[Merry Gentry 04] - A Stroke of Midnight

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Galen said what I was thinking. “Consort save us, Nicca, finish it.” It made me roll my eyes past Kitto, to my green man as he knelt near Kitto’s head on the edge of the towels.

  Nicca’s fingertips dug into my flesh, just a little, no nails, just the strength in his fingers that let me know that if he wished he could plunge his fingers inside my flesh. So strong, so very strong.

  I writhed for him, and had to fight not to be too fierce on the tender flesh inside my mouth. I had to raise my mouth off of Kitto for a moment. Had to catch my breath, and fight off the urge to bite down. I kept one hand on the base of him, but changed the grip, so that my hand covered as much of him as I could. I came up off of his body with my hand already stroking his wet, quivering shaft.

  I looked back at Nicca who was kneeling behind me, but no longer touching me. He looked brown and perfect kneeling there, with his hair still wet from the tub, clinging to his body in thick strands that tangled around his shoulders, arms, waist, and legs. His wings rose against all that chocolate-colored goodness like some spun sugar fantasy. I had a moment of regret about him going elsewhere, but only a moment. I wanted him happy more than I wanted him.

  “Why were you waiting?”

  “You are sending me to what amounts to my marriage bed, Merry. If this is to be my last time with you, I would like it to be exactly as I want it. You can say no.”

  I had to smile. “Ask, and I’ll know the answer.” Then I thought of something. “Are you unhappy about Biddy?”

  “No,” he said, but he frowned. “No, but there will be things I will miss.”

  “Such as?” I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I truly wanted to know.

  It was his turn to smile. “Such as watching you stretched underneath me, screaming your pleasure around another man’s body, while I bring you, and pour my pleasure between your legs.”

  Just hearing him describe it with that look in his eyes tightened things low in my body. “I was offering that,” I said.

  “I want you on your back as you were with Sage. I want to see your breasts rise and fall with your breathing.”

  I went to him, touching his face, trying to see through this combination of passion and seriousness. It wasn’t like him. “I want Biddy and you to be a happy time, not a sad one.”

  He smiled, but it held an edge of something that was not happy. “I remember a time when marriage was not the end of such joys but the beginnings of them. The sidhe never cheated on their partners, but if we agreed then others were brought into our beds.”

  He was speaking of a time before Andais was queen. A time before Christianity was anything but a heretic Jewish sect. Most of the sidhe didn’t speak of it, for they didn’t like talking about what they had lost. Who wants to talk of a time when the sidhe had not been outnumbered by the humans. A time when we married for love and not simply for children. A time when sex was about joy and sharing and not a relentless pursuit of pregnancy. A time when an unplanned baby didn’t condemn you to a loveless marriage. I had felt such happiness when the ring chose Nicca and Biddy for each other. But was it a true love match? Yes, they were infatuated with each other, and yes there might be a child, but would there be happy-ever-after? Or would Nicca love her, bed her, share a child with her, yet regret. And would those regrets eventually destroy their love?

  Suddenly I smelled roses. “Do you smell apple blossoms?” Galen asked.

  “Yes,” Nicca said, “like in the hallway with Mistral.”

  “Honeysuckle,” Kitto said.

  The scent was growing stronger. I had a moment of inspiration. It wasn’t the same as channeling the Goddess, but . . . “When did the sidhe stop having children, Nicca?”

  He blinked at me. “I can taste the perfume on the air.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “long ago.”

  “Did we stop having children after we adopted the human ideal of one partner?”

  “We adopted monogamy because the humans outbred us using it,” Nicca said.

  “Did they really?” I said. “Or did we begin to be outbred when we stopped being who and what we are?”

  “What do you mean, Merry?” Galen asked.

  I held up my hand to show the dull metal gleam of the queen’s ring. “She said she took this off her enemy’s body, but that she never saw babies with it. Lust, love, infatuation, but she could not see the babies. What if this is not the queen’s ring, but a ring meant for a fertility deity? We were nature deities originally, before human need turned some of us more civilized. We are that which is primal, basic.”

