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As he stood, his palm twisting over her thigh sparked another rogue wave of sexual interest, like the flint before the fire.

  “Should I stay?” Madoc asked.

  Caroline intertwined her fingers with Tragedy and tightened her grip. Tragedy met it with her own. Then Caroline nodded.

  Tragedy trilled happily.

  Madoc backed away and conjured a chair for himself to give the clowns and Caroline room. When she glanced down at Comedy, Madoc remained in her periphery, but only just barely. It was a way to give them privacy, but all Caroline needed to do was turn her head to reassure herself that he was still there. He settled into the chair as though he had done this a thousand times. Caroline thought of last night, when she’d heard Maya and the sound of more than one man. Had Madoc assumed that position then too? Did he like to watch Maya the way he’d made it clear he would enjoy watching her?

  This time, when Murphy grabbed her arms and jerked her back against the cushion so that she once again had no leverage to sit up from her half-recline, Caroline didn’t struggle. Murphy loomed over her. She saw none of the affection in his reptilian eyes that she couldn’t mistake in Tragedy’s. The beetle-black eyebrows writhed over his eyes in sullen resentment, but his attention kept returning to Tragedy for confirmation. Tragedy smiled her terrible smile, and the tension in Murphy’s face unwound. Even so, Caroline didn’t think he was going to warm to her any time soon.

  That didn’t matter. The way he held her down made Caroline’s breath quicken, but for an entirely different reason than before.

  Comedy, on the other hand, seemed to have decided that if he was going to be punished either way, he might as well take advantage of what was before him, because he displayed none of Murphy’s irritation.

  The cracking of the clowns’ mouths as they opened and shifted shivered through Caroline’s body. She didn’t think she would ever get used to that. However, there were other things to concentrate on, the things that had terrified her before because the context had been different. Now when Comedy stroked down her legs, caressing her calves to her ankles, pushing her legs open as he crawled closer, she bit her lip. Caroline moved her hips on the cushion to get more comfortable. She was keenly aware of the dampness on her panties and the steady trickle of warm excitement that made Comedy’s mouth water the closer he came.

  This time, the obscenity of that long tongue curving snakelike out of his mouth stabbed through her with unexpected intensity. Madoc had said they were like humans from the neck down, but that tongue definitely wasn’t human. It wove through the air as though tasting her scent and taunting her at the same time. But the taunting was playful. Their clown makeup wasn’t a cruel mockery of innocence anymore but mischief manifested.

  When Comedy gripped her thighs above her knees and pushed them wide apart more, Caroline submitted. A moan escaped her parted lips as Comedy spread her thighs almost as far as they could go, so that they hung on either side of the chair. Her skirt had ridden up again. Comedy bent over the bottom of the lounge and hissed through his teeth. The air cooled the wetness on her panties.

  Comedy glanced at Tragedy. She checked with Madoc, who nodded.

  Caroline cried out as Comedy darted down, grabbing her panties with his teeth. Those teeth grazed her skin, but he didn’t get any of her flesh between them. Her panties were not so lucky. Comedy tore through them as though they were paper. Now there was no barrier between Comedy and his intense gaze on her glistening folds, swollen with racing blood, soft with arousal that attacked her with as much ferocity as Comedy ripping off her clothing. She was so turned on it was almost painful. Excitement chased the heels of fear. She ached when Comedy’s breath brushed cool against her.

  He slowly slid his hands up her inner thighs and pulled open her folds to gaze his fill of her. She had never been so diligently inspected with such salacious intent.

  Tragedy brushed the back of her hand against Caroline’s flushed cheeks. She wasn’t a participant. She just wanted to ensure that Caroline enjoyed her gift—the way any friend would. It was a strange arrangement, but everything in Arcanium was strange.

  Caroline couldn’t help but let out a moan when Comedy slithered his tongue from his mouth again and waved it near her, so close that she could sense the displaced air and the moistness of it. And still he did not touch her. She strained against Murphy’s hold, but not to get away—only to get closer.

