Читать книгу Naughty Bits - Меган Харт, Alice Gaines - Страница 12

YESTERDAY AND LONG AGO, IN A KINGDOM FAR FROM here but right next door, there lived a handsome young man and his equally beautiful young wife. She had hair the color of sunshine, eyes like a summer sky and skin like rich cream. Her name was Ilina, and the young man loved her more than anything else in the world.

Ilina, for her part, loved her handsome young husband. Pitor was strong, with muscled arms and legs that had no trouble chopping wood or building fences. His hair, the color of the forest’s deepest shadows, hung to his shoulders in ripples like silk, and his eyes shone like the night sky littered with stars.

If Ilina had one small wish, it was that Pitor could be as satisfied with their humble cottage and plot of land as she was, but though her husband worked long and hard, he hated the labor that brought them their food and the roof above their heads. No matter how Ilina tried to soften the small rooms with her handwoven tapestries or delicately embroidered pillows, night after night Pitor looked around their home with dissatisfaction on his face.

“I love you,” she told him. “No matter if we eat on gold and silver or on wooden trenchers, Pitor, I love you.”

But Pitor would not be satisfied, no matter what Ilina did. And each day when he came home from chopping wood in the forest, he grew angrier and more sullen. Nothing Ilina did could move him to smile.

A time of drought and misfortune came upon the land. Pitor had to travel farther and farther into the woods to find trees he could chop for profit, until at last one day he’d traveled so far he couldn’t make it home before dark. Though he ached to return to his beloved Ilina and knew she would worry for his safety, he knew how foolish traveling in the dark would be. He made himself a small camp and prepared to spend the night. He dared not even burn one small portion of the wood he’d gathered, for not only would it be taking food from Ilina’s mouth to use the wood he intended to sell, but the risk of deadly fire in the dry forest was too great. Instead, he pulled his cloak around himself and hunkered down, unable even to sleep lest a beast attack him in the night.

Nevertheless, weariness overtook him, and Pitor’s eyes closed. He dreamed of his love, of her touch and of her kiss, and woke with his cock straining the front of his trousers.

“Ah, sweet,” said a voice from the shadows. “What a prize you hold between your legs. How I long for a man to fill me up with what you’ve got.”

Convinced he was dreaming, Pitor sat up with a shake of his head. Laughter curled like smoke from the darkness. A woman stepped from behind a tree. The sight of her sent fear and desire coursing through him in equal amounts, and Pitor sprang to his feet, his hatchet ready to defend against her.

“You know me?” The woman’s dark hair swirled around her face.

Pitor’s breath heaved. The closer she stepped the more aroused he became, until all he could think of was satisfying the carnal urges flooding him.

The woman was upon him, astride him, before he knew how to object.

“Who are you?” he cried, stricken, for he’d never been unfaithful to his wife before.

“You don’t need to know.”

He turned and was on her before she could escape, the blade of his ax to her throat, but she only laughed. To his shame, his cock twitched and rose at the sound of it. She reached between them to grab and stroke him fully erect.

“You should be better satisfied with what you have, woodsman, else you lose it all. Let me show you what you could have.”

Pitor jerked away from her and lowered the ax.“I love my wife.”

The woman stood, her eyes flashing in a face still covered with shadows. “Come with me and be my love, and we will walk the forest as monarchs.”

He shook his head. “No!”

She tilted her head. “No? Then fuck me once with that sweet prick, and I’ll reward you for your efforts.”

Pitor’s hand trembled. “No reward you could offer me would be enough for me to betray my wife.”

“Not even the life of your child?”

Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”

Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

“Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”

“You can promise me that?”

“That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.

As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”

“Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.

Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”

The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”

Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.

“Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.

She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.

For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.

The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”

“They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.

“Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.

Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.

She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.

“Take them away.”

The midwife, a goodhearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”

She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.

“See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”

Pitor shook his head.“My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”

The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.

“I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”

So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.

The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.

The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”

The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”

So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.

The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.

By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.

Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.

“She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”

“Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”

For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.

“They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”

“That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”

The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.

And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.

Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.

Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering, better than sitting in front of the blazing fireplace wrapped in a goose-down cloak. Only the year before she had longed for these long nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.

She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?

Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.

“You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.”

When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.

“Father—” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.

“I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”

The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.

“Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”

The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”

The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”

“Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”

The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”

The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.

“You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”

“That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”

The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.

“Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”

With that, the dark fairy was gone.

The nobleman reached out his hand to Mira, who didn’t take it. Nor did she reach for her mother, who wept with fists pressed to her mouth. Mira looked around the room, at the men and women gathered there, and something swelled inside her that she’d never felt before.

Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.

Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.

Desire.

It began at once.

Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.

Neither of them could stop it.

Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.

Clearly, this would not do.

Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting out his money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.

Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.

And then…nothing.

Frustrated, she stroked harder, pulling on her nipples. Heat rushed through her veins and she sank to the rush-matted floor of the chamber. She pumped her hips upward against her now-grasping touch, and still the sense of something building inside her grew and grew without cease. Without release.

She could not eat, nor sleep, for the fire consuming her took up so much of her attention. Yet instead of turning her ill, this fever only made her all the more beautiful. She saw it in her looking glass. Her hair was like shining silk. Her eyes, each as lovely as a jewel. Her mouth, ripe and plump and ready for kissing.

In the past her father had hoarded his gold, but now he received an uncommon summons from the king to pay some taxes to which he’d never before been held. He wept as the messenger carried away bag after bag of clinking coins. Her mother sought the solace of the wine barrel. This was but one day after the dark fairy’s curse, and Mira knew she had to find her completion soon or everything she’d known her entire life would be lost.

She made it known that she was now entertaining suitors, and as bad news travels fast, so did this. On the fifth day after the fairy’s curse, men had begun lining up outside the gate. Most of them, she assumed, had come for a chance to wet their pricks inside her, though a few of the more intelligent would have known that the man who managed to satisfy her would gain more than a willing cunny in which to spill his seed, but a vast portion of her father’s rapidly diminishing fortune, as well.

Mira cared little for her father’s fortune. She cared more for his happiness, and her mother’s, for though they had not bred or borne her, she loved them as dearly as if they had. Truth be told, she loved the line of men waiting to fuck her, too, for the fairy had been right about desire being a gift.

And still, no matter how many men entered Mira’s bedchamber and touched her, no matter how many urged her body to writhe and squirm beneath talented tongues and fingers and cocks, not one of them left her with anything other than emptiness when he’d gone.

