by Amy Lane
He was cut off by Grace’s kiss as she threw her lanky farmer’s body into his perfectly built sidhe embrace. Bracken and I rolled eyes at each other as they necked their way down the hallway, probably to her room to engage in a whole other kind of hunger before she fed this night.
I watched them go with a faint quirk to my lips but also a sort of depressed ennui that wouldn’t shake its weight off my shoulders.
“What’s wrong?” Bracken asked. Then, “Oh hell, are you hungry—”
“After lunch, snack, and second dinner? Are you shitting me?” I shook my head. “He surprised me tonight.”
“By wanting to be there?” Bracken asked, unnecessarily. There really was only one other “he” as far as we were concerned.
“He… it was… out of the blue, you know? And not that he’s not known for doing things like that before, but….”
“You can usually see it coming,” Bracken conceded. I was surprised when he draped his giant, formidable body over mine, warming me when it should have been unnecessary on a warm summer’s night.
“Yeah—and he was out there with Adrian, and I couldn’t hear….” That troubled me too. I felt… fractious and depressed. “Do you want us to come up there?” I didn’t realize I’d sent out the thought until, well, I had, and his response left me more unsettled.
“Are you done planning, beloved?”
“Yes—I need to fill you in.”
“Tomorrow.”
I got an image then of him comforting—and for once not in the carnal way—the young, fragile Cami.
“I can just come up—”
“My heart is sore with old wounds, beloved. I have no voice to give to them tonight. Spend your time with Brack—and tell me all about it.”
That abruptly, he was out of my head.
I gaped at Bracken in a combination of hurt, outrage, and confusion.
“He’s… he’s shutting me out!” I said, shaking off my ennui like a St. Bernard shakes off water. “He… he just told me to go get laid, and that he needs to… to think about old stuff and….” I shook my hands again, stunned by Green as I never had been. “Green needs space?”
Bracken’s stern mouth twisted disconcertingly. “Yes, Corinne Carol-Anne—because you’re the only one who gets to claim that privilege.”
And now I was pissed. “Fuck off,” I snarled, then stood up and stalked out of the room.
He caught me halfway down the hall, wrapping long arms around my shoulders.
“That was asinine,” he whispered in my ear.
“Damned straight.” But I relaxed into his embrace. Honestly he was right—and I wasn’t really mad at him anyway.
“Give him tonight,” Bracken said softly, rubbing his nose gently around my jaw. “You may or may not have noticed, but Green isn’t happy being alone.”
The laughter caught me by such surprise that I snorted, and Brack’s chuckle in my ear was much more composed.
“I’ve never heard it put that way before,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
Bracken hmmed warmly in my ear. “I’m saying,” he began, “that Green is over eighteen hundred years old, and he has no children.”
I blinked. Well, I guess sidhe had no biological clock.
“That’s gotta be….” I couldn’t even imagine. Mind-fuck wasn’t even the word.
“Are you good with it yet?” he asked. It was a serious subject, but the tenderness of his touch at my waist and along the outside of my arm made the subject fade into the background and the moment start to color my mood with prettiness and soft, smoky tones.
“I’m not thinking about it yet,” I confessed—because, well, I was always honest with Bracken, even if it hurt.
“Then let’s not think about it,” he whispered. “After weeks of keeping it quiet we’re actually talking about it—I feel like celebrating, not meditating.”
I laughed, the sound throaty even to my own ears. “But Green?” Because he was my ou’e’hm, and leaving him alone rankled.
And bless Bracken, he took me seriously.
“I love him too,” he said softly. “You know that. But whatever is inside him, it’s deep and wide. Once in… what? Two years?”
“More than,” I said, smiling slightly.
“Once in two years, he asks us for a moment to contemplate his past. Do you think we can give it to him?”
His hands—wicked, wicked hands on my stone-and-shadow lover. He smoothed them down the front of that stretchy little cotton dress, and I shivered.
“Are you trying to bribe me with sex?” I asked, just to make sure.