  “Oh fuck,” she gasped as Comedy finally licked at her folds, tracing them to her cunt then back up to her clit, where he teased it with the tip in torturous little circles. Caroline’s hips jerked off the cushions. Comedy tapped his fingers on her upper thighs and pushed her down with a trill that vibrated through his tongue and against the insistent little piece of flesh that he tormented with gentleness.

  Then Murphy needed to double down on her shoulders, because Comedy insinuated his tongue between his folds, wriggling it there with relish before stabbing into her cunt.

  “That’s— God, that’s impossible,” Caroline moaned. Not only could she feel the clown lapping with amazing control at her inner walls, but he folded his tongue up to continue pressing its wet heat against her clit as he thrust the end into her.

  Turned out just about anything was possible in this circus. Caroline writhed, trying to swallow and bite back her sounds of pleasure as he coaxed sensation from her pussy and clit simultaneously. Everyone else was so quiet, any cry magnified to fill the backstage. It was unsettling to only hear herself and not the others, to not get that feedback. But Comedy certainly seemed to like what Caroline had to offer as she rocked against his probing tongue. When he slipped out and brought it back to his mouth, he smiled and swallowed her pleasure from his tongue with satisfaction that narrowed his eyes in bliss.

  Madoc had been right. Their anatomy wasn’t human. It was better. Caroline kept her legs wide, clenching her open cunt as though begging Comedy to fill it once again with that amazingly slick, prehensile sensation unlike anything Caroline had ever experienced before.

  Comedy tapped her thighs again then moved his right hand in to stroke her, massaging the lips of her cunt and up to her throbbing clitoris. His hand wasn’t nearly as gentle—on the contrary, the roughness of his strokes surprised her after the relentless but soft, wet heat of his tongue.

  With the other hand, he yanked the neckline of her corset down hard. Murphy pushed the cotton sleeves over her shoulders so that Comedy could do so without ripping this fabric like he had her panties. Comedy pulled the corset down far enough for it to push the peaks of her breasts over the top. The boning dug into the undersides uncomfortably, but Comedy bent over as he continued to stroke her between her legs, and he slithered that awful, amazing tongue around one nipple.

  Caroline jumped when another tongue tip slid along her other breast. Turned out that Murphy might not be crazy about her, but he didn’t mind playing with her, teasing the nipple like his partner was into a hard, sensitive nub. Caroline arched her back to present her breasts to the two men. She closed her eyes tight when the thought passed through her mind that she wished they would bite.

  Comedy sank two fingers into her, careful with his claws. He drew out her wetness in a matter of seconds and knelt upright on the lounge to examine how shiny she had made his fingers, as though to gauge the pleasure he had given her. His trill lowered into a purr as he licked her moisture from him and left her breasts for Murphy, who slapped the tip of his tongue over the rigid nipples to make her twitch.

  Meanwhile, Comedy returned to her folds, the strokes of his fingers too harsh, too good, too much everything, but not enough to come. He tilted his head in query and closed his mouth, looking the most human since he’d revealed what he was.

  Caroline nodded. If he was asking whether she was ready, abso-fucking-lutely.

  If she could, she’d stroke that hedgehog spike of Comedy’s orange mohawk to see if it was soft or gelled into stiffness then use it to pull him closer. He kept himself at a surprising distance, though, touching her
with his long, flexible tongue, his hands, but not with his body and keeping his teeth well away from her flesh. To avoid the temptation, she realized.

  She couldn’t linger on the reminder of how dangerous they were while Murphy was still occupying himself with her nipples to his heart’s content. He chittered every time she whined because he’d pulled away from one to bother the other. The chittering grew louder in amusement after Caroline growled when Comedy abruptly removed his hand from her. With all stimulation between her legs gone, it only made it abundantly clear to her how much she needed to come, how much her clit needed a firm hand and how her cunt hated its own hollowness.

  Comedy brought those dexterous fingers she wanted to his trousers.

  “Holy—”

  Caroline had been so preoccupied with the male clowns all this time that she hadn’t had the opportunity to see what was confined in the artfully stitched brown and black patchwork leather trousers that matched Tragedy’s doll dress.