By the tenth day after the fairy’s decree, the line had dwindled as fast as her father’s fortune. The men who now waited at the gate were those a little needier, a little less affluent. Men to whom a pretty wife who’d lain with a hundred men and a bit of a fortune were better than a farm-roughened wife and no fortune at all. Mira took them as she’d done the ones in fine leather and velvet, and like their richer predecessors, none left her complete. One by one, the men left her chamber, grumbling that there could be no man who would finish her.

“Daughter, don’t kill yourself to find the one,” Mira’s mother urged, voice slurred, dress askew. “A fortune can be rewon.”

“Tell that to my father,” Mira said from her place in front of the mirror, where she searched her mismatched eyes for any sign of something different. Something new. “He’s the one killing himself, sitting in the counting room enumerating his coins and gnashing his teeth at each one he must relinquish.”

She turned to her mother. “Both of you believe you can do nothing to change the dark fairy’s curse, but I know I can.”

Again, she looked at her face. She’d become a woman, with a woman’s secret smile. She touched her bare breasts, the tight pink nipples. The floss between her thighs. The box that would bring her pleasure if only she could find the right key to unlock it.

“And I want to,” she said.

Winter eased into spring with little fanfare. Mira’s parents had done little to fight the fairy’s curse. It pained her to see her beloved mother and father give themselves so quickly to despair, and she was determined not to let them wither away. The line of men waiting to sample her beauty had dwindled to nothing, no more than one or two a sevenday.

Until one day, as Mira sat in the warming garden where the flowers had just begun to show their heads, two men arrived. One as fair as sunshine, the other dark as shadows. They reached the gate at the same time, one from each direction. From her seat on the stone bench, Mira could see them both, but at first neither looked at her.

“Gerard,” said the dark-haired man.

“Alain,” greeted the fair-haired man.

Mira got to her feet. Both had put their hands to their belts, one to pull a dagger and the other a short sword. Neither moved after that, each watching the other, until the dark-haired man gave a slight nod and stepped aside just enough to let the one called Gerard pass. Both of them came through the gate, and both stopped when they saw her.

“Madame,” said Gerard with a half bow. “We seek the lady Mira.”

“Many have sought her,” Mira said. “What makes the two of you any different than the hundreds of others?”

Alain stood an inch or so shorter than Gerard but still towered tall over Mira. He held out his hand for hers, and she took it at once. “I’ve heard she’s been gifted by the dark fairy.”

“Everyone knows that.” Mira tugged away her hand, still tingling from his touch.

“Ah,” said Alain with a half bow nearly identical to the one Gerard had already bestowed. “But not everyone else has received the same gift.”

Mira looked at them, from one to the other. “And you have?”

“Lady,” answered Gerard. “We both have.”

Most of the other men had arrived intent on seducing her at once. Some had been kind, a few considerate, but none of them had wasted their time with conversation. Alain and Gerard, however, followed Mira into the large dining hall where they set about laying a fire in the long-neglected hearth.

“Wine, lady?” Gerard’s question seemed more command than request, and Mira found herself scurrying to the sideboard in search of a bottle.

Alain watched her, his gaze like sapphires. “Where are your servants, lady?”

“Gone,” Mira said as she poured three glasses of almost sour wine. “My father can’t afford to pay them any longer, and they fear the dark fairy’s taint. My good mother has taken to her bed. And my father has gone mad.”

She expected the blunt statement to take the men aback, but neither looked surprised. She offered glasses, one to Alain and one to Gerard, and both took them. Gerard drank his at once with a grimace, but Alain waited for Mira to sip before he drank.

Gerard gave a low grunt and put his cup on the long wooden dining table that had hosted so many guests over the years. “Come here.”

Mira did at once, though she stopped far enough away from him that he would have to reach to grab her, if that was his intent. Gerard didn’t reach for her. He studied her.

“You are beautiful,” he said. “The fairy didn’t give you that.”

Mira shook her head. “No, sir, I don’t believe so.”

She looked at him. His pale hair fell to his shoulders, loose. He had the sharp features of a hawk and the body of a warrior beneath his simple, solid clothes. She shivered, thinking of his muscular arms around her, of his thick legs pushing hers apart. He would not be gentle, she saw this already, and her pulse beat faster between her legs.

“Would you have me?” he asked her, his voice low and rough.

Mira’s mouth parted, and she looked toward Alain, who had not yet put down his glass. “What of your companion, sir?”

Gerard laughed. “What of him?”

“You both arrived at the same time. You both want the same thing. How am I to know which of you can provide me with what I need if I don’t sample you both?”

From another woman these words would have made her a doxy, but Mira had long ceased caring. The dark fairy had gifted her with desire, and it built and built inside her every day without cease. Her mother was trying to sleep away her life and her father had gone insane because of it. She would fuck a thousand men if it meant she’d find the one to complete her.

Gerard gave Alain a challenging look. “Would that you had traveled a mile faster, brother of my heart. You might have been the one to fill this lady’s bucket.”

Alain put a hand over his heart and bowed his head to Gerard. “Would that you had traveled but a mile slower, oh my brother. For then, indeed, I might have been the first to reach her.”

Mira looked at them. They had history, of that there was no question. “You are brothers?”

Without looking away from Alain, Gerard said, “We have different parents.”

Without looking away from Gerard, Alain replied, “We have fought at each other’s side and won. We’ve shared much, Gerard and I.”

They both looked at her, but it was Gerard this time who held out his hand. “Lady, take me to your room, and I will give you what the dark fairy promised would save you and your family.”

Mira, having no reason to decline, took his hand and led him to the stairs. Halfway up, she looked back. Alain stared after them, but only she saw him press his lips to the tips of his fingers.

Gerard wasted no time with pretty words. He took Mira in his arms the moment the bedchamber door closed behind them. His breath smelled of wine, a heady aroma more tantalizing than the taste of it had been. His mouth took hers without preamble, nudging open her lips to allow his tongue to slide inside. Mira gasped into his kiss, and his arms tightened around her.

“She truly did gift you with desire,” Gerard murmured, tracing the line of her jaw with his mouth. Into her ear, he whispered, “You create it and feel it, both. Do you not?”

“Yes.” Mira shivered as his large hands roamed her body and cupped her buttocks through the simple linen dress she wore. Without maidservants to wash her clothes and help her dress, she’d gone without a shift or girdle beneath, and it was almost as if she wore nothing at all. “Yes, sir, I feel it.”

“You want me to touch you, as the other men have touched you?”

Mira sighed as his hands squeezed and one began tugging up her dress, inch by inch. “Oh, yes.”

“Tell me, lady,” Gerard said and bit into her soft flesh with a fierceness that urged a cry from Mira’s throat. “Tell me how they fucked you.”

She told him of men with hard, hot cocks who had used her mouth, her cunt, the tunnel of her breasts, the sweet back passage of her ass. How they had made her feel like she was meant to burst, how she had exploded with pleasure over and over, only to be left aching for more at once. Aching and empty.

