Frost laid his face against mine, and Doyle kissed the top of my head. Doyle lay back down and cuddled us both tighter in his arms. “Whatever comes, we can see it through together. For all the blessings that we have in our lives right now, there is nothing I would not do to defend us, and our children.” He smiled again, that bright surprise of a smile.
“The babies are a wonder to me,” Frost said, softly.
Doyle rose so that he could lay a quick kiss on his lips, and then I rose so he could share that kiss between us. “I’ve never been in love with someone I called friend before, Frost; it is everything we were as friends and now all this, and to be fathers together”—he hugged us again—“I am happier than I can remember.”
Frost got that almost-shy smile that he only seemed to get when the three of us were alone, and it was usually from something that Doyle said, not me. I wasn’t sure why it worked that way, but I knew it did.
He turned to me that pale handsome face, those serious gray eyes. “Whatever comes, Merry, we will face it together, with the other fathers at our side. Never has such might been joined in one purpose among us; we will prevail against all that stand against us. We can do this.”
“How can you be so certain?” I asked.
He smiled. “Because such love as ours cannot be without purpose, and if it were wasted by death or tragedy this soon, it would be without purpose, and I do not believe the Goddess and the Consort so cruel as that.”
The first pale, pink rose petal fell from empty air to land on Doyle’s shoulder. A second joined it as I said, “I am sorry that I lost faith for a moment. I love you both more than I have words to say; you are my hearts, and I will not despair again if the two of you are with me.” I touched Frost’s face again and gazed into those eyes. “I am blessed by Goddess and the Consort in so many ways; how dare I give in to sorrow.”
The petals kept falling, as if we were inside an invisible snow globe that was full of summer warmth instead of winter cold.
“The Goddess and Consort are with us, Merry, with us in a way that they have not been in centuries,” Doyle said.
“But magic is returning to our enemies, too,” I said, and I felt that hard knot in my stomach again. I realized that I was afraid of Taranis, truly afraid.
The rose petals began to slow, but the scent of a summer meadow with the wild roses sweet and thick-smelling in the heat was stronger.
“There is a purpose to that, as well, I think,” Doyle said.
I knew he was right, so why couldn’t I let go of my fear?
“In another few days I will be completely healed, and then the three of us can celebrate our happiness again,” Frost said.
“Does it sound odd to say that I’ve missed you both terribly when we’ve spent most of the last year sleeping next to each other?” I asked.
“No,” they said together, and then they laughed, a wonderful deep, shared masculine sound that I loved.
“You are meeting Sholto two days from now at the beach house, correct?” Doyle asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s our turn,” Frost said.
I looked from one to the other of them, and felt a deep, happy shiver run through my body that finally spilled out enough to make me writhe.
Doyle laughed again, “Oh, don’t do that again; my self-control is only so good.”
Frost sat up, pulling away from us. “You and Merry can have sex now, and in a day or so we can all be together.”
Doyle caught hold of his wrist and held him beside us. “No, my friend, we will break our fast together.”
“You do not have to wait for me,” Frost said.
“If I loved only Merry, then there would be no point to waiting, but I love you both, and that is worth waiting for,” Doyle said. His face was fierce as he said it.
Frost gave that shy smile and then looked down, his silver hair spilling forward to hide his face. “You shall make me cry again, Darkness.”
Doyle smiled, not fierce this time, but gentle. “That you both cry for love of me delights me.”
We both looked at him, and I didn’t have to see Frost’s face to know we were giving our Darkness almost the same look from both our faces. We loved him. He loved us. I loved Frost. Frost loved me. It was all more wonderful than I had ever dreamed. Doyle was right; as long as we were together, nothing would stop us. I believed that, I honestly did, but … but I was still afraid. I was beginning to wonder if Dogmaela was right. Maybe I did need a therapist. My father had taken me to one as a child, because I’d had flashback nightmares about Aunt Andais drowning me, or trying to drown me. She’d done it because no sidhe could die by drowning. Her reasoning had been that if she could drown me, then I wasn’t truly sidhe, and so I would be no loss. The therapist had helped me process it all; maybe the right one could help me again.