  Neither Riley nor Colm were any slouch, but Caroline couldn’t help but scramble back on the chaise when Comedy opened his trousers and took his cock in his hand. Nevertheless, he stroked it and displayed it to her—his offering as Tragedy’s proxy.

  God, this whole thing was so weird, and damn if that wasn’t the biggest cock she’d ever seen. She’d noted the impressive bulge in his tight pants when he hadn’t been hard, the way she idly noticed the front of every Arcanium male cast member’s trousers. But this…

  “I can’t,” Caroline stammered, looking between Comedy, Tragedy and Madoc. He had promised her pleasure, but that thing was huge. She hadn’t known that cocks that big existed outside of porn, especially not in the pants of creepy circus clowns. And while they were nice to think about, the reality was that there were some anatomical limitations. She liked a little pain, but she didn’t want sex to hurt. “It’s too big. That sounds so cliché, but I’ve never—”

  The corners of Madoc’s mouth lifted. The smug, enigmatic feline was back. “I assure you, you’re quite capable of taking it. There’s nothing quite like the attributes of a demon, my dear. You’ll see.”

  “This isn’t the time for you guys to be all secure about your virile manliness,” Caroline protested. Especially since Comedy was lowering himself onto the chaise and reaching down to stroke her mound with a kind of tenderness as he brought that cock closer to her. “This is reality, where there is such a thing as too big.”

  “You haven’t even had an opportunity to be terrified of Ciarán’s yet,” Madoc said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his bare chest, still irrationally pleased with her reaction.

  Ciarán, Ciarán, Ciarán…? Oh, right, the tall man. The really tall man. Implication being that he might just be proportional…

  “Are you fucking serious?”

  “You’ll like this, Caroline. I promise,” Madoc said. “There is no question of it.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you sound like a Magic 8 Ball?”

  “Once or twice. Hold on.”

  Why? And to what? Panic returned with a vengeance when Comedy pressed the blunt end of his well-sculpted erection against her entrance. Really, it was quite pretty, not the kind of cock one would expect from a demon clown—if one expected any kind of cock at all. But maybe she just felt that way because she could see the detail on his from a distance in a way she couldn’t an average or even above-average human male. Colm was large for her, but for fuck’s sake, she was just one small woman and Colm already pushed her limits.

  Tragedy stroked Caroline’s cheek to try to soothe her during her imminent hyperventilation. Without thinking, she obeyed Madoc’s suggestion and reached up where Murphy still held her down to grip her fists around his forearms. She couldn’t tell how he felt about that because she couldn’t look away from where Comedy teased the head of his cock against the opening of her cunt.

  He won’t fit. It won’t go in. It’ll tear through me the way his teeth tore my panties. She wanted to close her eyes, but it was as though she needed to be aware of her last moments of pleasure before it gave way to pain.

  He slipped into her as though her pussy had been made to take him. She took him as easily as if he had bathed his cock in oil, the juices that he had coaxed from her smoothing his way.

  More than that, as he breached her cunt, nerves she didn’t know she had at the entrance and inside her seemed to awaken. His cock played them in a continuous slide, until he lifted her thighs and her hips in his hands and plunged all the way in.

  Caroline didn’t know what sounds she was making, but she had a feeling they were as unseemly as they were unrestrained and that anyone outside the tent would be able to hear them. Caroline knew pleasure. Her men gave it to her every day, and she didn’t want to minimize that. But this was different. This reached places she hadn’t known existed, perhaps because they didn’t. Caroline should have been in pain, but instead her body not only accepted him with no trouble, it reveled in the internal caress of his cock, in every contour of it as it stroked her through his thrusts, conjuring arousal from her with unspeakable magic.

  Comedy trilled, passion in his eyes, and fucked her like a madman—and she wrapped her legs around his hips to pull him in harder, faster, closer, begging him for more, more, more. She couldn’t get enough, dreaded the moment of her orgasm because it would mean this would end. She relished the agony of the climbing pleasure that vined through her body.

