Sticks and Stone (2 page)

“No bargains.”

“Well, aren’t ye an impatient one? Perhaps ye should
listen to the offer before ye get all huffy about me gold. There are few things
finer than gold, save but for a nice pair o’ shoes…and, perhaps, wishes?”

“Wishes?” asked Zev.

“Aye, wishes. I can grant
ye
three wishes.
One for each.
I can see into your hearts
and grant your greatest desire, I can. Now, isn’t that much better than a silly
pot o’ gold, lad?”

Dermot thought about that. He had all the money he
wanted, but his greatest desire…

The leprechaun smiled. “I see a reasonable lad before
me. Let me free, and I will grant
ye
each one wish. Ye
will get what your heart most desires.”

“Go for the wish!” said Zev.

Dermot nodded.
“Fine.
I release
you.” He broke eye contact with the leprechaun, hoping he hadn’t made a huge
mistake.

But the leprechaun didn’t run away. Instead he looked at
each of the men in turn. “Aye, I have seen what it is ye most desire, and so it
shall be granted.”

“When?” asked Dermot.

The leprechaun chuckled. “Have patience, lad. Leprechaun
magic is a tricky business. It will work differently for all of
ye
. But it will work, that I promise.”

Greg held a hand to his forehead, as if suddenly dizzy,
and then fell to the ground. Within seconds, Zev had fallen as well.

“What did you do to them?” Dermot demanded.

“Don’t worry, ‘tis nothing to be concerned with. Their
greatest desire lies elsewhere.” The leprechaun pointed into the woods, in the
same direction they’d been walking. “Yours lies this way.”

The leprechaun winked, laughed merrily, and then dove
back into the leaves. Dermot stood there, listening as the laughter faded.

He suddenly realized that Zev was gone.
Vanished completely.
Where had his greatest desire taken
him?

It didn’t matter. Dermot’s desire lay straight ahead.

Leaving the lawyer snoring on the path, he headed deeper
into the woods.

Dermot Stone picked his way carefully through the
darkened forest, cursing his stupidity. Wandering through unknown woods with
only a single Coleman lantern for illumination, in search of his heart’s
greatest desire, was a calculated risk. He knew what he desired more than
anything—to see members of the faerie realm.
Incontrovertible
proof that there was more to life than the relentless pursuit of money and
power that formed the bedrock of his father’s life.
Proof
that Dermot was right to believe in more, in the magic of unseen possibilities.

Already tonight he’d seen, and captured, a leprechaun,
although that could have been an elaborately staged prank. The drunken nerd
who’d accompanied him had disappeared suspiciously, possibly to set up the
second stage of the joke. And it had been the nerd’s singing that summoned the
leprechaun.

Still, it would show more wit than his beer-soaked brain
had seemed capable of
to
mastermind a prank of this
magnitude. Dermot couldn’t see what he would gain from such a stunt, anyway.
No, he was mostly convinced that he’d bargained with a real leprechaun. And the
little man had promised that Dermot’s greatest desire lay this way.

He checked his watch. He’d been walking for twenty
minutes. Another twenty should bring him to the edge of the forest. If he
didn’t find his heart’s desire before then, he’d use the GPS feature on his
cell phone and call his driver to come pick him up.

His trek through the woods might be foolish, but he had
a plan, and a contingency plan. His stupidity lay in what he’d done before he
and the two other wedding guests had caught the leprechaun. That’s when Dermot
had revealed that Tamara Fuller had been both his last nanny and his first lay.

Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.
The tabloids would have a field day with that
news. Dermot could only hope the men didn’t know who he was, or wouldn’t
remember his confession in enough detail to repeat.

At least he hadn’t been foolish enough to tell them the
details of his relationship. His parents had pulled him out of prep school for
the summer and hired a nanny for a grand trip of Europe that was supposed to unite
them as a family, or some such foolishness. He’d protested that he was nearly
in college and far too old for a nanny, especially one who was barely older
than he was, but his parents had insisted that he not be allowed on his own in
countries where he was over the legal age of consent. His mother had visions of
gold-digging foreign women lurking in wait for American heirs they could slap
with paternity suits. Given the number of out of court settlements his father
had arranged for himself, her fears seemed fully justified.

Dermot had suspected at the time that the young woman,
tall and lean with a dancer’s graceful strength and model’s stunning looks, had
been hired because his father wanted to sleep with her. She matched Dermot for
height, but he was awkward and uncomfortable with his newly added inches, and
seemed to become even more clumsy and tangle-footed whenever he was around her.
He had been appropriately awful to her in the way only a self-involved teenager
could be. The poor girl had been at her wit’s end when she finally decided the
only way to keep him in line would be a good, old-fashioned spanking. She’d
pulled off his pants and shorts, shocking him into immobility, and laid him
across her lap, her miniskirt riding up so that he was stretched across her
bare thighs. What followed had been like no spanking he’d ever known.

Thinking of Tamara, his ass cheeks heated. He still
remembered how her small, soft hands felt slapping his ass, over and over
again, while his hardening cock rocked against her bare thighs with every blow.
Then his cock had slipped between her legs. She clamped her thighs around him,
and he thought he’d died, the pleasure was so intense. Every slap of her palm
against his ass forced his cock down, stroking against her thighs. When she
lifted her hand, he pulled back, stroking the other way, so that she could do
it again.

He’d been terrified that he’d embarrass himself by
coming in her
lap,
the fear keeping him rock hard
longer than he’d known was possible. Her slaps grew harder and faster as her
breathing turned ragged. Then she gave a strangled gasp, and her thighs
relaxed.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” she’d said. “Now pull up
your pants and go.” He’d run to the bathroom and jerked off, harder than he’d
ever come before, his vision fogging and his body shaking with the force of his
release.

