Lions' Pride Read online

  Which, unfortunately, was where Anthony Hage came in, with his genetics skills and his tiny magical ability that amounted to a natural cloaking, a “don’t look at me” aura that made him the perfect Agency mole.

  He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he was the first Hage male in five generations not to serve his country in the armed forces. He wasn’t suited to it and wouldn’t have been allowed to do it if he’d wanted to, due to stupid laws about gay people in the military. But when the Agency approached him, he’d seen it as his chance to serve.

  A choice he’d regretted once he’d learned more about the project, and which he regretted even more now that he was forced to do something that might hurt a colleague and friend.

  What would happen to Jude, he preferred not to think about. Agent Shaw assured him the test subjects survived—he understood an implied “most of them, anyway”—but he suspected it wasn’t in the same condition they started. More useful, but less free.

  He ducked back into his own office, locked the door, reinforced the minor spells of deflection resident in what looked like a harmless PDA and set to work to find out if Elissa’s pencil would give him the key he needed to get into her home—and Jude’s.

  —

  Elissa hung up the phone, shaking her head.

  No one from Weimer Vineyards had called. In fact, they wouldn’t be using the Ag Station’s magical services this year at all. They’d hired their own witch, a grape specialist from Germany. Made perfect sense. In this agricultural area, the green witches, both the station’s and freelancers, were spread thin, and vinifera grapes needed a lot of attention in a climate where it was often too cold, too hot or too wet for their liking.

  The call must have been another grape grower and Anthony, as if to fulfill the absentminded professor stereotype, had just gone along with her assumption. If he’d just forwarded her the voice mail like a normal person…

  Oh well, back to cold-hardy figs.

  She looked for her pencil. Like many witches, she didn’t quite trust technology and always took paper notes along with her computerized ones.

  Where had the blasted thing gotten to? Powers, she’d let Anthony wander off with it. Guess they both counted as absent-minded professors today.

  Then again, with all she had on her mind, who could blame her? If the dumbest thing she did today was lose a pencil, she’d be doing well.

  Chapter Eight

  Rafe couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even lie still in bed. Although the thermostat declared it to be a pleasant sixty-five inside and fortyish outside, the night felt hot and humid and strange. Haunted, he’d have said, if there were ghosts in his house. But he knew there weren’t.

  The dead had no business bothering the living, and ever since he was little, he’d been creeped out by the idea that they sometimes did. He wasn’t sure he’d even sense a ghost through Drozz, but that made the idea of one hanging around him even creepier. Hence, he’d bought a brand-new house—and still had a medium check it out, just to make sure no one lingered, remembering a home that stood there a century ago.

  No, whatever was haunting him tonight wasn’t ghosts. Not unless you counted ghosts of dead possibilities.

  Jude Duclos led a life that could have been Rafe’s. It wasn’t an easy life, not in the current political climate—not that a cop’s life was exactly a bed of fucking roses—but it was a life rich in ways he could scarcely imagine. A life lived to the fullest, with all sensation heightened. A life full of magic and possibility. A life not confined to one form or one way of perceiving the world.

  Not to mention a life with a hot, sexy little witch who clearly adored him. Jude was one lucky bastard.

  Rafe couldn’t begin to imagine what sex must be like for a dual. Even in the weird echo he’d been blessed or cursed to share, it had seemed extra intense. Which made sense. He’d experienced the full impact of his dual nature only for a few days, just as long as it had taken his parents to get him to a doctor who’d prescribe Drozz. He’d been too terrified of losing control again to enjoy simple pleasures, like a good steak or the fresh smell of the neighbor’s garden after rain, let alone sex. He hadn’t even dared to get himself off, never mind that at eighteen Mr. Happy kept rearing his head, blithely indifferent that Rafe’s world had been turned inside out, his future jeopardized. He’d gotten through those days only by rigid self-control and deep breathing exercises and being too damn scared to let go.

  Until now, the only times the regrets even came close to being serious were times when a dual’s heightened senses would be useful for his work.

