Linda Gayle (6 page)

They both sharply inhaled and glanced at each other then back at her. Their stormy outrage on her behalf was almost an embarrassment. With the heel of her hand, she smudged the lingering dampness from her lashes. “I was kind of losing it, so a friend of mine had a time-share on this hut. She offered it to me for a week so I could get my head together, and here I am.” She managed a weak smile and held up her hands. Ta-da. There was the whole ugly story.

“A week?” Moana asked.

“Yeah. I just flew in yesterday. And boy, are my arms tired.” When they stared blankly, her face heated, and she shrugged. “Never mind. Hey, I’m sure you guys didn’t wait a couple hundred years to hear my sob story.”

They got up together, and before she knew what was happening, sat beside her on the couch, their solid bodies pressing in on either side. Lyric held her breath, startled, but then let it out as their warmth soaked reassuringly into her. It was like being in a cozy man-meat sandwich. Instead of feeling trapped, she felt…protected, even when Rahiti put his hand just above her knee and Moana lightly draped his arm around her back and shoulders.

“If I could ram this man with my head, I would,” Rahiti said, his face a stony mask. Lyric took a second to figure out that was what a dolphin would do to a shark and tried hard not to smile.

“And I would stun him with clicks and whistles until he could not swim and drowned,” Moana promised from behind her.

Guess you could take the man out of the dolphin but not the dolphin out of the man. Leaning back a little against Moana’s strong chest, Lyric smiled. “Thanks, guys. I wish you’d been around a few months ago. Would’ve saved me a lot of heartache.”

“We wish that, too,” Rahiti murmured. The pupils of his eyes had started to spread, and the towel tented.

Oh jeez, she shouldn’t have let them this close, knowing the effect she apparently had on them. Her fears melted away when Moana started to give her shoulders a little massage. It felt so good, especially after the emotional purging she’d done, telling them her tale of woe. Speaking it aloud had made it seem more like something that had happened in the past, even though all that ugliness awaited her when she returned home.

“Now that we are here,” Moana said quietly against her ear, “you are safe. You will never fight alone again.”

What a wonderful thought. Feeling her eyelids drifting down—oh lord, the man had truly talented fingers—Lyric found the strength to murmur, “Except this can’t really be happening.”

Rahiti stroked her cheek with the backs of his knuckles, the touch so tender it made her sigh. “You have been dreaming a long, dark dream, and now you have awoken here with us.”

Between his gentle strokes, which continued down the side of her neck and over her chest and arms, never straying exactly into naughty territory, and Moana’s perfect manipulation of her tense muscles, Lyric began to wonder if he was right. Or maybe this was the dream, a wonderful, warm, wet dream from which she wished she’d never wake. She kept her eyes closed but felt the heat rising to her skin as her cunt slickened, and her breasts grew heavy and full. Rahiti’s hand had drifted to her bare thighs, and he lightly trailed his fingertips over them. God, she wanted to spread them and let him feel how wet she’d grown. Her heartbeat thudded in her inner core, and her nipples tingled to the point of discomfort, crying for his touch.

For
their
touch.

Jolting upright, she opened her eyes and launched from the couch. The two guys stared at her in shock. “What’s wrong, Lyric?” Moana asked, his hands poised in midair as if they still lay over her suddenly absent shoulders. “Did we hurt you?”

“No, not at all.” Christ, if anything, they were making her feel so incredibly good she’d do anything for them,
let
them do anything to her. Never in her life had she considered two men at once. Two men she’d just met. Two men who’d just turned
into
two men.

Oh, for Pete’s sake…
“I think I need to go talk to Henri, now. Before I—we—do something we’ll regret.”

Rahiti stood, not exactly towering over her, but his breadth and strength filled the space around her. “What can Henri tell you that we haven’t? You’ve seen with your own eyes what we were, who we are now.”

“Do not deny us, Lyric. We beg you.” Moana slid to his knees, the sight of the powerful, young warrior in that submissive pose so unintentionally erotic that she actually felt the beginning twinges of an orgasm spiraling up through her pussy.

