Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “I was,” he said, tilting my head back and using the showerhead to rinse. Ahhhhh… it felt so good, I just leaned my head against his naked hip, wrapped my arm around his thigh, and hung on. His boy parts—laughable, calling something that big “boy parts”—hung, heavy and saggy from the heat of the shower, surrounded by wet, coarse golden hair, and we were comfortable enough with each other for that not to matter. He was beautiful when he was engorged and erect, and lovely and powerful moving inside me, but he was my Green, and in romantic relationships there comes a time when it stops being about sex—although sex is pretty fucking awesome—and goes beyond it.

  Many people had seen Green naked and touched his body.

  But there was a place in his vast, open heart where only I resided, and this was the place I was seeking for refuge tonight.

  “Will you tell me why?” I all but begged, and he set the showerhead in its holder and bent that long way down to kiss my head as it rested against him.

  “Yes,” he agreed, something in his voice broken. “I wasn’t there for you tonight because there was something I didn’t want you to know.”

  “I was scared….”

  “It was dangerous,” he agreed. Suddenly I could hear the self-blame there, and it made me feel worse. Green… Green worked so hard for all of us. It was wrong to hear him angry at himself.

  “We were okay,” I found myself comforting, and he gave a masculine laugh/grunt sound and held me to his middle. I wrapped my arms around that slender waist and held on.

  “I put you in danger by keeping you in the dark,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, beloved. I… I didn’t want you to know.”

  “It’s okay.” Oh Goddess. My Green, there was shame in his voice. “Anything,” I sniffled. “You know, Green, anything. I’ll forgive you anything, I’ll protect you from anything—just don’t do stuff that hurts you anymore.”

  Oh, there they were, the inevitable fucking tears that always came with aftermath. Anyone who thought I was tough should watch me do this, because Green and Bracken had probably seen enough of it to last even Green’s 1800 years.

  “Shh shh shh shh…,” he comforted, and I was ashamed of how glad I was that he’d put off telling me the Big Bad until tomorrow. I was here in his heart now, and the terror of everything that had happened in Sugar Pine was shaking me in his embrace. Tomorrow, tomorrow, when we were clean and dry in the sunlight, would be time enough to air the shadows.

  Green: True Sunshine

  GREEN SLID back in bed with her after he’d walked the earth of his hill in the chill dawn. Bracken, who had crawled in next to Cory in the night, awakened with him. They’d gone walking together—not speaking, as was the custom of the elves who observed the quiet, strengthening meditation of the walk—but Bracken’s recriminating silence spoke volumes. Green had been to the point of blurting out I’m sorry, you git wank, could you just give me a fucking chance to explain! when their walk finished and they touched the porch, and Bracken characteristically ruined the dramatic effect of all of that impressive brooding.

  “You’d better fucking tell her, leader, or she’s going to castrate you with her vicious fucking tongue.”

  Brack’s untraditionally short black hair was sticking up all over his head, and his drawn-in brows and puckered eyes gave him the appearance of a disgruntled porcupine. In spite of himself, his guilt, his worry, and his acknowledgment that he’d fucked up, Green had to force back a snork of amusement.

  “What’s so goddamned funny?” Bracken huffed, and Green just shook his head.

  “You’re very right, brother,” he said, fighting the full-blown grin that was threatening. “But it would be a hell of a way to lose them, you think?”

  Bracken growled low in his throat, but it was hard to argue with Green, hard to cross him at all, especially since Brack had practically worshipped him since birth—and since Adrian’s death and their helpless attachment to the little human sorceress in their midst, they had become especially close.

  The fact that Green admitted he was wrong really did take the charge out of Brack’s impending tantrum, Green could tell.

  The tantrum dissipated like a smog cloud over the ocean, and Bracken stomped off to his own shower and his empty bed, grumbling something unflattering about silver-tongued elves and the fucked-up deadly magic secret poetry of fucking lunatic sex-gods. This also made Green giggle, but very quietly, and to himself.

  But he wasn’t laughing now.

