Elemental Pleasure (9 page)

She closed and locked the door. Leaning against the cool wood, she almost slid to the floor. It was
only
an act of sheer will that allowed her to keep her footing and make her way to the bathroom and the shower. She turned the dial to scalding and got in, letting the hot water beat down on her.

The first sob caught her by surprise. Carly braced her hands on the wall and leaned forward so the jets hit the back of her head.

She cried until she was empty, until she
was no longer shaking
.

Stumbling from the shower, she pulled on her clothes and sat on the side of the bed.

What was she going to do?

Last night was
the best sex of her
life
and that was the problem.

S
he’d lost herself. S
he wasn’t the kind of woma
n who let men—or anyone, for that matter—make decisions for her. They’d manipulated he
r, using her desire, her needs
, against her. They’d treated her like she was a sex toy they were fighting over and then decided to share, and she’d let them do it.

She didn
’t mind the sex. It was amazing
and she’d willingly do all of it again. No, the problem wasn’t that. It was the way they’d acted. They hadn’t treated her like a partner. They’d tr
eated her like a glorified blow-
up
doll.

She told th
em she didn’t want to be put in
between the two of them, and yet that’s exactly what had happened.

And she’d done nothing to stop them.

Carly wasn’t sure she if she was more angry with them or with herself, but she was furious. And terrified she’d let them do it all again.

She had to leave.

She didn’t care what power the Trinity Masters had, she wouldn’t be a part of this. The sex was good and Lance and Preston were hot, but she wouldn’t be some mindless fuck toy they used to manipulate each other…and her.

Pushing to her feet, she grimaced as her abused muscles protested. Carly placed her suitcase on the bed a
nd threw in her clothes. S
he tucked her
cell phone
in her pocket and put her hands-free set on her ear. Using voice command
,
she dialed the airline, changing her plane reservations as she finished packing.