After that, he’d found a reason to be “punished” every
night that his parents were out. Since they went out almost every night, his
ass was incredibly tender by the end of the trip. A few soft swats would be
sufficient to have him gasping across Tamara’s legs, fighting not to come.

The last night of their trip, his ass had throbbed even
before she’d pulled down his pants. The light scrape of cotton and elastic over
the burning skin had made him instantly hard. Tamara had licked her lips,
gazing at his straining cock, and wrapped her fingers lightly around it.

Dermot whimpered.

“You’re a bad, bad boy,” she whispered, her fingers
tightening until they gripped his cock with a delicious pain that made it even
harder. “Would you like to be a bad, bad man?”

“Please,” he begged.

She pushed him to the floor. He landed on his ass, the
pain making his vision swim and forcing a bead of come from the tip of his
cock.

“Lie still, and don’t come,” she’d ordered. Then she’d
knelt on the floor, straddling his hips. His rigid cock disappeared beneath the
mysteries of her miniskirt. She shifted position, and the head of his cock
touched hot, wet flesh. Then his cock was pushing past her slick skin, sinking
deep inside her. She rose up and down on him, faster and harder, until his
tender ass was banging against the floorboards with every stroke. He gasped,
fighting for control, struggling not to come, when everything was heat and wet
and pain.

“Now, Dermot.
Come now,” she
ordered.

“I…I can’t.”

She rode him harder, her breath coming in harsh gasps. He
grunted and strained beneath her, but the weeks of spankings had trained him to
endure her painful pleasures without coming. He couldn’t convince his cock that
this time, it was okay to come.

“I’ll just have to make you come,” she panted. Leaning
forward, she slid her hands beneath his shirt. It was the first time she’d
touched him anywhere except his ass or his cock, and he trembled even harder as
her nails scratched over his stomach, blazing a trail up to his nipples. She
flicked the twin erections with her sharp nails,
then
rolled the hard pebbles between her fingers. He groaned in agony, waves of heat
pouring straight to his groin. He bucked beneath her, slamming his ass against
the floor, rocking his cock against the tight walls of her vagina.

He felt the cool wetness of tears running down his
cheeks as his head thrashed wildly from side to side. He was blubbering like a
baby. That’s all he was, a baby. He wasn’t man enough to come inside her.

“Please Tami,” he begged. “Make me come.”

Her fingers tightened on his nipples. With a hard
thrust, she took his cock deeper than ever, until even his balls nestled in the
wet welcome of her flesh, at the same time she savagely twisted both his
nipples. White fire flashed a burning path to his groin, where it sparked an
explosion he couldn’t contain.

His body arched up from the floor and she covered his
mouth with her own, swallowing his hoarse cry. Then he was coming, flooding
into her, his entire body rigid and shaking as the orgasm tore through him.

Her inner muscles clenched around his cock, pulling the
last of his come from him. Then he was swallowing her cries as she shuddered
and shook above him, at last collapsing limply on top of him like a quivering
human blanket.

Their fused mouths gentled, becoming a slow, deep kiss.
Dermot sighed as their breathing faded to normal, and Tamara lifted her head.

She smiled with an almost feline expression of
satisfaction. “My poor
sweetling
, I made you cry.”

Her tongue swept over his cheek, gathering the dried
salt of his tears. He closed his eyes and groaned.

“Yes, you did. Please, do it again.”

Dermot smiled, warmed by the memory. Then he realized
he’d stopped walking, and had been absent-mindedly rubbing his cock while he
was lost in the past. His rigid cock was stretching the lines of his Armani
slacks in a way the designer had never intended.

He cupped his balls, thrusting against the heel of his
hand. What the hell. Maybe he should find a nice, dark tree to lean against,
drop his pants, and toast the bride the way she deserved.

He lifted the lantern in his other hand, looking for a
suitable spot, when a flash of white to his right caught his attention.

He dropped his hand to his side. He wasn’t letting some
paparazzi catch him fondling himself in the woods. Shrugging out of his suit
coat, he draped it over his free arm and held it before himself to shield his
erection from sight.

“Who’s there?” he called.

A woman’s silvery laughter floated through the trees.

He turned off the faint path he’d been following and
threaded his way between the
wych
elms, ashes, and
sycamores. Their branches swayed suggestively, urging him on, as if someone had
run between them a moment before.

He burst from the trees into a small clearing, no more
than eight feet across. The twined branches of the trees on the far side of the
clearing formed an impenetrable wall. The woman he’d followed had disappeared.

“Where are you?” he called.

Airy laughter tinkled from his right, very close. He
lifted the lantern higher, throwing a beam of light to the far end of the
clearing, and realized an elm he’d thought was part of the surrounding trees
was actually a foot or two inside the clearing. The woman must be hiding behind
it.

“Who are you?” he asked again.

The beam of his lantern revealed her pale face, peering
out at him over a fork in the trunk.

He stepped closer, and realized she was not standing
behind the tree, looking over it. She was standing
inside
the tree.

Now that he knew what to look for, he saw that the
forked limbs of the tree looked remarkably like uplifted arms, and the smooth
gray bark of the trunk resembled the curves of a woman’s body, concealed by a
flowing garment of bark.

“A dryad,” he whispered.

His heart hammering in his chest, Dermot slowly set the
lantern on the ground, his gaze never leaving the dryad’s. Moving as if he was
forcing his way through liquid resin, he took one step closer, then two. Then
he was standing in front of the dryad’s tree, near enough to touch her if he
dared.