Naughty Bits is a collection of Spice Briefs. They’re sexy, super-hot, speedy reads for busy women… And they’re available on the internet! If you’re looking for more quickies, check out www.spice-books.co.uk

Naughty Bits
An Anthology of Short Erotic Fiction
Naughty Bits
Jenesi Ash
Jina Bacarr
Eden Bradley
Jodi Lynn Copeland
Lacy Danes
Delilah Devlin
Grace D’Otare
Charlotte Featherstone
Alice Gaines
Megan Hart
Sarah McCarty
Alison Paige
Cathleen Ross
Kimberly Kaye Terry
Tracy Wolff

MILLS & BOON

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The Invitation

YOU LEFT ME A GIFT. MY SHAKING FINGERS SLIDE ALONG the red silk ribbon and into the loop of the bow. I have never expected a gift, and you know how much I love surprises. Pinching the tail of the bow in between my thumb and forefinger, I pull the ribbon loose and slide the card from the top of the rectangular box. My stomach flutters as I ease the stiff paper from the envelope. I close my eyes as goose bumps race over my skin. What will it say? What is in the box? My hands shake and I flip the card open as I raise my eyelids to take in your words…your wishes.

My slut,

Wear this gift and meet me on the trail at dusk…the trail where we initiated our wilderness exhibitionism. Wear shorts and a shirt, an easily lifted jacket, hiking boots, no bra or panties. Bring water and a very warm blanket.

Master Eric

A hike is something I have always enjoyed and a scene in the woods something I relish. My pussy throbs as images of you handcuffing my arms around a tree and fucking my ass flood my thoughts. Yum. What could you possibly have purchased for me to wear into the woods?

I hastily grab the box and spin about, sinking down onto the chair beside the table. I slowly lift the lid to reveal a bright blue velvet bag. The sleek fabric excites me and my nipples pebble as I pull the pouch from the box. Inside is an object of heavy weight. The shape, as my fingers smooth along the outside of the bag, is of an egg with a stem and handle. A plug. I uncinch the pouch and dump the gift into my hand and grin. Chills of delight race up my neck.

A three-inch art glass plug sits in my palm. The red and black colors swirl from tip to the flanged base and in the wide stopper end, etched into the glass, are the words Owned by E. My heart soars and I grin. My fingernail traces each letter; they look as if you handwrote them yourself. How did you do that?

Indeed, I am yours. You own my heart and I will do all you wish of me. Running my fingers over the polished surface, the image of sliding the smooth glass into my pucker, my flesh being stretched, readying me for your onslaught, makes me quiver. I fidget in my seat as heat curls between the globes of my ass. A smile of excitement stretches my lips and I can’t sit still. I can’t wait to see you, and see what you have in store for me. Time I go get ready…

What lies at the end of this hike—or what I hope does—thrills me. I grin and remember your instructions as my skin tingles in excitement and arousal. I am dressed as you requested. Shorts, shirt, jacket, no bra or panties. My makeup is as you like. Red lips, eyeliner…everything done to perfection. I feel beautiful, sexy in my short shorts and tight top. I am slightly overdone for the wilderness but know how I appear will please you, and that is all that matters to me.

I start to whistle a giddy little tune as I walk. The gravel path crunches beneath my feet as your gift tugs the skin of my bottom. The plug, snugly inserted in my ass, fills me and each step rocks the egg within me, arousing my body as I walk down the trail.

My pussy quivers remembering the last time I walked this path. Remembering you using your new crop on me, then fucking me as I trembled, floating in a euphoric haze looking out at the serene lake.

I pass the location where you kissed me on the bench, and I remember the clips tugging my sensitive nipples as we walked, talking about videos and movies we had watched, about our hometowns, and about all of our favorite foods and pastimes. We are so alike yet so opposite.

I come to the small clearing, the tree where we were caught with our pants down. I grin, wanting to relive that moment, to stay cuffed to that tree as the woman passed instead of you uncuffing me before she could see us. A small giggle bursts from my lips. God, I love to be watched, caught…it is a thrill like no other.

My feet take me deeper and deeper into the wilderness and I come to the place where our first scene was performed. You stand by the rail watching me, your blue eyes filled with intense desire, excitement. My body trembles just looking at you. Your short black hair and wicked smile. Your broad shoulders and stocky build. You are the most handsome man I know. But it goes so much beyond your looks. Your mind and your soul are what captivate me.

Your mouth quirks up as I reach your side. “Greet me properly.”

My lips curl into a smile. “Yes, Master.” I drop to my knees, my eyes filled with adoration never leaving yours, then smooth my hands up your thighs. My fingers trail over your zipper and slide the fly down. You stand absolutely still, hands clasped behind your back. I want to shake you, to make you moan, to lose the control you always hold in check—but I will never cross that line.

My mouth waters, wanting to take you into my sweet depths, to swallow you up and make you hard. I free your cock from the confines of your pants and press the plum-shaped tip to the soft glossed lips of my mouth. My tongue slides out and circles the head of your semifirm penis. The smell of your sex shoots straight to my wet labia, making my cunt gape with need. Saliva pools under my tongue and as I slide your prick into my mouth, the slickness slips down your cock coating you with my moisture.

You taste delicious. The salty spice of your skin tingles my taste buds and I flick my tongue against the smooth ridge of your head. The skin is loose but quickly fills, tightening over your wide penis.

I nestle your dick in my mouth then pull back out to the tip. Sliding back down your length, your crown gently touches the back of my tongue. I hesitate, afraid I may gag on your thickness, and again pull back up to the tip, swirling and gently nibbling on the rim with my teeth. You moan. The sound of your pleasure emboldens me; I want so desperately to hear more and more of that sweet delicious sound as you capture your pleasure and in turn I receive mine. Licking my lips I move back to suck the large tip deeper into my throat. To create the sensation I know you so love.

You grasp my chin. “No. Stand.”

Damn.

The unyielding grip of your fingers on my jawbone washes through me and I tremble. Even the lightest touch from you on my skin makes me shake but when you firmly grasp me, my vision hazes and I begin to float in the euphoric bliss that goes back ages in time. Dominant man in control of his spirited woman. I stand without hesitation, my eyes clouded with nothing but the vision of pleasing you. Of giving you all my power to do with as you wish.

You smile at me, devotion and excitement swirling in the depths of your gaze.

God, you make my knees weak.

You lead me, your fingers entwined with mine, into the woods, away from the lake and the pretty view that we enjoyed on our first encounter. Deep into the trees we walk, neither one of us saying a word. I wonder what you have planned but know I will enjoy it no matter what it is.

We reach a set of trees that are equal in size and spread about five feet apart. There is a large grouping of boulders off to one side by which you have placed your backpack, and a flask.

“Give me your pack.” You hold out your hand to me.

I hand over the bag, which contains the water and warm blanket you requested.

You grasp them in one hand and with the other you grab my hair. Tingles shoot through my scalp and you pull my lips to yours. The warmth of your mouth devours mine; the taste of Red Bull on your tongue as it plunges in, tangling slowly, warms me to my toes. The flavor I will forever associate with you.

My nipples are pebble-hard and I groan, wanting to touch you, to feel your skin beneath my hands, but I stand absolutely still as I have been trained by you to do.

You slip my jacket from my shoulders and off of me. I shiver, but more from excitement than the cold. I only want to please you, to excite you and bring you pleasure.

You walk me to the trees. There your fingers wrap my palm and you raise my arm, placing a fur-lined cuff about my wrist. The cuff is attached to the tree by rope. You do the same with my other hand, smiling a very devious smile. God, I love that smile. It is the smile that inhabits my every dream, my every memory of us. I tug on my arms to see if I have any room for escape. The cuffs dig into the base of my hand but don’t slip over.

“No escape.”

“Yes, Master. You know me, I had to check.” I grin at you.

You laugh as a blindfold emerges from your pocket and you slip it over my head. The soft fur underlining slides down my forehead and the last thing I see is your lips grinning at me.

Oh dear…what do you have planned?

My heart pounds and my breath hitches in my throat. I try to relax but it is impossible—my arms and legs begin to shake in anticipation of the unknown act you are about to press upon me for your pleasure, for my pleasure, for us.

Cold metal strokes my forearm, a single caress. Too quick for me to discern what it is exactly. Then the cold traces my shoulder and up my neck.

“Hold still, my slut. I wouldn’t want to cut you.”

Cut? The word slides panic straight to my gut.

A knife.

I inhale sharply and my body trembles involuntarily. I try to hold as still as possible as the blade traces the collar on my T-shirt, flowing like an eroticized paintbrush down between my breasts. The cold steel excites everywhere it touches.

The hem of my shirt lifts and pulls from my body. The knife reaches the place where fabric no longer is a part of me and I hear the material tear. It is a sharp knife. My stomach flips on the knowledge you could cut me at any moment. I inhale slowly and my trust in you calms my beating heart.

The knife cuts through the cotton, splitting the shirt from just below my breasts to the hem. My arms jump and shake and you pull the two tails of shirt, tearing the rest apart, exposing my breasts to the air. The difference in temperature tingles along my skin and your fingers graze my nipples. I moan, arching towards you, wanting you to pinch and suckle my peaked flesh. “Please.”

“Beautiful.” Your deep voice is full of love and warms my heart. “Stay still.” The cool tip of the knife touches the tip of my nipple then gently flicks it. A pinprick of pain is instantly soothed by the warm wetness of your tongue swirling about the bud.

“Ahhh.” My pussy throbs and my legs part trying to ease the ache sharpened by your domination. Your mouth’s caress leaves my puckered tip and your hair brushes the underside of my raised arm as you duck under it. I suck in a breath as my body shakes. The knife continues…

You cut up the backside of my shirt, then slide the separated pieces up my arms and off my cuffed hands. The cool air washes my heated skin and gooseflesh rises. There is a tug on my waistband, the button pops free and the zipper falls. You push the shorts down my legs and they pool at my feet. Yes, indeed. My pussy needs you.

“Kick them free.” Your voice sounds as if you have stepped quite a distance from my body.

“Yes, Master.” I wiggle my feet wanting to expose my hungry wet flesh for your pleasure. My legs continue to shake as I first work one foot free, then the other and kick my shorts from my body.

I stand nude for what seems like eternity, only the cold air touching my skin. I swallow hard and wait…wait to see what it is that you wish of me.

You pull my hair back and the knife scrapes like sandpaper up my neck from nape to chin. I shake uncontrollably as you hold the blade under my chin.

Your tongue snakes into my ear, swirling the curve and then dipping into the cup. “Such a sweet thing you are. Bound and totally at my will.” You pull from me and I am left panting for breath as my pussy spasms, wanting any part of you to touch the sopping wet flesh.

The cold blade traces up the inside of my thigh. I jump.

“Hold.”

I stiffen, my breath tight. My muscles aching to tremble as the press travels up the inside of my leg to the crease of my buttock cheek and thigh. You hold the steel there and your other hand rubs the cheeks of my ass as if I am a skittish dog in need of a gentle hand.

The metal turns from cold to the temperature of my body. You gently slide the base of the blade over to touch my labia.

I groan, my pussy overflowing and twitching with juices. The blade slowly parts the folds of my sex, spreading the lips wide. I hold absolutely still. Your finger slides into my cunny.

I scream, my inner muscles clamping about your finger, but I don’t dare move—the knife still holds my sensitive flesh. You remove your finger. The blade releases my labia and I hear you place your fingers into your mouth and suck them. My tongue traces my lips in a search for my tart flavor, but finds none.

“The best fruit this blade has opened yet.” I feel the smile in your tone.

I am proud I have pleased you. A sigh of contentedness and relief presses from my lungs.

Your footfalls sound and I sag slightly on my arms allowing the rope and cuffs to support me. Your voice calls from behind me, not far, but not close. “Arch your back and display your ass to me.”

I hear the rustling of tree leaves as I widen my stance and thrust my ass back in the direction of your voice.

Swoosh…

Swoosh…

“This will do quite nicely.” Your tone holds a note of humor.

What this is I have little time to consider.

Swoosh…

A long thin switch cuts across my buttocks, hard. I suck in a startled breath and tense my body, readying for the next blow.

Swoosh…

The rough wood cuts across the backs of my thighs. I cry out, half startled, half from the pain. Tears spring to my eyes, my lungs tighten and my shoulders press up to my ears as prickling heat radiates up my body to the core of me.

“Yes, indeed. Quite well. Don’t you agree, my sweet?”

Heated arousal washes over me at the tone of your voice and I begin to relax. The muscles of my shoulders sag, and all the air flows out of me. “Indeed, Master.”

The switch hits again, this time more gentle. The tip taps and taps my buttocks and thighs, slowly increasing in intensity and frequency. Warming my skin, readying my muscles for the more intense strokes I know will follow.

I pull on my hands. I twist against the leather cuffs that restrain me and stomp my feet. The hits get harder and closer together and I cry out, “Fuck!”

“Indeed. Take a deep breath and breathe, my love.” You pull in a sharp lungful of air and I know before the sound of the switch cuts through the air this will be a harsh one. I tense, readying for the heat and pain.

Swoosh…

The switch harshly caresses my ass.

I inhale through clenched teeth, and slip…slip into that state I so crave. My muscles liquefy and peaceful calm washes over me. I stand absolutely still and quiet as a shy child, hanging in the blissful haze as the leather cuffs and rope hold me.

Swoosh…

The switch cuts again with the same harsh intensity. I moan at the heat and tingling in my ass as my pussy gushes and fevered arousal courses through me.

Swoosh…swoosh…swoosh…swoosh…

I rock and sway to each knee-weakening hit.

You stop. I hear your heavy breathing behind me. Your fingertip gently traces a welt on my ass. I lift my head just a fraction then drop it back down. Your footfalls on the dirt indicate you are coming around to the front of me. The warmth of your breath caresses my ear.

“How are you doing, my love?”

I lick my lips and swallow. “Quite well, Master.”

“Exactly what I wanted to hear.” Your finger traces my lips and my tongue slides out and snakes about it. “Stand up straight.”

“Yes, Master.”

I shift, pulling my ass in and straightening my shoulders.

The sting that hits my breasts is soothing, a sensation I know well and love. The little rubber flogger I purchased for you for our one-year anniversary. The pricking warmth of each hit sends pleasure waves straight down my stomach to my clit. The tiny hardened button throbs as you continue flogging each breast and my shoulders.

I flinch as the lash changes focus to my thighs. Each hit stronger, the tips brush, sting, and arouse me.

“Part your legs.”

“Yes, Master.” I slide them apart and the flogger slices across my labia with a thud. I jump, suck in my breath, and quiver with pleasure as my muscles and my pussy clench.

The flogger hits again and the pleasure shoots straight to my womb. I scream as bliss grabs me and I spill juices onto the tails.

You reach in between my legs and the rubber handle pushes up into my weeping cunt. I groan. Deep. The sensation wracks my body as my pussy opens to you and your probing.

You slide the flogger back out and then in again, the tails brushing my thighs with each fuck of the handle. Your thumb rides against my clit as you push the handle deep.

The fire rushes through my body and I reach for the climax thundering in my veins. In and out the handle goes, sliding in my slick juices. My wetness is audible. I am soaking for you.

Your thumb glides in the same relentless rhythm against my button. I tremble and my toes curl in my boots as my hips arch toward you. “Please, please, Master. May I? May I please?”

“Come for me, my love.”

With your words I shatter.

My body convulsing, my pussy clenches the flogger handle in wave upon wave.

You lean in and suckle my breast. Tingles shoot through the tissue and I come again, shaking for you as I feel your lips smile against my skin.

You remove the flogger and slide the blindfold from my eyes.

I blink and stare at you, my handsome master, filled with love and devotion.

You smile. “You did very well.” Your eyes are thick black pools of arousal. You walk around behind me, trailing your fingers along my stomach and side. The gentle caress on my oversensitized skin tickles and I jump and shake, pulling away from you as I giggle.

“Ticklish, eh?”

“Yes, Master.” I close my eyes and try to relax the thundering in my veins.

Your finger gently traces one of the switch marks on my ass. The caress is filled with love, wonder and pride. Strange how a simple touch I can’t even see expresses all of that. I know I will have the marks from this scene for days to warm my thoughts and make me smile thinking of you, of this moment, of our love.

As you slide your finger about the wide base of the glass gift in my ass, I shake. The tips of your fingers forage beneath the ridge. The press of your flesh against my slick bottom renews the arousal in my veins. My breath quickens and I whimper.

Slowly you slide the bulb-shaped plug out. My anal ring stretches over the wide part of the egg and sensation spirals hot and cold through my ass, cunt and gut. I hear a ting as the glass hits the ground.

My muscles are liquid and you place your cock at my pucker. Your hips rock forward. A tiny single push in, and my body gives way to you, yielding over your large width without hesitation.

