I woke up sweating and teary-eyed and got up to go outside for some fresh air. Even with the blanket that I had picked up from the chair and wrapped around me, the cold nighttime air still bit at my damp shirt.

Michael came out behind me a few minutes later. He always seemed to feel it when I wasn’t lying beside him, and he would always come looking for me as if we were tethered together somehow. He brought another blanket with him and he spread it out on the mountainside for us to sit down. I sat next to him and held his hand on his lap as we looked up at the bright moon.

“Would you have chosen Julian?” he asked after a long while.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “But I feel like a piece of me is missing now.”

“Nothing is missing from you,” Michael said. “We are all still bonded together by fate, even Julian. He is still here with us now in this place.”

I sat and thought about his words, then wiped a single tear from my eye. I held tightly to his hand and breathed the mountain air deeply into my body. I turned to look at him and saw his chiseled jaw staring out into the night and his blonde hair blowing in the slight breeze around his face. When he turned to look at me, I brought his hand from his lap and touched it to my heart.

“Make love to me here,” I said.

I gently pulled him toward me as I laid down against the blanket on the mountainside. Michael climbed over the top of my body and loosened his cotton joggers until he fell heavily against my thighs and I felt him throbbing there. All it took was a small shedding of my own clothes before he slid his thickened girth between my thighs.

And when he slid inside of me, the world crashed and boomed with colors unknown to the spectrum of this earth.

“Sweet fuck,” he hissed.

I clung to him, my nails digging into the meat of his back through his shirt. His thrusts were swift, choking off my ability to breathe as I let him overwhelm me. The heat of his body relaxed me. The swift movements of his hips raised up within me carnal desires I longed to indulge. The stars twinkled above our heads in the middle of the woods and for the life of me, I wanted nothing else to change.

I wanted to stay like this, with all of us here, until we grew old and gray and died here together.

“Please, don’t stop,” I gasped.

Michael captured my lips. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I love you, Lisette.”

His hips pounded against my own and I locked my legs around his waist. I let him have me, all of me, as my eyes rolled into the back of my head. Electricity coursed through my veins as the rapid fluttering of my heart sounded in my ears. We made love beneath the night sky, with the cold air mixing against our heated bodies as sweat brewed against our brows. It felt as though he was right as he pounded against me. We were all bonded together, just as his body was now bonded with mine.

He kissed me deeply and I looked up at him with open eyes as his thrusts grew desperate and passionate, all at once.

“Michael,” I said as I paused for a small moment.

He panted as he gazed into my eyes. “Yeah?”

I cupped his cheek. “I love you.”

I watched his eyes shine, as if there were stars inside of him that just lit up against the night. He smiled and leaned down to kiss me more. And once our tongues were done with their familiar waltz of love, he pinned my hands above my head.

Before fucking me senseless until our muffled groans of passion devolved into orgasms that marked us as each other’s.

Forever.

15

“Where were you two last night?” Rob asked as Michael and I walked inside the cottage in the morning after having fallen asleep on the mountain.

Fortunately, since it was almost spring, the blankets and body heat had been enough to keep us from freezing to death.

“From the looks of them,” Adam smirked. “I’d say they were enjoying nature.”

“Hey, you guys want to help me go cut some more wood for the fire?” Rob asked.

“Sure,” Adam said. “I’m game.”

“I’ll come too,” Michael offered. “We can carry more back if all three of us go. Lisette will you be okay here for a little bit by yourself?”

“You could always come with us,” Rob said.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m going to take a hot shower and have some coffee. I feel a little bit like that storybook princess in the cabin in the woods with my three men,” I teased.

“Just don’t open the door to any wicked queens while we’re gone,” Adam retorted playfully.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said with a laugh.

The guys left to go get firewood and I locked up behind them. Then I went to take a nice, long hot shower which felt extraordinarily luxurious after having spent a cold night outside in the mountain air. When I finished the shower, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went into the garden.

The little garden was sitting snuggly against the backside of the cottage and had a curated selection of plants that looked like they were just starting to bud and blossom. I sipped my hot coffee and bent down to touch some of the little leaves with my fingertips. This was heaven, if there ever was one. Freedom from all of the past fear and anguish, peace and beauty.

I wished that my mom and Julian could have been here to see it with me.

“You would have loved it here,” I said quietly aloud in the air to them.

“I already do.”

The sheer dread that David’s voice filled me with made me drop my coffee cup into the garden. I backed away from him until my back pressed against the wall of the cottage.

“Hello Lisette,” he said as he crept slowly closer to me. “Miss me?”

He looked crazed and angry and completely disheveled as if he had been sleeping in his car.

“What are you doing here?” I managed to get out in a petrified whisper. “How did you find us?”

David waved his hands around in the air pompously. “Eh, you know, where there’s a need there’s a plan, or however that saying goes.”

“You need to leave,” I said as I tried to summon what little courage I had left. “They’ll be back soon.”

He snickered. “Who? Your boyfriends? I don’t care about them. I am curious though, why is it that you always seem to have three? If I killed off another one, would you find a replacement for him as well?”

I felt the heat of anger rise in my chest which helped to push out the fear.

“You know, I really do blame you,” he said. “You have ruined me. I’ve lost everything—the school, my business, all of my money and fortune. I have nothing now. Nothing except for you, that is… my dear sister. That’s why I came back for you. You’re all I have left.”

“I’m not your sister,” I said.

“Oh, right, my bad. I meant to say half-sister. Better?”