“And whom does that pain belong to? You or me?”

“You, Sir.”

He lets go of my nipple to slap my breast. “And that pain?”

“Yours.”

He grabs my hair and yanks my head to the side so he can bite my shoulder unimpeded. By now my body is singing, my nervous system baffled, sending all kinds of electric signals to my brain. “And this pain?”

“It’s yours, Sir,” I manage.

His hand drops to my chest, running fingertips down to the top of my left breast, where they come to rest against my heart. The movement is possessive and careful and deliberate. Very quietly, very slowly, he asks, “And this pain? Whom does that belong to?”

I want to argue, I want to scream at him that it can’t be his, it didn’t happen to him, it happened to me, but I’ve fallen enough in the cadence of our moment that I answer, “That pain belongs to you too.”

And the moment I say it, my face crumples and there’s no more hiding, no more pushing it away. It’s right there, and I find I’m begging him to take it. “Please make it go away,” I beg, tears running down my cheeks. “Take it away from me.”

“Always.” With no effort at all, he leans down and takes me into his arms, kissing away the salt water on my face. I feel his tongue flickering against my cheek as he licks at them, like a vampire feeding off of tears instead of blood. “It’s my risk because it’s already my pain, angel. Give it to me for the next hour, trust me for just the next hour. Let me carry it for you.”

I nod, still sniffling, curling into a ball on his lap. He runs his hands through my hair, and there’s an appreciative rumble from low in his chest when he lets the silky stuff fall through his fingers. I feel his erection burn against my thigh, and I almost smile at that—his thing for my hair never ceases to amuse me.

Embry comes in, an apple in hand. Those blue eyes warm with something I can’t read when he sees me in Ash’s lap, something molten and jealous. But it leaves as quickly as it came, and he closes the bedroom door and walks to us, apple extended.

“You ready, little princess?” Ash asks. “Snap your fingers if you need to stop, and we’ll stop. Otherwise, remember that your pain is my pain, and that I’m doing this for us. All of us.” I can feel him look up at Embry; Embry’s cock stirs under Ash’s gaze and he nods.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m ready.”

“Open your mouth then, angel. Just like you do when I want my cock in there. Oh very good, very good. What a pretty tongue you have, my little wife, so pink and so wet. Just like other parts of you. Embry, you know what to do.”

Embry’s face is slightly apologetic when he comes forward to put the apple in my mouth, but his cock is completely hard now, the skin at the crown stretched tight and dark. And the moment Ash murmurs, “Bite down,” and my teeth break the flesh of the apple, Embry’s face becomes angles and planes of pure, dangerous lust. Lost-to-himself lust, the kind I saw in Carpathia when he pretended to be my husband pretending to be my abductor, the kind I saw the night he pounded the virginity right out of me.

I’m so distracted by Embry’s face—like Mr. Darcy if Mr. Darcy fucked women to within an inch of their lives—that I don’t even think about the apple until the juice hits my tongue. But the moment it hits my tongue—sweet and tart and slightly floral—I buck and shudder in Ash’s arms, about to spit the damn thing out.

“Drop that apple, and you get the belt,” Ash warns, right as it’s about to fall from my mouth, and I have to bite deeper to keep it from tumbling. Juice runs out from the corner of my mouth and down my chin. I really don’t want the belt. Really, really, even though I know the high I have afterwards is like none other, that the way it drags me into the present and forces all other thought from my mind is probably exactly what I need right now.

“Clean her up,” Ash tells Embry, and I’m confused for a moment until I feel juice from the apple drip to my chest and run over the swells of my breasts.

Ash leans back to watch the show—me perched on his lap and loosely cradled in his arms as his lover approaches and kneels between his spread legs. Embry moves forward, pressing hungry lips to my flesh, lapping up the juice the way Ash earlier had lapped at my tears.

There’s a poem like this, I think dizzily, as Embry’s hot mouth moves to the nipple Ash abused earlier, and then to the other, sucking every bit of juice right off my skin. His mouth traces wet lines to my sternum and collarbone, his tongue light and fluttering in the hollow below my neck. Every movement of his mouth goes straight to my clit.

The Goblin Market, I remember. That’s the name of the poem. A Victorian poem about two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who must resist the forbidden fruits of the otherworldly goblin men. I taught it to undergraduates at Cambridge, and as Embry seals his mouth over the thudding pulse point in my neck and sucks, I remember some of the lines:

Did you miss me?

come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises

hug me, kiss me, suck my juices.

…eat me, drink me, love me,

Laura, make much of me.

Embry licks the juice from my chin next, lips tickling along my jaw, which is tense from holding the fruit. He kisses around the apple, around the edges of my stretched lips. “All clean,” he whispers against my skin.

“Thank you, Embry,” Ash says, his voice husky. I can feel how much watching Embry lick the juices from my skin has affected him, and then I feel it even more as Ash easily lifts me up and resettles me over his lap belly-down, ass-up. His erection is hot hard steel against my bare stomach, and my clit pulses at the new posture, the air wafting between my legs against my exposed cunt.