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.

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.

Only after I was a quivering thing, all nerve endings, and fluttering eyes that could focus on nothing, did he start again. This time there was nothing gentle about it. This time he rode me as if he owned me, and he wanted to make certain that he touched every part of me. He pounded himself into me, and it brought me again with almost the first stroke, so that I screamed over and over again, as if every push of his body brought me. I couldn't tell where one orgasm stopped and the next began. It was one long line of pleasure, until my voice was hoarse with screaming and I was only dimly aware of my surroundings. The world had narrowed down to the pounding of his body and the pleasure of mine.

In the end, he gave one last push, and in that moment I knew he'd been more careful, because that last thrust got a real scream out of me, but the pain was mingled with so much pleasure that it ceased to be pain and just became a part of the warm, glowing edge of ecstasy.

It was only as he began to pull himself out of me that I realized he wasn't pinning my wrists anymore, but something was. I couldn't make my eyes focus enough to see, but when I pulled on my wrists there were ropes, but unlike any rope I'd ever touched.

He moved from on top of me and I realized I couldn't move my legs either. More of the ropes were laced around my thighs and lower legs.

It made me struggle harder to see, to focus, and to be aware. I hated to chase back the edge of so much pleasure, but I wanted to see what he'd used to tie me, and how he'd done it without moving his hands.

There were vines around my wrists, vines that led to more vines that had climbed part of the glass wall, so that the dark lines of them were silhouetted against the softening dark. It wasn't as dark as it had been when we started, but it wasn't dawn either. The darkness was fading but there was no true light. False dawn pressed against the windows, half-hidden by the dark lines of ivy vines.

Ivi got to his feet, using the back of the couch to steady himself, and even then he almost fell. "I haven't been able to pleasure a woman like that in so long. I haven't been able to call the vines for even longer. You are ivy-bound, Princess."

I tried to say that I didn't know what that meant, but Briac was standing by the vine-covered glass. He was nude, and I could see the ash-white of his skin, not moonlight skin like mine, but a gray-white that no one else in either court could boast. His shoulders were broader than Ivi's, and there was more meat and muscle to his body. Brii was still beautiful, graceful with his long yellow braid of hair trailing over one shoulder and down the front of his body so that it half hid the eager length of him, but he'd have had to unbind his hair to cover his grace completely. I lay there, bound hand and foot, unable to rise, or move, and there he stood over me nude and ready.

"This is not the way I would have come to you first, Princess Meredith," he said. He seemed almost embarrassed, which wasn't an emotion we allowed during sex much.

"He doesn't do bondage much, our Briac," Ivi said, and there was that teasing note that had become his speech, but that edge of sorrow that he'd had for so long was missing, as if there was no room for anything but that happy afterglow.

I pulled at the vines, and they moved against my skin, binding closer, twisting and alive, so that they tightened their grip as I tugged on them.

"Yes," Ivi said, "they're alive. They're a part of me, but they're awake, Meredith. Struggle and they tighten. Struggle too much and they'll tighten more than you want."

Brii dropped to his knees, then to all fours. He began to crawl toward me, and the vines on the floor writhed away from him, like small animals running from his touch. I couldn't help but move against the bindings just a little as he crawled toward me. The vines tightened, like hands reminding me to stop that, and I fought to be still as Brii was over me, still on all fours, so that I could see down the line of his body. See that he was hard, and ready, and I was going to need the work that Ivi had done between my legs to take him inside.

Brii leaned those full red lips, the most beautiful lips in either court, near my mouth and whispered, "Say yes."

I said, "Yes."

He smiled, then he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and then he began to push his way inside me.

Chapter Twenty-three

He stayed up on his arms as Ivi had done. Both of them were too tall to do the standard missionary position with me. Brii slid inside me more easily than Ivi had, but it wasn't because he was smaller.

"Goddess, she's so wet, but tight."

"Not as tight as she was before I had my turn," Ivi said. He moved up enough so I could see him past the sweep of Brii's shoulders. He looked down at me as the other man found his rhythm and began to dance his way in and out of me, his body pumping above mine, while Ivi held me for him.

Brii raised one hand from the floor where he was holding himself above me, and put his fingers on either side of my face. "I want you looking at me while I fuck you, Princess, not him." As if I'd insulted him by looking away, he proved that he might prefer gentle, but he had other speeds. He began to pound himself into me as hard and fast as he could, so that the sound of flesh hitting flesh, his labored breathing, and my small sounds of protest were all the world could hold.

