now

A few minutes later, clean and dried with soft, fluffy towels, Ash wraps a fresh towel around Greer and scoops her easily into his arms. I expect that I’ll follow them into the bedroom, and I’m looking forward to the view—Ash’s tight ass and the muscled slopes of his back, the delicate lines of Greer’s lower legs and pointed toes as they hang over Ash’s arm…maybe even the silver glow of her eyes peering at me from around her husband’s shoulder.

But instead, Ash turns to me. “Would you like to do the honors?”

Greer is still in her glassy-eyed sex coma, giving me a drowsy smile from where her head is nestled against Ash’s chest, and I can’t resist. I step forward and take her into my arms, my chest going tight as she lets out a contented sigh and rests her head against me just like she had with Ash. She feels made to be in my arms—or my arms feel made to carry her—and there’s a tiny wail of grief inside my mind as I consider that I might never get to carry her like this again. That I could have had this every night, and now I never will.

I’m still grappling internally with this as we go into the bedroom (I did get that view of Ash’s perfect ass after all) and I lay Greer carefully on the bed.

She rolls to her side, eyes gazing all pearl-gray and languid up at us. “You’re hard again,” she murmurs, running a finger up my thigh and down my fresh erection to prove her point.

I am hard again. I can’t help it, I honestly can’t. It’s her and it’s him, and I love them, and my love for them has always come bound up in sex. That is to say, the way I love them is through my body and my soul, it’s with all parts of myself, every single part of Embry Moore. But I have the decency to be embarrassed about it. It’s not like I’ve gone without tonight, and even with the excuse of my celibacy, it’s still a little ridiculous. Like feasting all night at a banquet and then hearing your stomach rumble with hunger in front of your host.

And after five orgasms and two hours of vigorous play, it’s obvious that Greer is spent and sore. It feels selfish to want more. Graceless and greedy. But she doesn’t seem to think so, letting her legs fall open as she continues to tickle light fingers along my hard length.

“Greer, sweetheart.” I catch her hand, catch her eyes with my own. “You don’t have to do that. You’ve already done enough for me tonight. I can just jack it off real quick.” Or I could lie and tell her that it’ll go down on its own after a while, but I know that’s not true. Not with Ash still hard and full next to me. Not with Greer so heavy-limbed and well-used, spread across the bed in easy invitation.

“No,” she pouts, a little crease in her brow. “I want you to come inside me again. Please.”

My cock gives a little jump at her words. “I’d love that, but I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t hurt me,” she promises, spreading her legs even more. Her pussy is flushed and swollen and wet, tempting beyond belief—not the least because it’s flushed and wet from me. I’ve already come inside her tonight, and then I remember that Ash fucked her in the shower with my spend still in her pussy, and my semen must have been streaking and sliding all over his cock along with her arousal and his own, and I have to catch my breath. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. The messes the three of us make together.

And then there’s another hand on my cock—male, rough, big. There’s no may I? this time, no pretense, no game. There’s just his hand on me, where his hand belongs, and then I look up and my heart drops to his feet. Where it belongs.

His face is that raw mix of tender violence, and in the ambient lamplight scattering in from the corners of the room, I remember why it took me so long to figure out his eyes. They’re both dark and light, pale jade and vivid emerald and a thick lake-green, and they change, they deepen and lighten, they glint and go smoky, like leaves tossed green and thick on a fire.

His lips part as our eyes meet, and I’m haunted by the memory of his mouth on my body. Those lips that are so firm and pretty-shaped and full that whenever he looks serious or sad or even angry, they turn down into a beautiful, masculine pout—and he has no idea.

He glances down at where he holds me, and I get a glimpse of white, even teeth as he licks his lower lip in an unthinking, automatic response. And then he squeezes me, as if he’s testing for himself how hard I am for him, and he licks that lower lip again, and I make a noise in the back of my throat.

“What is it?” he asks, looking up and sending a lock of raven-colored hair tumbling over his forehead.

“You’re too handsome,” I accuse him. “It’s upsetting.”

“Mmm,” he hums, still fondling me and stepping closer as he does. His naked toes touch the side of my foot, his cock only bare inches away from my hip, and I can practically feel the heat coming off it. “I think you’ll find that I’m far more upset about you.”

