Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (17 page)

Until that moment, he had only been toying with his newly-discovered powers, feeling them out, testing their limits…testing
his
limits.

Desperation forced his hand.

The last thing Prentice remembered before everything went black was casting his psychic energy out wide and wild like a fisherman’s net.

He woke up on the tile with someone flashing a penlight in his eyes.

“I think that he’s going to be okay, but the other one…”

Prentice watched the EMT shrug and got a glimpse of Chad several feet away as two other EMT’s furiously worked to revive him.

He sat up, coughing, and the EMT patted him on the back, solicitous but wary.

“Are you okay?”

It took Prentice the better part of several minutes to convince the EMT and the school’s principal that he didn’t want to go to the hospital, in fact that he didn’t
need
to go to the hospital. The last thing he wanted was to be sent to the same place as Chad. In fact, he wanted to get as far away from the scene and
people
as he could get.

“I just want to go home,” he told the EMT.

Prentice’s parents had been summoned to the school to pick him up.

No questions had been asked and Prentice had learned later that the principal, football coach, and his and Chad’s parents had come to the consensus that no good would come of taking the incident any further, especially since no one could agree on what had actually happened. Of course they hadn’t asked Prentice for his take and he hadn’t volunteered. Since Chad had refused to implicate Prentice or himself in the matter, the authorities and the school had quietly closed the book on it and washed their hands of the episode—all nice and neat and tidy—just putting things down to boys being boys.

No matter how much everyone had agreed not to talk, word had still gotten around. Once recovered, Chad had started to give Prentice a wide berth in the halls during changeover and his jock buddies had unquestioningly followed his lead, basically making Prentice into a veritable pariah. This had suited him just fine. Better a pariah than anyone’s victim or Chad’s bitch.

Prentice opened his eyes, panting and glancing around wildly as if expecting to find Chad hovering over his bed. He hadn’t meant to dig so deep and unearth those emotionally wrenching memories. He hadn’t realized how much Ki’s advances had affected him.

He couldn’t be attracted to Ki. He
could not
be. Being attracted to a man like Ki—so rich and flawlessly good-looking—went against all logic, too ironic to even consider.

The fact that Ki vaguely favored Chad didn’t alarm him as much as the idea that he actually found himself attracted to Ki and curious.

In my time the term was called
bi-
curious
.

No way, no freaking way in hell!

He wasn’t going down that road. He wasn’t like that. Hadn’t he proven his manhood when he’d gotten it up with Lucy in the gazebo? Didn’t that hard-on mean something?

Yeah. It means I’m attracted to both of them.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!

Prentice couldn’t escape the truth. He couldn’t explain away his physiological reaction to Ki—incidentally the same physiological reaction he had to Lucy—no matter how much he tried.

He was thirty-two years old. He had made it through three decades of life only to learn that all the nasty names those jocks used to call him, all the homophobic insults they’d flung, had been accurate. He had hurt people, taken lives, gone back in time, died and come back to life to have his world turned upside down with the realization that everything he had believed to be true about himself was untrue.

Prentice closed his eyes again, picturing Ki as he’d cornered him in the kitchen.

He owned that Ki was a striking male. He was tall and masculine and Prentice could tell from the way his suit had hung on his body that he had a nice physique beneath.

It was a physique he could too easily imagine unclothed.

Prentice clutched the bedcovers in both hands and gritted his teeth as his cock slowly came to life. His hands itched with the need to grasp himself and ease the throbbing ache, but he refused to submit to the yearning.

If he couldn’t make it through one night in this house sleeping a couple of doors down from Lucy and her new husband, how was he going abide Lucy’s wish and stay any longer?

He tried not to listen, didn’t want to hear anything, but he felt his ears perk up, anticipating the sounds of hot newlywed sex. He didn’t, however, hear anything. He didn’t hear any erotic gasps or moans of passion. He didn’t hear any headboard banging against the wall. He didn’t hear any mattress squeaking beneath the pistoning action of two hips thrusting in concert right before the intense screams of release rended the air in a sensuous, shattering crescendo.

Prentice thought it would tear him apart if he had to hear Lucy’s dulcet tones raised in the throes of an orgasm in which he wasn’t the architect. He didn’t want to hear Ki do the things to her that
he
wanted to do…or imagine Ki doing the things to Lucy that he wanted Ki to do to
him
.

He thought he had had a hard enough time earlier fending off the married couple. He’d felt like he was being tag-teamed, as if Ki and Lucy had previously conferred and come to the decision on how best to seduce him. How else did one explain the way they had come at him one after the other, flaunting their sensual wiles at him? How he had managed to resist that one-two punch of male-female pheromones, Prentice had no idea.

The more he thought about it, however, the more he knew each encounter—the one in the kitchen and the one in the gazebo—had been natural and spontaneous, no more premeditated than someone taking advantage of an opportunity that had suddenly presented itself.

Lucy had especially seemed sincere about wanting him to stay and as confused by her feelings for him as he was confused by his feelings for Ki.

For Ki’s part, Prentice hadn’t sensed any of the cruelty or revulsion that he had experienced from Chad and his buddies as much as he had sensed Ki’s deliberate effort to unbalance and turn him on.

God help him, Ki’s efforts had worked, more than Prentice could have ever imagined.

