Page 16 of Incoronate
I needed to get a grip. I needed to remember why we were doing this in the first place. That this wasn’t about want or heat or the way my body responded to his touch. This was about safety. About making sure I didn’t walk out that door and hurt someone again.
I desperately needed to get it the fuck together, but I didn’t know how to do that. Not when his hands were touching my skin the way they were. Or when Trace was watching me from across the way, his chest rising and falling too quickly, his eyes locked on me with an intensity that made focusing on anything else impossible.
Finally, Dominic pulled back, climbing off the bed with the same easy command of his body that he’d used to get on it. He took the end of the chain and moved to the bedpost, winding it around the thick wood as though he’d done it hundreds of times before.
Trace stepped forward to help, and together they secured it, testing the hold to make sure it wouldn’t slip. That I wouldn’t be able to pull free no matter how hard I tried.
When they finished, I was well and truly trapped.
“Now what?” asked Trace, his voice rough.
“Now we sleep,” answered Dominic, as if that was even remotely possible.
Trace’s eyes flicked to me, lingering on my exposed thighs where my shirt had ridden up before drifting to the cuffs holding my wrists above my head. He dragged his tongue over his bottom lip without seeming to realize he was doing it. “On the bed?” he asked, gruffer than before.
Dominic’s smile was slow and devious. “It’s the safest place for her. We need to be close if the voices return.” He paused, letting his eyes rove over me. “Very close.”
Heat stirred low in my stomach.
My breathing turned shallow as I watched Trace reach for the hem of his shirt and pull it over his head, revealing the hard planes of his chest and stomach, the muscles moving and flexing beneath his skin as he tossed the shirt aside. My mouth went dry at the sight of him.
I dragged my gaze away before I could embarrass myself any further, only for it to land on Dominic as he reached up and began unbuttoning his shirt one unhurried button at a time, like a man who knew exactly what the sight of him was doing to me and was in no rush to put an end to it. One by one, the buttons came undone, revealing inch after inch of smooth, taut skin. He shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor as I fruitlessly tried to remember how to breathe.
Oh. My. Word.
Leaning over the end table, he switched off the lamp and plunged the room into darkness.
“Sweet dreams, angel.”
The mattress dipped on either side of me a moment later as they climbed into bed, Trace on my left, Dominic on my right, the three of us settling into a configuration that was going to test every last thread of my self-control tonight. I stared up at the ceiling in the dark, trying very hard not to focus on the fact that they were both half-naked in my bed while I was chained up and helpless between them, and failing spectacularly at every step of it.
The harder I tried not to focus on them, the louder everything else in the room became. The sound of ragged, uneven breathing. The intoxicating scent of spiced chocolate and whiskey. The way their bodies bracketed mine on either side, leaving almost no space between us at all.
My thighs pressed together involuntarily, a deep, insistent ache blooming low in my belly and refusing to be reasoned with. I couldn’t tell if it was mine or theirs or the spell braidingall of it together into something I had no hope of untangling or controlling.
“Angel.” Dominic’s clipped voice cut through the darkness, smooth as honey but wrapped in something darker. Almost scolding. The sound of it moved over my skin like liquid heat, igniting every nerve ending in my body.
“What?” I asked breathily.
“We can feel you.”
“Feel me what?” I asked, confused.
“Your arousal.”
My breath stopped cold in my lungs as heat blazed across my face so intense I was certain they could see it even in the moonlit darkness. Especially with their heightened sense.
I didn’t know if I wanted to scream, cry, beg, or die of shame on the spot.
“What do you want me to do about it? I’m not doing it on purpose,” I defended, my voice coming out breathless and unconvincing, even to my own ears. “And it’s not like either of you are helping.”
“Perhaps that’s because we’ve no interest in helping you resist what your body is clearly begging us for.”
“That isn’t what I…I’m not…my body isn’t—”
Trace shifted beside me, his lips brushing against the side of my neck and dissolving whatever excuse I’d been fumbling for. “We can make you feel better,” he murmured, his baritone like smoke against my ear. “If you want us to.”
My body responded traitorously to the promise in his tone, to the offer hanging in the air between us, dangerous and tempting and terrifying in equal measure. But somewhere deep beneath the heat, beneath the want, beneath the spell humming its approval, there was also fear curling tightly and watchful inside my chest.