“Upset means ‘hard,’ right?” I whisper as his hand dips low to cradle my testicles. In front of us, Greer is still spilled over the covers in endorphin-doped pleasure, a sinuous ribbon of satisfied woman. She continues running idle fingers around my nakedness, watching Ash and me with that lechery in her eyes I find so adorable (and also so fucking hot.)

“Upset means hard,” confirms Ash, his hand now cupping me with a possessive urgency. “Very, very hard.”

He shifts closer, his mouth close to my ear and his hand leaving my sac so he can put a firm palm against my dick. “Do you know what else?” he asks in a low voice, and it’s difficult to think right now with him pressing me so cruelly, pinning my cock between his hard hand and my hard stomach. I’ve oozed enough pre-cum that it smears across my stomach as my crown brushes against the skin, and feeling the wet evidence of my arousal is somehow just as overwhelming as having my cock pinioned like this.

“What?” I finally manage to breathe out.

Ash runs a finger around my navel, smearing it through the wet mess of pre-cum I’m leaving on my stomach. It’s humiliating, and Ash seems to think so too, saying in an amused voice, “I didn’t realize all you needed was an indifferent palm and your own stomach. I think I’ve wasted a lot of effort over the years.”

My hips are moving shamelessly against his touch now, and I don’t bother fighting off the indignity of it. I like the indignity, crave it, I’ll starve without it—even if I’ve always struggled to admit that to myself when I’m in my right mind. So instead I say gaspingly, “Your palm isn’t indifferent, you fucking liar.”

He laughs and grinds the heel of his hand harder against me for that as a punishment for my sass. Or maybe it’s a reward. Sometimes, Ash makes it hard to tell.

“What I was going to say, before you so charmingly made a mess of yourself,” murmurs Ash, “is that I think I know why you’re still not satisfied after two rounds with your queen.”

“And why is that?”

“Because,” he says, his lips moving across my jaw and ear and neck as he talks, “I haven’t fucked you yet.”

He’s right.

“You’re wrong,” I say.

“Oh, I am definitely not wrong,” he croons, and I feel his other hand run down my spine. My cock jolts without his permission and I can feel his smile all the way through my toes. “Poor Embry. Poor, poor Embry with no one to fuck him. With no one to make him feel good.”

His hand slides over my ass, and habit makes me widen my legs. “Poor Embry not being able to make me feel good,” he says in that low croon still, a fingertip pressing against my ass. “Because you love making me feel good, don’t you? Letting me use that ass whenever I need?”

His finger breaches my hole, and the sharp flare of invasion goes straight to my dick, straight to that place low in my pelvis. Every single sensation feels like it’s spiraling out from the place where he fingers me, and I buck back against his hand, trying to drive him deeper inside.

“Look at you,” mocks Ash. “Grinding against me like a needy whore. Are you that hard up for it? Are you that desperate to be fucked?”

“You’re not playing fair,” I groan. Ash has his hands on both the front and the back of me, Greer’s fingers are flitting everywhere private and prurient, and I’m about to tumble face first onto this bed because I don’t know if I can support my own weight anymore.

“Why would I play fair?” Ash asks, his finger pushing in to the knuckle. It’s going in dry, so it burns, but I welcome the burn and the sting. The biting proof that the man I love is inside me.

“I don’t know,” I mumble, my head hanging down and my eyes nearly closed with lust. “I don’t like it when you play fair anyway.”

“Tell me you want it,” Ash demands, all the crooning and mockery gone. He’s all Sir now, all the soldier who once fucked me while I was bleeding and high on morphine just because he wanted to. Well, because I told him to.

Okay, begged him.

And when I walked in here tonight, I didn’t plan on ending up at this moment, even though I’d secretly hoped for it. Panged shamefully at the idea that I’d be wrestled into submission by my ex-lover.

It’s embarrassing and foolish, but I can’t shake this prickly belief that it’s unmanly somehow. Not unmanly because of the penetration, you see, but because I’m supposed to be resisting him and publicly challenging his authority…and then a few hours alone with him and all the challenge has left me, driven out by stark craving and this stupid, fateful love for him that I’ll never be able to shake.

