He wasn’t close enough, deep enough. He had to envelop her, fill her. Easing his arms over her shoulders, between her back and the mattress, he lifted her chest against his and pressed in. Panting, frantic, fucking on fire, he fused their mouths together and surged deep into her once more. She responded again with a jerk and a groan. And still, it wasn’t enough. It never would be.

Hard, fast, the slick slide of his flesh over—into—hers was both heaven and hell.

Exquisite torture. Every rasp of her clasping cunt sent him careening closer to oblivion. She was everything he’d ever wanted, never believed existed or that he deserved. And he wasn’t leaving this bed until she exploded in orgasm and shouted a hoarse cry in his name.

“Deke,” Luc’s voice broke into the wild rhythm of his shuttling in and out of her.

“Deke!”

“What?” he snarled.

“Be gentle.”

Gentle? Shit!

Deke thundered a heavy stare down at Kimber. His gaze met her dilated hazel eyes and an arc of electricity zinged right up his cock, punctuated by her needy, restless moan. “Am I hurting you?”

Yeah, he sounded like he gargled with sandpaper. So fucking what? Before she could answer, he had to level another long stroke to the end of her channel. The motion lit up nerves and set off a blaze of sensation, based on the way she scratched her nails into his back, arched to him, and her sensitive walls clasped him tighter.

“Am I?” he demanded.

“No. More. God, more!”

Her words peeled the veneer off what little civility he possessed. Hammering into her like a lust-crazed maniac, Deke held her against him, immobile, forcing her to accept the brutal need of his every thrust as he took possession of her mouth in a desperate kiss.

“It appears you don’t need me here after all. I’ll just…go,” he heard Luc say over the roar of his heart. His cousin rose and made his way across the room, to the door.

The impact of Luc leaving him here alone with Kimber… Deke stopped. Froze.

Like someone had put a choke hold on his pleasure and squeezed the life out of his arousal. Blood rushed away from his erection. It dwindled, dread replacing arousal.

What the…? This had never happened. Panic stole into his veins like sharp, stinging needles. No, no, no! This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wanted to make love to Kimber, have her all to himself. His body had other plans.

Holy shit! His erection…gone. How? Why was this happening suddenly? He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to focus on everything sexual, anything that would bring his cock back to life.

Nothing.

In that instant, Deke knew he wouldn’t be able to finish this if Luc left.

Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch! What was wrong with him? Maybe he should just ask Heather. Oh, wait. She was dead.

Mortification slammed as he wondered with a sick frustration how his body could let him down. All this time he’d been afraid and psyching himself out about it, thinking he was just screwed up in the head in his refusal to fuck a woman alone.

But it was physical, too. He couldn’t even stay hard without his cousin here to hold his hand. He felt like half a man. Like a freak.

“Stay!” Deke demanded, choking the word out. “For chrissakes, come over here and be gentle. I can’t.”

Luc hesitated. “Please.” It physically hurt to spit the word out, but Deke knew, knew, he wasn’t going to be able to finish staking his claim on Kimber if Luc left the room.

And didn’t that speak volumes about how fucked-up in the head he was?

With a defeated sigh, Luc padded back to his side of the bed and crawled on.

Biting the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted blood, Deke rolled to his side so that Kimber’s back nestled to Luc’s chest.

His cousin placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed the damp crook of her neck. “You look beautiful in pleasure.”

All was normal again—or his definition of it. Seeing Kimber relax against Luc, and his cousin’s mouth travel over her flushed skin, his cock sprang back to vital life.

Taking hold of her hips, Deke pressed as deep inside Kimber as he could. “You are beautiful, kitten. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.” Fresh tears clawed out of Kimber’s eyes as she threw her arms around Deke’s neck. Her pussy fluttered around him. With another hard stroke into her, he pushed against her G-spot, ground up against her clit. And Kimber came apart, roaring out a tortured cry of satisfaction so wild, unlike any Deke had ever heard from her.

“Deke!”

Her untamed pulsing all over his cock, her cries of whimpering pleasure ringing off the walls, sent him straight into a crash of ecstasy that clenched around his heart. Sobbing out a masculine growl, sensations gathered up inside him like a fireball, dangerous and consuming. In a few powerful spasms, he poured it all out into her. Everything—his love, his need, his hopes, his soul. Kimber accepted it all inside her with a long cry. Their gazes connected, and the connection latched, locked into place. He couldn’t have looked away to save his fucking life.

Timeless moments later, the tumult ended. Kimber stilled, then broke their connection as her body sank into the mattress and she clambered away from him, rolling away—right into Luc’s arms with a sharp cry and jagged tears. Luc closed his arms around her, but his gaze met Deke’s. Confusion. There was no other word to describe it. About Deke’s physical reaction. About Kimber’s emotional one. From Deke’s complete inability to perform, then straight to orgasm. From her immersion in ecstasy to razor-sharp despair. Now, Deke was spent.

Kimber sobbed. Luc had no idea what was going on with either of them. Deke wasn’t totally sure himself. But he was focusing on Kimber for now.

“Kitten?” he rolled closer, leaning over her. “What?” For endless minutes, she refused to talk. He asked. Luc asked. No answers. Just more of those hysterical tears that ripped a sword of excruciating pain right through the middle of his heart. He did the only thing he could do. And Luc joined him. They simply rubbed her, soothed her, telling her everything would be okay.

Deke knew for a fact that every word out of his mouth was bullshit.

