The Green's Hill Novellas Read online

  “Come here.”

  Phillip moved closer, and Marcus gathered the hem of his T-shirt in his hands. He pulled the thing off and started to touch the other man. Just touch him. It was sexual, of course, because there had been feeding, but the touch was giving, not needing. Marcus gave reassurance, pleasure, gentleness, and… control.

  Phillip groaned under his hands, and Marcus moved behind him, kissing his shoulders, palming the curve of his lower back. He applied a little bit of pressure, to see if there would be resistance, and there was none. None at all. Phillip went over willingly, a naked, muscular man facedown on the mattress, waiting, trusting that Marcus, who wasn’t a leader at all, would make it all better, would lead him to safety.

  Marcus did his best. He kissed the back of Phillip’s neck, his ears, down his spine, and although he’d never done this before—deliberately seduced another man—he found that the cues a male lover gave were the same as with women. When Phillip groaned, Marcus was doing it right. When he writhed, Marcus was really doing it right.

  Marcus reached beneath that taut, muscular body and pulled Phillip up to his hands and knees. He had better access there to interesting toys—Phillip’s nipples, which made him groan, the flat plane of his stomach, which made him gasp, and then, there it was, every boy’s favorite playground.

  Phillip’s cock was amazing, long, and thick, with a curve and a flared head, and Marcus wanted it. Not like he had in the ravenous days when he’d last done this, but in a very personal way. God did he want to touch that with his mouth.

  “Roll over,” he commanded roughly, and Phillip said, “No.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t….” He couldn’t finish the sentence, and Marcus’s heart sank a little. Phillip wanted it, but apparently he didn’t want to face it. Well, sensual and consensual, right?

  “Okay,” Marcus conceded, and he reached around, grabbed Phillip’s cock, and squeezed hard. Phillip groaned and buried his face in the mattress, so Marcus did it again.

  “God!”

  “You want my fist but not my mouth?” Marcus taunted. “Stupid asshole.”

  “God!” Phillip groaned again, and Marcus rather enjoyed torturing him. Hey, changeling or not, the guy had been making the lives of everyone in the hill just fucking miserable. A little turnabout—even in play—was just all that was fair.

  Marcus opened his mouth over the tight, flexing muscles of Phillip’s ass cheek and suckled hard, letting his fangs graze the tender skin while Phillip groaned underneath him and thrust into his hand.

  “God, please!” he begged.

  Marcus pulled one last time and released him with a pop, knowing he was leaving a hickey on vampire-white skin and not caring. (It would be gone in a second, for one.)

  “Goddess, no,” he said, feeling childishly pleased.

  “God, I’m fucking begging you!” Phillip snarled, and Marcus gave that diamond-hard ass a light swat before releasing Phillip’s cock and parting the clenching cheeks.

  “And I’m telling you you’re not ready,” Marcus retorted. He licked his finger and started rubbing at Phillip’s entrance, massaging gently until the tight little knot of it relaxed.

  “Who cares about ready?” Phillip whined, and Marcus took pity on him and started to explain, making sure his breath dusted Phillip’s very exposed, very intimate parts as he continued to massage.

  “I do, idiot. Think it’s any fun for me if you’re dry?” He licked his finger again and massaged some more. Phillip relaxed enough for that finger to just… slip… right on in, and Phillip keened as Marcus wriggled farther.

  “Don’t care,” Phillip graveled, and Marcus twisted his finger a little harder.

  “Too bad. You wanted to use and abuse me. You had your chance—I even greased myself up for you, just so you could fuck me raw.” It was true, and Marcus still had lube running down his crease, teasing and, quite frankly, imbuing every moment of foreplay with some serious wriggle-your-ass-right-out-of-your-jeans tension.

  Phillip’s body tensed, like he was going to argue, and Marcus added a second finger, relaxing when he felt the man go boneless and willing and pliant.

