I wanted to go to him, wrap my arms around him, lay my cheek against his chest, and tell him don’t leave. I wanted to feel his body against mine. I wanted to wake in a cloud of his silver hair.
I did go to him then, but not the way I wanted to go. I got close, but didn’t trust myself to touch him. I was afraid if I did, I wouldn’t let him go. “I have the chance to satisfy mine and many a court lady’s curiosity tonight, Frost.”
He turned away so he couldn’t see my face. “I wish you joy in it,” but he didn’t sound like he meant it.
“I want you tonight, Frost.”
That turned him to me, with a startled look.
“With Doyle in my bed looking like that, and all the waiting, I still want you. My body begins to ache when you’re not with me. I hadn’t realized until today what that meant.” I couldn’t keep the pain out of my eyes, and finally stopped trying.
He stared down at me, raised a hand to touch my face, but stopped himself just short of my skin. “If that is true, then Doyle is right. You will be queen. And some things … you cannot be as others. You must be queen before all else.”
I laid my face against his open hand, and even that small touch made me shiver.
He drew his hand away, rubbing it against his pants as if something clung to his skin. “Tomorrow night, Princess.”
I nodded. “Tomorrow night, my—” and I stopped there for fear of what word I might use to finish.
He turned without another word and left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Some small noise turned me back to the room. Rhys slid to the other side of the bed near the window and picked up his clothes that were lying in a hasty heap on the floor. “The first night shouldn’t be a group effort.”
“Making this a threesome had not occurred to me,” Doyle said.
Rhys laughed. “I didn’t think it had.” He worked his way round the bed, holding the clothes with the brush balanced on top, all held above waist level so my view was uninterrupted. It was a nice view.
“A little help with the door, please.” The moment he asked, I knew that he was feeling left out. He was flaunting his charms and I was ignoring him. A deadly insult among the fey.
I got up to open the door for him, as if he couldn’t have shifted his clothes around to do it himself. But I stopped before opening the door and raised up on tiptoe to kiss him. I balanced with one hand behind his head, lost in the curls at his neck, and the other hand trailing down the side of his body, caressing over his ribs, the sweep of his hip. I let him see in my eyes how beautiful he was to me.
It made him smile, and he gave me a shy glance out of his one perfect eye. The shy was pretend, but the pleasure wasn’t.
I stayed on tiptoe long enough to put my forehead against his. My hands played in the curls at the back of his neck, and he shivered under my touch. I stood back on the ground flat-footed and moved out of the door so he could pass.
Rhys shook his head. “That was her idea of a good-bye kiss, Doyle.” He glanced back at the other man, still kneeling in the bed. “Have fun, kiddies.” But his serious face didn’t match the flippant words.
Rhys offered me the hairbrush from the pile of clothing, then I let him out. I shut the door behind him, and was suddenly very aware that I was alone with Doyle. Doyle, whom I’d never seen nude. Doyle, who had frightened me when I was a child. Doyle, who had been the Queen’s right hand for a thousand years. He’d kept me safe, guarded my body and my life, but somehow he hadn’t really been mine. Somehow he wouldn’t really be mine until I’d touched that dark body, seen all of him bare before me. I wasn’t sure why that was so important to me, but it was. By withholding himself from me, it was almost as if he was holding his options open. As if he believed that once he was with me, he’d have no more options. Which wasn’t true. I’d been with my onetime fiancé, Griffin, for seven years, and in the end he’d found plenty of options, none of them me. Having sex with me hadn’t been a lifealtering experience for him. Why should it be different for Doyle?
“Meredith.” He said my name once, but for once his voice wasn’t neutral. That one word held uncertainty, a question, and a hope. He spoke my name once more, and it turned me around to face the bed and what lay waiting for me among the burgundy sheets.
