“I want to marry you,” I said. “So marry me. Please.” I naively believed there were no excuses left to be had. She’d just resigned her commission too—also to work for the Benjamin empire—and the SCOTUS ruling meant all sorts of hurdles on the legal and bureaucratic ends would be sorting themselves out. My father adored her—was jealous of her, even—and while he still didn’t like our relationship, he’d accept it eventually. After all, if parental objections really mattered, then hardly anyone would get married, right?
So I’d assumed I’d blurt it out, and maybe I’d earn a little hell in bed for not allowing her to propose first, but I liked hell in bed, and anyway, it was time, and so she’d say yes and we’d kiss and then disappear upstairs to fuck.
She didn’t say yes.
She didn’t say anything at all.
I eventually turned and looked at her. Looked at the wind caressing the soft brown silk of her hair.
She didn’t look back at me. “I’m going to marry your brother.”
She might as well have told me in Pashto for how long it took the words to sink in. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t—I don’t—” For once my hero sounded uncertain. “I think it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand. She and I were happy, we were in love, even five years in we were as frantic and horny and obsessed as we’d been when we first met. How long had she . . . had they . . .
“I haven’t fucked him,” she said, reading my thoughts. “But nevertheless, marrying him is what I need to do if I’m supposed to get where I need to go.”
I still didn’t understand. Nothing made sense, not her words, not her uncertainty, not her path, none of it.
She softened. “Jace,” she said, “nothing has to change. I’ve already spoken with him and he understands that you and I will still be together. In fact, we’ll be together even more this way. This is just a . . . formality . . . that keeps me in your father’s good graces.”
“Fuck you,” was all I could manage at that. “Fuck you, ‘nothing has to change.’”
She bit her lip, and I realized I’d become addicted to her surety and confidence over the years because seeing the absence of it was beyond disorienting. “I don’t like it either,” she whispered. “But I know there’s this place, this thing, that I’m supposed to be, and this is the way to be it. Your father won’t accept me marrying you, I won’t be his right-hand man then. But if I marry his beloved son . . .”
“This is the stereotype, you know,” I said bitterly. “This is why people say you can’t trust bi girls.”
I expected her to snap back, to defend herself because it was a shitty thing for me to say, but she didn’t. Her shoulders rounded in unhappiness. “I hate this too. I hate it.”
“Then why?” I demanded, my voice shaking and furious and choked with tears. “Just because you think God wants you to be some kind of king?”
“Yes,” she said simply, and there it was. The certainty again, the wall around her tabernacle heart that I’d never be able to breach. She finally found a light she could eat and eat and never grow full of, and it wasn’t mine. It was God’s.
Tears and hysteria were strangling me, and any minute I’d succumb. I’d perish and dissolve, and I refused to let her see. Refused to let her have that indignity when I’d already given her so many. I stood up and she caught my hand, pressing it to her heart.
“I love you,” she said earnestly, looking up at me. “I won’t pretend this isn’t a hurdle, but we’ll figure it out, Jace, I promise.”
“I’m leaving.”
“I get it,” she said, holding my hand even tighter. “I’ll sleep in the guest room tonight. I know you need space while you digest this, and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to make you happy too, okay?”
I just stared at her. She really thought a way could exist to make me happy while she married my brother? She thought I just needed time to digest?
I pulled my hand back. I said nothing. And I went and packed my bag and left her there with my family—which was now going to be just as much hers as it was mine.
She called and called. She texted. She wrote letters. She showed up on my doorstep for months afterward.
She loved me, she said. She needed me. Why was I holding her back?
“I’m not holding you back,” I’d tell her. “Do whatever you want.” I didn’t mean that, though. I just hoped to be the only thing she wanted, but I wasn’t, I would never be.
The trouble with heroes and kings, I guess.
I cried myself to sleep every night without her. For eight months. And then I went to her wedding.
I’d never responded to the invitation, had refused to discuss the matter with my brother and father, and had certainly refused to talk to Devon about it, no matter how much she tried to woo me into being her mistress. But I’d gone because I knew I had to see it myself, I had to extinguish that last part of me that pined for some kind of happy ending. The hope that she’d see me and change her mind and she’d spend the rest of the night fucking me while wearing her wedding dress.
None of that happened, of course. She married my brother. She kissed him, and it was a chaste enough kiss, but it didn’t matter. She’d promised me once her body was mine and now it wasn’t and why oh why had I ever thought I could have her? Keep her? Love her? I could claw and claw but never scratch her, I could reach and reach and never grab her. She would never be mine, she was never mine, she’d always been my father’s, my brother’s, God’s.
And so I went with my father the very next week on a fairly dangerous trip back to Helmand, this time to check on our private defense installations and not as a Marine. When the bomb went off under our truck, there was a split second where I thought . . . at last, at last, at last God had answered my prayers for the pain to stop.
What a lie.
When I woke up, broken, stitched, drugged, Michael was there. “Dad’s dead,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Devon’s on her way.”
“No.”
