EDWARD AWOKE in a room full of sunshine, Mullins asleep next to him, curled on his side, facing away.
Edward reached out an arm and pulled him closer, full length of naked man flush backward against Edward’s front.
A quiet chuckle rumbled in his chest.
“What?” Mullins asked hazily.
“No tail.” Just a bare and slightly furry backside. Edward could rub it all day.
But as Mullins moaned deliciously and thrust against Edward’s hand, he thought maybe he had better things to do than rub his lover’s bottom.
He kissed the back of Mullins’s neck, scraping lightly with his teeth, and Mullins breathed out sharply through his nose.
“Have I ever told you how much I like that?” he asked.
Edward leaned over and nuzzled his ear. “How about that?”
“Mm… that too.”
Edward reached around and brushed a tan nipple with his thumb. “That too?”
“Mmm… yes….”
“This could be my favorite game ever,” Edward whispered, rolling his hips so Mullins could feel his erection pushing thickly against his backside.
“Can we play the short version this time?” Mullins asked breathily. “Suddenly I need you very much.”
Edward moved his reaching hand down Mullins’s stomach, not surprised in the least to find his cock hard and thick in his palm.
He squeezed and stroked, liking the way Mullins arched his hips very much.
“You need me?” he whispered.
“Inside me,” Mullins begged. He reached across the bed for a tiny plastic bottle sitting on the end table in plain sight. As he handed it off to Edward, Edward couldn’t help but ask.
“That was just there?”
“There were two cups of water too,” Mullins moaned. “I drank one in the middle of the night.”
Edward remembered that too. Simple human things, both of them drinking water, getting up to pee, stumbling in the dark.
Coming back to bed and cuddling together and falling asleep.
“Yes, but….” Edward couldn’t finish the thought as he slicked up his own cock and then probed between Mullins’s cleft.
“Ahh….” Mullins thrust back against his fingers, and Edward shuddered. So perfect, so easy. Life wouldn’t always give them each other, perfect and easy. This moment was something they’d worked for, had earned.
It was so much sweeter for all of that.
They could savor this moment and remember to always come back to it.
Mullins shifted his hips and pulled his knee up to his chest, giving Edward access, and there, ah! So tight. So warm. The haven his body had always needed.
Edward pushed inside him slowly, letting Mullins’s noises be his guide.
His head popped through, leaving Mullins to clamp down on his shaft as Edward slid all the way in with a delirious “Yesss!”
Oh yes.
He fucked.
Such an animal thing—hips forward, hips backward, cock forward, cock backward—skin and nerves and electrical stimuli….
And trust.
And joy.
And physical exultation.
And love.
Oh, so very much love.
Forward and backward, he built momentum, their bodies pulsing in waves of pleasure, high pitches of sensation.
Mullins groaned, hand moving to his own cock, and then, the best thing of all, he begged some more. “Faster, Edward. Harder. All. I need it all.”
With a growl Edward shoved against his shoulder blade, pushing him flat and facedown against the bed while he fucked him furiously, the pressure of pleasure building up in his loins until he was desperate for release.
“Augh!” he cried out. “No! Too soon—”
“Now!” Mullins demanded. “Now! I need… oh yes! Oh God yes! Please!”
Edward could deny him nothing. He howled, his arms shaking as his climax rocked him, shattered him, and he poured himself into his lover’s body, sweating and panting and joyous.
Mullins convulsed around him, milking him flaccid, pulling his seed inside, keeping all of him safe.
Edward collapsed on top of him, facedown on the bed, and licked the back of his neck.
“Didn’t we just do this?” Mullins mumbled.
“But it ended up so well the first time,” Edward said, and they were still connected when Mullins laughed, so it reverberated through his entire body.
The feeling was delicious.
“I’d like to kiss you now,” Mullins told him, and Edward lowered his face to where Mullins had turned his head.
“I’d like to kiss you forever,” he whispered.
“That too.”
But they started with now.
EVENTUALLY THEY made it out of bed in what appeared to be a suite. The floor and walls were paneled in glowing golden oak, and the coverlet—a detailed quilt, they realized as they looked at it—was all lake blue. They had a window that looked out over the hill and across the highway, to the canyon beyond.
Their windows were opened, and forest green curtains billowed into their room in the early morning breeze.