Chapter 18
HE SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED CLOSEST TO THE MIRROR, closest to me. He was almost lost among the black dream of his hair. Almost all the other sidhe I knew had some contrast from hair to skin to eyes, but Doyle was all of one piece. His unbound hair cascaded around him like a black cloud, so that his ebony skin was almost lost in the folds of it. A long, long lock of hair had fallen over his face, and his black-on-black eyes were lost in that darkness. He looked like a piece of night itself come to life. He swept a hand up to draw back the hair and try to tuck it behind one pointed ear. The earrings glittered like stars against his darkness.
I walked forward until the bed bumped against my thighs. My legs pressed into the bed, but all I could feel was the thickness of his hair, trapped between my body and the firmness of the bed. He turned his head, and I felt the hair tug underneath me. I pressed in harder, trapping his hair.
He turned those dark eyes up to me, and there were colors in his eyes that shone nowhere in the room, like a swarm of brilliant fireflies—blue, white, yellow, green, red, purple, and colors I had no name for. The pinpoints danced and swirled, and for a second I could almost feel them flying around me, the tiny wind of their passing like being caught in a cloud of butterflies; then I was falling and Doyle caught me.
I came to myself in his arms, in his lap, where he’d sat me. When I could speak, I said, “Why?”
“I am a power to be reckoned with, Meredith, and I want you to never forget that. A king should have more to offer than seed.”
I slid my hands across his skin, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Are you auditioning?”
He smiled. “We all are, Meredith. Some of the others may forget that in the rush of hot skin and sex, but you must never forget. You are choosing a father for your children, a king for the court, and someone you will be tied to forever.”
I hid my face in the curve of his neck. His skin was warm to the touch. His pulse beat against my face. His smell was so warm, so very warm. “I’ve been thinking about that.” I spoke the words against his skin.
He rubbed his neck against my face. “And what conclusions have you come to?”
I drew back enough to see his face. “That Nicca would be a victim and a disaster on the throne. That Rhys is lovely in bed, but I can’t see him as a king. That my father was right and Galen would be utterly disastrous. That there are more knights at court that I would rather kill than be tied to for the rest of my life.”
He laid his lips against the side of my neck, not quite kissing me. He spoke with his own mouth against my skin, so that his words made small kissing movements against me. “There is Frost and … me.”
The feel of his lips made me shiver, writhing in his lap. Doyle drew a sharp breath, his hands wrapping around my waist, across my thighs. He whispered, “Merry,” against my skin, his breath warm and fierce, his fingers digging into my thigh, my waist. There was such strength in his hands, such pressure, as if with little effort he could plunge his fingers into my body and bring my blood and flesh to the surface, peel me apart like something ripe and sweet. Something that had been waiting for his hand to open me, to bring me, to spill me in a rush of pleasure over his hands, across his body.
He half lifted me, half threw me onto the bed. I waited for him to press his body against mine, but he didn’t. He got up on all fours, straddling above me like a mare with a colt, but there was nothing motherly about the way he stared down at me. He’d thrown all that hair over one shoulder so that his naked upper body was exposed to the light. His skin gleamed like polished ebony. His breathing was deep and rapid, making the nipple ring wink and shimmer above me.
I raised my hand to touch it, brushed my fingers ov
er that bit of silver, and a sound came out of Doyle, low in his body and growing, a growl like some great beast, echoing through that slender, muscled body. He straddled my body, lips curving back to flash white teeth, while that growl trickled out of his lips, past his teeth like a warning.
It made my pulse race, but I wasn’t afraid yet. Not yet. He leaned down into my face and snarled, “Run!”
I just blinked at him, my pulse in my throat.
He threw back his head and howled, a sound that echoed and echoed in the small room. The hair on my body stood, and I stopped breathing for a second, because I knew that sound.
That lone, clear evil belling of the Gabriel Ratchets, the dark hounds of the wild hunt. He put his face inches from mine and growled, “Run!”
I scrambled out from underneath him, and he watched me with those dark eyes, his body immobile but so tense it seemed to shimmer with the promise of some violent action, violence contained, constrained, restricted, but there all the same.
