Blackthorne, Fiona - Moonstruck [Blue Moon 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read online

  The thought filled him with a fierce happiness and desire he had never known before. Desire he had known plenty, seeking pleasure for all his needs with girls who liked it rough, who liked it kinky and getting submissive. This was different because this was Ava.

  He pulled off her jeans and socks, and instantly in his eyes, she went from half-naked graduate student to a bare, beautiful wood nymph with dark hair and eyes that promised mystery and pleasure.

  “Oh, love,” he breathed, “you are so beautiful.”

  She didn’t say anything, but a small, sweet smile played on her lips. He picked her up and laid her upon the bearskin rug where there would be room for them both. He got rid of the rest of his clothes and gently covered her body with his.

  Every inch of his skin seemed electrified by contact with her. His cock was hard and swollen now, demanding her, needing her. He kissed her lips and pressed his body to hers, careful not to crush her. He growled, unable to control himself when she writhed against him, her breasts rubbing against his chest, and her hips bucking up against him.

  He held himself up, propped on one elbow as he used his other hand to part her folds and find her nub. She gasped and arched her back as he began to gently stroke it. He marveled at how such a tiny, soft little point that he could roll between his fingers could produce so much pleasure. Ava’s wild movements and cries called forth the animal inside him, and he finally let himself thrust into her.

  He thought he would explode in that moment. She was so tight, so hot, so wet. Her pussy was clenching around him, pulling him in, making demands. His mind blanked, and all he knew was that she was wrapping her soft, slender legs around his hips as he began to thrust in and out of her. Her arms came around his torso, and the feeling of her hands running down his back was a sweet madness he could hardly bear. Her fingertips were soft against his skin. She was soft against his skin. She was everything.

  All he could do now was continue to stroke her as he feasted on her lips and her nipples, thrusting into her over and over, feeling the waves of pressure building toward his own release. Her gasps and cries grew tighter and more insistent, and he knew she was near. He pressed his fingers down in a firm, long, slow stroke over her clit, and she exploded under him, bucking and arching as her pleasure consumed her. He kept stroking her to keep the climax going until her cries became almost painful.

  Finally, her desire-addled eyes focused on him, and he drowned inside her.

  “Robert,” she whispered breathlessly, reaching up to touch his face.

  His heart exploded in joy as he came, heartbeats and thrusts in time as he filled her, his climax rocking him and shaking him for longer than he had ever experienced before.

  “My Ava,” he gasped, reaching down to kiss her fiercely, feeling her soft lips yield to his insistence. “My love.”

  She pulled him down onto her, inviting him to drop his weight onto her entirely, and for a blessed moment of relief, he did. Her arms grew soft and tender as she loosened her legs from around his waist and let them side down his own legs so that they were still tangled.

  Everything. She was everything now. He knew it. She was the key to the legend, but more than that. She was the woman he loved.

  * * * *

  Ava was awakened by coffee and kisses. She stretched out under the covers, savoring the smell of the coffee before opening her eyes to see a fully dressed Robert bending over her and smiling down into her eyes.

  “Good morning,” she mumbled contentedly. She glanced around the room, glad to see that everything seemed to be behaving itself and looking completely normal in the gray daylight. Last night…no, she pushed the thought to the side. She needed coffee and a shower before she would tackle thinking about last night, about all of last night.

  “Good morning, love,” Robert replied. “I made you coffee. Cream and sugar. I hope that's okay.”

  “Perfect. Wow, it's early. It's only seven.”

  Robert chuckled. “Some of us have to work, despite the fact that it's a Tuesday morning.”

  “Editing a dissertation is work,” she replied mock indignantly, sitting up and holding the sheet around her as she reached for the coffee. “So, tell me what your job is.”

  “I'm a civil engineer,” Robert replied. “I focus mainly on coastal engineering and water management. And, before you ask, Declan is the harbor master for Blue Moon Harbor, and Sean owns an auto repair shop. However, we work because we choose to, not because we need to.”