“I want it,” I admit in a defeated voice. “I need it. Please, Ash, please—”

“Want what, little prince? Need what?” His hands leave me and he walks over to an end table by the bed, and I know he’ll want me to be specific, to beg specifically. He always does.

“I want you to fuck me,” I mumble, watching the fascinating contradiction of his Bible tremble on the end table while he dug in the drawer for lube.

“I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear.”

“I said I want you to fuck me,” I growl loudly. Then I mutter, “Asshole,” under my breath.

That earns me a dark look. “Don’t make trouble for yourself,” he warns, tossing the lube on the bed and closing the drawer.

Jesus. When have I ever done anything else?

Ash smooths Greer’s damp hair away from her forehead. “We need you one more time, my queen. Then you can rest.”

She nods, turning her head up to kiss his hand. “Do I have to come? I don’t know if I can.”

Only with Ash is being given permission not to come just as much a mercy as the opposite. He gives a small shake of his head. “You don’t have to come. Now spread your legs and welcome Embry home.”

With a happy smile and a catlike stretch, she unribbons herself, moving to the center of the bed and opening her legs in the world’s oldest invitation, and both Ash and I simply stare for a moment.

Glimmers of gold hair spilling over the pillow. A taut stomach with a little well of a belly button. Tits the perfect size for palming and cupping, the nipples furled tight and the undersides dotted with love bites. Even the most mundane parts of her—her knees and her toes and the hollows of her armpits—are perfect. This is the same woman who climbed onto a Chicago Ferris Wheel with a complete stranger, who fucked that same stranger in a heady fit of pain and rejection, who can speak three different dead languages and quote medieval poetry from memory, who has coolly stared down journalists accusing her of adultery and left the entire room rattled with her cold dignity. She is all things at once: hot and cold, closed and open. Polished elegance and raw carnality.

My Greer.

“I love her,” I tell him.

“I know,” is Ash’s response. “Go show her.”

So I crawl onto the bed to join her, relishing the way her eyes sweep down my body as I do, and also relishing just the act of it. Such a small thing to join someone on a bed, to dent the mattress with hands and knees as you crawl, to have them regarding you with anticipation and lust and familiarity. And yet it feels huge now because I don’t have this in my new life, there’s no prowling towards a waiting lover, no slide of skin on blankets as you move and they arch up to greet you. I commit every tiny, ordinary detail to memory as I gently lower my body over Greer’s. The practical little scoots we make on the blanket to line up our bodies. The moment our chests and stomachs touch. The brush of her thighs on the outside of mine. The pleasurable chore of parting the silky fall of her hair so I can brace a hand beside her head.

“I love you,” I tell her, searching her eyes. I want her to see, I want her to know, and I want her to know it now and forever. Every part of my soul burns for her and always will.

“I love you too,” she murmurs, looking so soft and pliant that I lean down and kiss her. Her lips part for me on a sigh, and she tastes like sex and the lingering sweet of champagne, and I lick at all of it, drink all of it in. Below the cradle of her hips, my cock leaks vulgar tears onto the bare skin of her pussy, and it’s she who reaches down and takes me in hand. She who guides my tip right to her center. She who wraps her legs around my waist and tries to bring me closer.

“Give it to me,” she pleads quietly. “Please. One more time.”

“One more time,” I say, and pierce her deep and full with my cock.

God, her pussy. Flushed and hot from her busy night, still wet inside from when I took my guest-right earlier and spent inside her. The best combination of slippery and tight, and it has my stomach clenching to feel my dick inside. Has my hand fisting in the pillow underneath her and my thighs trembling with restraint.

She arches and wiggles underneath me, her stomach once again pressing flat against mine and driving me mad. I unleash a wicked flurry of thrusts out of sheer reaction, my weight driving her into the bed, my hips moving hard and fast.

“Ohhh,” she breathes, staring up at me. “Oh God.”

