The terrible tension in his shoulders loosened, and then he raised his arms to hold me. We kissed and his lips were as gentle as any man in my bed for an instant, and then his arms enfolded me, lifted me off my feet, the kiss growing into an eagerness that was almost like feeding, as if his mouth had been hungry for mine. His arms tightened into a near-crushing weight, and he kissed me as if he meant to climb inside me through my mouth, forcing me to open wide for him. One arm held me in that so-tight grip and the other found the back of my hair and tightened until it was nearly painful. He let me know with his hands, his arms, his mouth, how much he wanted me, how much he’d missed me these long weeks, and how great his need was for the way we made love.
I gave myself over to the thrill and strength of that kiss, those arms, this man. He drew back enough to look into my face, his eyes almost wild with need. His eyes were a rich dark blue like the sky at dusk after a storm has blown everything clean.
He pressed his mouth against mine again in that passionate, almost painful kissing, turning with me in his arms to kneel on the bed, and begin to crawl us farther onto it. I managed to turn my lower body to the side, so that when he pinned me to the bed it was only part of me pressed under the solid weight of his upper body.
I fought free of his kisses and managed to say, “I cannot have intercourse yet, Mistral. The Gods know I want to, but the doctor says no, not yet.” My voice was breathless, my heart loud in my ears, my body thick with the rush and beat of my own pulse.
He laid his head on the bed and made an inarticulate sound, half groan and half yell. He spoke with his face still pressed to the covers, hair pooling over him so I could see nothing but the gray fall of hair. “I shall go mad soon.”
I touched his hair, smoothing it back until I could see the side of his face. “It’s only five to six more weeks, and then I can make love again.”
He rolled an eye up and the color was his more typical gray now. “Perhaps you should start with someone gentler than I, our Merry.”
I smiled and smoothed more of his hair back so I could see that handsome profile. “Perhaps, but believe this, my Storm King, I want you as badly as you want me.”
He studied my face and then smiled. “That is good to know.”
“Rhys said the sky is clear, and it’s a beautiful California night,” Usna said.
I leaned and laid a much more gentle kiss on Mistral’s lips. “We just needed his mood to lighten; fair mood, fair weather,” I said.
“That was good and quick thinking, Merry,” Doyle said. “I would not have thought of it in time.”
“I don’t think you kissing Mistral would have had the same effect,” Usna said.
Doyle frowned at him, but Frost collapsing to the carpet made us all move toward him. He said, “I am all right, I just need to lie down,” which meant he didn’t feel well at all.
Hafwyn came through the door, and I realized that until she appeared I hadn’t known if Usna had called a doctor or called someone who could heal with magic.
Healer
could mean either in this house.
Doyle knelt with Frost’s head in his lap, smoothing the other man’s hair and saying, “I am so sorry, Frost.”
I held Frost’s hand and felt it tighten as Hafwyn began to explore the wounds.
“You were not in your right mind, Darkness; I know you would never hurt me.”
“Not deliberately,” Doyle said, touching Frost’s face gently.
“This is two attacks in our dreams in almost as many nights; what can we do to protect ourselves?” I asked.
Frost’s hand tightened enough that I could feel that crushing strength, and I said, “Easy, my Killing Frost, easy.” I touched his face as I said it.
He loosened his grip. “I am sorry, Merry.”
“It’s all right, it must hurt a great deal for you to react so.”
“Nay, it does not.” I realized that despite the strength in his hands in my and Doyle’s grip his face was stoic, and only the cording in his arms showed the muscles he was using to hold on and not react to the pain. I cursed myself for revealing his pain when he was covering it so well, my brave man.
I leaned down and kissed him. He gave me startled eyes as I leaned back. I couldn’t explain why I’d kissed him without compounding the mistake, so I just smiled at him and let him see how much I loved him. That made him smile even as Hafwyn’s slender fingers finished exploring the claw marks.
