He laid me back on the bed, my legs still hanging over the edge, and reached under my skirt until he found my panties. He drew them down my legs, slipping them all the way down over my high heels to drop to the floor. He raised my skirt and gazed down at me naked from the waist down except for the shoes. I didn’t ask if he wanted me to remove the shoes, because I knew he didn’t. Sholto liked me in heels.
He put his hands on either side of my hips and pulled me roughly to the firm length of his body. He angled in against me, raising my hips rather than touching himself to change the angle. He pushed himself inside me and I was too tight for him to do it all in one thrust. He had to work his way in, but I was already wet, just tight. I squeezed around him, tighter still, making his head fall a little forward so that his hair swept across my face. He hesitated above me, then he pushed harder, and I made him work for every inch until I orgasmed simply from the sensation of him being so big, so wide, filling me up so completely.
I screamed my pleasure, my head thrown back, my fingers clawing at his satin-covered arms, unable to find something to mark.
He picked me up off the bed with most of him still inside me. He held me in his arms while my body spasmed around him, and I clung to him. He shoved the rest of himself inside me in one long, hard thrust while he held me, and I screamed for him again.
He half collapsed on the bed, half crawled us into the middle of it. He let go of me with his arms, and only his lower body pinned me to the bed. He’d stopped moving once he was as deep as his body could go. He said, “You are my queen, and I am king. This is proof of that.”
It was a very old saying among the nightflyers, of which his father had been one. They looked like huge dark manta rays with tentacles, and faces far from human. Among them, only the royals were able to breed, and able to bring the females to orgasm so easily. The female nightflyers reacted to a spine inside the penis that would have killed me, but luckily for both of us, Sholto didn’t take after his father that much.
I spoke the next part of the ritual, because Sholto had taught it to me. “You inside me proves that you are royal and I am with child.” If I hadn’t been pregnant the reply would have been, “You inside me proves that you are royal and I will be with child.”
He raised up enough to undo the belt around his tunic waist. He tossed the belt with its sword and gun to one side of us, not off the bed; within reach, but out of the way. He spoke as he began to wiggle out of his tunic with his body still pinning mine to the bed. “I don’t remember you being that easy to pleasure, Meredith.”
We shared well, all of us, but not so well that I could tell him that it had been partly Ivi and Brii last night that had helped make his entrance so amazing.
“I told you, I missed you.”
He grinned again, then was hidden behind the rise of his tunic. He stripped off the undertunic of white linen next, and I could finally see his upper body. He was as muscled as any of the men except Rhys. He was broad of shoulder, simply beautiful, but there was a tattoo on his stomach, tracing up to his rib cage. The tattoo was of the tentacles that he would have had had he taken more after his father. Once they hadn’t been a tattoo, but the real thing. Now he could be with me as smooth and human as any sidhe, or he could choose to be everything he could be.
Usually he asked me which I preferred, but one moment he rose above me with that flat and lovely stomach, the next tentacles writhed above me like some fantastic sea creature formed of ivory and crystal with lines of gold and silver running through all that pale beauty. He leaned over me, still hard and fast between my legs, but he leaned over for a kiss, pressing all that muscle and caressing against my body so that when we kissed he held me with more “arms” than any lover I’d ever had. The bigger tentacles were for heavy lifting, and wrapped around me like muscled rope but a thousand times softer, like velvet and satin and more. His more human arms were in the kiss, too, but it was all a part of him, all him hugging me, holding me, kissing me. Sholto loved that I didn’t recoil at his extra bits. Once the sight of his uniqueness had disturbed me, no, honestly, it had frightened me, but somewhere in the magic that had joined us as a couple I had come to appreciate that different wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, he could certainly brag that he could do things with me that none of the others could do without another man to help them.
The smaller tentacles, very thin and stretchy, had small reddish suction cups near the tips. They tickled between us, and I writhed toward their touch, eager for them to find their purpose. The small ends traced over my breasts until they came to my nipples, and then sucked on them hard and fast so that I made eager noises into his mouth as he kissed me. My hands traced along the muscled length of his back, and spilled over the hard velvet of the tentacles, caressing their undersides, where I knew they were sensitive. It made him begin to pull himself out from inside me, giving himself enough room so that one of the small tentacles could slide between my legs and find that small, sweet spot just under my hood, so that while he began to push his body in and out between my legs, working at the wetness and tightness, another of those small eager mouths sucked me.
