Divine Misdemeanors (18 page)

“I see the problem,” I said, and wrapped the almost forgotten towel around me. I felt a little cold all of a sudden. I hadn’t thought about my family quite like this. What if it was genetic? What if sadistic craziness was inside me somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out? Was it possible? Well, yes, but … My hand went to my stomach, still so flat, but there were babies in there. Would they take after me and my father, or … That was the most frightening of all. I trusted myself, but the babies were unknown.

“What can I do?” I asked. I wasn’t even sure which fear I was asking about, but the men had only one fear to focus on.

“We failed you tonight, Princess Meredith,” Brii said. “We do not deserve any more consideration than our lives.”

“When the Goddess moves among us none can stand in her way,” Rhys said.

“Do you really think that the Darkness or the Killing Frost would see it that way if something had happened to her?” Ivi asked.

“If something had happened to her, neither would I,” Rhys said, and there was that hardness to him that he hid most of the time behind jokes and his love of film noir, but more and more I glimpsed it. He’d come back into a lot of his power that had been gone for centuries, and there is something about that much power that makes you harder.

“See,” Ivi said.

“Again, I feel like I’m missing something. Rhys, just tell me what they keep tiptoeing around.”

Rhys looked from one man to the other. “You have to ask for yourselves. That’s always been the rule.”

“Because if you won’t ask for yourself, you don’t want it that badly,” Brii finished for him, a little sadly. He began to put all his arrows away, and turned for the still-open door.

“Stay, for if I ask it can be for both of us,” Ivi said.

Brii hesitated in the doorway.

“I want it badly enough to ask,” Ivi said.

“Ask what?” I said.

“Make love to us, have sex with us, fuck us. I don’t care what you call it, but please touch us. If you touch us tonight and let us have other lovers tomorrow and are calm about it, then it will be proof that you are not your aunt, or even your uncle of the Bright court. He wouldn’t kill lovers who went to another bed, but he destroyed them politically at court, because to go directly to another bed after a night with him said, to him at least, that he wasn’t good enough to make you not want someone else.”

“See why I would not ask tonight?” Brii said. “It is a great honor to be in the bed of our ruler, and it should not be a reward for such badly done duty.”

“The Goddess woke you first,” I said. “There has to be a reason for that.”

“I don’t smell flowers,” Rhys said.

“Me neither, but maybe this isn’t about Goddess work, as much as the fact that someone should have told me that sooner. I lived in fear of my aunt my entire life. I’ve been her victim of torture, and my cousin made my childhood a misery when my father wasn’t watching.”

“We need to know how much of the queen is in her niece,” Ivi said, and he was very solemn, unlike his usual teasing self. I realized that maybe his teasing, like Rhys’s humor, was hiding more serious things.

“Rhys needs the shower, and the beds are all taken, but the couches are big enough.”

Rhys kissed me on the cheek. “Have fun.” He moved past me to the showers, but put his weapons at the back of the shower, where the shelf had been designed for less lethal things, but it worked perfectly for weapons, as we’d all discovered.

“The couches are big enough for what?” Brii asked.

“Sex,” I said. “Sex tonight, but tomorrow you have to persuade one of the other guards to be with you, because this only works if you go from my bed almost directly to someone else, right?”

“Will that not bother you?” Brii asked.

I laughed. “If I wasn’t part fertility deity you wouldn’t get sex tonight. Rhys did his duty very well tonight, and if I were truly mortal flesh I’d be a little sore, but I am not, and the power will rise between us and it will be good.”

“So your orders are to make love to you now, but find another guard to sleep with as soon as possible?” Ivi asked.

I thought about it, and then nodded. “Yes, those are my orders.”

Ivi grinned at me. “I like you.”

I smiled back at him, because I couldn’t help it. “I like you, too. Now let’s go find the couches and prove just how much we like each other.”

I heard the shower turn on behind us as we moved for the door.

