MISTRAL DREW OUT OF ME WITH A SIGHING SHUDDER THAT RAN down the length of his body. Seeing him affected to that degree made my breath short and fast. At first I thought he had rain in his eyes to match the lightning; then he blinked, and I realized it was tears.

If we had been alone I would have questioned it, talked about it, but with this many other men around us, I could not. I could not point out that he was crying in front of them, nor could I ask him why and hope to get a truthful answer. But it meant a great deal to me that Mistral, master of storms, cried after he tasted my body.

Abeloec said, softly, “It’s been too long.”

Mistral looked at him, and he simply nodded with the shine of those few hard tears gliding down his cheeks. He looked down at me, and there was a gentleness on his face, a raw pain in his eyes. He kissed me, and this time it was gentle. “I have forgotten my manners, Princess, forgive me.”

“You can kiss me with force, just don’t choke me.”

He gave a small smile, and an even smaller nod. Then he laid his body carefully along the length of mine so that his testicles pressed against my groin, and the hard length of him touched me from groin to my upper stomach. He let his weight settle on top of me with a sigh, then wrapped his arms around me. He put his face to one side of mine, and it was as if he let some great tension fall away from him. It was almost as if he grew lighter at the same time that his actual weight became heavier. I laid a soft kiss against the curve of his ear, because it was the spot I could reach.

He shuddered against me again, but because he was pressed so hard against the front of my body it made me shudder, too. The wind trailed his hair and mine across my face, mingling the red and grey strands together, almost in the way the neon glow of power had wound itself together. Stronger together than apart. The clouds in his eyes spun so fast across them that it was almost dizzying to watch.

He unwound his arms from me and raised up enough to see my face. “I don’t want to kiss down the front of your body. I want to bite my way down it.”

I had to swallow hard before I could answer, in a breathy voice, “No blood, no permanent marks, and nothing as hard as what you did to my breast. You haven’t done enough prep work for that.”

“Prep work?” He made it a question.

Abeloec said, “Foreplay.” He had been kneeling above my head, so still that I had forgotten he was there.

We both looked at him. “Give us a little more room,” Mistral asked. “I am the only one inside this circle with you, and I must remain.”

Circle, I thought, then I realized that he was right. The lines of blue, green, and red encircled the three of us. Everyone else was covered in them, but they formed a barrier around the three of us. It was a barrier that the wind could cross at will, but there would be other things that could not cross it. I wasn’t sure what those other things would be, but I knew enough of magical circles to know that they were meant to keep some things in, and some things out. It was their nature, and tonight was all about the nature of things.

I ran my hands up Mistral’s back, tracing the line of his spine, playing along the muscles that held him just above me. He closed his eyes and swallowed before he looked down at me. “You wanted something?”

“You,” I said.

That earned me a smile. A real smile, not about sex, or pain, or sorrow, just a smile. I valued that smile the way I valued Frost’s smile, and Doyle’s. They had all come to me without a real smile, as if they had forgotten how to do it. By the standards that the other two men had set, Mistral was a fast learner.

I moved one hand around so I could trace his lower lip with my finger. “Do what you wanted to do. Just remember the rules.”

His smile held an edge of something that wasn’t happy now, and I wasn’t sure if the parameters that I’d put on him were actually that taxing, or if I’d reminded him of something sad. “No blood, no permanent marks, nothing as hard as what I did on your breast, because I have not done enough foreplay for that, yet.”

It was almost word for word what I’d said to him. “Good memory.”

“Memory is all I have.” As he said it, that raw pain was back in his eyes. I thought I understood now. He was enjoying himself, and determined to enjoy himself, but when he was finished, there would be no more. The queen would put him back in the lonely cell of her rules, her jealousy, her sadism. Would it be worse to have had this moment and then be denied again? Would it cause him pain to watch me with my men, and not be a part of it? It wasn’t that I was so special to him, or to them. It was simply that I was the only woman with whom the guards could break their long celibacy.

I raised myself off the ground and kissed him. “I am yours.”

He kissed me, gently at first, then harder. His tongue thrust between my lips. I opened my mouth and let him explore my mouth. He thrust deep inside, then backed off a little, enough so that it was just a good deep kiss. The feel of his mouth drew my mouth closer to his, made my body rise up to press tighter against him, sent my arms across his back, pressed my breasts firm against his chest.

He made a small sound low in his throat, and the wind suddenly felt cool against my skin. He drew his mouth from mine, and the expression in his eyes was wild. Storm clouds rode in his eyes, but they had slowed, so that it was no longer dizzying. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I might simply have thought his eyes were the grey of rain clouds.