  But now…now he felt a ghost of the person he might have become looking over his shoulder. If he’d taken a different route—a Different route, a route which accepted that, human family or not, he was not truly human—he might have been like Jude. Powerful. At ease in his own skin. An impressive blend of what was best in animal and human nature.

  And he wouldn’t be who he was now, he reminded himself. Wouldn’t be a cop, and a damn good one. Wouldn’t be an uncle to his niece and nephew, because his sister, also adopted, was human and had never quite gotten over the shock and embarrassment of coming home from a friend’s house and discovering her big brother had turned into a “big, stinky wild animal”, as she put it. He would probably have some kind of offbeat, under-the-table job, which might not be bad, but wouldn’t be the career he truly wanted.

  Chances were he wouldn’t have Elissa or someone like her, either. It wasn’t some kind of cosmic trade-off: give up your social standing, your career potential and some of your civil rights and get a hot, red-haired witch in exchange.

  But maybe if Rafe was one thing or the other, fully human or really dual, he’d have someone to share his life with. Women with any sense seemed to figure out he was hiding something, so while they enjoyed his company short-term, they didn’t hang around.

  Maybe he’d have had more luck sticking to men. When you’re both thinking with your dicks, you’re willing to overlook a lot of lies by omission, and maybe forgive them when you confess you’d glossed over the truth. God knew he’d done so often enough when the guy was hot, hung and worth taking a few risks for.

  He hadn’t met anyone who fit that description for a long time. Now that he wasn’t the walking cauldron of hormones going somewhere to find trouble that he’d been in college, it took a really special guy to get his attention.

  A guy like Jude.

  Jude with his green eyes, cocoa skin and body that belonged on the big screen—and a cock that looked like it shouldn’t fit into Elissa’s tiny body, but did, and apparently just right.

  If being haunted by regrets wasn’t bad enough, Rafe was haunted by sex he could never have.

  He couldn’t have either of them. A lionside dual might not be monogamous—lions weren’t—but a witch certainly would be. So would a man married to a witch, who wanted to keep his favorite body parts functioning. Rumor had it witches could do anti-fertility and anti-sex magic just as easily as the other kind, at least if the person on the receiving end of the spell had done something scummy enough that disarming his dick could pass as defense of self and others. Rumor might not be true, but it would take a brave man to test it. Brave and, oh, stupid.

  Given the dog-eating incident, he had good evidence Jude could be brave and stupid, but doing that would take a special kind of stupid, profound enough to risk what, to Rafe’s outsider’s eyes, looked like honest-to-God once-in-a-lifetime love.

  Not to mention incredible sex.

  Almost without thought, Rafe’s hand strayed under the covers and found his dick.

  Already hot and hard, it started to strain and buck as soon as he touched it.

  With a groan, he clasped his hand around it, began to stroke up and down, circling the shaft, caressing the swollen, sensitive head.

  Fragmented images poured into his head: Jude’s cock swelling against him as they wrestled. Elissa, her fair skin flushed, her head thrown back in the abandon of orgasm as Jude licked her.
The two of them fucking against the table, her tiny, pale body overwhelmed by Jude’s big, dark one, but giving back as good as it got.

  Jude’s cock in Rafe’s mouth, hot and salty, too big for him to handle well, but he didn’t care. Elissa sucking him as he sucked her husband, as her husband licked her, a circle of pleasure. Elissa’s tight pussy engulfing his cock—or was it Jude’s ass he was pounding into?

  Did it matter? Not really. It was all fantasy, and all good fantasy.

  Rafe’s world shrank to his dick and the lush, erotic images in his head. Jude. Elissa.

  Fucking each other, but not in the kitchen, not as he’d seen them. No, in a big, old-fashioned spool bed topped with a handmade quilt, in a plant-filled room. Elissa was on top, Jude’s big hands cupped her breasts, and her back arched like a bow. She was coming hard, squeezing and pulsating around Jude. Rafe wanted to be there so badly, licking at the place where their bodies joined, pushing them both…

  …over the edge, just as he went.

