Only Pleasure (46 page)

A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Kia stepped out of her parents' limo, her little shopping bag rolled up carefully in her overlarge purse and her heart lighter than it had been in years.

She was still bruised. Her face was healing, but she looked like a human punching bag beneath the makeup. Her mother and aunt had known the right person to call to help cover the bruising so she could finish her Christmas shopping.

"I'm walking you to the elevator," her father informed her, coming out of the limo as the chauffeur helped her out. "You should have let me call Chase and let him know you were here."

He was frowning at her steadily, watching her as though she were an invalid.

"When are you going to accept I'm fine, Daddy?" She smiled up at him, though she held on to his arm, mostly because he kept putting her hand back there.

"When that bruise on the side of your face heals. When I stop having nightmares over seeing you on the gurney, being loaded into an ambulance, too hurt to protest it."

She grimaced. "Fine. Do you want to go upstairs with me?"

"I'll let you do that on your own." He grunted. "I remember the last time I came upstairs without letting Chase know."

Kia almost laughed, and flushed instead. Her father had walked in on them as Chase was stalking her around the living room. She had been dressed. Chase hadn't been.

"But I'm not with him." She laughed.

"Why tempt fate?" her father growled. "That boy ain't near as pretty naked as he is dressed."

No, but he was a damned sight sexier naked. Kia kept that thought to herself.

She let her father open the elevator and check it out before she stepped inside.

"Love you, Daddy," she told him with a wide smile as he closed the barred door.

"Love you, sweetie," he told her as the elevator slid silently to the second floor.

She held her purse in her hands, her presents tucked securely into it, and let a frown flit across her brow. She had been out of the hospital for over a week, and her injuries hadn't been more serious than a few deep bruises. Still, Chase was treating her like an invalid.

And she could feel the tension growing in him, and in herself, she thought. She hadn't believed him when he told her that the hunger for the pleasures he had shown her wouldn't go away. That she would need the third he could bring to their bed as much as he would need to see her with one.

But it was growing, rising, and nothing else was stilling the knowledge of what Chase needed, or the knowledge of what she was growing to need as well.

It was a strange feeling, loving Chase as she did, to the very bottom of her soul, and realizing that they were sharing a need that they should have considered abnormal.

His need to see another man take her. Her need to be taken as he watched. To stare into his eyes, to be touched along every inch of her body at the time, to be taken in ways that could be achieved only with that third.

There were times that the thought of it still wasn't comfortable, but the hunger for it was growing.

When the elevator stopped, she stepped outside, then paused, listening. She could hear a male grunting, a curse, a less than polite insult.

She moved to the doorway, peeked around it, and her eyes widened in shock and surprise.

"Dammit, Chase, this bastard still isn't straight." Khalid cursed as he struggled to hold upright a huge, at least eight-and-a-half-foot tall live Christmas tree. "How the hell did you manage to talk me into this insanity? Why couldn't you do as I did and simply hire someone for this?"

"Hell, maybe I don't have Daddy's megabucks like you do," Chase snapped irritably from where he lay, stretched out on his back, beneath the tree. "Straighten it and hold it steady so I can lock it in here."

"Steady it? Have you lost your senses, Falladay? You didn't buy a tree, you bought a damned forest with this monster."

"Khalid, steady the damned tree or I'm kicking your ass off the fucking balcony. It's a long way down."

Khalid grimaced, struggling to hold the tree in place and keep it straight as Chase did whatever he was doing to keep it from shifting and Khalid from cursing.

It was a monster Christmas tree. Beautiful, with huge, full, dark-green branches. Around it was a multitude of Christmas decorations, strands of lights, and even a few wrapped boxes.

It was a week before Christmas, and Kia had forgotten about the tree. She hadn't forgotten about the present. It was the reason for her trip out with her parents today, because the present was for Chase, and he had dug his heels in at the thought of her going alone.

"There. Okay, let's try it," Chase announced from beneath the tree.

