We did not make it to the bedroom with any dignity intact.
For two days we had belonged to other people. To the rite, to the council, to a courtyard full of elders and a reception full of family, to every camera and every piece of choreography Yuki had written. For two days I had been looked at. Now the door was shut, the corridor behind us was empty, and the only people left in the world were the two men taking the last of my patience apart with their hands.
None of us wanted to wait.
My dress was half undone before we cleared the corridor, Rhain’s fingers at the laces and Dominic’s coat already gone, three sets of hands moving faster than they were moving well. I got Rhain’s shirt open and put my mouth to his chest because it was there and because I had wanted to all day and had not been allowed.
Rhain backed me the last steps to the suite door and put me against it.
There was nothing measured left in him. His mouth opened mine, his hand came up under my jaw, and he kissed me. I felt the dragon in it, in the press of him, in the rough sound he made against my lips. My hands were in his hair. The door was cold against my bare shoulders and I did not care.
Then his hands slid under my thighs and he lifted me like I weighed nothing. I wrapped my legs around him, and he carried me off the door and into the room.
He set me on my feet in the lamplight, turned me by the hips, and put my back against Dominic.
Dominic was already there. Already waiting, already bare to thewaist, his chest hot against my shoulder blades. When my back met his front I felt the whole hard length of him against the base of my spine, ready, patient in a way the rest of him was not.
I pushed back against him without deciding to.
His breath went out slow against my hair. One arm came across my collarbone and held me to him. His mouth found the left of my throat, where his claim had lived for a year, where his teeth had made me his in a crowded dining hall in front of his whole clan.
He set his teeth to the mark and bit down.
I came.
There was no climb to it and no warning. The bite went straight through the bond and the bond did the rest, and the orgasm arrived whole and immediate. My knees did not buckle so much as stop being mine. I went rigid between the two of them and then limp, and Rhain held me up, his hands at my waist where they had been since he carried me through the door, taking my weight without effort while the wave had its way with me. I heard myself cry out and could do nothing to shape it.
I was still coming when Rhain slid my underwear to the side and put his hand between my legs.
His fingers found me soaked and clenching, and he did not let it end. He drew it out, two fingers working slow through the pulse of it, pressing where the orgasm was already breaking so that it broke again, longer, the aftershock turning back into the thing itself. I sagged in his hold. Rhain watched my face the whole time, his pupils long and vertical and merciless.
“Count,” Dominic said against the mark.
It was not a request. It never was, when he used that voice. He had been keeping count for both of us since the first night, and somewhere in the last year he had decided he liked to hear me say the number more than he liked to say it himself.
“One.” It came out broken. I barely had the breath for it.
“Good girl.”
Rhain drew his fingers free, slick with me, lifted them to his mouth, and licked them clean.
“Faen,” he said softly, around his own fingers, his eyes never leaving mine. “You taste like the whole year I waited for you.”
The sight of it, the dark ruined Norwegian of his voice, lit me back up before the first wave had finished leaving me.
“I want to taste too,” I said.
I went to my knees in front of him.
I had his belt open and his pants down and my hand around him before either of them could decide whether to allow it. He was hard and hot in my palm, and the breath left him in a rush when I leaned in.
“Wait.”
Dominic. One word, quiet, and certain in a way I had learned not to argue with in this room.
He lowered himself onto his back on the floor, drew my underwear down and off at last, and pulled me by the hips until I knelt over him, my knees bracketing his head, all of me open above his mouth. From there he could reach every part of me, and he meant to.
“Now,” he said, against the inside of my thigh. “Go on.”