  “You don't need to work?” Ava repeated, confused.

  “No,” Robert replied with a rueful smile. “There is a hefty family fortune that has been several centuries in the making and could sustain the family for several more centuries.”

  She laughed bemusedly. “You all are like you just stepped out of a gothic romance. Three mysterious brothers in a mansion by the sea, an old family fortune, a town haunted by ghosts and demons.”

  “Truth is stranger than fiction,” he replied, his smile vanishing, and something much harder taking its place. “I want you to move into the mansion with us. You’re not safe here.”

  Damn! Why did he have to bring all that stuff up before she was ready? She stifled the irritation she felt, like when a student asked her a question she wasn’t quite prepped for. Deliberately, she sipped her coffee, forcing herself to savor the heat, the sweet and bitter mixed flavors, the sensation of it going down her throat.

  “I am not going to move anywhere except back to Boston in a month,” she said calmly. The words sounded weird to her, but she pushed that aside and continued. “I agree that something happened here last night, something that was not good. However, I am going to handle this my way—and before you object,” she said, raising her hand to cut off the words that she knew were on his lips. “Even if my dissertation topic didn’t involve extensive research into demonology, I’ve seen enough horror movies to know what to do and what not to do.”

  She managed a wry smile up at Robert, trying to hide the fact that deep inside her, she felt an insistent need to be near him and with him. Moving to the mansion with him and Declan and Sean appealed to her in a way she couldn’t articulate because it was so primal and fundamentally right.

  “I’m not going to use any Ouija boards,” she said. “I’m going to wear my crucifix around my neck and say the Lord’s Prayer several times a day. I’m going to take several other precautionary measures. I don’t necessarily believe in demons, but I’m not going to deny that something happened here last night. That’s mistake number one in every bad horror movie. In the end, if it gets too bad, I will simply leave Blue Moon.”

  “You can’t leave!” Robert exclaimed, balling his hands into fists.

  That was certainly not the response she had expected. She had thought he’d continue to press her to move in with him, to object to her staying here in the cottage. Leaving was never an item that was up for discussion.

  “I have to leave,” she said quietly. “December 18 at the latest.”

  The look of sudden anguish on Robert’s face was almost her undoing. Her heart tugged painfully toward him, and she couldn’t help but set down her coffee, and holding the sheet around her, get up on her knees to press herself against him and hug him.

  “Look,” she whispered, trying to smile. “I decided last night that what we were doing was actually okay. Even with your brothers. It is all okay. It’s good for me, a connection I haven’t had in a very, very long time. It’s not like this was ever going to be more than just a…a fling or an affair for a few weeks. So, let’s just enjoy the time we have together.”

  Robert wrapped his arms around her, pinning her to him so tightly she felt the air slowly being squeezed out of her lungs. Her realization last night as she was drifting off to sleep had been so easy, so natural, and so right, that she knew that she was in one of those moments where the universe had arranged everything to happen for a reason. A month of pleasure while she was editing her dissertation seemed right to her, a combination tha
t celebrated the ending of one phase of her life and the start of a new one. Robert’s needing more from her unnerved her and upset her perfect line of reasoning, but she knew her limits, and December 18 was her limit.

  “I won’t lose you,” Robert growled. Growled? Huh…now that it was daylight, and she was awake and only mildly riddled with desire for this man instead of drowning in it, she realized that Robert growled a lot. His growls were real things in the back of his throat. She pulled away as much as the iron cage of his arms would let her.

  “I can’t breathe.” She gasped, and finally, he relented slightly.

  “I can’t breathe without you,” Robert said fiercely, forcing her to look into his eyes but loosening his arms around her. What she saw there echoed uncomfortably in her heart. She set her jaw and tried to stay calm, but her body was coming alive with desire for him, and her heart yearned toward his, just as her lips yearned to speak those words back to him.

  Suddenly, he released her, and she fell back onto the bed, startled and confused.

  “Be careful today, Ava,” Robert said gruffly, turning and striding purposefully out of the bedroom.