I do it again. I hug her tight to my chest and burrow my face in her neck, and then I pump into her over and over and over, static crowding at the edges of my vision, my mouth open and kissing against her neck and shoulder. Her hand catches mine, and I slow my thrusts as I feel her fingers run across the new metal of my wedding band.

I freeze, lifting my head and staring down at her as she turns her head to see the glint of it in the dark.

“Greer…”

“It’s not real,” she whispers. And then she puts my hand with its traitorous ring flat against her chest, so I can feel the gentle slope of her breast and the hammer of her heart. “This,” she says, looking up at me and holding my hand against her heart, “this is what’s real. Us. What we have.”

I close my eyes a moment because it’s too much, her grace and her forgiveness and her understanding. Her generosity. I’m not worthy of it, and it eats me up inside that I can never be. Maybe…maybe if I win against Ash, and maybe if I can finally smother the Carpathian flames once and for all and guarantee that she’ll be safe from Melwas always—maybe then I’ll earn it. Maybe then I’ll deserve this gift she’s giving me.

I open my eyes after I can breathe normally and then I give her a long, ardent kiss. I claim her lips and tongue and teeth, tracing them with my tongue and stealing her breath and replacing it with mine. I fuck into her with slow, deep rolls that have her whimpering against my mouth. And all the while, my hateful wedding ring rests warm and solid between us, and after several minutes of kissing and unhurried coupling, it doesn’t feel so evil on my finger anymore. It’s nothing more than a hammered ring of inert metal, a thing, and it can never compare to the hammered ring our hearts make. To the fragile band that encircles the three of us and anchors us to one another.

This is real.

In my haste to fuck the queen, I’d forgotten about the king prowling around the room—and also that king’s bottle of lube resting next to where my hips move against his wife’s. It looks so innocuous there, smallish and white, and I remember how some of the most depraved and debauched nights of my life have begun with similar innocent-looking bottles. And then of course, there were the even more depraved nights—vicious and violating—when we made do without the real stuff. Olive oil or conditioner or aloe vera—or just spit and a prayer. Some of the best nights of my life.

I look up, expecting to see Ash ready to crawl on the bed behind me, but instead I find him kneeling on the floor beside us, his arms on the bed and his head pillowed on his arms. He’s watching me and Greer, and his face.

His face.

I’ve never wondered before what it would look like for someone to have their whole world in their eyes, never even thought to wonder. But Ash right now, kneeling and gazing at Greer and me—

His whole world is in his eyes.

And it’s incredible to see.

Holy, almost. Sacred.

That kind of awe and vulnerability and bloody, heart-beating love—it’s like being offered something on an altar, and realizing the person offering it thinks you’re a god. Ash is staring at us like he could forgo food and water and air as long as he had us, and suddenly my chest is cracking wide open and my heart is falling out and there was never any other way for me to end up than caught between them. With her arching underneath me and Ash beside me, I almost feel like I am a god, like I could conquer the entire world, and I dare anyone not to fall in love with her, not to kneel to him, I dare anyone to resist the undertow of Maxen Colchester and Greer Galloway.

Anyone.

Greer reaches over for Ash, and he takes her hand and rubs her fingers against his stubbled jaw as he watches us move in sweaty, lazy intimacy. “Join us,” she says to him.

“In a minute,” he answers. “I want to look at you both.”

“Looking can’t be as much fun as fucking,” Greer points out, with a little pout that would make any other man weep with lust.

“You underestimate what I’m looking at,” Ash says, unmoved, still rubbing her fingers against his face.

I know better than anyone the crude appetites he keeps behind all that honor and Catholic morality, and I know how to get him on the bed with us. I purposefully move Greer’s leg to the side and angle her hips so that he can see the stretch of her cunt around my erection, the indolent thresh of my hips against hers. The wet gleam of her on my cock as I pull out and slowly plunge back in.

Ash goes completely still, his hand frozen with Greer’s fingers against his jaw, his eyes darker than I’ve ever seen them. And with the low light of the room outlining the rigid muscles of his shoulders and arms, the tense set of his jaw, and the hunger and thirst expressed by that brutal mouth—I have a moment when I wonder if it was actually wise to provoke him. To stir the beast from his watchful pose. My stomach tightens in both fear and excitement.

