“Seriously?” he asks, and it takes Emily a second to realize he’s staring into Ryan’s eyes. “You want me to tell you what it said in front of all these people?”
Ryan straightens. “There are only four people in this room. The rest of us are something you will never understand.”
“Oh, I beg to differ, sweet thing,” Jonathan answers. “I could understand you face-first into a pillow all night long.”
Emily prepares for another burst of Ryan’s hostility. Instead, the young man tongues his upper lip briefly as he sweeps Jonathan’s bound, naked body with a lustful stare. “Maybe later,” he whispers.
“Suit yourself.” Jonathan gives him a wink.
Marcus says, “I thought we were negotiating Jonathan’s release here.”
Dupuy says, “Check out his wangdoodle. We kinda are.”
“Gentlemen,” Emily whispers. “Please.”
But Emily can’t help but glance down at Marcus’s cock, still barely concealed by his cupping hands, and still soft, thank God; he’s not turned on in the slightest by the electric current of desire that just passed between the two men on either side of them.
“Despite what you may believe,” Lilliane says, “this is not why I made everyone disrobe. Jonathan, the letter. Please. What did it say?”
Pity has replaced lust in Jonathan’s eyes as he stares at the preternaturally beautiful, completely nude, eternally youthful man standing across the room from him.
“Jonathan,” Emily says quietly.
Ryan stands up straight, his arms falling to his sides as if he’s bravely preparing himself for whatever blow his father is about to deliver by way of the naked man sitting bound to a chair across the room from him.
“He wants you to know he’s sorry even though he doesn’t expect you to accept his apology,” Jonathan begins. “He wants you to know that it’s taken him this long to figure out why he tried to destroy your life.”
“He did destroy my life,” Ryan whispers, lower lip trembling.
“Yes, well,” Jonathan continues, “he thought the only reason he did it was because he caught you in bed with his wife. For years, he says, he went on like that, believing his only motive was revenge. And that’s why he threw you out and stopped paying your tuition and took away everything you owned. He said he fully expected you to have to sell yourself on the street to survive and he didn’t care. At the time, he thought it would be poetic justice, being forced to live off the parts of yourself you used to seduce to his wife. Those were his exact words.”
“She seduced me,” Ryan whispers. “I was nineteen.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan says. “He knows that now. But back then, he blamed you for all of it because he couldn’t face the reality of what he’d done.”
“You mean throwing my mother away because she wasn’t twenty-five anymore?” Ryan asked. “Because she had the nerve to gain ten pounds in the thirty years they’d been married?”
“Basically,” Jonathan answers timidly. Emily can tell he’s doing his best to remember Arthur’s exact words, and it’s drained the sarcasm from him, and made his voice sound breathy and distant. “He accepts that, and he says, maybe if he had actually stopped loving your mother, that would have been one thing. But now he can see what really happened. What other people thought of the woman on his arm became more important to him than what was in his heart.”
“Of how she looked,” Ryan growls. “What other people thought of how the woman on his arm looked became more important to him. Not her character. Not who she actually was.”
Jonathan nods, continuing. “He says you saw even back then what he’d really done, and so you began to live the lesson he had taught you. You began to live as if the only thing of value you had was your body, your sexuality. And when he found you in bed with his new wife, who was closer to your age than his, you came to embody everything he hated about what he had done to your mother and who he had become. So he became determined to stamp you out, as if you’d never been his son at all.”
“Stamp me out,” Ryan whispers. “These are his words? In his letter?”
“Yes,” Jonathan answers.
“That’s how he described having dirty cops plant drugs on me while I was living on the street?”
“Yes. But he also paid off the judge to keep it from going to trial. He says he had a change of heart when he realized what was going to happen to a boy as beautiful as you in prison.”
“But for a while, he was looking forward to that part, wasn’t he?” Ryan asks. “Fitting revenge, isn’t it? Me being raped in prison as punishment for sleeping with his idiot trophy wife who only turned to me when she realized she meant about as much to him as one of his cars?”
