“Please,” I beg. “Please, Becket—” and the rest is swallowed by another avid kiss—wet and hot and hard.
He breaks the kiss to suck at the pulse pounding in my throat, saying roughly against my neck, “It hurts, doesn’t it? It hurts to want something so much.”
I’m wild by now, trying to climb him, but he won’t help me, he won’t do anything to fix the need I have for him. I twine my arms around his neck; I bite his lips as much as I kiss them—and still he won’t relent.
Made brazen by the ache between my legs, I slide my hands down his chest until I find the hanging ends of his belt, and then I pull at the stiff fabric of his shirt until I feel bare skin. His lower belly is firm and flat, but not ostentatiously sculpted, and there’s a fine trail of hair leading down into his pants. I know without looking that it’s as golden as the hair on his head—I remember seeing flashes of it on Beltane night, made ruddy and copperlike by the flaring firelight, or made silver and pale whenever a wandering flashlight caught it in its beam.
“Touch me,” I whisper, going farther down until I feel the heat of his erection against my fingertips. Until I can fill my hands with his cock and tug gently upwards.
He stiffens but he doesn’t relent. In fact, he barely reacts at all—just a small tensing of his stomach and a little hitch in his breathing.
“You’re made of stone,” I accuse.
He smiles against my mouth and pulls back enough that we can look each other in the eyes. “No. Not stone.”
Becket’s hands find mine, and he moves me like I’m a doll, cinching my skirt and curling my fingers around it and then placing my other hand against his heart. “This heart,” he murmurs, pressing me back into the shelves, “beats and pounds every minute of the day so that I can exist to love. I was created to love. And I know no other way to love than with my entire body.” His hips are against mine, and I can feel the dangling ends of his belt against my thighs. “I know no other way to love other than to be consumed by it, to throw my entire body on the altar of it. I want the blood in my veins to be burning with worship. I—” and here he drops his lips to my ear “—want—” and he finally pushes against me like that, sending the taut curve of his maleness pushing into my cunt “—ecstasy.”
I shudder as he pushes against me again—expertly, not penetrating me but teasing me, the tempting pressure of his erection sending me writhing against it. But every time I chase him, he moves with me, keeping us just at the edge of joining.
“I want nothing between me and what I love,” Becket whispers into my mouth. “Between you and me. Between me and God. Ecstasy always.”
I moan. “Becket, please—”
“But we can’t live day to day consumed by love,” Becket says, as if I hadn’t spoken. He cups my breast and slides his other hand into my hair. “So I have to keep my love at bay. I have to deny myself the full force of it.” His cock pushes against me, but still he refuses to let me impale myself on him, even though I’m wet enough that he’s slid past my inner folds right to my very entrance. All it would take is one nudge. One tilt.
“Denial,” Becket murmurs to me, closing his eyes, “is the imprint love leaves on the world. It is love’s fossil. Its sign. Sacrifice is the heart of love.”
It’s the same voice that exhorts a flock to return their hearts to their god, and it seems to fill the cavernous library, all the way up to the plasterwork arching above us and all the way down to the gloomiest leather-scented corners.
Sacrifice is the heart of love, I repeat to myself, the words thrumming through me. I think of Estamond’s torc and the black roses covering the door. She who became the Thorn King so that the men she loved wouldn’t have to. Because she couldn’t think of any other way to keep them safe.
“Sacrifice,” I say, and rock myself against him, “sounds like a lot of work.”
“Sometimes,” Becket agrees, “it’s far too much.” And then he pierces me fully with his broken denial, driving me right to my toes.
My head falls back as he thrusts inside, and even at this angle, there’s a stretch and fullness that has me gasping. He has my bottom filling his hands as he lifts me higher and can finally stroke in all the way to his thick, golden base.