“No more,” she sobbed. Then she closed her eyes against him. Moments later, she went still, as if the peaks of body and emotion were too overwhelming. She sank into slumber, curled in a fetal position. Deke looked down as he realized that he’d slipped his hand into hers at some point and she still clutched it.

The roaring climaxes that had wracked her body thrilled Deke, but all the tears..

It wasn’t a coincidence they’d come after Kimber had told him that she loved him and he’d confessed in kind. And after she’d told him that she didn’t want to be shared again, then it became obvious that he couldn’t love her by himself.

“No more what?” Luc asked, looking tense. “Is she talking about what I think she’s talking about?”

Shit. Here came the part where he had to be honest with Luc about a truth he could hardly process himself.

A truth that would change everything.

Deke sighed. “You know I think of you like a brother.” Something guarded and angry entered Luc’s dark eyes. “Yeah?”

“Keeping it real, my brother? We can’t keep doing this to her. She doesn’t want to be shared anymore.”

“What? You’re going to fuck her by yourself?” Luc challenged. “You didn’t seem exactly able a few minutes ago.”

Observant bastard. Deke had no idea how sex was going to work. Today had proven beyond all doubts that he was half a man, that he couldn’t make love to a woman without another man being near. Even if, like this morning, Luc didn’t fuck her, too. Simply knowing that someone else had his back, just in case…

Luc kept on. “You told her you were going to claim her for yourself. How are you going to make that happen?”

“They’re big words you know I can’t back up alone,” Deke choked, sounding as ripped apart about that as Luc looked. “Even so, this, the three of us…it has to stop.”

“Goddamn it!”

“C’mon. She’s not built for this. Can’t you see that?”

“I need this! You need this. What the hell are we supposed to do?” With a frown, Deke studied his cousin. “Why do you need this? What do you get out of it besides getting off?”

“Plenty. I’m not giving up on you two. Until today, Kimber did fine with us.

Perfectly. This is just some anomaly—”

“It’s not. You saw her sobbing her fucking heart out!” In some ways, he wished Luc was right. But the reality was, Kimber probably felt unloved, maybe abused, when he said he loved her and still let his cousin touch her. And he could barely stand to see Luc’s hands on her anymore.

“What the hell changed?”

Oh, another hard truth. Deke resisted the urge to wince. “She says she loves me.”

“She’s told me as much before.” And Luc didn’t sound jealous in the least.

Which confused the shit out of Deke. “I told her I love her, too.”

“And now she wants to be exclusive?” The tight, bitter smile told Deke this could get ugly fast.

He shrugged. “We both know I’m not built like that. I can’t”—Deke looked away and buried his face in his hands—“I feel so fucking broken. What the hell kind of man needs a buddy to hold his hand when he’s making love to his woman?”

“Do you think she understands that? Knows why?”

“No.” Luc started to open his mouth, but Deke shut him down. “Telling her won’t change facts.”

“That’s bullshit you tell yourself so you don’t have to spill the truth to her.” Maybe. But he wasn’t willing to test the theory. Oh hell, she was probably going to run screaming from him no matter what he did. So why vomit his past all over her?

“Drop it.”

Luc shrugged, clearly pissed. “So what’s next?”

With a sigh, Deke looked down at Kimber. Good freakin’ question. “We spend the rest of the morning driving back to our place and tell her there, after dinner, that there are no more threesomes. Then…I guess, we’ll let her decide what she wants.”

“You mean who?”

Half a man or the man she didn’t love. Hell of a choice.

Deke raked a tense hand through his hair. “Yeah.” Funny, when Kimber had first come to their place to ask him to teach her all about ménage, she’d asked how they handled jealousy. His answer had been bullshit and ignorant lies. The truth was, he’d never dealt with it before. None of the women he and Luc had fucked together had ever mattered. Now that he’d felt the bite of covetousness, he hadn’t handled it well. And he’d probably lose her in large part because of it.

The guys were eerily silent the rest of the day, which suited Kimber just fine.

She awoke that afternoon to find herself alone and exhausted in the swamp cabin’s big bed. Luc brought her lunch, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat it. Deke announced they were headed back to Texas. She supposed she should be happy.

But happy just wouldn’t come. Whether Luc’s brown or Deke’s dazzling blue, their eyes seemed to see through her, and they were heavy and worried. She had a feeling that some sort of reckoning was coming…

Listless and queasy from crying overload, she quietly packed her suitcase. In the kitchen, she heard Luc loading up the appliances and supplies he’d brought.

Deke…who knew where he was?

Kimber had the oddest urge to find him—now—ask if he still loved her. Ask if excluding Luc from their bed was going to end their relationship. She had a bad feeling about the answer, especially after experiencing his reaction to Luc’s attempt to leave the bedroom earlier that morning. It seemed wild, nearly unbelievable, that a man as virile as Deke couldn’t make love without another man in the room, but what if it was true?

The fact that he refused to tell her why was shredding her insides, and frankly, pissing her off.

And now she had one other complication she just hadn’t expected…

Silence filled the trip back to East Texas. She consoled herself with the thought that she was one step closer to seeing her dad—and figuring out where her life would go from here.

They’d barely stepped foot in Luc’s house before Deke announced that he had to leave to take care of business. God, he was distancing himself from her already. He might love her…but it sure felt like he wasn’t going to try to overcome whatever was bothering him. Was his sudden exit supposed to be her cue to leave?

The minute Deke left, Luc approached her looking like he had something on his mind. “You need something, sweetheart? Coffee? Food? I’ll make you anything.” At the moment, she just wanted to be alone, especially if he had any ideas about acting on the heat in that dark chocolate gaze of his, currently melting all over her.