Divine Misdemeanors

Chapter Twenty-two

There were actually two living rooms in the beach house. One was smaller and more intimate, if you could use that word for a space large enough to hold the dining room, kitchen, entrance, foyer, and a small sitting area off to one side. It was the Great Room, but the part that was a living room was smaller than the rest, so it was the small living room. The big one was a room to itself, with a bank of windows that ran from high-peaked ceiling to carpeted floor. It was one of the few carpeted areas in the house, so water tracked in here would be a problem, which was why it was isolated from most of the other rooms, and didn’t have a door connecting to the beach. The long, wide sectional couch made a nearly full square in the room. There was only one narrow entrance on one end, and coffee tables built into the furniture at intervals, so you had a place to put your drinks, if the small golden wood table that sat to one side, next to a fully stocked bar, wasn’t enough to set your drinks down.

The couches themselves were white, sitting in a sea of tan carpet. The color scheme was very close to Maeve Reed’s main house. There were cool colors—whites, creams, tans, golds, and blues—in other parts of the house, but here there was nothing to distract the eye from the amazing expanse of ocean, and if you weren’t bothered by heights you could stand near the windows and gaze down at sharp rocks that were pounded by the sea.

It was both a beautiful room and a cold one. It felt like a place created to entertain business associates, not friends. We were going to try to add some warmth to the decor.

The sky was still black against the glass. The sea stretched out, and almost oily in its ink-black shine, as it reflected the ripe moon.

The tan carpet was faded to a gray-white by the moonlight and the dark. The couches glowed almost ghostly in the moonlight. It was bright enough that it made thick shadows around the room. It took a bright moon to make shadows like that. The three of us walked into those bright shadows and our skin reflected the light as if we were white water to shine under the glow of the moon.

The house was so silent that I could hear the rush and murmur of the sea on the rocks below. We moved in a silence formed of moonlight, shadows, and the sighing of the sea.

I moved toward the couch that was closest to the glass wall, because to call it a window didn’t do it justice. It was a wall of glass so that the sea stretched out forever until it met the curve of the world in a dark, moving circle that glowed and shimmered under the touch of the moon.

Something about the play of light made me want to see more of the view, so I passed the couch up and stood at the edge of the glass, where I could have that dizzying glimpse of the sea and the rocks, the water foaming silver and white in the dark light.

Brii began to take off his bows, arrows, and blades, laying them carefully on the long table to the side of the room.

Ivi came to me with his holstered gun and the sword at his belt. He came to me with the body armor vest still in place. Most of the men were tentative after so long without a woman, but Ivi grabbed my upper arms in an almost bruising grip and lifted me off the ground so he could kiss me. There was no bending down for this man; he made me come to him, and he was strong enough to pick me up off the ground and simply hold me where he wanted me.

The towel on my hair fell to the floor, so that my hair was wet and cold against our faces. He put one arm around my waist to hold me. The other hand he wrapped in my wet hair and pulled hard and sharp, so that I cried out for him, part pain and part something else.

His voice was harsh and fierce, already going lower as some men’s do. “The others said you liked pain.”

My voice came out breathy, strained with the hold he had on me. “Some pain, not a lot.”

“But you like this,” he said.

“Yes, I like this.”

“Good, because so do I.” He had to let go of my hair to pin me more tightly against his body as his other hand undid the Velcro of his vest. Then he flung me to the carpet and jerked his vest over his head in almost the same movement.

I lay there, breathless from the suddenness of it, and he’d hit just the right note so that I felt passive. The willing victim was a game I enjoyed if it was done right. Done wrong and he’d have a fight on his hands. The towel that had been covering me had come undone so that I simply lay on it naked and bare for the moonlight and for him.

He pinned my legs by kneeling on them, trapping my lower body, while he stripped off guns, sword, belt, and T-shirt. They made a pile around him like petals torn from an impatient flower.