  “The sidhe have not been that in a very long time,” Kitto said.

  I turned to find him still lying in the nest of towels, as if he hadn’t moved. “What do you mean, Kitto?”

  “The goblins were the last of faerie to embrace the idea of only one spouse at a time. Once, if the husband, the dominant partner, could protect, feed, and house more, then you were allowed more if they all agreed.”

  “I wouldn’t think that the husband would care what the wife thought,” Galen said.

  “Technically, husband only means dominant partner, not the sex of a goblin, and he or she could bring anyone in without the wife’s permission. But in reality, if you bring in someone your wife hates, then your home life becomes a battleground, and not even a goblin wants that.”

  “So you could be someone’s wife?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “But not a husband,” Galen said.

  “I am not strong enough to be one.” He writhed on the bed of towels. “Why do I smell honeysuckle as if summer has arrived and I am standing in the sun? It’s so warm.”

  “You were in the hall when Merry and Mistral had their little fling,” Galen said, his voice almost as light as his words. “Apple blossoms for me.”

  “Like standing in the orchard in spring,” Nicca said.

  The two men smiled at each other.

  “Spring energy,” Kitto said.

  I looked at him. “What?”

  “They’re both spring energy,” he said.

  “And what are you?”

  “Summer, when the land is hot and ripening.” He writhed on the towels as he said it, his legs straining out as if he were close to orgasm. His body was thick and ripe again.

  “And what am I?” I asked.

  “Autumn,” he said. “You are the land when the harvest comes. You are what the year works toward, Merry.”

  “And what is winter?”

  “The long sleep,” Kitto said.

  I laid back against him, using his groin as a pillow. It brought a small sound from him. I gazed back at Nicca where he still knelt. “Tell me what you want, Nicca. Tell me exactly what you want.”

  “I want you on your back. I want to see another man push his way inside your mouth while I mount you. I want you to scream your pleasure around his body while I fuck you.”

  I nodded, rolling the back of my hair across Kitto’s groin. He writhed for me. “We can do that,” I said.

  Nicca smiled.

  Kitto’s voice came shaky, but clear. “I do not know how to position myself for what you ask. Where do my legs go?”

  “I’ll show you,” Galen said, and his voice was low with need.

  I rolled my head back so I could see him still sitting behind us. The movement made Kitto writhe again. Two birds with one caress. “You’ve refused before,” I said.

  “I didn’t say I would go that way, only that I’ll help Kitto figure out where his legs go. A hundred words can’t make as much sense as one good demonstration.” His eyes were far more serious than his words, serious and dark with need.

  “Well, as long as it’s a good demonstration,” I said, and my own voice was a little breathy.

  “Oh, it will be,” he said, and the look on his face was all male. I believed him.

  CHAPTER 31

  IT WAS MY TURN TO LIE BACK AGAINST THE TOWELS. TO LIE THERE and watch G
alen crawl toward me. His body was already thick and hard, dark with the extra blood, darker than the rest of his body.

  I wanted a lot of things from Galen, and had gotten most of them, but he like the rest of the men was so intent on making babies that he wouldn’t chance going elsewhere. I watched him crawling closer and felt positively covetous.

  He gave a laugh that was more nerves and anticipation than humor. “The look on your face, like I’m something good to eat.”

  “She did not look at me that way,” Kitto said.

  Which put me back to having to soothe his ego. I’d begun to notice the hardest thing about having this many men in my life wasn’t figuring out what position for sex tonight but how to keep from hurting anyone’s feelings or making anyone feel left out. It wasn’t the number of bodies in the bed that made it complicated but the number of hearts and hands.