With a growl, Ash stands up and puts a knee on the bed. Everything is brutal and beautiful about him right now, not just his mouth, it’s his vicious body and merciless cock and the way he prowls and crawls towards us, like no predator I’ve even dreamed of.

And then one sadistic hand is in my hair and his male organ is filling my mouth, invading it, no care or time for me to move my tongue and teeth to accommodate him. Just a rough shove in until he hits the back of my throat, and I know he must have felt the unprepared score of my teeth, the plush resistance of my tongue and the unwelcoming squeeze of my closed throat, but it only seems to inflame him further, a low groan of pleasure coming from somewhere deep in his chest as he pulls out and shoves back in again, ruthless and seeking and finally, finally it’s him, the dark master from my best and most delicious nightmares.

“Take it,” he says. “Open your goddamn throat and take it.”

I try, I do, but he’s too big, moving too fast, using me too hard, and there’s the distracting glance of Greer’s fingertips tracing my lips where they suck her husband’s cock, and it’s all too much for me to give, which seems to be fine by Ash because he forces his way down my throat with a harsh noise anyway. I choke around him and he tightens his hand in my hair.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, pushing in even deeper, until my nose is pressed against the close-trimmed hair stretching down from his navel. “That’s it. All the way. All the way.”

And then he is all the way in and I’m trying to suck air through my nose as water streams from my eyes and the cruel hand leaves my hair to cradle my face.

“You’re so fucking handsome like this,” he says to me. He pulls out, leaving me sputtering for air and then he bends down and seals his mouth over mine. Greer whimpers underneath us, her hands going to trace our chests and arms, her eyes big and silver and glued to the sight of us kissing.

Ash pulls back, his mouth wet, his cock wet, and his expression satisfied. “I’ve been looking forward to that all night.”

I’m too busy gasping for air to say me too, but he reads it in my face anyway and gives me a darkly knowing smirk. And then he’s crawling behind me, hair-rough legs moving against my own, his presence like a sun on my back, hot and life giving.

“Keep fucking,” he orders, giving my ass a smack, and so I look back down to Greer and start moving again.

She gives me a smile that I can’t describe, except to say that it conveys that hammered ring of love between the three of us and also the common bond that she and I share—which is the communion of being loved by a man like Ash. In her smile I see the understanding and amused sympathy and lust and jealousy that I feel when I watch her and Ash together, and I’m reminded forcefully of why I love her so much. We’re beaten from the same metal, she and I, cut from the same fucked-up cloth, and the ways that we love each other will always, always be tangled up in the ways we love Ash and the ways he loves us back.

Love you, she mouths as I trace the shape of her smile with a finger.

Love you too, I mouth back, angling my hips to catch her clit on the next thrust forward. Love you forever.

Her eyes glow up at me with renewed heat as I continue working against her most precious spots, as I dip my head to suck at the furled nipples grazing against my chest.

Behind me, I hear the click and flip of the lube bottle, and then two cold and slippery fingers probe impatiently between my legs. I still my hips, my breath shuddering in and out as the fingers find my hole and tease at the rim, circling once before pushing inside, both at once. I hiss at the pressure, at the sharp flare of pain, and that earns me another slap on the flank from the man behind me.

And then the fingers are gone, replaced by the hot crown of his cock. And it’s so blunt and so round pressing in against me, and I’ve forgotten how fucking big he is, because there’s a difference between big in your mouth and big in your ass, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had him inside me, and oh God, what I am I doing? What game do I think I’m playing? It’s not one I can win, even if it’s just for tonight, and if he fucks me right now, I’m going to walk out of here tomorrow morning without my heart, I’m going to walk out of here having given him everything when I had vowed not to give him anything.

I panic. “Wait,” I blurt out. “Wait!”

Ash waits.

“I—” I’m breathing so hard that I can feel my sides heaving, and I can’t gather my thoughts and my words and everything is just a messy storm of terror and lust. “This doesn’t change anything, okay? This isn’t a symbol or a surrender or a—”

“I know,” Ash says.

