He sighed tiredly. “No.”
She dipped her head and kissed her way up his throat to his lips, brushing hers lightly across his hard mouth. “Then—make love me,” she whispered.
He rolled, carrying her with him and covering her mouth hungrily. Excitement shot through her as his tongue skated along hers, dueled, teasing the sensitive inner surfaces as his taste and scent filled her mouth, invading her mind like a heady drug. She’d known, she thought dreamily, that his kiss would be this good.
His hands, as he stroked her body, exploring every inch of her flesh and touching off flutters of eagerness in her, were gentle, loving, and exquisitely stirring all at once. She was already burning with need when he lifted his lips from hers at last and worshipped her body with them, nipping at her skin, lathing her with his tongue. A shuddering sigh escaped her as he burned a path along the center of her body to her belly, paused to strip her briefs from her and meandered upward again. Sucking one distended nipple into his mouth, he unfastened her top and caught the opposite breast in the palm of his hand, massaging it. Fire erupted along every nerve ending, sizzling, sparking and she moaned as her belly tightened with anticipation.
When he’d so thoroughly tormented each nipple in turn that she could scarcely catch her breath, she pushed at him, sprawling on top of him when he rolled to his back and lavishing her own brand of appreciation on his body. He jerked, jackknifing upright when she reached his belly and opened her mouth over the head of his cock, sucking the sensitive tip. Planting her hand in the center of his chest, she pushed him back. After a moment, he settled again, his hands gripping the sheets on either side of him tightly. He began to shake with the effort to remain still. A groan escaped him. Abruptly, he speared his fingers in her hair and tugged. When she released him, he dragged her back up the bed and kissed her deeply, feverishly, moving from her mouth, along her throat to her breasts. She gasped, moaned, parting her thighs and arching against him. “Ohh, Cain! Now! Please!”
For several moments, she thought he either hadn’t heard her or he’d chosen to ignore her plea. Finally, he released her nipple and covered her mouth once more, pressing the head of his cock against the mouth of her sex. She gasped into his mouth as he pushed inside of her, forcing her body to yield to him. Tearing her mouth from his, she arched her head into the pillow, pushing up to meet him. Her body tensed, pleasure coiling tightly inside of her as his turgid flesh slowly invaded, stroking the sensitive inner flesh and touching off waves of exhilaration.
Wrapping her arms around him, she moved her hands along his back, stroked his dark head as he set a pace that spiraled her higher and higher until her moans of appreciation became sharper, keener cries that bordered on screams. Suddenly, her culmination burst upon her in a blinding flash of ecstasy. He shuddered, began to thrust more quickly, bringing his own crisis thundering down upon him.
They lay locked together for some time afterwards, each reluctant to sever their joining. Finally, Cain lifted slightly away from her, moving his cock slowly in and out of her almost playfully. Amaryllis opened her eyes a fraction to look up at him, her lips curling. “It feels sooo good to have you inside of me,” she murmured lazily. “I would just as soon you stay.”
His features went taut and Amaryllis felt him filling her, his cock growing hard. Her eyes widened as his thrusts became more purposeful. The heat that hadn’t even completely dissipated began to rise inside her, as well. Within moments, she found her body hovering once more on the edge of the precipice. When she came again, it was harder, more explosive, longer than the first time and dragged a keening cry from her throat.
She was so sated afterwards, she was barely conscious when he rolled off of her and gathered her against his chest. She drifted lazily for a time, half asleep, half awake. She had no idea of how long, but the room grew dim as the day waned.
She stirred after a while, hearing footsteps in the hallway. Cain’s arm tightened around her as the door opened. There was a significant pause and then the door closed again.
Smiling, she pressed a kiss against Cain’s chest, whereupon he rolled her onto her back and made love to her again, teasing her endlessly until she could no longer keep it inside of her and cried out in rapture.
Reese was no less attentive to her needs when he came to her the following night. Nor did Dante stint on displaying his affection. After nearly a week and half, Amaryllis was so exhausted from her lovers’ eager attention that she didn’t even go down on the evenings that were hers for fear one or the other might take it as an invitation.
It was merely by chance, therefore, that she discovered the rivalry between her men had been taken onto an entirely different field—hers. She didn’t know whether to be more amused or irritated to discover that they were vying to see who could make her ‘sing’ the loudest and the longest. She also didn’t know how they finally determined a winner, but she was obliged to consider herself the primary winner in the contest.
Whatever the case, a tentative bond formed between them and if Reese and Cain continued to occasionally butt heads, those occasions were fewer and further between and fairly mild compared to some of their earlier disputes.
Somehow, though, true contentment continued to elude her and she was finally forced to face the demons she’d been trying so hard to keep at bay, the demons Reese, and Dante, and Cain had helped her banish to the furthest reaches of her subconscious by their demands upon her and their loving attention to her needs.
Cain had woken her fears on the day they’d argued and it was he who brought her whole world crashing down around her once more the night he felt the child stir beneath his palm.
They’d made love until the wee hours and Amaryllis was more than nine tenths asleep when he sat up abruptly and stared down at her belly.
“I felt it.”
“Mmm?” she asked drowsily.
“The child. I felt it move.”
Amaryllis was instantly as wide awake as if he’d tossed a pail of cold water over her. She didn’t react or respond in any way. She was too frozen with shock even to think for several moments. Finally, she’d merely rolled onto her side and pretended sleep and after a while he’d lain down again.
She was more glad than she would ever have imagined when she finally woke from an exhausted sleep some time later to discover that Cain had gone. Feeling vaguely ill, she’d climbed from the bed and moved to the mirror to study herself, but she couldn’t tell that her belly was any bigger than it had been the last time she’d noticed.
She covered her face with her hands, realizing she’d been lying to herself so long that she simply couldn’t face the truth. No solution was going to come to her whether she worried it over in her mind constantly, or tried to ignore the problem by pushing it to the back of her mind as she’d been doing for weeks now. Therewasno out. She could feel the child move.
She didn’t remember nearly as much about her mother’s later pregnancies as she needed to know, but she did know that she was well beyond termination. Whatever she did now, she would be risking her own life as well as the child’s.
But didn’t she owe it to the child to do her best for it? Why should it have to suffer because she was a coward? Her own life was certainly no more valuable than the child’s.
She cupped a hand over her belly when she felt a slight flutter, as if the child had heard her thoughts and was responding. What would the cyborgs do if it wasn’t normal? Would they be as repelled as her own kind were? More repelled? Despite their human side, logic ruled them. Would they decide it was best to terminate it on the spot?
What would the child want? Would it want life anyway? Or would it spend much of its life hating—hating itself for being malformed; hating her for bringing it into world; hating everyone else for the horror it saw in their eyes whenever they looked at it?
She hadn’t. There had been times when she’d thought she did. There’d been times when she’d felt like she hated the whole universe, but her parents had loved her, and her brothers and sisters had accepted her and loved her.
She moved back to the bed after a while and sat down to try to think calmly. Was she just being paranoid? Was she just frightening herself because of what had happened to her, or was the possibility real?