“Oh,” I mumble, feeling Becket’s invasion now, and the Beltane sex a couple of nights before along with it. Becket is too gentle for real sadism, so the lingering soreness is all the roughness I’ll get. I hold on to it, I savor it. Use it to remind myself that I’m Auden’s May Queen, his and Saint’s little bride to be wedded by the Beltane fire. I don’t need pain to come—just kink, and being loaned out to a desperate priest is kinky enough—but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the reminders of Auden and Saint’s rough use of me don’t help me get there. And fast.
“Becket,” I say, and then I forget what I was going to say because Becket pins me against the side of the shelf again and gives me a taste of that mysterious expertise of his, stroking in and out of me until I can barely breathe for the climax building in my belly.
“You’re magnificent,” he says, his face so close to mine. “You’re heaven. You feel—so—good—” The smooth strokes of his hips grow jerky and abrupt, and I swear I feel him swell inside of me, bigger and harder than ever.
He’s going to come.
A small firecracker of panic flares and pops in my mind. I just started taking birth control pills yesterday, and I’m supposed to use a back-up method of contraception for seven days after starting to be on the safe side. Shit, shit, shit.
“I’m not—don’t come inside me,” I say, hoping it’s not too late, hoping he won’t be mad. “I should have said something earlier, I’m sorry, but—”
I forget that he’s a priest; I forget that he’s my priest, and the look he gives me as his hips go still is as patient and understanding as any shepherd’s. “Don’t apologize,” he murmurs. “I should have asked. Are you close?”
I nod.
“Do you want me to stay inside you while I make you come? There might still be some risk even then, but I’ll keep myself from coming.”
“You can do that?”
“Yes.”
I’m too horny to be a hundred percent safe right now. Mostly safe sounds good enough to my pussy. “Yes, I want you to stay inside.”
He needs no other encouragement, fingertips digging into my ass as he starts working me against him—not with short thrusts, but with deep, grinding rolls—strokes for me, not for him. Almost immediately, the earlier panic is replaced by pure, urgent pleasure.
“Is this okay?” I pant in his ear. “Will you be okay?”
“Do you mean,” Becket asks, his voice near-guttural with need, “will I be able to keep myself from pumping my release inside you once you go over the edge? Or will I just give in and give you everything I’ve been feeling all these weeks?”
I can’t answer him, because his obscene words—and in that voice, like he’s seconds away from throwing me on the floor and rutting into me however he wants—send me careening into bliss. The burst below my navel is bright and sweet and wonderful, and I ride it easily, my eyes open and my fingers clutched tight in his hair.
“Sweet saint,” he murmurs lovingly. “I’d give up everything for this, for you.”
Even in the haze of my orgasm, I know that’s not true. Even if I’d allow him to give up anything at all—which I wouldn’t—I know he could never give up serving God. Should never. Being a priest is too deeply rooted in him to weed out now; those roots are threaded through his nerves and veins and bones.
Becket pulls out of me, leaving me squeezing around nothing, and sets me back on my feet. There’s no time for words, for him explaining what he needs, and so he spins me around to face the shelves and uses a foot to kick my legs together. Before I realize what he’s up to, he’s sliding his slick cock between my thighs from behind, fucking my pressed-together thighs like he would a mouth or pussy.
Every surge sends the dusky tip of him emerging from the f
ront of my legs, and on every stroke, the top of his shaft glides along my wet seam, making everything slicker and slicker. It peeks out a final time—huge and taut and near-painful-looking with how swollen he is—and with a moan that’s deep and rich and musical, he erupts. Thick jets of seed spatter against the shelves and run down my thighs; his hands—suddenly more forceful than they’ve been all day—press into my soft thighs and yank me back, over and over and over, so he can fuck every last drop right out of himself.
Semen runs down the front of my leg, and his breath is warm and fast on my neck as the last few shudders rack his frame.
He gradually goes still.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
His hands become gentle and careful on my legs, stroking up once or twice before he smooths my skirt down over them. He pulls back as he slides free from my thighs, and it isn’t until he makes a low noise in his throat that I realize it’s because he wants to watch. Both the act of him pulling through my flesh and also the inevitable ruffle of my skirt back over my exposed bottom, which is no doubt bearing the fast-fading reddish marks of his hands.
