Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

I opened my eyes and gazed up at him. I met those green, green eyes.

“You’re crying,” he said, and the look on his face was one of wonderment.

“Not quite,” I said, but my voice sounded it. I had to swallow hard to say the next part. “Maybe I have been pulling back from you. I didn’t mean to.” I touched his hand with mine, kept it pressed against my face. “What terrified me about you being king was that our enemies would kill you. If I was picking men who could survive that kind of treachery, it wouldn’t be you, my gentle love.”

“Like Dormath thinking I would just forgive him for almost killing me.”

“Yes.”

“The last thing I thought, the very last thought, was you. I was afraid that it was the beginning of an assault on all of us.” He lowered his gaze and wouldn’t look at me. “I thought, Doyle and Frost will keep her safe. That if one of us had to die first, it was better that it was me.” His smile was more sad than happy. “I guess my actual last, last thought was, why me? If I’d killed someone first, it would have been Doyle, not me. I prayed to the Goddess for your safety, and I died.”

“Not quite,” I whispered.

He looked at me then, and the smile was almost a real one. “How can I blame you for looking to them for your king, when as I lay dying, they were who I thought of, too? Damn it, being a good person is not enough here, not to help keep us alive. I’m sorry for that.”

“I thought it would endanger you more to be my king, Galen, but now I understand that they’re going to try to kill you anyway.” I spoke to the look on his face. “I didn’t know about the green man bringing life to the court until the queen said it, but they are still going to kill as many of my allies as they can. They will strip me of my help, if they dare. So if you’re in danger either way, then you might as well be king.”

“I’m dead either way,” he said, and the smile was back to being more sad.

I sat up, trying to hug him, but he moved away just a little. My movement forced Nicca to move from my thigh to the mound between my legs for his pillow. Not for sex, but gently, as a pillow for his cheek.

“Come to me, Galen, please.”

“I cannot be your king, Merry. It would be the death of us all.” There was a hardness to his face that I had never seen before. In that moment I watched years be added, not in wrinkles, or lines, but in experience, in the depths of his eyes.

“Will you give up your place in her bed?” Nicca asked, and his voice held the lilt of surprise.

“No,” Galen said, his voice as grim as the look in his eyes. “I’m not strong enough to give that up, not yet, not until I have to. But it does open things up.” He smiled with that somber look still clinging to his eyes, still making him look not like my Galen at all. “But I could take Nicca’s place, and kiss you with more than mouths.”

“You’ve done that before.”

“But never where you could return the favor,” he said.

“You will have other nights,” Nicca said. “Would you deny me my last moments with our Merry?”

“No, not if it’s what you want. I know if it were my last night with her, I’d want it exactly the way I wanted it.” He looked almost back to normal, but there was a glint in his eyes that didn’t go away, and that I was both relieved and sad to see.

“I want to bring her with my lips and tongue, then I want to see another man in her mouth. I want us both to fuck her, until we go inside her. That’s what I want.”

Galen nodded. “Okay.”

“I do not care which of you it is at her mouth, but if it is you, Galen, I have one request.”

Galen said, “Ask.”

“You are taller than Kitto. If you could come at her from the side, and not in front. You partially block my view of her breasts, and since it is my last night with the largest breasts in the entire court, I want to see them.”

“From the side it is,” Galen said.

“I’ll need my head propped up if we’re going to do it like that,” I said.

“We can mound the towels up,” Galen said.

“Let me be Merry’s pillow,” Kitto said. “Rest your head in my lap, Princess.”

The rest of us exchanged a glance, and the glance was enough. “Okay,” I said.

Kitto’s smile was bright, and so very happy. Such a small thing to cause him such pleasure.

Nicca moved his head back down my body, his hands encircling my thighs again. “Now, where were we?”

My mouth suddenly dry, I asked, “Isn’t Galen supposed to be up here?”

“I won’t last in your mouth if you’re screaming an orgasm around me. I just won’t. Let him bring you, then Kitto and I will go where Nicca wants us.”

I might have argued for Galen to come closer sooner, but Nicca’s mouth found me again, and his tongue and lips stole my words, stole my breath, and finally stole the world away. For a few precious moments, I forgot that we were in danger, that there was a throne to win, or that there was anything but Nicca’s mouth between my legs. His mouth and my body became pleasure, as if there were no skin, no bones, nothing solid, only the overwhelming shivering joy of orgasm.

WHEN MY EYES STOPPED ROLLING BACK INTO MY HEAD SO THAT I could see again, Nicca was grinning up at me. “That was a good one.”

I still couldn’t talk, so I nodded.

“You’re good,” Galen said.

“I have never talked to Biddy about sex. You run into a few women, now and then, who won’t let you do this.”

My voice didn’t sound like mine when I said, “They’re mad.”

“Perhaps, but just in case it’s the last, I wanted it to be good.”

I had a little trouble focusing, but finally managed it. “I don’t want to send you to her bed with regrets.”

He came to his knees, and then climbed over my body until he could lay his nakedness along my own. The feel of his testicles pressed tight against where his mouth had just been made me writhe underneath him.

He stared down at me, supporting his upper body on his arms, but keeping his lower body pressed tight against me. No matter how gentle a lover, the look in his eyes was the look of every man, eventually. That knowledge, that fierce joy, that they have given you pleasure, and now they get to take their own. I do not know why all men have that look somewhere in their eyes, waiting to come out, but I have seen it too often not to know that it is there.

“Kiss me, take the sweet taste of you from my mouth.” He lowered his face to me, and I raised up to meet him. We kissed, and he was wet from me, and tasted of something clean and fresh, like the first breath of morning after a rain, when the world is wet and pure.

He kissed me until our tongues, our hands, our arms, found each other. He kissed me until I had licked him clean of that taste, and left the wetness of my mouth behind. He drew back breathless, and said, “Perfect.”

I understood what he meant, not that I was perfect, but that the kiss had been exactly what he’d wanted in that moment.

He raised himself above me on arms and knees. He was stretched tight and hard against the front of his own body. “I am ready.”

“I can see that,” I said, and my voice was breathy.

Nicca looked at the other men, and said, “Places, gentlemen.” There was a note of command in his voice that I’d seldom heard, even in the midst of sex. I realized that this was the first time I’d had sex with him since he’d been brought into his power. Not his wings, but his power. We weren’t certain what magic he had gained from it, but he’d gained other things that had nothing to do with magic, and everything with being comfortable in his own skin.

Kitto hesitated at my head as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.