“Jace,” he said, and his voice had trembled. His father was dead, his sister was nearly there, and his wife would be flying in to weep over the bed of the real person she loved. It must have been hell for him.
“No,” I said. I didn’t care about his hell. “Michael, please. Don’t let her—tell her anything. Tell her I’m dead.”
The moment the words bloomed on my tongue, I knew. It made sense. In every way except the obvious, it made sense. And Michael wasn’t as hard to convince as he should have been; perhaps the idea of me being dead appealed to the parts of him that wanted Devon to be wholly his. Or perhaps he could hear the pain in my voice, the kind of weary misery that can only grow after heartbreak. Between the Benjamin name and the Benjamin money, it was shockingly easy to arrange in just a few short hours.
And so I died.
* * *
Now
Yes is all Devon needs to hear. I’m yanked to my feet and bent over the kitchen table faster than I can ask her what she’s doing, and by the time I’ve caught my breath enough to ask, I don’t need to anymore because my jeans are around my ankles and her tongue is in my cunt.
I pant against the table, my breath leaving clouds along the shiny surface, and she makes a sound of satisfaction, like a warrior running her finger along a sharpened blade. I’m hers once again, for however short a time, and we both fall headlong into the spell of that. She gives me a final lick that’s more for her pleasure than mine, then stands up behind me. She palms my cunt, her middle finger pressing hard against my clit as she cups my heat, and I know I could come like this, just like this, because it’s been so long and because it’s her. Her. And no matter what she’s done, it will always be her.
I’m spanked hard, although it’s not punishment. I can’t say what it is—something closer to worship maybe, an act of penitence and reverence, and the strikes are meant to heal me,
to prove I’m the only thing she wants to touch and to own. With a long cry, I shudder out a climax just like that, grinding against her hand while my ass glows red from her attention.
“Stay here,” she breathes, and then she walks out the front door while I bend bare-assed over the table, my sides heaving like a racehorse’s and my pussy slowly wetting the insides of my thighs.
She comes back in with a black bag that’s as familiar to me as the gold-flecked brown of her eyes, sets it on the table in front of my face. “You must have felt optimistic,” I say, but I can’t muster any real bitterness. Not when I want it as much as she does.
She gives an elegant sort of noise. “A good Marine is always prepared.”
She strips me with care, lovingly, kissing and tasting all the skin her efforts reveal. I’m licked between the shoulder blades and down my spine. The soles of my feet are kissed too, my neck is sucked. By the time I’m completely naked, every single inch of my skin is tingling with want.
She pulls out a chair to the middle of the floor and sticks a thick cock to the wood, securing it with the sturdy suction cup at the end.
“On the chair,” she says. “You know how.”
I do know how. I am not new to what Devon likes to do with kitchen chairs.
I straddle the seat, as Devon leans down and takes my hip in one hand and grips the silicone dick in the other. She rubs the fat, cool head of it against my swollen pussy.
“It’s big,” I tell her.
“Where’s the fun in small?”
I shiver. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, Devon.”
“Then I have to break my girl back in, don’t it?” she says pleasantly and pushes me down.
The thickness spreads me open, parting me and tunneling through me, the pressure of it lighting up nerve endings that haven’t been touched since before Devon told me she was going to marry my brother. Heat and tight desire radiate outward from the places where Devon’s dick pierces me, and I moan at the sensation.
She sucks in a breath. “Dirty girl,” she whispers.
I have to swivel to work myself down all the way, but finally I’m there, with my ass flat on the chair and my legs spread to straddle it. The cock is buried to the hilt, and every breath, every heartbeat, reminds me of its delicious invasion. Reminds me of her, and her will, and how much I love this. Being hers to play with and break.
After my ankles are secured to the legs of the chair, my wrists are tied to the back of the chair, and then the rope makes a wide X across my chest, doubles around my ribcage and fastens me even more completely to the wood. I can barely move.
“Oh Jace,” Devon says, stepping back to look at me. I’m still wet, still squirming, my nipples bunched into tiny, tight points. I think the end of her cock is somewhere up in my chest. She groans as I squirm again. “I want to eat you alive.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I chant, leaning my head back in a fruitless bid to try to move my hips forward to fuck the length inside me, but I can’t move, I can’t do anything but wait.
A vibrator emerges from the black bag, and I’m fascinated by the lewd contrast of it in her hand. Those expensive, delicate shoes and those designer pants—her slender hand with its impeccable manicure—it all frames the blunt, utilitarian shape of the wand. And soon this elegant woman is going to bend down to me and tease my clit with it while I’m impaled on a cock of her choosing and tied to a chair.
It’s the kind of contrast only Devon could pull off.
The wand begins buzzing, and the minute she touches it to my swollen clitoris, she takes my mouth in a brutal kiss so she can eat up every gasp and grunt and sigh of mine. Her lips—soft and warm—part to allow her tongue to slide across mine, and she grips my jaw with her other hand to open my mouth even more to her claim. It’s all silky tongues and deep, filthy pressure, and quivers of sensation chasing up and down my thighs and belly. It feels so good, so fucking good, and all those vibrations are shaking me apart, shaking my anger and my pain into pointless pieces and leaving nothing underneath but the girl I used to be. The girl who just wanted Devon all to herself.