Khalid's expression was skeptical, though he let go of the huge fir slowly, watching it critically, then he gave it a little nudge when it obviously wasn't toppling to the floor.

Chase slid from beneath the branches. There was a scratch on his cheek, his dark hair was mussed, and he hadn't shaved that morning. He looked like a too sexy pirate, and she wanted a bite of him, desperately.

Khalid looked around the room. "Please tell me you hired someone to decorate this monstrosity." He shuddered in a mock attempt at fear. "Otherwise, I'm going to fear for your sanity."

"Start fearing," Chase muttered as he stepped around the tree, studied it, and stepped back to the front. "Okay, it's straight. We can start on the lights."

Khalid appraised him coolly. "You may start on that alone. I believe I'll grab a beer and merely watch."

"Fine, I'll yell at your chauffeur and his little coffee sidekick and see if they want to help me."

Khalid paused.

"You wouldn't be so cruel."

Chase grunted at that. "You know, Khalid, you're getting lazy," he pointed out. "A Christmas tree wouldn't have fazed you last year."

"Not lazy, merely more efficient." Khalid smiled and stared at the tree. "Perhaps I'm allergic to evergreens."

"I'll get you some antihistamine," Chase promised, entirely unconcerned. "Now, where the hell do we start on these lights?"

"This will have benefits, correct?" Khalid bent and plucked a twig off the floor. "A nice Christmas present? Something besides your normal can of cookies that you present each year?"

Chase frowned. "They're good cookies."

"They're cheap cookies, Chase," Khalid pointed out. "I priced them. Under five dollars. It's an insult."

"Beats that lump of coal you had wrapped in the box you gave me last year," Chase snarled. "And what the hell are you doing pricing my Christmas presents?"

Khalid's brow lifted. "I, of course, need to know whether or not to purchase the coal, which, I will remind you, now costs more than your can of cookies, or whether I should get more extravagant and actually put myself out in the choosing of your present." Khalid made a pretense of studying the ceiling.

"Don't put yourself out," Chase said irritably. "You might strain something."

Kia was on the verge of giggles. She couldn't help it. She couldn't believe the two of them. Staring at that tree, obviously procrastinating, dreading the work of arranging the lights so much that they were arguing instead.

Enough torture was enough, though.

"I know how to put the lights on." She stepped around the corner, dropping her purse on the table by the doorway and grinning back at them.

Tension immediately filled the room, and it wasn't just sexual.

Khalid, casually elegant in dark silk slacks and a shirt, tensed, almost dangerously. His black eyes hardened for a moment, his expression tightening as Chase turned quickly to her.

Something wasn't right.

She stared back at the two of them, feeling dread creeping inside her. There was an air of something here, something she could see in Chase's eyes that could hurt her.

Foreboding swept over her. Had she been reading him wrong? Had she somehow mistaken his lust for something deeper, after all?

He had told her he loved her, just that morning. Surely he hadn't changed his mind, no longer than it had taken her to go shopping?

She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin.

"Well, perhaps I should have eavesdropped a bit longer." She stepped fully into the room. "How is it that a woman always knows when a man, or men, as the case may be, are hiding something?"

She didn't back down when it came to Chase. She had always backed down in her marriage, always given Drew his way. She didn't do that with Chase. She wasn't going to start now.

Chase grimaced. "I'm not hiding a damned thing except your Christmas present." He shot Khalid a warning glance as the other man moved to the kitchen and pulled one of the horribly expensive beers he preferred from the refrigerator.

"It's a very nice present, too," Khalid said in an attempt at humor that fell ridiculously fiat. "Much better than a tin of cookies."

He stared at the beer before lifting it and taking a drink.

Kia watched Chase suspiciously as he moved to her and gave her a soft, lingering kiss. "We wanted to surprise you with the tree." He smiled, but there was something in his eyes when he looked back at Khalid that had her breathing in deeply, and it had nothing to do with his need to share her with the other man.

"I'll have you know, I never buy tins of cookies." She moved farther into the room, stepping over decorations and multicolored lights. "I'm not stupid either. What's up with you two?"