Incomplete.

“And why should you be different,” she half sobbed as his roaming hands found her slick crevice and parted her folds to allow one of his thick fingers to slide inside.

“Because I have to be.” Gerard, one hand still moving inside her, used the other to tear her gown from throat to hips.

Mira’s breasts thrust forward as she arched her back. She rode Gerard’s hand harder and harder as he thrust another finger inside her. His mouth found her sweetly aching nipples. When he suckled one, she cried out. Her fingers dug into his shoulder. She rocked her hips, seeking release.

But Gerard would not give it to her. “The others made you come, but none of them finished you.” He growled the words and withdrew his hand so swiftly from her body Mira stumbled. “Stand there, still. Don’t move.”

She did, though, taking a step on trembling legs toward him.

“I said,” murmured Gerard in a voice gone low and dangerous, “do not move.”

This time, Mira stayed still.

Gerard removed his belt, laid aside his scabbard, pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor. His body beneath was indeed that of a warrior, scarred and hard, with tight bronzed nipples and golden fleece around them and in a line disappearing into the waist of his breeches.

Watching her, he eased down his breeches and kicked them aside to stand before her naked. His cock, surrounded by its fluff of amber curls, rose straight and proud. Mira’s pearl beat with the pounding of her heart and her passage tightened in a brief spasm. She moaned, but stayed still as he had ordered.

“The others. Did any bind you? Beat you?”

“No!” Shock sent heat soaring into her cheeks.

Gerard stroked his cock even more fully erect. “Turn around and put your hands on the post.”

His gaze flickered to the foot of her bed. Some of the men had taken her on the floor, or across the table. None had told her to hold onto the bedpost. Mira hesitated, but at the flare of heat in Gerard’s eyes, she did.

She waited, trembling. Her hair had fallen from its coils and lay across her breasts. Gerard threaded his fingers through it, twisting the gilt and midnight together. His hand covered her breast.

“Move your legs apart.”

She did, her muscles tense with waiting. Gerard slid his other hand between her legs from behind. His thick fingers probed her slick folds, finding the bead of her clit and rolling it. Mira pushed her hips forward, wanting more pressure, but Gerard withdrew almost at once.

When she stilled, he slid his hand between her legs again. His fingers dipped into her wetness and caressed her heat. His cock probed the softness of her buttocks from behind, and Mira pushed herself back against him. Again, Gerard withdrew.

“Please.” Mira moaned the single word.

“Please, what?”

“Please, touch me.”

“Is that what you asked them?” Gerard bit lightly at her shoulder, and Mira jerked away from him with a gasp.

“I didn’t have to!” Her chin lifting, she pushed at him. It was like pushing at rock, but he stepped back. Her chest heaved with each breath, and the surprising sting of tears burned her eyes. “They all just did it! All of them just did it!”

“Perhaps, then, that’s your problem.” Gerard made no move toward her. His cock rose proud and strong in front of him. It begged for Mira’s touch, the heat of her mouth, but she didn’t move toward him.

“You want me to beg? Is that it?”

Gerard shrugged and moved to the chair in front of the fire, where he sat without regard to his nakedness. Or hers. This, more than anything, moved Mira to anger.

“Please,” she said through gritted jaws. “Please touch me, sir. Please fuck me.”

“No.”

“Then why did you come here?” she demanded, crossing to him. Fury made her want to strike him, but Mira didn’t dare.

Gerard looked her up and down, caressing her so thoroughly with his gaze it weakened her legs and tightened her nipples further. “To make you complete. Isn’t that what the dark fairy said you needed?”

“What did she say you needed?” The words came out broken, edged with glass, on the verge of cruel.

Quick as the sunshine from which his hair had been woven, Gerard grabbed her wrist. He pulled her forward and put her across his lap like a recalcitrant child. His big hand came down across her buttocks, the smack not hard enough to bruise, though Mira cried out at the sting. Heat spread across her flesh and her hips pushed forward, pushing her cunt against Gerard’s thigh.

“She told me I needed to complete someone.” His other hand pressed her tight against him so she couldn’t move.

“By beating me?” Mira cried, voice hoarse, even as her hips rocked.

“This is not a beating,” said Gerard. “This is an appreciation.”

Heat covered her buttocks and spread to meet the fire already burning between her thighs. As Gerard’s hand caressed her skin, Mira sagged against him. Her legs parted, inviting him to fill her with his fingers again, but he didn’t, not even when she wriggled and strove to get free of his grip.

Beneath her, his cock pressed. His breathing had grown harsher, his grip tighter as she struggled. Yet he did nothing but rest his hand upon the heat his spank had left on her skin.

“I am making you appreciate my touch,” Gerard said in a low voice. “Feel the heat of my hand. Focus on that, not my cock. Not your cunt. Focus on the sound of our breathing. On the brush of your hair against your face.”

Mira closed her eyes with a grimace. Her hips rocked again on Gerard’s thigh, but without much result. None of the others had done this. All had taken her, some rougher, some with gentler hands, but all had done it.

Gerard held her until her struggles ceased. Every line of Mira’s body had gone hot, as though he’d drawn a stick from the fire along her skin. She moaned into her fist as his hand shifted, the fingertips brushing the underside of her buttocks. He moved them lower, to tease her bottom lips. He felt how wet she was for him, how his touch had already teased her so close.

“Please, Gerard,” she whispered. “Please touch me.”

When at last he did, once more filling her with a phallus created from his fingers, Mira’s cry of relief rang around the room. His thumb rubbed at her pearl while his fingers moved inside her, and the ache that had built inside her, up and up, reached its peak and crashed.

Mira’s climax washed over her, no, thundered over her, and she jerked with it. She cried out his name, once. Twice. When the throbbing between her legs eased and she caught her breath, Gerard released her from his lap. Mira stood, her hand on his shoulder to keep herself from falling.

She drew in air scented like Gerard and sighed it out again. She wanted to weep. Her body had succumbed to his ministrations, she had reached her pleasure…and still…

“I am empty,” she said in a dull voice. She turned from him. She waited for the door to open and close behind him, for her body to cease its trembling. For her breath to fill again with air that smelled of smoke and stale bed linens.

“Lady,” said Gerard. “Did you think it would take but once?”

Alain listened for the sound of the lady’s cries as Gerard took her to orgasm. He knew too well the taste and touch of the man upstairs, and his cock rose in his trousers at the knowledge of what he would be doing to the woman. Once, they had shared everything, even women.

It had been a woman who drove them apart.

