“We’ll put you in the middle,” Galen said.
“Strictly as friends,” Rhys said.
Julian looked at me then, and his expression was pained. I laughed. “You’ll get your cuddle, but you will be stuck between two of the prettiest men around and no sex.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and finally said, “I want the touch, but I’m not sure if I should be insulted or complimented.”
Rhys and Galen both laughed. “It’s a compliment,” Rhys said, “and we can send you back home with your virtue intact.”
“Won’t you be sleeping with Merry tonight?” Julian asked.
“Not tonight. Mistral hasn’t seen her in two days, almost three, so we’ll step aside for him. Not sure who the other man will be, but we’ve bunked with her recently, and I think tonight won’t be about sex.”
“I feel strangely fine now,” I said.
Rhys gave me a look. “I still wouldn’t push it. This is the first morning sickness you’ve had, so I’d take it easy.”
“I didn’t know you could get morning sickness in the evening,” Galen said.
“Apparently you can,” I said, and didn’t elaborate on the conversation in the car. I reached up under my skirt for the tops of my thigh-highs. I wanted them off and then I’d brush my teeth. Strangely, I really wanted to brush my teeth soon. The breath mints that Carmichael had given me only went so far.
Mistral came through the door cursing under his breath. His hair was a uniform gray like rain clouds, but unlike Wilson’s, his had always been that color. His eyes were the shade of sickly yellow-green that the sky turns just before the heavens open up and the tornado eats the world. It was the color his eyes went when he was very worried, or very mad. Once long ago when Mistral’s eyes had been that color the sky had mirrored them, so that his anger or anxiety had changed the weather. Now he was simply more than six feet of muscled warrior. He was the most masculinely handsome of my men. He was very handsome, but you would never look at his face and think pretty, or beautiful. He was entirely too male-looking for that. He was also the only one with shoulders broader than either Doyle or Frost. Barinthus had him on sheer physical size, but there was always something about Mistral, Lord of Storms, that made him big. He was a big man who took up a lot of space. Now he was a big, angry man. The only thing I caught completely in the rush of very old Gallic was the name Niceven, and a few choice curses.
Galen said, “I take it Niceven wouldn’t change her mind.”
“She wants out of this alliance for a reason.” He made a visible effort to master his temper and came to me. “I have failed you, Merry. You have to feed that creature of hers tonight.”
“Let me try to talk to her,” Rhys said.
“You think you can do what I could not?”
“I can tell her that Merry got sick tonight. Niceven’s had children. Maybe she’ll cut Merry some slack for that.”
Mistral sat down on the bed beside me, face all concern. “Are you well?”
“I seem to be now. I guess I couldn’t get by without a little morning sickness.”
He hugged me very gently, as if afraid I’d break. Mistral liked his sex pretty rough, so to feel him hold me like I was made of eggshells made me smile. I hugged him back a little more firmly. “Let me brush my teeth and then we’ll see how I feel.” And that’s what we did. I took the robe that had been laid on the bed into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and took off the hose, and my dress. I came back out with the robe belted in place and the room empty except for Rhys. He was sitting on the side of the bed looking less than pleased.
“How do you feel?”
“Fine,” I said.
He gave me a look.
“Really, I’m fine; whatever caused me to be sick seems to have passed.”
“I’ll have the cooks make a list of the food you ate tonight. Some women just can’t eat certain foods while pregnant.”
“Could your wife?” I asked.
He shook his head, smiling a little, and stood up. “No, I won’t talk about that. What I will talk about is that Royal is outside. He seems genuinely embarrassed that his queen is insisting on this, even knowing you were ill earlier this evening, but he’s worried that she’ll call him home if he refuses to be a good little surrogate for her.”
I came to him, putting my arms around his waist. He returned the favor, and with him only six inches taller than me the eye contact was comfortable. “Kitto made mention that Kurag is wanting out of our alliance, and Kitto is being careful not to give him any excuse for it. Is there something happening at the Unseelie Court that I should know about?”
“You didn’t want to rule the Unseelie Court, so it’s not your problem.”
“That would be a yes. Something is happening.”
“Not that you need to know about, though.”
I studied his face, trying to read something behind the smiling pleasantness of it. “Why are the goblins and the demi-fey both wanting to sever ties with me?”
“When they thought you were going to be queen they wanted to align themselves with you, but now they want to be able to align with whoever wins the race.”
“The Unseelie Court still has a queen,” I said.
“Who seems to have been driven mad by the death of her son.”
I hugged him, putting my face against his chest. “Cel was going to kill me. I had no choice.”
He rested his head against my hair. “He would have killed us all, Merry, and she would have let him. The fact that you had enough power to do it is amazing and wonderful, and let’s face it, she wasn’t the most stable cookie in the box to begin with.”
“I didn’t mean to leave our court in such disarray. I just wanted us safe.”
“No one blames you, Merry.”
“Barinthus does, and if he does so do others.”
He kissed my cheek and held me close, and again that was answer enough. I could have asked questions about how bad it was, and what we could do, but the only thing we could do was to go back and take the throne, but we’d rejected the crowns of faerie once. I hadn’t found that you got second chances at such offers. Even with the crowns on our heads, the chances that Doyle and I could hold the throne against all the factions that Andais had allowed to rise in her court was slim. I wanted to stay safe and have our babies. They and the men I loved meant more to me than crowns and even the Unseelie. So I let him hold me and I didn’t press for details because I was certain they would all be bad ones.
Chapter Fourty
Royal might have been embarrassed about his Queen’s lack of manners, but he couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted to be with me. Of course, in fey culture to hide the fact that you found someone attractive, especially if they were trying to be attractive, was an insult. I wasn’t exactly trying to be attractive, but I wasn’t trying not to be either.
I lay in the white robe against all the pale creams and gold of the bed. Royal floated above me on his wings of red and black and gray. They were a blur of color, and even though the wings were the wings of a moth, they moved more like those of a dragonfly, or a bee, much faster than the moth he resembled. He lowered himself slowly toward me until his wings blew my hair across the pillow in a red wave. He landed in the middle of my chest. His weight was not so much that I minded, but solid enough that I knew he was there. He knelt between the mounds of my breasts, his knees touching some of that soft flesh. He was wearing one of the gauzy loincloths that some of the demi-fey were fond of. It was the grown-up real version of the clothes that the killer had put on the demi-fey at the first crime scene.
He folded his wings behind his back, so that the darker and plainer outer coverings slipped over the startling brightness of the red-and-black stripes. He gazed up at me, and with a face that small with bobbing black antennae he should have been cute or silly even, but Royal had always managed to be neither of those things, from the first moment I met him.