“Why do you have flowers?” Becket asked him then, but he already knew why.
He already knew where Ralph would lay them down too.
Ralph’s eyes had narrowed then. “Don’t . Test . Me ,” he’d hissed. “I could still call the police. It’s only for the sake of your father that I won’t.”
The hand clutching the flowers had been shaking though.
Ralph Guest was afraid. And Becket knew why.
“I know what you did,” he told the older man. “I know what you did here.”
“You don’t know anything,” Ralph said uncertainly. Fearfully.
“I know what you did .”
Ralph’s fear crystalized into anger, and he’d taken one threatening step toward Becket, which was all it took to send Becket running, scrambling up steep hills through the woods until he emerged onto a footpath, back sweaty and palms covered in mud from how often he’d fallen.
He’d been too frightened to return for years, too frightened even to think of it; only taking the collar had given him enough sense of safety to return. And by then, Ralph was too sick to terrorize anyone any longer, even people trespassing into the chapel ruins.
In the here and now, Becket walks back to the altar and the tree. It’s too dark and wet to see much, even with the flashlight, but he knows the exact spot he’s looking for.
The spot where Ralph Guest would have laid down his flowers.
In the dark and the cold, still smelling like smoke and mud and spilled Prosecco, Father Becket Hess gets to his knees.
And he prays.
* * *
Rebecca decides to admit it to herself.
She liked tonight.
She liked it more than she had any right to and far more than she thought she would. She liked the sex, of course, even if she wasn’t the one having it, and she liked the cool, wet night all around her, the trees and the grass and the thorns and the rain. She even liked the ritual, though she doesn’t know if she’d ever admit that to anyone else, and anyway, she was just responding to the orderliness of it, the feeling of being with her friends and marking out a fresh start.
Who wouldn’t respond to that?
Unfortunately, and most troublesomely for her, the part she liked best about tonight is currently naked and wrapped in her blanket, with clean blond hair spilling every which way across her pillow.
She can still hear the sweetest word in the world coming from Delphine’s lips. Yes.
Yes.
She relished every second of helping Delphine clean up, of bandaging her hand, of cuddling her to sleep, like she was playing house, but instead of house , the game was kink, the game was Your Very Own Submissive To Keep. The game was pretending this was their real life, where Rebecca could spend the evening whispering commands into Delphine’s ear, and then spend hours afterwards petting her and coddling her.
Rebecca stands up and walks to her window, unable to see much past the rain but not caring. She doesn’t feel ready to stop playing the game. In fact, her body is burning with unmet need, and while any good Domme has her share of scenes where she doesn’t come, Rebecca actually feels like the hunger has gotten worse since the night’s gone on. Like the ritual cracked her open, and now she’s going to be a wet, horny mess until forever from now.
She risks a glance back at Delphine, at the exposed shoulder and the high curve of a breast.
God, she wants to fuck. She wants to fuck so badly she’s shaking with it.
But she won’t wake Delphine up; she can’t. That would be beyond thoughtless, and strange anyway, given that whatever truce they’ve struck around the ritual is bound to be dissolved by morning. It’s safer to stay away, safer not to crawl over Delphine and pin her wrists to the bed and bite her neck until Delphine is begging to eat her mistress’s pussy . . .
Rebecca shudders, leans her forehead against the cool glass of the window.
Stop playing this game , she berates herself. It doesn’t matter that the very thought of Delphine’s soft, giving body makes her wet; it doesn’t matter that somehow with Delphine Rebecca forgets that she has to be perfect, that she has to work harder than everyone else, that she has to earn everything she wants two or three times over.
It doesn’t matter because it wouldn’t make sense, this game, and Rebecca doesn’t have time for things that don’t make sense.
No time at all.
* * *
Delphine wakes up with a stretch about twenty minutes later, one of those long stretches that one could do forever, and then she yawns and rolls onto her side. Last night she slept in the guest bed, and now she’s in a bed that smells like something clean and mossy and floral. A garden of a bed.
Rebecca’s bed.
Delphine looks across the room to see Rebecca standing by the window in a nightgown, all dainty spaghetti straps and thin red silk, with her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed. Her hair is bound up in a satin scarf, exposing the slender swan curve of her neck and the exquisite wings of her shoulder blades, and she’s so pretty it hurts to look at her.
But Delphine keeps looking. She’s learning she likes it when it hurts.
“Come to bed,” she says. She doesn’t even know why she says it, except it’s the only thing she wants right now. She doesn’t want Rebecca far away, she wants Rebecca close. She doesn’t want Rebecca holding herself, she wants Rebecca holding her .
She’s too tired and too wrung raw by the ritual to pretend anything else.
Rebecca finally turns to her, and Delphine doesn’t need more light to know that her eyebrow is raised. “I give the orders in this room,” Rebecca says, but she sounds more amused than annoyed.
“Come to bed . . . please?” Delphine tries again.
Rebecca studies her for a long minute. And then with a sigh so big it moves her shoulders up and down, she drops her arms and comes to the edge of the bed. But she doesn’t climb in, she just sits next to Delphine and stares down at her.
“What’s wrong?” Delphine whispers. “Why won’t you get in bed?”