  “I’m hungry,” he begged pitifully, and Marcus knew, knew that he was talking about feeling empty, lost, afraid, and that having someone inside him, steering, taking care of him, was what he craved, had craved since his awakening. No one wanted to do this to a new vampire, especially one who hadn’t come over consensually, but Marcus had known Phillip, no matter how briefly, before he’d died. Marcus was the only one with a feeling for how his heart had beat before, and only Marcus could do this.

  “I’ll fill you,” he promised darkly, scissoring his two fingers until Phillip howled and grunted into the mattress. “I’ll fill you, but I’m not going to hurt you, you hear me?”

  “Auuughhh!”

  “You hear me, right?”

  “Yes! God, yes!”

  Marcus got up on his knees and shoved his jeans down, almost whimpering himself with the relief of the pressure. He took a gentle moment and stroked Phillip’s back, his flanks, the backs of his thighs. His cock was aching and dripping, and Phillip was screaming and begging, and Marcus wanted to savor this moment—he wasn’t sure if he and Phillip would ever get another one like it.

  He positioned himself and thrust slowly home—or that was his intention. Phillip threw himself backward, slamming his ass into Marcus’s hips and making him see stars, even as Phillip screamed, “Yeeeeesssssss!” into the bedding.

  “Fuck!” Marcus growled, throwing his hips forward. Phillip grunted, and Marcus placed a heavy hand in the center of his shoulders while he piston-thrust his pelvis in a blur of irritation and lust. “Fucking try and take it from me? Don’t think so, asshole, don’t think so, goddammit. You gave it to me, you wiggled your hot little ass, and it’s mine, and it’s mine and don’t fucking move. Do you hear me? Don’t fucking move!”

  Marcus was ranting and fucking with his feeding face on. His blood was up, and for the first time since he’d changed into a vampire, he was fucking without deliberate gentleness or any consciousness of his improved strength or stamina. Dammit, the guy had begged for it, and he’d goddamned well just lie there and fucking take it, and fucking take it and take it and take it until Marcus saw him spurting his toenails out his cock onto the fucking mattress!

  Marcus grabbed Phillip’s hips, gave a particularly vicious thrust, and heard Phillip grunt beneath him. Then he realized that while he’d been ranting, Phillip had been babbling too, and he shut up and kept fucking and listened, because Phillip’s gibbering and begging just made him hotter.

  “God, yes, please… oh please… that’s right… fuck me harder… so tight… it’s so tight and it burns… burns good… please don’t stop… filling me up… please don’t stop… need… need… please… God please… fuck me, just keep, don’t stop, Marcus, please, I’m gonna fucking come just whatever you do just don’t stop fucking me! Auuughhh!”

  That last was because Marcus was too close to coming to listen to that anymore, so he reached around, grabbed Phillip’s cock, and yanked, yanked hard and squeezed, and did it again and again while he kept thrusting. Phillip suddenly stiffened and quivered, convulsing around Marcus’s cock as he screamed and came in icy ropes over his stomach and Marcus’s tightened fist and forearm.

  Marcus pulled his hand away and smacked Phillip smartly across the ass before pumping in once, twice, then raising his hand to taste Phillip’s spend, which exploded across his tongue like ambrosia, and listening to his begging, almost incoherent, sobbing cries some more and….

  Coming. Coming so hard his eyes rolled back and his toes curled and he saw spots and stars and those other things that humans saw when they forgot to breathe, but he saw because it felt like he was about to spurt his balls out his cock along with everything in them.

  Phillip howled beneath him and collapsed in a twitching mass of sobbing moans, and Marcus fell on top of him, still buried in his bod
y. They stayed there, twitching and calming, until Marcus began to shrink, and he fell limply out of Phillip. He rolled slightly, and Phillip made perhaps the saddest sound of protest Marcus had ever heard.

  He’d dominated the man in bed, but he wouldn’t make him beg now—not now, not after they’d been naked and raw with each other to the point of vulnerability and pain.

  “C’mere,” he muttered and stretched out his arm beneath his head while rolling to the side, all the better to pull Phillip toward him. Phillip scooted with a little sigh, and Marcus rooted on the ground next to the mattress and found a rumpled blanket that he threw over their cool, still bodies as they stopped shivering in the aftermath. They wouldn’t get cold, no, but blankets never stopped being comfort.

