Briar
THE SCENT OF JASMINE RAMBLING THROUGH THE WINDOWS greeted me first.
Home.
This castle in the sky was everything I wanted it to be—a sanctuary, an oasis, a reprieve from the horrors of the rest of the world.
It lulled me in, making me forget the land below and the responsibilities beyond it.
Maybe I could be like Maez. Maybe I could forget the world beyond me existed.
Maybe with enough time and practice, I could just be selfish and have something just as good.
“Going back to your room?” Maez asked from where she lounged on the bed, sifting through the mounds of treasure she’d spread across it like a gilded blanket.
It was only then I realized that I was staring at the door, unmoving.
I put a hand on my hip, the fabric already crumpled from our escapades around Rikesh. I turned back to Maez. “I don’t want my own room,” I announced.
Her eyes lit up at that, green magic sparking around her.
“What do you want?” she asked, a catlike grin stretching over her face as she studied me.
“I want to stay here with you,” I said, defiantly squaring my shoulders and firmly planting my bare feet on the tiled floor. “Will you move my things in here?”
She snapped her fingers. “Done.”
I leaned my weight side to side. “That’s okay, isn’t it?” My bravado wavered. “Me being here?”
This is what I wanted—to be selfish, to claim what I wanted, to surrender to this little world we created and pretend nothing else existed.
Maez’s smile widened. “It is more than okay, Princess.”
She prowled off the bed, grabbing me by the hips and spinning me so I landed on the treasure. Coins jingled and jewels clinked together as I bounced on the mattress.
“Look at you,” she said, taking me in. “You look good splayed out on a bed of jewels.”
“Better than in the blood of my enemies?” I taunted.
“With some minor adjustments,” she purred, leaning forward and unclasping the shoulder pins of my dress. She yanked the fabric down leaving me bare before her. “Better.”
My chest rose and fell at that hungry look in her eyes.
She grabbed one of the pearl necklaces and lifted it over her head. She draped the beads over my naked body, trailing them over my breasts and belly and down toward my core. When she got to my pussy, she grabbed the other end of the necklace.
I rose on my elbows. “What are you doing?”
She looked up at me with a wicked grin and commanded, “Lie back down.”
She parted my sex with the taught strand of pearls, the smooth round balls dragging over my clit. That rolling rhythm made me gasp. She moved them faster, making me vibrate with the feeling of them.
“Do you like that?” she asked as I grabbed handfuls of silken sheets for purchase.
“Yes,” I moaned as she pulled the necklace over me slower and faster and slower again, torturing me. My back arched off the bed, the sensation so different, so all-consuming it was already pushing my body toward an orgasm. “That feels so good.”
At my words, Maez stopped, and I let out a whimper. I rose back on my elbows to watch as she lifted the pearls to her mouth, cleaning one bead with her tongue and then another, sucking along the string. She hummed.
“Delicious,” she crooned. Her eyes drifted past me and her smile widened.
She prowled onto the bed. Kissing me, her tongue sweeping over mine and letting me taste my own desire.
I took advantage of her position, unbuckling her belt and yanking down her trousers.
She barely had time to kick them off before I sat up and dropped my mouth to her pussy.
My hands wrapped around her legs, kneading her ass as I pulled her sex against my tongue.
Maez’s head dropped back as she grabbed my hair, rocking her hips into me with a groan.
Her knees leaned into the bed frame as if the feeling was too good and she couldn’t hold herself up.
I licked her in quick circles, knowing exactly what made her come undone.
I laved my tongue over her clit as she rocked into my mouth.
I had thought I would bring her to the edge and leave her wanting, just as she had done to me, but as she tightened her grip on my hair, I knew I wouldn’t.
I wanted to feast on her, wanted to make her unravel and come against my mouth, wanted to hear her sweet moans as I brought her a pleasure no one else could.
I worked her in that steady rhythm—not too fast, not too slow—letting her take the lead as she pressed into me harder.
All at once, she climaxed, coming against my tongue, her ass tightening under my grip as she thrust against my lips.
The sounds she made had my own pussy fluttering, wet heat coating my legs.
When she pulled back, there was a black fire in her eyes as if she knew how aching and desperate I was for her.
She grabbed me by the waist, flipping me over so I was belly down across her gold.
Maez spread my knees wider across the bed, pulling my hips back and my pussy against her waiting tongue. She gave me one long lick and hummed.
“You’re so wet for me, Princess.”
I could only let out a strangled sound of agreement as she plucked a long smooth emerald from the bed.
She trailed the gem down my back, tracing it across my spine as I trembled in anticipation.
When she pressed the tip of the precious stone to my core, I swallowed thickly, and when she started to push it inside me, I clawed at the bedsheets.
“That’s it,” she purred. I felt her kneel on the bed behind me, her thighs hitting mine as she pushed the stone deeper. “You take my treasure like such a good girl.”
I moaned as she pulled it out and thrust it back in again faster. “Maez,” I panted, desperately clinging to bed as she began to fuck me in earnest.
“Yes. Say my fucking name.”
Her thighs slapped against mine and I wondered if she was holding that stone to her clit, fucking me while pleasuring herself with it.
My pussy dripped, my thighs slick with the sensation of her pushing in and out, pumping that gemstone into my eager body.
When her other hand snaked around to rub my clit, I cried out. The feel of it was so overwhelming.
“What am I to you?” She panted, rubbing faster. “Say it.”
“My mate,” I moaned. “You’re my mate.”
Maez bent forward, curling over my back, her breasts rubbing against my bare skin, and I could hear in her ragged breaths that she was close again, too.
She thrust the emerald into me, holding it there deep inside of me, stretching me until my eyes were rolling back.
She moved against it, rubbing herself again and again against the rounded edge of the oblong and the heel of her hand gripping it.
Her fingers kept circling me as my inner muscles squeezed against the stone.
I felt so light and weighted with lead all at once, my vision spotting.
“Yes,” I groaned as her fingers worked me faster.
Maez’s breaths grew more sharp, her breathing frantic as she began moving again, fucking me through her own release. The feeling of that stone pumping in and out again had me toppling over the edge.
I screamed, my eyes going dark as I bit down into the silken sheets and let her ride me through the most explosive orgasm I’d ever had in my entire life.
My soul seemed to tear apart and reform, the sensation so overwhelming that Maez’s hand on my clit was the only thing keeping me from collapsing back down onto the bed.
Wave after wave she pulled out of me, one orgasm colliding into another, feeling like I might never come back down.
My mind was blank, my body jelly, when she finally released me and I dropped against the coins and silk sheets, panting and ecstatic.
“I take back everything I said,” I panted into the sheets. “We definitely, definitely needed this treasure.”
Maez chuckled, slowly pulling the emerald out of my happily sore pussy and tossing it onto the bed.
She dropped beside me and gathered me into her arms, and the feeling of my skin against her own soothed me.
She was holding me. She hadn’t done that in so long, and Sweet Moon, it felt so good.
It was like its own homecoming the way her fingers trailed down my back.
Yes. Maybe I could be selfish. Maybe I could have this. Maybe nothing else mattered. I’d turn my soul into her same shade of darkness until we were once again one and the same.