“Is it working?”
Oh, Goddess! To escape into lovemaking, to clear my head of what would be our mission tomorrow night, to not even think of the great and terrible change that was taking place in my body with every breath….
“Yes…,” I moaned, turning in his arms.
Bracken reached under my thighs, and I hopped a little, wrapping my legs around his hips so I could drown in his best kiss.
And my husband’s best kiss was amazing.
Sweet and warm and passionate—lips, tongue, gentle teeth—Bracken could use them all to tantalize, promise, and excite.
And I returned it, because passive wasn’t my style—but also to give, because the kiss itself was generous and tender, and I shivered everywhere at his taste.
Effortlessly he carried me to our bedroom, ducking slightly to avoid the stairway to the top of the hill. He was gentle—too gentle, perhaps—when he laid me down on the giant bed that sometimes slept the two of us and sometimes slept four. I propped myself up on my elbows to meet him when he kissed me again, but he surprised me.
His long-fingered, wide-palmed hands slid softly up my thighs as he reached to slide my underwear off my hips. I was left, my thighs parted, with my skirt rucked up around my waist.
Why did that make me feel more wanton than just being naked?
For a moment, innate modesty kicked in, and I tried to wiggle and close my knees, but Bracken stopped me, sliding his palms along the inside and parting me before him.
He touched a delicate kiss inside my knee.
“Are your breasts tender?” he whispered, and somehow his husky voice made that not as intrusive as it should have been.
“Yes,” I whispered, running my thumb barely over my nipple and shivering.
Bracken kissed up farther. “Take off your bra,” he commanded softly. “And touch them. Tell me—soft, easy, hard—so I know how to touch you.”
I let out a breathy gasp of laughter. “Not sure I—”
He reached up across my body and ran his thumb gently across the crest through my clothing. I moaned. Good—so good—but too gently. I wasn’t made of air and wishes—I wanted more.
I pushed myself up and started to wrestle my bra off from under the stretchy top of my dress. I had just managed to drag it out and pitch it over the bed and onto the floor somewhere when I caught Bracken looking at me—his eyes glinting with a combination of desire and humor.
“What?” I found myself smiling, a little embarrassed.
He shook his head and wrapped a great hand around each calf, then smoothed back until he was cupping my bare bottom under my dress. My breath caught and my thighs fell open, and still that glint of amusement in his eyes.
“You’re really good at that.” He smirked. “And I can’t figure out if it pisses me off or turns me on.”
I grinned up at him, my hips shifting already in arousal, the brush of the air as it hit my open, wet sex tantalizing.
“Please tell me it turns you on?”
He chuckled evilly and worked the button fly of his jeans. They fell to the floor, leaving his cock bare and engorged and looking at me through one narrowed eye.
I wanted to taste him. I always wanted to taste him.
I pushed myself up on my elbows, intending to lean forward, legs splayed, and take him into my throat, but he took a step back and shook his head.
“I wanna,” he said throu
gh a gruff throat. He stepped up and palmed my inner thighs again, and the contrast between his heat and the cool air made me moan.
“That’s a good sound.” He lowered himself fluidly to his knees and nuzzled the crease of my inner thigh.
I made it again.
“More,” he whispered, then stuck out a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and felt his tongue parting me, teasing the seam of my inner lips, and then flattening as I spread wider.
“You’re—” (moan) “—teasing me!”
His chuckle puffed against my sex, and I reached out blindly to knot my fingers in his collar-length black hair. He caught my hand and guided it back to my breast, and I started doing what felt good.
And so did Bracken.
Ahhh…. There is a place you go to, when your lover is hitting all your spots—the bright-fire nerve endings of the power spots, the dreamier, pastel nerve endings of the deep well between them. It’s like a sea, a turbulent one, where you’re surrounded by the ocean roar of your breathing, your gasps, the burbling little pleas that issue from your mouth as you try not to micromanage what’s going on out of your control, because if you do, you might miss something really frickin’ wonderful, like….
Oh God!