I groan at the sensation of being filled with you, being joined in this primitive dance of us.

You moan and pull your cock back out to the tip.

Your fingers grasp my hips and you fuck me. You thrust hard; my body shakes and sways against you. My ass jiggles with each slap of your groin against my plush bottom. Each slip of you into me, you groan.

Sensations like no other overload me as your thick cock stretches me. I shake and gasp for breath. You press deep and my pussy squirts gush after gush from my core. The slick fluid slides down my legs and they tremble. My god, I want your dick in my cunt…your cunt.

You grab my hair and arch my head back. Your hips slow the rapturous pounding I so adore. Slipping from my ass, I feel you wipe your cock on something. You slide down my crack and directly spear my pussy. I suck in a pleasurable whimper. Aggressively you renew the onslaught of my cunt hole. “Oh yes. Yes, Master. Fuck me.”

“Um-hum. Is this what my cunt wants?”

“Oh! Oh yes, Master.”

I gush and shake violently against you in pleasure. I love the way you fuck me, the way your thick prick glides effortlessly in and out of me, joining more than our bodies. Our souls intertwine and fly.

Wanting to feel every inch of your glorious cock, I clench the muscles of my pussy about your invasion. You groan and your dick twitches within me. A telltale sign you will come soon. I grin, wanting that. To hear you cry out as you seek and find bliss.

You pull out and I gasp at the loss of you. I feel the tug of the straps on the cuffs and my arms lower. You step in front of me.

Your hand rises to my shoulder and your loving gaze caresses my face. I know what you want and I instantly drop to my knees. Your cock is glistening with my juices and steely hard. I want to taste you, your essence mixed with mine as I swallow you up.

I spit into my palms and place them on the shaft of your cock with a tight grip. Licking the tip, I slide the crown into my mouth. My body and mind are calm and languid from my flogging and thorough fucking; my muscles loose. The only thought in my mind is you; my love for you and pleasuring you so that you are in the same state of contentedness.

My lips part further and skim all the way down your cock to my hands. I slide back to the tip, my hands squeezing tight up your length in my mouth’s wake. I want nothing more than to make you come, to feel you spurt deep in my mouth and drink the essence of you.

I suck your cock with vigor, pouring all my love, all my passion into the act. Your legs shake against me. Your hand snags into my hair and you begin fucking my mouth in tune with my motions.

Your cock goes deep, touching my throat again and again. You groan and the hand in my hair clenches. “I’m going to come.”

I continue sucking and sucking you. I want this—I want to hear you cry out and know I was the one that caused your greatest pleasure. The smooth hot skin of your cock glides effortlessly in and out of me as saliva drizzles down my chin.

You groan, “Uh-un-uh-uh.” Spurt after delicious spurt of custard slides down my throat. I swallow the tart stingy taste of you and greedily continue to suck you for more. Your hand grasps my hair and you hold me still as you slide your cock from my mouth.

You stand absolutely motionless, breathing hard. I lick my lips and swallow, then place my hands on your thighs. I gaze up at you.

Your eyes widen and you smile. “Amazing, my love.” Your hand rubs my head.

A smile turns my lips, too. I have thoroughly pleased you.

“Stay right there.” You turn and walk to my bag. Pulling the warm blanket out of the pack, you come back to me and hold out your hand. “Stand, my love.”

I grasp your hand and you help me to stand, then wrap the blanket about me. I stare, unable to take my eyes from you. My master. I love you so intensely, more deeply than anyone before in my life. The connection we have woven together is nonesuch.

“So how was your day? Did you finish all the paperwork for your patients?” You undo the cuffs and rope from the tree. My gaze never leaves you—your fluid, strong movements as you do even the most mundane of tasks. You are beautiful.

“Yes, I came home and then saw your gift sitting on the table.” Exhaustion hits me and I start to shake once more.

“Indeed, a delicious gift, was it not?” You gather up the toys and put them in the backpack, then with it over your shoulder you walk to me.

“How did you get the words in the glass, Eric?”

“Silly. I had it specially made for you.” You lean in and kiss the tip of my nose. “You are mine. Owned by E.” Pride and possession flashes in your eyes.

“Indeed, you own my heart, Eric. I love you.”

“I love you. You are mine. You did very, very well. Let’s go home, get some food and cuddle.” You wiggle your eyebrows and chuckle. “And of course make love again.”

I giggle, and tears well in my eyes and my lower lip trembles.

You lean down, wrap your arms about me, and pick me up. “Shh.”

I slump against you, content to my bones. Your strong arms about me as you carry me out of the woods stop my trembling. I feel safe. Safe to be me, who I am deep in my soul. To be vulnerable and yours.

“I will take care of you always.” You kiss the top of my head.

I nuzzle into the scent of you. Your warmth surrounds me and your heart beats full of love beneath my ear. You squeeze me close and kiss my cheek. I sigh, knowing that your love for me will be forever a constant in my life.

Invite Me In

YOU MUST INVITE ME IN.

I awoke from my dreams, emerging through the dark strata to find my heart pounding against my chest, soft cotton sheets tangled around my limbs. I noted the hour on my digital clock—midnight. Listened to rain pinging on the tiles of my balcony. Yes, I was awake.

Invite me in.

The voice wasn’t a part of any sensual dream. I felt it like a physical caress. The rasp of his words and insistent tone slithered sinuously along my hip, wrapped around my spine, crept upward like the glide of a warm palm to lift goose bumps on my naked skin—until, at last, he whispered in my ear.

Open to me.

I recognized the deep tones and slight inflections of his indiscernible accent. I’d heard it before, several nights ago, echoing in my mind.

Even then, I’d known he was different. Never had a voice reached me without my seeking it first.

Perhaps that was the reason his dark, primal passion resonated so deeply inside me. Only, I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. I shied away from the fact I found him every bit as irresistible as did the woman next door who had more men passing through her door than the Saints’ locker room.

He was back—the one with the wicked kisses and silky caresses—and soon he’d be sliding into bed with her. Although why, when she’d barely satisfied him the last time, I didn’t understand.

I told myself I was on a deadline, I couldn’t afford to lose sleep—but her delight was palpable. What was it about him that made him such an overwhelming temptation?

Curious, I relaxed the defenses I instinctively threw up to ward off the sensations that swept through my body when people nearby began to lose themselves to passion.

For once, I waited eagerly for the intrusion of carnal thoughts drifting in the ether. I reached out, finding the slender threads of their spirits as they lifted, intertwined, and followed them back into her room. Because I could only meld with one, I chose her.

Her eagerness flooded me with heat. Already, her breasts tingled and tightened…as did mine.

He stepped closer. I knew because she inhaled sharply, dragging in the fragrance clinging to his cheeks and dampened hair. His scent, redolent with the aroma of fresh rain and heated male musk, slowly filled my nostrils.

In moments, his lips glided across her mouth, fastening to suction softly before he thrust his tongue inside. He tasted of mint and coffee, and something else I didn’t recognize because he moved on too quickly, sliding his firm lips along her jaw and lower.

Her sighs deepened, her slender frame trembled. He pushed her down to the mattress and covered her, head to toe, a blanket of solid muscle and masculine heat.

Anticipation shortened our breaths and made our hearts pound faster. He reached out to snag her wrist. His thumb swept back and forth as he pushed her hand above her head and pressed it into the pillow—a silent command to submit.

Could he feel her pulse leap beneath his gently chafing thumb?

I could. My own pulse skittered, and then rushed screaming through my body to plump the folds of my sex, he brought me to the brink that fast.

Something about him drew me helplessly into her bedroom, kept me trapped beneath his long, rangy frame, my mind and body opening to the wicked delights he rained upon her warm skin.

I closed my eyes and let the fingers she trailed along his body tell me how sleek and hard his muscled back and flanks were.

When she plunged her hands into his thick hair, I learned its silky texture and length. When he leaned over her to kiss her mouth, I felt it sweep forward to brush my cheeks.

The weight of his body crushed the breath from her, and made me gasp with pleasure. The pressure of his clothed, rigid cock burrowing between her folds drew a lusty wash of liquid arousal from her body…and mine.

My legs splayed open. My knees came up to hug the sides of his hips and encourage him closer, deeper.

“Too many clothes…” Her soft words intruded…or were they mine?

A hot, hard palm cupped a naked breast; his thumb scraped a ruched nipple. I arched my back to press against his hand, demanding a rougher exploration. When his lips latched onto a nipple and drew hard, I gasped.

My hips rolled, beginning a rhythm that slowed the beats of my racing heart, and my hands fell to the pillow beside my head as I let him lead me—no, lead us—toward completion.

“I need you naked…please…inside me…” I whimpered. Already the walls of my vagina clenched and rippled, readying for his penetration.

He murmured, nuzzling my neck until I turned my head to the side to allow him to trail a wet kiss along my skin. His teeth scraped, eliciting a moan, his lips drew on my skin, suckling hard for a moment, and then I felt a sharp, piercing pain—

A scream ripped the air. Mine? Hers? My eyes slammed open in the darkness, the thread unraveling as I jackknifed upward to sit at the edge of my bed.

What the hell had just happened?

A shadow passed in front of the French doors that led to the balcony outside my bedroom. Had a cloud passed in front of the moon? My French Quarter apartment was three stories up; my fire escape ladder secured.

Invite me in!

Ice-cold terror doused the heat coursing through my body. The words hadn’t been spoken aloud. This time I could be sure neither my ears nor hers had heard them. His voice echoed inside my mind—harsh and angry. The doors were glass and slender slats of wood—if he chose, he could force his way inside.

If not tonight, I’ll be back tomorrow night, and the next…. You will open to me.

I sat stunned, aware of my nudity, aware of the sensual snare he’d laid on her bed…for me. But wasn’t this what I’d secretly hoped for? A chance to experience his brand of dangerous passion for myself?

After all, I’d filtered my neighbor’s activities over the months, allowing in just what I needed to fill my muse. Only with this man had I been tempted to linger and fill my well with my own lust.

He waited, as though sensing my internal battle. And what had he done? At the last moment when I’d felt him pierce her skin, I’d also felt the bloom of an orgasm, so intense it had frightened me more than the thought he might have somehow wounded her.

I reached for my thin silky robe and shrugged my arms inside, cinched the belt around my waist, and approached the doors. My stomach clenched, my body trembled—I was afraid, but also filled with a sense that this was inevitable.

As I stepped closer, I straightened my shoulders—I wasn’t exactly without weapons of my own. The closer to the doors I drew, the more I gave myself over to the remnants of the simmering sensuality he’d fed me. My hips loosened and swayed, my breasts tightened, my thighs slid together and apart, building a frictional heat only one thing could assuage.

His shadow loomed, tall with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. I already knew how soft the skin was that stretched over his lean, muscled frame.

Closing my eyes for a brief moment, I turned the lock and opened the doors.

His hot, surly gaze swept over me, then locked with mine. “May I come in?” he whispered roughly.

He’d gotten me to comply with his demand, and yet he hesitated—he needed my permission to enter my room.

A soft rain fell, dampening his dark shirt and misting my face and the vee of skin exposed above the neckline of my robe.

I canted my head and stared at the hard edges of his face—the sharp, high cheekbones and square, stubbled jaw. His brows were furrowed, drawn in a fearsome frown as dark as the midnight hair brushing the shoulders of his cotton shirt.

Empowered by his need for me to obey, I was oddly unafraid. Staying just inside the door frame, I leaned against the edge of the door, pretending a nonchalance I was far from feeling.

“How did you get here? Fly?” I asked, turning my gaze to the five-foot span between her balcony and mine.

The corners of his lips curved upward, slight and mocking.

A frisson of alarm made me shiver. Had he? I was something other—was he as well?

“Stop thinking,” he murmured, his hands reaching up to grip the top of the door frame. “You brought me here.”

I lifted my chin. I realized that was a mistake when his gaze dropped to my lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

As the moments stretched, my mouth grew dry, my nipples pebbled against the thin fabric sticking to my skin.

“You were with us,” he said softly. “Both times. You’re the only reason I returned.”

I didn’t pretend not to understand. “Are you angry because I peeked?”

“No…intrigued.” He leaned back his head and drew a deep breath, which lifted his well-defined chest.

I’d felt the weight of all that masculine mass crushing my breasts. I licked my lips and imagined how much more powerful the sensations would be without the filter of another’s body between us.

His lips twisted. “Are we going to do it out here?”

I cleared my throat. “Do what?” I asked after I’d pried my tongue loose from the roof of my dry mouth.

One dark, elegant eyebrow rose. His gaze kept its steady glare.

I straightened from the door. “Are you punishing me for intruding?”

“That’s an odd way to describe the kind of pleasure I bring. Perhaps you only get off sucking someone else’s pleasure.”

Christ! He knew what I was. “Better that than taking their blood.”

“We all do what we must to survive.” His expression grew impossibly darker. “Invite me in.”

My heart pounded harder, faster. Oh, he frightened me all right—but I was more frightened of myself. I’d learned to harness my curse, use it, control it. I lived a solitary life for a reason.

Maybe this was recompense for stubbornly distancing myself from others, letting in only what I needed, when I needed it—on my own terms.

I took a deep breath and stepped back.“Come in,” I whispered.

To give him credit, he didn’t immediately pounce. He let go of the door frame, shot me another all-encompassing glance and stepped past me, into my bedroom.

Once inside, he seemed to grow larger, darker. His movements, at once fluid and purposeful, drew my attention and robbed me of breath. Soon, I’d know his touch, his kisses, firsthand.

I moved to close the doors, but he glanced back and shook his head. “Let the storm inside.”

I already had. His eyes, so dark and fathomless, pulled me deeper into the room. “Stop it!” I said. “No tricks. You’re here—you have what you want.”

A harsh, rasping laugh lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. Then before I could make up my mind whether to step closer or flee, he moved—so quickly his movements were a blur. His hands slid around my waist and he lifted me off my feet, stepping forward until the wall behind me halted his progress.

He held me up, my body inches from his, but close enough to feel the heat of his skin and his sweet breath as it washed over my face. “Decide now, succubus. Will you feed me?”

“You have the advantage. Why even ask?”

“Because I’m going to ravage you, and I want you ready—committed. I want everything you’ve taken.”

Not just my blood? Would he take my strength as well? I trembled and leaned back against the wall, watching his mouth as it tightened.

I licked my lips, considering. I’d never shared the power of the passions I drew from others. I’d kept them, using them to fuel the stories I wove. What would it be like to release them, share them with another?

I closed my eyes for a moment. In all the months I’d lived here, no man had ever stepped inside this room. Except for a delivery boy every now and then, no one had even seen the inside of my apartment.

Yet here I was, trapped against a wall with a man towering over me, demanding I submit to his lust.

Damn, was there even a choice? I’d been lonely and alone for so long.

I made my decision, then lifted my hands to slide them over the damp cotton covering his hard chest. “So, you intend to ravage me?” I quipped softly.

Grim satisfaction filled his stark features. His chest rose beneath my palms. His heartbeat, just beneath my fingers, hammered against his chest. “Take off your robe.” But he didn’t move away, just let go of my waist while he waited for me to obey, challenging me to complain with his watchful gaze.

I scowled and wriggled, sandwiched between the wall of his chest and the plaster behind me, until the robe slipped to the floor. Already, my nipples were erect, chafed into arousal by the movements that brought my breasts into contact with the fabric of his shirt. “I better not be the only one naked here.”

A grin curved his lips. His hands slid between us, the backs rubbing my breasts and belly as he unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it. Then he toed off his boots, one a time, while at the same time sliding down the zipper of his black pants, slowly, letting me feel the heat of his hands and belly, then the weight of his thick cock when it sprang free.

My breaths grew ragged. Cream seeped between my legs to dampen my labia and inner thighs.

His nostrils flared, no doubt picking up the proof of my arousal. When he’d managed to push down his pants and kick them to the side, we stood for a moment, skin to skin, savoring the freedom and the anticipation.

Again, I smoothed my palms upward, following the curves of his muscled arms up to his shoulders, and then I thrust my hands into his hair, combing it with my fingers as I waited for him to move.

He let me wait a long, excruciating minute while our deep breaths rasped our chest together and apart. My knees began to shake, my belly quivered, and finally, he lifted me again, higher against the wall.

His mouth opened on the blushing skin of my chest, pressing wet kisses on the upper swell of my breasts, gliding his tongue between them, then suckling the full curve beneath.

My legs moved restlessly, until I wrapped them around his upper abdomen and squeezed. My pussy opened, sliding along his hot skin and I rolled my hips, letting him know he could hurry it up a bit and I’d have no complaints.

However, he seemed content to tease me, drawing out the pleasurable sensation of his mouth gobbling up my breasts.

“My nipples,” I pleaded between clenched teeth. “Suck them! Please.”