His body reacted to the kiss, and nude he could not hide it. He was not one of my men who enjoyed pain. Everyone’s need had grown over the months of enforced celibacy. I’d even been forbidden oral, or really any sexual contact, once the doctors told me that any orgasm might bring on premature labor. It hadn’t been worth the risk, but now that the babies were on the outside, we wouldn’t endanger them.
“I can’t have intercourse for weeks yet, but I could do oral and hand on some of you,” I said. If I’d been human it would have been too bold in the situation, but no one in that room was human.
“That is very generous of you, Princess,” Hafwyn said, “but it is not our way to offer sex without hope of pleasure in return.” She wasn’t chiding me, just stating cultural norms, as people do.
“I can orgasm from touching a man, especially oral.”
Hafwyn looked at me, head to one side like a curious bird. Both her graceful eyebrows arched at me in surprise. “Truly?”
I smiled. “Truly.”
“I’d forgotten what it meant to be a goddess of fertility.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Sex is a much broader pleasure for certain goddesses.”
“I am no goddess,” I said.
She made a small gesture with her head, almost a shrug. “As my princess wills, so shall it be, but there are some humans who live because a bit of metal that once pierced your flesh touched them, and now they use those objects to heal others.”
“It is magic, yes, but it is not deity,” I said.
She averted her eyes, laying out fresh bandages. “If you say so, then of course it is true.”
“Hafwyn, seriously, there can be no talk of gods and goddesses for any of us.”
“I know that if we are worshipped in this country it is grounds for our exile as a people,” she said, still not looking at me, “but to not speak of a thing does not make it less true.”
I didn’t know what to say that, because I’d been thinking it as the soldiers that I’d healed had come back here on their leave, or when their tour of duty was up. They had come to me like a kind of pilgrimage, and those who had natural psychic abilities were growing in power, just as priests and priestesses did of old when the sidhe had been worshipped. We were ignoring it if we could, but eventually someone in the government would come to speak to us. I didn’t think they’d kick us out of the country, but they would have to do something—but what? How do you forbid people from worshipping in a country where freedom of religion is one of the rights that people believe helped found the country?
I decided to change the subject back to something more pleasant and less confusing. I kissed Frost’s hand. “I can pleasure you again, our Frost.”
“I am too injured to do you even that much good, our Merry,” Frost said, his voice holding some of the pain.
I squeezed his hand. “And I am sorry for that.”
“I am more sorry, and will wait until our Frost can join us,” Doyle said.
“No, Doyle, you do not have to wait for me.”
“I will wait for you, Frost.” Doyle made it sound very final.
“Very noble, Darkness, but will you be happy in your nobility as others take their turns first?” Mistral asked.
“Happy, no, but content to wait until Frost is healed so the three of us can be together, yes.”
“You are certain?” Mistral asked, and I was almost sure what he would ask next.
“I am,” Doyle said.
“I think Merry should begin with someone gentler than myself,” he said.
I turned around so I could see him more clearly, and let him see the surprise on my face.
He smiled. “I want you, but I want rough even with just oral and I would prefer you be with others who are less demanding first. I would not want to be accused of souring you on the whole thing by my violence.”
“You know how much I enjoy having sex with you, Mistral.”
“I do,” and his smile widened, filling his eyes with the unclouded blue of a spring sky. “But I also know that birth is a trauma to a woman’s body, and would prefer you healed a bit more before we test if our idea of rough sex is pleasant to you.”
I nodded. “It is logical.”
“And noble of you, Mistral,” Doyle said.
“Perhaps, but it will bother me to see other men have pleasure when I could have put myself first.”
“Then it is truly noble,” Doyle said.
Mistral gave a nod that was almost a bow.
“There was a time when I would have tried to jump the queue, but Cathbodua is in my bed and that is enough for me,” Usna said.
“Then who?” Doyle asked.
“Are you not limiting your affections to the fathers of your babies now?” Hafwyn asked.
I looked at Doyle and said the truth. “Yes, for this, the fathers.”
“You won’t know for certain who the fathers are until the tests come back,” she said.
“The Goddess has shown me for Alastair and Gwenwyfar, and I think I know for Bryluen.”