It had been too soon since Ivi's good work, and Briac brought me quickly. One moment I was riding the building pleasure, the next my body was bucking and straining underneath him, fighting the orgasm, fighting the vines that held me down, my spine bowing, my neck thrown back so I screamed his name against the glass.

Briac rode my body until it quieted, and I was left blind and limp underneath him, and then and only then did he let his body do that one last thrust, so that he screamed wordlessly above me. Then he fell on top of me, limp, but his weight felt good and right. His heart pounded against my body, his breathing so harsh it sounded like he was still running as fast as he could as he lay there on top of me, too exhausted to move, too tired to do more than throw his body a little to the side so I wasn't smothered under his chest and stomach.

When he could finally move, he drew himself out of me, and that made me cry out again, and caused him to make a sound that was pleasure edged with pain.

He lay on his side beside me, and I could focus my eyes enough to see his own fluttering shut. He spoke in a voice that was hoarse and thick, "Goddess, that felt so good, almost too good."

"It almost hurts, doesn't it, after so long?" Ivi said, and I could see him now sitting on the couch, close enough that he'd had a ringside seat for the sex.

"Yes," Brii answered.

"Princess, can you hear me?" Ivi asked.

I blinked up at him and finally managed a breathy "Yes."

"Can you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Say something besides yes."

I gave a small smile and said, "What do you want me to say?"

He smiled. "Good, you really can hear me. I thought we might get you to pass out from pleasure."

"Not quite," I said.

"Maybe next time," he said.

That made me look at him a little harder, trying to chase back the amazing afterglow of it all. Dawn had come to the east, so there was white light to the western sky. The night had slipped away during all that sex.

"Didn't think there'd be next time," I said, and I realized that my voice was hoarse from screaming their names.

He smiled more widely, and his eyes held that knowledge that a man's eyes can after they've been with you in that most intimate of ways. "You ordered us to fuck someone else as soon as possible. You didn't order us never to fuck you again."

I couldn't argue with that, though it seemed like I should have, but I wasn't thinking quite clearly yet. My body still felt loose and liquid, as if I was only half inside it. I hadn't passed out, but it had been a near thing.

The vines began to unwind from my arms and legs, rolling away like they had muscles and minds of their own. I smelled flowers, but it was neither roses nor apple blossoms.

I looked past Brii, where he still lay on his side against the glass. There was a tree growing against the glass, just a few yards away from us. It had gray-white bark, and it rose at least ten feet above us. It was covered in white and pink blossoms, and the whole room smelled sweet with it.

I fought to support myself on my elbows enough to get a better look at it. I realized that the bark was the same ash-white color as Briac's skin. I'd always known he was a vegetative deity of some kind, but his name gave no clue. I stared up at the blossoming tree, then down at the man who was apparently passed out at my side.

"It's a ..."

"Cherry tree," Ivi finished for me.

Chapter Twenty-four

We weren't sure if the vines and the tree would last, or if they would fade away like the apple tree had at the main house after Maeve Reed and I had had sex there. So, without really discussing it, we had breakfast in the formal living room around the table, under the spreading branches of the cherry tree with its blossoms and its breath of spring.

It was a longer walk for Galen and Hafwyn to bring the food, but everyone helped, and no one thought it a hardship as the first petals fell onto our plates. Before we had finished breakfast we were sitting in a room full of pink and white snow formed of petals, and where the blossoms had been there was the beginning of leaves, and the barest beginnings of fruit.

We talked quietly under the fall of blossoms and the growing greenery. And nothing we had to share seemed as bad, or as harsh, or as dangerous as it might have been, as if the very air were sweeter and calmer, and nothing could upset us.

I knew it wouldn't last, but while it did, we all enjoyed it. So, where Doyle and Frost might have been upset that they had slept through the night, they weren't. Rhys and I shared the dream about Brennan and his men, and we all discussed what it might mean, and what it meant that the soldiers whom I'd healed were healing others.

We talked of hard things, but nothing seemed that hard while the tree grew above us, and the light spilled across the sea. It was one of the most peaceful Sundays I'd ever known, full of quiet talk, touching, and being held, and even the news that Rhys had a sithen of his own here didn't cause alarm. It was as if we could have given each other any news, no matter how important or grim, and it simply wouldn't have been that important or that bad.

We had a blessed day, and though we'd planned on going back to the main house that night, somehow we didn't. None of us wanted to break the spell, for spell it was, or blessing. Whatever magic you wished to call it, we wanted it to last. It did last all that day, and all that night, but Monday morning always comes, and the magic of the weekend never lasts. Not even for fairy princesses and immortal warriors. More's the pity.