  I reached out and touched Kitto’s knee where he knelt so close. He was supposed to be watching, so he could learn where the legs went. “Galen was my first crush, Kitto, the first man that I ever lusted over. The first that I ever loved. I’d spent years fantasizing about him before he came to my bed. You’re new on the menu. I haven’t had a chance to fantasize about you for so many unrequited years.”

  “Don’t feel slighted,” Nicca said. “She doesn’t look at me that way either.”

  I looked down my body at him. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  He held up a hand to stop my words. “I do not feel slighted, Merry. All that had eyes knew how long you pined after Galen. You followed him around like a puppy when you were so young you didn’t even realize why you found him so compelling.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the puppy remark, but I let it go, because when I was fourteen, it was probably embarrassingly accurate.

  “Merry,” Galen said, “you’re blushing.”

  I covered my face with my hands, because I rarely if ever blushed. I wasn’t blushing for me now, but for that long ago girl. The girl that I had been would have been mortified to know that her “secret” love was no secret at all.

  Hands touched my wrists. “Merry.” Galen’s voice was as gentle as his hands, as he moved mine away from my face. “You blushed for me.”

  I actually couldn’t look at him. “It’s just the thought that everyone knew. I didn’t know I was being that obvious when I was fourteen.”

  “We’re all that obvious when we’re fourteen,” he said with a smile.

  “It’s been a few centuries since I was fourteen,” Nicca said, “but if memory serves, Galen’s right.”

  Kitto’s comment was, “The goblins are not a subtle race.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Galen asked.

  “It means that if a goblin lusts after another, everyone knows it. We do not see the point of hiding our admiration, unless we fear the goblin we lust after will take it as an insult. We are not subtle, but we can hide what we feel if we must.”

  I held my hand out to him, palm up. He took my hand, looking puzzled. “What would you have of me, Princess?”

  “A smile,” I said.

  He looked even more puzzled.

  Galen explained, “She wants to chase that shadow from your eyes.”

  Kitto rewarded us both with a shy smile, then shook his head. “I like being sidhe.”

  I squeezed his hand and would have said something comforting, but Nicca chose that moment to play his hand between my legs and suddenly I couldn’t think of any words.

  “You’re not wet enough,” Nicca said.

  It took me two swallows to say with a suddenly dry throat, “Bath, always does that.”

  “Odd that such wetness makes a woman dry,” he said, and his finger found my opening, slipped inside. It made me gasp, made my hand convulse around Kitto’s. Nicca moved his finger inside me, gently, slowly. “I am not so large as some, but not small either. This dry it will hurt.”

  My voice came breathy. “Then make me wet.”

  “As my princess commands,” he said, with a smile. He took his hand away from my body, and said to Galen, “Show Kitto where the legs go, so that when she is ready to be entered, I will have my view.”

  “Let me know when you’re ready,” Galen said.

  “I won’t have to tell you,” Nicca said, “you’ll know.”

  The scent of flowers had faded, like the dream of roses in a long-closed room. You open the door and get the hint of perfume, then it fades, and you wonder if you imagined it. Such is the passing of many spirits and powers in the human world. Many things that humans take for ghosts are the shadows of things that were never truly mortal.

  Galen had faded a little, too, with all the talk, and I liked that better for oral sex. A little softness first, a little less size to begin with. He straddled my upper body, and as soon as he was close enough I tried to take him in my mouth.

  He laughed, and held his hand in the way. “Let me get settled first; you’ll pull a muscle in your neck doing it that way.”

