Consort of Thorns

by Eva Chase

  This was the only view I was going to get of the party. The knowledge that Rose was taking such an immense risk all on her own itched at me, but I couldn’t think of a single excuse that would get me in there for more than a minute or two. And making that intrusion would catch her dad’s attention.

  No, it was better for her that I laid low and stayed out of the way. Better for her if she didn’t even need to think about me. I’d already jerked her around enough. I’d be keeping watch out here from my apartment, and if something went wrong, if she needed me…

  My jaw clenched. Who was I kidding? We’d been there before, in the line of fire, when her stepmother had dragged her away, and I hadn’t been able to do a single thing to help her then.

  I peered at the task list for several seconds before my brain caught up and recognized that in my furor of keeping my mind off the impending party, I’d finished every single job. Matt’s voice from earlier that afternoon came back to me. Take it easy, kid. You know they will be. No one’s going to be making any urgent trips tonight.

  Damn, I couldn’t sit in the apartment for the next two hours just waiting for the real waiting to start. I paced back and forth in the hall, willing Matt to appear and give me something to do, but then I remembered he’d headed for home. He wasn’t usually here on the weekend at all—it’d been a short shift preparing for the party. Tyler wasn’t around at all. It was just me and the cars.

  I stepped out into the yard, thinking I’d give the hubcaps an extra polish or something, and just then the front door of the manor opened. Rose slipped out, clutching her purse at her side. She glanced straight at the garage, as if that had already been her destination.

  Maybe it had been. When I hesitated, she tipped her chin up with a flick of her gaze toward the apartment. She didn’t need to do anything more than that.

  I hurried up the steps, my heart thumping faster. Had something gone wrong? A sudden vision darted through my mind of plunking her on the back of my motorcycle and ripping the hell out of here to who knew where.

  And what, leave the other guys behind? That wasn’t happening. If she got the hell out of here, it’d be with them, not me. As it should be.

  I left the apartment door unlocked. Stalking through the living room, I jerked the curtains shut. Grabbed the worn shirt I’d left on the armchair and tossed it in the bedroom laundry basket. I was just re-emerging when Rose ducked in.

  She turned the deadbolt with a thud. Then she stood there in the momentary silence, her fingers tight around her purse straps, looking as if she wasn’t completely sure how she’d ended up there.

  I stayed on the opposite side of the room. Easier to keep my impulses under control that way. “Rose?”

  She let out a shaky breath. With a few quick gestures, she cast some sort of spell—maybe to make sure her presence wouldn’t be noticed from outside. Then she turned to me. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to get too involved. I just… You’re the only one who’s here.”

  You don’t want to get too involved. Was that the impression I’d left her with? I guessed it made sense she’d have interpreted my actions that way after I’d pushed her away, even if I’d tried to tell her differently.

  “It’s fine, Rose,” I said. “But if you want me to reach out to the other guys—”

  She shook her head, cutting me off. “No. I didn’t mean, exactly— I want to talk to you. You’ll be honest with me. Won’t you?” Her gaze held mine, those dark green irises turned liquid with worry. Her distress made my chest ache. I had to step a little closer.

  “Always, Rose. What’s going on? What’s the matter?”

  “I just…” She looked at her purse with an expression as if she were afraid to put it down and yet hated having it near her at the same time. Carefully, she slid the strap off her shoulder and set it on the floor beside the door. “Everything’s ready,” she said, straightening up. “I cast the last spell. That wand my dad brought back from Cairo is in there.” She motioned to the purse.

  “Did the magic work the way you wanted?”

  “I’m pretty sure it did. It feels right. Well, it feels like I did it right. The other kind of right… That’s why I’m here.” She looked down at her hands.

  I motioned her over to the sofa. “Sit down. Gather yourself. I don’t have any place else to be.”

  Her lips twitched with a hint of a smile, but it faded quickly. She clasped her hands together on her lap as she sat down. Her gaze darted back to her purse.

  “It’ll hurt people,” she said as I sat down across from her.

  “That was the idea, wasn’t it?” I said. “Just enough to scare them?”

  “Yeah. And I thought I was okay with that. But—” She met my eyes again. “Some part of me wants to do more than that, Gabriel. Some part of me wants to really hurt them for what they were willing to do to me. For what they would do to the guys if they found out I’d consorted with them.”

  The ache in my chest expanded. Oh, Sprout. She’d never had to think about really hurting anyone before, had she?

  “I think that’s understandable,” I said. “Hell, all of me wants to mess them up for messing with you.”

  “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Because I know it’d be more trouble than it’s worth. But you’re doing this so you and the guys can be free of your dad.”

  “I know. I just…” She rubbed her mouth. “I feel like maybe I’m proving them right somehow—my dad and Celestine and whoever else. They thought my power was dangerous, and now I’m going to show just how dangerous I can be. I’m acting like them—lying, manipulating people to get my way. If I stoop to their level, what does that say about me?”

  “Rose,” I said firmly, “they were scheming—still are scheming—to trap you in a loveless marriage where your husband and your father control every spell you cast. Where they can torture you if you try to go against them, for the rest of your life. Nothing you’re thinking of can be half as bad as that. Besides, it’s not the same. If you caught a fox in a snare and it bit you, is that stooping to your level or just fighting to survive?”