I had crawled off on the wrong side of the bed. I was trapped between the window and the bed. The outer door lay across the bed, past Doyle. I’d played games of hunt and catch before. A lot of things in the Unseelie Court liked to catch you first, but that was pretend, play, foreplay. The look in Doyle’s eyes was hungry, but one hunger looks much like another until it’s too late.
His voice fought out from his clenched teeth. “You … are … not … running!” With that last, he made a rush at me on all fours, a black blur. I threw myself over the edge of the bed, rolled, and fell to the floor in front of the outer door. I was on my feet, hand on the doorknob when his body crashed into mine. The door shook and my body bruised with the violence of it. He jerked my hand off the doorknob, and I could not withstand his strength.
I screamed.
He tore me away from the door, threw me on the bed. I tried to slide off to one side, but he was there, his lower body pressing against mine, keeping me pinned to the side of the bed. I could feel the firmness of him through his jeans, through my panties.
The door opened behind us, and Rhys looked in. Doyle growled at him. Rhys said, “You screamed?” His face was serious. There was a gun in his hand, held next to his leg, not pointed but there.
Doyle growled, “Get out!”
“I leave at the princess’s order, not yours, sire.” He shrugged. “Sorry. You having a good time, Merry, or …” He made a vague motion with the gun.
“I’m … I’m not sure.” My voice came out breathy. The feel of Doyle pressed tight and firm against me was exciting, even the promise of violence was exciting, but only if it was the promise of it, a game.
His hands on my thighs were shaking, his entire body quivering with the effort not to finish what he’d started. I touched his face gently. He startled as if I’d hurt him, then turned, looked at me. The look in his eyes was barely human. It was like looking into the eyes of a tiger, beautiful, neutral, hungry.
“Are we having fun here, Doyle, or are you going to eat me?” My voice was a little steadier, firmer.
“This first time I would not trust myself to put my mouth to such tender places.”
It took me a second to realize that he had misunderstood me. “I don’t mean eat me in the euphemistic sense, Doyle. I mean, am I food?” My voice sounded utterly calm now, ordinary. Pinned to the bed by his body, his eyes still animalistic and wild, and I sounded like I was in the office, talking business.
He blinked and I saw the confusion in his eyes. I realized that I was asking him to think too deeply. He’d given himself over to a piece of himself that he rarely let out. That part didn’t think like a person.
He did something with his legs that pressed him tighter against me. It made me cry out, but not in pain. “Do you want this?” His voice was almost normal, breathy, but almost normal.
I searched his face, tried to read something there that would comfort me. There was a glimpse of him in the eyes, a sliver of Doyle left behind. I took a deep breath, and said, “Yes.”
“You heard her. Get out.” His voice began to fall into the growl again, every word lower and lower.
“You sure, Merry?” Rhys asked.
I’d almost forgotten him standing there. I nodded. “I’m sure.”
“So we just close the door and ignore the noise and trust that you’ll be all right?”
I stared into Doyle’s eyes and found nothing but need, a need like nothing I’d ever seen in any man. It went beyond desire and became a true need, like food, or water. For him, tonight, this was need; if I turned from him now, we might come together as lovers, but he’d never let himself go this far again. He might close this part of himself away forever, and it would be a little death.
I’d endured that little death for years, dying by inches on the shores of the human sea. Doyle had found me and brought me back to faerie. He’d brought back all those parts of myself I’d had to leave behind to pass for human, to pass for lesser fey. If I turned from him now, would he ever find this piece of himself again?
“I’ll be all right, Rhys,” I said, but I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at Doyle.
“You sure?”
Doyle turned and spoke in a voice that was almost too low and animal to understand. “You heard her. Now get out.”
