I kissed the tip of his nose. He blinked, startled, and a faint flush crept across the bridge of it—seven hundred years old and blushing because I’d kissed his nose, while he was still inside me, in a room that smelled like sex and iron, on the floor, after a gang bang.
“That was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I told him. “And I once found a one-hundred-dollar bill in a Denny’s parking lot, so the bar was high.”
His mouth twitched. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It was a joke. And a compliment.”
He pressed his forehead to mine. Our breath mingled. His cock shifted inside me and I clenched around him and we both made soft, punched-out sounds at the same time, and then we were kissing again, slow and lazy, his arms tight around me, my fingers in his hair.
I didn’t understand.
That was the thing turning over in my brain while his tongue traced my lower lip and his hands mapped the knobs of my spine. I didn’t understand how a gang bang with three anonymous cocks, iron restraints, and a man watching could feel like this. Could feel like the most intimate thing I’d ever experienced. Could feel like being sealed to another person in some permanent, molecular way, bonded at a level that went deeper than skin.
Three men had been inside me. I couldn’t have picked them out of a lineup. They were bodies, sensations, experiences I’d processed and already half-forgotten. But Aeldryc was different. He was in every piece of iron that had touched me. His magic had held me through every thrust, every stretch, every sob.
He had been more present while other men fucked me than most of my previous partners had ever been. I’d had sex with three guards and made love to the man who was watching. And now he was inside me, and he was staying inside me because I’d asked,and his magic was keeping him hard for me because I needed it, and his hands were so gentle on my back, and his kiss was so soft, and I was sitting in his lap on a stone floor in a trashed sitting room and I never wanted to move again.
How the fuck, I thought, could a gang bang make me feel this sealed to one man?
The answer, I suspected, was the same answer to every question I’d asked since landing in Qoksmere with my ass out and my heart wide open.
Aeldryc.
“Ricky?”
“That’s not my name.”
“Can we stay like this for a while?”
His arms tightened around me. His magic pulsed through the collar, a soft vibration, matching my heartbeat.
“As long as you want, sweetheart.”
“Thanks, Ricky.”
“Maybe less time if you keep calling me Ricky.”
“You lie. You think it’s cute.” My voice was sleepy now. I closed my eyes and pressed my face into his neck and listened to his heartbeat through the iron at my throat and thought: this is what it feels like when someone stays.
Chapter 17
Pip
Iwasstillsoretwo days later when Aeldryc put on his serious face at breakfast and my appetite left immediately. His regular face was already serious by any reasonable human standard—stone jaw tense, violet eyes narrowed. The serious face added a crease between his eyebrows and a particular tightness at the corner of his mouth that meant he was about to say something I wouldn’t like.
“There has been another sighting,” he said.
I stopped chewing as the bread turned to chalk in my mouth.
“Another sighting of what?”
“Another twink.”
A laugh almost escaped me. They were still convinced ‘twink’ was a magical species, and nothing I said could change their minds. And even worse, the palace rumor mill insisted I’d enchanted Aeldryc, because the idea that a 750-year-old fae commander could just be into a guy like me was apparently less believable than dark magic. It was, frankly, insulting.
“Where?”
“The same place we found you, different old lady, this one with a horse and cart.”
