“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.”
“Won’t that hurt you?”
Nicca laid his head against my thigh, and said, “You were in the hallway, right? You saw her with Mistral.”
He nodded. “I saw.” There was a hunching of his shoulders when he said it.
I ran my fingers down the front of his body, down his chest, his stomach, and only him rolling away kept me from wrapping my hand around him. “What is wrong?” I asked.
“I will never be comfortable being that rough with anyone.”
“You don’t have to be rough tonight, just give me the length of you. Let me feel you in my mouth all the way down to your balls. I want all of you in me in every conceivable way. If there’s an opening that can hold you, I want it.”
He gave me a look.
“Galen, Galen, we’re running out of time, don’t you understand that? Doyle and Frost already think the ring has chosen Mistral for me.”
He looked stricken, as if I’d stabbed him low and hard with something made of cold iron.
“I don’t believe they are right, but I do not know. None of us do. So while I have you, I want you. Don’t you understand that?”
He looked down, and he was small again, his foreskin covering him. “If what you did with Mistral is what you want, then why do you want me?”
“I don’t want rough every night, Galen. Some nights I like gentle. Some nights I like to make love, not fuck.”
“But some nights you like to fuck,” he said. “I pretty much always want to make love.”
I smiled at him. “I could argue that.”
He tried not to smile, but failed. “Not if what you did in the hallway was fucking.”
“That was fucking with Mistral. Sex depends on the person you’re with, Galen. Lovemaking rises and falls on the rhythms of the people involved.” I held my hand out to him. “Come to me.”
He shook his head. “If I come to you now, I won’t be able to come to you when Nicca finally enters you.”
“I can bring you back with a little bit of magic.”
“Yeah, but if you do it immediately, it hurts a little.”
“You never told me.”
I looked down my body at Nicca, who had gone very quiet, his head resting on my thigh more for a pillow now than for sex. “Does it? Hurt, I mean?”
“Until recently I almost always shared my night with Rhys, so with two of us in the bed there was more waiting between times. So no, it did not hurt. But if I had to go straight back to it, it might,” he said.
“Doyle and Frost never complained,” I said.
“I think pain is more useful for them in the bedroom than it is for me or Galen.”
I thought about that for a second. “Maybe.”
Galen’s voice came soft. “Is the reason you want me this way that you don’t want me to be your king?”
I started to say no, then hesitated. It wasn’t my motive for the oral sex, but the last part was true enough, or had been.
“I want you like this because I want you,” I said.
Nicca spoke with his head still pillowed on my thigh. “I’ve seen her do this with more than just Mistral. She does seem to enjoy it.”
“Sage, you mean,” Galen said, but still didn’t sound happy. His face did what it almost always did: it showed his every emotion.
“Yes,” I said, and wasn’t sure what to do to reassure him. It wasn’t like Galen to pout this much. This was more Frost’s speed.
“Sage,” he said again, “another who won’t ever be your king.”
I sighed. “We have a night of ecstasy in front of us, and you’re spoiling it with hard questions, it’s not like you.”
“No, it’s more like Frost.”
He’d spoken exactly what I’d just finished thinking. He’d done that several times tonight.
He continued with, “You complain about his moods, but you seem to like him better and better. Maybe you like your men a little more complicated.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Why do you love one man and not another? Why is it that one person’s touch fills you with shivery heat, and the same touch from another leaves you cold? It is a mystery. But I could answer truthfully and still be comforting.
“I love you, Galen.”
He just looked at me.
“Maybe I had forgotten just how much, but today. . when I saw you lying there…” My voice failed me, and I had to close my eyes to keep from seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood.
Nicca stroked my thigh, not for sex but to comfort.
“When I saw you there, like that, I thought I would die from grief. To never see your smile again.” My eyes felt hot, and I couldn’t decide if crying would make me feel better or worse.
He touched my face, and without opening my eyes, I knew it was his hand. His warm, gentle hand. I laid my cheek into that hand. I was reminded sharply of doing the same thing to Doyle only a few hours ago. Galen had failed me then, had not understood why Gillette’s failing me had made me cry. But giving Galen into the hands of another woman who could give him his nights of gentle love was one thing; giving him up to death was another. That I could not bear.
I opened my eyes and gazed up at him. I met those green, green eyes.
“You’re crying,” he said, and the look on his face was one of wonderment.
“Not quite,” I said, but my voice sounded it. I had to swallow hard to say the next part. “Maybe I have been pulling back from you. I didn’t mean to.” I touched his hand with mine, kept it pressed against my face. “What terrified me about you being king was that our enemies would kill you. If I was picking men who could survive that kind of treachery, it wouldn’t be you, my gentle love.”
“Like Dormath thinking I would just forgive him for almost killing me.”
“Yes.”
“The last thing I thought, the very last thought, was you. I was afraid that it was the beginning of an assault on all of us.” He lowered his gaze and wouldn’t look at me. “I thought, Doyle and Frost will keep her safe. That if one of us had to die first, it was better that it was me.” His smile was more sad than happy. “I guess my actual last, last thought was, why me? If I’d killed someone first, it would have been Doyle, not me. I prayed to the Goddess for your safety, and I died.”
“Not quite,” I whispered.
He looked at me then, and the smile was almost a real one. “How can I blame you for looking to them for your king, when as I lay dying, they were who I thought of, too? Damn it, being a good person is not enough here, not to help keep us alive. I’m sorry for that.”
“I thought it would endanger you more to be my king, Galen, but now I understand that they’re going to try to kill you anyway.” I spoke to the look on his face. “I didn’t know about the green man bringing life to the court until the queen said it, but they are still going to kill as many of my allies as they can. They will strip me of my help, if they dare. So if you’re in danger either way, then you might as well be king.”
“I’m dead either way,” he said, and the smile was back to being more sad.
I sat up, trying to hug him, but he moved away just a little. My movement forced Nicca to move from my thigh to the mound between my legs for his pillow. Not for sex, but gently, as a pillow for his cheek.
“Come to me, Galen, please.”
“I cannot be your king, Merry. It would be the death of us all.” There was a hardness to his face that I had never seen before. In that moment I watched years be added, not in wrinkles, or lines, but in experience, in the depths of his eyes.
“Will you give up your place in her bed?” Nicca asked, and his voice held the lilt of surprise.