Sienna #2
A week ago I'd have felt the old arithmetic kick in, the lifelong certainty that there was a catch, a cost, a line you weren't allowed to want past. It didn't come.
What came instead was the thing he'd named over the eggs, the plain animal fact of a woman who'd gone hungry a long time looking at a full table and deciding, finally, to sit down.
"Are you coming up," I said, "or are you going to stand there being smug about it?"
"Pretty girl." He dropped the towel. "I can do both."
My room was warm from the fire Cormac kept laying in it like a habit he wouldn't put a name to, and the low gray light off the water came in across the bed.
I had about three seconds of taking it in before there were hands on me from two directions and the last of my careful management went out of me for good.
Ronan got my dress off slowly, like he meant to keep the memory.
Tiernan got it the rest of the way off fast, because that was Tiernan, and then there were two mouths on me at once, his at the back of my neck and working down my spine, Ronan's moving from my throat to my breasts.
When Ronan closed his mouth over one nipple and drew on it while Tiernan's hand claimed the other, the sound that came out of me wasn't one I'd have admitted to in daylight.
I felt them both go still for half a beat at it, the particular stillness of men who'd just heard a thing they intended to hear again, and again, until they had the whole map of it.
They took me apart between them, and I didn't reach for dignified.
Ronan laid me back and put his shoulders under my thighs and his mouth where he'd had it on the rug, except this time he didn't stop and draw my clothes back up.
He licked into me slowly and deeply, no hurry in it, that same terrible patience he brought to everything, until my hips rolled up to meet him and my heels found the muscle of his back.
Tiernan stretched out alongside me, propped on one elbow, watching my face like it was the only thing in the room worth watching.
I turned to him blind and open-mouthed, and he kissed me through it, one hand fisted in my hair and the other at my breast, working me in time with whatever Ronan was doing.
"There you are," he said against my jaw. "There's the one she keeps locked up under all the rest."
I reached for him without deciding to, got my hand around the hard length of him, and the rough sound he made was worth every guarded year.
I stroked him slow while Ronan worked me.
For a while there was nothing in the world but the two of them, my hand on one and my whole body arching into the other, the heat of being wanted from two directions at once burning through years of careful like it was paper.
I was climbing, close, when the door opened.
I knew it was Cormac before I lifted my head.
The room changed temperature the way it did when he came into it.
I expected him to leave. He didn't. I turned my face and found him just inside the door, one shoulder to the frame, taking in all of it.
I was laid open between the other two with my hand around Tiernan and Ronan's mouth on me, and he didn't look away and he didn't come closer.
"Don't stop on my account," he said. Flat. Low. The most dangerous quiet in the house.
"Wasn't going to," Ronan said against me, and I felt the rumble of it everywhere.
So Cormac watched. He crossed to the chair by the fire and sat, forearms on his knees, every line of him strung tight around a want he'd decided one more time not to spend.
Knowing he was there, that he wanted this and was holding the line by his fingernails, lit me up in a way I didn't expect and didn't question.
Ronan chose that second to close his lips around my clit and slide two thick fingers into me and curl them, and I broke, hard, my back coming off the bed, a cry tearing out of me that I didn't bother to swallow, because there was no one in this room I needed to hide from anymore.
"That's my girl," Tiernan murmured, riding me through it, his hand gentling on my breast. "That's it. Let them hear you."
I was still shaking when Ronan rose up over me, broad and dark and finally, finally done waiting, and I got both hands on him and pulled.
"Now," I said. "Ronan. Now."
"I know." His forehead came to mine. "I've got you. I've had you the whole time."
He notched himself against me and pushed in slowly, a lifetime of restraint in how careful he made himself be.
The stretch of it, the thick blunt fullness of him, dragged a moan out of both of us.
He gave me all of it by degrees, watching my face the whole way in, and then he moved, deep and unhurried and then not unhurried at all, the bed rocking with it, his control coming apart the deeper he got.
Tiernan stayed at my mouth and my breast with a low filthy run of praise, and when he reached down and put his fingers on my clit while Ronan filled me, I made a sound that had Cormac going still as stone in the chair.
"Wait until you see her go," Tiernan told him, wrecked, conversational, not taking his eyes off me.
"Enough," Cormac said, rough. It wasn't a no. It was a man at the very edge of his own discipline, and every one of us heard exactly what it was.
I came again with Ronan buried deep and Tiernan's fingers working me and both their names in my mouth, clenching down hard enough that Ronan's hips stuttered.
He dropped his head to my shoulder and breathed to hold himself together.
The line between one and the next went soft.
I heard myself saying things I never said to anyone, please and yes and don't stop and their names like something close to prayer, and not one cell of me watched the exits.
That was the part I'd keep. Not the heat of it, though God, the heat of it.
The part where I lay open and wrecked and filled in a house full of dangerous men, one of them watching me come undone from six feet away with everything he held back roaring in the set of his jaw, and I felt, the whole length of it, completely safe.
The word I'd sworn off an hour ago at the dinner table, and there it was anyway.
When I turned my head again, Cormac was on his feet.
I didn't reach for him. Reaching was the surest way to send him back behind the wall, and I'd learned the shape of it well enough by now to let it stand. I only let him see that I saw him. That the door, when he was ready for it, opened from my side too.
Something surfaced in him that wasn't the flat nothing he wore for the world.
Want, badly held. And under it the other thing, the one he'd named in the kitchen with his thumb on my pulse, the one he still wouldn't let into his hands.
Not the refusal from that night, though. A different word this time. Later.
He held my eyes one beat longer. Then he stepped back, soft and deliberate, and drew the door not quite shut behind him, leaving it open a hand's width, which from Cormac was as good as a vow.
Ronan's rhythm gentled, finding me again, and I let the last of it take me, the whole table of it, every good thing I'd sworn I would never risk having because having was only ever a longer road to losing.
He followed me over with my name against my throat.
Tiernan gathered us both in, and for a while nobody said anything at all.
After, there was the tangle of it. Ronan's arm a dead weight across my middle, his breath gone slow in my hair.
Tiernan on my other side drawing idle lines up and down my spine and humming something tuneless, pleased with himself.
The fire ticked down. The sea past the glass, steady and endless, and for the length of that one night, I let it be nothing but the sea.
I should have known better. Fifteen years should have taught me. A person doesn't get to think the word home at a dark window in this life without the dark deciding to answer.
But I didn't know yet.
That night I slept boneless in a tangle of them, in a house full of people who knew my name, without one ear open for the first time since I was fifteen, and dreamed of nothing at all.