“Because,” Rebecca says mildly, “if I get into this bed with you, then I’m going to fuck you.”
Delphine’s mouth falls open as Rebecca adds, “And if I fuck you, then I’m probably going to want to do it again, and maybe a third time, and I think you need your sleep.”
Delphine shakes her head so fast she can hear her hair sliding over Rebecca’s satin pillowcases. “I’m not tired. I promise. I don’t need sleep.”
A small and tender smile pulls at the creased fullness of Rebecca’s mouth. “You do,” she says, but she can’t seem to stop herself from reaching down and tracing the place where the blanket covers Delphine’s breasts. And then she drags the blanket down, slowly, so slowly that Delphine has no choice but to feel every fiber dragging over her sensitive nipples.
Rebecca lets out a surprised exhale once Delphine’s breasts are exposed, as if she’s forgotten what they look like. As if she underestimated what seeing them would do to her. “Just for a minute,” Rebecca whispers, as if to herself, and then she’s straddling Delphine with long, lean legs, her nightgown bunching up around her waist as she dips her head to give one of Delphine’s nipples a mean, hard suck.
Delphine cries out—happiness, pure, pleasured happiness—and Rebecca claps a hand over her mouth and moves to the other nipple, sucking and pulling until Delphine can feel it in her belly, feel her clit jumping in response.
Rebecca nuzzles a breast, nips at it, then looks up at Delphine. “I want to fuck you,” she says plainly. “But it’s a bad idea.”
Delphine wants to whine and kick her feet, she wants to stomp around like Veruca Salt because she wants to be fucked and she wants it now . “There are no bad ideas tonight,” she says, trying to sound rational because she knows Rebecca likes rational. “We can just pretend we’re back in the clearing still. That this is part of the ritual and we don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Rebecca says. “We
have one now. Either we fuck, we fuck my way, and we fuck a lot—and tomorrow we wake up ashamed. Or we go to bed like responsible adults and pretend this was all a dream.”
“Is this really a question?”
Another eyebrow from Rebecca.
When Rebecca doesn’t answer, Delphine says impatiently, “The first choice then, please. The one with fucking.”
“You have sex one time, and now you’re insatiable,” mutters Rebecca.
Delphine wriggles underneath her. “Yes. Can we do more sex now?”
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Rebecca tells her. “And that I need to fuck you so badly.”
For some reason, this kindles warmth in Delphine’s chest in a way that all of Auden’s sweet and romantic sentiments never did. She beams up at Rebecca as if Rebecca’s just recited sonnets to her.
“You think I’m cute?”
“No, I only bite the breasts of women I don’t think are cute. Put your hands up above your head and cross them at the wrists.”
Delphine does as she’s told, and then smiles again. The feeling of her wrists crossed above her head is better than being handed a bouquet of flowers. She doesn’t know why. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe she should hate anything like this after what happened to her at Audra Bishop’s summer party.
But she doesn’t. She loves it. It’s like everything is starting to make sense now that she’s found this, and now that she’s here, she can’t help but think of course, of course it’s this.
Of course this is where I should have been all along.
And then Rebecca moves up to sit over Delphine’s face, lifting the silk nightgown and bunching it against the taut, dark skin of her belly. “This first time is going to be fast,” Rebecca says. “But I have to come now if I’m going to take my time with you later.”
And then all Delphine can taste and smell and breathe is Rebecca’s garden-smelling skin and the secret place between her legs, and she doesn’t think anything at all but yes, yes, yes for a very long time.
* * *
Auden gathers the wet blankets and dark lanterns, checks anything that was ever on fire tonight or that ever even thought about being on fire, and then makes for the path. Becket’s already gone ahead, murmuring something about needing to get back to the rectory and sleep a little before morning Mass. So it’s Auden alone who piles what he can into his arms and leaves the slow-misting ruins behind him.
All told, it’s not a pleasant walk. The blankets are sopping wet and cold as hell, and the three lanterns he managed to hook with his fingers are clanking together with an obnoxious racket.
But he barely notices. His thoughts are everywhere else.
His thoughts are back in that tiny shower stall, crammed in with Proserpina’s tiny, curvy body and Saint’s sculpted one. His thoughts are on the swollen silk of Poe’s cunt as he plucked an orgasm from her like ripe fruit off a tree.
He’s never done that before, made someone come, and in the last two hours, he did it twice. And fuck if it wasn’t the best thing he’s ever felt, someone coming all over his hand, someone buckling and moaning and spilling everywhere because of him . It’s as good as spanking. As good as kissing every cut on Poe’s hand and then dressing every little wound. As good as feeling St. Sebastian’s lip ring against his mouth.
His thoughts are also still on the ritual, on the sex, on the fire. On the thorns. He thinks about Delphine, who’s no longer his, and his heart jolts, and he thinks about Proserpina naked in the firelight and his heart jolts harder. He thinks about how he felt walking the path up to the clearing, about the strange, near-violent clarity that came to him as they moved through the ancient motions of the ceremony.