“I’m okay,” I reassure him, and turn to give him a hug. He’s warm—so warm—even through his shirt, and his heart is still beating fast. “Are you?”
I want to say something more—maybe about how he should try to stop loving me or about how I could attempt to love him like he wants me to—but both of those things would be wrong, and so all I can do is repeat what I said earlier. “Anytime you need me—anytime you need to show me how you feel . . .”
His lips find my hair.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I know.”
Chapter Six
Proserpina
After Becket leaves, I can’t concentrate. I decide to leave my work for later and go find Auden before he drives to London.
I stop at a window on the way up to his office and watch the bustle and swarm of the maze’s destruction. Workers crawl over its carcass, and emerging from the mud and stubble of removed hedges is the statueless plinth next to the fountain. There’re a few people standing next to it, waving in a small crane-looking thing, which I assume is to remove the heavy masonry of the fountain. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, the secret stairs will be exposed.
I wonder how Estamond would feel about that.
Rebecca is there too, in a camel-colored trench coat with her iPad tucked into the crook of her elbow, a slender, still fixture in the midst of all the chaos. Occasionally workers come up to her and she bends her head to listen—one time she pulls up something on her iPad to show them and then points to where the thing shall be done—but otherwise she doesn’t move. She is the axis the work rotates on; she is the order, the intelligence, the will that reshapes the earth. But as I finally step away from the window, I see her turn and glance back at the house.
She’s looking at her bedroom window, where even now from down the hall and up the stairs, I can hear Delphine talking about backlinks and follower benchmarks to someone on the phone.
Outside, Rebecca twists her head away, as if irritated with herself—but I notice she looks at the house one more time before she shakes her head and then strides determinedly to the other side of the maze.
Auden’s new studio and office takes up a huge swath of the renovated third floor. Like in the bedrooms, he’s kept the old beams and he’s floored the entire story with planks of pale, buttery wood. Windows are everywhere—windows which had been removed, taken apart, cleaned, repaired or replaced as needed, and then releaded and reinstalled. I know it must have been an enormous expense, but for all his en-suiting and rewiring, Auden has kept the parts of the house with the most flair and the best history, and the leaded windows were some of those parts. And now even on a cloudy day, the studio glows with light, the latticed shapes of it tracing back and forth over the floor like a grid.
On the far end of the massive room—past the rows and rows of bookshelves and the two drafting tables and the sprawling model table already covered with tiny shrubs and piles of baby-sized bricks and neat stacks of balsa wood—Auden sits at a desk with his head thrown back against his chair and one arm dangling by his side. That hand flexes now and again, and once or twice it balls in some powerful emotion, but the rest of him is utterly still—a study of Brideshead Revisited-esque tweed and mussed hair.
I suddenly have the awful premonition that he’s angry with me—one that’s not eased when he says, in a flat, emotionless voice, “Come here, Proserpina.”
Is he upset about Becket? Or maybe that I didn’t come up the very moment Becket left the house? Is he upset that I didn’t refuse Becket or personally ask permission to play?
Come to think of it . . . am I upset about these things? Should I be?
I get to Auden and I don’t wait for him to turn around, I don’t wait for him to speak. I just drop to my knees next to his chair and press my face against his leg.
“How was your time with Becket?” he asks, his dangling hand coming up to toy with my hair.
I don’t know how to answer that, other than honestly. “Good,” I say. “And also . . . not.”
“Why was that?”
I want to bury my face against Auden’s thigh forever. “He feels very strongly about me.”
“Ah,” says Auden. He tugs at my hair so that I have to look up at him. His eyes are soft.
“So you know then,” he says. Gently.
It takes a second for his words and their unspoken meaning to sink in. “You knew Becket loved me.” I try not to sound accusatory, I really do, but it’s hard. “You know how he felt.”
