Severed Read online

  Suddenly I had a mental image—a picture right behind my eyes I could tell wasn’t mine. It was the three of us in bed together, just as we were now, only this time no one had on any clothes. Big hands were roving over my body, olive green and deep blue contrasting with my own creamy brown, plucking at my nipples…cupping my pussy…touching me everywhere while I moaned and arched my back, kissing first Drace and then Lucian…and then back to Drace again.

  “Drace!” I exclaimed breathlessly. “You promised nothing sexual!”

  “I said we wouldn’t have to touch you in a sexual way,” he said. “And we aren’t—we just have to replace any bad images with good ones. These are pretty fucking good if you ask me.”

  I privately thought they were pretty good too —or extremely arousing, however you wanted to put it—but I wasn’t about to admit it.

  “We signed a no-sex contract,” I pointed out, wishing my voice didn’t sound so breathless.

  “Are either of us penetrating you?” Lucian asked in a reasonable tone. “Are we touching you with anything less than respect?”

  “Well…no,” I admitted. “But you can send me positive images that don’t involve the three of us, you know…”

  “We can try.” Drace sounded doubtful. “Though the way our bodies react to each other might make it hard.” He shifted in the bed and I felt something hot and stiff brush against my hip. Hard indeed.

  “Allow me,” Lucian volunteered. “I believe I have the idea of how it’s done now.”

  “Be my guest.” Drace nodded at him.

  “All right. Let us all close our eyes,” Lucian murmured.

  Dutifully, I closed my eyes and found myself standing in the middle of a meadow filled with star flowers.

  I don’t mean that the flowers were shaped like a child’s drawing of a star or that they had five points or anything like that—I mean they were actual tiny stars. White and blue and yellow and red burning balls of energy growing from pure black stalks. I had the feeling if I picked them I would singe my fingers but that was all right—I didn’t want to pick them. I just wanted to stand there and admire their beauty.

  “Oh,” I whispered. “This is wonderful!” The star-flowers weren’t the only attraction. The sky overhead looked like a Van Gogh painting—pure cerulean blue with whirling pinwheels of gold and silver.

  “A beautiful scene for a beautiful female,” Lucian said softly.

  “You’re good at this,” Drace murmured, sounding impressed.

  “Thank you—just as you were good at the memory-wipe. It seems we’re surprisingly good at mastering the talents of each other’s Clans.”

  “You’re both amazing,” I said dreamily. “How do you have these incredible mental abilities? I mean, is it just you, or do all extraterrestrials have them?”

  “Each Clan on Denaris is blessed with different talents,” Lucian said. “But no, not all males of the Twelve Peoples have them.”

  “I’m certain our abilities will be nothing to your La-ti-zal powers when they come out,” Drace said. “Though I’ve heard it can take a while for that to happen.”

  I still thought they were wrong about that—about me being special and having special gifts, I mean—so I wanted to change the subject.

  “So this is normal for your people?” I said, the words spilling out before I thought about them. “Two guys and one girl? I mean, don’t you ever get jealous? That would be a big problem for us on Earth.”

  “There is no jealousy between proper bond-mates,” Lucian said. “They both have one goal in mind—to pleasure their shared female.”

  Suddenly I was no longer alone in the amazing field—Lucian came to stand beside me, on my right.

  “In other words, it’s not about them—it’s about her,” Drace rumbled. And then he was on my left.

  “But why?” I asked, looking back and forth. Their faces were incredibly clear in this vision—if I didn’t know we were sharing a dream-fantasy, I would have thought we were really there in that magical star field together. “Why do you always have to have two males to one female? Is it just for preference or custom or is there some biological reason?”

  “It has to do with the predators on Denaris,” Lucian replied. “Back at the dawn of our time, our entire race was nearly wiped out by a carnivorous creature called a kr’awn.”

  “A what?” I asked frowning. “What did it look like?”

  “Extremely large with black fur,” Drace said. “It had no eyes—it hunted entirely by scent. And it had fangs longer than Lucian’s.”

  “Very funny,” Lucian said dryly. “But it was no laughing matter. Now the kr’awn are extinct but back then, in our early pre-history, they were plentiful and very hungry.”

  “They fed only on our females,” Drace continued the story. “Somehow they were able to find them and tell the difference between male and female by scent. So many females were taken our clans began to die out. We didn’t have enough females to repopulate.”

  “That’s awful! What happened?” I asked, interested.

  “Two warriors of one of the early clans banded together, swearing to care for a single female and pleasure her equally with no jealousy between them,” Lucian said. “She agreed to be with them both and they swore to protect her with their lives.”

  “The kr’awn never bothered males, you see,” Drace said. “The warriors found that by shielding their female with their bodies when a kr’awn was near they could cover her scent and keep her safe. When other clans saw this was working, they adopted the pattern too. An Alpha and a Beta join together and then find a female to complete their Triune bond.”

  “Over time we evolved to make it a necessity in more than one way,” Lucian went on. “We no longer have to protect our females from the kr’awn—as I said, they are extinct. But no male of Denaris is able to father a child by himself. It takes the DNA of two males to start a child in their bonded female’s belly.”

  “But how do you do that? I mean do you take turns or…or what?” I could feel my cheeks getting hot and I kept my eyes tightly shut as I spoke. Better to stay in the dream world Drace and Lucian were projecting the three of us into than to open my eyes and see both of them leaning over me with that hungry light in their faces.

  “Are you asking how we make love?” Lucian’s voice was soft and sensual in my ear. In the vision we were sharing, he turned my face towards his and brushed his knuckles lightly over my burning cheek.

  “Well, I mean…yes, I…I guess so,” I stammered, filled with a mixture of shame and intrigue.

  “First of all, we don’t rush it.” Drace was suddenly behind me, one big hand cupping the curve of my waist. “We bring our female pleasure and make her come over and over before we even think of penetrating her.” As he spoke, he brushed my hair away from the side of my neck and bent down to place a hot, open-mouthed kiss on the tender flesh there.

  “Oh!” I gasped, but I didn’t make any move to get away from him. “And how…how do you do that?”

  “Firstly with our hands.” Lucian was facing me, standing in front of me as Drace stood behind. He cupped my breasts through the thin white nightgown (we were wearing the same thing in this vision as we were in real life) and thumbed my nipples lightly.

  “Ah!” I gasped. Though I knew it was just a vision, I swore I could feel his hands on me—and Drace’s too as they slid up and down my sides, stroking my curves while he kissed my neck.

  It’s just a vision—it’s just a dream, I told myself. To reassure myself, I opened one eye and peeked down at myself. Sure enough, we were all three still just lying in bed and the guys were touching my shoulders—nothing else. Nothing sexual.

  That made me feel a little better. This was all a dream…a fantasy. I could do what I wanted to with no consequences.

  I shut my eyes again and breathed, “Tell me…tell me more.”

  “We also pleasure our females with our mouths,” Drace growled softly from behind me. His tongue slid down the side of my