  He called a name as he fell, but he didn’t know which one, or cared.

  Only after he came—only after he was lying in the darkness panting and grinning and wondering if it was normal for the room to be spinning and tilting—did he remember he hadn’t taken his evening dose of Drozz.

  Or the morning dose, either.

  It was downstairs on the kitchen counter. All he had to do was get out of bed and get it.

  In a minute. He’d get it in a minute. Right now, the bed had turned to Velcro and was holding him in place.

  It was cold out there, and there were wolves.

  Lions, at least. But he liked the lions. They were sexy.

  Rafe slept.

  —

  Elissa cried out as she peaked. Her internal muscles milked Jude, and his face contorted with need, but he wasn’t letting himself come yet. Wasn’t letting her stop, either. He slid one hand down her body, added his fingers’ skilled caress to the pressure on her clit. She threw her head back in ecstasy and opened her eyes.

  She should have seen their reflection in the skylight, or, if the dim candlelight in the room permitted, whatever stars shone through the nearly perpetual early spring cloud cover.

  Instead, she saw Raphael Benedict sprawled in bed, his face twisted with what she thought at first was pain.

  She realized, with a combination of embarrassment and glee, it wasn’t pain.

  He shouted his pleasure, and she heard it as clearly as the little squelching noises she made moving over Jude, and Jude’s sudden roar.

  Better than she heard herself as she called Jude’s name—at least she hoped it was Jude’s—and lost herself to stars.

  —

  Whatever Anthony had hoped to see through the spying spell—which, though he’d never admit it to Agent Shaw, was Jude watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or otherwise being incredibly, boringly human—Jude and Elissa making love wasn’t it.

  So much for a dull evening of spying on his colleague and her husband from the comfort of his own home. Dull would have been a lot easier to handle.

  Jude’s body was as amazing as Anthony imagined, and Anthony could practically smell the pheromones rolling off him through the magical link. Jude was so intent on his own pleasure and his partner’s that a herd of elephants could have stomped into the bedroom and he probably wouldn’t have noticed. Pure sex.

  More surprisingly, he couldn’t stop staring at the play of light and shadow on Elissa’s skin, at the way her breasts moved and her stomach rippled as she came. He’d known she was pretty, in the abstract way flowers and kittens and sunsets were pretty, but seeing her like this was different. She was Jude’s perfect foil. Anthony might be gay, but seeing people that turned on, even during het sex, was hot. Especially when one of the partners was a witch. Thanks to the spying spell, he could watch her aura flare red and gold, which called to his own meager magic, reminded him how it felt when he’d really connected sexually to someone and his aura had done the happy dance.

  Definitely a good view.

  But not a useful view. Anthony couldn’t look away, but nothing going on would be of interest to the Agency, except to their prurient sides, supposing they still had anything that normal. The higher-ups in the Agency were classic Men in Black, anonymous and detached.

  He supposed you developed that kind of detachment after years of doing a dangerous and thankless job. He didn’t plan to be with the Agency long enough or get deeply involved enough to develop that creepy detachment. He was already a shy geek. He didn’t need to completely forget other people existed.

  Just do this assigned job, get the information they needed on Jude Duclos and get out. Get out while he still could, before he got so ensnared in government secrets he could never be the ordinary plant geneticist he wanted to be.

  He shut down the link, considered taking a few minutes to relieve the frustrated need his spying had aroused.

  No. He wouldn’t. Spying on them was a necessary evil. Getting off on what he’d seen during that necessary evil, though, seemed tacky.

  With a frustrated groan, he pulled himself to his feet. If he wasn’t going to give in to the promptings of his cock and lose the shaky moral high ground he clung to, he needed to do something. Cold showers never worked—just left him more eager than ever to find a warm body to curl up with or at least pretend he’d found one.

