Page 11 of The Hard Way

“Move a little,” I whispered. “Little pulses.”

He moved inside me. Just his first tiny pulse rocked my orgasm out from deep inside me, starting up like a rumbling freight train. Then he moved deeper and it was an explosion of pleasure barreling through me.

It was like nothing I’d ever experienced—in terms of pleasure, but also in terms of how connected we felt, like we shared a mind, a body—a soul, even—that’s how all-consuming it was.

“Goddess,” Odin cried as we went further off together, careening from one magical landscape of pleasure to the next, him filling me madly.

I came down slowly, spinning.

Eventually it ended.

“Odin,” I gasped as soon as my capacity for speech had returned. I was back in an alley in Rome.

He slipped out.

I felt a little sad that he was out. I collapsed onto Thor, who stroked my hair.

“Um, did you guys just have some sort of mystical butt-fucking experience?” Thor asked.

I looked over at Odin. I didn’t feel like answering.

Odin cleaned the both of us up and pulled me into his lap. “Ice doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.

Really, I thinkhedidn’t want to talk about it.

Something important had passed between us.

I gazed up at Odin, feeling floppy as a kitten, and traced his lips with the pad of my finger. The way he’d just fucked medidseem mystical and magical, but saying so would break the magic.

“It means everything that you trust me,” Odin said. He was seriously on this trusting jag.

I grinned up at him. “I’m naked in an alley on your lap. I better trust you.”

Zeus strolled up and towered over the three of us. “Jesus.” He reached down and pulled me up. “You have never been hotter,” he said. “Seriously. Hey, Thor. You got something of Ice’s?”

Thor tossed over my dress. Zeus held it like a coat. I slipped into it and fastened the tie around my waist.

“Can we just buy an eighty-year supply of these wraparound things? Because Italy has the right idea.” He held my arm as I stepped into my panties.

“You see us fucking into our hundreds?” I ask.

“Fuck yeah.” Zeus settled his suit coat around my shoulders.

Odin pulled his coat from the cobblestones and slung it over his shoulder.

Thor wanted dessert, so we raced to the late-night bakery, trying to get there before it closed so we could get the chocolate biscotti we’d gotten addicted to. We bought a dozen in a white paper bag and took them to a bridge over the river near our luxury hotel. We leaned over the rail, eating our biscotti and enjoying the way the starlight shone on the water. Or at least I was enjoying that. The guys were in an argument about what of the stars were actually satellites.

Guys.

Odin came to me while Thor and Zeus were on the other side of the bridge, arguing about whether a particularly bright star was really a star.

“It felt different inside you tonight,” he said. “I can’t describe what it was like. I think it’s impossible to describe…”

“Like the most intense intimacy?”

“Yes.”

I smoothed the soft, dark stubble down the side of his face, sliding along the grain, so that it felt almost silky. “I was there, remember?”

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