A Lick of Frost (Merry Gentry #6)(38)

He smiled then, and it was a good smile. A smile that we’d only discovered he had in the last little bit. He crawled under the sheet and slid his body against the back of mine. He spooned his nakedness against my body, and it was simply comforting. I would have turned down almost any other man at the door in that moment.Kitto knew he would not be king, so the sex wasn’t such a press to him. But more than that he valued the gentle cuddling almost more than the sex. After all, he’d had sex before, but I wasn’t certain he’d ever truly been loved just for himself. I did love him. I loved them all, but Rhys was right, I didn’t love them equally.
The constitution of our country says that all men are created equal, but it’s a lie. I’ll never be able to make a jump shot like Magic Johnson, or drive a car like Mario Andretti, or paint like Picasso. We are not created equal in talent. But the place where we are least equal is the heart. You can work at a talent, take lessons, but love, love either works or it doesn’t. You love someone or you don’t. You can’t change it. You can’t undo it.
I lay there drifting on the warm edge of sleep with the wonderful edge of good sex coating my body. Kitto’s warmth and clinging shape held me as I drifted off. I felt safe, loved, and content. I wished Rhys would feel as good about this afternoon as I did, but I knew that that was a wish that wouldn’t come true.
I was a faerie princess, but there were no faerie godmothers. There were only mothers and grandmothers, and there was no magic wand to wave over a person’s heart and make it all better. The fairy tales lied. Rhys knew that. I knew that. The man who was breathing at my back as he began to fall deeper to sleep knew that.
Fucking Brothers Grimm.
CHAPTER 20
WHILE MAEVE REED WAS OFF IN EUROPE STAYING OUT OF TARANIS’S reach, she’d given us full use of her house. She said it was a small price to pay for us saving her life and helping her become pregnant before her human husband had died of cancer. So for once good deeds had been rewarded. We had a mansion on a huge plot of land in Holmby Hills, with a guesthouse, a pool house, and a smaller cottage near the gate for the caretaker-gardener.
I still slept in the master bedroom of the guesthouse, but there were now enough of us to fill the bedrooms of both houses. The men were having to double up in some of the bedrooms.
Kitto had gotten a room to himself because it was too small a room to share with anyone much above my, and Rhys’s size. Which meant no one.
We’d planned on using the main house’s dining room for the initial meeting with the goblins. It was a huge room that had begun life as a ballroom. So it was light and airy and full of marble. It looked like something out of a human fairy tale. The Seelie Court would have approved, but then Maeve was exiled from there, so maybe the ballroom/dining room was a piece of home for her.
Most of my bodyguards looked as at home here in the brightness as the glittering chandeliers above us. The guards whom Ash and Holly had brought didn’t look at home at all. 
The Red Caps towered over everyone else in the room. Seven feet of goblin was a lot of goblin. But that was short for a Red Cap. Most were closer to the twelve-foot mark. The average height was eight to ten feet. Their skins were shades of yellow, gray, and sickly green. I’d known that the goblins were bringing Red Caps as guards. Kurag, the Goblin King, had felt that if he sent Ash and Holly without guards to us and something happened to them, it would be seen as a plot between him and me to rid himself of the brothers. Since the only way for him to step down as king and them to step up was for him to be dead at their hands, their deaths would be very convenient for him.
So why was he offering them to me to make them even more powerful? Because Kurag knew how his kingship would end, as all goblin kings ended. He wanted to ensure that his people were strong even after he died. He did not resent the brothers for their ambition. He just wanted to hold it off a little longer.
If the twins died by our hands, even by accident, without goblins around them, then it could be misconstrued. If the goblins thought that Kurag had had the brothers assassinated, his life was forfeit. All challenges were personal challenges. There were goblins who were assassins as a sideline, but they never took “jobs” where the victim was another goblin. They’d kill sidhe, or lesser folk, but never another goblin.
The only exception was if the goblin was one of the “kept,” as Kitto had been. If you had a problem with one of them, their “masters” fought you. Because to be what Kitto was among them was an admission that he was not fighter enough to be part of the larger goblin culture.
