by Jane Kindred
Sebastian clutched his belt loops. “You have me now. I’m all yours.”
Macsen unbuttoned Sebastian’s trousers and worked them over the slender hips and off his legs, tugging them over the boots and tossing them down. Sebastian lay beneath him in only the white cotton undergarment and his socks and boots. The picture struck Macsen as incredibly arousing. He lowered himself once more onto Sebastian to feel the heat of the stiff cock against his stomach through the thin layer of cloth, remembering how it had felt in his mouth yesterday, damp fabric hugging the swelling beneath it.
“You’re all mine,” he echoed, liking the sound of it. He kissed his way down Sebastian’s torso without quite realizing he was repeating the steps of the previous afternoon, pausing just below Sebastian’s navel. Crawling backward, he peeled the shorts down, letting Sebastian’s cock spring out slowly before removing the garment completely. Sebastian was naked and utterly beautiful.
“Turn over,” he whispered. Sebastian did, and Macsen couldn’t help kissing the dimples above Sebastian’s cleft, and the cheeks of his ass, firm and round. And the cleft itself, his tongue slipping down into it. Sebastian gasped, clutching at the bed covering. Fates. What the hell was Macsen thinking? Sebastian’s body seemed to make him lose all reason.
But this wasn’t the same as what he’d done before. This wasn’t Macsen allowing Sebastian to penetrate his mouth. His tongue was the instrument that might penetrate. He separated Sebastian’s buttocks with his thumbs pressing inside the cleft. Macsen stroked his thumbs down against the seam of flesh where Sebastian’s scrotum began, and then put his tongue there.
Sebastian moaned, squirming beneath his touch. After stroking his tongue upward to the point of no return, Macsen circled Sebastian’s entrance and pressed against the center until the tight ring of flesh gave. The moaning got louder. Macsen forgot all about what he should or shouldn’t be doing as a man, forgot about how anyone else had touched Sebastian, or how he himself measured up against them. He only wanted to possess Sebastian fully, every part of him, and to give him pleasure. The sounds Sebastian was making and his undulating motions against the bed said Macsen was succeeding overwhelmingly at the latter.
With his own erection becoming painful after such prolonged confinement within the tight fabric of his trousers, he yanked the buttons from their holes and gave himself breathing room, stroking himself, even as he held Sebastian’s cheeks open with his other hand.
He traced the path upward with his tongue once more, pausing at the center, and couldn’t help repeating the words he’d said the first time they’d come together. “Do you want me, Sebastian?”
Sebastian too repeated his earlier words in a breathy gasp. “Fates, yes. Please.”
Macsen scrambled out of his trousers and realized he’d lost track of the little pouch. For a frantic moment, he searched the bed before he spied it on the carpet. Swiftly, he snatched it up and tore the soft tab with his teeth. Slick, silky fluid spurted into his hand, and he massaged it over his cock, pulling Sebastian back to meet him at the edge of the bed as he brought himself close. The fluid was slicker than oil and made for a swift entry, and Sebastian gave a little groan of surprise.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No,” Sebastian moaned, punctuating the sound by pushing back against him, partly braced on his knees.
Macsen drew him back farther, driving himself deep inside, gripped tight by the strong muscle. Brushing his hands up Sebastian’s sides as he pumped into him, his slick fingers closed around the slender waist. Sebastian seemed to fit him in every way.
The room was full of their soft groans and the slap of flesh slick with the lubricating fluid and sweat. Macsen moved one sticky hand to Sebastian’s cock, finding the lubricant made this more interesting, too, and clearly seemed to please Sebastian. He forgot to fuck him for a moment, leaning against him and jerking rapidly on the slippery cock, and then realizing from Sebastian’s tensing muscle that he was about to come, he fucked him hard, eliciting a loud, guttural groan as Sebastian shot. Just a few more vigorous motions and he was coming too, emptying into Sebastian while Sebastian moaned against the bed covering.
They hadn’t had the freedom to make such noise the first time, and as he groaned against Sebastian’s hair, Macsen silently blessed August for what had obviously been a carefully orchestrated plan to give them time alone where they could fully enjoy it.
They collapsed onto the bed, Macsen wrapping his arms around Sebastian and kissing every part of his skin he could reach, the fleeting essence of Sebastian’s magic in his sweat tingling against his lips. “I like dancing with you,” he said again, and Sebastian laughed. Smiling at the happy sound, he extricated himself from Sebastian and rolled onto his back, while Sebastian turned on his side and propped his head on his hand with his elbow against the bed.
“You left my boots on,” Sebastian observed.
“Mine too.” He waggled his feet in the air at the end of the bed. “Like it?”
Sebastian smiled. “Yes, I think I do. And I think I like you too. Very much. Which is odd, considering how much I loathed you two days ago.”
Macsen elbowed him. “You didn’t loathe me. You wanted me from the moment you set eyes on me in your guise as August.”
Sebastian observed him with a serious expression. “I might have. But I loathed you too.”
Macsen’s smile faded. “You think it’s your magic that’s doing it. That what we’re feeling isn’t real.”
“What are we feeling?”