  She heard the front door open and close and sat there, staring at the wall and wondering what the hell had just happened.

  Chapter 10

  Ava sat at her kitchen table, staring out at the water and letting her coffee go cold. Around her neck, she now wore her mother’s small gold crucifix, a family heirloom from a family she knew nothing about.

  The rain continued to pound the ground outside, and the tall pines swayed with the fierce winds. When she had finally gotten out of bed, she found that Robert had made a fire for her so that the cottage was warm and cozy.

  She sighed and let her mind wander. Being with Robert had been so good, mind-blowingly good. What was really weird was that she not only wanted to see him again, but she felt this deep urge to see Declan and Sean, too. She smiled a little as she thought that maybe some of the nineteenth century avant-garde doctors had been right in diagnosing female “hysteria” as the result of a lack of sex, or rather “connexion.” She didn’t feel the slightest bit hysterical this morning. She felt good, better than she had in years…or maybe ever.

  She’d give this wild crazy ride with three men a month to play out, and then she’d go back Boston. Maybe this was the universe’s way of telling her that it was okay to get back out on the dating scene again. The guys would probably be glad to see her go. They’d probably be tired of her by then. No, that was a lie. The memory of Robert’s stricken face rang truer than any excuse she could give herself. Well, she had to go back. That was all.

  Stretching her arms upward, she breathed in deeply and turned to considering what had happened last night that hadn’t been so mind-blowingly good. Looking at the facts as coolly and impartially as she could, she was still forced to accept that something had made loud knocking sounds around her cottage. It was mainly her interpretation that the knocks had seemed to have some kind of intelligence, but she couldn’t shake the idea that this was closer to being a fact than she liked. She refused to label whatever it was that had caused the noise, though. Calling it a “poltergeist” or a “demon” made her feel silly and less intelligent than she was. It was an unexplained scientific phenomenon. Hmmm. That was a mouthful. Well, she would use the word demon as a shortcut.

  She pulled over a piece of paper and a pen and made a short list, then decided to get ready and go into town and do a few errands. Maybe she’d grab lunch at the Double Rainbow again.

  * * * *

  “God, I fucking hate the rain!” she snarled out loud as she slapped through big, muddy puddles to her beat-up old hatchback. The rain pelted her bare hands, soaking her hair and everything else from her knit wool cap to her parka and jeans. Once inside the car, she started the ignition and sat for a minute, waiting for the engine to warm up as the windshield wipers cleared away the dead leaves. She cranked the heater, hoping the old car would make it through another winter in Boston, hell, that it would make it through a month in Maine. She was in no position to buy a new car. Maybe when she finally landed a tenure-track professorship, she’d be able to do something about getting a newer used car, but for now, Mimi the hatchback was all she had.

  She stared into the woods as she thought about her financial situation. The forest was a dense weave of grays and browns, with old, tired yellowish greens. What the fuck was that? She gasped and held her breath as she tried to accept what she had just seen.

  A dark, opaque figure, as tall as a person, had flitted from behind one tree to another. She knew it wasn’t a human being. Nothing in its movements had been remotely human, not the way it seemed to glide or the quickness with which it darted. If that hadn’t been enough, the figure had been completely dark, like a shadow. A black shadow.

  “No, no, no,” Ava muttered, throwing the car into gear and spinning her tires against the mud and wet grass in an effort to get away from the edge of the forest as fast as possible.

  Her heart pounding and rigid with panic, she drove helter-skelter down the pitted gravel road to Long Road then careened the entire six miles to Blue Moon’s tiny town center. It was only when she pulled into a parking spot next to the old red General Store that she realized she was shaking. Badly.

  She stumbled out of the car and ran through the rain into the store, gasping as she finally found herself safe inside a building with other human beings. Breathing hard, she looked up and realized that everyone in the store was looking at her.

  “Uh, hi,” she panted, trying to smile, but pretty sure it came out as a grimace.