Like Brack’s slickened finger delicately penetrating my back door while his tongue flickered over the threshold of the more conventional entrance.
I gave up on gasping and moaning and went straight to shrieking and begging.
“Oh, dammit, Bracken, fuck me now!”
He lifted his head and met my eyes across the rucked-up fabric on the plane of my body.
“No,” he said, licking his lips insolently. Then he stuck out his tongue, wiggled his finger, and brought me screaming over the precipice and into the raging waters of climax.
The sheer power of the orgasm left me shaking, groggy, and out of it, and when he pulled away and helped me out of my dress, I was barely coherent.
“You ready for me?” he whispered in my ear.
Oh hell yes! I lifted my legs and wrapped them around his waist as he thrust into me, and did I think I’d climaxed in a raging ocean before?
That was the kiddie pool.
Bracken’s cock is… prodigious is the only word for it. Nicky and I have been afraid to measure it in inches, in case the numbers scared us away. Having him thrust that thing into my body was like having a cookie press push all extraneous thought out of my head. There was only room for Bracken—inside me, on top of me, cock driving into my body, biceps bulging on either side of my head as he rested his weight on his elbows. I dragged my hands down his arms, along his back, the back of his neck, across his cheeks, crying out with every thrust, every motion. My sex felt shimmery with wet, swollen and dripping and sensitized from his tongue and his clever, clever fingers, and my body gave in to his invasion, welcomed him, tightened around him, every touch so fucking beautiful it hurt.
I could not fight the wash of brightness behind my eyes as my magic escaped, powered through my skin by the joy of the physical act of love. Bracken pulled back and hit that spot inside of me again, and I tilted my head and screamed, the sunshine of my power blowing through the very walls of the hill as I convulsed around him again and again.
Bracken, beyond endurance, gave a hoarse shout and sat up on his knees, the better to drive into my body like the shaking, clenching receptacle it was. My final orgasm, the climax behemoth, terrifying in its immensity, shattering in its power, rolled over the two of us—a whale dancing in a warm ocean, graceful and terrible and inescapable.
My vision blacked and all thought, words, even self-knowledge rolled out of me, effectively squashed by the forces of love and magic that possessed me daily but not always with quite so much terrible immensity.
Bracken collapsed on top of me, our bodies clammy with cooling sweat. His hands tangled in my hair as he kissed my temple and shushed quietly, reminding me of who we were and what it was we’d just done.
I FELL asleep, wanton and sprawled beneath Brack, his body still inside mine. When I awoke, I was naked under the covers, my head pillowed on Brack’s shoulder, and we were not alone.
Bracken was twitching faintly, quiet moans coming from his open mouth, his free hand covering his eyes. The covers near his midsection were distorted, and I lifted the quilt and sheet to see Nicky down there, naked as well, cleaning Bracken up with his mouth.
Ooh… clever Nicky. Bracken was hard to surprise that way, and sometimes there is no sex as sensual as the “surprise, you’re awake and making love” kind of sex. Once an outsider, forced into our marriage bed by circumstance, Nicky had more and more become comfortable being sexual with us without formal permission.
Judging by the way Bracken was shaking underneath me, I didn’t think he minded.
For a moment I thought about wiggling down under the covers to join him for round two, but my body was leaden and unresponsive. This might have panicked me—my magic was charged by emotion, which meant the more and better I felt, the stronger I was. On the one hand, it was sort of embarrassing—the well-being of our entire collective was sometimes dependent on me being happy, healthy, and well fucking laid. On the other hand, it gave me a sort of liberation that most women didn’t have.
I had permission—hell, I had encouragement—to treat my sexuality like a positive, life-affirming, necessary thing from the get-go. Part of that was the magic, of course, but part of that was Green and the place he’d built here. Sensual and consensual was encouraged. It didn’t have to be forever, and it didn’t have to be one boy and one girl, but it did have to give everybody involved pleasure. You weren’t allowed to shame a lover in Green’s hill. You weren’t allowed to feel bad yourself because of something that had given you pleasure in bed—or standing up and handcuffed to the ceiling, really, if that was your thing.