He nuzzled them with his nose, licked his way around one dimpled areola without ever touching the tip, and then glided across to torture the other breast in a similar fashion.

I gripped his shoulders hard. “If I’d known you were so damn slow to take a hint, I’d have drawn you a map.”

Laughter gusted against my breast, and at last, he latched his lips around one spiked tip and drew hard.

My toes curled, my hips tilted toward him, my whole body tightening as he suckled. It was almost enough. It was almost heaven.

I thrashed my head back and forth on the wall behind me before finally blurting out, “Please, enough! I need you inside me.”

His teeth clamped down, nipping me gently. “When I say.” But he let me slide down his body until I felt his cock nudge at my center.

My breath hitched when the blunt, velvet tip pushed against me. His size didn’t surprise me. He’d stretched the inner walls of a woman who dated linebackers. But my body wasn’t prepared for his girth. Hot, exquisite pressure built as he pushed. I bit my lip and begged him with my gaze to help me take him.

His eyes held mine as he slipped a hand between us and thrust his fingers through my soft curls. He parted my lust-slick folds, guided his dick into me, slowly, letting me swallow him an inch at a time, until we were both breathless and sweating.

I’m sure he was surprised by how tight I was, given what I was. He’d wanted to thrust inside, wanted to ream me with that thick cock, but he clamped his jaws tight and groaned, tunneling only so deep before withdrawing, and coming back for more.

I couldn’t help the shaking that trembled along my limbs and jerked my belly against his. No more than I could help the reflexive pulsing radiating along my channel.

When his first inches grazed my inner walls, he started the slow, rhythmic push and pull, my liquid heat drenching him and easing his way. He stroked into me, sliding my body up and down the wall, an unhurried, crawling wave of motion that calmed the quivering inside me.

As I followed his powerful thrusts, friction built between his cock and my vagina in a slow-burning fire. I clenched my inner muscles around him, riding his thickly veined shaft as it moved in and out.

The ridge of his plump crown abraded the sweet spot deep inside me, the one so few men ever found, and I arched my back, surrendering to the coiling heat licking at my core. At that point, I felt a leaching away of the barrier between his mind and mine, as the passions I’d stolen began to swirl inside me and spill over to douse him in glorious heat.

A low, feral growl erupted from him and he ground inside me, deeper this time, his jaws flexing as his hips strained.

I knew there was more, knew he held back. I wondered at the strength of will he possessed to resist the crashing waves of sensuality that battered us both.

In that instant, I lost all my fear of him as a man and a vampire. He could have ravaged me and made me love it anyway, but he’d taken me slowly, with care and precision, careful not to harm or frighten me.

“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I can take all you want to give.”

“Be quiet,” he ground out. “You’re so damn tight. I’m going crazy here.”

“Then fuck me,” I whispered in his ear. “I’m ready.” God, I’m ready. I bit his earlobe. I squeezed hard around him as he stroked inside, released to let him withdraw, then squeezed as he rammed himself inside again. The friction was divine.

Impossibly, his cock expanded, grew longer, blunter.

“You’re playing with fire,” he said, ramming deeper this time.

I sucked in a jagged breath and smoothed my sweaty cheek against his shoulder. “Do me. Do me like you’ve never done a woman before. Give me everything.”

His lips stretched in a slow, wicked smile. “Think you’ve seen everything?”

“I’m allowing you to fuck me against a wall, aren’t I?”

“Such a baby. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Suddenly, we slid up the wall together. Alarmed, I wrapped my arms around him and gasped as his soft, wicked laughter sifted through my hair.

“Brace yourself against the wall.”

I unwound my legs from his waist and let them drop. They dangled in the air. The only thing holding me up was the strength of his cock buried halfway inside me and his hard chest pressed against my breasts.

He grabbed my hands and slid my palms down and outward along the wall. I felt anchored somehow and lifted my knees to press my feet flat against the cool plaster. It was better, but I knew if he pulled away, I’d go crashing to the floor. “Nice trick,” I said breathlessly.

“I’m only getting started.” He kissed me, rubbing my lips hard, tangling his tongue with mine as he started to fuck in and out of me again, stroking deeper, until at last, the base of his cock was grinding into my clit.

I forgot I was suspended in the air, forgot I was at a vampire’s mercy. Nothing had ever felt as decadent and delicious as the thickness gliding in and out of me, tugging at my tender, heated tissues, glistening with the liquid spilling from my body as he rolled his hips, grinding deeper, spearing my womb.

Heat coiled tighter in my core as he stroked and circled. The muscles of his back and shoulders bunched beneath my hands. Sweat slicked his skin and mine everywhere we touched. He widened his knees, nudging mine even farther apart, then gathered his body and plunged inside over and over, the thrusts deepening, sharpening.

I came apart, unraveling in a sinuous, writhing dance, driving my hips against his. I lacked rhythm, lacked any finesse, trying to fill the desperate need to stay in that moment, hold onto the explosion of color and emotions that rocked me as his wild thrusts grew brutal.

He rolled us over and over, his arms encircling me to prevent me from hurting myself. My back to the wall, now his, every roll allowing his cock to slide and circle and press at a different angle each time. Flashes of the pale gray bed below and the curtains billowing inward on a breeze, interspersed with the dark shadowy ceiling. Only when he came to a halt did my orgasm finally wane, allowing me to catch my breath.

I gasped.

I was looking over his shoulder at my bed—ten feet below us.

I drew back my head and smacked it against the ceiling. “Ouch!”

His chest heaved against mine, his gaze spearing me as harshly as his cock had moments ago.

I wet my parched lips with the tip of my tongue, trying to gather my scattered wits after my trip to the moon. “That…was—” I stopped and caught my breath “—different.”

“You need to expand your vocabulary. Learn some more descriptive adjectives.”

I raised an eyebrow, trying to mimic his sardonic look. “Need a little praise, do you?”

He snorted. “No, I don’t need any praise. I know it was good. I’m swimming in your pleasure.”

I wrinkled my nose. “That was kinda crude.” I wriggled against him. “You’re getting a little heavy.”

A mocking eyebrow rose. “Actually, love, you’re on top.”

“You know this doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“I’m dead. The laws of physics don’t necessarily apply here.”

I boldly placed my hand between his legs. “Not all of you. Why didn’t you come?”

“Are you complaining?”

“No, I’m just surprised,” I answered, but there was that insecure part of me that wondered whether I hadn’t been able to satisfy him. “I mean, you’re carrying on a conversation. In my experience, men are decidedly nonverbal when they’re aroused.”

“Your vast experience?”

I blushed. He knew better. “Well, not so vast, I guess, unless you count…”

“Vicarious pleasures?”

“That’s a nice way of putting it. Still, you didn’t come. After being with her, and then me, I just thought…” His slow smile made me feel stupid, which angered me. I jutted out my chin. “Why didn’t you take a bite of me? I was there for you, opening to you, ready.”

“I’m not done yet. That was just to get you to relax a bit.”

“I’m pinned to my ceiling. How am I supposed to relax?” However, I was strangely content.

“Sorry, are you uncomfortable?” He carefully pulled out of me, and we fell in a heap to the mattress below, bouncing once before settling.

I leaned up on my elbows and pushed back the hair falling in my face. “Not nice,” I said, as I crawled off his body.

“I never claimed to be nice.” His hand clamped on my thigh. “And I’m not through.”

His words stopped me. As much as the arm that encircled me and dragged me down on top of him.

His cock gouged my belly as I lay over him.

“Maybe I’m done.”

“Like I said. That first time was for you. To calm you.” He sprawled beneath me, an arm under his head, looking completely at ease, totally in control.

Already, my blood thrummed against my temple, my nipples beaded, my pussy tightened. The way his gaze bored into mine, I knew whatever wicked delights he had in store for me would probably make me cringe in embarrassment. “You know,” I said, deliberately stalling, “I just realized I don’t know your name.”

“Do you know the names of all the people who’ve shared their passion with you?”

“That’s different. They don’t know I’m there. And I don’t do it because I’m some sort of sick voyeur.”

“And I don’t feed my hungers just to get off.”

“Neither do I!”

He lifted a finger to trail along my cheek and down my neck.

I thought I hid the little shiver of delight he elicited with that simple touch, but his mouth curved with male satisfaction. “You’re dying to know what I’m going to do next.”

I opened my mouth to issue a scathing denial, but he pressed his finger against my lips. “Shut up. Roll onto your back.”

I swallowed, hating that he had me aching and ready to do anything he wanted, but I rolled away and lay facing the damn ceiling.

“Some sex is pure magic without any tricks,” he said, coming up on his knees to crawl toward me.

Already my chest rose and fell faster, and the quivering started, something I’d never done with any other man. Not that I was still afraid.

I shook with need.

Moonlight sifted through the curtains, striking the harsh planes of his face, illuminating his body in silver light. The ridges of his muscled chest and abdomen stood in stark relief. The length and thickness of his cock had me sucking in my breath.

His eyes trailed over my body as well, and I wondered if I’d been too lazy lately, too devoted to my writing. Spent too many late nights pounding at a keyboard instead of pounding pavement to keep my body tight and strong.

He smoothed a hand over my breasts, pausing to circle one taut nipple, then glided down my belly to trail his fingers through my curls.

One thick digit slid between my folds and I opened my legs, inviting him to play. He feathered the edges of my inner lips before thrusting the finger into my opening.

Instantly, my pussy clamped around him, making a moist sound that drew a slow smile from him.

Then he leaned low over my sex, and I knew what he was about to do would be too much, too intimate, but I couldn’t force a complaint past my lips. Instead, I groaned as his tongue swept out and curled around the thin inner lips, lapping up my cream.

The flavor of me seemed to please him, but I had to know what he really felt about me, had to see myself through him.

I opened my mind, sifting through the threads until I found him.

He turned to nip my inner thigh.“I didn’t give you permission.”

“Please. I’ve never done this before.”

His head lifted and his gaze locked with mine. “You can’t tear away like before, if something frightens you.”

“I promise.”

“I’ll want you to feel everything I feel.”

I nodded and lay back, closing my eyes. Then I was there, with him, bending over my pussy, inhaling my fragrance, tasting the juices that slid along his tongue. I felt the tightening of his balls as his arousal spiked higher, the urgency building in his belly. How did he resist climbing over me and thrusting toward my core?

And then I couldn’t think, could only follow and feel. His fingers toyed with me, two thrusting in my channel, another sliding over my hooded clit.

I gasped; my hips rolled. I opened my thighs wider and groaned when his stubbled cheek caressed my inner thigh, plunging downward to rub against the moisture coating my sex.

When he thrust another finger inside, I felt the gush of arousal greeting his entry, felt the silken walls clasp and relax to milk his hand.

He leaned closer still, and his lips closed around my clit to suck it hard into his mouth, while at the same time a thick thumb glided south and circled my anus.

“Christ, no!” I cried out, but I felt his hand shake as his excitement rose along with mine, and I surrendered, understanding he wasn’t in control any longer, wasn’t simply pulling strings or playing some head game with the little succubus.

He wanted me. Wanted this with me. He needed my arousal to spike with his.

When his thumb pressed inside my tight little entrance, I felt his cock jerk at the way I moaned and rolled my hips. I was out of control, beyond shame, heading straight to the precipice whether he was with me or not.

When he curved all his fingers and drove them inside me, my bottom came off the bed, curving upward, begging him to thrust deep.

With a twist of his hand he was inside me, his knuckles scraping my walls, the ball of his fist crammed so tight and high, I keened, wailing in an agony of need. I was close.

My hands clawed at the bedding, but my vampire wasn’t finished with me yet. His tongue swirled on my hard little clit, then he turned and burrowed his face into my inner thigh just to the side of my outer lips.

I felt a tingling start in his gums, then a slow glide as his incisors lengthened. I knew what he was about to do, but I lay breathless, on the edge of an orgasm I knew would thrust me beyond the strata I traveled in my dreams.

When he bit, I screamed—a strangled, choking sound cut short as soon as I tasted the blood that seeped into his mouth, mixing with my cream to coat his tongue and slide in a sensual stream down his throat.

His voice rumbled around a murmur of pleasure so great he fought the urge to thrust against the bedding and spend himself.

I wasn’t nearly as strong. My body exploded, writhing against his mouth, anchored only by the hand thrust deep inside my body.

As waves of pleasure rushed over him, I understood at last the hunger that drove him. His heart slowed, his body warmed with the infusion of blood. Strength renewed, he disengaged his fangs and laved the tiny wounds he’d made, closing them completely.

When he lifted his head to catch my glance, I opened my arms.

He scooted quickly up my body, his cock sliding home inside my slick, silken walls. I wrapped myself around him, holding him tight against my body, sharing my warmth, my sex, my stolen passions with him.

He thrust three times, and then groaned loudly in my ear. His cum bathed my channel in creamy heat. He continued to rock against me for long moments afterward.

When I could form words again, I asked, “So why were you so angry with me for being there with her?”

“You don’t know?” he murmured against my shoulder. He lifted his head and sighed. “When you were drawing on her lust, you pulled me along with you. I felt everything she did. Heard everything you thought. When I bit her, I was offering you a gift.”

“And I refused your gift. Sorry, I didn’t understand what you wanted from me.”

He cupped my face between his hands. “You do now.” Again, his gaze, so dark and intense, held mine.

I dragged in a shaky breath. He’d touched me, deep inside, where no one ever had. He understood what I was, and wasn’t freaked.

Then again, he was something special, too. “I still don’t know your name.”

One side of his beautiful mouth lifted in a wry grin. “Don’t you know everything that’s important?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m a woman. I want shoe sizes, cell and home phone…”

“Birth date and social security number…”

“Do you have one?”

“Of course. I don’t spend all my time lurking on women’s balconies.”

“Darn.”

His thumb slid across my lower lip. “Want me to lurk on yours?”

I licked the pad of his thumb and wrinkled my nose. “You have an open invitation.”

His nostrils flared and his cock twitched where it lay tucked between my legs. Soon, he’d know everything there was to know about loving a succubus.

Maybe this was the start of something. Had I found a friend? Someone to share my isolation?

I sighed, content for now to share my bed, my blood, my passion with him. But just maybe, I’d found a love of my own.

Soul Strangers

THE WARM WATER OF THE GULF OF MEXICO SWIRLS around her ankles, soothing the weariness from her bones. It had been a long drive down from Corpus Christi to Veracruz. She hadn’t meant to stop here, hadn’t really known where she was going; simply going was the important part.

She had wanted to be alone, and here she is, surrounded by the solitude of a nearly empty beach, populated only by a few strangers. And since they are strangers, they don’t matter, don’t intrude.

She has been entirely alone for three days—on the drive, then wandering this beach, taking short swims, sleeping in her hotel room. The room is really a small cottage on the beach, the sand coming right to her door, where she has to wipe her feet with a towel before going inside. Still, sand is scattered over the worn tile floor, buried deeply in the fibers of the colorful woven rugs.

The place smells of the sea, and a little of mildew and something faintly dark and exotic. She doesn’t mind. She loves the scent, even the undertone of mildew; it reminds her that she’s far from home, from her life. The bed, which is perhaps a bit too soft, cradles her as she sleeps at night and during her frequent daytime naps. She has been sleeping endlessly in her room here on the beach. Still, she’s tired. Her limbs are filled with a languid heaviness she cannot shake. Nothing seems to energize her—not the brilliant Mexican sunsets, nor the endless hours of sleep, not even the power of the ocean.

What is it she needs?

She moves deeper into the blue-and-green water, looking out to sea where the late afternoon sun touches the tips of the waves in glinting bits of silver. The ocean surges, swells, caresses her knees, her hips, like the soft hands of a lover she has never known.

There is movement next to her and she turns to find a man standing nearby, waist-deep in water. All she can see of him is his torso, his head. Sunlight gleams off his wide, tanned shoulders, one of which is covered by an intricate tattoo, but she can’t make out the design. She can see the shadowed planes of a finely muscled back, a narrow waist.

Her body gives a surprising shiver. He turns, almost as though he is aware of her looking at him, and smiles brilliantly.

She smiles back and suddenly he is moving toward her. She can see now he has a striking face, one of those faces that is beautiful and masculine at the same time. His features are a bit irregular but his jaw is strong, his mouth lush and sensual. His eyes are the color of the earth, that same deep brown she finds when digging in her small garden at home. But she doesn’t want to think of home now. No, all she wants is to be here, watching this man.

His body is all hard-packed muscle and he moves with grace through the weight of the water. He pauses several feet away. But he is still close enough that she can make out the smooth texture of his skin. Her eyes are brought back to his tattoo, which she can now see is a tiger drawn against a background of tsunami waves in classic Japanese style. She finds herself wanting to touch it.

