Page 45 of Waves
As we swam closer to one of the middle platforms, I was surprised to see Valdez floating in line, waiting for a turn, his pink hair dancing in the current. He spotted us and the gold ring on the corner of his mouth curved upward with his welcoming smile. “Well, well, well. Look who we have here.”
We swam over to a wooden platform attached to the iceberg, where a deep hole had been bored into the side, and I waved at some giggling kids before joining the line behind the pink dolphin shifter. His gaze slid between me and Keelan, before he slyly asked, “Looking to be pinned between two men today, Your Majesty?”
My entire face heated at the insinuation and my gaze darted over to the rest of the line, but it looked as if the last of the children had just shot down the slide. Thank goodness!The panic racing through me dimmed once I realized no little ears overheard his lewd statement. Then the floral scent that I associated with Valdez’s arousal perfumed the current around us, making me slightly dizzy.
He reached for my hand and pulled me in front of him before addressing Keelan. “We can trade—take turns riding in front of or behind?—”
“I call first backsies,” Keelan immediately declared.
Valdez gave an exaggerated sigh of disappointment that nearly made me titter. “Fine.”
The men staggered themselves in front of and behind me as Mr. Whelk shot off to play with some nearby mer children. In the distance, I caught sight of several small figures surrounding my guards, who were quite discreet this morning.
I barely had a second to glance in that direction before Valdez had tossed his long legs down the tube of the ice tunnel and was reaching back for me. “Damn. This is ice cold. Warm me up, Majesty.”
With Keelan’s help, I climbed up behind the dolphin shifter and wrapped my hands around his trim middle. He was absolutely correct, the tunnel stung the length of my legs, and I squealed, quickly lifting them up and using Valdez’s legs as shields for my own. That left me pressed tightly against him and wrapped around him, not unlike the monkey that one of Rasle’s former courtiers had brought to Evaness. Every inch of me that could be pressed up against Valdez was.
His hands landed on my thighs, latching onto me before he let his thumbs drift in slow circles, transforming my trembling from a cold-related shiver to something else.
Keelan settled in behind me, gently folding each of my wings forward around my sides as he wrapped me up firmly with his good arm, pressing forward. With him inside the tunnel too, the light dimmed until everything became a hazy blue shadow.But what I couldn’t see was irrelevant because I had two men touching me, both spurred on by the relative privacy of our situation. Their fingers mapped out my body, traced trails along my skin, explored. Touch overwhelmed me, and a flush heated my neck despite the intense cold.
My lips parted, my breath grew quicker, misting in front of me, as Keelan’s hand reached my inner thigh. Head tilted back to his shoulder, I became aware of my pounding pulse as he let the heat of his hand press against me, there.
“Now!” Keelan’s yell startled me, but apparently both men had been awaiting that signal—as if they’d planned this brutal, delicious assault—and they pushed off, feet shoving us forward, the siren’s hand trapped against me.
We went flying. My stomach slammed upward into my chest cavity as we came to a drop that went almost straight down in the steep tube, my ass burning from cold as we slid along the ice. Our speed created a wind that ripped my hair back from my face and made my eyes squint, tearing up slightly at the edges.
The siren and the dolphin shifter both whooped in delight, filling the tunnel with bouncing sounds of joy as we tilted right and then left before the slide had another wild drop—one that wrenched a scream right out of me.
Without warning, the drop ended, and we slammed into the bottom of the slide for just a second before shooting out the side of the iceberg into the calm, complacent open water.
The sudden shift from speed to weightlessness did strange things to my belly and the inside of my skull—both felt hollowed out. My fingers seemed unaware that the danger was over because they wouldn’t unlatch from Valdez’s shirt. It took an entire minute of calm breathing before I was able to convince my body that it wasn’t under attack.
As soon as I did, both men swam up on either side of me, wearing matching grins of boyish delight. “Again,” they commanded.
And we went again. And again. And again.
Chapter 19
Avia
After an hour of being pinned between two men, I needed a break. I was fairly certain that any skin on my rear had burned away from the cold and my throat positively ached from screeching. We’d tried each and every slide carved into the iceberg, bored through it by playful narwhals, or so the children told us. They were divine. My favorite were the twisting tunnels but both men seemed to like the way my thighs clenched around them when we went on the slides with large drops, so we’d gone on those a fair number of times.
Each turn had been preceded by a bit of teasing fingers and wandering hands, and by the time I pleaded for mercy, I was not only frozen, but a bit worked up.
After our final run, we floated outside the berg near the lower tip in a band of water that was cornflower blue. The current had died down, but both my contestants were still delightfully unkempt, Valdez’s pink hair ruffled and Keelan’s pale shirt untucked after our rides. My grin was an insistent thing that I couldn’t have stifled even if I’d wanted to.
But then Valdez lifted my hands to his chilly lips and kissed it. “Avia, while I would love to take full advantage of thatnaughty spark in your eyes, I promised I’d meet an old friend for lunch. And I’m quite late.”
Though I understood, my smile to him might have stiffened because the shifter had definitely riled me as he’d held me from behind, kissing and squeezing my neck during our final round, playing with my breathlessness. Holding me captive beneath his fingers.
I’d been hoping, perhaps foolishly, that he’d finally make good on his constant teasing about taking me with another man. It was definitely the sort of scenario that I wasn’t brave enough to take charge of or propose myself.
Or perhaps it was obvious that I was still a bit hesitant. And perhaps he was waiting for that point where he drove me off the ledge of reason, to the point where consequences and propriety fled my mind, where inhibition lost its hold. When I became feral for him.
Leaning forward, his lips brushed my cheek. “Soon,” he whispered in my ear, his breath a hot promise. And then he swam off as I fought a fluttering, light-headed feeling as if I was teetering on the brink.
I turned to Keelan with an attitude that bordered on cruel but was merely desperate. “Don’t you dare say you have plans too.”