I gazed at the two men in my bed. They were worth fighting for, even if that fight was against the issues in my own head. I knew Maeve had seen someone after her husband died of cancer, and the therapist had helped her deal with the grief. I had everything I could ever want and more, but I felt like I was grieving something; maybe it was time to find out what.
I kissed them both, long and thoroughly, then went to find Maeve and apologize to Aisling for falling apart all over him. He would tell me not to worry about it, that it was his honor or something, but he wasn’t my lover, or my love, so I’d apologize, because that level of care should come with love attached to it somewhere.
THE THREE OF
us, and then the five of us, talked for hours about everything that was worrying me. Doyle, Frost, Galen, Rhys, and Mistral had all had different points of view that helped me think and helped us all plan. Maeve had joined us in interviewing lesser fey for nanny duty. We thought we’d found some possible candidates. We’d done what we could to plan about the babies, especially about Bryluen’s powers. Aisling had helped reassure us that we did not need to veil her; he said her power did not come from her face. So she was still a concern, but that particular fear was gone. We’d gone back to the days when I had no hand of power and kept bags of antinightmare herbs tucked into our pillows; so far either it was working, or Taranis had not tried to invade anyone else’s dreams. It was odd that we really couldn’t know if the herbs worked, only if they didn’t. I realized that having real sidhe magic had made me arrogant like the rest of the nobles, and I’d thrown out almost all the anti-fey practices I’d used for years to keep me safer around my relatives. It seemed odd that I, of all people, would forget that there are so many more kinds of magic than just sidhe, but I had. I was part human and part lesser fey through my brownie heritage. I needed to remember all the parts of myself, not just one.
We planned, we talked to Sholto via mirror about our plans, and then two days later I was standing on a windswept beach waiting for him. One of his titles was Lord of That Which Passes Between, and that was why we were at the edge of the sea where the water met the sand in swirling, whooshing waves. The edge of the surf is one of the between places, neither dry land nor water, but both, and neither. The edge of a woods that bordered a meadow or a plowed field would probably be where he started, hundreds of miles away in Illinois, because that was a place that was neither wild nor tame, a place between. He was also able to control the recently dead, animating them until their bodies were well and truly dead, and he could call a taxi out of nowhere, or any kind of transport that spent its time going between places.
The wind was cold off the water—not winter cold, it was L. A., but still plenty cold as it whipped my short skirt around my thighs. I was happy for the thigh-high hose with their lace edges, because it was at least something between my legs and the wind. I was standing on the next-to-last step on the long stairs that led from the house on the cliff above to the pale sand. The high-heeled pumps would look awesome as I walked back up the stairs, but they weren’t meant for protection from the elements. I’d dressed for cute and sexy, not standing beside the ocean in the early-morning chill. Even in June, Southern California could have mornings that felt more like Midwestern fall.
“Princess Meredith, please take my jacket.” Becket, one of the human DSS guards, held out his suit jacket, which left most of his arsenal of weapons very visible against his white dress shirt. His tie was like a black stripe down his chest, held in place against the wind with a tie bar, so generic I wondered if it had come standard government issue. He was broad through the shoulders, and without the jacket on, the shirt sleeves seemed to strain just a touch over the muscles of his arms, which meant his jacket was going to be huge on me.
His partner, Cooper, said, “Let her have mine, Becket; yours will swallow her.”
Cooper was a few inches taller, a few years younger, and a lot more slender. If I hadn’t had so many sidhe to compare him to I’d have used words like
willowy
and
graceful
to describe Cooper, but he was only human, and that put more bulk on his thin frame, and meant that he’d never have the speed or dancing grace of the nonhuman guards. His hair was truly black, and he had the skin tone to match. Becket was one of those blonds with a ruddy complexion as if he’d burned years ago and never been able to get rid of all of it. He had his pale hair cut so close to his head that it was as if he had started to shave himself bald, but stopped most of the way through. Coop’s hair was thick, and longer on top than any of the other diplomatic specialists assigned to us. I wondered if he put hair gel in it and went out to clubs in his spare time.
