Лорел Гамильтон - A Lick Of Frost

I was on all fours where his grip had moved me. My breasts hung down, slapping together from the fury of his sex. I screamed my pleasure, I filled the room with his name like a prayer to some angry god. Then his body made one last tremendous thrust so deep inside me that I knew it should have hurt, but there was too much pleasure for real pain.

His body shivered above me, thrusting again deep inside me. I felt him spill himself inside me in a hot wash of seed and power.

He'd said he would pray while he fucked me. He'd said he'd use his power to make me his. I should have been afraid, but I wasn't, I couldn't be afraid of Rhys.

I collapsed underneath him with his body still buried inside me. He lay on top of me, both of us too spent to move, our breathing a ragged sound, our hearts still in our throats. The glow of our bodies began to fade as our pulses slowed.

He finally rolled off, slowly. I lay where I was, too limp to move yet. He lay on his back, still breathing heavily. He spoke, in a voice still harsh from exertion. "The way you react to roughness urges a man on, Merry, even when you didn't think you'd like it."

"You were amazing," I whispered, my own voice a little rough from the screaming.

He smiled at me. "You really don't have any idea how good you are at this, do you?"

"I'm good, or so I'm told."

He shook his head. "No, Merry, no joke, you are amazing in bed, and on the floor, and on a sturdy table."

I laughed.

He smiled at me, and it was almost the old Rhys before he got so serious on me. Then that seriousness peeked out again. "I know that the goblins will have you tonight, and there is nothing I can do about it." His face, went from serious to angry. "But when they shove themselves inside you tonight they'll be shoving my seed farther in."

"Rhys…"

"No, it's all right. I know you're doing your duty as queen. We need the goblins as our allies, and this is the way to get the treaty lengthened. I know politically that it's a good idea, a great idea." He stared at me, and there was such pressure to that gaze that I had to fight to meet it. "But the idea of the two of them having you tonight — the way it's planned — excites you, doesn't it?"

I hesitated, then told the truth. "Yes."

"That is not Seelie Court. That is most definitely Unseelie Court. It's the part of you that I don't understand. It's the part that Doyle understands best, better even than Frost. He may be your Darkness, but he also holds your darkness as precious to him. I don't want your darkness, Merry. I want the light of you."

"You can't separate the light and the dark, Rhys. They're both a part of me."

He nodded. "I know, I know." He sat up and eased himself off the edge of the bed. "I'm going to go clean up."

"You were magnificent," I said.

"I'm already sore."

"I warned you, foreplay isn't just for my body's comfort."

"You did warn me." He gathered his clothes from the floor, but made no move to put them on.

"Enjoy your shower," I said.

"Want to join me?"

I smiled. "No, I need some actual sleep before tonight, I think."

"I tire you out?"

"Yes, but in a wonderful way." I curled on my side, pulling the sheet up.

Rhys went for the door. I heard him talking to someone outside. I heard him say, "Ask her yourself."

Kitto's voice came from the door. "May I come in?"

"Yes," I said.

He walked inside, the door closing behind him. He must have been sitting in the hallway the entire time. "Do you want to hold me while you sleep?" he asked.

I looked at his earnest face, so serious. He was always serious, our Kitto. "Yes," I said.

He smiled then, and it was a good smile. A smile that we'd only discovered he had in the last little bit. He crawled under the sheet and slid his body against the back of mine. He spooned his nakedness against my body, and it was simply comforting. I would have turned down almost any other man at the door in that moment.

Kitto knew he would not be king, so the sex wasn't such a press to him. But more than that he valued the gentle cuddling almost more than the sex. After all, he'd had sex before, but I wasn't certain he'd ever truly been loved just for himself. I did love him. I loved them all, but Rhys was right, I didn't love them equally.

The constitution of our country says that all men are created equal, but it's a lie. I'll never be able to make a jump shot like Magic Johnson, or drive a car like Mario Andretti, or paint like Picasso. We are not created equal in talent. But the place where we are least equal is the heart. You can work at a talent, take lessons, but love, love either works or it doesn't. You love someone or you don't. You can't change it. You can't undo it.

I lay there drifting on the warm edge of sleep with the wonderful edge of good sex coating my body. Kitto's warmth and clinging shape held me as I drifted off. I felt safe, loved, and content. I wished Rhys would feel as good about this afternoon as I did, but I knew that was a wish that wouldn't come true.

I was a faerie princess, but there were no faerie godmothers. There were only mothers and grandmothers, and there was no magic wand to wave over a person's heart and make it all better. The fairy tales lied. Rhys knew that. I knew that. The man who was breathing at my back as he began to fall deeper to sleep knew that.

Fucking brothers Grimm.

WHILE MAEVE REED WAS OFF IN EUROPE STAYING OUT OF TARANIS'S reach, she'd given us full use of her house. She said it was a small price to pay for us saving her life and helping her become pregnant before her human husband had died of cancer. So for once good deeds had been rewarded. We had a mansion on a huge plot of land in Holmby Hills, with a guesthouse, a pool house, and a smaller cottage near the gate for the caretaker-gardener.

I still slept in the master bedroom of the guesthouse, but there were now enough of us to fill the bedrooms of both houses. The men were having to double up in some of the bedrooms.

Kitto had gotten a room to himself because it was too small a room to share with anyone much above my, and Rhys's size. Which meant no one.

We'd planned on using the main house's dining room for the initial meeting with the goblins. It was a huge room that had begun life as a ballroom. So it was light and airy and full of marble. It looked like something out of a human fairy tale. The Seelie Court would have approved, but then Maeve was exiled from there, so maybe the ballroom-dining room was a piece of home for her.

Most of my bodyguards looked as at home here in the brightness as the glittering chandeliers above us. The guards whom Ash and Holly had brought didn't look at home at all.

The Red Caps towered over everyone else in the room. Seven feet of goblin was a lot of goblin. But that was short for a Red Cap. Most were closer to the twelve-foot mark. The average height was eight to ten feet. Their skins were shades of yellow, gray, and sickly green. I'd known that the goblins were bringing Red Caps as guards. Kurag, the Goblin King, had felt that if he sent Ash and Holly without guards to us and something happened to them, it would be seen as a plot between him and me to rid himself of the brothers. Since the only way for him to step down as king and them to step up was for him to be dead at their hands, their deaths would be very convenient for him.

So why was he offering them to me to make them even more powerful? Because Kurag knew how his kingship would end, as all goblin kings ended. He wanted to ensure that his people were strong even after he died. He did not resent the brothers for their ambition. He just wanted to hold it off a little longer.

If the twins died by our hands, even by accident, without goblins around them, then it could be misconstrued. If the goblins thought that Kurag had had the brothers assassinated, his life was forfeit. All challenges were personal challenges. There were goblins who were assassins as a sideline, but they never took «jobs» where the victim was another goblin. They'd kill sidhe, or lesser folk, but never another goblin.