“Easy, Ryan,” Lilliane says quietly. “Your father isn’t here.”
“What else does the letter say?” Ryan asks, trying to maintain his grip on his anger as he wipes away tears with the back of one hand.
“He says he accepts full responsibility for what he did. To your mother, to you, and to your heart. He says that for you, his only son, he has taken this self-awareness into his soul, rather than spend his final hours in peace or denial.”
At the very moment when Ryan Benoit looks like he’s about to let loose a sob, he roars instead. He throws both arms into the air above his head, fists clenched, and doors slam throughout the vast house, shaking the entire structure to its bones and causing the giant chandelier overhead to rock and sway, its crystals tinkling together like wine glasses being shaken inside of a crate. Then he bolts from the room, running past the staircase and deeper into the first floor, but not before Emily catches a glimpse of his eyes flaming with such gold radiance, his pupils, irises, and sclera have been lost.
“We need to go,” Marcus says, and Emily’s not sure who he’s speaking to.
“We’re not finished here,” Lilliane says.
“If we’d had any idea what that kid was capable of, no way we would have agreed to bring him that letter. My boss is in danger. You need to let us go.”
“You remain loyal to your employer even after hearing about his stellar parenting skills. That’s touching, Marcus.”
“We’ve all got sins, lady. I’m sure your story has more than a few.”
There’s a scraping sound against the hardwood floor close to where Ryan was standing moments before. Emily expects the arrival of more radiants, until she sees the actual source. A high-backed chair just like the one Jonathan is tied to is traveling across the floor by itself, thanks, Emily is sure, to Lilliane’s powers.
“Using corrupt police officers to frame his teenage son for a crime he didn’t commit? Just to punish him for the fact that he was seduced by an older woman? Whatever became of this lovely young wife anyway?”
“He divorced her a year later,” Emily says. “Now we know why,” she adds in a whisper.
“A whole year? Really?” Lilliane barks with laughter. “How big of Arthur Benoit! Truly, his heart must know no bounds. A whole year while his son lived on the street, paying the price for his father’s sham marriage. That, young man, is not my story and it never will be. And besides, my story is not the reason any of us are here tonight.”
“Yeah, I beg to differ, ma’am, so how ’bout we—”
Marcus flies across the room and lands ass-first in the giant throne-like chair. He’s so stunned by the impact, he doesn’t have time to get to his feet before the two radiants who carried Jonathan into the room are on him. Marcus gasps for breath, trying to summon anger out of shock, as the two radiants tie his wrists to the chair's arms and his ankles to its legs. When they’re done, Jonathan and Marcus are mirror images of one another on opposite sides of Lilliane’s long walkway made of humans.
Maybe human, Emily corrects herself.
“Ryan Benoit has gone to the same place he always goes to when he suffers from a genuine emotion,” Lilliane says. “His room. To cry. Alone.”
With that, Lilliane steps down off of her radiants and crosses the ca
rpet. Even though Dupuy has rested a comforting hand on her shoulder, Emily’s knees begin to shake as the whip-toting woman closes the distance between them.
“Now, Miss Blaine,” Lilliane says. “It’s time to discuss the final condition of Jonathan’s release.
“What do you want?”
“I want to know what else was a lie besides your name, your paper mills, your beautiful Aston Martin,” Lilliane whispers.
When she takes Emily’s chin in one powerful hand, her grip is anything but gentle.
“Get off her,” Dupuy says.
With a flick of her other wrist, Lilliane sends the man tumbling backward over his own feet before he lands ass-first on the carpet with a loud, bone-shaking thud.
“Did you lie to my book, Emily, or are you really a fan of dirty doctors?”
“Tell me what you are and I’ll let you do whatever it is…you do.”
“Why delay? Are you afraid of what we’ll see? Is your heart in conflict? Possibly between these two men?”
“What would you know of anyone’s heart? You deal in lust, not love.”
“We deal in desire, which is both!”
