Chapter Twenty-One

Naga

Being a fifteen-foot-long serpent had a lot of advantages. Especially when you still had the arms our snakish brother had absorbed millions of years ago. I'd used my hands to move things enough for Drake to get in and save our mate, but she must have been bracing something because the second she was gone, it all tumbled to the floor in a very expensive mess. Keeping Jasmine out of here had been a very good idea, but maybe not primarily for the reasons we thought. I grasped the edge of a stainless steel table and propelled myself forward and away from the worst of it all. My tail was caught, however, between a monitor and a desk drawer, pinched tight.

"Naga, you okay?" Drake was just on the other side of the heap of electronics.

"Yeah, but I'm trying to free my tail. How is Jasmine?"

"She's going to need some first aid, for sure. Mostly she's worried about you."

"Did you ask her what happened?" I dug my back toes between the drawer and monitor, struggling for leverage.

"Can I get in there and help you?"

"No, I don't think so. Hang back." I counted to three in my head and lunged forward, freeing my tail and slamming my head into the wall in front of me. "I'm out but, ow."

"Sorry, friend—" Crash and tinkle of whatever remained of the equipment our mate had brought down interrupted whatever he intended to say, and I climbed over the mess before shifting back into human form and finding my pants on the desk chair where I'd left them. Drake and I turned away from the disaster. We needed to take care of our mate.

And she was looking sad. "It's all my fault. Did I already say that?"

"It doesn't matter, although we're going to want to hear what happened later." I crouched beside her to examine her wounds.

"Can I pay for what broke?"

"No…gonna say no." Not unless she was a secret millionaire. "Can you hold out your arm so Naga can see it?"

"There's glass in it."

Hell if there wasn't. She had a shard sticking right out of it, deeply embedded enough that I didn't want to touch it, and Drake agreed. Our girl needed a trip to the human ER located a convenient hour and a half away. I helped her up the stairs while Drake made sure nothing was plugged in that was likely to cause a fire or other hazard. Of course, Jasmine did not want to go anywhere in torn, blood-soaked clothing, but I assisted her to clean the blood away from her minor wounds and covered them with gauze then dressed her in a loose tee, easing it past the glass, and clean shorts.

She even managed to make me shift, just for long enough for her to get a look at my serpent and for him to get to see her with his own eyes. Nobody ever petted him before. Or called him beautiful. He loved it.

We were back home twelve hours later, something Jasmine told us was pretty typical of human emergency rooms, especially those that served a broad rural area and was understaffed. The doctors and nurses did their very best but they were "only human." Jasmine had stitches in her forehead and arm and some sort of scan to check for concussion. We'd teased her that if she was only a shifter, she could have saved all those hours by simply shifting and healing that way. She was good enough to laugh about the whole thing, but we had a lot of talking to do and not that night because she'd been through a lot. We slept with her only at her insistence because we were so afraid of hurting her—but our serpents would never have let us leave her either, so we'd have sat on the floor watching over her otherwise.

Sometime during the night, Jasmine woke up and wanted to talk. It was a huge relief to clear the air between us, and so we lay together in bed, holding our mate tenderly in our arms, and listened to the whole story that began with, "I was at my friend's wedding." It turned out, she'd only met us as part of a bet that she could keep her heart from growing attached, and with everything in me I wanted to be mad, to feel insulted, but my serpent listened beneath the words. She was lonely. She needed us. Our mate found us, and it doesn't matter how.

Nothing about how she'd behaved in all the time she was here was cold or unemotional but before we mated her, we needed to know one thing. "Jasmine, are you going to win the bet?" I asked.

"I lost it the moment I set eyes on you two in video chat. I'm going to tell my friends they can keep their money whether you are willing to forgive me and keep me or not." She chewed on her lower lip. "After I finish paying off my student loans, I'll start paying off the destruction downstairs."

"Jasmine, we can pay for all your loans and we have insurance for the equipment. Are you saying you want to stay?"

"Yes, but not at your expense. I'll concede to whatever the insurance covers, but I want to pay the deductible and my own debts, or it's no deal." She reached past me for her phone on the nightstand. "If we are in agreement, I will tell my friends the bet is off and I lost." She grinned at my friend then at me, her stitched-up forehead doing nothing to detract from her beauty. "So…deal?"

Our arms closed around her from either side, and we showed her how we felt about that deal. We made slow gentle love to her, being very careful not to hurt her, but ending with marking her on either side of her throat. She joked that the wounds she'd gotten from our equipment were likely to leave marks anyway, but we were proud to tell her that a little research had shown us a couple of things.

Cuddling her close, Drake said, "First, turns out serpents only mark if they feel like it. Your scent had already mingled with ours, and we were mated. We weren't sure, and that's what had us making a few calls. Our parents didn't want to talk about "private things," but our siblings were glad to share. They also told us that while you can't shift and heal like we can, you do get some better healing ability and likely won't scar. Also, you probably will live as long as we do."

She tilted her head to the side as I nibbled her new mark. "How long is that?"

"Long time." I kissed my way up to her ear and murmured, "Much longer than the average human. So we won't have to spend decades missing you."

"I do feel much better already," she mused. "I think the marking did help."

"What do our brothers know?" I growled, rolling her on her side, facing me and lifting her leg onto my hip. "Tell us if you feel pain or want to stop. You were badly injured."

"I coughed a lot, too," she said.

"You're not coughing now," Drake put in, lying behind her and reaching between her legs to bring her wetness to her back hole. "Aren't you nervous?"

"No." Jasmine worked her leg higher, opening herself wider to us. "Horny, but not nervous."

"And maybe a little naughty?" I laughed and pushed inside then stopped, waiting for Drake to stretch her wide enough to join me in the rear. We'd promised to do this one day, and there was no better time I could think of. She was always tight, but with my friend sharing her body, she was impossibly so.

"Not naughty, but maybe very bad." She moaned, tossing her head and shivering all over.

"No, I think very good." Drake gave me a nod and we began to move in tandem. Pacing ourselves as best we could. It wasn't going to be long, for sure, but our mate couldn't be left behind. Her sheath tightened around me as she found her climax, and Drake's shout followed. My cum shot into her in jets, and then we all lay in a heap, kissing and breathing hard.

After a few minutes, Drake said, "Jasmine, weren't you going to call your friends?"

She giggled. "Yes, but I don't know what happened to my phone."