Chapter 3

Juno

Only after Leo had gone did Caleb come out.

He didn't dare look at me. Clutching himself below the waist, he fled back to his room.

In the small hours of the night, I slipped into Leo's room after all.

I'd rested outside for a long while, but I still couldn't quiet the jolt that Caleb's young body had sent through me.

Leo's stamina wasn't enough to satisfy me. But Caleb, with a frame far stronger and finer than his father's, would surely do the trick.

When I crept in, Leo had only just lain down. He pulled me into his arms under the covers, his hand sliding up beneath my skirt to find the underwear already soaked through.

"Little slut."

He laughed as he cursed me, and his kises, thick with ragged breath, rained down on me like a madness.

I feigned pleasure, sighing softly and sweetly against his ear, over and over.

A pity that I'd carelessly dropped the pills I'd brought into the liquor cabinet.

I looped my arms around Leo's neck and worked hard to stoke his desire. But for all his heavy breathing and long effort, his body gave no response.

In the end, he finished me off with his hand.

I lay against him, my whole body burning, an endless emptiness that nearly wrung a cry from my flesh. Leo, though, seemed even more spent than I was. He roled onto his back, breath coming quick and short.

I climbed lightly onto his shoulder, soft as a she-demon feding on blood, and wrapped myself around him from behind.

"I'll have finance transfer your wages tomorrow. Get some sleep."

Leo seemed to know exactly what was on my mind. Once he'd said it, I settled back down onto the bed. Since I'd be getting the money, I had no wish to kep waiting on this old man who was all want and no ability.

Soon I was fast asleep.

At dawn, I rose before Leo's alarm could sound.

As Leo's mistress, I also had to play the manor's servant now and then. This hundred thousand of mine hadn't come easy.

After directing the kitchen staff through breakfast, I went back upstairs. Leo wasn't up yet, but Caleb's door stood open. I pushed it in—the room was empty.

I gathered the clothes Caleb had tossed into the laundry hamper. A certain smell hung over the basket, one no grown adult could mistake.

Buried at the very bottom of the hamper, I spotted a pair of shorts stained with white. My lips curved without my meaning them to. I hooked the underwear up one finger, my mind on Caleb's flushed face and on the thing that had pressed so insistently against my bely the night before.

Caleb really had... grown up.

"What are you doing?"

Caleb's flustered voice came from the dorway. I turned, and the moment he saw the underwear dangling from my finger, his face went crimson again throat bobbing as if it shared his panic.

"Just tidying your dirty laundry for you."

I tilted my head, playing the innocent, and smiled at him brightly.

"Put it down. Don't touch my things."

His voice dropped low, thick with a boy's mortification. Before he could snatch it away, I tucked the underwear in among the rest and clutched the whole bundle to my chest.

"What are you afraid of? You're grown now. Every man goes through this."

My voice gently soothed his frayed nerves. But that flushed young face was simply too tempting. Just as Caleb began to relax, I laughed again.

"I only didn't expect my body would get such a rise out of you."

I dredged up the memory of last night once more, and his expression turned worse still.

"Get out!"

Like a snarling beast, he drove me from the room without another word. Outside, though, I couldn't stop laughing for the longest time.

The young ones—far more vigorous than that old fellow of a father, no question.

Leaving Caleb's room, I saw Orion's door shut tight and assumed he was still aslep. But as I passed it, I heard faint sobing from within.

I frowned. Was Orion crying?

In this house, Leo treated me as a plaything and Caleb treated me as an enemy. Only Orion, this eighteen-year-old boy, was ever kind to me.

I couldn't leave it be. I twisted the handle and stepped inside to find Orion curled in a ball on the bed, tear tracks still at the corners of his eyes.

"Juno, I dreamed about Mom."

Water shimmered in the boy's amber eyes. Orion didn't have his brother's sharp features—his was a gentle face without a trace of menace, and just then he looked like a pitiful white rabbit, stirring pity in me.

I couldn't help rembering how, in the time just after my own mother died, I too used to dream of her often.

"Don't be afraid, Orion. Leo and Caleb will always be here with you."

I comforted him softly, sitting on the edge of the bed and gathering him into my arms like a child.

I'd always thought of Orion as still a boy. But holding him, I realized this eighteen-year-old had grown to a hundred and eighty centimeters—cradling even his upper half left me straining.

"Juno, will you stay with me forever?"

The boy's wounded voice sounded against me and snapped me back to myself. I pated his lean, strong back.

Forever, I couldn't promise. I wasn't sure how much of his novelty I still held for Leo. But once the debt was paid, I would begin a clean life of my own.

"I will."

To settle the boy's fragile heart, I gave him the promise anyway. Having it, Orion stopped crying and nuzzled his head against my chest, docile as a little animal.

Caleb, passing by the door, saw all of it. His voice was thick with anger he couldn't hold back.

"Orion, get up."

He was already trying his utmost to be gentle with his brother. Reluctantly, Orion drew his head from my arms and sat up, his clean, obedient face utterly disarming. Caleb tucked the covers around him with care—but the moment he'd pulled me out of the room, his face darkened fast.

Dangerously, until you hardly dared to breathe.

He pinned me to the wall, something vicious rising in his blue eyes.

"What are you doing to Orion? He's just a kid."

His savage warning made it clear. So this was about Orion nuzzling at my chest?

I couldn't help a soft laugh, without the least fear.

"You know yourself that he's only a child. I was just comforting a boy heartbroken over dreaming of his dead mother. What did you take it for?"

I smiled and closed in, step by step, and Caleb was the one who shrank back—until our roles reversed and it was I who backed him into the corner. I pointed a finger at his chest, my voice soft and bewitching.

"Or is it that you've got otherideas about me, and so you assume your brother's up to no good too?"

A light tap of my finger, and I plainly caught the hitch in his breath. His heavy breaths washed over my face; only a few centimeters lay between us.

I stared into those beautiful blue eyes, my voice light as a cat's yet strangely spellbinding.

"Or maybe you've changed your mind—you don't want to drive me out. Your body's taken command of your head, and you want to take your father's place and have me for yourself?"

"Do you dare, Caleb?"

The next second, Caleb's large hand seized my waist and spun me, pressing me into the corner. His solid, powerful body bore down hard on mine. He wasn't the green, bashful boy of last night now—every inch of skin pressed tight to me, his eyes like a bonfire flaring in the wilderness at night, all aggression.

"You think I don't dare?"

"Where do you want it—my room? Or shall we do it right in front of my father, before he wakes?"