“It should be colder,” Mullins said as they made their way out of a deliciously prolonged shower. He was bare, with a towel wrapped around his waist as he hunted for sweats in a set of drawers that looked hand-carved to match the bedframe.
“I think Green controls the temperature,” Edward told him, biting his lip. He could go again. He could. They’d had sex waking up and sex in the shower, and he could have gone one more time if Mullins hadn’t begged for food to sustain him.
Half laughing, yes, but also serious.
Edward knew it was the first of many meals to come.
“He can do that?” Mullins pulled out what looked to be a clean pair of comfortably worn sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt in a man’s medium. He threw them at Edward—with boxer shorts to match—and grabbed a set for himself.
“He apparently shopped for us,” Edward said dryly, sliding the clothes on.
“These could fit half the men here,” Mullins told him. “It’s like we got the shared laundry pile Emma used to use for you three.”
Edward grinned and bounced his bottom on the bed. “Now us six,” he said, overwhelmed with the joy of having them all—brothers and lover and parents—all in one heart.
“Four,” Mullins corrected, pulling on his bottoms. “Suriel and Beltane need totally different sizes.”
Edward laughed. “So you, my demon lover, are really the most average man of us all!”
Mullins finished dressing and walked into the vee of Edward’s legs. “Not too average, I hope,” he said softly, closing his eyes and lowering his mouth for a kiss.
“Perfect,” Edward said against his lips. “Absolutely perfect.”
Mullins sank into the kiss, and Edward was about to let his good intentions about finding breakfast fly out the window when there was a knock on the door.
“Guys? You got breakfast arriving.” At Cory’s words, a tray of everything—toast, fruit, eggs, sausage, everything—appeared on the dresser they’d just used, and Mullins moaned in gratitude as he moved toward the food. “And I hope you’re decent because I’ve got to come in.”
“All dressed, Lady,” Edward said. He couldn’t begrudge their hostess a damned thing—not after everything her people had done for them.
“Excellent.” Cory came through the door dressed… well, much the way Mullins and Edward were. The men’s sweats were snug across her hips, and the enormous white T-shirt—likely one of Bracken’s or Green’s—hung down to her knees. Her hair was pulled up in a practical ponytail behind her head, and she carried the little girl—white-blonde of hair and silver-blue of eye—on her hip. “Can you say hello, Silver?”
The child hid her face against Cory’s neck, and she kissed the top of a perfectly braided blond coif.
Apparently the sprites did more than just cook.
“Too shy,” Cory apologized, smiling. “So, guys—come out when you’re ready. They’ll drop food in on you and clean up if you don’t, and get mad at me if you don’t eat, so definitely eat. We have snacks out in the kitchen if you get hungry between times—make yourself at home. Green wants to meet with you this evening, and we’re going to have a celebratory feast tomorrow. You may want to invite your mother, Edward, because that’s the other thing.” A buzzing filled the room, and Cory grimaced, pulling Edward’s phone out of the pocket of her sweats. “Your mother’s been calling. She wants an update. She seems to think we’ve cooked you and served you up as scraps. Francis and Beltane don’t count—and Suriel got us about an hour’s reprieve. She needs to talk to you.”
Edward frowned. “What about Harry?”
Cory sobered. “Still sleeping. He’ll be okay, but Suriel and Green both thought they should let him stay that way. So there you go. You have a banquet in your honor tomorrow, and your only chore today is to call your mother. You’re welcome.”
Edward shook his head and accepted the phone. “My lady—I have a debt I can never repay—”
“Ha!” she laughed, and Silver repeated the sound. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Yeah, they’d better laugh,” Cory burbled. “Oh, honey, don’t you worry. I’m not sure how or when or where, but we will come knocking on your door someday—or even on your phone—and say, ‘Oh, guys! We’ve got a thing only you can do!’”
“And I’ll say ‘We’ll do it.’ In a heartbeat. Without question,” Edward said, bowing, Mullins at his side.
Cory grinned. “Excellent. We’ll try not to bring the forces of hell down on your heads when we do that—because yeah, it was novel, but it was a little too damned interesting for a picnic in the garden, you think, Silver?”
“Dammit!” Silver said proudly, and Cory grinned at her.
“Anything else you want to say, little lady?”
“Dammit! Dammit!”