Ready to go, she paused. As angry as she was, it felt wrong to walk away without saying anything, so she dashed
off a note on the hotel statione
ry, apologizing for her necessary departure. Then she opened the door as quietly as she could, placed the note on the bar and left.

~~~~

Chapter
Six

Lance folded his arms,
his
jaw clenched. He’d woken up next to Preston, which had been m
ore than a little disconcerting,
and discovered Carly missing. They’d gone looking for her, only to find a note saying
she had returned to California
and that she couldn’t be a part of their trinity.

“You scared her,” Lance said,
eyes on Preston as the other ma
n read the letter once more.

“I think we both did.”

Lance snorted.

Preston put the letter down and pinned him with a calm, dark gaze. “You’
ve made it abundantly clear
you don’t want to be a part of this relationship.”

Lance opened his mouth, but shook his head. That wasn’t really true, but he didn’t know how to explain the anger that had come when he’d felt like he was losing control.

“Perhaps you need to be reminded what you took on when you joined the Trinity Masters.”

“I know
the rules
and I know I’d be dead without them.”

That seemed to take Preston by surprise. “Dead?”

“I joined while I was in college. A girl in the Marine
s
got me involved. I—” Lance shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I have trouble following orders if I don’t understand them.”

Preston tipped his head to the side and considered Lance. “I assume that’s not a valued trait in
a
Marine.”

“No. I
t’s not. But the Trinity Master
s stepped in. I was an offic
er going in, but if not for their influence;
I would have been out with a team, stomping through
the desert. They made sure
my skills were put to better use.”

“And what are your skills
?
”

“Math.”

Preston blinked,
a slow grin spread
ing
across his face. “You’re a mathematician?”

“Yes. For DARPA.”

His brows rose. “Damn if I’m not impressed.”

Lance looked away, not entirely comfortable with the praise.

“If you’re good with numbers, I have a financial report back in California that could use some translating.”

“Unless you need a massive mathematical simulation run on it, that’s a bit below my pay grade.”

“Of course.
I was only joking.”

There was a moment of silence,
but this one was less tense than previous one
s.

“Is that why you were so resistant?” Preston asked. “It was an order you weren’t sure if you should follow?”

That was close to the truth, and Lance nodded, relieved he wouldn’t have to try to explain himself.

“What do you do?” Lance was suddenly curious as to who and what Preston was. Of the three of them, only Preston seemed totall
y comfortable with the fact
he’d just been bound to two people he’d never met.

“Well, most relevant to our current state of affairs, I’m a Trinity Masters legacy.”

“A what?”

Lance sat on the couch, listening as Preston explained that his parents, all three of them, were members of the Trinity Masters. He found himself admiring Preston’s poise. His first impression of the other man had convinced him Preston was calculating, controlling, cold. Now
,
Lance could see he’d been mistaken. Preston was smart—serio
usly smart—and confident. H
e knew how to handle things in an efficient way Lance couldn’t.

“Do you want to go get a drink?” Preston asked.

“Yeah.” Lance went to his room and grabbed a coat. When he came back, he asked, “What are we going to do about Carly?”

Lance realized he was deferring to Preston the way he would to a superior officer. As soon as the thought shot through his brain, Lance relaxed. He shouldn’t have been surprised. In the heat of the moment last night
,
they’d worked well together. Preston had a better understanding of what was expected of them
, what the potential traps were
and how to negotiate a successful outcome. As far as Lance was concerned
,
that meant Preston needed to take the lead.

“Let’s talk about that over a drink.”

Nodding, Lance followed him out of the suite.

*****

Carly lay back in the tub. She had aromatherapy bath salts in the water, cal
ming candles burning all around
and cello music playing.

Despite that, her mind was whirling, shifting betwe
en angry, sad, confused and arou
s
ed.

In short, she had no idea how she felt. By the time she landed in San Francisco, she’d been ashamed
of herself for running, yet certain
she
ha
d made the right choice. She needed to
get away from Lance and Preston
to ground herself. When she had run from Boston, she’d seriously been ready to back
out of the d
eal, to disobey
the
laws of
the Trinity Masters and refuse
the partners the Grand Master had picked for her, but she couldn’t do it.

She would lose everything.

That price was too high. As tumultuous as their encounter had been, it wasn’t worth giving up everything. Her best hope was to ask the Grand Master for a new match, to make it clear she wasn’t disobeying, but that she was trying to keep herself sane. She couldn’t go through the rest of her life being treated like a sex toy they’d decided to share. She had a company to run, an entire industry to pioneer. Her value as a computer programmer and an innovator must be high enough that he would find her other partners rather than risk her falling apart.

The thought was bittersweet. She
refused to participate in a relationship where
Lance and Preston were at each ot
her’s throats all the time. Well, e
xcept
, of course,
when they were fucking her. Once they’d agreed to share, they seemed to get
along just fine. It had been she
who’d had a problem with what was happening, a problem she’d done nothing about, said nothing abo
ut, because she’d been too turn
ed
on
to think straight.

It was amazing the stupid things people would do for the sake of pleasure. All Carly had to do was read the news—o
r the gossip blogs—to know
terrible decisions were made every day for the sake of lust. Labeling it love didn’t make it any more legitimate. While she might have thought she was above that, yesterday made it clear she wasn’t.

She sighed in regret. If
things were different, if they woul
d
agree to
treat her like an equal in the bedroom as well as outside it, Carly would be the luckiest woman on earth. She
certainly
couldn’t have asked for two hotter, sexier men.

The image of Lance between her legs, his cock sliding in and out as Preston touched her made her dip her hand under the water. Pressing her knees against the sides of the tub
, she opened her thighs and push
ed her fingers into her sex. She was
roused
by
the memory of it, and with a few quick strokes, she came, whispering their names in the silence of her mind.

When her heartbeat slowed, she rose from the tub. The orgasm had done more to calm her than the candles or music. Toweling off
,
she vowed to put the men out of her mind. She was going back to work tomorrow. Somehow she would get in touch with the Grand Master to make her request.

Until then, she had the memory of their hands and mouths—and a vibrator—to get her through.

*****

Carly slipped her headphones off, letting them dangle around her neck like a stethoscope. Like a doctor
,
she’d been diagnosing, but in this case, it was the most technologically advanced RPG on the market, not a person.

Nexus Six had taken the world by storm, as players bored with games that could be beaten with walkthroughs, and whose interactive features mostly centered on character customizations, flocked to her game. No two players, and no two games, were ever the same.

Nexus Six was in the middle of beta-testing the next version of their signature game,
End Times
, which would elevate it to a new level. They were taking the ever-changing world they’d created and adding multi-player features. Solo players loved the complexity of
End Times
, but those who loved MMORPG—massive mul
tiplayer online role play games
like
World of Warcraft
—wanted the multi-player features. It was no small feat to create a game in which multiple people could have input, while simultaneously having it react in unique ways. The story department constantly had to come up with new starting poin
ts—quests, missions and events—that
launched the game. They created the stories and dialogue that were fed into the program, creating the base layers, and once the game was live, it learned from other players, taking their decisions, actions, and even their dialogue—whether spoken or keyed in—and added it to the program’s memory banks.

It meant Nexus Six had server rooms that rivaled those of Google, a massive programming team, and an even bigger troubleshooting department, who responded to reported issues and jumped in and out of games to see how the program was working.

At the center
of, and in charge of
all that
was Carly.

“We’re going to need to split the input,” Charles, one of her team, said.

“I don’t want to split it.” Carly pushed herself out of the beanbag she’d been sitting in. The testing room
looked like a kid’s dream room
with a massive HD projector, couches and beanbags, and small tables loaded with gaming equipment and computers. “What if we have it aggregate the player input, then treat that as a single input for the next trigger?”