THERE WERE ACTUALLY TWO LIVING ROOMS IN THE BEACH HOUSE
. One was smaller and more intimate, if you could use that word for a space large enough to hold the dining room, kitchen, entrance, foyer, and a small sitting area off to one side. It was the Great Room, but the part that was a living room was smaller than the rest, so it was the small living room. The big one was a room to itself, with a bank of windows that ran from high-peaked ceiling to carpeted floor. It was one of the few carpeted areas in the house, so water tracked in here would be a problem, which was why it was isolated from most of the other rooms, and didn’t have a door connecting to the beach. The long, wide sectional couch made a nearly full square in the room. There was only one narrow entrance on one end, and coffee tables built into the furniture at intervals, so you had a place to put your drinks, if the small golden wood table that sat to one side, next to a fully stocked bar, wasn’t enough to set your drinks down.

The couches themselves were white, sitting in a sea of tan carpet. The color scheme was very close to Maeve Reed’s main house. There were cool colors—whites, creams, tans, golds, and blues—in other parts of the house, but here there was nothing to distract the eye from the amazing expanse of ocean, and if you weren’t bothered by heights
you could stand near the windows and gaze down at sharp rocks that were pounded by the sea.

It was both a beautiful room and a cold one. It felt like a place created to entertain business associates, not friends. We were going to try to add some warmth to the decor.

The sky was still black against the glass. The sea stretched out, and almost oily in its ink-black shine, as it reflected the ripe moon.

The tan carpet was faded to a gray-white by the moonlight and the dark. The couches glowed almost ghostly in the moonlight. It was bright enough that it made thick shadows around the room. It took a bright moon to make shadows like that. The three of us walked into those bright shadows and our skin reflected the light as if we were white water to shine under the glow of the moon.

The house was so silent that I could hear the rush and murmur of the sea on the rocks below. We moved in a silence formed of moonlight, shadows, and the sighing of the sea.

I moved toward the couch that was closest to the glass wall, because to call it a window didn’t do it justice. It was a wall of glass so that the sea stretched out forever until it met the curve of the world in a dark, moving circle that glowed and shimmered under the touch of the moon.

Something about the play of light made me want to see more of the view, so I passed the couch up and stood at the edge of the glass, where I could have that dizzying glimpse of the sea and the rocks, the water foaming silver and white in the dark light.

Brii began to take off his bows, arrows, and blades, laying them carefully on the long table to the side of the room.

Ivi came to me with his holstered gun and the sword at his belt. He came to me with the body armor vest still in place. Most of the men were tentative after so long without a woman, but Ivi grabbed my upper arms in an almost bruising grip and lifted me off the ground so he could kiss me. There was no bending down for this man; he made me come to him, and he was strong enough to pick me up off the ground and simply hold me where he wanted me.

The towel on my hair fell to the floor, so that my hair was wet and cold against our faces. He put one arm around my waist to hold me. The other hand he wrapped in my wet hair and pulled hard and sharp, so that I cried out for him, part pain and part something else.

His voice was harsh and fierce, already going lower as some men’s do. “The others said you liked pain.”

My voice came out breathy, strained with the hold he had on me. “Some pain, not a lot.”

“But you like this,” he said.

“Yes, I like this.”

“Good, because so do I.” He had to let go of my hair to pin me more tightly against his body as his other hand undid the Velcro of his vest. Then he flung me to the carpet and jerked his vest over his head in almost the same movement.

I lay there, breathless from the suddenness of it, and he’d hit just the right note so that I felt passive. The willing victim was a game I enjoyed if it was done right. Done wrong and he’d have a fight on his hands. The towel that had been covering me had come undone so that I simply lay on it naked and bare for the moonlight and for him.

He pinned my legs by kneeling on them, trapping my lower body, while he stripped off guns, sword, belt, and T-shirt. They made a pile around him like petals torn from an impatient flower.

He rose above me, putting more pressure on my legs, so that it was almost pain, but not quite. I had seen him nude, because most of us had no problem with nudity, but getting a glimpse of a man without his clothes is not the same thing as looking up the line of that same body as it kneels over you, and you know that this time everything that body promises is about to be yours.