The dark fairy, who had no name any mortal knew, had stalked Alain through the forest and seduced him not once, but twice. She had used his cock for her personal joy, writhing on him and milking him of his seed even as he fought to remember where he was. Who he was. The dark fairy had cared little for Alain’s mind. All she wanted was his penis and mouth. His hands. She’d have continued sucking him dry had Gerard not come looking for him. She’d seduced Gerard, as well, and Alain could still recall the sound of their cries as she’d taunted Gerard into fucking her harder and harder.

Then, for fun or spite, she had caused them to quarrel. Not with swords, for at that they’d have been too well matched. It would have ended in death for the pair of them. No, she’d urged them to battle with their words. Accusations, old hurts, imagined slights and falsehoods had torn them apart.

Alain and Gerard had not known each other as children, though that had ceased to matter a mere three days into their acquaintance. They’d both been assigned places in the King’s Guard, an elite division of the Royal Army.

The first thing Alain had noticed about Gerard was his hands. Big, strong hands, scarred from work and battle. Gerard had been demonstrating his skill with his broadsword, using the flat of the blade to smack at his opponent. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, highlighting Gerard’s hair into shimmering gold and Alain had, quite literally, lost his breath.

“You there,” Gerard had said with a crook of his finger. “Get your ass over here and let me beat it.”

Even now, recalling Gerard’s surprise at not winning that first fight, Alain smiled. Arrogant from never losing, Gerard hadn’t paid enough attention to the newcomer and had ended up on his back with Alain’s blade at his throat.

It was the last time he didn’t pay enough attention to Alain.

They’d forged the deepest of bonds, the pair of them matched so well physically there were none who could stand against them. They fought hard for the king, and they made merry with equal fierceness…for themselves.

Alain had long known his cock rose without hesitation at both the curved softness of women and the hard, muscled planes of men. Physical love between men wasn’t forbidden in the King’s Guard, where it might be weeks before a man could find a woman, but it wasn’t exactly encouraged, either. Alain, who felt no shame at his proclivities, also felt no need to fight to defend them. He’d surely kill anyone who came up against him, and while his blade had tasted the blood of many of the king’s enemies, he had no desire to spill that of his comrades.

Gerard had never shown signs of liking cock, and Alain had never made a move to push their friendship into that place. They fought, they wrestled, they shared a room and a bath. They often visited the brothels together or sampled some of the same tavern wenches. Gerard had a heavier hand with his women than Alain, who had no desire to bind or beat his bedmates. When Alain sought the company of men, he did it discreetly, and without Gerard. It was the one thing they didn’t share.

Until the night Alain came home from an encounter with one of his favorite male partners to find Gerard waiting for him.

“Where do you go?” Gerard had asked in a deceptively gentle voice that didn’t fool Alain.

“I didn’t know I owed you an accounting of my time,” Alain had replied mildly.

Gerard had drawn his brows. “You stink of fucking.”

“I’ll wash.”

Gerard’s hand had flown out to grab Alain’s wrist as he’d passed. “I don’t smell a woman’s sweetness on you, Alain.”

Alain had looked down at Gerard’s fingers gripping his wrist but made no move to pull away. “No.”

They had trained together so often Gerard’s move shouldn’t have surprised him, but then perhaps Alain had chosen to be surprised. Gerard had turned him and pressed him forward, both hands tight on his wrists, in the time it took to draw a breath. Alain hadn’t struggled. Against his back, he’d felt the familiar breadth and width of Gerard’s body.

Gerard had pushed Alain toward the room’s rough-hewn table and pinned his hands to the splintered wood. He’d kicked his legs apart and pressed harder against his back. Alain had closed his eyes, breathing hard, making no offer.

“You like it this way?” Gerard had breathed in Alain’s ear. The touch of Gerard’s hot breath had sent a shudder down Alain’s spine and still he said nothing, made no move to get away, though he easily could have.

Gerard’s hand had let go of one of Alain’s and moved around to cup Alain’s hardening cock. “Your prick is hard, my friend.”

Gerard hadn’t fumbled with the ties of Alain’s trousers, nor had his touch hesitated when he took Alain’s hard length into his palm. He’d stroked, hard, in the way only men knew how to do, until at last Alain had pumped his hips forward with a cry.

“Yes,” he’d said. “Yes, Gerard, I like that.”

He’d groaned when the bluntness of Gerard’s thick cock nudged at the passage of his ass, and cried aloud when Gerard had eased his way inside. Gerard had fucked him fast and hard, jerking Alain’s prick at the same time, until they’d both exploded into pleasure.

“You can share everything with me,” Gerard had said then, and until the dark fairy came along, they had.

Alain’s cock had risen at the memories and now pressed uncomfortably against the front of his breeches. He turned at the soft noise behind him to see Mira, her lovely skin flushed and that marvelous hair hanging in tangled curls around her face.

“He sent me to fetch him some ale.” Her voice was scratchy, hoarse.

“My lady,” Alain said kindly, for he knew well enough how Gerard’s touch could leave one shaken. “Would you sit?”

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sank into it as though her legs had been about to collapse. He brought her mulled wine and a hunk of bread from the sideboard, but she neither drank nor ate.

“My lady,” said Alain gently and waited until she looked at his face. “What do you need?”

“I don’t need wine and bread,” she snapped suddenly, her intriguingly mismatched eyes flashing. “I need fulfillment!”

He’d been certain she’d find it with Gerard, and yet the moment she said the words Alain knew she spoke the truth. A smile tugged at his lips. Now it was his turn to try.

Mira’s buttocks still held the heat left behind by Gerard’s hand, but she refused to squirm on the hard seat of her chair. The humiliation of what he’d done—and without lifting the curse!—brought heat to her face equal to that in her bottom. She scowled at the dark-haired man in front of her.

“Bring me a dipper of cold water from the well,” she demanded and pointed out the window to the garden. “That’s what I want.”

She felt certain he’d balk at her imperious tone, perhaps even take her in hand the way Gerard had, but Alain only ducked his head and strode to the doorway on his long, long legs. The well of which she spoke hadn’t been used for a long time because the winch used to lift the bucket from its depths had rusted. Even so, the water drawn from it was the sweetest she’d ever tasted, and she wanted it now.

More than that, she thought as she watched him disappear through the door, she wanted to make someone suffer, even the tiniest bit, to make up for the way she had suffered upstairs.

But she hadn’t suffered, really, had she? Even now, thinking of the way Gerard had ordered her to hold tight to the bedpost while he plundered her body from behind caused Mira’s nipples to tighten and her pulse to throb harder between her legs.

As the beloved only child of doting parents, Mira had never been spanked in her life. No one had ever even raised their voice to her. Yet, she mused, her thighs slipping apart enough to dimple the fabric of her gown between them, there had been nothing parental about Gerard’s treatment of her.

