked.  “Why did you run, kitten?”

She squeezed their hands tightly and told them what she’d been feeling.  Terrified of the new emotions.  The old memories.  The lies upon lies that the females had told her.  She really didn’t know what to believe at first, choosing to think of the instant attraction as an anomaly.  But each day was worse than the one before, until she couldn’t go five minutes without thinking of them.

“We wanted to come find you, but the blood-sharing seemed so weak,” Fate said.

“Was that my fault?  I was denying this.”

“Probably,” Dag said, sitting down in a kitchen chair that he pulled in front of the couch.  “But don’t worry.  We know what your history is and we understand why you acted the way you did.”

“You do?  Because I still don’t really understand.  I just knew that I had to come here.  Female lions don’t have mates and don’t form family bonds, but all of that feels like lies to me.  I couldn’t stop from coming back.  Now that I’m here, I’m sorry I left in the first place.”

Dionne sat down in another chair next to Dag.  “Hanai is on his way with his books.  He’ll help explain things, sweetheart.”

Happiness flooded Jilly as she sat between her mates.  They both watched her with a mixture of relief and worry, their hands holding onto hers tightly.  She hoped they weren’t worried she was going to take off again, because she had no intention of leaving their sides.

Dag stood and opened the door before Hanai even knocked, and their uncle stepped into the trailer with an armful of books.  Dionne and Dag took some of the books and laid them on a long coffee table in front of the couch, and then Dag pulled another chair over for Hanai.

“It’s nice to see you again.  Did the tea help your headache?”

Jilly nodded.  The packet he had given her when she left on Monday contained tea leaves, and she used the tea when she got home.  It eased some of the ache in her head, but hadn’t done anything for the lump in her throat or the tightness around her heart that leaving her mates had done to her.

Mates
.  Thinking the word — allowing herself to think it and accept it — was so freeing.

Hanai said, “I’m the clan historian.  History is my passion, but not human history.  I prefer to learn all that I can about the history of shifters.  My trailer is full of books I’ve collected over the years.  Do you know anything about panthers, Jilly?”

She shook her head.

He smiled.  “Panthers are nomads.  We form a clan of mostly family groups and travel as we please.  Down south for the winter and north for the summer.  From one coast to the other, from Canada down to Mexico.  The only reason we stop in any one place for an extended period of time is if one of our clan members finds his or her mate.  The male or female clan member can choose to stay with the mate after they bond and begin a new clan, or the mate can join our clan.  Fate and Wyked have been acting strange since we crossed into Pennsylvania some time ago.  It wasn’t until we arrived here that we began to understand they had found a connection to you because we are fairly close to where you live.”

Fate, who had turned slightly so he could look at her, touched her jaw with his fingers.  The contact made her shiver.  “We would have found you eventually, Jilly.  Our kind are hard-wired to naturally gravitate to their mates.  Even though we weren’t in charge of the direction the clan traveled, we did suggest coming to the mountains this summer.  I think that was our nature wanting us to be close enough to find you.”

She smiled at him.  “I don’t care how you got here.  I only care that you’re here now and I’m here, too.”  Her smile slipped some.  “I just don’t understand why we’re mates, though.  I was always told that female lions never mated because it was against our ways.  That the male lions were meant only for protection and procreation and to raise the next generation.  The females were meant to be carriers of the future generations, but always separate from the males, never together in a family unit.”

Fate and Wyked made her want to form a family.  Something she hadn’t wanted before.

Hanai nodded solemnly and picked up one of the books from the coffee table.  “I think I can explain about your people, Jilly.”  He opened the large, leather-bound book and turned the pages.  “When you left on Monday, I went straight to my library to find every book referencing mountain lions that I could.  Your kind are fairly unique in the shifter world, Jilly, with males and females who do not form family groups or ever mate together.”

Hanai turned the book around and handed it across the table to her.  Because Fate and Wyked wouldn’t let her hands go, they both grabbed the book with their free hands and set it on her lap.

The book felt like it was made of stone and was big enough to cover her entire lap.  The pages were yellowed with age.  Hanai handed other books to Dionne and Dag and instructed them to find the information about the mountain lions contained within.  Wyked tapped the page with his index finger.  She glanced at him and he said, “Read, little kitten.  It’s important.”