Macsen sat up and began working his bootlaces loose. “Do we have to have words for everything?”
“Some words might be nice.”
If Sebastian wanted a declaration of love, he wasn’t going to get it. Macsen wasn’t versed in that sort of language. He wasn’t certain he even knew the meaning of the word, or whether he’d ever felt it from or for anyone. He only knew how frightened he was at how much he needed Sebastian already, how Sebastian permeated his every waking thought, and most of his sleeping ones as well. He couldn’t possibly put that into words.
He pulled off his boots and tossed them aside, heading for the water closet.
“Macsen? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Macsen turned back in the doorway of the little closet room. “I do not loathe you, Sebastian Swift. Not even a little bit.” Without another word, he went in and relieved himself, and turned on the shower when he was done. “We’re a bit sticky,” he called out. “Care for a bathe?”
After a moment, Sebastian appeared in the doorway. “You haven’t turned on the light.”
“Oh. Right. I keep forgetting I can.”
Sebastian switched it on, prompting a little fan recessed behind a grill in the ceiling to begin whirring overhead. He took off his boots and socks and joined Macsen in the steamy tub behind the curtain.
Macsen put his arms around him as the water streamed over them both. “I don’t know what happens next, Sebastian. I don’t know what any of this means. But I know that being with you—the way we are together—I don’t ever want it to stop.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Macsen seemed to have no trouble sleeping once we’d finally climbed into bed, but my mind was racing. Too much had happened in the past forty-eight hours for me to fully absorb. The overwhelming connection to a man who had been my enemy just a few days ago; the flight to another world that was both familiar and strange; August, alive. This last fact alone ought to have been the most stunning, and yet it was almost impossible to quantify its fantastic nature against the other two equally impossible things.
But August was key in all of them. She had brought me to Macsen in the first place, and now she was going out of her way to facilitate our being together, despite her professed misgivings about whether Macsen could be trusted. And she had kept so much from me that I was finding hard to forgive, whatever her reasons—had
even coerced Macsen into keeping things from me. If I was to trust either of them, I wanted to trust her, but there were too many things that gave me pause.
Where had she gone this evening? Why had she wanted us occupied and distracted from what she was doing? Because there was no doubt in my mind that she had. She might want me to be happy and might support me in what made me so, but there had been purpose in her actions that had nothing to do with being a supportive sister. Where had her support been, after all, during all those miserable years in All Fates? Perhaps it had been the drugs Emrys had been giving me that had kept me from seeing her and feeling my connection to her. Or perhaps she simply hadn’t been there at all.
I rolled over and watched Macsen sleeping. Of all the unlikely people in the universe, he had been here for me. The way he’d touched me tonight… I shivered at the memory as I snuggled against the warmth of his body, and Macsen stirred, rolling toward me to wrap me in his arms, though he was still sleeping. Even in slumber, he reached out for me and protected me.
I’d forgotten the marks on his back until I stretched my arms around him. We had both suffered abuse at Emrys’s hand and had both been pawns in his narcissistic scheme, merely a means for him to get what he wanted. It made a strange kind of sense at last that we should be drawn to one another. Who else in any world could understand us? I trusted him. Completely.
* * * * *
When I finally slept, it was heavily, with strange dreams fueled by too much alcohol, and I’d almost convinced myself that the night with Macsen had been part of them. His kiss drawing me out of sleep was delightful proof that it hadn’t.
There wasn’t time for much—August would be waiting for us for the drive back to Aberystwyth—and in any event, there was no more of the little pouch of slippery oil Macsen had picked up at the club. But there was time enough to bring us both to a very agreeable climax as we kissed, Macsen’s hand on me, and mine on him.
By the time we’d showered and dressed, August was at the door, and after a quick breakfast, we were on our way. I prepared to ask August to leave the top on the car so we could talk, determined to find out what she’d been up to the night before, but before I could voice my concern, she volunteered the information herself. Helmont House hadn’t been closed for the long weekend at all. She had gone back to the building after dropping us off and charmed her way in.
“I didn’t want you boys to draw attention to yourselves,” she explained when I voiced my displeasure. “There are cameras inside the building—the devices that capture your image—and Emrys might have gotten wind of your visit.”
“I’ve been there before,” Macsen reminded her.
“During business hours.” August dodged traffic artfully while she spoke, as if the conversation didn’t even distract her. I was gripping the seat. “You wouldn’t have attracted attention then. Trust me; this was the best way. I was able to get in and spend as much time as I needed there with no one about. And I found what I was looking for.”
I leaned forward in my seat; I’d ceded the front to Macsen for the ride back. “Which was?”
“You said Emrys was seeking investors,” she said to Macsen. “I had an inkling what it might be for, but I hoped I was wrong. I’m afraid it’s worse than I’d feared.”
My patience was wearing thin. “What is?”
August turned onto the dizzying expressway, taking the corners of what seemed an endless turn at a nauseating pace. “He’s selling Cantre’r Gwaelod’s water.”
“The water? How would he sell our water here? And why would anyone buy it?”