The other men had fucked her in all manner of ways, but none had commanded her so. Thinking of it now sent a shiver through her. Her sex, still wet with her own slickness, clenched hard enough to force a small moan from her lips.

“My lady.”

At the sound of Alain’s reverent voice, Mira’s eyes flew open. She’d arched back in the chair, her hips lifting at the memory of Gerard’s touch, but having Alain witness her reaction to those thoughts didn’t quench her arousal. She studied him, the pail from the well brimming with water.

“I brought your water.”

She didn’t know what made her do it, except that all at once she lost all grasp of the difference between memory and reality. Gerard had commanded her but now she would command Alain; all of it seemed to make sense the way light will suddenly shine through the one clean spot in an otherwise filthy window.

She kicked the bucket of water from his hands. It hit the floor with a thump and split into several pieces. The cold, clear water, sweet as honey, splattered Alain’s boots and breeches. Frigid droplets hit her bare toes and calves, but her gasp wasn’t from their small sting. It came when Alain went at once to his knees, his head bowed.

“My lady, I have displeased you.”

Mira had been protected and indulged her entire life, but just as Gerard’s treatment of her didn’t echo anything parental, neither did this new desire sweeping her have anything to do with her previous experiences. She had always taken her clean clothes and prepared food as a fact of her existence and considered the servants who’d provided them a part of her family, like her parents. She’d never demanded anything from them.

The sight of Alain on his knees sent waves of pleasure through her so strong her head spun. Her legs parted further and she inched her skirt to her knees. Her fingers fisted in the fabric and she imagined how it would feel to bury them in the thickness of his dark hair.

“Tell me how I might serve you, lady,” Alain murmured, “and I shall do my utmost to please you.”

“I would have your face between my legs.” The words rose to her lips as haughtily as any queen might have said them, and emboldened by her own tone, she added, “Pleasure my cunt with your tongue.”

The dark fairy’s gift had stolen any shyness from Mira, but even so it was the first time she’d ever said such a thing aloud. Her heart pounded. She’d begged Gerard to touch her a mere hour before and now she ordered his comrade to do the same. Opposite ends of experience, yet both had made her heart trip faster in her breast.

“If it would please my lady to do so,” Alain said without hesitation, “then it will be my pleasure to serve her.”

His strong hands, only slightly smaller than Gerard’s but with the same delightful calluses, slid up her thighs and pushed her skirt to her hips. She was bare beneath. She’d washed upstairs, but her sex glistened anew with her arousal. The smooth bead of her clitoris protruded sweetly from its hood of flesh and her soft curls.

Alain used his thumbs to stroke along her folds and brought them together, one on each side of her clitoris. Mira hissed out a gasp and her hips rocked forward again.

“Your mouth,” she ordered.

He obeyed at once, dipping his head to press his lips to her flesh. His tongue, hot and wet, stroked her folds and anchored itself on her clitoris. He worked her flesh with his lips and tongue, and her desire coursed through her like flames consuming paper.

She fisted her hands in his hair and held him tight as his mouth moved. His tongue flickered, fast, then moved in slow, deliberate circles that had her writhing.

“Fuck me with your fingers,” Mira gasped when Alain’s tongue alone wasn’t enough to send her over the edge.

Alain did as she ordered. His fingers were longer but not so thick as Gerard’s, and in her ecstatic delirium Mira wondered if their cocks would be as disparate. He pushed two fingers deep inside her, curving them slightly upward as his tongue kept its steady pace. Bright sparks of fresh pleasure shot through her, and again when he pressed deeper and his knuckles provided additional pressure on her back passage.

She moaned his name, and again, louder. She closed her eyes and threw back her head to allow the ecstasy to take her over entirely.

“I want you to fuck me,” she gasped. “Fuck me, Alain!”

Her climax shook her, the pleasure so intense she went briefly blind. Her toes pointed, her thighs fell open, her hands clutched at nothing. The words spewed from her mouth, yet she knew what she said and meant it.

“Be careful, lady,” said a familiar male voice, dipping low with amusement. “For if you command it, Alain will feel compelled to obey.”

Mira opened her eyes as the vestiges of ecstasy seeped out of her. Alain still knelt before her, his mouth glistening and his eyes hot with desire, but it was to Gerard she gave her full attention. Her heart still pounded from her climax but now the pitter-pat stepped up at the sight of the man who’d so recently mastered her. What would he do to her? To both of them?

Gerard spoke in a voice that could never have been called kind but was at least not cruel. He put his hand on Alain’s head the way a man will touch his hound to prove his ownership and its loyalty to him. “It’s in his nature, you see.”

Mira swallowed hard, though her mouth had gone dry at the flare of lust in Gerard’s blue eyes. In front of her, Alain remained on his knees, his head slightly bowed beneath the weight of Gerard’s hand. He didn’t look frightened. She watched as he licked his mouth of her sweetness.

“How does she taste, Alain?”

“Like sweet honey, Gerard.”

Gerard’s smile sent a frisson from the base of Mira’s spine all the way to the sensitive flesh of the back of her neck. The curve of his lips affected another part of her as well, the soft and slick center between her thighs.

“Alain made you come, lady?”

She lifted her chin, almost defiant. “Yes.”

Gerard’s hand stroked down Alain’s hair. “His tongue is most talented, is it not? And yet you screamed for his cock, too?”

Even now, her body twitched and shivered at the thought. The dark fairy had blessed her with desire, and it had grown tenfold since Gerard and Alain had walked through her garden gate. She covered herself with her hand.

“Yes,” she said.

“You are not yet complete,” said Alain.

She shook her head. Alain got to his feet, shrugging off Gerard’s hand.“I can complete you, lady. Allow me to serve you.”

“The lady seeks to serve,” Gerard said in a deceptively kind tone. “She is natural at it, Alain.”

Alain turned to face the other man. “You didn’t complete her, Gerard. The weight of desire hangs heavy on her shoulders. Her burden has not yet been lifted, and nor has ours.”

Gerard stared at Mira. “I haven’t yet had my full way with her, Alain. Once I have—”

“Once I have,” Alain interrupted, “the curse will be lifted.”

“You?” Gerard turned his face to Alain and laughed. “I know well how your mouth can service, Alain, but you’re not the one for this lady. I can feel it.”

“I feel it,” Alain said in a low, dangerous voice, and while in the past he might have served Gerard the way he’d served Mira, it was clear to her that whatever rift had been torn between them had not yet healed.

“Will you ask the lady to choose?” Gerard asked in a frightening voice.

