Exiled Read online

  “I’m not, all right? That isn’t it at all!” Kat put her hands on her hips, fully prepared to give as well as she was getting.

  “Then why haven’t you introduced us to your relatives? Why haven’t you planned our Joining Ceremony?” Deep thundered. “Lauren and Xairn had the most elaborate joining imaginable with both Scourge and Human customs planned by you and yet you won’t even talk about a ceremony for the three of us.”

  “My lady Kat,” Lock murmured, coming forward at last and taking her hand. “Forgive Deep for being so loud.” He gave his brother a glare. “But it hurts us that you don’t want to acknowledge our relationship.”

  “Lock’s right. We want to—damn it, what’s the Earth word?”

  “Marry,” Lock supplied quietly.

  “Yes, we want to marry you in the presence of the Goddess and all our families. Our mother has been asking lately when the ceremony will be held.”

  “She’s very excited to give us her blessing and it worries her that we haven’t even set a date yet.” Lock looked at her appealingly. “We never told her but I think she has an idea of how close we came to losing you and she likes you, Kat.”

  “She wants you for her daughter under-the-law, or whatever the hell you call it,” Deep growled.

  “It’s daughter-in-law.” Kat looked at the two of them and shook her head. “You know this is the opposite of how things are supposed to be, right? I mean, it’s supposed to be the girl nagging about setting a date and the guy or guys in your case, are supposed to be trying to put her off and delay.”

  Deep frowned. “Is that the human way? How stupid.”

  “It’s called fear of commitment,” Kat snapped. “And right now I wish the two of you would have a little of it.”

  “But why should we fear to commit to you, my lady?” Lock looked genuinely confused and hurt. “We are bound together by ties stronger than death—why should we not wish to have a ceremony celebrating those ties?”

  “No, the question is why doesn’t Kat want to have a ceremony,” Deep snarled. “And I say it’s because she’s ashamed of us.”

  “For the last time I am not ashamed of you!” Kat threw her hands in the air. “You want to meet my grandma? My deeply religious, Southern Baptist grandma and tell her we’re about to be married—all three of us? You want to give an old lady a heart attack? Well then fine, we’ll go. Hell, let’s go right now.” She turned to march out of the kitchen but Lock caught her by the arm.

  “My lady,” he murmured softly. “We do want to meet her but not like this. Not in anger.”

  “You said you wanted to see her. You s-said you wanted to g-go.” To Kat’s horror, she was beginning to tear up. “Crap,” she muttered, rubbing her arm quickly over her eyes.

  “Little Kat…” Deep’s voice was oddly gentle, considering how angry he’d been earlier. “We don’t want to hurt you, we just want to love you.”

  “And part of loving you is knowing your family,” Lock said. “You can’t keep your mother’s mother in the dark forever. She knows you’re living aboard the Mother Ship now and everyone on Earth knows there’s only one reason an Earth female comes aboard and stays.”

  Kat knew it was true. In her heart, she was certain her grandmother already knew she was bound to a Kindred. She just wondered how Grandma would take it when she realized Kat was actually bound to two of them.

  She let out a little sound that was half sob/half laugh. “I guess you’re right. And I know my grandma will love both of you—I just don’t know how she’ll react to knowing you’re both with me. I can see her now giving me that disapproving look of hers and saying, “Kat, sweetie, two of them? At the same time?”

  Deep frowned. “After all this time, are you really still ashamed of what we do together when we love each other?”

  “Well, no…” Kat bit her lip. “But you have to understand. On Earth there aren’t many stable, long term Male/Female/Male relationships going on. Mostly when you hear about a girl who gets with two guys you’re talking about the plot of a new porno. And when you add the fact that the two guys are brothers, well, then you’re taking it to a whole new level of kinky.”

  “Lock and I don’t touch each other that way.” Deep sounded indignant. “The most we do is fuse our shafts together when we enter you as one.”

  “And what we do together isn’t pornography—it’s making love,” Lock added.

  Kat sighed. “I’m just telling you how most people on Earth see it—how my grandma is probably going to see it. She raised me pretty strict—this is going to be a blow for her.”

  Deep frowned. “If you’re that worried about her, maybe only one of us should go. You should take Lock—he’s less offensive than I am. You can pretend he’s the only male you’re with. That should make the mother of your mother happy.”

  “No!” Kat’s heart was suddenly in her throat. This was how she had nearly lost Deep last time. He had been determined that he was no good for her or Lock and had tried to cut himself completely out of their three-way relationship. They had a bond now—one that she was fairly sure couldn’t be broken. But it still made her nervous to see the dark twin trying to bow out.

  “No,” she repeated. “I love both of you. I want both of you to be there. Just…” She ran a hand through her hair. “Just let me call my grandma and be sure she’ll be home. We can go tomorrow afternoon. That should give me time to think of how to explain.”

  She started to leave again, to go to the viewing room where she could place a call to Earth. Of course, she could have used the Think-me but she didn’t like startling her elderly grandma by making her think she was hearing voices in her head. Besides, some things needed to be said face to face.

  “Wait, Kat.” This time it was Deep who caught and held her.

  “Yes?” She looked up into his dark eyes, trying to see if he was still mad. But there was nothing but tenderness in his face as he spoke.

  “Thank you,” the dark twin said simply. “This means a lot to me—to both of us. Meeting your family, planning our ceremony.”

  “We haven’t gotten to the ceremony part yet,” Kat pointed out. “Let’s be sure we can tell Grandma without putting her into ICU before we start hearing wedding bells.”

  “But I’m sure when we do have a ceremony, it will be spectacular.” Lock came up from behind her and pressed close, sandwiching her between himself and his brother. “Weren’t you planning on having a cake with bonding fruit cream in the center?”

  Being caught between their two large, muscular male bodies was a position that used to make Kat feel helpless and frightened. Now it made her feel loved and secure. And hot…very, very hot. She could smell Lock’s bonding scent—the warm, comforting aroma of the light twin’s desire for her. But even stronger was Deep’s scent—that delicious dark chocolate and sex smell that made her mouth water and her pussy wet at the same time.

  “Yes,” she murmured, wishing her voice didn’t sound quite so breathless. “I…actually, I was planning on a cake with one special layer that had bonding fruit puree. Lauren was going to make it for me.”

  Bonding fruit—the sweet, triangular fruit that was native to Twin Moons—was the thing that made her relationship with Deep and Lock possible. Without its almost magical stretching properties, which allowed her to accommodate their larger-than-average Kindred sized shafts, she never could have managed to make love to even one of them, let alone both at the same time.

  As she thought about it, Kat suddenly realized she’d had more than her fair share of the delicious fruit lately. She usually tried to limit herself to just one a day but there had been several that were on the verge of being too ripe to eat and she hated to let them go to waste. So she had eaten three or four of them earlier that day with hardly a thought as she read her way through the latest bodice ripper romance she’d gotten from Earth.

  Kat had just been trying to escape her worries for a while by drowning them in fantasy, but now a few scenes from the racy book ca