  He hadn’t needed to shower—Cory had gotten used to cold, slightly damp feet in her bed in the mornings. This morning she looked so charming, so vulnerable, lying mostly on her stomach but a little on her side, with her hands bundled up under her chin clutching the blankets and her bare shoulder peeking out of his enormous white T-shirt. It just seemed imperative that he strip naked to slide into bed with her.

  He wanted his body to be as bare as his soul when they were done, and she could choose to do with that what she wished.

  “My hair’s a disaster,” she mumbled, squinting up at him. He moved closer to her so he could stroke a bare arm with one slender finger.

  “The sprites have been at you, luv. You look like you had full hair and makeup for your ‘morning after’ scene.” Normally, after going to sleep with damp hair, she would wake up to find her reddish, curly hair was as tall on her head as it was long down her back.

  She giggled a little and hid her face from him. “I barely do hair and makeup for my ‘night before’ scenes,” she admitted, and Green laughed, the sound like sunshine.

  “You don’t need to, beloved,” he told her throatily and then leaned forward to breathe in her ear until she turned her face to him.

  “Sure I do,” she told him, still shy and pleased with the compliment. “Just so you know that I care enough to do it.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt your love if you cut it short and dyed it black again,” he said semiseriously. He was rewarded when her out-and-out grin made an appearance, no shyness added.

  “If the sprites ever give up on me, I may hold you to that,” she warned. “Easiest haircut I ever had.”

  Green laughed again, remembering who she had been and what she had looked like when she first arrived at the hill. But his laughter stilled, and he caught her sombering eyes and nodded, lowering himself off his elbow to lie side by side just inches from her, their bodies not quite touching, their faces just barely close enough to feel the breath of a hard sigh.

  “It’s time, isn’t it?” he asked regretfully.

  “Yes, please.”

  There was no recrimination in her voice, no anger, no bitterness, but there was expectation. He hadn’t been there for her, and all she asked was to know why. Goddess, he thought, a real pain squeezing his heart, she was all of him, the throb of blood in his veins.

  “Adrian wouldn’t have noticed at first,” he said, almost to himself. “He would have just let it go, until he reached for me. And then he would have been pissed as hell.” He and Adrian had very rarely fought, but an instance like this one had been one of their few angry moments.

  He’d never told Adrian the truth that had spawned that particular argument. Adrian hadn’t worried at it the way Cory had—he had complete faith in Green, and Green had tried to live up to that without involving Adrian personally.

  Cory wouldn’t let him get away with that shit—she never had.

  “Adrian was better than I am…,” she said unhappily, jumping, of course, to the most wrong conclusion she possibly could.

  Green reached out and traced the pattern her freckles made across her cheeks. He couldn’t yet put his fingers on the subtle changes wrought by the last two years. There were no lines, no sags, no puffy-skin moments, but he knew there were changes. He’d never minded human aging, but he was relieved he didn’t see it on her yet. More time for him, mostly. More time for them.

  “Adrian was more of a self-centered git,” he corrected almost absentmindedly. “You are right here in the moment with me, luv. Yo
u won’t let me do this shit. And it scares me, you know—scares the hell out of me. All I want to do is all I’ve ever wanted to do….”

  “Keep us safe.” Because she understood.

  “But you’ve been running out on these ‘jobs’ since last year,” he continued, mindful that she’d moved her hand up to clasp his restless fingers and bring them to the warm beating space between her breasts, “and I can’t seem to tell you no. So I need to share this with you too. I….” He sighed, a memory of Adrian suddenly so clear in his mind that he was surprised Cory didn’t see him as well. He’d been lying in this bed, almost in her exact position, but his white-blond hair had been shorter, and his eyes, that clear, autumn-sky blue, had brightened the moonlight that flooded the window.

  “So many people here, Green. Maybe you were right—I don’t think I can be trusted with all of that.” Those stunning eyes had been oh so anxious, and for the first time in a decade, Green saw the frightened victim he’d raised out of hell in the hold of a ship.