Water seems elemental to the moment. Except that he is all earth, this man. This stranger. And when he speaks, his voice is a deep rumble that is very much of the earth.

“You’re new here.”

It is a statement, yet she feels the urge to answer. He’s American and it seems the hospitable thing to do.

“I came the day before yesterday.”

He simply nods, moves in closer. She cannot take her eyes off him. When she does glance up, his gaze is focused on her face. The sun is glaring but she can see his eyes, dark and earthy, and they make her tremble inside.

Why does she feel as though he can see right through her?

She is suddenly very much aware of the water rushing like silk between her thighs as the waves surge, then retreat. The bare skin exposed by her turquoise bikini, the same shade as the ocean out beyond the waves, makes her feel naked beneath the stranger’s gaze.

She watches him. He licks his lips. She wants to kiss him so much her own mouth waters. He takes another step closer, until he is standing so near she swears she can smell the salt on his skin.

She doesn’t dare move, to break the spell of this moment. They are doing nothing more than watching one another. She doesn’t want to have to speak. Her whole body feels raw with yearning. She just wants to touch his skin; she doesn’t want to think about why.

A wave rolls in, splashing against the small of her back. With his elemental gaze still locked on hers, she can imagine it is his hand that caresses the tender flesh there. And again, she feels as though he can see right into her, as though he knows who she is deep inside.

“Swim with me,” he says.

They splash out into the waves, and he dives through them, coming up dripping, like some fantastical merman. But he is some fantasy creature. Her mind is making up stories about him already—erotic stories, sensual daydreams. His hands all over her naked skin, on her breasts, between her thighs. His mouth on hers, moving over her flesh…

She dips below the water to cool off. When she surfaces, smoothing her long brown hair from her face, he is right there. He puts a hand on her arm, just a small feathering of fingers she can barely feel, yet it goes through her like an electric shock. Her nipples come up hard beneath the wet fabric of her bikini. Her sex goes warm. She wants him to touch her again.

She moves closer, letting the waves bring her right up against him. His body is every bit as hard and strong as it looks. And his solid erection presses into the soft flesh of her belly.

In her mind is one word: Yes.

His hand grasps her shoulder, slides down her arm, and the next wave crushes them together, her breasts pressing against his hard chest. She looks up, sees his mouth, wants to kiss him still. And as though reading her mind, he lowers his head and his mouth comes down on hers.

His lips are lovely, soft, salty with the ocean. When he parts her lips and slides his tongue inside, she melts all over. Her sex grows molten with need, and she kisses him back, hungry for whatever he offers. He fills her mouth; his tongue is hot, wet. She needs more.

Pulling away, she presses her lips to his neck, slides her tongue down his throat and hears a small moan from him. Her body pulses in response. Moving her mouth, she licks the tattooed skin of his shoulder, swirls her tongue over the design there. Salt—the salt of sweat and of the sea. And something else, something almost sweet, vanilla-like, beneath the salt. Something which is simply a part of him. His hands go into her hair, his fingers curling, but he lets her move freely.

She pulls back to see the landscape of his body, the angles and curves of him. Reaching out to touch him, she finds his nipples hard beneath her fingers. She wants to pull them, one at a time, into her mouth, and she does, while the strength of the ocean moves them around.

His hands slide down her sides and slip beneath her bathing suit top. Finding her nipples with his fingertips, he caresses, pulls, teases, until her sex is throbbing with heat. She moves back to his mouth, licks his lower lip, takes it into her mouth, sucks on it. He pinches her nipples, hard, and she breathes out,“Touch me.”

His arm comes around her waist, pulling her into his body. His hand snakes down between them, beneath the water, pushes aside the edge of her bikini bottom. And delves inside, finding her swollen folds. She can hardly stand it, his touch, the warm rush of the water, the heady scent of him in her nostrils. He moves his fingertips over her clitoris, which is hard and alive and needy. He begins to rub.

She is aching, nearly hurting. Reaching beneath the water, she pulls his engorged cock from his trunks and is thrilled with the size and the weight of it. And even more with the feel of the heavy steel ring embedded just below the head. Immediately fascinated, she runs her fingertips over the cool metal, playing with the ring, tugging on it a little.

She strokes him in cadence with his hand between her thighs. He is guiding her legs with his free hand now, wrapping them around his waist, so that he is holding her, weightless, in the water.

Sensation builds. Blood pounds through her veins, her pulse beating into his mouth where it is sucking on the flesh of her throat. Her sex beats in time, a low, thrumming rhythm, matched by his pulsing cock in her hand. She loves the way he fills her palm, that she can barely wrap her fingers around him. But she doesn’t want him inside her yet. She wants them to come into each other’s hands first.

When he pushes a thumb inside her she almost loses it. She grasps his cock tighter, strokes harder, hangs on until she hears him moan again, feels his body tensing all over. She moves her hips into his hand, trembles as he presses onto her clit, taking her up and over the edge. Pressure is building inside her, like a vessel filled to overflowing. He moves his hand faster. Pleasure swims through her veins, through her head, overtaking her. And as her orgasm washes over her, she pumps his cock, feeling the hot rush as he comes into her palm. She shakes with the force of it, thrusts her hips, presses harder into his fingers. And he doesn’t stop, stays with her, while her sex clenches, while pleasure arcs through her sex, through her body.

Her hand is sticky with his come, but soon the cleansing ocean water washes it away, leaving her feeling a little sad. She clings to him, her sex still pulsing and warm, her breath a ragged panting in her own ears.

And all around them, the ocean moves to its own eternal rhythm.

With his fingers, he wipes her wet hair from her face. Such a tender move from a stranger, but with his softening cock still in her hand, he is hardly a stranger, is he?

They stay together in the water, letting the ocean rock them, her head against his chest, until the sky begins to streak with pink and amber. Neither seems to want to let go, to end the experience.

Finally he asks her, “Are you tired?”

“No, not tired at all.” And for the first time in days, she realizes this is true. She feels the energy in her body like a banked fire he has sparked to life.

He is quiet a moment, then he whispers, so softly she can barely hear him above the pounding of the surf, the call of ocean birds, “Take me to your room.”

She looks up at him, nods her head. Slowly, she unwraps her body from his, uncoiling like a long strand of seaweed, the tension gone from her body. She feels a sense of release. And yet, a new and exquisite tension is building simply from the soft tone of his voice in her ear. At the implication of what might lie ahead tonight.

He takes her hand and follows her out of the sea. On the beach, she grabs her towel from the sand, her straw hat, the book she brought along to read, but which she wasn’t able to concentrate on.

Together they move across the sand. At the door to her room she turns to look at him. His skin is beaded with water, the tips of his short, light brown hair still dripping. She offers her towel to him. He takes it, but rather than drying himself he smoothes the towel over her skin: her shoulders, down her arms, across her stomach. When he kneels to dry her calves, moving up her thighs, her sex gives a hard squeeze.

Yes…

In a moment he is on his feet again, roughly rubbing himself dry. He lifts his chin, motioning for her to open the door. She pauses, and he smiles at her.

His smile is brilliant, radiant. As beautiful as the rest of him.

She turns the knob, opens the door and they slip inside. She drops her hat and her book on a small painted table. He moves past her, looks around, then drapes the damp towel over the back of a chair. She shivers a little in the cooler air of the cottage, watching him move, the sleek motion of hard-packed muscle.

She takes a step toward him.

“Wait,” he tells her. “I want to look at you. To watch you for a moment.”

She stops, waits. He runs a hand down his stomach, over that narrow trail of dark hair leading from his navel and into the band of his black and red trunks. Yes, she wants to see him as well, wants to see his naked flesh, his pierced cock. Her nipples are going hard once more, the lips of her sex filling, swelling.

When he presses a hand to the front of his trunks, she can clearly see the outline of his hardening cock beneath the wet fabric.

Oh, yes…

And then he slips his trunks off and stands before her, naked. His body is a marvel, all hard muscle and smooth, tanned skin. His cock is so beautiful, her hands ache to touch it. Her sex aches with the need to feel him inside of her. And the wicked metal ring glinting in the dying sun coming through the shuttered windows.

Her throat goes dry. Her sex goes wet. She squeezes her thighs together.

“Your turn,” he says.

With his dark eyes on her, she brings her hands up to cup her breasts through her bathing suit top; she cannot wait for his touch. Her nipples are so hard they hurt. His eyes are riveted to her hands moving over her breasts, and she moves the triangles of blue fabric aside, squeezes her nipples, tugs on them, pleasure burrowing deep into her system. Everything is amplified by his brown eyes on her, by the lust clear on his face.

He moans softly. Whispers, “Beautiful.”

It has been a long time since she’s felt beautiful. But now, with him, she does. And it is a sort of relief she can’t explain, even to herself, whispering beneath the desire.

But she doesn’t need to think now. She only needs to feel.

Pulling her bikini top off, she keeps her gaze on him. His mouth has gone soft, his eyes glittering. And he is stroking his cock, his fingers moving lightly over that rigid flesh.

She has never seen anything hotter in her life.

She slides her bikini bottoms over her hips, steps out of them, takes one step closer to him. He moves toward her, stops a foot or two away.

“Touch yourself for me,” he demands.

She smiles, feathers her fingers over her nipples once more before moving lower, brushing her mound. When she slips two fingers over her cleft she is soaking wet, slippery, like the sea. She can still hear it, smell that tang of salt in the air. And it is all a part of the moment—the sea moving and surging, the scent in the air. It is the power of the ocean and he is the earth, and between them is fire, building, burning.

“Put your fingers inside yourself,” he tells her, and she does it, spreading her thighs a little and dipping into that wet, waiting hole.

Pleasure moves through her, at her own touch, at his dark gaze on her. At the way he takes a gasping breath and clamps his fingers over his beautiful cock.

He reaches out and takes her hand from between her thighs, raises it. His lips open and he takes her fingers into his mouth, the damp heat enveloping her.

This must be what his cock feels like, sliding into a woman. Sliding into her.

Her sex clenches.

“I need to feel you,” she tells him. “I need your hands on me. Your mouth. Your cock.”

“Yes,” he says, his voice low, full of smoke and need.

Her hand still in his, he leads her to the bed. The sheets are mussed from her nap earlier in the day, the pillows dented. He lays her down on her back and kneels over her. She shivers, waiting.

Lowering his head, he kisses her, lightly, and she can taste her own juices on his lips. Then he is moving lower, his mouth all over her skin, sucking one rigid nipple into his mouth.

“Ah!”

She can hardly believe how close she is to coming already. Her hands go into his damp, thick hair, holding him close to her breast. He is sucking so hard it hurts. But it feels too good for her to care.

Yes, suck harder….

Pleasure, warm and sweet, washes over her body, a trail of heat from her breasts to her sex. Her clit is throbbing.

“Touch me,” she says demandingly.

He moves lower and spreads her thighs wide with his hands. And then his mouth is on her, his wet, clever tongue sliding over her pussy lips, pushing inside. And she is squirming, panting. Pleasure is driving into her body, making her shudder. And when he pulls her clit into his mouth and sucks, she comes, bursting, her hips lifting up off the bed.

“Ah, yes, fuck me!”

His fingers drive into her, and pleasure coils anew in her belly, tight and hot, then crashes over her like a pummeling wave. And she shatters, coming and coming, her hips bucking into his mouth, his hand.

She is still shivering when he raises his head. He is smiling. He lifts her and moves her up on the bed, then asks her, “Condoms?”

She nods her head, but it is a moment before she can speak. “In the small silver case, next to my suitcase.”

She watches as he leans over next to the bed where her open luggage sits on the floor, clothes spilling out onto the tiles. He finds the silver cosmetics case, unzips it, and after a moment of digging, pulls out the folded strand of foil packets left over from the last trip she’d taken with her ex before…

She isn’t going to think of that now.

He is opening a packet with his teeth, and this seems purely sexual to her, animalistic. But perhaps that’s simply because her body is still trembling with the aftershock of orgasm. Or the keen anticipation of knowing his cock will be inside her in only moments.

Yes.

He kneels over her on the bed, but before he can sheath himself she reaches up and takes the silver ring between her fingers, tugs on it.

He groans.

“It’s called a Prince Albert piercing?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never seen one before. Not in person. Did it hurt?”

He laughs. “Yes, it hurt.”

She smiles, doesn’t tell him she likes knowing that for some reason.

“Will it feel different?”

“You’re about to find out.”

He slips the condom onto his cock, and she spreads her thighs for him.

“Yes, that’s it. Wider.” His voice is low, strained.

He is kneeling between her legs, and she loops them over his strong thighs. He slips one hand under her ass and pulls her up, onto his shaft, entering her.

He pauses, the head of his cock inside her, and she swears she can feel the curve of the metal ring, a lovely added texture. Her sex is pulsing with pleasure, her whole body is pulsing; a steady beat of lust centered at that point where the thick metal ring, the head of his cock, pierces her body.

She shifts, trying to take him deeper. His hand comes to her cheek, caresses her jaw, then he is holding her face a little too roughly. And he slams into her, one deep, hurting thrust.

“Oh!”

She goes loose all over, her body turning to pure liquid fire. Pleasure, pain, it’s all the same as he pulls back, rams into her again. Then he is fucking her, his cock sliding in and out, hard and hurting and so damn good she is ready to come again in moments.

The first wave makes the walls of her sex clench around his swollen cock.

“So fucking tight,” he murmurs.

And then he is driving harder into her, and she is coming apart, her climax pounding into her, overwhelming her. She is lost, drowning in pleasure, shaking with the force of it.

And he is still fucking her, fucking her, driving her orgasm on. Moments later he tenses, shivers, cries out as he comes, one hand gripping her ass, his nails biting deep. The other hand still holds her face, so that she is forced to look at him. And she loves the way he just comes apart, his mouth so full and soft as he groans, his eyes closed, his head falling back.

And still his hips are moving, his cock still hard somehow. And she is coming again, her body tensing, clenching. He senses what is happening, reaches down and takes her clit between his fingers, pinching, tugging. Pleasure, intense, freeing, surges through her, driving deep. And she is left panting and weak. And as sated as she has ever been in her life.

He pulls out of her and she expects him to move away. But after tugging the condom off, he rolls onto his side, pulling her close. Her head against his chest, she can hear his heart hammering beneath her ear. His body is warm. He smells more like the ocean than ever.

They sleep. When she wakes it is fully dark. She has no idea what time it is. It doesn’t matter.

She slips from the bed and brings a bottle of wine—a fruity red from Chile—back to the bed, along with a plate of fruit and some pastries she bought that morning from a vendor on the beach.

Moonlight washes through the half-open shutters, blue and silver in the dark room. And she can see that he is awake, watching her.

“Hey,” he says, his voice rough with sleep.

“Hey.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“No. Stay here with me. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.” He sits up in the bed, takes the wine from her, uncorks it and drinks from the bottle before passing it back to her.

She has set the plate on the bed, and he takes the knife she laid on the edge of the plate and peels an apple, then cuts it into pieces and offers her one. She bites into the apple, the cool sweetness filling her mouth. She follows it with a long sip of the wine. Everything seems utterly sensual to her: the fruit, the wine, the scent of sex in the air, the heat of his body next to hers. And outside the windows, the pulsing beat of the ocean crashing on the shore.

They sit on the bed and feed each other, pulling the pastry apart with their fingers. It’s sweet with honey. They wash it down with the wine. And when they’re both full, he pours a little of the wine on her naked skin, then licks it off until she is wet and aching, begging him to fuck her again.

He turns her onto her stomach this time, pulls her up onto her knees. She is shivering, as he uses his fingers to part her pussy lips, at the sound of a foil packet tearing.

He enters her with his fingers first, sliding right inside. She surges back onto his hand, pleasure shafting through her in long, rippling waves.

“You’re so wet, so ready.”

“Yes…”

He pulls his fingers from her and in a moment the head of his cock is pushing inside her. He is so big, filling her inch by inch, the ring sliding against her G-spot. His arm wraps around her waist, his other hand going into her hair, grasping tight, pulling her head up. She feels taken over, commanded. And she gives herself over to it, to him, as he begins to fuck her, moving slowly at first, then harder, faster. Pleasure seeps into her system, flooding her belly, her arms, her legs. And her sex is clenching, swollen, ready to explode.

When his hand moves down, massaging her wet cleft, pressing onto her clit, she comes, hard. Waves of pleasure wrack her body, stinging, swift as the ocean current. And she is shaking, nearly sobbing with the power of it.

She is surprised when he pulls out of her, left empty, bereft. But his hand is there, his lovely, soft fingers, pushing into her, pulling out, wiping her juices all over her pussy lips and back, over her anus. He leans in and plants wet kisses down her spine, and she arches her back, loving the sensation. She is hypersensitive all over, her skin, every part of her body, from coming so much, from his touch. He parts his lips, swirls his tongue over her lower back, and at the same time he slips one finger into her anus.