His waist was long and slender. Even the muscles under all that gleaming skin were long and lean, as if no matter what he did he wouldn’t bulk up. He was built like a long-distance runner, grace and speed mixed in with all that strength. His hair fanned out around him, and I realized it was moving on its own with no wind but his own magic to make it spread out around him like a body-long halo of
white, gray, and silver, and the vines that traced that hair glowed more brightly, as if electric wire had been run to every line of vine and leaf so that they were painted in shades of green. The spiral of his eyes had begun to move, as if I would grow dizzy if I looked too long.

Whatever he saw in my face, it made him undo his pants, and push them down slender hips so that he revealed that last part of himself already hard and long and thick, as if his body had decided that the rest of him was slender enough and it would make up for it here. He pressed against the front of his own body, thick and long, and everything you could want in that moment.

He leaned over me, his knees still pinning my legs, so that he would have to move to use all that thick, quivering eagerness. He leaned over me, and his hair didn’t fall forward, it moved to either side of us so that we were sheltered in the glow and movement of it. His hair made a sound like wind in leaves around us.

He pinned my wrists against the floor, and I was completely pinned, but he could not reach me. So I was trapped, but to no purpose that I could see.

He leaned his face over mine, and whispered, “Don’t frown, Meredith. That’s not the look I want on your face right now.”

My voice was breathy, but I managed to ask, “What look do you want on my face?”

He kissed me. He kissed me as if he was eating me from the mouth down, all teeth and biting, and then when I was about to cry enough, he changed to a long, deep kiss, as tender and full of care as any I had ever had.

He raised his face just enough so I could see his eyes. They weren’t spirals anymore, but just a glowing green as if he would be blind from the light. “That look,” he said. “You said in the shower that you’d had all the foreplay you needed, so I won’t bother tonight, but I want you to know that I am not like your Mistral. There are nights when gentle is good, too.”

“But not tonight,” I whispered.

He smiled. “No, not tonight, because I’ve seen you make a thousand
decisions every day, Princess. Always in charge of something, always a choice to be made, always something to affect so many people. I’ve felt you needing to have a place where the decisions are made for you, and choice is not yours, some place where you can let go and stop being the princess.”

“And be what?” I whispered.

“Just this,” he said. He pinned my wrists with one hand and used the other to push his pants down to the middle of his thighs. Then he moved his knees from on top of my legs to use them to slide my thighs wider, so that he could begin to push against my opening.

He was almost too long for the angle he was using, so he had to use his free hand to move himself until he could slip the tip of himself inside. He was wide enough that even with my earlier sex, he had to push himself inside me, working his way in with his hips.

I raised my head enough that I could watch his body push its way into mine. There is always something about that first time that a man enters me that makes me want to watch, and just the sight of him so thick, so big … made me cry out, wordlessly.

He had almost his full weight on my wrists where he had pinned them. It hurt, but in that good way, in that way that let me know that the moment of decision was truly past. I could have said no, protested, but if he didn’t want to let me go, I could not make him, and there was something about that moment of surrender that was exactly what I needed.

I cried out twice more before he worked his way as far inside as he was going. We ran into the end of my body before we ran out of the end of him. Then he began to pull himself back out, and then the push in, and finally I was wet enough, and he was ready enough. He began to push himself in and out in long, slow strokes. I’d expected the sex to be rough to go with the way he’d started, but once he was inside me, it was like the second kiss he’d given me, deep, tender, amazing.

He worked that slow, steady stroking until it spilled me over the edge and made me scream his name. My hands strained under his, and if I could have reached him I’d have painted his body with my
nails, but he held me easily, keeping himself safe while he rode me and made me scream his name.

My body ran with light, my skin glowing to match his. My hair was like ruby lights reflecting on the white and dark of his hair, and my eyes adding shimmering gold and different shades of green to his, so that we lay in a tunnel of light and magic formed of the fall of his own hair.