“But the Goddess did not show you for certain,” Hafwyn said.
“No,” I said.
She nodded and said, “I will be able to heal much of this, but not all today.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Three to four days,” she said.
“In four days, Merry,” Doyle said.
“Four days,” Frost said.
The looks on both their faces tightened things low in my body that hadn’t been getting used for a while. It felt good, but my body let me know that Frost wasn’t the only one who was hurt. The doctors said I was healing remarkably fast, but giving birth was a trauma to the body as much as any wound, so I’d want to be careful.
“In four days, my Darkness, and my Killing Frost.”
“In four days,” Doyle said, and the heat in his eyes made me shiver happily.
THERE WERE SO
many things that needed my attention, but I left Doyle to talk to the queen about how to keep Taranis out of our dreams, then left the other fathers with the babies, and I had the first hours of being just me, just Merry, in months. Being pregnant had been what I was for so long: unescapable, wonderful, terrifying, physically overwhelming. The fact that I was pregnant was the first thing people saw about me, thought about me, and during the second half of the pregnancy it was all I thought about myself. Trapped under the weight of triplets, I had been unable to even get out of bed if I was on my back, though lying on my back hadn’t really been an option at the very end; it was like being crushed. So I’d slept on pillows, sitting up, which meant I had slept badly, and been exhausted, and … I loved the babies, but I was so glad to have them in our arms instead of being forever pregnant.
Maeve Reed was back in her master suite, which I’d used for most of the last year. We’d moved to one of the larger guest rooms in anticipation of her return. It was still a large room, bigger than my apartment in Los Angeles had been. When I said
we
, I meant Doyle and Frost. None of us had spoken of it out loud, but gradually they had moved in and had no other room to call their own. Some of the other men slept with us occasionally, but most of them were as broad through the shoulders as Frost, and what had fit in the bigger bed upstairs was a tight fit here. Since I was planning sex and not sleep, the bed would have been fine, except that Frost was resting in it, because sleep would help him heal faster, so I went to the extra room.
It was one of the other guest rooms in the palatial mansion that Maeve Reed had owned since the 1950s. It was actually one of the smaller bedrooms, but one wall had a bank of windows that faced east, and two skylights, so the room was almost always light and airy and seemed bigger than it actually was. It also had a bathroom complete with shower, which was important for cleaning up afterward. If the room had been bigger I would have moved the three of us in here when we had to leave the master suite, but the shower was narrow enough that some of the men had trouble not bumping their shoulders against the walls. The bathroom in the bedroom that had become ours was much bigger, as was the entire room, but I liked the smaller bedroom better.
I sat on the edge of the bed in a forest-green silk robe, which had been one of the few pieces of clothing that had fit me until right at the end of the pregnancy, and then even the robe hadn’t tied over the babies and me. Now it was laced tight. One of the things hardest to explain is that pregnancy makes your body a stranger in a way. You’ve known it your whole life and yet at some point in pregnancy it’s like some stranger has moved in and your body isn’t yours anymore. It doesn’t react the same way, feel the same way, and there are movements inside you that you know are not your muscles, your fingers and toes wiggling, but other people with their own brains and wills and personalities growing like little strangers inside you. You hope that you’ll be friends and like each other, as well as love each other, but you can’t really know, not for certain. I’d seen too many people in my family hate each other, kill each other. When that is part of your family’s repeated history it destroys a lot of illusions that most women have about their babies and everyone being perfectly happy and loving. That was for Hallmark holiday commercials, not for any reality I’d ever experienced with my actual blood relatives.
I sat with my robe tied tight around a waist and a body that looked, almost, like me again, and wanted to be just me, just Merry, with someone, for an hour or two.
There was a knock on the door, not a soft one either. I said, “Come in.”
Rhys opened the door, smiling. Galen was behind him, sort of looming with his six inches of extra height. I didn’t normally think of Galen as that tall, because he seemed smaller compared to the other guards, but now I realized he was as tall as most; only Rhys was under six feet.
I smiled but fought not to frown. “I thought you were supposed to decide which of you it was going to be.”