It was a dark and stormy night, not Daphne’s first choice for bridal weather, but on her own she wouldn’t have picked Phil’s nineteenth-century family beach house for their honeymoon, either. He’d described it as a tradition going back generations, though, so she’d readily agreed. After all, he’d yielded to her wishes in most other ways. Fortunately, the sprawling Victorian structure’s shabby-comfortable interior didn’t match its Gothic-sounding name, Porta Tenebrarum – Gate of Shadows – not in the daytime, at least. By night, with lights off at Phil’s romantic insistence, the shadows thickened.
Alone in the dark bedroom, illuminated only by flashes of lightning punctuated by peals of thunder, she skimmed her hands down the front of her satin nightgown. Her skin tingled, heat pooling at her core. Sometimes she felt Phil was a little too considerate, with his touchingly old-fashioned insistence on postponing full consummation until this night to make it “special.” While they’d shared pleasure in every other mode, she’d never seen him naked or enjoyed a complete union of their bodies.
Any minute now, he would join her in the wide, canopied bed, and the frustrating delay would end.
Her heartbeat quickened with anticipation when the door to the hallway creaked open. Phil paused on the threshold, a darker silhouette amid the lightning-cast shadows. Daphne flung her arms wide. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
He strode to her. Between thunderclaps, she heard the rustle of his robe falling to the floor. He slid between the sheets to kiss her lips and the hollow of her neck. When he rolled up her gown, the heat of his bare flesh branded her everywhere their bodies touched. As his mouth and hands wandered over her, spurring her toward the first peak, for a second she felt as if more fingers than ten caressed her. But then the wave crashed over her and annihilated all thought. She twined around him and drew him in.
After they soared to the final heights and subsided to earth, she lay in his arms while his breath slowly calmed along with hers. To her mild disappointment, he got up and switched on the nightstand lamp. She squinted against the sudden glare.
“There’s somebody I want you to meet. I was waiting until – well, after – so you wouldn’t be too shocked.”
“Huh? Shocked at what?” She scrambled into a sitting position, pulling the sheet up to her neck. “Meet somebody? Right now?”
“My twin brother. Just a second.”
Brother? Why hadn’t she heard of him before? A pretty big secret to keep!
Staring at Phil, she blinked in disbelief at a glimpse of delicately quivering tendrils that encircled his hips. Her head spun as he walked to the door, opened it, and called, “Okay, come on.”
A sloshing noise sounded in the hall. A briny ocean scent drifted into the room. Phil returned to the bedside and clasped her hand. “Please don’t freak out. Howard looks more like our father than I do.”
An amorphous shadow momentarily loomed in the doorway before oozing inside. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Daphne. Welcome to the family,” said the gelatinous blob with multiple eyestalks and tentacles.
-end-