He helped me slip into the jacket. It was still warm from his body, and smelled faintly of nice aftershave. I was betting he fought to keep his hair long enough to style. I didn’t blame him, but it was just interesting. He was also one of the few of the men who weren’t married or in a serious relationship.
Becket and most of the others had been eager to have a diplomatic assignment in the States so they could be with their loved ones more. It was hard to maintain a relationship from halfway around the world, and usually in a place too dangerous to bring your family. Los Angeles was dangerous, but not in the same way as Pakistan.
“We really appreciate you asking for us this morning, Princess Meredith,” Coop said.
“You’re welcome, Agent Cooper, Agent Becket.” I wrapped his jacket around me. It covered me to midcalf, as if I’d borrowed my father’s coat to wear, but I was warmer, and that seemed more important than looking sexy, for now.
“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Becket said, “but why us?”
I smiled at him, because I’d already learned that he could never quite leave well enough alone. He had to ask that one more question, take that one more small chance. Cooper would never have asked.
“I saw you practicing with the other guards.”
He looked embarrassed, rubbing his big blunt-fingered hands down his sides. “Yeah, that wasn’t such a great idea.”
“I told you that before we did it,” Cooper said.
Becket shrugged those big shoulders. “Hey, how do we tell the princess here that we can take care of her, if we don’t know how we stack up against her main guards?”
“That was the reasoning that made me agree to it,” Cooper said, but he didn’t look happy about it.
“You both acquitted yourselves well,” I said.
“Acquitted ourselves well; if that means got our asses handed to us, then I’ll agree,” Becket said.
I laughed, and a distant flight of seagulls seemed to laugh back at me, as they arched their wings and let the wind carry them closer to us.
“Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing,” Cooper said.
“Becket’s turn of phrase was what made me laugh. You both did well in practice—Doyle said as much, and he never gives praise unless it’s earned.”
“Yeah, your … main … person,” Becket stopped and looked across me at his partner.
Cooper said, “Captain Doyle is reserved about a lot of things when we’re around.”
“And by ‘we,’ he means humans,” Becket said.
Cooper frowned at him. “I said what I meant, Beck.”
Becket shrugged. “We’re the odd people out here, Cooper. The princess knows that; why not say so?”
I smiled again and let the banter go on around me. Doyle hadn’t liked me coming out to the beach house without him or Frost, but our shared man was still healing, and I’d felt that we needed to use the human guards more, at least the ones who had braved hand-to-hand practice with Doyle and the others. I had brought Saraid and Dogmaela with me, but they were inside the house. One of the other female guards needed a word with them. The shared abuse had made many of the guards more comfortable talking to each other, so I’d let them handle it. I’d also reminded Doyle that there were other sidhe guards at the beach house. We’d started putting anyone we weren’t sure was entirely trustworthy here first. The main estate was building more rooms, but there were still more sidhe than rooms. The other sidhe had been very insulted that I’d come down to the beach with only the human guards, until I’d asked them if they thought humans were lesser beings, bearing in mind that I was part human. To that they’d said the only thing they could—“Of course not,” which was a lie, but a political lie. When everybody knows it’s a lie, it isn’t like lying at all, just doing what I wanted them to do, and we could all live with that. The sidhe had been impressed that Becket and Cooper had joined practice at the main house. That the men had even tried to hold their own with the fey had earned them points with me and with Doyle. He’d said, “They aren’t bad, and for humans they are really quite good.” If Becket only knew what high praise that was from him, he’d have been happier about it.
“It’s okay, Agent Cooper, you and the rest of the human guards are the outsiders at the house.”
“See, told you so,” Becket said.
“But it’s not just because you’re human, it’s because you’re new. We don’t know you yet, and you don’t know us; that makes you all the odd people out. There’s a learning curve when new sidhe join the guards, too,” I said.
“You usually give very good eye contact, but you’re staring at the horizon while we’re talking. What are you looking for, Princess Meredith?” Cooper asked.