He pulled himself out of me, with a laugh and a shudder. I gave one last, soft cry, and collapsed to my side, with him curled around me. We lay there, relearning how to breathe, and only then did I look out into the night and see Truth standing in the starlight.
58
TRUTH STOOD THERE with his serious eyes, and his dark hair in contrast to his brother’s. He stared at us with gray eyes and a face that was a match for his brother’s under the partial beard that hid that nice jawline and let him be a little more invisible than Wicked.
I expected him to look away, our modest Truth, but he didn’t. He looked at us, his face cold and pale in the starlight with that edge of dark hair. He looked at us, and there was something I’d never seen on Truth’s face: hunger. He looked at us like a starving man, or maybe a drowning one.
Wicked ran his hand down the front of my body, uncurling my legs so that the front of me was bare to his brother’s eyes.
I started to tell him to stop teasing his brother, but the words died unspoken because Truth was walking toward us. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, and his black T-shirt followed. Their upper bodies were almost identical, broad and strong; only a long curving scar, shiny with age, showed a difference. His hands were at his belt when I tried again to say something. It was when he dropped his gun, holster and all, on the ground without a backward glance that I knew something was wrong. Truth and Wicked were always careful of their weapons, always.
I started to say something, but his hands were at his belt and the pants were peeling back, and I found that it wasn’t just their upper bodies that were almost identical.
I said, “Truth,” and I felt it then. The ardeur wasn’t gone. When I fed, it went back to sleep, always, unless it had spread to others in the room. But I had to touch someone to have it spread like that. Truth had been too far away, but even as I tried to think that logic all the way through, he was balancing on one leg to pull off first one boot, then the other, and he was in front of us, spilling his pants over his ankles and stepping out of them.
Still lying on the ground, held against his brother’s body, I stared up at him. I had a moment to decide how I felt about that, and then he was kneeling beside us, reaching for me.
I managed to say, “Truth,” and then he pulled me away from Wicked and spilled me to my back. I was left gazing up at him. He fell on top of me, putting his mouth to mine, and kissed me as if he would climb inside and flow down my throat. I kissed him back, kissed him with mouth and arms around his back, tracing his spine, spilling down to the swell of his body where waist ended and other things began. I couldn’t reach beyond that; he was too tall.
He kissed me, long and hard, until soft, protesting noises spilled out of his lips, then he rose off me, too tall to both kiss me and make love to me. He spread my thighs with the strength of his hands. I had a moment to see all that hard, thick length, and then Wicked’s hand was there, holding a condom.
Truth made a sound, low in his throat, but he took it and put it on. By the time he was finished he was making a sound that was almost a growl, low and persistent. Eagerness did not begin to describe that sound in a man’s throat. He pressed all that safely sheathed length against me. I watched him push himself inside me, one inch at a time. Just watching him slide inside me threw my head back and made me cry out. I could see the night sky and a million stars dancing overhead as Truth pushed his way inside me.
He kept himself propped above me, back on his knees, so that almost the only thing that touched me was the long, slide of flesh that kept going in and out of me.
I cried his name to the stars, and he began to pound himself inside me, harder, faster, his breathing growing ragged as he began to lose his rhythm. I stared up at his body above mine, his eyes looking out into the night and not at me. I started to tell him to look at me, but the orgasm caught me unawares, and I was left screaming, shrieking, hands reaching for any part of him I could, tracing my pleasure in his flesh. He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted my lower body off the ground as he made that last hard, shuddering thrust, burying himself as deep inside my body as he could, as he spilled inside me and the ardeur fed.
I fed not just on the sex and the soft sweat of him, but on the fear in him. He’d been afraid of the ardeur since Belle Morte gave him a taste centuries ago. So afraid, yet it had caught him again, caught him in the desert night under a shine of stars and the sweet scent of naked bodies. He collapsed forward, still on his knees, his hands locked around my body, his head falling forward against my breasts. I managed to touch his hair; it was finer than Wicked’s, fine and silky under my hands.