Sexual Healing for Three (10 page)

“What do you mean?”

“She fixed us up tonight.”

“Oh…I…I’m not…”

Russ drew to a stop at the red light ahead and turned to her with a reassuring grin. “I wasn’t trying to put you on the spot. I was just curious about what you thought of your sister’s latest efforts.”

Donna didn’t say anything, and Russ got the feeling it was one of the rare times she was speechless or at a loss about anything.

“Was trying to beat Angela to the punch your only reason for coming with my brother?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I asked Chance to come as a favor.

But the fact is, I think he’s a nice guy.”

“I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear that kiss of death.”

Donna chuckled. “I didn’t mean it like that. I find him attractive too.”

“What about me?”

“Now you are putting me on the spot.”

74

Gracie C. McKeever

“Yeah, I am.”

“I’m beginning to see what your ex-wife meant.”

“The bull in a china shop thing?”

“Yes.” She grinned.

Russ didn’t say anything for several seconds as he pulled forward, searching for Donna’s block when the light changed. He found her building several minutes later and silently parked at the curb before turning off the engine, disengaging his seatbelt, and turning in his seat to face her. When she just looked at him and didn’t say anything or make a move to leave the truck, he sidled incrementally closer, placing one arm on the back of her headrest and invading her personal space as much as he could without being too obvious. If she really did pay attention to her brother, he knew she’d understand his intentions.

He hadn’t gotten to this point in a date in a long time, not to the point where he wanted things to continue after the evening was over.

He was determined to wait her out, at the very least garner an invitation upstairs.

After a long moment, Donna finally disengaged her seatbelt, turned to him, and took a deep breath. “You have to understand something about my sister, Russ…” She paused and mumbled her next words, “I can’t believe I’m going to say this out loud.”

“Say what out loud?”

“You’ve got good hearing.”

“I’m a good listener, like you.”

“That’s good because I don’t know if Angela covered this subject in any of your conversations, but she’s psychic.” She stared at him, folding her arms across her breasts in a defensive so-make-something-of-it gesture, as if she expected him to dispute her statement.

He felt her waiting for his shock, knew she expected it, but the truth was he wasn’t shocked, not after growing up with a younger brother who could heal and practically bring things back from the brink of death with a touch.

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Russ remembered the first time he’d seen his brother exercise his gift. It was a couple of months after he had pulled Chance’s lifeless body out of a neighbor’s pool and resuscitated him. He’d recovered without incident, according to the doctors who’d later examined him in more detail at the hospital, but Russ knew better, sensed the little differences in his brother from the moment the little boy coughed up a mouthful of water, opened his eyes, and threw his arms around Russ and thanked him for saving his life. He sensed it in the way his brother looked at him when he asked a question and wasn’t satisfied with the answer, the sensation of something, or
someone
sifting through Russ’s mind always following. He knew his brother was different for sure when, three years after his near-death experience, a six-year-old Chance cradled his badly injured dog after a hit-and-run, passing his hands over the puppy’s ribs and legs until the dog got up under his own steam, panting and licking Chance’s face, fit as a fiddle.

Russ had wondered how many other animals, big and small, Chance had brought back from the brink without Russ’s knowing.

He wondered now how Donna would handle these little newsflashes, or did growing up with psychics in the family make her more accepting of the supernatural?

“So…” Donna cleared her throat and looked at him. “Nothing to say?”

“What’s her area of expertise?”

“Clairvoyance, visions and telepathy.”

“Hmm, that’s interesting.”

Donna threw up her hands. “Is that all you have to say?”

He wanted to reassure her, let her know that she wasn’t alone in the world, but he wasn’t as ready as she was to share his sibling’s gifts and secrets. He didn’t think it was his place and decided if Chance wanted Donna to know, he would tell her when the time came. “I take it you brought up your sister’s gifts for a reason?”

“She had a vision about us—me, you, and—”

76

Gracie C. McKeever

“My brother?” Now he
was
surprised. Angela wasn’t really expecting him and Chance to share her sister, was she?

“I see that shocks you more than my sister being a psychic.”

“Don’t tell me you’re all right with all this.”

“I’m not sure. I just…” She shook her head, sighing as she fixed him with her bewildered, soulful mink gaze. “You have to understand my sister’s real big on soul mates, and she’s got it in her head that you and your brother are my soul mates.”

In all their discussions on spirituality and religion, he and Angela had never discussed anything close to polyamory. As interesting and unconventional as he found Angela and her beliefs, he would have remembered something
that
unconventional.

“I suppose you find the whole soul mates thing interesting too.”

Donna arched a brow. She seemed to be daring him to make light of the situation with his patented composure.

Russ stared at her, her expressive face a living work of art to watch, her full, pursed lips a poetic invitation that he was finding hard to resist. He had to get his mind off this track before he did something he would regret, like steal his brother’s woman, but what came out of his mouth next only added oil to the fire.

“You never did answer
my
question, Donna.”

She frowned. “What question?”

“When you said you find Chance attractive, I asked you what about me. You never answered. Unless bringing up your sister and her soul mates plan
was
your answer?”

“I suppose in a roundabout way it was.”

“Not falling for it, though.”

“You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

At her harried look, he wanted to make it easy on her. He wanted to tease and please her any way he could, any way she would let him.

Except they needed to get this whole ménage business straight, and one of their party wasn’t even present.

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Was it fair of them to even have this discussion without Chance?

They’d have to go over this ground all over again, wouldn’t they?

Hell, he wasn’t even sure what the ground was or what
his
take was on all this. He wouldn’t even try to guess what his brother’s take would be or how he’d take it.

