Page 109 of Running on Empty

She let out a little moan as her head landed on Ronan’s chest, the slurping sound making clear just what my brother was doing. I wanted to tell him to do deeper, harder, get her off with a merciless efficiency and then force her to come again, even as she begged him to stop. I wanted him to push his fingers inside her, groaning as she felt them sink deep, then crook them and rub them against that spot until her thighs spread wider. But Jax didn’t need direction. He did just that, the squelching sound of her cunt, the ravenous growls from my brother’s throat, a background track to this.

Stevie was always beautiful to me, the sound of her name able to conjure a million memories of her, one piled up on the other, until my heart swelled, my fangs ached and so did my eyes. She burned like magnesium, too bright to look at for long, right as she came apart.

And Jax? He pulled away with a grin on his face, the mess of her all over his chin that he refused to wipe away, a smile that got wider as he pumped his fingers in and out of her, to the kittenish sounds of her cries, her hands trying to push him away with limp fingers.

How could he ever doubt what she was to him, when she gave him her pleasure so readily? I watched him scoop her up, holding her against his body, murmuring something sweet into her ear, her giggle in his ears before they both turned back to Ronan.

“Feeling good, beautiful?” Ronan asked the question as Jax stroked his hand up and down her stomach, no doubt imagining it swollen with our cubs. He reached up idly, pushing a strand of her hair behind her ear. “We don’t have to go any further…”

But as if in answer to that, she snatched up the knife off the bed, then flicked open the blade with a theatrical flair.

Right. I needed to step in now.

“Do you know what you’re doing with that?” I asked her, crawling onto the bed, her scent hitting me like a ton of bricks.

“Stab him with the pointy end,” she said, doing just that into the air. “Or rather, don’t do that now, only the bad guys.” She heard my hiss of frustration and grinned, so fucking full of sass I wanted to pull her over my knee and…

Later.

“The knife is supposed to become an extension of you,” I told her, reciting the advice I had read. “A form of touch, but you have to be so much more careful using it.”

“Or you don’t.” Ronan winked at her, the devil on her shoulder.

“For now, please be careful,” I said, swearing inside my head that I’d lock away every damn knife to make sure they were.

“OK, big guy.” She held the handle of the knife more firmly. “Now what?”

“You have two points of contact: the tip of the knife and the blade. Try running one then the other over his skin.”

“Yeah…” Any smart arse response Ronan tried to muster was cut off. “Fuck, that’s it.”

She and I watched closely as she wrote unintelligible words across his skin with the tip, red marks left in her wake. But my brother stiffened, his hips thrusting up, making clear the way he was responding to this little caress.

“Ask him how he’s feeling,” I told her. She bristled a little at that, despite inviting me to control things. She always would and that was the tantalising thing about our relationship. Sometimes, and I would never know when, she’d give in to me and I’d… I shook my head, focusing back on them. “Make him tell you what it feels like.”

“What’s it feel like?” she asked obediently, then started to improvise, something that made my teeth lock down tight and Ronan’s smile widen. Because she laid the knife against his throat, making me thank all the god’s that the blade was blunt, but I had to check to make sure.

Ronan looked like all his Christmases had come at once, his focus entirely locked down on Stevie.

“I feel the sting of the marks you leave long after you’ve finished.” His hands smoothed down his stomach, his fingertips scudding over those red marks. “I’ll wear them with pleasure and any others you give me. I like it to hurt, beautiful, as much as I like it to feel good. Pleasure and pain? They get all messed up in my head until I don’t know anything but…”

“Ronan.” I snapped out his name as he grabbed Stevie’s hand, pushing the knife down his chest and his stomach, the blade leaving a broad swathe of reddened skin in its wake. “Ronan!”

He stopped where he was, his eyes flashing as he met my gaze, but his jaw locked down tight and then he turned back to Stevie.

“The cockblocker says I have to stop and listen,” she said.

“But it’ll feel so good when you do.” Jax rasped that out, moving behind Stevie and slotting his body against hers. His hands slid around her ribcage as she arched into his caress. “You know that, right?” Then he shot me a warning look.

“Fingers on Stevie’s clit before Ronan gets what he wants.”

I delivered my order as crisply as a general at war, though the only battle was inside me. I didn’t specify who should do it, so both of my brothers did, her whole body jerking at the sudden contact. But when they watched her pleasure rise, curling tighter and tighter inside her, it was with perfect focus.

Leaving me on the outer.

Where I was the most comfortable, I knew that now.

I didn’t think I was a voyeur. I hadn’t slunk into Stevie’s gardens to watch her through her windows, but… There was a cold, removed kind of pleasure, as exhilarating at the first snow, and just as bracing, that came from watching. So I let things get too far, the two of them working as one to get my girl off, until I interrupted at the last minute.

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