“I mean, it is kind of a surrender because that’s what I want it to be, but that’s what I’m choosing, okay? And I’m only choosing for tonight, and it’s not like a real surrender anyway, it’s just sex, and just because I want it doesn’t mean I want anything else—”

“Embry,” says Ash. “I know.”

“And this doesn’t mean I’m yours again, it doesn’t mean that I’m choosing anything different outside of this bedroom, it doesn’t mean anything at all, it doesn’t change how—”

“Embry, shut up,” Ash says and shoves his cock up my ass.

Holy fucking God.

The invasion is so brutal that it steals my breath and blinds my vision. It’s raw and piercing and animalistic, and I’m speared on Ash’s cock like a fish on a gaff, my heartbeat dropping down to my cock, which is still throbbing inside Greer.

“Is he inside you right now?” she asks with indecent curiosity.

“I—fuck—yes,” I wheeze. Behind me, Ash’s cock is unpitying and cruel, stretching me and searching out my deepest depths, and shit shit shit, I’m so fucking hard I can feel it in my teeth. I’d forgotten, but how could I ever forget? That having Ash inside of me, merciless and lewd, is the most alive, the most turned on, the most myself I can ever be? Ash leans forward, pressing me deeper into Greer, and instructs, “When I fuck, you fuck, got it?”

I nod hazily, not surprised to feel sweat already misting along my skin, and then Ash starts, a deep thrust that makes me grunt and push into Greer. The dual sensations of being filled and filling someone else have me dizzy, have me giddy and out of my mind with endorphins and lust and I want to fuck and fuck and fuck forever.

One of Ash’s hands roams over my tight stomach, the fingers strumming along the tensed furrows of my abdomen, the hard planes of my chest. And then he’s cupping my throat to arch me back to him.

“You think I don’t know,” he growls in my ear, “that this changes nothing? You think I don’t know, every time I look at you, that you aren’t mine anymore?”

I pant in response, because his fucking is still merciless, wedging into me with deliciously thorough strokes I can feel down to my toes. And because every thrust has me thrusting into Greer, and she is writhing like a mad woman underneath me, pulling on my hair and reaching up to squeeze my biceps and reaching behind me to touch her husband.

“God, if I could fuck you back to me,” grunts Ash. “If I could fuck you hard enough to make you stay with me forever, I’d do it, you know I would do it.”

Fuck if it doesn’t feel like he’s already trying, and I don’t know if I can even attempt an answer, because all my words are gone. Just gone. Between Ash’s cock and Greer’s pussy, my body is threatening to dissolve into nothing, into pure bliss, into an orgasm so massive and titanic that I don’t know that I’ll survive it.

“You like me fucking you through him?” Ash asks his wife. “You like knowing my cock is inside him while his is inside you?”

“Yes,” she moans. Her hands drop to my hips and reach around to palm my ass cheeks. And then she pulls them wide apart, just like we made her do to herself in the shower tonight, and I’m stretched open, visible and exposed and on display. Ash stills his hips for a moment and I just know he’s staring down at where his wife holds me open for him, and Greer is staring at him staring at me, and all of sudden, I’m completely and entirely peeled open. Everything is pulped and raw and bleeding out of my soul, because they are all of me, and fucking them is the ritual that makes it manifest, and it’s as if Ash realizes the same thing at the same moment, because he becomes unglued. Insane. Feral. He shoves me down onto Greer and follows me, his stomach against my back and his hips driving his dick in and in and in, deeper, deeper, deeper, and I can feel his entire body working for the sole purpose of fucking the life right out of me. His feet sliding for traction on the bed, his knees pushing my thighs and Greer’s thighs wider apart. His hands fisting at covers and hair and flesh. He is in rut now, an animal bent only on mating, mindless with the sheer need to come inside someone, and he’s grunting and I’m barely breathing and Greer is giving delighted, grinning squeaks as my cock pummels into her from the force of Ash’s strokes.

This. This is what he was saving his orgasm for. This moment when the three of us are thoughtless, reflexive beasts, joined so elementally that there’s no separating us. We are one, we are one, and my body burns and sings with the truth. With Ash’s kingship over me, with the secret fire he is forging at the base of my spine, and with the holy devotion we both have for the electric and otherworldly woman underneath us, who’s now murmuring words both goading and coaxing.