  It was way too late to go to the gym, but the night was pleasant enough for March in Geneva. A run would clear his head, subdue his hormones, maybe wear him out enough that he could sleep. It wouldn’t do anything to relieve his sense of shame and guilt, but he was learning to live with that.

  It occurred to him to wonder if his father, who’d been a Navy SEAL, ever felt guilty for things he’d done in the name of duty. Not that he’d ever ask. His father would mutter something about damn liberals and what had he done to deserve a fag intellectual for a son.

  If he was thinking about his father, regretting the breach between them, it was definitely time for a run.

  Chapter Nine

  Jude came down from the speechless high of sex. The tendrils of his being separated from Elissa and he became himself again rather than the wondrously joined being, the he-and-she, of moments before.

  As the power of rational thought switched back on, so did a realization—an image—that had been lost in the nonverbal bliss of a dual with his mate.

  He bolted upright, punched the wall with a hand halfway between a fist and a paw. He didn’t even try to pull back his strength. The plaster cracked under the blow—it was good, old-fashioned horsehair plaster, not flimsy plasterboard—and he smiled ferally.

  The lion roared inside him. His form wavered and his vision shifted to a lion’s, keener in the dim light than his wordy eyes, but with the colors muted. The room filled with bright, poignant smells.

  Still in humanoid form, but with the lion taking over his brain, Jude grimaced, tasting the air with a flehmen as a cat would. He didn’t have Jacobson’s organs in this body to allow him to smell through his mouth, but they waited beneath the surface in case the wordside needed a touch of the lion, an extra sensory edge.

  Like he did now.

  Someone was coming between the lion and his lioness, his mate.

  Rafe Benedict.

  He’d felt the other man there, and now, his nose and his flehmen working in concert, he caught a trace of Rafe’s baffling, intriguing scent of fur and pine and Drozz and naked lust. But…not really. More an echo of a smell, frustratingly out of reach.

  “Jude, get a grip.” Elissa reached out to touch him, but pulled back at the last second.

  “I’m trying to.”

  The lion didn’t want to keep control. The lion wanted to leap on the errant mate, make her submit and bare her throat. There would be cuffing and clawing and biting and drawing of blood, the lion eagerly prompted him, then there’d be more sex, this time lionside where everything was always much simpler and clearer, black and white and shades of red.<
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  If he’d fallen for a dual woman—any dual woman, not necessarily a lion—that would be where a fight would lead. It was the natural course of things between two duals. He couldn’t say how often, growing up, he’d heard roaring from the not-quite-soundproofed basement, and snarling, then other, more intimate noises. His parents would emerge later, scratched up or worse, but with their arms around each other and grinning from ear to ear in a way that made his younger self say, “You guys are gross!”

  But Elissa wasn’t a dual. She couldn’t match him blow for blow, didn’t have a thick coat to cushion against careless claws and teeth. She was small even for a human, far too petite to play with his animal. Lionside, he could kill her by accident, during sex as easily as during a fight.

  She certainly couldn’t handle sex with his lion form. Lions had barbs on their penises, and to handle that a girl needed to walk on the cat side herself, with a body wired to be stimulated by those barbs instead of injured.

  He had to maintain control at all costs. The cracked plaster and sure-to-be-sore knuckles were a small price if it would keep Elissa safe from him.

  “Jude, what in the name of the Powers is wrong? I can feel the lion stirring around under your skin, and usually after sex he’s relaxed and purring.”

  “You…were fantasizing about him,” he said, slowly and softly in a deliberate attempt not to roar, even though speaking the words made his fears real. “About Raphael Benedict.”

  The full, formal name gave him a measure of distance. Rafe was a name you could cry out to the dark, a name for a gorgeous hunk he could all too easily imagine Elissa fucking. Hell, he could imagine fucking Rafe himself.

  Raphael Benedict was safely remote, a stranger with an old-fashioned, sort of goofy name, like a hero from a historical romance.

  Although maybe that wasn’t such a good image. Elissa loved those books, and some of them were damn sexy.