He rose onto his arms, the bigger tentacles helping support his weight above me, as he sucked all three spots expertly. He knew I liked to watch him going in and out of me, so he parted all those extras like a curtain so I could raise my head enough to look down the length of our bodies. I had begun by enjoying watching him go in and out between my legs, but now I also liked seeing where he sucked my breasts and between my legs, so it was all him, all long, and firm, and giving me pleasure.
He had finally worked me open enough to move faster inside me. His body began to find its rhythm, and I felt the warmth begin to build between my legs from it, but the other building pressure of pleasure was coming faster.
I found my breath enough to say, “I’m coming soon.” He liked to know.
“Which?”
“Upper,” I said.
He smiled, and his eyes flashed to life, gold, amber, and yellow glowing above me, and suddenly his body was a glowing, vibrating thing. Magic struck gold and silver lightning along those extra parts of him. He caused my skin to glow, as if the moon were rising inside me to meet the glow and rise of him above me.I had enough energy left to raise my hands and touch the moving bits, and my soft glowing hands caused colored lights to burst under his skin, one magic calling the other. But it was the vibrating of his magic along his skin inside me, outside me, and against me that finally pushed that first wave of warm, bursting pleasure over my body, so that I screamed, writhing underneath him. My fingers found the hard, solidness of the heavy flesh and marked them. I painted my pleasure down the colored lights of the heavy tentacles, and where he bled the red glowed so that it spattered against my skin like rubies scattered across the moon.
He fought his body to keep the slow, deep rhythm going between my legs. His head fell forward, his hair mingling with everything, and the hair filled with light so it was like making love inside something spun of crystal. And then between one thrust and the next he brought me, and we screamed together the light of our pleasure so bright that we filled the room with colored shadows.
He collapsed above me, and for a moment I was buried underneath the weight of him, with his heart pounding so hard that it seemed to be trying to come out of his chest where the pulse of it beat against the side of my face. Then he moved enough of his upper body so I wasn’t trapped and I could breathe a little more easily. He pulled out from between my legs, the smaller pieces of him already faded, lying against me as if every bit of him were exhausted.
He lay on his side next to me while we both relearned how to breathe. “I love you, Meredith,” he whispered.
“I love you, too.” And in that moment it was as true as any words I had ever spoken.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SHOLTO AND I GOT DRESSED AND JOINED EVERYONE IN THE SMALL living room just off the kitchen and dining room. Since there were no walls to speak of, I thought it was just all the “great room,” but the ones living here called it the small living room, so that’s what we all called it.
Hafwyn and Dogmaela were on the biggest couch. Dogmaela was still crying softly into the other woman’s shoulder. Their blond braids were intertwined and were so close to the same color that I couldn’t tell at a glance which hair belonged to whom.
Saraid stood near the huge bank of windows with her shoulders hunched, her arms crossed over her chest, cradling her small, tight breasts. You didn’t need magic to feel the anger rolling off of her. The sunlight sparkled in her golden hair. As Frost’s was silver, hers was truly golden, as if the precious metal had been woven into hair. I wondered if her hair was as soft as Frost’s.
Brii was standing beside her, his yellow hair seeming pale and unfinished next to her true gold. He tried to touch her shoulder, and she glared at him until he dropped his hand, but he kept speaking quietly to her. He was obviously trying to soothe her.
Ivi was near the sliding-glass doors talking quietly and urgently to Doyle and Frost. Barinthus and Galen stood to one side. The bigger man was talking to Galen and obviously upset. But it had to be about Dogmaela and Ivi, because if he’d figured out that Galen had almost rolled his mind with glamour he’d have been more upset. It was a serious insult for one highborn sidhe to try to bespell another. It said clearly that the spell-caster felt superior and more powerful than the one they were bespelling. Galen hadn’t meant it like that, but Barinthus would most likely have taken it that way.