Rhys gave a small bow and shut the door behind him. Doyle turned those eyes back to me. He growled more than spoke, “You want this?” He was giving me one last chance to say no. But his body ground against mine, his fingers digging into my thighs, as he said it. His mind and mouth were trying to give me a way out, although his body didn’t want to.
I had to close my eyes as I shuddered under the press of him. He growled against my face, and the sound traveled through his body, vibrating along mine, as if the sound could travel places that his body hadn’t touched yet.
Even as his body ground into mine, forced small noises from my throat, he growled, “Do you want this?”
“I want this.”
One of his hands slid from my thigh to the side of my panties. The silk tore with a wet sound like skin being cut. My body jerked as he stripped the silk away and pressed the rough material of his jeans against my naked body. He ground himself against me until I cried out, half in pleasure, half in pain.
He scooted me onto the bed just enough so that he could tear at his pants. The belt opened, the button, the zipper, everything slid down until I saw him nude for the first time. He was long and thick, and perfect. He slid a finger inside of me. It made me cry out, but that wasn’t why he’d done it. When he found me wet and open, he pushed himself inside me, and even wet, he had to work himself in. I was screaming underneath him before he’d managed to get himself all inside me. He seemed to fill me up, every inch, and I writhed underneath, just from the feel of him stiff and large inside me.
Then he began to drag himself out of me, and push himself into me, and the small waves of pleasure began. I watched the dark length of him sliding in and out of my white, white flesh, and the sight alone made me cry out.
My skin began to glow like I’d swallowed the moon, and his dark skin gleamed in answer, filled with all the colors that had been in his eyes. It was as if he were still black water reflecting the glow of the moon, and I was the moon. The bright dancing colors flowed under his skin, and the room brightened, brightened, flickering as if we both burned with colored flame. We cast shadows on the wall, the ceiling, as if we lay at the center of some great light, some great flame, and we became that light, that fire, that heat.
It was as if our skins melted into each other and I felt those dancing lights flow across my skin. I sank into his dark glow as he was swallowed by my white shine, and somewhere in all of that, he brought me screaming, screaming, screaming, drowning in pleasure that was so intense it was like pain. I heard him cry out, heard that bell-like howl, but in that one moment I didn’t care. He could have ripped my throat out and I’d have gone with a smile.
I came to myself with Doyle collapsed on top of
me, his breathing labored, his back covered in a sheen of sweat and blood. I raised my hands and found blood on my white skin, glowing like neon against the fading glow. In that last moment when I hadn’t been aware, I’d bloodied his back. I felt the first stinging trickle of blood and found his teeth marks in my shoulder, bleeding, hurting a little, but not too much, not yet. Nothing could hurt too much with Doyle’s body still on top of mine, him still inside me, as we both relearned how to breathe, how to be in our own bodies again.
His first panting words were, “Did I hurt you?”
I touched my bloody fingers into the bite on my shoulder, mixed the neon glows together like mixing paint, and held up my fingers before his face. “I think I should be asking you the same question.”
He put a hand back to touch the blood on his back, as if he hadn’t felt it until that moment. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at the blood on his hands. Then he threw back his head and laughed, laughed until he collapsed on top of me again, and when he finished laughing, he cried.
Chapter 19
WE LAY ENTWINED TOGETHER ON A BED OF DOYLE’S HAIR. IT was like having fur rubbing the length of my bare body. My head was cradled in the curve of his shoulder. His body was like warm muscled silk. I traced my fingers along his waist, over the curve of his hip, an idle gesture, not exactly sexual. More to know that I could touch him. We’d been quietly touching each other for several minutes. His one hand was trapped underneath my body, curved up around my back, holding me close, but not too close. He wanted room to run his free hand down my body, and he wanted to give me room to touch him. He wanted the feel of hands on his body. It was as if he wasn’t merely starved for sex, but starved for touch. I knew that humans could become touch-starved. Infants will die from lack of enough touch, even if every other need is met. But I hadn’t known it of the sidhe, especially the unmovable object known as the Queen’s Darkness.
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