“I will not choose!” Mira cried so loudly the china in the cupboard rang. She got up from the chair, her skirts falling around her bare feet. “It is not for me to choose! It is for you to complete me!”

She pointed at each of them. “It is not a contest of who is the manlier!”

Alain ducked his head at her words and put his hand over his heart. “My lady—”

Gerard, however, had drawn his sword with a growl. “It is a contest, lady, for just as you seek completion and the breaking of the fairy’s curse, so I seek it. Alain!”

Alain had drawn no weapon but Mira, heart thudding again, had no illusions he was not as ready to wage battle as Gerard. “Yes, brother of my heart.”

“Outside.”

“Yes, Gerard.”

Again, Alain inclined his head, but though it gave the appearance of him following Gerard’s command, Mira was not fooled. Alain was his own man. Her breath hitched faster in her chest when Alain followed Gerard out into the garden.

When they fought over her.

The room was not the best he’d ever been given, but it was clean and bright, and the bed was softer than any had ever been in the barracks of the King’s Guard. The basins, one filled with hot water and one with cold, were of finer porcelain, too, as were the cloths Gerard now used to wash the worst of his wounds. Alain’s blade had some time ago become nicked, and the cuts it gave were ragged. He hissed as he smoothed the water over his bleeding flesh.

It gave him no small pleasure to hear the same pained noises coming from the room Alain had been given. Though the rooms were separated by a door, it hung open. Gerard could hear Alain’s measured pacing as he bathed and dressed his own wounds. He might have taken more pride had he known his comrade’s injuries to be worse than his own, but Gerard was no fonder of lies told to himself than he was of untruths told to him by another.

Neither had held back in their fight to prove who was better suited to bring the lady Mira her completion, but, as in all else, they were so even in skill neither had been able to win. They were not a pair of matched ponies to draw a carriage, he mused as he watched Alain’s shadow lengthen and shorten in the doorway. Rather they were as firmly opposite as the sun and moon. Like a lock and a key, Alain and Gerard were fair to useless without one another.

“Alain!”

The shadow paused and in the next moment, Alain’s familiar form appeared in the open doorway. “Yes, Gerard.”

“Come here.”

Alain did at once, and though he refused to show any sign of it upon his face, Gerard ached inside for the days before the dark fairy had come between them. No woman ever had, not even the prettiest. No man had, either. Yet the dark fairy, on a whim they’d never understood, had taken the core of their friendship and used it to tear them asunder.

“I have missed you,” Alain said simply, and Gerard hated and admired him for his ability to put voice to his emotions. “It’s been overlong since we were able to practice together.”

It was just like Alain, Gerard mused, to make it as though they’d been exercising rather than trying to kill one another. He wanted to keep from smiling but felt his mouth curve anyway. “Aye, brother of my heart, I have long regretted our distance as well.”

Only Alain knew him well enough to know there was more to what he felt than what he said. Of all the lovers Gerard had ever taken, only Alain had also been his friend. He reached to grab Alain’s wrist and tug him forward, and Alain stepped toward him without resistance.

“We have never let a woman come between us before,” Gerard said. “Only that bitch of a fairy has ever separated us. Let us not allow this like-cursed lady to widen the gap.”

“Mayhap,” Alain said as he ran his hand through Gerard’s hair, “she can help us bridge it, Gerard.”

Alain had ever been the one of them to think more thoroughly, and Gerard had always been the one to take action. Together it had made them formidable foes to any who opposed them. Now Gerard would listen to his friend, to his brother of the heart, and they would take their action together.

“The fairy cursed us all three with desire,” Gerard said. “All the same curse. Might we all have the same cure?”

“I think we might.”

Alain’s fingers tightened in Gerard’s hair briefly as Gerard’s hand on his wrist pulled him yet closer. It was not often that Gerard was the one looking up, but he did so now. Alain’s gaze held a hotness he recognized. His cock had become thick and pushed the front of his breeches.

Alain gasped aloud when Gerard tugged open the laces of his breeches and drew forth his erect cock, and louder when Gerard slid the hot flesh between his lips, for it was not often Gerard’s pleasure to provide this service. Gerard opened himself to take in Alain’s length, sucking hard. Alain’s hips bumped forward as Gerard’s hands found his ass and gripped. The muscles of Alain’s thighs jumped and twitched as Gerard sucked and licked all the way down to the root and up again, paying special attention to the crown. One hand left Alain’s ass to grip the smooth foreskin and slide it back and forth as his mouth worked.

It might not have been Gerard’s habit to suck Alain’s cock, but he did it well nonetheless, for he knew just what Alain liked. In moments Alain’s guttural growls were becoming the slow, deep moans that signaled his release, and now it was Gerard’s turn to seek his own pleasure.

Without preamble he removed his mouth from Alain’s erection and stood so suddenly Alain had no time to react. With his fist gripping Alain’s prick, Gerard captured Alain’s mouth in a harsh, demanding kiss. It would leave them both bruised, but the small pains were as nothing compared to the damage they’d already caused each other, and Alain’s moan and the throb in his cock told Gerard he didn’t mind.

“You think you deserve to spill?” Gerard growled into Alain’s ear, his own cock as hard and thick as granite at the thought of what was to come. “Do you really think I’d take your seed down the back of my throat?”

Alain had his triggers and Gerard knew them all as well as he knew how to make him come. “No, Gerard.”

Gerard let his hand drift along Alain’s cock before letting go of it. “How long has it been since anyone’s taken a strap to your ass, Alain?”

“Too long.” Alain’s voice pushed from gritted jaws, and Gerard heard the truth in it. “Not since you, Gerard. That last time.”

That had been a long time then, for the dark fairy had cursed them more than three moons before. Until this morning with Mira, it had been just as long since Gerard had beaten anyone, though he’d taken countless women to his bed while seeking to break the curse.

Gerard gripped Alain’s chin in his hand and looked hard into the other man’s eyes. “It’s been too long then.”

He ordered Alain to take his position against the plastered wall, his hands at shoulder height and fingers spread. They had no safe word. They didn’t need one. The position of Alain’s fingers would tell Gerard how much pain he was able to take—today, with his previous injuries, it might be very little. The wider apart his fingers, the more he could take. If he closed them together, Gerard would know to ease off.

Just as using his mouth to service Alain was not his habit, neither was undressing him, but Gerard knew Alain was so close to coming, his cock already so hard, that bending to remove his breeches would only give him additional pleasure. Gerard intended to keep Alain balanced on the knife’s edge for a sufficient time, so he was the one who pulled off Alain’s breeches until Alain stood naked.