“Shh, relax,” he whispers.

And she does. This is the first time that hole has been breached, but at this moment, it is utterly sensual. With his other hand he teases her clitoris into a hard nub once more. She can hardly believe her body is still able to feel pleasure. But it moves through her in a warm wash of desire, longing.

He presses his finger deeper. “Breathe,” he tells her, his voice quiet, soothing. There is sex in his voice, his own desire held tight.

She does as he asks, breathing in, pulling in that scent of ocean and sex and him. And she is shivering once more. He moves his finger in, slides it out. She has never felt anything quite like it, a sense of fullness, and yet, she wants more.

“Fuck me. Please.”

He plays her anus with his finger for another few moments, making her surge back, taking more of him in.

“Please,” she begs again.

His hand moves away and she feels the head of his cock at that tightest of holes. And she is wet again, trembling with a need that rages through her. He spreads her buttocks, pushes the tip of his cock in. And at the same time, he rubs her clit in small circles with his thumb, pushes a few fingers into her sex. Pleasure, wild and keen, cuts into her like a knife. She cries out. He answers by pushing into her deeper, fingers and cock all at once. Inch by exquisite inch, telling her to breathe, to relax.

But she is already liquid all over. Liquid and wanting everything from him. Anything.

He takes it slow and it seems to go on forever, his cock working its way into her ass, his thumb circling her clit, his fingers dipping inside her.

Just when she is beginning to think he is too tentative with her, he steps up the pace, sliding in and out of her ass, her pussy, filling her, stretching her. Lovely, painful. She is dizzy with sensation, in a state of overload. But all she can do is thrust back against him, pleasure infusing her, emptying her mind. She is nothing more than these sensations, this body being fucked in every possible way. And she is loose and free in a way she has never been before.

This is what she’s needed, what she’s been searching for, she thinks fleetingly, even though she didn’t know it until this moment.

Pleasure builds, deepens, rolls over her body in long waves. Excruciating. Sharper, heavier, until she is completely weighed down by it. She collapses on the bed, but he is still fucking her, relentless, his hand working her mercilessly. She is coming again, shards of pure pleasure stabbing into her. She is sobbing, crying out, shaking so hard her teeth are clattering together. Coming so hard she can’t think of anything at all but the exquisite sensations moving through her body, a body which no longer belongs to her, but to him.

He tenses, growls, pumps into her ass. And it hurts, his pumping cock—and to know that it’s over, this experience.

He lies on top of her. He is shivering as hard as she is. He wipes the tears from her cheek, doesn’t say a word. They lie together for a long time, and at some point, they sleep.

Dawn comes as it always does on the Veracruz beach, with an edge of chill to the otherwise warm and sultry air. But he is warm beside her, the sound of his breath a quiet sigh.

She lies on her back, remembers why she needed to leave Corpus Christi. Remembers her broken heart, which is no longer broken.

Her stranger has healed her, somehow. He is like some magical creature, except that the physical reality of him is all too real—his sleeping form next to her, the lovely ache in her body.

As she watches him, his eyes open. They are that same elemental brown. He is so much of the earth, and of the water. She reaches out, runs her fingertips over the waves tattooed behind the tiger on his shoulder. Yes, he is of the water, too. Their time together is made up of the elements and suddenly she needs to be back in the water with him. She feels desperate, a little sad.

“Come with me,” she whispers.

He nods, sits up, runs a hand over his stubbled jaw. Smiles at her. And she knows everything is all right again.

She takes his hand and leads him, naked, out onto the beach and down to where the surf crashes on the sand. The sun is just coming over the horizon, an arc of fire in the deep, silvery sky.

They move together into the water, and it is soothing, womblike. The waves surge, wash away, caressing her skin, her naked sex. He pulls her deeper, until the water is waist-high. He holds her there, moves his hand between her thighs, pushes his fingers inside her. She spreads for him, reaches down to torment his cock. She runs her fingers over the cool metal of the ring piercing the head of his cock, tugs on it.

He moans, buries his face in her hair, pushes his cock into her hand. And they float in the water as they did that first time. Only yesterday, and yet it seems a million miles away.

He works her with his hand, fingers deep inside her, his thumb pressing on her clitoris. His hips thrust into her fisted hand, her fingers tight around his beautiful cock. They move together, breathe together, long, gasping pants as they build toward climax.

Pleasure, swift and sure, thrums through her body, taking her higher and higher. And the warm ocean all around them, rocks them, the wild scent of it in her nostrils.

As her body begins that first lovely clench, he murmurs, “I’m coming.”

“Yes,” she answers.

And their bodies buck and writhe with desire unleashed, as wild as the sea. His come floods her hand, hot and thick as honey, while she comes apart. Loose and shivering, her climax moves through her like the waves, rolling, thunderous. As powerful as the tides moving on the earth.

She wraps her legs around his waist. He kisses her cheek, her forehead. And they stay there while the sun comes up, burning golden, then pink, then finally a white glow in the deep blue sky. They are quiet as the world around them awakens, the seabirds sweeping in over the waves. All she can hear is the ocean and the sound of his breath in her ear.

He pulls back finally, watches her face quietly for a moment. Then he says, “I’m leaving today, heading down to Cozumel to do some diving.”

“I hear it’s very beautiful there.”

“It is.” He pauses. “Come with me.”

She smiles, shakes her head. “I can’t. I need to go home. Need to get back to…my life. Deal with some things.” She only realizes as she says it that it’s true.

He nods. “Do you even want to know my name?”

“No. I’m sorry but…”

“It’s all right.”

“You’re not angry?”

“What about this time with you is there to be angry about?” He reaches out, runs a finger down her cheek. “You’re like something out of a dream. Maybe it’s meant to be this way. Dream time.”

“Yes.”

That’s it exactly. He understands.

A wave crests, splashes against them. She blinks the water from her eyes, looks up at him. He leans in and licks the salty water from her lower lip, smiling. His eyes have a languid cast to them, but they are still dark, bottomless. And still seem to see right through her, into her soul. She shivers again, but this time it is not physical pleasure but something deeper.

He knows her; she is sure of it. And it is both comforting and terrifying at the same time. It is why they are here together, as though a force that is far beyond them both has determined that this moment should be.

She won’t question it further. Whatever else may happen doesn’t matter. She is satisfied with knowing this much.

Gilt and Midnight

YESTERDAY AND LONG AGO, IN A KINGDOM FAR FROM here but right next door, there lived a handsome young man and his equally beautiful young wife. She had hair the color of sunshine, eyes like a summer sky and skin like rich cream. Her name was Ilina, and the young man loved her more than anything else in the world.

Ilina, for her part, loved her handsome young husband. Pitor was strong, with muscled arms and legs that had no trouble chopping wood or building fences. His hair, the color of the forest’s deepest shadows, hung to his shoulders in ripples like silk, and his eyes shone like the night sky littered with stars.

If Ilina had one small wish, it was that Pitor could be as satisfied with their humble cottage and plot of land as she was, but though her husband worked long and hard, he hated the labor that brought them their food and the roof above their heads. No matter how Ilina tried to soften the small rooms with her handwoven tapestries or delicately embroidered pillows, night after night Pitor looked around their home with dissatisfaction on his face.

“I love you,” she told him. “No matter if we eat on gold and silver or on wooden trenchers, Pitor, I love you.”

But Pitor would not be satisfied, no matter what Ilina did. And each day when he came home from chopping wood in the forest, he grew angrier and more sullen. Nothing Ilina did could move him to smile.

A time of drought and misfortune came upon the land. Pitor had to travel farther and farther into the woods to find trees he could chop for profit, until at last one day he’d traveled so far he couldn’t make it home before dark. Though he ached to return to his beloved Ilina and knew she would worry for his safety, he knew how foolish traveling in the dark would be. He made himself a small camp and prepared to spend the night. He dared not even burn one small portion of the wood he’d gathered, for not only would it be taking food from Ilina’s mouth to use the wood he intended to sell, but the risk of deadly fire in the dry forest was too great. Instead, he pulled his cloak around himself and hunkered down, unable even to sleep lest a beast attack him in the night.

Nevertheless, weariness overtook him, and Pitor’s eyes closed. He dreamed of his love, of her touch and of her kiss, and woke with his cock straining the front of his trousers.

“Ah, sweet,” said a voice from the shadows. “What a prize you hold between your legs. How I long for a man to fill me up with what you’ve got.”

Convinced he was dreaming, Pitor sat up with a shake of his head. Laughter curled like smoke from the darkness. A woman stepped from behind a tree. The sight of her sent fear and desire coursing through him in equal amounts, and Pitor sprang to his feet, his hatchet ready to defend against her.

“You know me?” The woman’s dark hair swirled around her face.

Pitor’s breath heaved. The closer she stepped the more aroused he became, until all he could think of was satisfying the carnal urges flooding him.

The woman was upon him, astride him, before he knew how to object.

“Who are you?” he cried, stricken, for he’d never been unfaithful to his wife before.

“You don’t need to know.”

He turned and was on her before she could escape, the blade of his ax to her throat, but she only laughed. To his shame, his cock twitched and rose at the sound of it. She reached between them to grab and stroke him fully erect.

“You should be better satisfied with what you have, woodsman, else you lose it all. Let me show you what you could have.”

Pitor jerked away from her and lowered the ax.“I love my wife.”

The woman stood, her eyes flashing in a face still covered with shadows. “Come with me and be my love, and we will walk the forest as monarchs.”

He shook his head. “No!”

She tilted her head. “No? Then fuck me once with that sweet prick, and I’ll reward you for your efforts.”

Pitor’s hand trembled. “No reward you could offer me would be enough for me to betray my wife.”

“Not even the life of your child?”

Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”

Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

“Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”

“You can promise me that?”

“That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.

As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”

“Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.

Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”

The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”

Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.

“Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.

She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.

For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.

The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”

“They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.

“Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.

Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.

She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.

“Take them away.”

The midwife, a goodhearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”

She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.

“See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”

Pitor shook his head.“My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”

The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.

“I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”

So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.

The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.

The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”

The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”

So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.

The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.

By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.

Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.

“She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”

“Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”

For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.

“They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”

“That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”

The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.

And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.

Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.

Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering, better than sitting in front of the blazing fireplace wrapped in a goose-down cloak. Only the year before she had longed for these long nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.

She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?

Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.

“You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.”

When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.

“Father—” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.

“I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”

The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.

“Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”

The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”

The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”

“Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”

The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”

The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.

“You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”

“That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”

The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.

“Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”

With that, the dark fairy was gone.

The nobleman reached out his hand to Mira, who didn’t take it. Nor did she reach for her mother, who wept with fists pressed to her mouth. Mira looked around the room, at the men and women gathered there, and something swelled inside her that she’d never felt before.

Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.

Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.

Desire.

It began at once.

Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.

Neither of them could stop it.

Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.

Clearly, this would not do.

Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting out his money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.

Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.

And then…nothing.

Frustrated, she stroked harder, pulling on her nipples. Heat rushed through her veins and she sank to the rush-matted floor of the chamber. She pumped her hips upward against her now-grasping touch, and still the sense of something building inside her grew and grew without cease. Without release.

She could not eat, nor sleep, for the fire consuming her took up so much of her attention. Yet instead of turning her ill, this fever only made her all the more beautiful. She saw it in her looking glass. Her hair was like shining silk. Her eyes, each as lovely as a jewel. Her mouth, ripe and plump and ready for kissing.

In the past her father had hoarded his gold, but now he received an uncommon summons from the king to pay some taxes to which he’d never before been held. He wept as the messenger carried away bag after bag of clinking coins. Her mother sought the solace of the wine barrel. This was but one day after the dark fairy’s curse, and Mira knew she had to find her completion soon or everything she’d known her entire life would be lost.

She made it known that she was now entertaining suitors, and as bad news travels fast, so did this. On the fifth day after the fairy’s curse, men had begun lining up outside the gate. Most of them, she assumed, had come for a chance to wet their pricks inside her, though a few of the more intelligent would have known that the man who managed to satisfy her would gain more than a willing cunny in which to spill his seed, but a vast portion of her father’s rapidly diminishing fortune, as well.

Mira cared little for her father’s fortune. She cared more for his happiness, and her mother’s, for though they had not bred or borne her, she loved them as dearly as if they had. Truth be told, she loved the line of men waiting to fuck her, too, for the fairy had been right about desire being a gift.

And still, no matter how many men entered Mira’s bedchamber and touched her, no matter how many urged her body to writhe and squirm beneath talented tongues and fingers and cocks, not one of them left her with anything other than emptiness when he’d gone.

By the tenth day after the fairy’s decree, the line had dwindled as fast as her father’s fortune. The men who now waited at the gate were those a little needier, a little less affluent. Men to whom a pretty wife who’d lain with a hundred men and a bit of a fortune were better than a farm-roughened wife and no fortune at all. Mira took them as she’d done the ones in fine leather and velvet, and like their richer predecessors, none left her complete. One by one, the men left her chamber, grumbling that there could be no man who would finish her.

“Daughter, don’t kill yourself to find the one,” Mira’s mother urged, voice slurred, dress askew. “A fortune can be rewon.”

“Tell that to my father,” Mira said from her place in front of the mirror, where she searched her mismatched eyes for any sign of something different. Something new. “He’s the one killing himself, sitting in the counting room enumerating his coins and gnashing his teeth at each one he must relinquish.”

She turned to her mother. “Both of you believe you can do nothing to change the dark fairy’s curse, but I know I can.”

Again, she looked at her face. She’d become a woman, with a woman’s secret smile. She touched her bare breasts, the tight pink nipples. The floss between her thighs. The box that would bring her pleasure if only she could find the right key to unlock it.

“And I want to,” she said.

Winter eased into spring with little fanfare. Mira’s parents had done little to fight the fairy’s curse. It pained her to see her beloved mother and father give themselves so quickly to despair, and she was determined not to let them wither away. The line of men waiting to sample her beauty had dwindled to nothing, no more than one or two a sevenday.

Until one day, as Mira sat in the warming garden where the flowers had just begun to show their heads, two men arrived. One as fair as sunshine, the other dark as shadows. They reached the gate at the same time, one from each direction. From her seat on the stone bench, Mira could see them both, but at first neither looked at her.

“Gerard,” said the dark-haired man.

“Alain,” greeted the fair-haired man.

Mira got to her feet. Both had put their hands to their belts, one to pull a dagger and the other a short sword. Neither moved after that, each watching the other, until the dark-haired man gave a slight nod and stepped aside just enough to let the one called Gerard pass. Both of them came through the gate, and both stopped when they saw her.

“Madame,” said Gerard with a half bow. “We seek the lady Mira.”

“Many have sought her,” Mira said. “What makes the two of you any different than the hundreds of others?”

Alain stood an inch or so shorter than Gerard but still towered tall over Mira. He held out his hand for hers, and she took it at once. “I’ve heard she’s been gifted by the dark fairy.”

“Everyone knows that.” Mira tugged away her hand, still tingling from his touch.

“Ah,” said Alain with a half bow nearly identical to the one Gerard had already bestowed. “But not everyone else has received the same gift.”

Mira looked at them, from one to the other. “And you have?”

“Lady,” answered Gerard. “We both have.”

Most of the other men had arrived intent on seducing her at once. Some had been kind, a few considerate, but none of them had wasted their time with conversation. Alain and Gerard, however, followed Mira into the large dining hall where they set about laying a fire in the long-neglected hearth.

“Wine, lady?” Gerard’s question seemed more command than request, and Mira found herself scurrying to the sideboard in search of a bottle.

Alain watched her, his gaze like sapphires. “Where are your servants, lady?”

“Gone,” Mira said as she poured three glasses of almost sour wine. “My father can’t afford to pay them any longer, and they fear the dark fairy’s taint. My good mother has taken to her bed. And my father has gone mad.”

She expected the blunt statement to take the men aback, but neither looked surprised. She offered glasses, one to Alain and one to Gerard, and both took them. Gerard drank his at once with a grimace, but Alain waited for Mira to sip before he drank.

Gerard gave a low grunt and put his cup on the long wooden dining table that had hosted so many guests over the years. “Come here.”

Mira did at once, though she stopped far enough away from him that he would have to reach to grab her, if that was his intent. Gerard didn’t reach for her. He studied her.

“You are beautiful,” he said. “The fairy didn’t give you that.”

Mira shook her head. “No, sir, I don’t believe so.”

She looked at him. His pale hair fell to his shoulders, loose. He had the sharp features of a hawk and the body of a warrior beneath his simple, solid clothes. She shivered, thinking of his muscular arms around her, of his thick legs pushing hers apart. He would not be gentle, she saw this already, and her pulse beat faster between her legs.

“Would you have me?” he asked her, his voice low and rough.

Mira’s mouth parted, and she looked toward Alain, who had not yet put down his glass. “What of your companion, sir?”

