Page 29

There was a magical looking Christmas village, complete with tiny ice skaters moving around on a frozen pond.

Even the huge eighty-inch television on the wall, around the corner in the entertainment and gaming area, had garland around the top and the outside, draped on the sides like a curtain.

The ornaments and little fake presents were mostly red, gold, and pearl, with a little silver here and there, but there was tons of greenery to somehow balance it all out.

The hearth in the conversation area had wreaths with huge red and gold bows on them.

She counted trees again and realized she’d been wrong. There were two groupings of three trees in various sizes, and then four huge solo trees scattered around by themselves. That made ten trees. In one room.

“Wow.” It was beautiful, and completely over the top, but she supposed if you were going to be seven or eight years old forever, maybe it made sense?

Dev chuckled. “That’s a pretty common response. Some of the houses have contests. I don’t compete. The main coterie house is doing a Whoville theme, and Clive is doing an Island of Misfit Toys theme, complete with a huge Bumbles outside that has to be forty feet tall. I have no idea where he found it. They all decorate the weekend following Thanksgiving, mostly. I stopped joining in the fun a few decades ago, so Brooke sends people to do it for me.”

“Why did you stop?”

He eyed her a good twenty seconds before telling her, “For a lot of reasons, Christmas has been a time for me to make it good for others, while it wasn’t that special to me. Perhaps this year, I can focus on different aspects. I find that I hope you’ll agree to be part of my Christmas celebration this year.”

There was a question Genie wanted to ask Dev, and she’d meant to ask it right away, but now that it came to it, she wasn’t sure how to bring it up. She sat on one of the sofas and rubbed her arms. She was in a red sweater and faded jeans, and she felt as if she matched the decorations. It was a turtleneck, so no cleavage showed, but sometimes her breasts looked even bigger when completely covered. She hadn’t been sure how to dress, but because of her boobs, if she didn’t wear the tight exercise bras she bought to work in, she pretty much always looked sexy whether she meant to or not.

“Are the twins going to have safewords?” He’d told her they’d be bound to keep them from getting into trouble, and she understood they’d been trained to enjoy being submissive, but she needed to be certain they had a say in what happened to them.

“I operate, Itrain, based on positive and negative reinforcement. Part of that is the earning of privileges. Today, they can safeword to let me know if something hurts outside of the norm, but they can’t safeword to stop something that isn’t detrimental in some way. They’re obligated to let me know if an item or action brings up bad memories, or if they’re in danger of being injured enough they might have tochangeand heal. The more they do to work towards the status of someone with the rights and privileges of a freeperson, the more say-so they will have in sex, should they want it. I have a feeling Elijah will never want it, though I’m not certain about Ezra.”

“You should know that I’ll stop things if I scent distress on either of them.”

“If we hurt them and it’s a good hurt, you’ll smell a combination of distress and pleasure. I hope you’ll only stop the scene if there’s a lack of the good, because for a masochist, without distress, there might not be an orgasm.”

“Have you played with them enough to be certain they’re masochists?”

He crossed those massive arms over is chest. “I’ve fucked them both, as have most of the dominant males in Brooke’s coterie. It’s important they know where they stand. Two nights ago, they were fucked nearly constantly for almost six hours. They were in tiny little cock cages that didn’t allow them to get fully erect, and neither was allowed an orgasm.”

Genie had gone through something similar — without the cock age or the orgasm denial — when the Chattanooga bikers had accepted her. It’d been equal parts heaven and hell, and she wouldn’t trade the memories of it for anything. She’d be eighty years old and still playing with her clit to the memories of that night.

“Okay.”

Dev lifted an eyebrow. “That’s it? Just okay?”

“Initiation, of a sort. A shortcut into making them part of the coterie. Brooke’s blood bond would do it, but this fast-tracks them having a history with everyone. I get it.” Also, if they’d gone through that, then whatever was going to happen tonight would be a piece of cake.

“Okay, one more question.” She’d started to mention it several times, and always chickened out, but she needed to know. But now that it came to it, she wasn’t sure how to ask it.

“You haven’t…” She blew out a breath. “I mean, I’ve tried a couple of times, and you move me away.”

Dev reached for her hand, and she noted that the size difference between them wasn’t far off from the size difference between Genie and Brooke, who Genie thought was closer to the size of a modern-day five-year-old than an eight-year-old, though she wasn’t an expert on children’s sizes, so maybe she was wrong.

“What haven’t I done, or let you do, little owl?”

His voice was soft, but not the soft-and-dangerous voice her owl tried to hear. No, he was trying not to scare her, and in doing so, he’d terrified her inner owl. She breathed in and out, and sat a little taller, trying to push the fear to the background.

“You haven’t fucked my mouth, nor have you let me give you a really good blow job.”

“I frequently throat-fuck shapeshifter men, but I rarely do so with a much smaller shapeshifter woman, and I almost never do so with a human of either gender. My snake and I see you as something between human and shapeshifter. Not as fragile as a human, but not as hardy as a wolf or big-cat shifter. Certainly not as sturdy as a bear.”

He sighed. “If it’s important to you, I’ll order you to pleasure me with your mouth a few moments as foreplay, but the truth is, I’d rather fuck your ass than your face — it doesn’t have teeth.”

Truth, but not the entire truth. She wasn’t prepared to call him on it, though, so she asked, “Have you fucked the twins faces?”

“I have, but only as part of a dominance thing, so I own both of their holes. I prefer their asses, too.”