  Phillip stayed facing away from him, and Marcus wanted to sigh, but he didn’t. What did he expect? The guy had obviously been the same as Marcus—rabidly and rigidly straight—until his life took a turn for the undeath. Marcus wasn’t going to force affection that Phillip didn’t feel. Instead, he played the grown-up again and stroked Phillip’s coarse, straight, dark hair tenderly, the way Adrian or Green would, and breathed softly into the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

  “If you just tell us what you need,” he said quietly, “we’ll give it to you. I swear, Phillip, you can be happy here. There are people who want to make you happy here, including me. We just need to know what you want. I’m sorry you lost your life—all the parts of it you miss. But that doesn’t mean what you have here now can’t be good too, okay?”

  There had been a service for the four people lost in the avalanche who hadn’t been recovered. Phillip had been among those named, and Green and Adrian had been relieved. Just as predators had supposedly made off with Marcus’s carcass, Mother Nature’s own viciousness seemed to have taken care of Phillip’s death as well. But Marcus knew the loneliness of seeing your family move on without you when you were still there on the planet, still holding them there in your heart.

  “Stay with me,” Phillip said unexpectedly. “Stay with me through this. We don’t have to fuck all the time, and I’ll feed from whoever you want, but…. Never mind.”

  He’d firmed up his voice with the last, and Marcus’s heart hurt a little.

  “Of course,” he said softly. “I’ll stay with you. Let’s get up and start cleaning up, okay? The next time a shape-shifter comes in, it doesn’t have to be so brutal, okay?”

  Marcus could actually hear Phillip swallow. Goddess, did the humanness ever really leave them?

  “Good,” Phillip agreed. “In a minute. We’ll get up in a minute.”

  In a minute would be dawn, Marcus realized, feeling the terrible weakness rushing in on him. “Adrian?”

  “You going to live, mate?”

  “Yeah—could we get some cleanup in here when the sun comes up, while we sleep? I think he’s ready to be civilized about this.”

  “Think you’re right. Good job, mate.”

  “You know what the bad news is, don’t you?” It was only fair he be honest about it.

  “I knew before you went in,” Adrian replied gently. “It’s okay. We’ll be here to pick up the pieces, right?”

  “Right. Thanks, Adrian.”

  “Anytime.”

  Marcus kept stroking Phillip’s hair until the dawn claimed them both.

  Roomies

  PHILLIP NEVER did tell Marcus about his interview with Green. But just like with Marcus, shortly after it happened, Phillip woke up ensconced in Marcus’s bedroom in the other king-size bed.

  And proceeded to fuck anything without a cock that lived under the hill.

  “They’ll do anything!” Phillip marveled one night, after two werekitties (sort of a shape-shifting giant tabby cat) left the room all but purring in their human forms. “I mean, when I was human, I had to do some fast talking to get two girls into my bed—and into each other—but these girls? Man… just suggest something, and if it’s not physically possible for them, they’ll find something here that has the equipment for it or can make it out of oak trees and spit and polish!”

  Well, maybe not exactly, but since most everything that lived under the hill was allergic to latex, he was damned close.

  “Well, sensual and consensual is the rule,” Marcus said dryly. Dawn was fast approaching, and he’d returned to his bed in the darkling for the same reason humans went to their beds at night—it was a comfortable place to lie down for a while.

  “Why do they all leave before dawn?” Phillip asked on a yawn. He’d been out of the vault for about two weeks, and already he was comfortable enough to sleep naked. They didn’t really get cold unless they were in a snow cave and it was below freezing, so he was turned over on his side, his lean body perfect and marble in the dark.

  “Our souls go somewhere,” Marcus told him, just as Adrian had told him nearly ten years before. “If we’re with someone living when the sun comes up, and our souls leave us, it’s possible we could pass through them and mark them. It’s sort of a frightening thing for a mortal, and it gives the living power over us, so that’s not good either.” Marcus sighed and swallowed. “And we freak people out, you know? I mean, we’re dead. Anyway, it’s just safer that way, you know?”

