And then it’s there.
The thing underneath it all, which is something like completion, except it’s not completion necessarily, and neither is it satiety, because I want more and more and more of it and the wanting is part of the feeling too.
It’s more like...serenity. Or ecstasy. No matter how different those two things might seem on the surface, they are twins at the root. They are both a rightness of self, a rightness of the world.
A rightness so deep that even my bones feel right. My cells, my mitochondria.
Everything is curled up in bliss and singing with happiness to be fucked like this. To be Lorne’s again. However briefly.
“You were going to give this to a stranger,” Lorne breathes, biting at my neck as he pumps into me. “You were going to go to a stranger when I was right here, when you have an ex-husband who could give you exactly what you needed.”
The shock of each and every thrust makes it hard to speak. Everything below my navel is a single, searing ache, made hotter and achier by the near-angry way he stabs into me. Still, the truth tumbles out of my mouth. “I was going to pretend it was you,” I admit, my head dropping to his shoulder. “I wanted it to be you, but my pride...”
“I know all about your pride, little witch,” he says, surging up into me and then giving my clit slow, hard grinds. I moan into his tuxedo. “But your pride is one of the things I treasure most about you. I’d never want you to give it up. Just let me inside it with you sometimes.”
“Liar,” I mumble as the pressure behind my clit becomes unbearably wonderful. “I know Dominants. I know you. You want to play with my pride too, not just treasure it.”
I feel him smile against my hair. His stubble scratches the shell of my ear as he agrees, “Yes, my witch. That too.”
And then—incredibly—I’m smiling back. I forgot how good this feels, the smoldering wickedness of him, being drunk on him. How free and playful it was, how exhilarating, how alive it made me. I mean, I am always alive, of course, and dominating can be just as thrilling, just as sweet, but only with him have I also felt this. This...euphoria threaded through with a delicious kind of shame, a fun kind of fear.
And before, when we were married, having both feelings inside me felt like a lie, like I was being disingenuous somehow. But maybe…
I can have both. I can choose.
“Then play with it,” I tell him, sinking my hands into his dark hair. “I want what I came for.”
“And what did you come for, ex-wife?”
I turn my head to study the strong-featured face I’ve missed so much. The blade-carved jaw, the proud nose. The bold eyebrows over his drink-me eyes.
“To remember what it felt like to be yours.”
He sounds more curious than upset when he asks, “Even if you had to use someone else to do it?”
“Well. You can punish me for it, if you’d like,” I say, and then he laughs.
“You’re smiling again, Morgan le Fay. Someone might think you’re happy, and then what will become of your fearsome reputation?”
I move my fingers down to trace the line of his mask. “Maybe I’ll have to take fearsomeness lessons from you.”
“In that case.”
His hands find my ass, and suddenly I’m hauled up against him, my legs around his waist, and my core still impaled with his rigid length. His hands are over the fairy dress, which means whatever’s in the fabric that’s been irritating my skin is now back to tormenting me.
I give a low cry—muffled by his sudden kiss—as the pain on my bottom joins the carnal bliss currently knitting itself into a frantic orgasm. God, I forgot this too, the way pain and pleasure work a spell together, the way they hex each other into twisting, thorny rapture. It’s like being stabbed all over with paradise itself, like being tickled and caressed with agony. A contradiction I’ve only ever found with Lorne.
As if he knows what his hands are doing to my poor, abused backside, he grips me even harder, he squeezes me, plumps me with his fingers, and I sink my teeth into his shoulder to keep quiet...which is nearly impossible with the rough, unforgiving way he’s riding me right now. He’s fucking me like he paid for me, and every second of it, every goddamn bit of it, is too good; it’s what I’ve needed, what I’ve craved. And it’s too much like falling back in love—
With an abrupt shudder, I come apart—a mess of fairy wings and urgent, gasping squirms. I try to fuck myself against him, I pull his hair, I bite his shoulder again and again, but he is relentless, he is all fury and burn and the triumph of my orgasm has only stoked the burn higher.
He fucks me through my climax, and then the minute I’ve collapsed shivering in his arms, he sets me down and spins me around.
“Hands on the wall,” he grates, and I’m too Lorne-drunk to argue, too horny to care that this is definitely less ambiguous to anyone watching us through the gauzy fabric of the alcove.
He pushes my dress up and over my ass and hisses in pleasure at what he sees.
“Beautiful,” he says, fitting his cock to my opening once again. “Fucking beautiful.”
And with a low grunt I feel everywhere in my body, he wedges himself back inside. One hand curls around my hip while the other reverently strokes my bottom. “My Morgan,” he sighs, fucking into me harder. “My witch.”
It takes nothing for me to come again like this. My hands against the wall, the gentle sear of his fingers over the welts from my dress. His massive erection stroking me from the inside out.
It doesn’t matter what this means, it doesn’t matter that I’m terrified to call myself a switch, it doesn’t matter that I’ve pushed this man away over and over again because he’s the only person since Maxen Colchester to make me vulnerable.
All that matters is how it feels, and how it feels is fucking perfect.
I climax again, barely able to stand, shuddering with pleasure as Lorne bands an arm around my waist to keep me upright. He keeps moving between my thighs, holding me up to fuck me, until—with an abrupt breath torn from his throat—he rams into me a final time and I feel his erection swell.
His warm lips find my nape, my neck, as he throbs in my cunt, and I know the minute he starts pumping the latex full of his release, because he sighs again—a sigh like a man dying. A sigh like a man coming home.
For a long moment we stay like this, his lips against my neck, his cock finishing inside me. His arm stays around my waist and his heart is beating so hard I can feel it even through the thin wool of his tuxedo and the wire and netting of my wings.
Happiness.
That’s what this is.
It’s the same happiness stolen night after night in our marriage, always followed by a crashing fear that I was somehow a coward or a liar for stealing it.
Morgan Leffey, the Witch of the White House, becoming a kitten in the arms of a man.
I don’t need to see Lorne’s face to know that when he pulls out, it’s with a deep reluctance, because I feel the same.
If only the entire world could be this moment, this hot embrace against a ballroom wall while a party whirls and twirls behind us…
I feel the cool, damp emptiness signaling his withdrawal and hear the slick noise of latex over skin and the rustle of fabric as he pulls off and wraps the condom in a handkerchief—an old trick of his from when he used to fuck me at fundraisers and charity galas.