Gerard admired the lines of Alain’s back and ass as he pulled the sturdy leather strap from his bag. The leather was supple and oiled and fit his fist exactly. He tugged it between his two hands to snap it, and his cock twitched at the way Alain’s muscles jumped, though he showed no other sign he’d heard.

“By the time I’m done,” Gerard said, “your back and ass are going to be on fire, Alain.”

“Please,” Alain murmured.

Gerard laid the strap in even lines along Alain’s skin. His cock stiffened further at the red stripes and the low, strangled grunts of Alain’s ecstasy.

Alain’s head hung and his entire body quivered with exhaustion and still he did not push his fingers together, but it was Gerard’s duty to know when Alain could take no more even if Alain himself could no longer tell, and he put aside the strap. He ran his hand over the heated flesh of Alain’s back and delighted in his hiss. He slid a hand over Alain’s ass and felt the muscles twitch and jump. He pulled a bottle of soothing oil from his bag and poured a palmful and repeated the motion. Alain’s body tensed at the contact of the smooth oil on his flesh, and his hips pumped forward recklessly as he moaned.

He was so close Gerard knew it would take very little to send him over the edge, and for a moment he thought of allowing his friend that final release, but his own nature made him grin slyly instead. He ran his fingers, slick with oil, down the crease of Alain’s buttocks and teased the hot, tight circle of his anus with one finger. Alain bucked and cried out, but his hands never left their places on the wall.

“Such a good soldier,” Gerard murmured as his finger probed slightly deeper. “So good at following orders.”

Alain’s low, gasping chuckle sounded tortured, but he said nothing. He pushed back a bit against Gerard’s hand. From a true slave Gerard would have not tolerated the insubordination, but Alain was not his slave even though they sometimes played at that game.

“You want this?” Gerard eased his finger into Alain’s hot passage. “Or would you like my cock there, instead? Fucking you? How long has it been since anyone’s been inside you, Alain?”

“As long as it’s been since anyone’s strapped me,” Alain managed to say, though his voice shook with effort. “Please, Gerard, for the sake of our friendship….”

Gerard could be cruel, but this was not about cruelty, and he reached to stroke Alain’s cock with his oil-filled palm. Once, twice, and Alain was crying out and pumping into Gerard’s fist. Once more and his seed spilled, hot and fragrant, into Gerard’s hand.

“Now,” Gerard said when Alain had ceased his jerking and moaning, “use your mouth on me the way you did for her.”

Alain turned and fell at once to his knees. He took Gerard’s prick deep down his throat and sucked. He used his hand in tandem, stroking and caressing Gerard’s balls in the way that made his mind go blank of any thought but the supreme pleasure between his legs.

It took only moments for Gerard to explode into ecstasy, and when he did he shouted Alain’s name. As Alain got up from his knees, Gerard put a hand on his arm to keep him from turning immediately away.

“I have missed you, as well,” Gerard said.

Whatever had happened between the two men, the last to come through the gate for a fortnight, they had somehow repaired their bond. Mira had expected them to leave when both realized they were unable to bring about the end to the dark fairy’s gift, but as the days passed and Gerard and Alain ingratiated themselves into the household, Mira realized they intended to stay. More than that, they were wooing her, each in his own way, and neither was competing with the other for her affections.

In the past, of course, guests of the house had sought to court her in proper fashion as befit her status as the daughter of a very wealthy man. No suitor would have dared do more than walk with her in the garden, much less have been so bold as to kiss her, and anything more intimate than that was strictly forbidden.

The fairy’s curse had changed all that. The first men who’d come seeking her had been satisfied to fuck her and move on when they failed to break the curse, but Alain and Gerard were not like any other men she’d ever met in her life.

Gerard set her to tasks such as polishing his boots and serving him his food, and his hand could be heavy when she didn’t serve to his pleasure. The first time he’d tied her hands and feet to the posts at the foot of his bed and strapped her, she’d wept tears of pain and anger even as her cunt wept with arousal, yet she hadn’t sent him from the house. Her body had grown to crave Gerard’s discipline, as harsh as it could be, and he brought her to climax over and over with the flat of his hand or the leather strap he wielded with such proficiency. He fucked her thoroughly as well, when she pleased him, and denied her that ecstasy when she did not.

With Alain, however, Mira played the mistress without a second thought. He was as eager to serve her as she was to submit to Gerard. Alain took whatever abuse she offered him, whether it be her refusal to allow him to achieve orgasm when he used his mouth to satisfy her, or the performance of countless meaningless tasks meant only to prove she controlled him. He made love to her with worshipful hands, when she allowed it, and Mira found his touch as satisfying as Gerard’s even if it was in a totally different way.

Both men pursued and pleased her over and over, yet no matter how many times her body sang with desire, something was still missing. She waited for one of them to finish her completely, to break the dark fairy’s curse, but no matter how many times she submitted to Gerard or governed Alain, nothing seemed to change.

Her father’s fortune continued to slip away in summonses from the king, extra taxes, small disasters to the house. Her parents sought their comfort in elderberry wine and madness, leaving Mira to run the much-diminished household with no advice.

Summer had passed and turned to autumn, and still a space in her soul remained empty and bleak. She began to despair of ever saving her parents or ridding herself of the fairy’s cursed gift. Her two lovers might fulfill her body, but it wasn’t enough.

“It’s not enough,” she said aloud to the last nodding flowers in their beds.

The flowers didn’t reply, though the wind tossed their heads and ruffled their petals as prettily as if they were the dresses of innocent maidens. Mira hadn’t been innocent for the passing of several moons, and she wept now for that lost innocence and the life she should have had. She sank onto her knees in the browning grass and fragrant earth and buried her face in her hands.

“My lady, what ails you?”

Mira lifted her head at Alain’s low voice. She wiped her face as he crouched beside her to cradle her. He took a fine linen handkerchief from his pocket and dried her tears, and not for the first time, Mira realized Alain was no common soldier. He had wealth of his own, and status. Under other circumstances he might even have been of a high enough class to court her properly.

“If not for the curse,” she bit out through a fresh veil of tears.

Alain didn’t ask her to elaborate. Instead he bent his mouth to hers and kissed her through the salty wetness. His tongue slipped between her lips until she opened her mouth.

As always, that gentle touch set her body aflame with desire, but Mira struggled this time against the pleasure coursing through her. It would be fleeting, that ecstasy, and leave her with naught in the end.

“What can I do to please you?” Alain asked and cupped her face in his hands. “Only tell me and I’ll do it.”

Mira shook her head. “If you could do it, Alain, you’d have done so already.”