Gerard laughed. “What of him?”

“You both arrived at the same time. You both want the same thing. How am I to know which of you can provide me with what I need if I don’t sample you both?”

From another woman these words would have made her a doxy, but Mira had long ceased caring. The dark fairy had gifted her with desire, and it built and built inside her every day without cease. Her mother was trying to sleep away her life and her father had gone insane because of it. She would fuck a thousand men if it meant she’d find the one to complete her.

Gerard gave Alain a challenging look. “Would that you had traveled a mile faster, brother of my heart. You might have been the one to fill this lady’s bucket.”

Alain put a hand over his heart and bowed his head to Gerard. “Would that you had traveled but a mile slower, oh my brother. For then, indeed, I might have been the first to reach her.”

Mira looked at them. They had history, of that there was no question. “You are brothers?”

Without looking away from Alain, Gerard said, “We have different parents.”

Without looking away from Gerard, Alain replied, “We have fought at each other’s side and won. We’ve shared much, Gerard and I.”

They both looked at her, but it was Gerard this time who held out his hand. “Lady, take me to your room, and I will give you what the dark fairy promised would save you and your family.”

Mira, having no reason to decline, took his hand and led him to the stairs. Halfway up, she looked back. Alain stared after them, but only she saw him press his lips to the tips of his fingers.

Gerard wasted no time with pretty words. He took Mira in his arms the moment the bedchamber door closed behind them. His breath smelled of wine, a heady aroma more tantalizing than the taste of it had been. His mouth took hers without preamble, nudging open her lips to allow his tongue to slide inside. Mira gasped into his kiss, and his arms tightened around her.

“She truly did gift you with desire,” Gerard murmured, tracing the line of her jaw with his mouth. Into her ear, he whispered, “You create it and feel it, both. Do you not?”

“Yes.” Mira shivered as his large hands roamed her body and cupped her buttocks through the simple linen dress she wore. Without maidservants to wash her clothes and help her dress, she’d gone without a shift or girdle beneath, and it was almost as if she wore nothing at all. “Yes, sir, I feel it.”

“You want me to touch you, as the other men have touched you?”

Mira sighed as his hands squeezed and one began tugging up her dress, inch by inch. “Oh, yes.”

“Tell me, lady,” Gerard said and bit into her soft flesh with a fierceness that urged a cry from Mira’s throat. “Tell me how they fucked you.”

She told him of men with hard, hot cocks who had used her mouth, her cunt, the tunnel of her breasts, the sweet back passage of her ass. How they had made her feel like she was meant to burst, how she had exploded with pleasure over and over, only to be left aching for more at once. Aching and empty.

Incomplete.

“And why should you be different,” she half sobbed as his roaming hands found her slick crevice and parted her folds to allow one of his thick fingers to slide inside.

“Because I have to be.” Gerard, one hand still moving inside her, used the other to tear her gown from throat to hips.

Mira’s breasts thrust forward as she arched her back. She rode Gerard’s hand harder and harder as he thrust another finger inside her. His mouth found her sweetly aching nipples. When he suckled one, she cried out. Her fingers dug into his shoulder. She rocked her hips, seeking release.

But Gerard would not give it to her. “The others made you come, but none of them finished you.” He growled the words and withdrew his hand so swiftly from her body Mira stumbled. “Stand there, still. Don’t move.”

She did, though, taking a step on trembling legs toward him.

“I said,” murmured Gerard in a voice gone low and dangerous, “do not move.”

This time, Mira stayed still.

Gerard removed his belt, laid aside his scabbard, pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor. His body beneath was indeed that of a warrior, scarred and hard, with tight bronzed nipples and golden fleece around them and in a line disappearing into the waist of his breeches.

Watching her, he eased down his breeches and kicked them aside to stand before her naked. His cock, surrounded by its fluff of amber curls, rose straight and proud. Mira’s pearl beat with the pounding of her heart and her passage tightened in a brief spasm. She moaned, but stayed still as he had ordered.

“The others. Did any bind you? Beat you?”

“No!” Shock sent heat soaring into her cheeks.

Gerard stroked his cock even more fully erect. “Turn around and put your hands on the post.”

His gaze flickered to the foot of her bed. Some of the men had taken her on the floor, or across the table. None had told her to hold onto the bedpost. Mira hesitated, but at the flare of heat in Gerard’s eyes, she did.

She waited, trembling. Her hair had fallen from its coils and lay across her breasts. Gerard threaded his fingers through it, twisting the gilt and midnight together. His hand covered her breast.

“Move your legs apart.”

She did, her muscles tense with waiting. Gerard slid his other hand between her legs from behind. His thick fingers probed her slick folds, finding the bead of her clit and rolling it. Mira pushed her hips forward, wanting more pressure, but Gerard withdrew almost at once.

When she stilled, he slid his hand between her legs again. His fingers dipped into her wetness and caressed her heat. His cock probed the softness of her buttocks from behind, and Mira pushed herself back against him. Again, Gerard withdrew.

“Please.” Mira moaned the single word.

“Please, what?”

“Please, touch me.”

“Is that what you asked them?” Gerard bit lightly at her shoulder, and Mira jerked away from him with a gasp.

“I didn’t have to!” Her chin lifting, she pushed at him. It was like pushing at rock, but he stepped back. Her chest heaved with each breath, and the surprising sting of tears burned her eyes. “They all just did it! All of them just did it!”

“Perhaps, then, that’s your problem.” Gerard made no move toward her. His cock rose proud and strong in front of him. It begged for Mira’s touch, the heat of her mouth, but she didn’t move toward him.

“You want me to beg? Is that it?”

Gerard shrugged and moved to the chair in front of the fire, where he sat without regard to his nakedness. Or hers. This, more than anything, moved Mira to anger.

“Please,” she said through gritted jaws. “Please touch me, sir. Please fuck me.”

“No.”

“Then why did you come here?” she demanded, crossing to him. Fury made her want to strike him, but Mira didn’t dare.

Gerard looked her up and down, caressing her so thoroughly with his gaze it weakened her legs and tightened her nipples further. “To make you complete. Isn’t that what the dark fairy said you needed?”

“What did she say you needed?” The words came out broken, edged with glass, on the verge of cruel.

Quick as the sunshine from which his hair had been woven, Gerard grabbed her wrist. He pulled her forward and put her across his lap like a recalcitrant child. His big hand came down across her buttocks, the smack not hard enough to bruise, though Mira cried out at the sting. Heat spread across her flesh and her hips pushed forward, pushing her cunt against Gerard’s thigh.

“She told me I needed to complete someone.” His other hand pressed her tight against him so she couldn’t move.

“By beating me?” Mira cried, voice hoarse, even as her hips rocked.

“This is not a beating,” said Gerard. “This is an appreciation.”

Heat covered her buttocks and spread to meet the fire already burning between her thighs. As Gerard’s hand caressed her skin, Mira sagged against him. Her legs parted, inviting him to fill her with his fingers again, but he didn’t, not even when she wriggled and strove to get free of his grip.

Beneath her, his cock pressed. His breathing had grown harsher, his grip tighter as she struggled. Yet he did nothing but rest his hand upon the heat his spank had left on her skin.

“I am making you appreciate my touch,” Gerard said in a low voice. “Feel the heat of my hand. Focus on that, not my cock. Not your cunt. Focus on the sound of our breathing. On the brush of your hair against your face.”

Mira closed her eyes with a grimace. Her hips rocked again on Gerard’s thigh, but without much result. None of the others had done this. All had taken her, some rougher, some with gentler hands, but all had done it.

Gerard held her until her struggles ceased. Every line of Mira’s body had gone hot, as though he’d drawn a stick from the fire along her skin. She moaned into her fist as his hand shifted, the fingertips brushing the underside of her buttocks. He moved them lower, to tease her bottom lips. He felt how wet she was for him, how his touch had already teased her so close.

“Please, Gerard,” she whispered. “Please touch me.”

When at last he did, once more filling her with a phallus created from his fingers, Mira’s cry of relief rang around the room. His thumb rubbed at her pearl while his fingers moved inside her, and the ache that had built inside her, up and up, reached its peak and crashed.

Mira’s climax washed over her, no, thundered over her, and she jerked with it. She cried out his name, once. Twice. When the throbbing between her legs eased and she caught her breath, Gerard released her from his lap. Mira stood, her hand on his shoulder to keep herself from falling.

She drew in air scented like Gerard and sighed it out again. She wanted to weep. Her body had succumbed to his ministrations, she had reached her pleasure…and still…

“I am empty,” she said in a dull voice. She turned from him. She waited for the door to open and close behind him, for her body to cease its trembling. For her breath to fill again with air that smelled of smoke and stale bed linens.

“Lady,” said Gerard. “Did you think it would take but once?”

Alain listened for the sound of the lady’s cries as Gerard took her to orgasm. He knew too well the taste and touch of the man upstairs, and his cock rose in his trousers at the knowledge of what he would be doing to the woman. Once, they had shared everything, even women.

It had been a woman who drove them apart.

The dark fairy, who had no name any mortal knew, had stalked Alain through the forest and seduced him not once, but twice. She had used his cock for her personal joy, writhing on him and milking him of his seed even as he fought to remember where he was. Who he was. The dark fairy had cared little for Alain’s mind. All she wanted was his penis and mouth. His hands. She’d have continued sucking him dry had Gerard not come looking for him. She’d seduced Gerard, as well, and Alain could still recall the sound of their cries as she’d taunted Gerard into fucking her harder and harder.

Then, for fun or spite, she had caused them to quarrel. Not with swords, for at that they’d have been too well matched. It would have ended in death for the pair of them. No, she’d urged them to battle with their words. Accusations, old hurts, imagined slights and falsehoods had torn them apart.

Alain and Gerard had not known each other as children, though that had ceased to matter a mere three days into their acquaintance. They’d both been assigned places in the King’s Guard, an elite division of the Royal Army.

The first thing Alain had noticed about Gerard was his hands. Big, strong hands, scarred from work and battle. Gerard had been demonstrating his skill with his broadsword, using the flat of the blade to smack at his opponent. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, highlighting Gerard’s hair into shimmering gold and Alain had, quite literally, lost his breath.

“You there,” Gerard had said with a crook of his finger. “Get your ass over here and let me beat it.”

Even now, recalling Gerard’s surprise at not winning that first fight, Alain smiled. Arrogant from never losing, Gerard hadn’t paid enough attention to the newcomer and had ended up on his back with Alain’s blade at his throat.

It was the last time he didn’t pay enough attention to Alain.

They’d forged the deepest of bonds, the pair of them matched so well physically there were none who could stand against them. They fought hard for the king, and they made merry with equal fierceness…for themselves.

Alain had long known his cock rose without hesitation at both the curved softness of women and the hard, muscled planes of men. Physical love between men wasn’t forbidden in the King’s Guard, where it might be weeks before a man could find a woman, but it wasn’t exactly encouraged, either. Alain, who felt no shame at his proclivities, also felt no need to fight to defend them. He’d surely kill anyone who came up against him, and while his blade had tasted the blood of many of the king’s enemies, he had no desire to spill that of his comrades.

Gerard had never shown signs of liking cock, and Alain had never made a move to push their friendship into that place. They fought, they wrestled, they shared a room and a bath. They often visited the brothels together or sampled some of the same tavern wenches. Gerard had a heavier hand with his women than Alain, who had no desire to bind or beat his bedmates. When Alain sought the company of men, he did it discreetly, and without Gerard. It was the one thing they didn’t share.

Until the night Alain came home from an encounter with one of his favorite male partners to find Gerard waiting for him.

“Where do you go?” Gerard had asked in a deceptively gentle voice that didn’t fool Alain.

“I didn’t know I owed you an accounting of my time,” Alain had replied mildly.

Gerard had drawn his brows. “You stink of fucking.”

“I’ll wash.”

Gerard’s hand had flown out to grab Alain’s wrist as he’d passed. “I don’t smell a woman’s sweetness on you, Alain.”

Alain had looked down at Gerard’s fingers gripping his wrist but made no move to pull away. “No.”

They had trained together so often Gerard’s move shouldn’t have surprised him, but then perhaps Alain had chosen to be surprised. Gerard had turned him and pressed him forward, both hands tight on his wrists, in the time it took to draw a breath. Alain hadn’t struggled. Against his back, he’d felt the familiar breadth and width of Gerard’s body.

Gerard had pushed Alain toward the room’s rough-hewn table and pinned his hands to the splintered wood. He’d kicked his legs apart and pressed harder against his back. Alain had closed his eyes, breathing hard, making no offer.

“You like it this way?” Gerard had breathed in Alain’s ear. The touch of Gerard’s hot breath had sent a shudder down Alain’s spine and still he said nothing, made no move to get away, though he easily could have.

Gerard’s hand had let go of one of Alain’s and moved around to cup Alain’s hardening cock. “Your prick is hard, my friend.”

Gerard hadn’t fumbled with the ties of Alain’s trousers, nor had his touch hesitated when he took Alain’s hard length into his palm. He’d stroked, hard, in the way only men knew how to do, until at last Alain had pumped his hips forward with a cry.

“Yes,” he’d said. “Yes, Gerard, I like that.”

He’d groaned when the bluntness of Gerard’s thick cock nudged at the passage of his ass, and cried aloud when Gerard had eased his way inside. Gerard had fucked him fast and hard, jerking Alain’s prick at the same time, until they’d both exploded into pleasure.

“You can share everything with me,” Gerard had said then, and until the dark fairy came along, they had.

Alain’s cock had risen at the memories and now pressed uncomfortably against the front of his breeches. He turned at the soft noise behind him to see Mira, her lovely skin flushed and that marvelous hair hanging in tangled curls around her face.

“He sent me to fetch him some ale.” Her voice was scratchy, hoarse.

“My lady,” Alain said kindly, for he knew well enough how Gerard’s touch could leave one shaken. “Would you sit?”

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sank into it as though her legs had been about to collapse. He brought her mulled wine and a hunk of bread from the sideboard, but she neither drank nor ate.

“My lady,” said Alain gently and waited until she looked at his face. “What do you need?”

“I don’t need wine and bread,” she snapped suddenly, her intriguingly mismatched eyes flashing. “I need fulfillment!”

He’d been certain she’d find it with Gerard, and yet the moment she said the words Alain knew she spoke the truth. A smile tugged at his lips. Now it was his turn to try.

Mira’s buttocks still held the heat left behind by Gerard’s hand, but she refused to squirm on the hard seat of her chair. The humiliation of what he’d done—and without lifting the curse!—brought heat to her face equal to that in her bottom. She scowled at the dark-haired man in front of her.

“Bring me a dipper of cold water from the well,” she demanded and pointed out the window to the garden. “That’s what I want.”

She felt certain he’d balk at her imperious tone, perhaps even take her in hand the way Gerard had, but Alain only ducked his head and strode to the doorway on his long, long legs. The well of which she spoke hadn’t been used for a long time because the winch used to lift the bucket from its depths had rusted. Even so, the water drawn from it was the sweetest she’d ever tasted, and she wanted it now.

More than that, she thought as she watched him disappear through the door, she wanted to make someone suffer, even the tiniest bit, to make up for the way she had suffered upstairs.

But she hadn’t suffered, really, had she? Even now, thinking of the way Gerard had ordered her to hold tight to the bedpost while he plundered her body from behind caused Mira’s nipples to tighten and her pulse to throb harder between her legs.

As the beloved only child of doting parents, Mira had never been spanked in her life. No one had ever even raised their voice to her. Yet, she mused, her thighs slipping apart enough to dimple the fabric of her gown between them, there had been nothing parental about Gerard’s treatment of her.

The other men had fucked her in all manner of ways, but none had commanded her so. Thinking of it now sent a shiver through her. Her sex, still wet with her own slickness, clenched hard enough to force a small moan from her lips.

“My lady.”

At the sound of Alain’s reverent voice, Mira’s eyes flew open. She’d arched back in the chair, her hips lifting at the memory of Gerard’s touch, but having Alain witness her reaction to those thoughts didn’t quench her arousal. She studied him, the pail from the well brimming with water.

“I brought your water.”

She didn’t know what made her do it, except that all at once she lost all grasp of the difference between memory and reality. Gerard had commanded her but now she would command Alain; all of it seemed to make sense the way light will suddenly shine through the one clean spot in an otherwise filthy window.

She kicked the bucket of water from his hands. It hit the floor with a thump and split into several pieces. The cold, clear water, sweet as honey, splattered Alain’s boots and breeches. Frigid droplets hit her bare toes and calves, but her gasp wasn’t from their small sting. It came when Alain went at once to his knees, his head bowed.

“My lady, I have displeased you.”