“It’s the reason our ancestor sank the Hundred,” said August. “The water is the purest in the world. It’s imbued with our magic. Emrys has been selling bottles of it for an amount you couldn’t even conceive of even in Cantre’r Gwaelod terms—selling it to the wealthiest individuals of this realm. Some use it to keep themselves youthful. Others will pay anything to save a dying loved one. It cures anything.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Macsen. “We’ve drunk and bathed in it all our lives. It’s done nothing special for us. People still sicken and die in Cantre’r Gwaelod.”
“Not like they do here. And it’s only here that it has such properties. The act of bringing it through to this realm is what imbues it with the magic.”
I leaned back. “That’s why he’s been hoarding the water from the wells. Not just to extort his tenants, but to profit from it here.”
“That’s easily mended.” Macsen rested his arm on the seat back as he turned to me. “You can call the water yourself and prevent him from bringing it through. If you opened a portal, you could even direct the water in Cantre’r Gwaelod back to its proper source to confound his mischief there.”
August shook her head. “It’s not that simple. He has Sebastian’s magic. Liters of it. He can open portals himself wherever he likes. But it gets worse. He means to raise Cantre’r Gwaelod.”
“Raise it?” I gripped the back of her seat as I leaned forward once more. “What happens if he raises it?”
“This world is forever changed.” August sighed. “And Cantre’r Gwaelod as we know it is destroyed.”
It dawned on me then that it was because of me that Emrys had such power in his hands. Because I had been his unwitting fool all these years, letting him harvest my magic, he had the power to bring an entire civilization to an end and wreak havoc on another. I would not be the cause of such destruction.
“How do we stop him?”
“Short of sneaking back into Cantre’r Gwaelod to find out where he keeps the vials of your magic and smashing them all, there’s nothing we can do.”
“Then that is what we’ll do,” said Macsen. “You open a portal for me, and I’ll go.”
“You can’t go back.” The idea of losing him tied my stomach in knots—a reaction I hadn’t anticipated. The thought of what such a visceral response must mean filled me with unexpected warmth and frightened me at the same time. “What if Emrys caught you? He’d kill you.”
“He wouldn’t kill me. He needs an earl at Llys Mawr in order to keep the title.”
“All the more reason you can’t go back. At the very least, he’d never let you leave again. You’re the one who told me we had to flee, that it was too dangerous to remain there.”
Macsen slipped his elbow from the seat back and faced the window at the front of the vehicle. “It was too dangerous for you, Sebastian. Too dangerous for me with you there. He would have harmed you to punish me. But with you here in the upper realms where he can’t reach you—I don’t fear him.”
I knew this wasn’t true. I’d felt the fear in the raised hairs along his flesh, had seen it in his eyes. Emrys would punish him whether or not I was within reach, and the punishment would be vicious.
“Let’s not be hasty,” said August. “Let me think about it.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” I insisted. But August had gone quiet with concentration on the road at last—or with scheming about putting Macsen in danger to suit her aims. I was beginning to see that she did nothing without a certain benefit to her own agenda. If it benefited her to encourage me into his bed, she would do so. And if it benefited her to sacrifice him for what she deemed to be right, she would do that also.
We were all quiet for the remainder of the drive. I was angry with August for manipulating us both, and angry with Macsen for being willing to leave me. And most of all, I was angry with myself for falling in love with him. Because I had. Hopelessly. That much was as clear as the water in Cardigan Bay.
* * * * *
Back at August’s flat, the argument resumed over lunch. Apparently, the thought she’d given the matter on the drive home had put her decidedly in Macsen’s camp. When I voiced my opposition once more and insisted that I had no intention of opening a portal to help Macsen put himself in certain danger, she calmly reminded me that
we shared our power and she could open the portal just as effectively as I could—more so, in fact, since I’d only ever done it once and she was well practiced in it.
Macsen sat quietly listening to us argue, arms folded, having finished his meal while we were busy debating. I could see he’d made up his mind and meant to find a way to open a portal with or without August’s help. I remembered then what Sven had told me once, that he’d come from this realm, through an accidental portal. There were many such passages, if Sven was right, that only went one way.
There was no point in continuing to spar with August. She wasn’t the person I needed to win the argument against. I shut up and finished my meal, waiting until afterward when we were alone to give Macsen a piece of my mind.
* * * * *
I followed him to his room, and he held the door for me, a look of questioning on his face as if he wasn’t certain whether I’d come to argue or to roll about naked with him. The latter was tempting, but I held my ground.
“Why would you do it?” I demanded when he’d closed the door. “Why, after everything, would you return and face him? You told me he had men at his disposal who would thrash you within an inch of your life.”
“An inch,” he said maddeningly, his arms folded once more. “If he has me beaten, I’ll recover. It’s seeing you beaten I couldn’t recover from.”
“But you’d leave me here.”
“And I’d come back. That’s the plan. I have no intention of remaining in Cantre’r Gwaelod as Emrys’s puppet. Even if he caught me, I’d find a way to get back, eventually.”
“Eventually!”
“It has to be done, Sebastian. If he destroys everyone and everything we’ve ever known, making himself virtually a god in this realm, could you live with yourself? Knowing you were the reason?”
My face went hot at the truth of this. “So all of this is my fault.”