  Green’s smile had been proportionately soft, proportionately protective.

  “Peace, beloved,” he’d soothed, lacing their fingers together, remembering the taste of Adrian’s skin just moments before, craving the feel of that taut, giving, cool flesh around him again, even now, when their breathing had hardly stilled.

  “I’ll take care of you, Adrian,” Green reassured then, propping up, kissing that lovely, vulnerable shoulder blade, up to the curved hollow of the neck, his hands moving lower to the flesh he’d just violated and loved, rubbing the traces of himself on Adrian’s backside into that delicate, ticklish cleft that hid all of Adrian’s not-so-secret places.

  Adrian gasped, moaned, bared his fangs as he rolled onto his back and opened his body up for complete submission to the one person he loved above all others.

  “You always take care of me, Green,” he’d panted. Green had taken that invitation and moved lips and fingertips over the sweet, pale, cool body with reverence and passion, even as Adrian clutched his hair and moaned again. “You take such bloody good care of me….”

  CORY WAS gazing patiently into his faraway eyes, and Green forced himself to come back, in spite of the fact that his erection was called to attention by the memory and by Cory’s very warm, very soft, very human body next to him.

  He remembered that he had a sentence to finish.

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me make love to you so we could not have this conversation?” he asked out of the wild blue.

  Her smile was sad. “Adrian would.”

  “But not you.” He nodded. “I love you for it, you know.”

  “Love me but don’t trust me?” she asked, getting to the heart of the matter.

  “Trust you, and don’t want you hurt,” he replied, not taking offense. He hadn’t been there. Two years of promising he would always be there, and he hadn’t been there. She could have raged and ranted—two years ago she would have—and he would have taken it, because he had promised her the world but ripped the rug out from under her feet.

  She blinked, slowly, her red-brown lashes fanning her cheeks. “So tell me,” she said at last, and he did.

  Two sentences in, her jaw clenched. Halfway through, she sat up in bed, clutching the sheet protectively to her T-shirted chest. By the time he was done speaking, she’d dropped the sheet and was off the bed, her eyes burning and her fist clenched.

  “I’ll kill him,” she snarled, the emotion building momentum in her throat.

  “Beloved, we need to find out how far this goes…,” he interrupted reasonably, but she wasn’t feeling reasonable.

  “Fuck that. I’ll kill him.” She started to pace on his floor, her bare feet padding on the hardwood. “You know where he lives. Bracken and I will go, and I’ll do a mind-whammy to find out where the pictures are, and then Bracken will suck his heart out of his fucking chest!”

  Green scrambled out of the bed to take her shoulders and calm her down. “Corinne Carol-Anne…,” he began, knowing that her full name still had some power for her.

  “He touched you!” she growled, interrupting the whole of it. “Fuck the logic, fuck the reason, he’s slimy and demonic and reprehensible and corrosive and he touched my Green!” Her brown eyes were burning with fury, and Green put his hands on her shoulders to soothe her. She scowled and clamped her hands over his, pulling them to her chest and cuddling them like kittens, stroking their backs like fur.

  “No one touches you like that,” she said brokenly. “You’re Green… you’re all that’s good. All that holds us together.”

  He bent forward and kissed her angry forehead, and she glowered at him. “This is what I do,” he reassured. “My body, my gifts—they’re all about pleasure. I use them as I can….”

  She shook her head and stroked a suddenly wet cheek against the back of his hand. “You’re wrong, ou’e’hm.”

  She was very adept with words. She used his title for a reason. “That may have been what you were given, but that’s not how you’ve used them. All the time you’ve put into making your home a haven, a sanctuary—it’s not about sex anymore, Green. It’s not about pleasure. It’s about love. He profanes you with his touch. I’m your… your paladin, Green. The tasks I accomplish, the missions I run—that’s about keeping our people safe, your dream alive. And I say no.” Only the fact that her voice broke on no indicated that she knew she was lecturing him, giving him orders, and that wasn’t the way their relationship worked.