“What are you?”
At the sound of Emily’s frightened cry, Lilliane softens her grip on Emily’s chin.
“We were offered a gift,” Lilliane whispers, as if she doesn’t want anyone else in the room to overhear this explanation. “All of us. We were offered a very special gift. But we resisted it, and this resistance made us what we are.”
“There’s something in all of you. Something gold in your eyes. Some type of force that can use fire. I don’t understand… Are you possessed? Is that it? Is it some kind of spirit that’s in all of you?”
“Spirits, plural,” she whispers.
“And if I don’t want them in me?”
“That’s not how it works. We unleash, we don’t invade. And you’re not afraid of what I might put into you, Emily Blaine.” Suddenly, but gently, Lilliane grips the sides of Emily’s face with both hands. Glittering snakes of gold pour from her eyes and between her lips, lacing the air between them. “You’re afraid of what’s already there.”
Emily opens her mouth to scream, but in that same moment, a single, slight inhale from Lilliane pulls all the breath from Emily’s lungs…
27
….Darkness encloses her, presses against every inch of her naked skin.
There’s a pulse and throb nearby. It’s the dance floor, she’s sure. The dance floor she returns to again and again in her mind, that press of male bodies, all that unbridled, uninhibited male sexuality making a mockery of her inhibitions. It’s either that, or she’s inside the womb again.
Fingers slip against her skin, the feel of them somehow blending with the soft, enclosing blanket of darkness, and then the fingers move across her face.
She’s blinking in bright sunlight. She realizes the nearby throb is not the bass beat of some techno track, but pounding surf. And the fingers slipping across her skin now, clearing the sand away from her buried body, belong to Jonathan, who is smiling down at her as he gently pushes grains from her eyes, from the bridge of her nose. He uses several fingertips to gently clear her upper lip.
His other hand works to uncover the rest of her body. Whenever she gasps or sighs, he grins. The sky overhead is cornflower blue. Cloudless and eternal, a stark backdrop to Jonathan’s olive skin and jet-black hair.
Now that he’s revealed her face, he goes to work on her body with both hands, uncovering more of her legs, her arms, her waist, her breasts. With just one palm, he gently clears a layer of sand from the top of her sex. And then, she feels his arms sliding through the sand beneath her and he lifts her into the air so that the last remaining bits of sand can slide off her body as he walks.
There are no houses along this beach, no walkways crossing the dunes, just an eternal blanket of white and endless pounding sea. And one familiar-looking lounger, which he lays her down on gently, as if he’s afraid every bone in her body could break from a sudden impact.
“Jonathan…”
“Shhhhh.”
“Jonathan…”
He’s working on her again with maddening gentleness, infuriating tenderness. The palms of his hands graze her nipples as he sweeps sand away, but his fingers don’t linger. They don’t pinch, prod, or probe. It’s torture, plain and simple.
“Jonathan….”
“Hush now, Emily Blaine. Tide’s coming soon.”
The tide? What does that even mean? Why won’t he touch her? Why doesn’t he devour her? Why won’t he taste her?
“Jonathan…”
She’s so distracted by her hunger for him, she hasn’t noticed he’s tying her hands over her head with slender rope he’s looped through the lounger’s top slates. She doesn’t fight. She doesn’t resist, figures it’s another step closer to satisfaction and release at his skillful hands. Then he ties a length of rope around her waist and underneath the lounger, and then he’s straddling her, but he’s staring down at her with an almost wistful expression. He grazes the side of her cheek with his fingers. She’s trussed up and exposed to him and this is all he wants? This is all he’ll do?
Why would he torture her like this? Why go to the trouble of unearthing her, laying her bare before the sun and the surf?
“Jonathan…”
He bends over and gives her the gentlest kiss on her lips. She opens her mouth for more, and he whispers, “Tide’s coming, Emily Blaine.”