  He moved his body closer to my mouth, settled his knees more firmly on either side of my shoulders. His groin filled my view, not just the head and shaft, but the tight firmness of his testicles, in their close-curled nest of darker green hair. My hands were trapped underneath his weight. I could touch his thighs, his ass, and the lowest edge of his back, but that was all my hands could reach. If I had known that I would have a chance to finally have Galen in my mouth, I might not have agreed to the change in positioning. With me on top I would have been able to guide more of what went into my mouth, and how. In this position I had to let the man direct it more. I wanted a hand to help angle him for my mouth. But I shouldn’t have worried. Galen stared down at me, his eyes filling with that darkness that men get only in the most intimate of moments. He used his hand to move himself so that the angle was better. And once my mouth slid over the head of him, he adjusted his upper body so that when I sucked him down, I was able to suck all of him. He was soft, and silken inside my mouth, the foreskin rolling, something extra for my tongue to play with. I sucked eagerly to get all of him inside me. My lips rested solid against his body. I rolled him in my mouth, sucking, stroking, playing with him with tongue and mouth, while I still could. Even as I enjoyed the sensation of him soft, he grew in my mouth. I felt that bit of flesh go from soft and silken to hard and ripe. He filled my mouth and then my throat. I had to back off of him to draw a breath.

  Galen drew himself out of my mouth. “This is supposed to be foreplay, Merry.”

  “You know what I want,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  I trailed my hands along his ass. “Nicca will go between my legs, then with a touch, I will bring him back again. He will service me and Biddy this night. Why can’t you go twice tonight, too?”

  “I usually do.”

  I pressed my body upward, gripping his ass with my hands. I raised up enough so I could lick lightly on his balls. “Go once in my mouth, and once between my legs. Please, Galen, please.”

  Nicca’s hands slid down my thighs, and I felt him settling between my legs a second before his tongue touched me, a quick caress that made me writhe and dig my nails, just a little, into Galen’s body.

  It made him close his eyes, and count his breaths.

  “I would give almost anything to have a woman beg me like that,” Kitto said. “Do not refuse such a gift.”

  I didn’t look at Kitto, because I only had eyes for Galen.

  Nicca’s tongue licked inside my opening, then up in a sure, firm stroke. I had to learn how to breathe again, and when I opened my eyes, Galen was still there, looking down at me. Nicca began to lick in circles around the edge of me, long sure strokes, for he had found that quick ones only worked later, not at the beginning. That sensation of fullness was already beginning to grow low in my body.

  “Please,” I said simply.

  He settled his body over me again, wrapped his own hand around himself, and gave me the angle my mouth needed. “A princess shouldn’t have to b
eg” was the last thing he said before he slid inside my mouth.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE WEIGHT GREW LOW IN MY BODY, AS NICCA’S TONGUE CARESSED in long, heavy circles, and at the top of that circle he found that spot, the one that would eventually turn that growing warm weight into pleasure. But he had to work me wet first, otherwise it would hurt and rub, not pleasure.

  Galen had gotten over his reluctance. He put his hands on the floor just past my head, so that he could move his hips as if he were making love to my mouth. And it was making love, not a pounding, but a caress of muscled velvet sliding between my lips, a sweet, hard weight that made me open my mouth wide to him, so he could glide every inch from the smooth head to the end of the shaft where it met his body. Except we never got that far. He never put that much of himself inside me. Nicca had stopped what he was doing. I knew he was still lying between my legs, because I could feel his hands wrapped around my thighs, but he was still, giving only an occasional lick, just enough to not lose ground, but not even close to making me come. Normally, it would have been irritating, but it freed me to concentrate on the sensation of Galen in my mouth in a way he had never allowed before. Except that he was holding back. Never once did the soft, hanging weight of his testicles touch my face. He wasn’t giving me his all, not even close.

  He spoke, and his voice showed the strain, the control he was wasting on his movements. “You stopped,” he said in a strangled voice. “Nicca, why did you stop?”

  “I thought to let you both enjoy it without me distracting her too much. Though from what I saw her do with Sage and Mistral, you are being overly careful.”

  “I don’t want to hurt her.”

  That was it. I managed to get my hands free and pushed. He came up off of me, holding himself above me effortlessly, as if he could have held himself poised and perfect forever. Just gazing down the length of his body like that made me shiver.

  “I want to feel all of you in my mouth, Galen, all of you.”