So lying on Bracken, replete and still dripping in his come while our other lover serviced him for the sheer joy of it, wasn’t a problem in the least.
It was made even better by Green sitting next to me in bed, stroking my cheek gently. I leaned into his touch as Bracken’s body arched in a brief afterglow sort of orgasm, and Nicky crawled up for air on his other side, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Enjoying ourselves?” Green asked playfully, which saved me the effort of trying to wake up too much.
“Goddess yes,” Nicky said, unashamed. Under the covers his own hand moved languidly, and he shivered in his own pleasure.
I opened my mouth to offer to finish him off—because, well, it was only courteous, right? But what I meant to say and what I actually said were… well, pretty far apart, really.
“What?” Nicky asked, his breath catching.
“Wan’ me ’oo….” And then I yawned so wide I had to close my eyes. By the time I yanked myself away from sleep again, the covers were yanked back from Nicky’s hips and Bracken’s hand was a blur on Nicky’s body. Nicky cried out as his hips arched off the bed. A shot of semen spattered up across his abdomen and his chest, and a final one simply creamed over the top of Bracken’s squeezing fist.
Bracken moved his hand toward his mouth to lick it off, and Green lowered his head to help.
“Good,” I said succinctly. Then sleep whomped over me like a steamroller, and I don’t know, literally don’t know, what happened next.
I woke up what must have been hours later, wearing a thin gray T-shirt this time and sandwiched between a naked Green and a naked Bracken.
I had to pee like no woman in history.
I wiggled out between the sleeping men and made my way to the bathroom in the dark—and the fact that Bracken was asleep again blew my mind. He slept so much less than I did—it was always a surprise. When I got back, Green was sitting up in bed, his magnificent butter-colored hair slung over one shoulder to spill off the bed, his pale bare chest gleaming softly in the lamplight.
I wanted to be snarky and say something like “So, do we have enough space,” but people didn’t get snarky with Green
. For better or worse, Green’s actions were always so pure—so unfettered by pettiness or revenge—that it took those same emotions inside a person to want to inflict pain on him.
I had worked so very hard in my life to cleanse those things from my heart.
He smiled at me as I approached, his lips twisting wryly.
“So, were you trying to get my attention?” he asked, and I blinked at him dumbly.
“By taking a leak?”
He shook his head, and his shoulders shook with gentle laughter. He held out his arms, and I came to sit in his lap. The almost transparent T-shirt somehow helped make the naked moment less awkward—my body was protected, so I could let my heart be vulnerable.
“You redecorated again,” he said against my temple.
I blinked owlishly around the room. The last time we’d had environment-changing sex, it had taken all four of us, and I’d sent a wash of color—browns and greens and beiges, which weren’t bad—through the walls of the hill.
Those colors were gone, replaced with a sort of bold purple with gold trim, and I groaned. “Hell, at least it’s not pastels.”
Green looked around the room and shrugged. “That’s not even what I’m talking about, Corinne Carol-Anne.”
I blinked, relaxing bonelessly against his chest. “Do I have to get up and look?” Honestly, if it could wait until morning, I didn’t even want to deal. That horrid exhaustion was sucking the life out of me once again.
“You can see it tomorrow,” Green said drolly. “By then, the sprites will have made matching drapes and started looking through catalogs for furniture.”
“I made a room?”
Green snorted softly in my ear. “Look at the wall behind me again,” he ordered. “Do you see anything out of place?”
Oh my Goddess. “There’s a door there,” I said, feeling dumb.
“And a room connected to the door,” Green said, looking bemused. “It’s sort of squeezed in there, by the way, between your room and Nicky’s. He has a connecting door as well.”
Oh, Lord. I sagged against Green. “I can’t even…. I so cannot….”
“I understand,” he said simply, kissing my temple. “But maybe, next time you’re a wee bit upset with me, beloved, you should possibly confront me.”