  “I had other options, though,” she said. “I could have just run, like I was thinking. Hidden out somewhere until after my birthday, when Dad couldn’t go through with the plan anyway.”

  “But you don’t know that he wouldn’t have found you before then, and then you’d have been in even more trouble,” I pointed out. “And even if you’d managed to stay away for long enough, the second he found out about the guys, you’d have been screwed. You stayed here for a reason.”

  “That’s the other thing. It’s not just me. If I make a mistake here, they’re all going to have to live with the consequences—or die with them—too.”

  I clenched my hand against the urge to reach out to her. “We all know you’re doing the best you can.”

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t even be here now. That’s why you’ve been keeping your distance—so I don’t get you too tangled up, so it’s not your life on the line too—and here I am—”

  She pushed to her feet, spinning toward the door, and then I had to move. I sprang off the sofa and grasped her arm before she could take more than a step. With a gentle tug, I turned her to face me. “What are you talking about, Rose? I’m here for you. I want to be here for you.”

  “But not too close,” she said, looking up at me, her voice raw. “You said you’d tell me the truth, Gabriel. You don’t really trust me either, do you?”

  I stared at her. Fucking hell. I’d thought I was doing what was best for her, and somehow I hadn’t realized just how much it was hurting her.

  Maybe it didn’t matter whether I was the kind of man she needed right now. Maybe what she needed was just to know how much she had me.

  “Rose,” I said. “I promise you, it’s not that. It’s not— You’re everything I could have wanted. Hell, I’d share you with four other guys in a heartbeat, take whatever time you could give me. I just don’t want to screw up y
our life.”

  A startled laugh burst out of her. “How could you possibly screw up my life more than it already is?”

  “I already did once, didn’t I?” I said, waving my other hand. “I pulled you in with us, I encouraged you to run around with us when we were kids, and then your stepmother came down on you and I couldn’t do shit. I promised you we’d be there for you and it happened anyway. They dragged you away from your home. Maybe your dad wouldn’t even have felt he needed to do this crazy magical binding if it wasn’t for us—for me.”

  “Gabriel.” Rose caught my hand and brought it between us, wrapping her fingers around mine. The warmth of her touch sent a shiver of desire through me even through all the other emotions churning inside me. “It was my choice to hang out with you guys. I knew even when I was seven years old that I was breaking the rules. You didn’t force me into anything. And if I couldn’t do anything about my stepmother, how could you possibly have changed her mind?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My pulse stuttered at the words I was about to say. I forced myself to hold her gaze. “But it’s not just you. Everyone in my life—I couldn’t save my dad. This job was his life after my mom left, you know, and then he lost that, because of me. I know he never forgave me. And I could never make it up to him.”

  “Gabriel,” Rose said again, softly, but I didn’t let her stop me.

  “I went looking for my mom after he died, you know. Tracked down her new family out in Nevada. She acted like she didn’t even know me. Like I had to be some kind of crazy person. The last time she’d seen me I was five years old, and she couldn’t even—”

  I caught myself just before my voice broke. With a ragged breath, I finished. “I break things. I break people. There’s obviously just something about me… So it’s better if I don’t stick around anywhere too long. I don’t want to get close to you because I don’t want to get close to anyone, because something always goes wrong.”

  As the last words spilled out of me, I felt wrung out. Drained. I’d never admitted that all out loud to anyone before. I wasn’t sure I’d even admitted it to myself all at once.

  Rose was silent for a long moment. Her hand squeezed tighter around mine. “So this whole time you’ve been pushing me away out of some idea you were protecting me from you?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “For starters, you never broke me. I was fine. I missed home and I missed you and the other guys, but look at me. I survived. I’m stronger now than I ever was. And that’s the other way you’re wrong. You’re not going to break me now. There’s nothing you could do that could hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt by people who owed me more, and I’m still standing.”

  “That doesn’t change—”

  She raised her hand from my hand to my chest, resting her fingers lightly there. “If you really don’t think there’d be anything wrong with me lashing out at my dad and the people working with him, then how can you think there’s anything wrong with you? Haven’t you always done everything you could to help me, to help everyone you care about? If it counts for me, it should count for you too.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. My heart beat beneath her hand and the ache inside me seemed to bleed right out to the edges of my skin, but the pain of it was almost pleasant now, like the hot glow of the sun when you’ve come out of somewhere cold.

  Tentatively, I eased my arms around her. I gathered her against me, tucking her head under my chin, feeling her soft warmth all along my body, the rise and fall of her breath.

  This was Rose. My Rose. She would let me call her that. She’d already told me, more than once, how much she wanted me. And here she still was, in spite of everything.

  This was what it felt like to hold her in my arms. She didn’t feel at all fragile now. Strength was coiled through those muscles, and power I couldn’t even imagine simmered deep inside her.