“Awesome! Let’s go see Nicky and we can blame this on him!”
“Dammit!”
“That’s right—once more with feeling!”
Mullins and Edward both laughed, and Cory turned around and left the room.
“So,” Mullins said, going back to the food and starting to dish up their plates. “Food first or conversation with Emma first?”
Edward looked at the phone.
Fifteen messages, forty phone calls.
“Could you make me a plate?” he hedged. “I think I’ll do both.”
The room had two stuffed chairs near the window, facing a small television, and Edward sank into one of them and hit Emma’s number.
Time to face the music.
“Are you dead?” she asked before the phone had even finished ringing.
“I’m pretty sure Francis and Bel told you I’m not!”
“But they must have been mistaken,” she responded sweetly, “because here you are, not dead, and yet I haven’t spoken to you by phone or brainwave in almost twenty hours. There’s a block around the hill, you know. Harry was sick—I get that—which means you’re the one I trusted to tell me you all aren’t dead.”
For a moment Edward thought of brushing it off, Harry style, and saying, “Not even a bruise. Maybe a little one,” but he couldn’t.
“Harry got really sick,” he told her honestly. “Emma—I think he almost died. And… and he could barely stand, and he did anyway, and sent me to hell to bring Mullins back. And we got back and there was”—he had to use the word—“fucking chaos, and battle, and Mullins wasn’t breathing and… and I did it. Mom, I did it, but I don’t know how….”
His voice broke, and Mullins’s hands on his shoulders grounded him as Emma soothed.
“Now see?” she said when both of them had calmed down. Her voice sounded shaky and broken. “This is why I talk to you, Edward. You’re the one who tells me the truth. Now what’s your plan from here?”
Edward took a deep breath.
And a bite of toast.
And remembered his belief in truth and his belief in reason.
And remembered who had taught him these things.
“I think Francis is going to need to stay—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Bel will come back with you all, and Francis should come with him. He needs to be with Bel until Bel returns to England. When Bel goes back, he can return to Green’s.”
Emma knew best. Oh God, she really did.
“And Harry needs to sleep here for a week,” Edward told her, his voice wobbling.
“Ask him when he’s ready to return,” she said softly. “Green’s consort—”
“The Lady Cory?”
“No, I got an impertinent young man named Nicky. Does he have more than one?”
“Yeah….”
The conversation continued as Edward told his mother about the hill and she told him about how to make sure his brothers were as whole as possible.
When he finally hung up, his plate was clean and Mullins had placed it on the dresser with the tray. Mullins had flung himself across the bed and was facing him, eyes half-closed. He heard Edward sign off and opened them.
“So?” he asked softly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and sitting to face Edward.
“We stay here until Harry’s ready to travel. We rest. We make love. We enjoy our break.” He grimaced. “Bel and Francis are going to… to need to figure things out on their own. Francis will probably come back here after Beltane leaves again.”
“Until he’s ready,” Mullins said softly.
Edward swallowed and looked away.
“You’ll miss them.”
Oh, he felt so foolish. “I… I had this vision. The six of us, the family business—”
Mullins’s laugh was so gentle, Edward almost missed the tone of an older lover. “My darling,” he said. “We have so much time for that to be our reality.” He smiled, and it was blinding. “Your brothers will always be your brothers. I think if yesterday showed anything, it was that you will always be inseparable.”
In his head Edward could hear Harry calling him a “worrier princess,” and he took a deep breath. “Harry’s going to be okay,” he said, remembering Green’s kiss on his brother’s brow.
“He will.” Mullins stood and moved to between his knees again, then took his hands.
“And Francis and Bel will find their way,” he realized.
Mullins smiled and nodded, kissing the backs of his knuckles.
“And you and I will be together until death do us part,” Edward said, the revelation seeping into his bones.
“I wouldn’t have left hell if it wasn’t to be by your side,” Mullins told him reverently.
Edward’s eyes burned. “I’m so very glad you did,” he rasped, and Mullins bent to take his mouth.
The kiss wasn’t passionate—although there would be plenty more of that. It was a blessing, a promise, and a prayer.
It was their future as two, their more-than-mortal lifespans made beautiful, sustained in their hearts, by being lovers side by side.
They would be two, and their family would follow, and there was happiness—such happiness—to hold gently in the palms of their hands.