He rose above me, putting more pressure on my legs, so that it was almost pain, but not quite. I had seen him nude, because most of us had no problem with nudity, but getting a glimpse of a man without his clothes is not the same thing as looking up the line of that same body as it kneels over you, and you know that this time everything that body promises is about to be yours.

His waist was long and slender. Even the muscles under all that gleaming skin were long and lean, as if no matter what he did he wouldn’t bulk up. He was built like a long-distance runner, grace and speed mixed in with all that strength. His hair fanned out around him, and I realized it was moving on its own with no wind but his own magic to make it spread out around him like a body-long halo of white, gray, and silver, and the vines that traced that hair glowed more brightly, as if electric wire had been run to every line of vine and leaf so that they were painted in shades of green. The spiral of his eyes had begun to move, as if I would grow dizzy if I looked too long.

Whatever he saw in my face, it made him undo his pants, and push them down slender hips so that he revealed that last part of himself already hard and long and thick, as if his body had decided that the rest of him was slender enough and it would make up for it here. He pressed against the front of his own body, thick and long, and everything you could want in that moment.

He leaned over me, his knees still pinning my legs, so that he would have to move to use all that thick, quivering eagerness. He leaned over me, and his hair didn’t fall forward, it moved to either side of us so that we were sheltered in the glow and movement of it. His hair made a sound like wind in leaves around us.

He pinned my wrists against the floor, and I was completely pinned, but he could not reach me. So I was trapped, but to no purpose that I could see.

He leaned his face over mine, and whispered, “Don’t frown, Meredith. That’s not the look I want on your face right now.”

My voice was breathy, but I managed to ask, “What look do you want on my face?”

He kissed me. He kissed me as if he was eating me from the mouth down, all teeth and biting, and then when I was about to cry enough, he changed to a long, deep kiss, as tender and full of care as any I had ever had.

He raised his face just enough so I could see his eyes. They weren’t spirals anymore, but just a glowing green as if he would be blind from the light. “That look,” he said. “You said in the shower that you’d had all the foreplay you needed, so I won’t bother tonight, but I want you to know that I am not like your Mistral. There are nights when gentle is good, too.”

“But not tonight,” I whispered.

He smiled. “No, not tonight, because I’ve seen you make a thousand decisions every day, Princess. Always in charge of something, always a choice to be made, always something to affect so many people. I’ve felt you needing to have a place where the decisions are made for you, and choice is not yours, some place where you can let go and stop being the princess.”

“And be what?” I whispered.

“Just this,” he said. He pinned my wrists with one hand and used the other to push his pants down to the middle of his thighs. Then he moved his knees from on top of my legs to use them to slide my thighs wider, so that he could begin to push against my opening.

He was almost too long for the angle he was using, so he had to use his free hand to move himself until he could slip the tip of himself inside. He was wide enough that even with my earlier sex, he had to push himself inside me, working his way in with his hips.

I raised my head enough that I could watch his body push its way into mine. There is always something about that first time that a man enters me that makes me want to watch, and just the sight of him so thick, so big … made me cry out, wordlessly.

He had almost his full weight on my wrists where he had pinned them. It hurt, but in that good way, in that way that let me know that the moment of decision was truly past. I could have said no, protested, but if he didn’t want to let me go, I could not make him, and there was something about that moment of surrender that was exactly what I needed.

I cried out twice more before he worked his way as far inside as he was going. We ran into the end of my body before we ran out of the end of him. Then he began to pull himself back out, and then the push in, and finally I was wet enough, and he was ready enough. He began to push himself in and out in long, slow strokes. I’d expected the sex to be rough to go with the way he’d started, but once he was inside me, it was like the second kiss he’d given me, deep, tender, amazing.

He worked that slow, steady stroking until it spilled me over the edge and made me scream his name. My hands strained under his, and if I could have reached him I’d have painted his body with my nails, but he held me easily, keeping himself safe while he rode me and made me scream his name.