Mira had been protected and indulged her entire life, but just as Gerard’s treatment of her didn’t echo anything parental, neither did this new desire sweeping her have anything to do with her previous experiences. She had always taken her clean clothes and prepared food as a fact of her existence and considered the servants who’d provided them a part of her family, like her parents. She’d never demanded anything from them.

The sight of Alain on his knees sent waves of pleasure through her so strong her head spun. Her legs parted further and she inched her skirt to her knees. Her fingers fisted in the fabric and she imagined how it would feel to bury them in the thickness of his dark hair.

“Tell me how I might serve you, lady,” Alain murmured, “and I shall do my utmost to please you.”

“I would have your face between my legs.” The words rose to her lips as haughtily as any queen might have said them, and emboldened by her own tone, she added, “Pleasure my cunt with your tongue.”

The dark fairy’s gift had stolen any shyness from Mira, but even so it was the first time she’d ever said such a thing aloud. Her heart pounded. She’d begged Gerard to touch her a mere hour before and now she ordered his comrade to do the same. Opposite ends of experience, yet both had made her heart trip faster in her breast.

“If it would please my lady to do so,” Alain said without hesitation, “then it will be my pleasure to serve her.”

His strong hands, only slightly smaller than Gerard’s but with the same delightful calluses, slid up her thighs and pushed her skirt to her hips. She was bare beneath. She’d washed upstairs, but her sex glistened anew with her arousal. The smooth bead of her clitoris protruded sweetly from its hood of flesh and her soft curls.

Alain used his thumbs to stroke along her folds and brought them together, one on each side of her clitoris. Mira hissed out a gasp and her hips rocked forward again.

“Your mouth,” she ordered.

He obeyed at once, dipping his head to press his lips to her flesh. His tongue, hot and wet, stroked her folds and anchored itself on her clitoris. He worked her flesh with his lips and tongue, and her desire coursed through her like flames consuming paper.

She fisted her hands in his hair and held him tight as his mouth moved. His tongue flickered, fast, then moved in slow, deliberate circles that had her writhing.

“Fuck me with your fingers,” Mira gasped when Alain’s tongue alone wasn’t enough to send her over the edge.

Alain did as she ordered. His fingers were longer but not so thick as Gerard’s, and in her ecstatic delirium Mira wondered if their cocks would be as disparate. He pushed two fingers deep inside her, curving them slightly upward as his tongue kept its steady pace. Bright sparks of fresh pleasure shot through her, and again when he pressed deeper and his knuckles provided additional pressure on her back passage.

She moaned his name, and again, louder. She closed her eyes and threw back her head to allow the ecstasy to take her over entirely.

“I want you to fuck me,” she gasped. “Fuck me, Alain!”

Her climax shook her, the pleasure so intense she went briefly blind. Her toes pointed, her thighs fell open, her hands clutched at nothing. The words spewed from her mouth, yet she knew what she said and meant it.

“Be careful, lady,” said a familiar male voice, dipping low with amusement. “For if you command it, Alain will feel compelled to obey.”

Mira opened her eyes as the vestiges of ecstasy seeped out of her. Alain still knelt before her, his mouth glistening and his eyes hot with desire, but it was to Gerard she gave her full attention. Her heart still pounded from her climax but now the pitter-pat stepped up at the sight of the man who’d so recently mastered her. What would he do to her? To both of them?

Gerard spoke in a voice that could never have been called kind but was at least not cruel. He put his hand on Alain’s head the way a man will touch his hound to prove his ownership and its loyalty to him. “It’s in his nature, you see.”

Mira swallowed hard, though her mouth had gone dry at the flare of lust in Gerard’s blue eyes. In front of her, Alain remained on his knees, his head slightly bowed beneath the weight of Gerard’s hand. He didn’t look frightened. She watched as he licked his mouth of her sweetness.

“How does she taste, Alain?”

“Like sweet honey, Gerard.”

Gerard’s smile sent a frisson from the base of Mira’s spine all the way to the sensitive flesh of the back of her neck. The curve of his lips affected another part of her as well, the soft and slick center between her thighs.

“Alain made you come, lady?”

She lifted her chin, almost defiant. “Yes.”

Gerard’s hand stroked down Alain’s hair. “His tongue is most talented, is it not? And yet you screamed for his cock, too?”

Even now, her body twitched and shivered at the thought. The dark fairy had blessed her with desire, and it had grown tenfold since Gerard and Alain had walked through her garden gate. She covered herself with her hand.

“Yes,” she said.

“You are not yet complete,” said Alain.

She shook her head. Alain got to his feet, shrugging off Gerard’s hand.“I can complete you, lady. Allow me to serve you.”

“The lady seeks to serve,” Gerard said in a deceptively kind tone. “She is natural at it, Alain.”

Alain turned to face the other man. “You didn’t complete her, Gerard. The weight of desire hangs heavy on her shoulders. Her burden has not yet been lifted, and nor has ours.”

Gerard stared at Mira. “I haven’t yet had my full way with her, Alain. Once I have—”

“Once I have,” Alain interrupted, “the curse will be lifted.”

“You?” Gerard turned his face to Alain and laughed. “I know well how your mouth can service, Alain, but you’re not the one for this lady. I can feel it.”

“I feel it,” Alain said in a low, dangerous voice, and while in the past he might have served Gerard the way he’d served Mira, it was clear to her that whatever rift had been torn between them had not yet healed.

“Will you ask the lady to choose?” Gerard asked in a frightening voice.

“I will not choose!” Mira cried so loudly the china in the cupboard rang. She got up from the chair, her skirts falling around her bare feet. “It is not for me to choose! It is for you to complete me!”

She pointed at each of them. “It is not a contest of who is the manlier!”

Alain ducked his head at her words and put his hand over his heart. “My lady—”

Gerard, however, had drawn his sword with a growl. “It is a contest, lady, for just as you seek completion and the breaking of the fairy’s curse, so I seek it. Alain!”

Alain had drawn no weapon but Mira, heart thudding again, had no illusions he was not as ready to wage battle as Gerard. “Yes, brother of my heart.”

“Outside.”

“Yes, Gerard.”

Again, Alain inclined his head, but though it gave the appearance of him following Gerard’s command, Mira was not fooled. Alain was his own man. Her breath hitched faster in her chest when Alain followed Gerard out into the garden.

When they fought over her.

The room was not the best he’d ever been given, but it was clean and bright, and the bed was softer than any had ever been in the barracks of the King’s Guard. The basins, one filled with hot water and one with cold, were of finer porcelain, too, as were the cloths Gerard now used to wash the worst of his wounds. Alain’s blade had some time ago become nicked, and the cuts it gave were ragged. He hissed as he smoothed the water over his bleeding flesh.

It gave him no small pleasure to hear the same pained noises coming from the room Alain had been given. Though the rooms were separated by a door, it hung open. Gerard could hear Alain’s measured pacing as he bathed and dressed his own wounds. He might have taken more pride had he known his comrade’s injuries to be worse than his own, but Gerard was no fonder of lies told to himself than he was of untruths told to him by another.

Neither had held back in their fight to prove who was better suited to bring the lady Mira her completion, but, as in all else, they were so even in skill neither had been able to win. They were not a pair of matched ponies to draw a carriage, he mused as he watched Alain’s shadow lengthen and shorten in the doorway. Rather they were as firmly opposite as the sun and moon. Like a lock and a key, Alain and Gerard were fair to useless without one another.

“Alain!”

The shadow paused and in the next moment, Alain’s familiar form appeared in the open doorway. “Yes, Gerard.”

“Come here.”

Alain did at once, and though he refused to show any sign of it upon his face, Gerard ached inside for the days before the dark fairy had come between them. No woman ever had, not even the prettiest. No man had, either. Yet the dark fairy, on a whim they’d never understood, had taken the core of their friendship and used it to tear them asunder.

“I have missed you,” Alain said simply, and Gerard hated and admired him for his ability to put voice to his emotions. “It’s been overlong since we were able to practice together.”

It was just like Alain, Gerard mused, to make it as though they’d been exercising rather than trying to kill one another. He wanted to keep from smiling but felt his mouth curve anyway. “Aye, brother of my heart, I have long regretted our distance as well.”

Only Alain knew him well enough to know there was more to what he felt than what he said. Of all the lovers Gerard had ever taken, only Alain had also been his friend. He reached to grab Alain’s wrist and tug him forward, and Alain stepped toward him without resistance.

“We have never let a woman come between us before,” Gerard said. “Only that bitch of a fairy has ever separated us. Let us not allow this like-cursed lady to widen the gap.”

“Mayhap,” Alain said as he ran his hand through Gerard’s hair, “she can help us bridge it, Gerard.”

Alain had ever been the one of them to think more thoroughly, and Gerard had always been the one to take action. Together it had made them formidable foes to any who opposed them. Now Gerard would listen to his friend, to his brother of the heart, and they would take their action together.

“The fairy cursed us all three with desire,” Gerard said. “All the same curse. Might we all have the same cure?”

“I think we might.”

Alain’s fingers tightened in Gerard’s hair briefly as Gerard’s hand on his wrist pulled him yet closer. It was not often that Gerard was the one looking up, but he did so now. Alain’s gaze held a hotness he recognized. His cock had become thick and pushed the front of his breeches.

Alain gasped aloud when Gerard tugged open the laces of his breeches and drew forth his erect cock, and louder when Gerard slid the hot flesh between his lips, for it was not often Gerard’s pleasure to provide this service. Gerard opened himself to take in Alain’s length, sucking hard. Alain’s hips bumped forward as Gerard’s hands found his ass and gripped. The muscles of Alain’s thighs jumped and twitched as Gerard sucked and licked all the way down to the root and up again, paying special attention to the crown. One hand left Alain’s ass to grip the smooth foreskin and slide it back and forth as his mouth worked.

It might not have been Gerard’s habit to suck Alain’s cock, but he did it well nonetheless, for he knew just what Alain liked. In moments Alain’s guttural growls were becoming the slow, deep moans that signaled his release, and now it was Gerard’s turn to seek his own pleasure.

Without preamble he removed his mouth from Alain’s erection and stood so suddenly Alain had no time to react. With his fist gripping Alain’s prick, Gerard captured Alain’s mouth in a harsh, demanding kiss. It would leave them both bruised, but the small pains were as nothing compared to the damage they’d already caused each other, and Alain’s moan and the throb in his cock told Gerard he didn’t mind.

“You think you deserve to spill?” Gerard growled into Alain’s ear, his own cock as hard and thick as granite at the thought of what was to come. “Do you really think I’d take your seed down the back of my throat?”

Alain had his triggers and Gerard knew them all as well as he knew how to make him come. “No, Gerard.”

Gerard let his hand drift along Alain’s cock before letting go of it. “How long has it been since anyone’s taken a strap to your ass, Alain?”

“Too long.” Alain’s voice pushed from gritted jaws, and Gerard heard the truth in it. “Not since you, Gerard. That last time.”

That had been a long time then, for the dark fairy had cursed them more than three moons before. Until this morning with Mira, it had been just as long since Gerard had beaten anyone, though he’d taken countless women to his bed while seeking to break the curse.

Gerard gripped Alain’s chin in his hand and looked hard into the other man’s eyes. “It’s been too long then.”

He ordered Alain to take his position against the plastered wall, his hands at shoulder height and fingers spread. They had no safe word. They didn’t need one. The position of Alain’s fingers would tell Gerard how much pain he was able to take—today, with his previous injuries, it might be very little. The wider apart his fingers, the more he could take. If he closed them together, Gerard would know to ease off.

Just as using his mouth to service Alain was not his habit, neither was undressing him, but Gerard knew Alain was so close to coming, his cock already so hard, that bending to remove his breeches would only give him additional pleasure. Gerard intended to keep Alain balanced on the knife’s edge for a sufficient time, so he was the one who pulled off Alain’s breeches until Alain stood naked.

Gerard admired the lines of Alain’s back and ass as he pulled the sturdy leather strap from his bag. The leather was supple and oiled and fit his fist exactly. He tugged it between his two hands to snap it, and his cock twitched at the way Alain’s muscles jumped, though he showed no other sign he’d heard.

“By the time I’m done,” Gerard said, “your back and ass are going to be on fire, Alain.”

“Please,” Alain murmured.

Gerard laid the strap in even lines along Alain’s skin. His cock stiffened further at the red stripes and the low, strangled grunts of Alain’s ecstasy.

Alain’s head hung and his entire body quivered with exhaustion and still he did not push his fingers together, but it was Gerard’s duty to know when Alain could take no more even if Alain himself could no longer tell, and he put aside the strap. He ran his hand over the heated flesh of Alain’s back and delighted in his hiss. He slid a hand over Alain’s ass and felt the muscles twitch and jump. He pulled a bottle of soothing oil from his bag and poured a palmful and repeated the motion. Alain’s body tensed at the contact of the smooth oil on his flesh, and his hips pumped forward recklessly as he moaned.

He was so close Gerard knew it would take very little to send him over the edge, and for a moment he thought of allowing his friend that final release, but his own nature made him grin slyly instead. He ran his fingers, slick with oil, down the crease of Alain’s buttocks and teased the hot, tight circle of his anus with one finger. Alain bucked and cried out, but his hands never left their places on the wall.

“Such a good soldier,” Gerard murmured as his finger probed slightly deeper. “So good at following orders.”

Alain’s low, gasping chuckle sounded tortured, but he said nothing. He pushed back a bit against Gerard’s hand. From a true slave Gerard would have not tolerated the insubordination, but Alain was not his slave even though they sometimes played at that game.

“You want this?” Gerard eased his finger into Alain’s hot passage. “Or would you like my cock there, instead? Fucking you? How long has it been since anyone’s been inside you, Alain?”

“As long as it’s been since anyone’s strapped me,” Alain managed to say, though his voice shook with effort. “Please, Gerard, for the sake of our friendship….”

Gerard could be cruel, but this was not about cruelty, and he reached to stroke Alain’s cock with his oil-filled palm. Once, twice, and Alain was crying out and pumping into Gerard’s fist. Once more and his seed spilled, hot and fragrant, into Gerard’s hand.

“Now,” Gerard said when Alain had ceased his jerking and moaning, “use your mouth on me the way you did for her.”

Alain turned and fell at once to his knees. He took Gerard’s prick deep down his throat and sucked. He used his hand in tandem, stroking and caressing Gerard’s balls in the way that made his mind go blank of any thought but the supreme pleasure between his legs.

It took only moments for Gerard to explode into ecstasy, and when he did he shouted Alain’s name. As Alain got up from his knees, Gerard put a hand on his arm to keep him from turning immediately away.

“I have missed you, as well,” Gerard said.

Whatever had happened between the two men, the last to come through the gate for a fortnight, they had somehow repaired their bond. Mira had expected them to leave when both realized they were unable to bring about the end to the dark fairy’s gift, but as the days passed and Gerard and Alain ingratiated themselves into the household, Mira realized they intended to stay. More than that, they were wooing her, each in his own way, and neither was competing with the other for her affections.

In the past, of course, guests of the house had sought to court her in proper fashion as befit her status as the daughter of a very wealthy man. No suitor would have dared do more than walk with her in the garden, much less have been so bold as to kiss her, and anything more intimate than that was strictly forbidden.

The fairy’s curse had changed all that. The first men who’d come seeking her had been satisfied to fuck her and move on when they failed to break the curse, but Alain and Gerard were not like any other men she’d ever met in her life.

Gerard set her to tasks such as polishing his boots and serving him his food, and his hand could be heavy when she didn’t serve to his pleasure. The first time he’d tied her hands and feet to the posts at the foot of his bed and strapped her, she’d wept tears of pain and anger even as her cunt wept with arousal, yet she hadn’t sent him from the house. Her body had grown to crave Gerard’s discipline, as harsh as it could be, and he brought her to climax over and over with the flat of his hand or the leather strap he wielded with such proficiency. He fucked her thoroughly as well, when she pleased him, and denied her that ecstasy when she did not.

With Alain, however, Mira played the mistress without a second thought. He was as eager to serve her as she was to submit to Gerard. Alain took whatever abuse she offered him, whether it be her refusal to allow him to achieve orgasm when he used his mouth to satisfy her, or the performance of countless meaningless tasks meant only to prove she controlled him. He made love to her with worshipful hands, when she allowed it, and Mira found his touch as satisfying as Gerard’s even if it was in a totally different way.

Both men pursued and pleased her over and over, yet no matter how many times her body sang with desire, something was still missing. She waited for one of them to finish her completely, to break the dark fairy’s curse, but no matter how many times she submitted to Gerard or governed Alain, nothing seemed to change.

Her father’s fortune continued to slip away in summonses from the king, extra taxes, small disasters to the house. Her parents sought their comfort in elderberry wine and madness, leaving Mira to run the much-diminished household with no advice.