He laid his face in the curve of my neck. He didn’t so much kiss me as lay his lips against my skin. His breath went out in a heavy sigh that spread warmth across my skin. It made me shiver, and that was it. He set his teeth in the side of my neck, and bit me. It made me cry out and tense my fingers along his back, to trail an edge of nail across his skin.

He bit my shoulder, quick and hard. I cried out for him, and he moved again. I don’t think he trusted himself to hold my flesh in his mouth for very long. I knew he wanted to bite down harder, and I could feel the effort required to fight that urge in his lips, his hands, his entire body. He was enjoying himself, but he was struggling to keep his impulses in check.

He put his mouth into the side of the breast he had not marked and barely laid teeth. I grabbed the side of his face, not hard, but it stopped him. He lifted his gaze to mine, his mouth half opened, and I watched his expression fall. I think he expected me to tell him to stop. Even if that had been what I meant to do, I wouldn’t have had the heart to say it. But regardless, it hadn’t.

“Harder,” I said instead.

He gave me a wolfish grin, and again I got that glimpse of something in him that would have made me hesitate to be alone with him. But I was no longer certain if that was truly Mistral’s nature, or whether centuries of denial had made him wild with need.

He set his teeth into my side and bit down hard, hard enough that I writhed under him. He moved just a little farther down my side, to my waist, and this time when I felt him begin to let go, I said, “Harder.”

He bit me deeper this time, bit me until I felt his teeth almost meet in my skin. I cried out and said, “Enough, enough.”

He lifted his face as if to stop completely. I smiled at him. “I didn’t say stop, I just meant that was hard enough.”

He moved to the other side of my body and bit me again without urging, hard enough that I had to tell him, almost immediately, not to go farther. He looked up at me, and whatever he saw on my face satisfied him, because he bit next to my belly button, setting his teeth so hard and fast that I had to tell him to stop.

He’d left a press of red teeth marks on my stomach. There were red marks here and there on my body, but nothing as perfect as that. A perfect set of his teeth marks in the white flesh of my body. Looking at it made me shiver.

“You like it,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said.

The wind held an edge of dampness as it trailed across my skin. He licked low on my stomach, and the wind seemed to blow across that wet line, almost as if the wind had a mouth, too, and could blow where it wished.

Mistral pressed his mouth where he had licked, and bit me. Hard and sharp, enough to make me startle, and raise my upper body off the ground. “Enough,” I said, and my voice was almost a yell.

The wind began to pick up, blowing more dead leaves across my body. Streaming my hair across my face, so that for a moment I couldn’t see what Mistral was doing. The wind was damp, as if it rode an edge of rain. But it never rained in the dead gardens.

I felt his mouth laid on the mound between my legs, resting on the tight, curling hair. I couldn’t see, but I knew what he was doing. He bit me, and I yelled, “Enough.”

I used one hand to push my hair out of the way, so I could look down my body and see him. He gave one quick flick of his tongue between my legs. That one small touch sped my pulse and opened my mouth in a silent O.

“You know what I want to do,” he said. He spoke with his hands around my thighs, fingers digging in just a little, his face just above my groin, so close that his breath touched me there.

I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice. On the one hand, I didn’t want him to hurt me; on the other, I did want him to come just to that edge of truly hurting me. I liked that edge. I liked it a lot.

I finally found my voice, and it almost didn’t sound like me, so breathy, so eager. “Go slow, and when I say enough, you stop.”

He gave that smile again that filled his cloud-dazed eyes with a fierce light, and I realized it wasn’t my imagination. Lightning played through the heavy grey clouds of his eyes. It had gone away, but now it was back, and it filled them with a flashing white, white light, so that his eyes looked blind for a second. The wind slowed, and the air felt heavy, thick, and I felt an edge of electricity in the air.

He spread me wide, using his fingers, so strong, so thick. He licked the length of me, back and forth until I writhed under his mouth and hands. Only then did he press his mouth over me. Only then did he let me feel the edge of his teeth around the most intimate parts of my body.

He bit down slowly, so slowly, so carefully.

I breathed out, “Harder.”

He obeyed.

He took as much of my flesh down there into his mouth as he could fit, and bit me. Bit me so hard that it raised my upper body completely off the ground, and I screamed for him. But I didn’t scream stop, or enough. I just screamed, full-throated, spine bowing, staring down at him with wide eyes and opened mouth. I orgasmed for him, from the feel of his teeth in my most intimate flesh. I orgasmed for him, and even through the pleasure of it I changed my scream to “Stop, stop, oh, God, stop!” Even through that most overwhelming of pleasures, I could feel his teeth going just a little too far. When something hurts in the middle of orgasm, you need to stop — things usually only hurt when the afterglow begins to fade.