My body ran with light, my skin glowing to match his. My hair was like ruby lights reflecting on the white and dark of his hair, and my eyes adding shimmering gold and different shades of green to his, so that we lay in a tunnel of light and magic formed of the fall of his own hair.

Only after I was a quivering thing, all nerve endings, and fluttering eyes that could focus on nothing, did he start again. This time there was nothing gentle about it. This time he rode me as if he owned me, and he wanted to make certain that he touched every part of me. He pounded himself into me, and it brought me again with almost the first stroke, so that I screamed over and over again, as if every push of his body brought me. I couldn’t tell where one orgasm stopped and the next began. It was one long line of pleasure, until my voice was hoarse with screaming and I was only dimly aware of my surroundings. The world had narrowed down to the pounding of his body and the pleasure of mine.

In the end, he gave one last push, and in that moment I knew he’d been more careful, because that last thrust got a real scream out of me, but the pain was mingled with so much pleasure that it ceased to be pain and just became a part of the warm, glowing edge of ecstasy.

It was only as he began to pull himself out of me that I realized he wasn’t pinning my wrists anymore, but something was. I couldn’t make my eyes focus enough to see, but when I pulled on my wrists there were ropes, but unlike any rope I’d ever touched.

He moved from on top of me and I realized I couldn’t move my legs either. More of the ropes were laced around my thighs and lower legs.

It made me struggle harder to see, to focus, and to be aware. I hated to chase back the edge of so much pleasure, but I wanted to see what he’d used to tie me, and how he’d done it without moving his hands.

There were vines around my wrists, vines that led to more vines that had climbed part of the glass wall, so that the dark lines of them were silhouetted against the softening dark. It wasn’t as dark as it had been when we started, but it wasn’t dawn either. The darkness was fading but there was no true light. False dawn pressed against the windows, half-hidden by the dark lines of ivy vines.

Ivi got to his feet, using the back of the couch to steady himself, and even then he almost fell. “I haven’t been able to pleasure a woman like that in so long. I haven’t been able to call the vines for even longer. You are ivy-bound, Princess.”

I tried to say that I didn’t know what that meant, but Briac was standing by the vine-covered glass. He was nude, and I could see the ash-white of his skin, not moonlight skin like mine, but a gray-white that no one else in either court could boast. His shoulders were broader than Ivi’s, and there was more meat and muscle to his body. Brii was still beautiful, graceful with his long yellow braid of hair trailing over one shoulder and down the front of his body so that it half hid the eager length of him, but he’d have had to unbind his hair to cover his grace completely. I lay there, bound hand and foot, unable to rise, or move, and there he stood over me nude and ready.

“This is not the way I would have come to you first, Princess Meredith,” he said. He seemed almost embarrassed, which wasn’t an emotion we allowed during sex much.

“He doesn’t do bondage much, our Briac,” Ivi said, and there was that teasing note that had become his speech, but that edge of sorrow that he’d had for so long was missing, as if there was no room for anything but that happy afterglow.

I pulled at the vines, and they moved against my skin, binding closer, twisting and alive, so that they tightened their grip as I tugged on them.

“Yes,” Ivi said, “they’re alive. They’re a part of me, but they’re awake, Meredith. Struggle and they tighten. Struggle too much and they’ll tighten more than you want.”

Brii dropped to his knees, then to all fours. He began to crawl toward me, and the vines on the floor writhed away from him, like small animals running from his touch. I couldn’t help but move against the bindings just a little as he crawled toward me. The vines tightened, like hands reminding me to stop that, and I fought to be still as Brii was over me, still on all fours, so that I could see down the line of his body. See that he was hard, and ready, and I was going to need the work that Ivi had done between my legs to take him inside.

Brii leaned those full red lips, the most beautiful lips in either court, near my mouth and whispered, “Say yes.”

I said, “Yes.”

He smiled, then he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and then he began to push his way inside me.