“Loves and feels,” Auden corrects, and then with an effortlessness that belies the strength of his lean frame, he hauls me easily onto his lap and pushes an impatient hand up my skirt. “It’s very much a present emotion for him, I believe.”
I try to look at him, but it’s impossible from this angle. “You’re not jealous—ohhh, oh, oh—” Auden’s clever fingers have found the heart of me, and they delve easily inside. I’m still wet and open from Becket, and there’s nothing stopping Auden from adding a second finger after a moment, and then a third.
I twist and groan on his lap, the stretch almost too much and still not enough, and so I try to fuck myself on his fingers, bracing my hands on the armrests for leverage. I know it must look beyond undignified, me with my legs splayed and my dress up to my waist and my mouth dropped into an O of surprised, submissive pleasure, but I don’t care. And given the hard male arousal underneath me, I don’t think Auden cares either.
“Of course I’m jealous,” Auden says, nipping at my earlobe as he fucks me with his hand. “Some days, I want to lock you away like fine china. I want you on a leash so I can keep you curled at my feet wherever I go, and I want you kept in a faraway tower where only I can have you. Because I’m selfish and mean, and I want your bright eyes and sweet body just for me. But I don’t really need to be jealous, do I?”
“You—you don’t?” I manage to say.
I can feel his smile curving against my neck. I know this smile. It’s probably the same smile his ancestors wore when they began ranging and ravaging their way into Dumnonia. “It’s my fingers you’re currently screwing this curvy little body down onto, and this weekend, it will be my bruises you wear. It’s me who claimed you by the fire, and it’s me you love. You’re mine, little bride, and you have been since you were a girl.”
His words are like his fingers—pressing and probing into secret parts of me. My head drops back onto his shoulder. “I have been yours since then,” I whisper. “Saint’s too.”
For just the briefest second—too brief for me to react—Auden’s breath catches behind me. And then he’s back to exploring my pussy, and when he speaks again, he doesn’t mention Saint.
“You’re wet,” he says. His voice is low and dark and cool. “You’re wet from Becket.”
“Yes,” I say. “Are you—are you very angry with me?”
“Am I angry t
hat my little slut acted like a little slut when I wanted her to?” The hand not working me open slides up my thigh and brushes over a streak of dried semen. “He didn’t come inside you?”
He sounds disappointed, like he’d loaned out a prized sports car to a friend and they came back having driven under the speed limit the entire time.
“I only just started the birth control,” I say. “I’m supposed to be extra careful the first week, and—”
He gives me a little nuzzle—nothing but gentle affection, as if he doesn’t have three fingers jammed inside me and didn’t just call me a slut. “I forgot about that. I’m glad you were safe then.”
My heart swells until I think it might pop like an overblown balloon. I knew before Thornchapel that I needed love like this, that I needed it rough and tender and mean and sweet, all jumbled together like a wild garden. But now . . . now I know it like I know nothing else. I need Auden, I need Saint, and I need love to be like this.
I don’t know why.
I was the little girl who tied ropes to her wrists just to feel the scratches and itches of it while she played. Maybe I was made for a raw, scratchy love from the very beginning. Or maybe I grew into it the same way that certain flowers push through the brambles to bloom.
Who can say?
“Becket took it on the chin,” I add.
Auden traces a fingertip up my thigh. “By the looks of it, I’d say he took it between your legs.”
I laugh, which sends me clenching around his fingers—and we both make noises at the same time, mine a gasp of surprised pleasure and his a hoarse kind of growl.
“I need to fuck you,” he says on an exhale, pulling free of my body and banding an arm around my waist. He lifts me up just enough to reach into his pocket to retrieve a condom and unbutton his pants, and then I’m perched on his knees while he prepares himself. I can’t resist sneaking a look over my shoulder, catching a glimpse of expensive fabric rucked up the firm planes of his stomach and the taut, swollen head of him already glistening with latex.
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