  I let my head dip, just a little. Just enough to brush my lips against her temple. Her breath caught. I kissed a little lower, and lower still, charting a slow path across the curve of her cheek. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt. I had just enough self-control left to murmur, by the corner of her mouth, “If you need to get back to the house—”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But the Spark help me, Gabriel, if you back away again—”

  I captured her mouth with mine, cutting off her words. Letting my kiss be my answer. She melted into me, one hand trailing up over the back of my neck, sending tingles down my spine. Her lips parted under my mouth, offering me entrance, and I had to take it, teasing my tongue over hers, tasting how sweet she was all the way through. She made a hungry sound and pulled me even closer.

  I traced her sides down to the hem of her shirt. Hell, yes, that was coming off of her. I tugged, and she eased back half a step to let me pull it up over her head. For a second, I just stood there gazing at the slim curves of her breasts in the black bra that was as glossy as her hair.

  She made a twitching motion with her hand, and the back unclasped itself. The bra tumbled to the floor, leaving her completely on display for my approval. In an instant, I was rock hard.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered to myself.

  She laughed, mischief dancing in her eyes. “That’s the general idea.”

  I caught her waist and pulled her back to me, kissing her shoulder, her collarbone, the top of her breasts. Rose’s chest hitched with desire. But just before I reached those perfect pink tips, she touched the side of my face and drew me back up.

  “You know it’s not just tonight I want,” she said, her gaze searching mine. “I want to belong to you and I want you to belong to me—all of us, together. It’s never going to feel totally right without you, Gabriel. But only if that’s what you want too. If you’re not sure—you don’t have to decide right away—I just don’t want you to think this is only messing around. I want all of you, even the parts you’re scared of.”

  I swallowed hard, tenderness and lust singing in harmony through my veins. “And I want all of you, Rose. Every fucking day I can have you. Even the parts you’re scared of. I think maybe those are the parts I love the most.”

  A shimmer filled her eyes, but any tears there were happy ones. The smile that split her face had nothing but joy in it. She bobbed up on her toes to press her mouth to mine.

  “I won’t let you down,” she murmured against my lips. “I won’t let any of you down. I swear it.”

  “You could never let me down,” I said. Then I was kissing her again, my thumbs stroking over her breasts. A whimper crept from her throat as I brushed my knuckles over her nipples.

  I cupped my hand under one and brought my mouth to it. She moaned breathlessly, gripping my hair as I swirled my tongue over that stiffened peak. Her hips canted toward me, and even more heat gathered at the base of my cock.

  We were doing this. She was mine. I was hers. Maybe it had always been as simple as that.

  I moved to her other breast, grazing my teeth over her nipple until she cried out with need. She wrenched at my shirt, and I tugged it off. I swept her off her feet in one smooth movement, gathering her against me, chest to bare chest, to carry her into my bedroom. Her arm slid behind my neck, and she drew me into another kiss.

  We fell onto the bed together, a jumble of limbs and desperate mouths. I peeled her jeans off her and kicked mine off when she grasped the waist. Then we were close, so close, my erection sliding against her core with only two thin layers of silky fabric between us. She arched up to meet me. We ground together, kissing hard and hot, an even headier friction than what we’d had the other day in the car.

  I wanted her. I needed her. She knew every part of me so well, and now I’d know her from the inside out. I tugged her panties off her, and she fumbled with my boxers. Then her hand was gliding up over my cock, her thumb slicking over the moisture already beading at the tip. I groaned.

  “Rose.” Was I going to be this ho
nest? Yes, she deserved that. She’d laid bare every fear she had to me without hesitation. I kissed her again and leaned my head close hers, our noses touching. “I haven’t actually done this before. Everything but, yeah”—hands and mouths, giving and receiving—“but going all the way… just never felt exactly right with anyone.” Too close. Too dangerous. Too much of a connection.

  Rose’s eyes widened. “Gabriel,” she said, sounding awed. “And you’re sure you want it to be me, like this?”

  A strained chuckle spilled out of me. “I’ve been sure of that since pretty much the first moment I saw you, sweetheart,” I said. “I just don’t know how long I’m going to last.”

  “I’ll take whatever you can give me,” she murmured, tipping her mouth up to meet mine.

  I slid inside her with that kiss. Pleasure shot through me as the hot slick center of her closed around me. She raised her legs, urging me even deeper, and I accepted that invitation with a groan. Oh, God, all the times I’d passed up the chance at this sensation—but it wouldn’t have felt quite like this. Not with anyone but her.

  I didn’t have a single regret about that choice.

  “You feel so good,” Rose said, clutching me. The words and the tightening of her sex around me sent a fresh wave of bliss through me. I pulled back and plunged in again, finding a rhythm that was already spiraling me toward release.

  “You too,” I mumbled. “So fucking good. There couldn’t have been anyone better. Never.”

  She clenched around me again at those words, and I was lost. A stuttered cry broke from her lips. My balls clenched and my cock jerked inside her. I kept thrusting, spilling myself into her. My hand dropped to finger her clit, to draw out her pleasure, and her eyes rolled back.

  “Gabriel,” she gasped. Her body shuddered around me, and I knew I’d brought her to her peak too.

  I eased out and sprawled down on the bed beside her. She snuggled close, hooking her leg over my thigh so we aligned perfectly.