Khalid glanced at Chase broodingly, and Kia only barely caught the subtle little shake of Chase's head.

"Keeping secrets from me?" she asked the two of them. "Shame on you."

She turned back to Chase as she reached the cleared area of the floor and looked between the two men.

"Khalid has issues." Chase shrugged.

"So it would appear," she said. "Am I allowed to be nosy?"

"No." It was Chase who answered.

Kia's brows arched. "I think I will be anyway."

She barely caught Chase's muttered curse.

"He's a part of our lives," she told Chase "For however long that lasts. I don't like secrets, Chase. You promised to let me know about anything that can even remotely affect me."

And something here was getting ready to affect her.

"She has to know." Khalid set his beer softly on the counter, his expression brooding as he looked back at Chase, then to Kia. "It's time, Chase."

"Hell." Chase rubbed at the back of his neck. "You and your fucking guilt complex."

Khalid's lips twisted in a mock grin. "Am I not lucky that I so rarely feel guilt?"

Kia sat down slowly in the chair beside her, crossed her legs, and waited. She wasn't demanding anything more, but Chase knew that tilt to her chin, that expression on her face. The truth would come out, or she would find ways to remind him that he was withholding something from her, and they wouldn't be notes taped around the apartment.

Seeing her hurt again, even in the slightest, enraged him. Knowing Khalid had the power to sear the pride and confidence he saw in her could make him violent.

Chase moved protectively behind her, standing behind her chair, aware of the tension that filled her as Khalid moved to the couch, sitting within feet of her and staring back at her as she turned and watched him silently.

For Khalid, it was one of the most difficult tasks of his life. He stared into Kia's bright blue eyes and saw the fears that shadowed them. She was so used to being struck, to being forced to defend her tender emotions, that, even now, she was preparing herself to defend against another.

Hell, he hadn't meant to do this. He had meant to forever keep it from her, one small burden he could have kept from falling on her fragile shoulders.

"It's normally easier if you just strike hard and fast," she told him quietly. "I actually handle that better."

He grimaced.

Khalid was suave, smooth, charismatic, and completely male. Even now, facing her with something he obviously didn't want to tell her, the savage contours of his face and wicked black eyes stood out in sharp relief.

"I would rather prefer to bleed to death than to hurt one such as you," he said finally, sighing.

Kia frowned back at him. "What exactly is 'one such as me'?"

His lips twisted down. "A woman of strength and courage. One who knew to kick her husband in the balls when he was otherwise occupied in his struggle to keep the third from strangling the life from him."

It took her a moment. She stared at him, the knowledge slamming into her, that night flashing before her eyes.

The utter terror of being touched by someone she didn't know, someone whose face she couldn't see. But whose guttural, enraged curse she heard as he jerked Drew away from her.

"It was you," she whispered, suddenly aware of Chase's hands on her shoulders, comforting, his body tense. "You were the one with Drew that night."

Khalid caught her hands, and only then did she realize she was gripping them together tight enough to leave the impressions of her nails in the skin.

He lifted them, touched his lips to her clenched knuckles, and watched her, a hint of sorrow in his dark gaze.

"I had no idea you did not know I would be there," he told her. "I thought you had agreed to the experience, little one. I never imagined the lengths Drew would go to in forcing such a thing upon you. I do not ask for your forgiveness. Only that when you remember I was a part of such pain and fear, that you would try not to know true hatred for me."

She shook her head.

"I understand if this is something you cannot do." He laid her hands gently in her lap. "I should have refused to be Chase's third, but in my own defense, I had to know, to be there, to ensure you knew only the greatest of pleasure and not even a hint of the fear that once filled you." He moved to rise to his feet. "I will leave you now."

"No!" She gripped his arm, staring back at him as he sat back down slowly. "You saved me."

He lowered his dark head and shook it. "I was the reason for your fear."

"And if it had been someone else?" He had been the one who had kept Drew from actually raping her. "Would they have forced him to let me go? Would they have called my father and had him come for me?"