  “Mmm….” Phillip nodded. Dawn must have been close, because that still-as-death lethargy was upon them both. “What happens if vampires are close together?”

  Marcus didn’t quite have the energy to shrug. “Probably nothing. I think the closest we have to that is the maker’s bond. But you’ve got that with Adrian—”

  “And you,” Phillip yawned, and although Marcus knew perfectly well that Phillip hadn’t connected with Marcus that way, the sun picked that moment to rise, so he was unable to say so.

  But apparently Phillip wasn’t done with the conversation. They were still lying exactly where they had been when Marcus’s eyes popped open with the sunset and Phillip said, “Why aren’t you having sex?”

  Marcus blinked and turned and then blinked again, because Phillip had moved in that time and was kneeling by his bed, still naked, and was peering at Marcus curiously now that they were both awake and ready to face the darkness.

  “I’ve had sex,” Marcus said dryly. “I’ve had lots of sex. I’m just between girlfriends right now.”

  “Scoot over,” Phillip grumbled, “and let me get under the covers.”

  Marcus blinked again. “We’re doing this now?” he asked, a little befuddled. “I thought you hated having a roommate.”

  Phillip had bitched copiously the minute he found he wasn’t in the room alone, and Marcus had grimly explained about Green’s power protecting the hill to make sure no one came and bothered the vampires while they were sleeping, and that the weather stayed in the range that suited the sidhe, and that the shape-shifters weren’t vulnerable to the hunters who were still all over the area at the time.

  “There’s just not enough room for us all to have our own place. At least the darkling is underground, okay? Even if the sun takes you in the hallway, as long as you’re in the darkling, you’re safe.”

  Phillip had subsided and had seemed to enjoy Marcus’s company when he wasn’t out and about chatting up girls or flying straight up as far as he could just to look at the world from that high.

  But now he was crawling into Marcus’s bed as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and Marcus was a little annoyed.

  He’d gotten used to the idea that he and Phillip would never be lovers again. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But he knew that risk, had known it would come to that, the minute he’d walked into the vault to calm the guy down. He’d been through the change. No one who had been through the change could be that straight, and Marcus already liked the guy, albeit reluctantly. Risking his heart was inevitable, like the dawn stealing his soul.

  “I like having you as a roommate,” Phillip confessed. “I just want to know why you’re not getting any.”

  Marcus shrugged. “I told you—between girlfriends at the moment.
” He’d actually been seeing Gina yet again when they’d gone skiing, and Marcus had come home with a whole new emotional facet.

  “You have girlfriends?” Phillip boggled, and Marcus shook his head.

  “Just because a lot of people here aren’t monogamous doesn’t mean you can’t be.”

  “Yeah, but why would you want to be?”

  He was really sort of adorable. “For the same reason you would want to be as a human, Phillip. A body in a bed is just that. A partner—that’s something else.”

  Phillip grunted. “I wasn’t good at relationships as a human. My best relationships were with my coworkers or my clients.” He’d confessed to being a stockbroker, and Green had enlisted his help with the collective’s finances. Phillip was good at it, and he’d told Marcus that it made him feel useful. He liked that, and he also liked having all of Green’s money to play with, as long as he did so safely. Which was why it was no surprise at all when he added, “I’m really sort of an asshole, you know?”

  Marcus looked at him, his brown eyes taking on that unexpected shyness in the dark of the room. They had enhanced sight, so they left the lights off a lot, and Marcus liked the way Phillip’s face looked in the dark—it was like they hid a secret part of him that only Marcus got to see.

  “Well, we’re sort of stuck with each other for a while,” Marcus said now, letting some humor sneak into his voice. “I suggest you try not to be too much of an asshole, because our lives could be really fucking miserable if we get on each other’s nerves too much.”

  Phillip’s shy smile grew even shyer. “I like you. I’m not good with people—you all might have had to put me down if you hadn’t walked in the vault, you know.”