  “Cory,” he tried again, when a tense, wrought silence had weighted the sunshine on their backs. She interrupted him with a shaken head.

  “You just can’t,” she whispered, still stroking his hands. “You had to do that once to stay alive. I can take care of myself, I can take care of us…. You can’t do this anymore.”

  “I’m not ashamed of what I do to make you safe,” he said with injured dignity, and she stopped looking at his hands and looked him solidly in the eyes.

  “Then why wouldn’t you tell me?” she asked brokenly, and he grimaced.

  “You’re human, dearest. In spite of everything, you grew up with words for people who do what I just did….”

  She stepped back as though he’d slapped her, and the look on her face was enough to flay his skin. “Bullshit…,” she whispered, then stronger, “bullshit…,” and then as he neared her to touch her hands, to calm down the storm he saw and heard breaking, “bullshit!”

  “Cory—”

  “Fuck you, beloved!” she shouted, and he actually flinched—because she fought with Bracken like this, but not with him.

  “Corinne Carol-Anne—”

  “Kirkpatrick op Crocken Green!” she finished with gritted teeth. “If the Goddess doesn’t strike you with cramps, sweat, and barf right now, it’s because you’ve completely deluded yourself, Green. I’d hack out my tongue with yarn scissors before I called you that word.”

  He blanched, because he’d misjudged her, underestimated her the same way the world had done so often before she came to the hill. “Shit.” He yanked his hand through his hair and snarled it at the ends.

  “‘Shit’ is right. You know better than that from me,” she accused. “And besides—you showered. We got here and you were in the fucking shower. There’s only one reason you’d do that, Green, and we both know it.”

  And once again, he’d bollixed things up completely.

  “I used to be better at relationships than this,” he said almost to himself, feeling completely lost after nearly two millennia of living. “Adrian and I never had this conversation. One hundred and fifty years, and it never even came up….”

  She was listening to him ramble with such a terrible, inexplicable look of hurt and anger and bafflement twisting her plainly pretty face that he wanted to hold her hands, touch her face, anything to help her sort it all out. But she was Cory—his Cory, like he was “her Green.” She did just fine on her own.

  “Say it,” she whispered, a sudden, serene—almost Green-like
, had he known it—kindness suffusing her face with softer colors.

  “Say what?” That lost feeling was still there, the horrible one that seemed to hollow out his stomach when he was least ready to fill it. It was the same blood he’d tasted when he’d held Cory at the bottom of a gravel hill and realized they would both survive Adrian’s death, and the clink he’d heard when his prison door had faded shut in Oberon’s faerie hill. It was even the feeling he’d had, if the truth be known, right after he’d escaped and boarded that fateful ship with a hold full of lime trees giving him strength and protection from the deadly salt ocean, when he’d smelled the fresh spray on the air.

  And here she was, his beloved—perhaps the last beloved his heart would have the strength to bear—and her voice promised a path out of this wilderness.

  He listened to her with the grip of a drowning man on a rope.

  “Tell me why you showered. You were sopping wet. I remember you, there in my head for most of the trip, but there was a… a gap. A tiny gap. I wouldn’t have remembered it if you hadn’t been dripping wet. Why the shower?”

  He closed his eyes. “Ah, Goddess….” He opened them again; she was still looking at him without flinching, her gaze absolutely relentless.

  “Say it, Green!” she demanded in a voice that trembled.

  “What’s there to say? I didn’t want him touching you? I didn’t want him on my skin when I touched you? Is that such a big surprise?”

  She made the first move, suddenly close enough to touch, and her little, rough hands came up to his lovely narrow face, cupping against his cheeks, stroking his cheekbones with her thumbs.

  “If he’s not good enough to touch me,” she said, her voice as firm about this as he’d ever heard it, “he’s not good enough to touch you.”

  He was going to try to convince her otherwise. He played chess. He was good at it. He knew his role on the board, and he knew what it would take to keep the blackmailer in line until they had all of the evidence tracked down. Stopping what they were doing would only make their lives more difficult.