Fuck him, Ash, fuck the cum right out of him

I want to see your face when you come inside him, I want you to fill him up

Oh I can feel it when you fuck him, it feels so fucking good

Despite her earlier request not to orgasm, Greer is the first to snap, her mouth parting in an O of surprise and her body going so tight around my cock that she squeezes my climax from almost there to there there there, and then Ash gives a final toe-curling thrust against my prostate and I hear him mutter to himself, that’s it, fuck yes, that’s it, and I’m falling, detonating with a two-ton bomb at the bottom and erupting with what feels like all the cum my body has every held, spurting into Greer so hard and thick that I can feel it against my shaft and leaking out around my balls. Behind me Ash says, “Shit, Embry, I’m going to—” and then his hips shudder and jerk as his cock throbs palpably and fills me with heat. He lets out a strangled groan.

“Little prince,” is all he says as he empties himself into me and I empty myself into Greer and Greer still quavers out her pleasure underneath it all, and the moment whirls on for an eternity, seething pressure and wet friction and pounding hearts. And the rhythmic contractions of our joining for an impossible moment sync and align, and I would swear to every god I can name that we are actually coming together, that we are actually sharing the same orgasm, and that we are shivering through each and every wave together, joined as we should be, bound as we should be, together, together, as one flesh.

Man and man and wife.

* * *

It’s four in the morning, and a soft October chill fogs the corners of the windowpanes. Outside, the sky is an inky gloom backlit by the tired blare of the city lights, and the wind is tugging at every crack in the building, blowing brittle leaves noisily by.

Inside, however, is warm and the kind of cozy dark that makes a man want to sleep forever, but I’m not asleep because I don’t want to miss a single second of this, I want all of it etched onto the metal of my mind, indelible and permanent.

After our intense scene, Ash spent a long, intimate hour with aftercare. He cleaned us with warm rags, he gave us cold water, he rubbed our legs and backs and kissed along every inch of Greer and me as we lay tangled and spent underneath him. And after he finished tending to every bruise and sticky spot, after he finished murmuring words of pride and affection to us—that we made him so proud, that we made him so happy, that we were so precious to him—he also stretched out on the bed next to me. And without preamble, Greer poured herself into the narrow space between us, threw a leg over my hip, hugged Ash’s hand to her heart, and fell immediately asleep, her rosebud mouth slightly parted and her hair—freshly brushed by Ash—gleaming on the pillow.

But I stayed awake to watch her, and Ash did too, and now we’re staring at each other over Greer’s head. He moves his hand from her chest and runs it over the muscles of my bicep and shoulder. And then he takes my hand. Not to bite or bind, not to use on his cock. He takes it to hold it, and that simple touch undoes me, breaks open whatever little armor I have left.

“Tonight,” I say.

“Tonight,” he agrees.

I think of being between the two of them, of being so in love and blown open that I forgot who I was. I think of holding Greer and kneeling before Ash, and I think of the long days ahead with none of that. With a cold bed and a lonely heart, shut off from the only two people I ever want to love, and tonight was a painful blessing, with every high underscored by the bitterest low.

“It was cruel to give it to me.”

“Maybe.”

“And kind.”

His thumb rubs at the back of my hand. “Yes.”

“Because you love me.”

His eyes look like captured shadows in the dark. “Because I love you.”

His fingers move to the band of metal around my ring finger, rotating the ring and caressing the skin around it.

I don’t know how it makes me feel to have his fingers on that ring. Not when that ring should have been his. It always should have been his, and I can’t even imagine how he feels right now, touching something that should belong to him.

I swallow. “Why did you invite me over, Ash?”

“You said it yourself,” Ash replies, still playing with the flat gold band. “To be cruel and to be kind. Because I love you.”

“But why tonight?”

Ash sighs, releasing the ring and threading his fingers through mine. “You can guess.”

“You were jealous. My wedding night should have been yours.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

He props his head up on his other hand, staring at me. “And what, Embry? What more do you want me to admit? Of course, I was fucking jealous. Of course any wedding night of yours should have been mine too.”