All he could do was kiss her, which he did, and touch her, which he did as well. His hands slid up beneath her skirts and found her bare and ready for him, as she always was. Mira muttered a curse under her breath when his fingers stroked her pearl and the first spasms of climax began building inside her. It was so easy to give in to her body’s longings. Nearly impossible, in fact, to refuse them. Alain brought her to the edge of orgasm with only a few practiced strokes, and when he slid a finger inside her to stroke from the inside as well, Mira shuddered and tossed her head back with a sigh.

“Well, well. What a pretty sight.”

Mira bit down on the strangled cry seeking escape from her throat and looked up. Gerard stood watching them, an unreadable expression on his handsome face. His lips tilted, finally, when Alain’s stroking hand tipped Mira into a helpless rush of orgasm that jerked her entire body. She didn’t look away from Gerard’s eyes the entire time.

Though she had made no secret of the fact both men shared her bed and her body, none of them had ever mentioned it aloud. She’d wondered privately if Gerard and Alain had worked out some sort of system so each could have their turn with her, for they’d never overlapped or intruded upon the other until now.

“Alain,” Gerard said in the voice that made Mira shudder anew with fresh longing. “Have you pleased our lady?”

Alain withdrew his fingers from Mira’s center and slid them along his lips. “I think so, Gerard. But only just once, so far.”

Gerard’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a grin so feral and frightening Mira let out a startled squeak. “We’ll have to remedy that, won’t we?”

They meant to take her at the same time, she saw, and her heart threatened to fly entirely out of her chest, so fiercely did it pound. She’d experienced every intimacy a woman and man could share with both men in front of her, but the thought of them both taking her, both touching her…both fucking her! She shook at the thought.

“What do you suggest?” Alain asked and pinned her with his gaze.

Gerard came up behind him and cupped the back of Alain’s neck in a gesture so intimate Mira’s breath lodged in her throat. She’d known the men were close, and had oft wondered at their friendship, but the way Gerard touched Alain gave proof to what had only been a thought. They were lovers, too.

She’d heard of men who preferred the company of their own sex, yet she knew both of these men to be fervent and skilled lovers. Gerard’s smile grew broader at what must have been a puzzled look upon her face. Alain reached to stroke her cheek, perhaps in reassurance.

“We only want to please you,” Alain said.

Gerard nodded and crooked his finger to her. So accustomed to obeying him had she become, Mira stepped at once toward him. Gerard kissed her as skillfully but with less tenderness than Alain. When he probed without warning between her thighs, she cried out. Her knees sagged a little, but Alain caught her.

“We will take care of you, my lady,” he said. “Don’t fear.”

“I’m not afraid.” Mira wet her lips. Something kindled deep within her. “I’ve been waiting for this.”

“Take off your gown,” Gerard ordered.

Mira didn’t hesitate, though the garden was bright with sunshine and would provide no shadow to hide her nakedness from the eyes of anyone passing. Gerard had commanded it, and so she did it, her nipples already peaked and throbbing and her sex dewed. She tugged open the laces of her gown and dropped the material to the ground, then stepped out of it.

“She is so beautiful, Gerard.”

“She is, indeed, brother of my heart. She is indeed. I want you to get on your knees for her and pleasure her with your tongue.”

Alain ducked his head in acquiescence and Mira parted her legs to allow him access. His tongue, hot and sleek, dove straight to her center and licked and swirled on her until her hips began to rock. She kept her balance with one hand on Alain’s shoulder, but the other drifted from breast to breast, pinching her nipples as Gerard watched, his eyes gleaming.

The front of his breeches tented and he pulled the laces free to push them down over his strong, muscled thighs. His shirt came off over his head until he stood as naked as she. The sun was kind to him, casting him in glittering rays of gold, as if he’d been covered in gilt.

Alain still knelt between her legs, his midnight-black hair streaming over his shoulders. Mira climaxed under his tongue as Gerard watched. Alain kissed her and drew back as Gerard came forward to claim her mouth. When he pulled away, Alain had stripped as well.

Side by side, their differences only proved how well-matched they were. Dark and light.

“Key and lock,” Mira said aloud. “Both of you.”

“And you the door that makes us worth our function,” Alain said as though teasing, but the instant he spoke the words Mira knew them as truth.

“Get on that bench,” Gerard told her. “Alain is going to make love to you now.”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed and settled herself at once onto the carved wooden bench overlooking her favorite flowerbed. Far from being too hard or uncomfortable against her bare skin, the smooth, sun-warmed wood caressed her as she lay back and opened her legs for Alain.

He slid inside her with ease, both of them groaning when he sank to the hilt. He paused before thrusting, but when he began his motions were slow and steady. The bench was high enough off the ground that he could stand, knees slightly bent, to press into her. His hands gripped her hips as he thrust, and when Mira cried out one of them left her curves to stroke her clitoris in time to his thrusts.

The pleasure swept over her in waves so strong they brought tears to her eyes. Alain moved inside her as Mira blinked away the blur and murmured words of encouragement…and love.

It was love, she realized with a wonder even the mind-fuzzing pleasure couldn’t conceal. She loved Alain for his tenderness and gallantry, and her orgasm swept over her as she cried the words over and over.

Alain shouted out his reply as his hips rocked inside her and slowed. They stared into each other’s eyes, smiling, and Mira only looked away when she saw Gerard appear over Alain’s shoulder.

“I love you, too, Gerard,” she said and gave a low cry as Alain’s thrust began another surge of climax building inside her. She loved Gerard for his command and discipline of her.

Each of them gave her something different, something she’d craved without knowing it. She loved them both, and at last understood how to break the curse.

Gerard and Alain seemed to have come to the same realization as Mira, for Gerard again cupped the back of Alain’s neck with one large hand. Watching the men kiss sent a thrill through Mira unlike any other she’d experienced. It would have been easy to fear their fondness for each other, to worry she’d have no place with them, but Alain had said she was the door and now, more than ever, Mira felt it.

Gerard kissed Alain but briefly, for Alain still thrust ever so slowly in and out of Mira. Gerard moved behind Alain. His hands gripped Alain’s hips, and in a moment Mira felt the added pressure of Gerard’s thrust inside Alain. The two men moved in perfect tandem, in and out. Alain cried out, his fingers on Mira’s clit pausing their circling, and it was the hesitation in the stimulation that sent her over the edge once more.

Together, the three of them fucked. Together, they made love. And when Gerard cried out first her name and then Alain’s, and Alain shuddered and grunted with his climax, Mira tipped once again into a spiral of ecstasy so great all she could do was let it sweep her away nearly to oblivion.

When they had untangled themselves from her and from each other, Mira kissed and embraced the two men who’d come through her garden gate and changed her life forever. One fair, the other dark. Gilt and midnight, her own dual nature split into two lovers, each providing the final piece of what she needed to love.

More than that.

Each what she needed to be complete.