  “Oh, honey, what happened to you?” asked an older woman with badly bleached hair and leathery skin. She wore a heavy parka and jeans, and she came right over and put her arm around Ava and led her to a stool by the counter, forcing her to sit down.

  “I, uh, just had a scare,” Ava replied, dizzy as the adrenaline started to ebb. “You know, driving these roads in the rain and all.”

  “Now there’s a damn lie if ever I heard one,” said a tall, heavyset man from behind the counter. He had a shock of pure white hair and a weathered face, and he wore a heavy plaid flannel shirt. Ava studied him blankly, thinking he must have been quite handsome in his youth. He was still pretty darn good looking now. Obviously Blue Moon had one hell of a gene pool.

  “Al, get her some coffee,” the woman said. “Honestly! Men. Stand there yapping all day when there’s someone that needs help.”

  “I’m getting it, Cookie,” the man replied. “I’m getting to it.”

  “I’m Cookie Boyer,” the woman said, smiling at Ava and patting her hand. “That man over there is Big Al, my husband. We own the General Store.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ava said, slowly starting to feel normal again. “I’m Ava—”

  “Ava Bell, staying down at the cottage at White Farm.” Cookie laughed. “We all know, honey.”

  “Oh.”

  “Small town, you know. Besides, anything that happens down at White Farm is pretty damn important to us all.”

  “Do you really believe all—”

  “Yes, I do, and if you were half as smart as you’re supposed to be on paper, Miss P-H-D, you’d believe it, too.” Cookie’s warmth and smile took the sting out of her words. Ava was reminded of what she had always wanted her mother to be like, confident and solid like this woman.

  “Stop scolding her, Cookie,” Big Al said, coming back over with a mug filled with black coffee. “Cream and sugar’s on the counter, Ava. I’ll be right back, now, okay?”

  “Thank you,” Ava replied, looking around her. The General Store was smaller than she thought. It was just a little bigger than her cottage. There were three aisles full of food, a small produce case, and a couple of freezer doors along the wall with butter, milk, eggs, and ice cream inside. Along the walls were all kinds of miscellaneous things for sale, from fishing line to duct tape, light bulbs to mousetraps. There was a counter for making sandwiches, cigarettes fo
r sale behind the register, and a few soggy, generic Maine postcards.

  She sipped at the coffee as Cookie rang up a customer, a customer who just happened to be an incredibly buff six feet tall with piercing blue eyes and chiseled features.

  “Later, Coleman,” Cookie said to the man. “Take care of your brother. We don’t need one of you down for the count with the flu right now.”

  The man grinned and held up the bag through which Ava could see a bottle of cold medicine.

  “Not likely,” he said. “But if this doesn’t work, I’ll get Doreen to come down and look at him.

  “See as you do,” Cookie replied with an affectionate smile. She pinched his cheek and shooed him out.

  A wolf howl pierced the patter of the rain, and Ava jumped, nearly spilling her coffee. The howl had sounded like it was right out back of the store! There was another howl, followed by a few yips, and then a minute later, a more distant howl seemed to reply.

  “Oh my God,” Ava whispered to Cookie. “There’s a wolf outside! Aren’t you scared with them so close?”

  “Nah.” Cookie laughed. “The wolves here don’t do no harm. They’s good folk as take care of us.”

  Ava looked at her, not believing what she was hearing.

  “This has to be the strangest town I’ve ever seen,” she said. “The whole place believes in an old ghost story, and everyone here thinks the wolves are nice, friendly puppy dogs!”

  Cookie gave her a strange look and put her hands on her hips.

  “You mean those boys haven’t told you about the wolves yet?” she asked. “The nerve of them! What were they thinking, getting you all twined up with them without telling you first. When I see them, I’m gonna give them a piece of my mind!”

  “I get a piece of your mind on a regular basis, Cookie.” Declan Molineaux laughed somewhat breathlessly as he burst through the front door. “If it’s as good as a piece of your blueberry pie, I’ll take it.”