And then he’s walking away. Footsteps squeaking over the pounding of the surf and she’s staring at his bare, muscular back as he leaves, and she’s calling his name, but he’s so far away now, so far away she’s convinced he can’t hear her anymore. But then he turns, and she can see the broad smile on his face, can see him pointing one powerful arm in the direction of the ocean. Is he warning her? How could that be? Why would he tie her up like this and leave her here, vulnerable, and then warn her about the pounding, approaching surf?
Suddenly, a burst of froth picks up the lounger and drives it several feet up the beach, dragging it back in the other direction as it retreats back out to sea. The waves have reached her somehow, or at least their very edges have, and the lounger is being dragged back and forth across the sand.
Terror. This is terror she’s feeling. The terror of being abandoned. The terror of being dragged out to sea, alone, and beyond the reach of anything familiar, dragged out to sea to drown. How could he do this to her? How could he sacrifice her to the waves?
A bigger wave crashes down to the sand all around her, and she’s struggling with her restraints as the lounger is dragged out to sea by what feels like several yards, at least. She’s no longer sure if the lounger is floating or if it’s still scraping across the beach. She can feel the surf retreating, feel the next wave gathering terrible, thundering force. Is sure this is going to be the one that submerges her, drowns her.
And then it breaks, and Marcus Dylan crashes down onto her body. Marcus’s mouth opens hungrily against her neck. Marcus’s hand slides up against her sex, fingers finding entrance, devouring her with unleashed hunger. Naked, his muscular body streaming foam. The next wave drags him halfway off her body, and then the one after drives him against her again, pressing his hard cock up against her entrance. Marcus, the unstoppable force she would have missed had she been able to free herself from the lounger and run for higher ground. Marcus Dylan, a gift of the tides.
And it is Jonathan who brought her to the place where she could remain open and exposed for as long as it took to collide with a passion she’s never known before now, a passion that makes the teasing slips of Jonathan’s fingers across her skin feel like child’s play. It is Jonathan who carried her to the place where Marcus could taste her for the first time.
And it is Jonathan who set her free.
Marcus gathers her breast in a desperate handful, driving his cock against the inside of her thigh, Marcus unties her restraints, and then, the next powerful wave
knocks the lounger out from under her. It’s sliding away from her in pieces, riding a tide of froth behind her after releasing her to Marcus’s embrace. The head of his cock slipping between her folds for the first time, her right leg hooking around his waist, he stands her upright in the surf. His powerful embrace supports her now as she sees that they’re standing in the middle of an eternal tide, an endless, interminable sea of whitecaps and white froth. The surf parts around their entwined bodies, charging past them with unstoppable force on either side, unable to submerge them or pry them apart, as he says her name for the first time while buried deep inside her.
And what at first seemed like a terrifying, isolated landscape now belongs only to them, and even louder than the sound of the surf, is the cry of pleasure she unleashes into Marcus’s flesh…
…Emily is on her knees, staring up into Lilliane’s eyes as the climax that began in her fantasy continues to sweep through her body.
The radiants stand on the lower stairs now, still masked and expressionless. Marcus and Jonathan, still bound to their respective chairs, are both winded and flushed from having watched the spectacle of her fantasy play out in the center of the room between them.
Are those tears in Marcus’s eyes? What must it have been like for him to watch himself ravish her in fantasy while being unable to touch her or even relieve himself? Is this why his cock is fully erect, jerking slightly in his lap, even as the sight of Emily returning to her own flesh brings a relieved smile to his face?
She glimpses the tendrils of gold radiating out from her head in their last second of illumination before they appear to be entirely sucked into her lungs by her first full breath.
“Did you not see what you feared you would see?” Lilliane asks.
“No,” Emily whispers.
“Do you still think we only deal in lust?”
“No.”
“You possess a fascinating mind, Miss Blaine,” Lilliane says, gently bringing her hands away from Emily’s face, breathing heavily from the exertion of whatever this radiance demanded of her enhanced body. “Most people can’t perceive their own fantasies in terms of metaphors and abstractions. But that was most certainly…”