Summer had passed and turned to autumn, and still a space in her soul remained empty and bleak. She began to despair of ever saving her parents or ridding herself of the fairy’s cursed gift. Her two lovers might fulfill her body, but it wasn’t enough.

“It’s not enough,” she said aloud to the last nodding flowers in their beds.

The flowers didn’t reply, though the wind tossed their heads and ruffled their petals as prettily as if they were the dresses of innocent maidens. Mira hadn’t been innocent for the passing of several moons, and she wept now for that lost innocence and the life she should have had. She sank onto her knees in the browning grass and fragrant earth and buried her face in her hands.

“My lady, what ails you?”

Mira lifted her head at Alain’s low voice. She wiped her face as he crouched beside her to cradle her. He took a fine linen handkerchief from his pocket and dried her tears, and not for the first time, Mira realized Alain was no common soldier. He had wealth of his own, and status. Under other circumstances he might even have been of a high enough class to court her properly.

“If not for the curse,” she bit out through a fresh veil of tears.

Alain didn’t ask her to elaborate. Instead he bent his mouth to hers and kissed her through the salty wetness. His tongue slipped between her lips until she opened her mouth.

As always, that gentle touch set her body aflame with desire, but Mira struggled this time against the pleasure coursing through her. It would be fleeting, that ecstasy, and leave her with naught in the end.

“What can I do to please you?” Alain asked and cupped her face in his hands. “Only tell me and I’ll do it.”

Mira shook her head. “If you could do it, Alain, you’d have done so already.”

All he could do was kiss her, which he did, and touch her, which he did as well. His hands slid up beneath her skirts and found her bare and ready for him, as she always was. Mira muttered a curse under her breath when his fingers stroked her pearl and the first spasms of climax began building inside her. It was so easy to give in to her body’s longings. Nearly impossible, in fact, to refuse them. Alain brought her to the edge of orgasm with only a few practiced strokes, and when he slid a finger inside her to stroke from the inside as well, Mira shuddered and tossed her head back with a sigh.

“Well, well. What a pretty sight.”

Mira bit down on the strangled cry seeking escape from her throat and looked up. Gerard stood watching them, an unreadable expression on his handsome face. His lips tilted, finally, when Alain’s stroking hand tipped Mira into a helpless rush of orgasm that jerked her entire body. She didn’t look away from Gerard’s eyes the entire time.

Though she had made no secret of the fact both men shared her bed and her body, none of them had ever mentioned it aloud. She’d wondered privately if Gerard and Alain had worked out some sort of system so each could have their turn with her, for they’d never overlapped or intruded upon the other until now.

“Alain,” Gerard said in the voice that made Mira shudder anew with fresh longing. “Have you pleased our lady?”

Alain withdrew his fingers from Mira’s center and slid them along his lips. “I think so, Gerard. But only just once, so far.”

Gerard’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a grin so feral and frightening Mira let out a startled squeak. “We’ll have to remedy that, won’t we?”

They meant to take her at the same time, she saw, and her heart threatened to fly entirely out of her chest, so fiercely did it pound. She’d experienced every intimacy a woman and man could share with both men in front of her, but the thought of them both taking her, both touching her…both fucking her! She shook at the thought.

“What do you suggest?” Alain asked and pinned her with his gaze.

Gerard came up behind him and cupped the back of Alain’s neck in a gesture so intimate Mira’s breath lodged in her throat. She’d known the men were close, and had oft wondered at their friendship, but the way Gerard touched Alain gave proof to what had only been a thought. They were lovers, too.

She’d heard of men who preferred the company of their own sex, yet she knew both of these men to be fervent and skilled lovers. Gerard’s smile grew broader at what must have been a puzzled look upon her face. Alain reached to stroke her cheek, perhaps in reassurance.

“We only want to please you,” Alain said.

Gerard nodded and crooked his finger to her. So accustomed to obeying him had she become, Mira stepped at once toward him. Gerard kissed her as skillfully but with less tenderness than Alain. When he probed without warning between her thighs, she cried out. Her knees sagged a little, but Alain caught her.

“We will take care of you, my lady,” he said. “Don’t fear.”

“I’m not afraid.” Mira wet her lips. Something kindled deep within her. “I’ve been waiting for this.”

“Take off your gown,” Gerard ordered.

Mira didn’t hesitate, though the garden was bright with sunshine and would provide no shadow to hide her nakedness from the eyes of anyone passing. Gerard had commanded it, and so she did it, her nipples already peaked and throbbing and her sex dewed. She tugged open the laces of her gown and dropped the material to the ground, then stepped out of it.

“She is so beautiful, Gerard.”

“She is, indeed, brother of my heart. She is indeed. I want you to get on your knees for her and pleasure her with your tongue.”

Alain ducked his head in acquiescence and Mira parted her legs to allow him access. His tongue, hot and sleek, dove straight to her center and licked and swirled on her until her hips began to rock. She kept her balance with one hand on Alain’s shoulder, but the other drifted from breast to breast, pinching her nipples as Gerard watched, his eyes gleaming.

The front of his breeches tented and he pulled the laces free to push them down over his strong, muscled thighs. His shirt came off over his head until he stood as naked as she. The sun was kind to him, casting him in glittering rays of gold, as if he’d been covered in gilt.

Alain still knelt between her legs, his midnight-black hair streaming over his shoulders. Mira climaxed under his tongue as Gerard watched. Alain kissed her and drew back as Gerard came forward to claim her mouth. When he pulled away, Alain had stripped as well.

Side by side, their differences only proved how well-matched they were. Dark and light.

“Key and lock,” Mira said aloud. “Both of you.”

“And you the door that makes us worth our function,” Alain said as though teasing, but the instant he spoke the words Mira knew them as truth.

“Get on that bench,” Gerard told her. “Alain is going to make love to you now.”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed and settled herself at once onto the carved wooden bench overlooking her favorite flowerbed. Far from being too hard or uncomfortable against her bare skin, the smooth, sun-warmed wood caressed her as she lay back and opened her legs for Alain.

He slid inside her with ease, both of them groaning when he sank to the hilt. He paused before thrusting, but when he began his motions were slow and steady. The bench was high enough off the ground that he could stand, knees slightly bent, to press into her. His hands gripped her hips as he thrust, and when Mira cried out one of them left her curves to stroke her clitoris in time to his thrusts.

The pleasure swept over her in waves so strong they brought tears to her eyes. Alain moved inside her as Mira blinked away the blur and murmured words of encouragement…and love.

It was love, she realized with a wonder even the mind-fuzzing pleasure couldn’t conceal. She loved Alain for his tenderness and gallantry, and her orgasm swept over her as she cried the words over and over.

Alain shouted out his reply as his hips rocked inside her and slowed. They stared into each other’s eyes, smiling, and Mira only looked away when she saw Gerard appear over Alain’s shoulder.

“I love you, too, Gerard,” she said and gave a low cry as Alain’s thrust began another surge of climax building inside her. She loved Gerard for his command and discipline of her.

Each of them gave her something different, something she’d craved without knowing it. She loved them both, and at last understood how to break the curse.

Gerard and Alain seemed to have come to the same realization as Mira, for Gerard again cupped the back of Alain’s neck with one large hand. Watching the men kiss sent a thrill through Mira unlike any other she’d experienced. It would have been easy to fear their fondness for each other, to worry she’d have no place with them, but Alain had said she was the door and now, more than ever, Mira felt it.

Gerard kissed Alain but briefly, for Alain still thrust ever so slowly in and out of Mira. Gerard moved behind Alain. His hands gripped Alain’s hips, and in a moment Mira felt the added pressure of Gerard’s thrust inside Alain. The two men moved in perfect tandem, in and out. Alain cried out, his fingers on Mira’s clit pausing their circling, and it was the hesitation in the stimulation that sent her over the edge once more.

Together, the three of them fucked. Together, they made love. And when Gerard cried out first her name and then Alain’s, and Alain shuddered and grunted with his climax, Mira tipped once again into a spiral of ecstasy so great all she could do was let it sweep her away nearly to oblivion.

When they had untangled themselves from her and from each other, Mira kissed and embraced the two men who’d come through her garden gate and changed her life forever. One fair, the other dark. Gilt and midnight, her own dual nature split into two lovers, each providing the final piece of what she needed to love.

More than that.

Each what she needed to be complete.

No Apologies

CHAPTER ONE

HE WAS STARING AT HER. THOUGH SHE DIDN’T look—why ruin the game so soon—she felt the heat of his dark chocolate gaze cruising down her neck to her partially bare breasts and beyond, taking in every detail of her new dress and the body that lay beneath it. She’d thought of him when she’d chosen the red silk. Imagined his expression the first time he saw her in it and the unbelievable pleasure she would feel as he slowly peeled her out of it.

He shifted in his seat and a shiver of pure liquid lust shot through her at the simple movement, though she caught it only out of the corner of her eye. She shouldn’t be this attuned to him—it just wasn’t normal, no matter what wicked, wonderful things she’d let him do to her body for the last three months. And, she admitted, she’d let him do a lot. She’d given him everything he asked for and more; so much more that it disturbed her sometimes.

She didn’t know how to deal with this…obsession. Annalise cringed at the word, but could think of nothing else to describe the craving she had for Gabe every moment of every day. No one else could satisfy it, no matter how hard she’d tried to find someone who could. And God, how she tried—every chance she got. Nearly every night he wasn’t with her she made sure she was flat on her back beneath someone else. A momentary diversion, a last-ditch effort to stop the need he built so explosively, and effortlessly, within her.

She refused to turn out like her mother—her beautiful, youthful, completely insane mother. Living with one man while chasing after another, changing marriages like underwear—until her life was nothing but one long nervous breakdown. No thank you. Been there, seen that.

Yet her feelings for Gabe remained more powerful than she liked. Obsession. Need. The words whispered through her until all she could think about, all she could feel, was Gabe.

The distance between their tables was negligible in the sleepy little restaurant. He sat halfway across the room, immersed in a business discussion of stocks and commodities and so many other things she couldn’t care less about, but Annalise felt each of his glances like a caress.

Though she refused to look up from the menu she was oh so carelessly perusing, his pull battered her defenses. Enveloped her until she was wet and aching and ready to let him fuck her right there in the middle of Emilio’s exclusive dining room. Yet, when she’d risked a glance at him earlier, he’d looked completely unruffled. How could he turn her into a raving, sexcrazed lunatic and still manage to stay so untouched?

Fuck it. She reached for her wine, took a healthy sip. Two could play his game. After all, she’d been doing it for more years and with more men than she could count. She had to remember that Gabe was just one more.

Deliberately she uncrossed her silk-clad legs, one slow inch at a time. Leaning back in her chair slightly, she let her knees fall open—nothing too graphic in dear Emilio’s little restaurant—just enough to reveal a smooth expanse of leg and a hint of the shadow near the apex of her thighs.

She used one slender finger to toy with her water glass—a careless slide around the rim, a little dip into the cool water, an absentminded skim across red lips. She studied her menu—though she knew it by heart and he knew she did.

But it gave her an excuse to ignore him as his eyes forged a blazing path up the long legs he loved to kiss. Legs made even longer by the Jimmy Choos with the five-inch heels she had just spent way too much of her last paycheck on. But the second she’d seen them it had been love at first sight.

Annalise couldn’t help grinning. What did it say about her that she had a more emotional and lasting relationship with her shoes than she did with any man? Even Gabe.

Smart, she decided as she glanced down at the sparkly crimson miracles, admiring the sheer beauty and craftsmanship that had gone into her most recent purchase. Investing in her shoes instead of a man definitely made her smarter than so many of the women she competed with on the dating scene.

She glanced up as her waiter approached. “Can I get you another chardonnay, Annalise?” Angelo asked, laying a familiar hand on her shoulder and leaning down to speak quietly in her ear.

Taking the last sip, she handed him her glass with a flourish. “You bet, sugar. But just one more—I’m driving.”

He glanced across the restaurant. “Gabe’s busy tonight, huh?” “Oh yeah. You know Gabe and his one-track mind.” Though she was doing her best to distract him. Leaning into Angelo, she gave a breathy laugh and laid a well-manicured hand on his forearm.

He nodded, his blue eyes darkening as she stroked him through the thin fabric of his suit. “If he’s busy for the rest of the night, I get off at ten-thirty.” His hand slid from her shoulder to the small of her back.

Annalise grinned up at him—she couldn’t help it, he was just so irrepressible. And one of her favorite fuck buddies for just that reason. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she murmured, turning in to him so that her breasts brushed against his arm.

“Too long,” he answered, his voice deepening as her nipple hardened against his muscular bicep. Gabe and his hot stare had her in such a state of arousal that just that one quick brush against Angelo had her nipples standing at attention.

But she had bigger plans and, with a sigh of regret, she eased back from him. “I’ve got something going tonight, sugar. But if you’re free on Monday…”

His grin was frankly sensual. “I’ll call you.”

“You do that.” She gave him a slow smile and a wink before letting her hand drop, oh so leisurely, from his arm. “And I’ll take the pasta primavera whenever you get a chance.”

“You got it.” After an intimate shoulder squeeze, he headed toward the kitchen, a noticeable spring in his step.

Annalise grinned before she could help herself. Men were just too easy. Or at least, most men were. She spent a minute watching Angelo walk away, giving both Gabe and herself a chance to process the interaction.

Not that Gabe really needed much time to process, she mused. His fury was a living entity, crossing the space between them and skewering her without a word. She was playing with fire and she knew it—but the pleasurable pain that came with the burn made the game impossible to resist.

Besides, Gabe’s possessive nature was beginning to grate. She’d made it abundantly clear before they’d gotten together—and in the months since—that they weren’t exclusive. They weren’t serious. And they certainly weren’t emotionally involved. She didn’t do emotions and hadn’t for eight long years. And Gabe had agreed when she’d laid out the rules.

Agreed, hell, he’d been right there with her—looking for a good time with no strings attached. It’s what had made them so perfect for each other. He knew she had guys on the side—she let things slip every once in a while, sometimes refused to see him because she already had a date, occasionally answered calls from other men when she was out with him. Just little clues, enough to make sure he knew that she wasn’t harboring any happily-ever-after fantasies like so many of the other women in his life. And he definitely had other women—she wasn’t naive enough to think that he didn’t. Nor did it bother her—why should it when he always had more than enough left to give her what she wanted?

Refusing to be a coward—she’d done nothing wrong, after all—Annalise slowly lifted her head and let her blue eyes meet his nearly black ones across the dining room. Sparks leapt between them, as they had every day since they’d first laid eyes on each other three months before.

She’d been having dinner with some friends at a trendy La Jolla restaurant and he’d been involved in yet another business meeting. She’d brushed past his table on her way to the ladies’ room and had fallen instantly in lust. Not that any sane woman could blame her. The man was yummy—with a capital Y. Beautiful mocha skin covering incredible muscles. Dark, sexy eyes that promised more pleasure than it should be possible to feel. And those strong, work-roughened hands that had delivered on all the promises his eyes had made and many more to boot.

They’d spent the first two days of their acquaintance in his bed, and she’d come so many times in the first twenty-four hours that she’d lost count some time after number twelve. Much of their subsequent acquaintance had been spent in bed as well—at his place and hers.

Taking a long, cool drink of water, she smiled sassily at him. Tried to appear unaffected by the rage sizzling—hot and dangerous—in his eyes. It was setting fire to the very air around them until she felt like she could barely breathe, the oxygen trembling in her suddenly shaky lungs. Anger, possession, lust—and other emotions she couldn’t begin to name—shot across the room from him to her. Her nipples—already pressed against the thin silk of her dress—tightened to the point of pain. She knew he could see them, but she was too far gone to care. It took all her control not to spread her legs and beg for it.

But she refused to back down—even if the prize was the hot and satisfying sex he was the absolute best at providing. Besides, they’d get there eventually. The attraction between them wouldn’t allow anything less.

Leaning back in her chair, Annalise let her head drop back and ran her hands through her long black hair. The action thrust her full breasts forward, making her erect nipples even more obvious. She stretched, a long, feline movement that inched her dress farther up her thighs and revealed the lace tops of her thigh highs and the smooth, pale skin above them.

Angelo let out a long, low whistle as he dropped off her second glass of wine. “You’ll have him whimpering in a second, babe,” he whispered in her ear. But a searing look from Gabe had him hightailing it back into the kitchen before she could answer.

Need shivered through her—hot, aching, alive—and she pushed away from the table before she lost it completely. Grabbing her skinny purse with one hand, she ran the thumb from her other hand over an aroused nipple. Once, twice, in plain view of anyone who cared to look. She didn’t care who else saw as long as Gabe was watching.

As she turned toward the bathroom, the heat skating up her spine assured her that he was indeed watching her instead of concentrating on whatever his clients were saying. She wasn’t the least bit sorry.

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