  His eyes might not have been human, but the yearning she saw there was the same she had witnessed in Riley’s and Colm’s and other men she’d had in her life. Need that drove him forward again and again, need to have her tighten around him, to drown himself in her juices, to lose himself in the sensations just as she did.

  Caroline dug her nails into Murphy’s arms as he returned that magical tongue to her tight, hard nipples to add to the onslaught.

  “I can’t,” she panted. “I can’t. I’m going to… Oh God, yes, yes.”

  It couldn’t last forever, no matter how much she wanted it to. Comedy doubled over, grimacing as his cock jerked inside her. She felt the heat of his cum, hotter than he had made her and finally tipping her over the heights to which he’d brought her. All she could do was sob her orgasm to the canvas ceiling, rocking her hips to stretch it out until she couldn’t take any more without shaking apart altogether.

  Comedy finally stilled, all the way inside her, braced against the cushions because he didn’t need to hold her legs anymore.

  Almost at once, Caroline’s whole body seemed to release every bit of tension she had been carrying, from her moral conflict to her fear of the clowns. Her hands dropped away from Murphy’s arms to her belly, and Murphy drew his tongue away from her nipples. She didn’t bother trying to cover her breasts, which shone with a sheen of saliva from both the clowns’ diligent ministrations. She unknotted her legs from around Comedy’s waist and settled them on either side of him as he panted above her.

  Brushing her blonde and blue hair out of her face, she said, “Man, that is one gift I am never, ever going to return.”

  Chapter Nine

  Caroline somehow found the reserve strength to lift her arms. She steered clear of Comedy’s parted mouth to stroke the orange mohawk above her. Just to know what it felt like. It was softer than it looked, like frayed chenille. Something with more than two rows of piranha-like teeth shouldn’t have hair that soft.

  But Comedy leaned into her hand, the only acknowledgment of her gratitude before he abruptly withdrew out and away from her. He stood at the end of the chaise, tucking himself back into his trousers despite the mess. Maybe it didn’t bother him. Or maybe there was magic involved, like there had been when he’d taken her.

  She turned onto her side to face Tragedy, the author of this scene. Tragedy closed her mouth like a clam closing its shell. It was amazing the difference it made, the transition between monster and human nearly seamless. Now Caroline knew the line of the mouth was there, but how many patrons
of the circus would ever get close enough to see it themselves?

  The ones who probably don’t last the night, was the sobering answer to that thought. With the most surreal of the afternoon’s strangeness behind her, Caroline couldn’t believe she’d done this with them, that she’d accepted the gift, mind-blowing though it had been. But all she could manage to process was what the clowns had been like with her, which wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Tragedy took her hand as Caroline propped herself up. Then, moving like a hesitant, disjointed marionette, she slowly encircled Caroline’s shoulders with her arms in an unsure embrace. They tightened when Caroline returned the hug. Murphy and Comedy took their place behind the chaise, waiting for the third of their trio. It was almost time for everyone to be in place for the pre-opening. Since Madoc hadn’t stopped them or told them to hurry, she assumed they weren’t going to be docked if they were late.

  The trill in Caroline’s ear was like the coo of a mourning dove. When Caroline saw Tragedy’s face again as the clown stood up, she tried to see it as though for the first time. It was uncanny. Tragedy really did look like her, an older her, an edgier her. It was unsettling to see herself that way.

  Comedy slung an arm over Tragedy’s shoulder and nuzzled her neck, and Murphy squeezed Tragedy under the petticoated skirt. Caroline experienced an odd sense of déjà vu that was hard to pinpoint until the three clowns were silhouetted against the sun on their way out. Two men, one desiring to please, the other surly but willing, yet still bound to the woman between them.

  Caroline didn’t know how to feel about that.

  “As promised,” Madoc said, sitting next to her again.

  Caroline rolled onto her back from where she had been watching the clowns leave. She started putting herself back together. At least this time none of her costume needed to be repaired, although she’d have to find a new pair of underwear and hope that she had it on before Comedy’s cum dripped out of her—otherwise she’d have to add her leather skirt to the list of things that needed to be cleaned, leaving her costume choices somewhat narrow.