“Why would just being picked up make her scream?” I asked.
“Hafwyn says that it was something their old master, the prince, would do, but he would then fling them on the bed or hold them for someone else to do very bad things to them.”
“Oh,” I said, “it’s a trigger event.”
“A trigger what?” Sholto asked.
Galen said, “It’s something usually innocuous that reminds you of abuse or violence, and suddenly it brings it all back up.”
We both looked at him, both of us surprised, and unable to hide it. Galen gave me a sour look. “What, I couldn’t know that?”
“No, it’s just that”—I hugged him—“it was just unexpected.”
“That I was that insightful is that big a surprise?” he asked.
There was nothing polite I could say to that question, so I hugged him a little more tightly. He hugged me back, and kissed me on top of my head.
Sholto was standing beside us now, and his eyes were all for me. There was that look that men get when they see a woman who is their lover and more. It was partly possessive, partly excited, and partly puzzled, as if something out in the other room was still on his mind. He held his hand out to me, and I left Galen’s hand to go to him. Galen let me do it; we shared well most of the time, and even if we didn’t, Goddess had decreed that Sholto was one of the fathers of the babies I carried. The fathers all got privileges. I just think that none of us had expected the genetic miracle of six fathers for two babies.
Sholto drew me into his arms, and I went willingly. He was the newest to my bed of all the fathers. We’d actually only had sex once I got pregnant, but as the old saying goes, once is enough. The newness meant that I wasn’t in love with him. I didn’t actually love him at all. I was attracted to him, I cared for him, but we hadn’t had enough conversations to let me know if I loved him, or could love him. We liked each other, though; we liked each other a lot.
“I’ve seen the traditional King of the Sluagh’s greeting to his queen,” Galen said, “so I’ll leave you to it. Maybe I can be insightful for Dogmaela.” He sounded a little disgusted, but I let him go, because he had surprised me by being smarter than I’d given him credit for and that was my lack of insight.
Sholto didn’t wait for Galen to close the door behind him before he showed me just how much he liked me with his kiss, his hands, and his body held as tightly to me as it could be with clothes still on. I let myself sink into the strength of his arms, the satin of his tunic, and the glint of the embroidery and the small jewels sewn into it, so that I ran my hands over his clothes as much as the body underneath them. I thought about him making love to me the way Ivi had done last night with most of his clothes still on so that the satin caressed my skin as we made love. The thought made me respond even more to his kisses, and sent my hands lower to trace his ass underneath the tunic, though I couldn’t get as good a grip with one hand as the other because I had to reach around the sword at his waist.
Sholto responded to my eagerness, sliding his hands under my ass and picking me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he walked us back the few feet to the bed. He lowered me to the bed, with my arms and legs still wrapped around him. He kept one hand on my back and the other caught our weight against the bed.
He drew out of the kisses enough to say in a breathless voice, “If I’d known this was the greeting I’d get, I’d have come sooner.”
I smiled up at him. “I’ve missed you.”
He grinned. He had one of the most handsome faces in either court, and the grin ruined that beyond-model-perfect perfection, but I loved that grin, because I knew that it was for me. I knew that no one else had ever made him look at them in quite that way. No one had ever made him as happy as he was in the moments we were together. Maybe I didn’t love him yet, but I loved how he was when we were together. I loved that he let me see the great King of the Sluagh grin. I valued him letting down those years of arrogant shields so that I could see the man behind them.
“I love that you miss me.” As if he’d read my mind, he raised up, forcing me to let him go just enough so he could reach down and begin to undo his pants. He left his sword, belt, gun, and holster in place, undoing only enough of his soft trousers to spill himself out into the light, hard and firm and as fine as any man in court.
Normally, I wanted more foreplay, but in that moment it worked for me. It was partly what Ivi and Brii had done with me last night, but it was also that Sholto had begun to condition me to the greeting.
He laid me back on the bed, my legs still hanging over the edge, and reached under my skirt until he found my panties. He drew them down my legs, slipping them all the way down over my high heels to drop to the floor. He raised my skirt and gazed down at me naked from the waist down except for the shoes. I didn’t ask if he wanted me to remove the shoes, because I knew he didn’t. Sholto liked me in heels.
He put his hands on either side of my hips and pulled me roughly to the firm length of his body. He angled in against me, raising my hips rather than touching himself to change the angle. He pushed himself inside me and I was too tight for him to do it all in one thrust. He had to work his way in, but I was already wet, just tight. I squeezed around him, tighter still, making his head fall a little forward so that his hair swept across my face. He hesitated above me, then he pushed harder, and I made him work for every inch until I orgasmed simply from the sensation of him being so big, so wide, filling me up so completely.
I screamed my pleasure, my head thrown back, my fingers clawing at his satin-covered arms, unable to find something to mark.
He picked me up off the bed with most of him still inside me. He held me in his arms while my body spasmed around him, and I clung to him. He shoved the rest of himself inside me in one long, hard thrust while he held me, and I screamed for him again.
He half collapsed on the bed, half crawled us into the middle of it. He let go of me with his arms, and only his lower body pinned me to the bed. He’d stopped moving once he was as deep as his body could go. He said, “You are my queen, and I am king. This is proof of that.”
It was a very old saying among the nightflyers, of which his father had been one. They looked like huge dark manta rays with tentacles, and faces far from human. Among them, only the royals were able to breed, and able to bring the females to orgasm so easily. The female nightflyers reacted to a spine inside the penis that would have killed me, but luckily for both of us, Sholto didn’t take after his father that much.
I spoke the next part of the ritual, because Sholto had taught it to me. “You inside me proves that you are royal and I am with child.” If I hadn’t been pregnant the reply would have been, “You inside me proves that you are royal and I will be with child.”
He raised up enough to undo the belt around his tunic waist. He tossed the belt with its sword and gun to one side of us, not off the bed; within reach, but out of the way. He spoke as he began to wiggle out of his tunic with his body still pinning mine to the bed. “I don’t remember you being that easy to pleasure, Meredith.”
We shared well, all of us, but not so well that I could tell him that it had been partly Ivi and Brii last night that had helped make his entrance so amazing.
“I told you, I missed you.”
He grinned again, then was hidden behind the rise of his tunic. He stripped off the undertunic of white linen next, and I could finally see his upper body. He was as muscled as any of the men except Rhys. He was broad of shoulder, simply beautiful, but there was a tattoo on his stomach, tracing up to his rib cage. The tattoo was of the tentacles that he would have had had he taken more after his father. Once they hadn’t been a tattoo, but the real thing. Now he could be with me as smooth and human as any sidhe, or he could choose to be everything he could be.