“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.
Chapter Twenty-two
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.