Stumbling back a step then forcing her feet toward the bedroom, Lyric said, “I need answers. I need to know…what to do.” Her words came out choppy as she yanked on shorts and a T-shirt and shoved her feet into flip-flops. When she returned to the main room, the men stood side by side, staring at her with their big, dark eyes. Her heart tumbled. Maybe they really did need her, but what the hell was she supposed to do with a couple of dolphin-men?

Henri would know. Henri would tell her. She held up a hand. “I’ll be back, I promise. Don’t panic.”

Their big shoulders relaxed marginally. Moana glanced at Rahiti and said something in their language. Rahiti answered him then turned to her. “He worries we might change back if we’re not near you. It’s probably best if we wait near the shore. Or in the water.” Disappointment colored his tone.

If they regained their fishy forms, would she be able to make them men again? A chill ran through her. Then she would’ve blown the chance to have had probably the most incredible sex of her life with two of the hottest guys she’d ever seen. To say nothing of the fact that she would have relegated them back to their cursed existences.

Putting her fists on her hips, she said, “I don’t think that’ll happen. If this was meant to be, my wandering away for an hour won’t jinx it.”

Rahiti’s brows creased, but only briefly. “We must trust you.”

“With our lives,” Moana agreed.

Well, great, not too much pressure there. Her body really wanted to stay and sample what they had started to offer her, but her will mastered it, and Lyric walked to the door. They followed her out, faces long.

“Don’t go too far, and don’t worry,” she said. “Henri and his wife live at the other end of the island. It’s about a mile, so that means I should be back in an hour or so, depending on how long we talk.”

Moana gazed at the sun, probably measuring where it would be in that time. Rahiti put his hands on her waist and drew her in for a soft kiss. As if she was on autopilot or had done this many times before, Lyric tipped her head back to receive it. A delicious little thrill zinged through her at the brush of his lips, and the same sparkling energy sped into her fingertips and toes when Moana echoed his movement, touching his mouth to hers almost chastely. Reverently.

Their obvious caring warmed her all the way through, and that wasn’t good. If her heart got tangled up the way her body already was, she’d be in serious, serious trouble with these two. Her jaw clenched with determination, Lyric waved to them and set off for Henri’s.

* * * *

Moana watched Lyric go and couldn’t quite believe she was leaving them. Rahiti stared after her also, his expression forlorn. Moana touched his friend’s arm, drawing his gaze. “Rahiti, she will come back for us.”

“I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck and gazed toward the water. “We should go to the shore. In case.”

“Yes.”

They walked together to the hated ocean, deceptive and ensnaring in its beauty. Moana didn’t care if he never set foot in it again. The idea of becoming a dolphin once more, being helplessly enslaved in a shape that denied him the pleasure of touching another human in the way he needed to, burned like a flame in his mind. He clutched Rahiti’s arm as they stopped, and the waves licked at their toes. “I cannot return to the sea,” he said.

“It’s only until she returns.”

“I mean…” He swallowed, unable to meet his friend’s gaze.

Rahiti put his arm around his shoulders and drew him against his side. “I know what you mean,” he murmured. “I’m beginning to feel the same way. Better we die as men than continue on as animals.”

Choked with emotion, Moana nodded sharply. Rahiti’s comforting heat flowed over his skin. He leaned against him. “I would never have survived so long without you, my friend.”

“And to think, we started out enemies.”

“That was a long time ago. We have learned much since then.” And they had. Swimming beneath the waves, they’d learned all that Kanaloa had asked them to—how to work together to save stranded fishermen, how to put their differences aside to find food, how to defend each other and rely upon one another.

“We were too proud,” Rahiti said, hanging his head. “We put ourselves before Mohea.”

Moana took in the wide sweep of pure white sand coasting up to the edge of the lush, green tropical growth and swaying palms. “To think, she died here, waiting for us. I would have given my life for her a hundred times over.”

“As would I.” He kicked at a shell, his arm tightening around Moana. “I wanted to kill you then, to keep Mohea for myself. I was wrong.”