He hadn’t said a prayer since he was very young. After having so many go unanswered, he had never felt the need to continue the useless and impractical custom. Once he realized that he couldn’t count on anyone but himself to reach his goals, he had never been tempted to search outside of himself for strength or answers to his problems.

For the first time in longer than he could remember, however, Prentice felt the need to ask for help.

He opened his eyes, stared up at the ceiling, and waited.

After several moments when nothing happened he wondered what he had expected and berated himself for presuming anything had changed since he had been a kid.

He was alone in the world and he would always be a—

You are not alone, Prentice.

He fought not to respond right away. She had made him wait, he would make her wait.

At the thought, he heard Brielle laugh.

How could she take this so lightly? He was losing his sanity, losing
himself
, and she was laughing.

I am not laughing at you.

Yeah, yeah, she was laughing with him. Well, he wasn’t laughing.

And why had it taken her so long to make an appearance? He hadn’t exactly been a choir boy or Boy Scout since he had come back. He had offered to kill Ki no more than several hours ago. Shouldn’t Brielle or Caith have intervened before now? Or was it because he didn’t have his powers and they knew he couldn’t do the same damage as he had in his previous incarnation that they felt they could be so lax with him?

Goddess knows your heart. You would not have hurt Ki.

He was glad someone knew his heart, because he certainly didn’t.

You are not losing yourself, Prentice. You are finding yourself.

He wanted to believe her, but what did it mean if she was telling the truth? Had his entire life been a lie?

All of those years of isolation and pain were preparation for your true passion.

She made him feel like a caterpillar about to burst free from his cocoon a newly-minted and beautiful butterfly.

Again, he heard that familiar soft laughter.

“Are you trying to tell me my true passion is…is Ki?”

What do you think, Prentice?

“I think you’re avoiding the question answering my question with one of your own.”

She laughed again and Prentice didn’t know whether to be insulted or comforted by her continued good humor, her light and uninhibited tone.

What must it have been like to grow up with her as a mother?

Unlike his own mother, Brielle seemed like the supportive and nurturing type. Caith was probably the stern voice of reason, the one to put his foot down when Thayne and Cade had gotten too rambunctious for the soft-hearted Brielle to handle alone.

I was no saint.

Prentice swallowed hard at her kind, gentle voice. How could she be so nice to him when his parents had killed her and her husband and taken them from their sons? How could she treat him as if
he
hadn’t tried to kill her sons, as if he hadn’t killed her sister?

She had said she wasn’t a saint, but how else could he explain her behavior?

I believe in the Goddess, and Goddess believes in you.

He was so far from devoted and virtuous, why would any celestial being believe in
him
?

Prentice felt so unworthy and…impure when he remembered what he had been doing, what he had been about to do, and what he had been thinking right before Brielle had let her presence be known. Another minute and she would have caught him with his hand in his underwear, gripping his cock, trying to relieve the sexual frustration he had been experiencing since first being reunited with Lucy and meeting Ki.

Prentice had never been one to believe in destiny. He’d always made his own destiny. There had been something about his encounter with Ki, though, that screamed fate, as if he had been waiting all his life to meet someone like himself, as if he had been waiting all his life to meet the man who could rock him to his foundations.

Prentice heard a door open quickly followed by the distinct sound of footsteps padding down the carpeted hall.

It’s none of my business.

No matter how much he told himself to stay out of things, however, he found himself throwing back the covers and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. He waited a moment for self-preservative good sense to kick in, but nothing did and when he didn’t hear anything from his guardian angels, the silence cinched his decision.

Prentice got out of bed, crossed the room, opened the door, and slipped into the hallway. He caught the diminishing sight of Lucy’s floor-length, peach, lace-and-ruffle nightgown as she scampered down the stairs.

Had they had an argument on their wedding night? Why wasn’t Ki following her, then?

What kind of creepy marriage did they have?

Prentice might have believed Lucy was running down for some restorative snacks after a round of energetic sex except that he hadn’t heard anything that could have been construed as energetic sex. Sure the walls were more solid now than in the twenty-first century, but no one engaged in backbreaking, back-scratching
newlywed
sex without making at least a peep.

He walked down the hall and paused at the door, thought twice about going into the room to ask Ki what the hell was up, but he didn’t trust himself alone in a bedroom with the guy. The bastard was too sexy for his own good and Prentice was too weak and mixed up to fight off any advances tonight.

Oh, like I can fight off an advance from his too-sexy-for-her-own-good wife?

Damn it.

He reached the kitchen in time to see Lucy putting the tea kettle on the cast iron stove.

Tea? Okay, granted they didn’t have whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and strawberries readily available to grab from a fridge and take up to their bedroom, but tea had to be the most unsexy drink he had ever heard of. It fell right down there with warm milk, evoking visions of cranky insomniac brats and little old ladies in rocking chairs crocheting.

The floor creaked beneath his bare foot as he approached.

Lucy gasped and grabbed her chest before she turned to see him. “Prentice, you scared the bejesus out of me.”

He grinned. It seemed he had a habit of scaring the bejesus out of people since his return, starting with Kelly O’Brien.

God, the night he’d returned to life seemed so long ago and it was barely more than a week. So much had happened in that time though.

“What are you doing creeping around down here so late?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question.” He crossed the floor and watched her eyes widen as he neared her.

“I asked you first. Besides, I’m making tea. What’s your excuse?”