“Your iron dog? That’s it?”
“Hey, Rauta means a lot to me,” he snaps. Then his eyes soften. “What did I feel like?” he asks quietly. “What did my hands feel like to you?”
“It’s hard to say, since I was screaming, thinking I was going to die,” I admit. “Wasn’t really paying attention to the details, you know?”
I turn and walk over to his other self. I reach down and take his big strong hand in mine, clasping my fingers around it, giving it a squeeze. Though the Shadow Self doesn’t look up, he does squeeze back. I can almost feel Death inside him, making him move. “It feels nice,” I say quietly. “You have very soft hands.”
Suddenly I feel Death at my back and he places his gloved hands over my shoulders, holding me in place. He brushes my hair out of the way with his nose, puts his mouth at my neck.
I immediately sink into him.
“I’ve missed you,” I find myself whispering.
“I’m with you every night,” he murmurs, lips brushing softly against my skin, making me shiver with delight.
“I know,” I say, my eyes falling shut. “But tonight you weren’t.”
“I’m with you now.”
I want to tell him about me being a Goddess. I want to tell him about seeing Vipunen in his true form. And yet all the urgency melts away. Thoughts fade, as they always do when he’s kissing my neck, when my body starts responding to his.
He continues to gently suck at my neck, hand sliding down to my waist.
Need licks up my spine like a bonfire.
My hand is still in the hand of his Shadow Self and his grip is getting tighter. I look down at him to see his Shadow Self staring up at me. There’s clarity in his eyes now.
“Are you…practicing?” I ask in a throaty voice, holding eye contact.
“Do you mind?” Death says. “It would be a great test to see what I can do. What I can feel.” His hand slips over my breast, making me gasp. My nipple strains against the thin fabric. “What I can control.”
The Shadow Self keeps a hold of my hand as he gets to his feet. I’m suddenly caught between two versions of Death; My husband and his Shadow Self, both looming over me in all their dark and Godly glory.
“Do you mind?” Death asks again. His grip on my shoulders tightens and he turns me around so that I’m facing him now, his Shadow Self at my back. “Do you mind if you become part of the magic?”
He’s so damn beautiful it hurts.
I swallow hard, trying to tell him that I don’t mind at all, but all I can make is this weak noise of want that gets caught in my throat. Death is pressed up against me, hard as a fucking rock, and he’s pulling down my nightgown, exposing my breasts. He glances down at me through his dark lashes, his gray eyes simmering as he takes me in. There is so much want and desire in them that I find myself getting weak at the knees, weak in the soul.
Then the Shadow Self slips a bare hand over my shoulder, holding me in place. He’s hard as hell too, his cock pressed up against my ass.
Oh my gods.
Plural.
Chapter 19
Hanna
“The Duality”
My old roommate had a threesome once. She was dating a guy, very casually, and it turns out he was dating another girl. Also very casually. They all got drunk at his house one night and voila.
I asked her about it the next day, all ears, and she said it was fun but it definitely created some weirdness between them. They ended up breaking up, and the other girl broke up with him too. She said the dynamics changed, creating and breaking possessiveness. Things were easily complicated when three people are involved intimately.
I would have assumed the same under any other circumstances, as I am very much a one-man kind of woman when it comes down to it.
But here, with my husband—the God of Death—in front of me, pulling my nightgown off over my head, and his body double, his Shadow Self behind me and running his bare hands—bare hands!—over my shoulders in a sensual manner, I have to remind myself that this isn’t two different people and there isn’t someone else to have things get weird with after.
“Are you sure that he’s still you?” I still ask. My voice is coming out breathy and quiet in the room. My pulse is beating rabbit-fast in my neck.
Death throws my nightgown to the floor and brings his molten gaze from my chest to meet my eyes. “Do I look like a man that would share?” he asks dryly.
I swallow thickly. No. He doesn’t. He is possessive to the core.
“The man behind you is still me,” he says in a low voice. “He feels what I feel, he thinks what I think. I see through his eyes. We are one, just as you are one.”