I don’t even realize I’m trying as hard as possible to fuck the chair until Devon says against my mouth, “Still that desperate little thing, aren’t you? Needing it so bad?”
I answer with a climax that has me bucking against my restraints and crying out into her kiss—cries that she swallows hungrily. Love me, I want to beg. Love me now.
“I want another out of you,” she says, and she does it. She presses the bulbous head of the wand even harder against me, coaxing a third orgasm out of me and then a fourth, until I’m crying and sweaty and pleading for her to stop in broken, agonized mumbles.
She stands up and takes me in with greedy eyes. “It killed me, missing this. Missing you.”
I lick my lower lip, still trying to catch my breath, and her eyes go from greedy to downright vampiric. “Fuck, Jace,” she breathes.
“What?”
“I fucking love you.”
I’m shaken all the way apart now. “I love you too,” I whisper.
She takes pity on me and unties me, helping me stand and supporting me when the slow drag of the cock out of my sensitive flesh is enough to make my knees buckle. Together, we go back to my room, where I lay naked and sweaty against her fashionable, still-clothed frame. I should be asking myself what I’m doing, letting her cuddle me and pet me, but I think maybe I don’t care anymore.
I think maybe . . . I forgive her.
I shouldn’t, she doesn’t deserve it, and yet, there it is anyway. A shaft of light in a place that’s been dark for three years.
“How are you?” she murmurs, running her fingers along my throat. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I just came three times on a giant-ass dildo.”
“A giant-ass dildo or a giant ass-dildo?”
“Fuck you.”
She just laughs.
The endorphins do their work, and I’m almost asleep when she says, “I left the company too, Jace. Along with divorcing Michael.”
That wakes me up, and I roll onto an elbow so I can see her face. She simply keeps stroking my neck, her eyes clear and calm. “But that was your goal all along!” I protest. “To get to the top and follow in my father’s footsteps.”
She lifts a shoulder. “It was the wrong way. Hurting you never should have been an option, not ever, and that was the first sign I was doing everything wrong. I never should have wanted to be your father; he was afraid and jealous and angry all the time. I should have wanted to be my own kind of king.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before we fucked in my kitchen?”
Her hand moves to cradle my cheek and she gives me a smile with that perfect, heart-shaped mouth. “It’s the right thing to do, and I didn’t want to use the right thing to do as leverage in bed. I wanted to give you something without trying to manipulate you.”
“Devon, everything you do is manipulation.”
“Fine. I at least wanted to be transparent about the manipulation then.”
We both laugh a little at that.
“And God?” I ask. “What does He want?”
She closes her eyes, regret and shame all over her beautiful face. “He wants me to be better, I think. I was so ready to be where I thought He wanted me that I forgot to truly listen, and I chased after power instead of honor.”
She opens her eyes and says carefully, “It’s a mistake I won’t make again.”
“You won’t?”
She searches my face. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I shake my head, although I know what I hope she’s saying, what I pray she means.
“I’ll never hurt you again, Jace. I’ll never put anything above loving you again, not power, not ambition, not anything, because I hate myself for what I’ve done and I love you more than anything. If you let me have you again, you’ll be my entire world.”
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I want to be hers again. I want to forgive her, not because she deserves it, but because I love her and sometimes love means cold nights of howling into the dark and sometimes it means choosing to step back into the light instead. Love, like God, has to be merciful as often as it’s terrifying, otherwise the terror of it all is for nothing.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll let you.”
She smiles, wide and happy and open, just like the youthful hero I met all those years ago. And I smile back.
“Really?” she asks.
“Really.”
“I don’t deserve it but fuck, I’m taking it anyway.”
“That’s the spirit,” I laugh.
She yanks me into a searing kiss and rolls me onto my back, and within moments, she’s naked and above me and together we move from sin and shame to ecstatic, carnal absolution. Together, our bodies make a kind of praise, a hymn and a worship.
A hallelujah that echoes through the night.
A prayer for eternity.
One in which I am very, very much alive.
♬
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THE NEW CAMELOT SERIES
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Say Yes
Elle Kennedy
“Always On My Mind” – Willie Nelson
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Emilia
Tom, 29
Interests: the gym, hiking, basketball, beers with the boys
Fine, so any man who lists “beers with the boys” as an “interest” probably isn’t a viable long-term partner.
But who says I’m looking for one of those?
Tom’s online profile might lean toward the douche side, but it doesn’t stop me from swiping through his pictures. He likes the gym, all right—I find three gym-mirror selfies, one in which he’s holding a dumbbell to show off his very defined biceps. Then we have the token shirtless shots, two on the beach, one at a swim-up pool bar with a bunch of guys who I’m assuming are “the boys.” But where’s the shirtless, bathroom-mirror selfie? There’s always at least one of—there it is. Right on cue.
Mixtape: A Love Song Anthology Page 13
