Page 46 of Samhain

“What does my princess want, huh?” He nibbled at my throat, his fingers working between my legs, teasing at flesh that ached.

After these last three days together, I shouldn’t yearn for him the way I did. I shouldn’t want anyone this desperately. Hadn’t I had my fill? But I couldn’t stop myself. I had to get more.

“Tell me you missed me.” I kissed him and wrapped my hands around his neck, positioning his cock at my entrance.

“I missed you more than you can ever know.”

“Do you still love me?” I knew he did, of course he did, but I wanted to hear him say it.

“I’ll always love you.” He grabbed my wrists and twisted them behind my back, holding them at the base of my spine, pinning me to him. I sank lower, sheathing Lex’s big cock inside me, arching into the agony and the nirvana mixing together. He took my nipple between his teeth, biting and pulling as he worked himself in and out, sending a tremble up my spine and down my legs.

“Tell me you love me, too.” He gave the other nipple the same attention before grabbing me by the back of the neck and pulling me upright, his hand in the back of my hair. “Tell me I didn’t lose you to the Hollywood heartthrob.”

I laughed and rocked against him, smiling as tingles of electricity shot through our connection. I was sore, but in the soothing warm water, I’d do anything for him. I craved his body as much as it appeared he craved mine.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

We took each other the way we always did, with nails and teeth and filthy words. When my climax claimed me, wrenching from my body in a combustible mix of pain and ecstasy, I moaned into the space between his neck and his shoulder, delighting in the kick of his cock inside me.

“Fucking hell, Miri.” He kissed me, groaning and gasping, making me feel so damn lucky to have him.

“My prince,” I murmured between gasps. “My love.”

In the aftermath, he helped me out of the bath and dried me off, wrapping the towel around my shoulders with a wink before grabbing his own.

“Are you happy, darling?” I asked. “With all this?”

“Happy?” Shaking his head, he snorted and pushed the lever for the drain on the bath, gesturing me to go in the opposite direction of where Ivy had left, into his room. “No, none of us is happy.”

The walls were painted a gunmetal gray and decorated with black-and-white photographs. I got closer and realized they were places from his life—our college, our old dorm, the Naval Observatory where he lived as a child, and finally a stunning one of Ivy.

It took my breath away.

She sat naked on a chair, facing the floor-to-ceiling window in a former apartment, the Washington Monument and the Capitol in the distance. One long leg crossed over the other and a high heel dangling from her toes, she had her elbow on her knee and a cigarette hanging between two fingers. She’d been crying, but the way she absently stared out at the DC skyline indicated the scenery wasn’t the cause of her tears.

It was beautiful, and it said so much about Ivy as a person—facing the physical manifestation of her legacy, crying because, at the end of the day, she was human like the rest of us.

“Who took this?” I asked, desperate for a copy of my own.

“I did.” Lex walked up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “When you don’t fuck everything that moves, you have a lot of spare time on your hands.”

I turned in his hold.

“You’re not slagging around?” This surprised me. Of course, I had stopped all my extracurricular activities as well. But when we met, we were equally as disreputable.

“No,” he said. “After Ireland, it didn’t feel right.” He walked to his dresser, digging through his clothes to find something suitable to wear. “I tried with Ivy for a while.”

“Oh?” I pretended that didn’t hurt. It did and it didn’t. I couldn’t act like I hadn’t done the same thing with Carter. We’d needed each other in a way only we understood. Lex and Ivy had to have felt the same way. To distract myself, I went to my luggage so I could find my own sleepwear. “How did that go?”

Another sardonic laugh. “About as well as you’d imagine.”

“That great, huh?” I smiled, remembering how they used to fight.

He sighed as he bent his arms through a shirt to pull it over his head. “She’s convinced whatever’s between us is just because of some fairy curse.” He shoved his long legs into gym shorts. “And I don’t have a good enough reason to argue with her.”

“Fairy curse.” I thought of my gift, of how I could grow flowers. In two years, I hadn’t told a soul. Maybe I should have said something to Lex right then and there, but I imagined what he’d think of me and held my tongue, and it wasn’t him I needed to tell first. If anyone deserved that honor, it was Ivy.

“Yeah,” he said. “Siobhan and the ring and the nightmares.”

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