Chapter 33
Annabelle
Tonight, I do the claiming.
“Sit down,” I say. “All of you.”
Three sets of identical blue eyes land on me. Nobody moves. Ethan’s mouth curves, slow and dangerous. “And why would we do that?”
“Because I’ve spent a few months letting you decide everything. What I eat, when I sleep, where your names go.” I pull my top over my head and stand there in my bra and leggings, heart going hard, because brave is a muscle and I’m still learning to use it. “But tonight I want a turn.”
It’s Callan who sits first. Callan, who can’t bear to be touched, who flinches from the whole loud mess of the world, lowers himself to the edge of the bed and looks up at me with his pupils blown black and says, “Then take it.”
Aidan laughs low and shifts to make room. Ethan takes the armchair, the one he guards me from, and for once, he lets me be the thing in charge of the room.
I go to Callan first. Because it costs him the most, and because he gave it first.
I climb into his lap, slowly, giving him every second to stop me.
He doesn’t. His hands come to my hips like he’s holding something that might break him.
I take his face in both hands and kiss him.
He makes that low, wrecked sound against my mouth that undoes me every single time.
His cock is already hard under me. I roll my hips once, deliberate, and feel him shudder.
“Tell me you want this,” I murmur against his lips. The way he always asks me.
“You know I do.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I want you.” His voice scrapes. “I’ve wanted you since before I let myself know what wanting was.”
I pull his shirt over his head, and there he is, the man who hides more than his brothers ever have, bare under my hands.
I press my mouth to his collarbone, his chest, lower, and I slide off his lap to my knees between his thighs, and I take my time with the button of his jeans because I want him to feel watched the way he’s spent his whole life watching.
When I take his cock in my mouth, Callan’s hand fists in my hair, careful even now. His head drops back. The sound he makes is the most honest thing in the room. I work him slowly, with my tongue, my hand, my eyes on his face, until his thighs go tight and his breath turns ragged.
“Annabelle.” A warning. “If you keep doing that, I won’t last, and I want to be inside you.”
I let him slip from my mouth with a wet sound that has Aidan groaning behind me. “Then get inside me.”
But I’m not done choosing. I rise and turn to Aidan, who is already reaching, and I put a hand flat on his chest and push him back down.
“Patience,” I tell him.
“Never had any, little bell.”
“Learn.”
Ethan laughs from the chair, dark and delighted. “She’s got your number.”
I strip the rest of my clothes off myself, no one undressing me for once, and I stand in the middle of their attention, naked except for the butterfly, and I have never in my life felt less fragile.
“Callan on your back,” I say. “I want to ride you while I watch you break.”
He moves quickly. I straddle him and sink down onto his cock in one slow slide. We both groan. His hands find my waist, holding me like an anchor holds a boat against the pull of the tide.
“Look at me,” I tell him, giving him his own words back, and he does, and I ride him with his eyes locked on mine and his control coming apart under me one breath at a time.
The bed dips behind me. Aidan’s hands skim up my spine, his mouth at my shoulder, his cock hard against the curve of my arse.
“Room for one more?” he murmurs.
“You have to ask now?” I pant.
“New rules, apparently.” He bites the top of my shoulder, soft. “I’m asking.”
“Yes,” I breathe. “Yes.”
He preps me carefully, his fingers slick with lube, his other hand splayed warm across my belly. When he presses into me, I’m full of both of them, stretched, shaking, and so far past thought that the only words I have left are their names.
“Fuck,” Aidan grits out against my neck. “That’s it. Take us. Good girl.”
I find a rhythm between them, Callan beneath me, Aidan behind me with his teeth at the side of my throat, and the pleasure builds in slow, brutal waves until I’m grinding down without any grace at all, just need.
Ethan moves to the edge of the bed and watches me come apart between his brothers. I reach for him because the set isn’t complete without him, and we all know it.
“Tinks,” he says, low.
“I want all of you,” I tell him, wrecked. “That’s the whole point. All of you, or it isn’t us.”
Something moves behind his eyes, deep and decided. He strips off and kneels next to us, bringing his cock to my mouth. I take him. Now there’s nowhere on me that isn’t theirs, nowhere on them that isn’t mine, and the difference between those two things finally stops mattering.
We fuck hard. Callan’s cock drives up into my pussy. Aidan sets a savage pace at my back. Ethan’s fingers tangle in my hair, guiding. I take him deep, look up the length of his body, and see his control finally, completely crack.
“Fucking hell, Annabelle,” he breathes.
Callan goes first. He stops fighting it, his whole body bowing up under me, and he comes with my name on his lips like a prayer he’s done pretending he doesn’t say. The feel of him pushes me over with him, my orgasm tearing through me so hard I lose Ethan from my mouth and cry out into the dark.
Aidan follows, swearing, his hand fisted in my hair, his hips stuttering against me. “There she is. There’s my girl.”
Ethan brings himself to the edge with my hand wrapped around him and my eyes on his, and when he comes, he says my name again, just once, like it’s the only word left that’s true.
After, we end up in a heap that shouldn’t be comfortable and somehow is. Callan’s arm under my neck, Aidan’s leg thrown over mine, and Ethan along my other side, his palm spread possessively on my hip.
“So,” Aidan says into the quiet. “That’s how it’s going to be, is it. You giving orders.”
“Sometimes,” I say.
“I can live with sometimes.” He yawns. “It’s a bit hot, actually.”
“It was extremely hot,” Ethan says, with the gravity of a man delivering a verdict.
Callan says nothing. He just turns his head and presses his mouth to my hair. His hand finds mine in the dark, and he holds on.
I lie there in the wreck of the bed, marked and claiming, surrounded by the three men who pulled me out of the water and never once let go, and I think about the box on the shelf in the other room with my mother folded quietly inside it.
She wanted me to live. Not survive. Live.
I’m finally doing it.