“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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HE STAYED UP ON HIS ARMS AS IVI HAD DONE. BOTH OF THEM WERE too tall to do the standard missionary position with me. Brii slid inside me more easily than Ivi had, but it wasn’t because he was smaller.
“Goddess, she’s so wet, but tight.”
“Not as tight as she was before I had my turn,” Ivi said. He moved up enough so I could see him past the sweep of Brii’s shoulders. He looked down at me as the other man found his rhythm and began to dance his way in and out of me, his body pumping above mine, while Ivi held me for him.
Brii raised one hand from the floor where he was holding himself above me, and put his fingers on either side of my face. “I want you looking at me while I fuck you, Princess, not him.” As if I’d insulted him by looking away, he proved that he might prefer gentle, but he had other speeds. He began to pound himself into me as hard and fast as he could, so that the sound of flesh hitting flesh, his labored breathing, and my small sounds of protest were all the world could hold.
It had been too soon since Ivi’s good work, and Briac brought me quickly. One moment I was riding the building pleasure, the next my body was bucking and straining underneath him, fighting the orgasm, fighting the vines that held me down, my spine bowing, my neck thrown back so I screamed his name against the glass.
Briac rode my body until it quieted, and I was left blind and limp underneath him, and then and only then did he let his body do that one last thrust, so that he screamed wordlessly above me. Then he fell on top of me, limp, but his weight felt good and right. His heart pounded against my body, his breathing so harsh it sounded like he was still running as fast as he could as he lay there on top of me, too exhausted to move, too tired to do more than throw his body a little to the side so I wasn’t smothered under his chest and stomach.
When he could finally move, he drew himself out of me, and that made me cry out again, and caused him to make a sound that was pleasure edged with pain.
He lay on his side beside me, and I could focus my eyes enough to see his own fluttering shut. He spoke in a voice that was hoarse and thick, “Goddess, that felt so good, almost too good.”
“It almost hurts, doesn’t it, after so long?” Ivi said, and I could see him now sitting on the couch, close enough that he’d had a ringside seat for the sex.
“Yes,” Brii answered.
“Princess, can you hear me?” Ivi asked.
I blinked up at him and finally managed a breathy “Yes.”
“Can you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Say something besides yes.”
I gave a small smile and said, “What do you want me to say?”
He smiled. “Good, you really can hear me. I thought we might get you to pass out from pleasure.”“Not quite,” I said.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
That made me look at him a little harder, trying to chase back the amazing afterglow of it all. Dawn had come to the east, so there was white light to the western sky. The night had slipped away during all that sex.