To say they were almost as much strangers to each other as he was to Donna would be putting things mildly. He and his brother hadn’t seen each other in years, and brief conversations on the phone just didn’t cut it, coming nowhere near understanding the sort of values and ideas that he and Donna danced around right now.

“I think you’re attractive too,” Donna whispered, and Russ watched as she demurely lowered her eyes. The act seemed out of character, yet perfectly natural.

Russ reached across the small space between them to put his index finger under her chin and lift her head. He waited for her to meet his gaze before he said, “I think you’re gorgeous.” Gorgeous didn’t come anywhere close to describing what he thought of her. What he really wanted to say was that her ass was so juicy and magnetic he couldn’t keep his eyes off of it, and her voluptuous breasts made him want to be an infant again so he could cuddle next to them endlessly without a care or consequence. What came out of his mouth was, “I’m sure Chance thinks you’re gorgeous too.”

“So where exactly does that leave us?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“No, my guess is as good as Angela’s.” Donna clenched her teeth and muttered, this time low enough so that Russ couldn’t make out what she said, but he had a feeling if Angela were there, she would have gotten an earful.

“Would you like to come up?”

That he heard loud and clear. “I thought you’d never ask.”

78

Gracie C. McKeever

What was she doing?

It was bad enough listening to Angela’s soul mate theories, but to entertain her sister’s latest scheme, encouraging Russ’s attention and inviting him up was just plain irresponsible, leading him on when she had no intentions on taking their relationship to the next level.

She didn’t, did she? And what, exactly, was the next level? Damn, was she that much out of practice that she didn’t
know
?

She didn’t know her own mind anymore, hadn’t since turning up at the barbecue to discover that her sister knew Chance and had set her up with his brother Russ.

It should have been simple to get out of his SUV and just go upstairs alone, but there was something there between them, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, something that made her heart flutter and her pussy moist. She couldn’t ignore a feeling like that, not when she felt it so rarely, and not when the man who’d triggered it was someone she’d entrusted with personal information she hadn’t shared with anyone before, not even her ex-husband.

Donna held trust in high regard, right up there with honesty. They were commodities she rarely encountered in people, so she valued whenever she did encounter them.

She closed her eyes now as she put the coffee on, shifting her weight from one leg to the other at the thought of Russ’s younger brother as her center heated like the percolator on the kitchen counter and her pussy moistened.

Her psyche and body had been under constant attack since Chance had picked her up on his bike earlier in the evening. And despite her
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79

conversation with Angela, she was still undecided how to proceed or how to reconcile her intellect with what her body craved—both men, on some level, and in some capacity, in her life.

Was she really thinking of going through with this, whatever this was, especially with how she felt about men with an obvious dominant nature like Russ? Not to mention Chance being a little more than a decade younger than her.

There was no question she was attracted to him, to each man, her hormones on overload and body experiencing an instant pull toward them when everything logical in her told her to follow down this avenue Angela had pointed her toward was a bad idea.

What were her own ideas? How did she feel about this?

As free and uninhibited as she had been in her youth—and she had been pretty wild as a teen alone—there was just something intrinsic in her that said being with two men at the same time was wrong.

But what if the two men were okay with it? Would Chance be okay with it? Was Russ?

“Everything okay in here?”

Donna nearly leaped out of her skin when she felt Russ standing behind her. She took a deep breath, put a hand over her chest, and slowly turned to him. The space between them was so minute as to be almost nonexistent. It didn’t seem to bother Russ a bit. In fact, the grin on his face said he was getting off on invading her personal space.

“Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He’d startled her more than anything, right before bringing to dazzling light the fact that she hadn’t had sex in two years and she desperately missed and wanted it.

Russ’s taboo presence only added to that desperation.

How had she let so much time go by without exploring the pleasures of her sexuality?

80

Gracie C. McKeever

The idea that she had allowed a few bad experiences, most notably Bo and Peter, to color her need and desire for a man appalled her. She wasn’t a coward in any other areas of her life, certainly not at her job, where she stood beside her clients to face down violent boyfriends and husbands daily. But it was always easier to help and advise someone else about their affairs. Admitting that
her
personal life was seriously screwed up wasn’t as easy. But she was admitting it now, at least to herself.

Donna tilted her head back to look into Russ’s eyes, falling more and more for his intense gray gaze the more she looked into it and not feeling as threatened as she thought she should when his broad-shouldered frame dwarfed her five-six by almost an entire foot.

If it was just his physical presence that dwarfed her, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it wasn’t just the physical, which she easily found mouthwatering under any circumstances. It was his spiritual presence, his aura—subtle yet powerful—that drew her.

Damn, had she just thought that? She really,
really
needed to stop hanging around with Angela. The woman was a seriously bad influence.

“You’ve got a lot to entertain a body with all the family photos, books, and exotic fish, but I was still feeling lonely out there.”

Donna chuckled when he pouted, could imagine him laying that line and sad-puppy-dog expression on any number of unsuspecting females, and felt the unfamiliar stirrings of her green-eyed monster yawning and stretching out of hibernation.

If she was feeling even remotely possessive this early in the game, how were Russ and Chance supposed to handle this scene? And was that really her concern?

What concerned her now was Russ’s proximity, his obvious availability—just him, here and now. There was no Chance, and there was no Angela egging her on, just her own starved libido, just her own stifled recklessness and sense of adventure begging for recognition.

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81

She hadn’t indulged either in so long, not since her rowdy and experimental college years. Her mind rebelled against everything for which her body now hummed. She knew what happened when she indulged and went down that rowdy road. She had spent the better part of her post-college years rectifying the aftermath and becoming a
responsible
and mature member of society after Bo. And after Peter, she had done nothing but try to rebuild her crushed self-esteem, burying herself in work and her cause.