Dante got up jerkily and took one of the eggs, gulping it down almost whole. His brows lifted. “It is good,” he said, swallowing convulsively again as he turned to her.
His gaze didn’t meet hers, however. It zoomed in on her breasts and stayed there.
Amaryllis shifted. Sitting forward, she smoothed the fabric over her thighs. His gaze followed the movement and moved with her when she sat back again.
Maybe she’d misinterpreted their reaction, she thought a little hopefully? Maybe they were just surprised, not horrified, or embarrassed for her.
Neither Reese nor Cain had so much as moved. When she glanced at Reese, he blinked again, slowly, frowned and looked around as if he was trying to figure out where he was.
Cain very casually crossed his legs, but not before she noticed the hard ridge lifting his loincloth.
Smiling inwardly, she relaxed fractionally. “I should have gotten everyone drinks. I’ll be right back.”
When she returned, the three had pulled up a table and were half-heartedly attempting to sort through a game. They were still behaving strangely, but she saw when she met Reese’s gaze that the thoughts running through his mind were all carnal.
Pleased with herself, she set the drinks out for everyone and settled on the couch once more, crossing her legs and lightly swinging the upper one.
When they’d cleaned the tray of eggs, the game got underway at last. Amaryllis didn’t have much interest in that particular game, however. The looks they’d been giving her had fired her blood and she was far more interested in seeing how long it would take them to act on the desire she could see boiling inside of them—all three of them.
They were paying far more attention to the movement of her leg and the sway of her breasts caused by the movement than they were the cards. When it came her turn to discard, she leaned forward and tossed down two cards. Sitting back again, she uncrossed her legs and set her feet on the edge of the table, fanning her knees instead. The third time she parted her thighs, Cain shot to his feet so abruptly, his chair screeched as it slid across the floor.
Reese came to his feet almost simultaneously. The two men exchanged a look. More slowly, Dante rose. Abruptly, Cain muttered that he was going for a walk and strode from the room. Without a word, Reese crossed to her. Leaning down, he scooped her from the couch. Amaryllis let out a gurgling laugh. “What are you doing?”
His lips curled up at one corner. “I will show you.”
Dante followed. Reese paused at the foot of the stairs. The brothers exchanged a look and then the three of them proceeded up the stairs.
Chapter Twenty Six
Amaryllis felt positively decadent when she woke halfway through the morning the following day. Ordinarily, she would’ve bounded out of the bed guiltily as soon as she realized she’d slept so late, but she realized she felt very little guilt over it. She had not, in point of fact, done that much sleeping.
She smiled dreamily at the memory. It had been the first time the three of them had played together since that first night and she realized she’d almost forgotten how good it felt to have both them at the same time.
The only fly in her soup was the fact that Cain hadn’t seemed interested in joining them.
He’d definitely been interested, though. She was certain she hadn’t been mistaken about that. She wasn’t as certain that it was her in particular that he wanted, but at least she did know that he wasn’t immune to her.
She frowned thoughtfully, but she was fairly certain that neither Dante nor Reese would have warned him away from her—and just as certain that, even if they’d tried it, Cain would’ve ignored it. In fact, it seemed that something like that would’ve made him more determined to have her.
She pondered over the possibilities for a while but finally decided that that was a dead end. He wouldn’t talk to her and she didn’t know him well enough to figure it out without some input from him.
He was needy, though. She was positive about that, and just as certain that he was unlikely to find it outside his contract. He simply didn’t strike her as the type to willfully breach—besides which all the females were spoken for—several times over.
She was just going to have to keep battering at him until he caved in. That was all there was to it. Maybe, once he’d had a little relief, whatever it was that was eating him would go away, and even if it didn’t, he would surely be more open with her and they’d be able to work it out.
The best way to start, she decided, would be to put him in the position of not being able to avoid her. As long as he could avoid her, he would, and whatever was bothering him would only fester and get worse.
Throwing the covers off, she rolled out of bed and went to bathe. She debated briefly over what to wear but finally decided to go with the typical dress. A glimpse now and then of the veils would keep all of them more interested than seeing it all the time.
That thought led to an epiphany. Maybe she should try her hand at designing clothing? She didn’t know how to make them, but if shecouldcome up with ideas, she could ask Reese to design ‘bots for her to do the actual labor of making them. As far as she’d seen, there was no one on the planet to fill that particular niche, and with a quarter of the population female, there would almost certainly be a demand for it.
Cain, she discovered when she’d searched the house thoroughly, had made himself scarce. “Coward,” she muttered, plunking her hands on her hips irritably.
Balked of that possibility, she decided to try her hand at her idea and went into the study. She couldn’t jack in, of course, which was a real pain in the ass and made for slow going since she had to depend upon voice response and visual. The computer did have access to design programming, but, not surprisingly, none of it dealt with fashion.
Unfazed, since she really hadn’t expected it to anyway, she set to work streamlining a program that would. She was still working on it when Cain came in.
He stopped as abruptly as if he’d encountered a force field. If he hadn’t, Amaryllis wasn’t certain she would even have noticed him, she was so deeply into what she was doing. As it was, shehadcompletely forgotten what had brought her downstairs to begin with. She glanced at him absently. “You needed the computer?”