I sat in a large chair that had been set up as a sort of temporary throne. The big table had been moved back against the wall, along with most of the chairs. Frost was at my back. Doyle was still closeted in his bedroom with the black dogs. Taranis had nearly killed my Darkness. If we’d been inside faerie proper, he might have been healed already. None of our magics were as strong here. It was one of the reasons that exile was so feared by most, because you were never as powerful outside of faerie.
“We have brought you inside so the human reporters cannot bandy it about in the press,” Frost said in a voice as cold as his namesake. “But for the press I would not have allowed you inside our wards with such an army at your back.”
I couldn’t really argue with him, but I was strangely unworried. In fact, I felt better than I’d felt in hours.
“It is done, Frost,” I said.
“Why are you not more worried about this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“If they were not goblins, I would say they had bespelled you,” Rhys said.
Ash and Holly were impressed with all of the show, which set them apart from the other goblins and made them so much more sidhe.
“Greetings, Ash and Holly, goblin warriors. Greetings also to the Red Caps of the Goblin Court. Who leads here?”
“We do,” Ash said, as he and his brother stepped up to stand before my chair. They were wearing the court clothes that they’d worn before, Ash in green to match his eyes, Holly in red to match his. The clothes were satin, and the height of fashion if the year happened to be between 1500 and 1600.
Their short yellow hair brushed their ears as they bowed. They’d started to let their hair grow, though it wasn’t long enough to get them in trouble with the queen—it had to touch their collars for that.
“You’ve let your hair grow in the month since I saw you,” I said.
They exchanged a glance, then Ash said, “We do it in anticipation of your magic bringing us into our sidhe-side powers.”
“That’s very confident of you,” I said.“We have every confidence in your powers, Princess,” Ash said.
I looked at Holly. There was no confidence in his eyes, just eagerness. He got to bed me tonight; all else was just pretense. Holly would give me what the brothers truly felt. Ash was nearly as good at playing courtier as sidhe lord. I didn’t trust either of them, but Ash could lie with his eyes and face; Holly couldn’t. Good to know.
I looked past them to the Red Caps. I recognized some of them from the fight weeks before. They had stood by me, not the brothers, or Kurag their king. The Red Caps had obeyed me beyond what was required of them by treaty. I had not explored that strange obedience, so unlike the usual Red Cap attitude toward sidhe or female, because I wasn’t sure how Kurag would take it. I did not want to be seen as trying to seduce, even politically, the most powerful warriors of the goblin race to my service.
Kurag desperately wanted out of the treaty with me. He feared that civil war was coming either within the Unseelie themselves or between both courts. He wanted no part of the coming battles, yet his treaty with me held him to me. I would not give him an excuse to pull out. We needed him too much. So I had not probed further into the Red Caps motivations for their loyalty to me.
Now they stood before me, more of them than I’d ever seen in one place at one time. They were like a living wall of flesh and muscle. They all wore little round skullcaps. Most were covered in dry blood so that the wool was shades of brown and black. But about a third of them had blood running from their caps to trickle down their faces and stain the shoulders and chest of their clothes.
Once to be war leader among them you had to be able to make the blood on your cap stay fresh. The alternative was to kill a foe often enough to keep your hat red. This little cultural habit had made them some of the most bloodthirsty warriors in all of faerie.
I’d only met one Red Cap who could make his hat stay fresh and bright red: Jonty. He stood among them, in the front near the center. He was about ten feet tall, with gray skin and eyes the color of fresh blood. All the Red Caps had red eyes, but there are shades of red, and Jonty’s were as bright as his cap.
When I’d met him his skin had reminded me of the gray of dust, but his skin didn’t look dry or harsh now. He looked…like he’d had a good deep moisturizer used on all the skin I could see. Since goblins didn’t go to spas, I didn’t understand the change in his skin tone.
There were other changes as well. His hat bled in thick runlets of blood so that his entire upper body was soaked in it. The blood had trickled down his clothes, and dripped off the ends of his thick fingers as he stood there, making a delicate pattern of blood on the marble floor.