My stomach plunged with overwhelming guilt. I should have never left him. I should have been there.

“I ended up at the Garden,” he said, “with a dozen prostitutes nursing me back to health for six miserable months. And before you ask—”

“I’m not going to ask.”

“I’m saying it anyway for both of you to hear. Ashley is the last person I fucked, and that was over two years ago. Now…” He glided his hand across my abdomen and sank it between my thighs. “You’re going to promise me that you will never feel guilty when you look at my scars. My actions forced you to run, and I set that fire. I vow to you that I will never do those two things again.” He caressed his fingers along my slit, distracting me with the blissful sensation. “Promise me, Bennett. You will not blame yourself. Ever.”

“I promise.” A gasp caught in my throat, and my gaze darted to Ashley.

He sat across from me, his chest and shoulders stiff above the water, and his hands… I couldn’t see them, but I knew he was holding himself, touching and stroking that giant cock as he watched me.

His expression was serene. Gorgeously untroubled. I didn’t have a clue how this three-way intimacy would work, but he liked seeing me with Priest. Or perhaps he loved seeing Priest with a woman.

“Have you…?” I licked my lips, hesitating. “Have you ever shared a female?”

“No,” they said in unison.

Priest hardened and swelled against my backside, his breaths shortening. “Not once, in the twenty years I’ve known him, have we ever planned to fuck.”

Fuck. I loved hearing that word on Priest’s sinful, accented tongue. Chills. Every. Time.

“You’re telling me,” I said, “that you’ve never sought each other out just for pleasure?”

“Never. That part is always spontaneous between us.” Ashley held Priest’s gaze. “Usually angry. Often the result of a fight. It just happens. Then it’s over, and we don’t analyze it.”

I valued that insight. It helped me understand the physical nature of their relationship.

It also aroused me. I could imagine it vividly. Just like they’d been in the bedchamber, punching and wrestling on the floor. Then the shift in the air. The change in temper, passion heating, consuming. Had I not dropped that water bucket, would they have fucked right there on the floor?

Curling two diabolical fingers, Priest slowly dipped them into my aching. My body’s wetness was softer, thicker than water, easing the glide of his penetration. I dropped my head back on his shoulder, gripped his powerful thighs beneath me, and moaned.