He feels different, although he can’t exactly quantify how . He’s still being ripped apart from the inside by the same thorns, but it’s as if they’ve finally found a place to take root. A place to anchor themselves. He doesn’t understand them—his needs, his hurts, the hopes he’s forgotten how to name—but it feels like, for the first time, they understand him .
And that’s something he didn’t have before Imbolc night.
By the time he gets back inside the house, he feels resolved to one thing at least—it’s time he figured things out with Proserpina. It’s time he courted her, if such an old-fashioned word can be permitted. He’ll go in and he’ll snuggle her for the rest of the night, and when she wakes up, he’ll tell her everything. About the things he wants, about what he wants with her. She told him what he’d have to do to earn her—now he’ll tell her he’s ready to begin.
As for Saint, he has no illusions things will change. There’s too much past between them for a kiss and a hand job to make any difference now. Which is fine.
Just fine.
Saint’s hurt him enough for one lifetime—although honestly, Auden can’t think of a single way Saint could hurt him any more than he already has.
Wet things deposited and rain boots pulled off, Auden makes his way upstairs to Poe’s bedroom, his heart easing with each step. He knows it’s too soon after Delphine, but he’ll figure it out. He’ll do as he has done and take things slowly, he’ll speak transparently, let Poe take the lead—
A low cry reaches his ears, a low cry coupled with heavy, masculine grunts, and Auden freezes.
It’s coming from behind Poe’s door, and even though he knows, he knows immediately, he still forces himself forward to the door and he opens it, just a crack, to witness the scene within.
St. Sebastian is braced over Poe, rutting fiercely between her legs. And she’s rutting just as fiercely back—arching her back and whimpering deliciously. They’re fucking.
God.
They’re fucking.
And he’s about to close the door, he really is, when Poe comes.
He’s seen her come on someone else’s hand, he’s seen her come on his own—but this is different, and he can’t tell if it’s jealousy or shock that makes it that way, only that it does. Only that it reverberates through him with something more potent and dangerous than arousal on its own, and he can only barely fight off the fantasy of banging the door open, striding inside, and taking both of them in hand.
He’s hard before the first cry even leaves her mouth; the heel of his palm is grinding against his erection before the second cry even starts.
He could do it, he knows. He could shove his way in there and—
No.
No.
He drops his hand and closes the door as quietly as he opened it, and then he turns around and slumps, his cock throbbing and his heart pounding and something hurting so pitilessly behind his ribs and up in his throat that he nearly drops down to his knees.
No, this is not his bedroom, that is not his bed. The two people inside are not his , although by God if they were, he’d spend every minute of every day making them know it. He’d fuck and spank and bite and tease until they were his by right, until he’d earned them. Like he was going to earn Poe, before.
Before just now.
Before he knew she wanted someone else.
Tears prick at the back of his eyes, and he feels like an idiot. Foolish for thinking lovely, perfect Poe was interested in him, as spoiled and thorny as he is, and foolish for thinking Saint didn’t have the power to hurt him anymore. He rubs at his throat, his chest, his face. He tries to take a deep breath, but it seems to stop somewhere right below his collarbone, not making it down into his lungs.
He won’t have the chance to earn Proserpina Markham after all.
Down the hall, Rebecca’s door opens and she emerges in a silk robe, saying something over her shoulder to someone inside—presumably Delphine.
She turns to go to the bathroom and then sees Auden against the door.
“What are you doing?” she asks at the same moment a broken, telling moan echoes from out of Poe’s room. Her face lengthens in sympathetic understanding, and she comes forward and loops her arm through Auden’s and pulls him away, down to the very end of the hall.
&
nbsp; “You okay?” she asks him, bending her knees to catch his eyes because he can’t seem to lift his head.
“Yeah,” he mumbles in a voice that means absolutely not.
She gives him a brisk, Quartey hug and then puts her hands on his shoulders. “It’s been inevitable, Auden, they’ve been mooning after each other since the day she got here. You would have had to have been blind not to see it. And you’ve been engaged up until last night .”
“I know. I know. I just thought . . .”
He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t even know what he just thought.
He suddenly feels like the worst of everything, not just stupid but also selfish, and not just selfish, but also toxic. Like his father but worse because he’d known better and he’d still let this place infect him. He’d still let it sweep him away, he’d still chased after its secret ways and hidden stories as if they mattered in real life. As if they could erase all the ways he was slowly failing everyone around him.
I don’t kneel for selfish men . Isn’t that what Poe said to him last night?
And what could be more selfish than the craven, grasping man he is now?
But looking down into his best friend’s concerned face, there is still one thing that makes sense. One thing that doesn’t feel tainted or ruined or unworthy.
“I want to learn,” he says abruptly.
Her eyebrows pull together. “Learn what?”
“I want to learn how to be like you.”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean a Ghanaian landscape architect,” she says slowly.
He shakes his head. “Kink. How to do it right. How to play. How to keep everyone safe.”
She searches his face, as if trying to decide how much of this is genuine and how much of this is about the couple still moaning down the hall—but whatever she sees there seems to satisfy her, because after a long minute, she finally gives him a short, businesslike nod.
“Okay then, Guest,” she says. “I’ll teach you.”
“Thank you,” he says fervently. “Thank you.”
A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel Book 1) Page 30