Their epic battle, which had drawn the wrath of the gods and engendered a furious storm, was so fresh in Moana’s memory it was as if it had just happened. He could clearly picture Rahiti, vicious snarl on his face, short spear in hand, slick with sweat and blood, for they had scored a number of wounds on each other after many hours of battle. He remembered the rage that had blistered him from the inside out, like the sun blazing in his gut, and the overwhelming drive to claim Mohea as his own.

He slid his arm around Rahiti’s hips in like fashion and turned to align his body with Rahiti’s, as they had when they were dolphins for comfort. “I was just as wrong. Everything’s different now, though. I would give my life for you as I once would have for Mohea.”

When Rahiti’s arms came around him fully, he relaxed into his friend’s enveloping embrace. He nearly moaned when Rahiti ran his hands over his back. To be held again in human arms was paradise. His
tore
began to respond beneath the towel draped around his hips. He held his breath, wondering if Rahiti felt it, what he would think, do. After the span of three heartbeats, Rahiti pushed his hips against Moana, gently, as if setting his feet on a new path, and Moana exhaled a heated breath when he felt the hard club of Rahiti’s
tore
against his thigh.

Without releasing him, his mouth close enough to Moana’s ear that Moana felt his breath against his skin, Rahiti said, “I wasn’t sure if what we felt as dolphins would be the same now, but I burn, Moana.”

Tentatively, Moana rubbed his groin side to side against Rahiti. Between the rough cloth of the towel and being so near to Rahiti’s muscular body, his
tore
—cock—began to throb. “Being close to Lyric has made me hungry for fucking,” he admitted, his voice sounding choked. “She is so beautiful.”

Mentioning Lyric seemed to stiffen Rahiti’s cock further. Moana could feel it growing harder, longer, as his friend rubbed it almost shyly against his hip bone. He cursed the towels between them then grew impatient and pulled his off, letting it drop to the sand. He drew his arms from around Rahiti’s back and took Rahiti’s towel with him. The sight of his friend’s thick staff standing up straight from its black bush of hair made him lick his lips.

“Tell me,” he said, running his fingers up the underside of Rahiti’s cock, “if Lyric was here, what would you want her to do?”

A great shudder shook Rahiti’s frame, and then, to Moana’s delight, he reached down and grasped Moana’s cock in a loose grip. “It is enough that you are here, my friend. My brother.”

Moana couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “I don’t think brothers do this to each other.” Closing his fist around Rahiti’s length, he dragged it from the base to the wet tip then spread the wetness around the dark head with his thumb. “I have dreamed of this, of seeing you as a man. Touching you…”

Rahiti did the same to his cock, and Moana clenched his thighs and buttocks, feeling for the first time in so long his balls draw up, his asshole tighten and relax. When he’d been a younger warrior, he’d sometimes played with a beautiful
mahu
from his village who had shown him the pleasures of licking and teasing and plundering that private place. His mouth flooded with moisture at the thought of showing Rahiti, who he suspected had never played with another boy, the delights of fingers and tongue.

“Let us lie on the sand,” Moana said breathlessly. “If we relax each other now, then later, when Lyric returns, we will be able to control ourselves better.”

“And we won’t frighten her off.” Rahiti’s handsome face grew serious. “Did we make a mistake? Touching her like we did?”

Moana released his cock to stroke his hands over Rahiti’s sides. He took his hand and drew him down to the beach to sit beside him. “No. I think she was just as eager to fuck as we were, but her heart has been wounded, and she doesn’t trust herself, or us. But if we are gentle”—he nudged Rahiti to lie down on the sand—“and patient”—he eased half his body over his friend’s, stroking his broad chest, letting his fingertips trail over Rahiti’s nipples—“then she will come to love us.”

“Both of us,” Rahiti said on a sigh then closed his eyes and arched his back as Moana flicked his tongue over his right nipple. Moana could have crowed with happiness. To please his friend was a gift. His own cock began to drip, and his balls lay heavy against his inner thigh, but he would not rush this. While he teased the tightly beaded nipple with the tip of his tongue, he eased his hand down until he once again held the thick spear of Rahiti’s cock in his palm. “Oh, Moana…” Rahiti jerked, and Moana caught his gasp in his mouth as he pressed his lips against Rahiti’s.