He stops, his jaw setting and his throat working and his eyes glassing with unshed emotion, and then he regains control. Blinks. Breathes. “But my jealousy isn’t important, and I can’t change the past, so instead I wanted to give you something. No bridegroom should be alone on his wedding night. Especially not my little prince.”

My throat tightens and I can’t speak and all I can do is raise Ash’s hand to my mouth and kiss it. Let him feel the tears slipping down my face. Because no matter how jealous he was, no matter how possessive and bitter and sadistic, I know that ultimately he always intended tonight as a gift. He knew tonight would be one of the loneliest nights of my life, when for most people it’s one of the happiest, and he wanted to make it better for me. He wanted to help me shoulder the burden for as long as he could, and I know without a doubt that he would take it all from me if I asked. If I told him I couldn’t bear it alone, I couldn’t live with all these hooks tethered in my soul, he would lay down down his heart and his life to make me happy.

In fact, I am certain he would do it even as I ran a campaign against him. He would let me into his arms at night even as I fought him during the day, he would love me and keep me even if I refused to stop running against him. All I have to do is ask, and it’s done. Forgiveness would be mine, and I’d have a place at his feet and in his bed once again.

But…I can’t. The thought is as bitter as it is true; I can’t deny it even as it slices a fresh gash across my already scarred heart. I can’t do it because it wouldn’t be fair to Ash. For me to demand his care and love with one hand while I fight him with the other, for me to solicit his protection and adoration while I smear and malign him when we’re apart. To make him love me as I try to steal everything from him.

Even I’m not that selfish.

He rubs his hand across my tear-wet cheek, along the early morning stubble roughing the edge of my jaw, and then brings his hand back to his face. I wonder what he’s doing and then I see the part of his lips and the slide of his tongue. He’s tasting my tears. Something I’ve seen him do a hundred times, and yet every time is as sexy and sweet and terrible as the last.

I can’t help it, I let out a groan as I watch the dart of his tongue and the press of his mouth. “You make me crazy,” I whisper, and I mean it in every good way and every bad way and every way in between.

He pauses, his hand still at his mouth and his eyes glittering in the dark. And then I see his throat working again, a clench and swallow against some powerful emotion. Somehow I know, I just do, what he’s going to say.

“Embry,” he starts.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t ask. Please.”

“Why?” he asks in agony. “Why can’t I even have the asking?”

I could lie. I know I could, just as I know that he would recognize it for what it was immediately—and just as I know he would let me lie to grant me whatever shreds of dignity I wanted to grasp at.

But I won’t lie. Morning is almost here, and the truth is edging at the horizon with the sun, ready to shine a pale, weary light on us anyway.

“Because,” I say, fighting back more tears. “If you ask, then I won’t be able to say no.”

He rubs at his face with his hand, spending a long time with his fingertips against his eyes. “All you’ve ever done is say no when I ask you things. I don’t see why now is any different.”

His bitterness stings. “I suppose I deserve that,” I say.

“I’m sorry, ” he says, his voice tired. He drops his hand from his face and looks at me. “I want you, and I want to have you, and to keep you, and for fifteen years, I’ve been trying. And I can’t tell what’s the best way to love you, whether it’s trying to catch you or to let you go.”

“I’ll always want to be yours,” I say. It should be embarrassing, it should feel weak to admit it, but it doesn’t. Not here in the dark with our tears and our sweet Greer warm between us. “Always. But…” I trail off.

“But you can’t allow yourself that,” he finishes for me.

“It’s how things have to be, Ash. You know why.”

“I suppose.”

And we go quiet. The air is unsettled, painful, and just when I start thinking it’s time for me to leave, Ash gets off the bed and comes around to my side, crawling under the covers behind me and wrapping his big body around my own. His knees tuck behind mine and his arm snugs in across my waist, and his groin presses against my ass. He nuzzles his face against the back of my neck.

“You have to kiss me goodbye when you leave,” he murmurs.

“Yes, Achilles.”

And despite the oncoming dawn, I fall asleep in his arms, knowing that when I wake up and kiss him goodbye, it will be for real, and probably for always.

And it will kill me.