He nodded again. “And it would lessen Kurag’s hold on them. Goblin kings never step down, or die of old age, Merry. They’re murdered by their successor.”
“The ones most likely to succeed him are Holly and Ash, and they are my allies, too.”
“There are some among the goblins who think you are only sleeping with the twins to keep them from killing Kurag.”
“Why would I care enough about Kurag to do that?” I asked.
“There are those at our court who think the twins would not honor the treaty Kurag made with you, and then the goblins would be free to ally themselves with whomever they wished when the Unseelie has a new ruler.”
“Andais isn’t going to step down,” I said.
“Not for anyone but you,” he said.
“I don’t want the throne,” I said.
“Then she will be queen until someone assassinates her. I fear that whomever takes the throne may always see you as a threat to their holding the crown.”
“Because faerie and Goddess crowned me and Doyle.”
“Yes, and you are the queen’s bloodline.”
“Maybe faerie will pick a new ruler for them.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he sounded doubtful.
“But what does all the politics have to do with the oral sex in the privacy of our own bedchamber?”
“Until things are settled at both the Unseelie and the goblin courts I don’t want to do anything that might cause a problem for you.”
I studied his solemn face. “You mean that. That until both courts are sure of their rulers, you pleasure me first.”
He nodded.
I sighed, and then smiled. “It’s not a hardship; you are very orally talented.”
He smiled, and there was nothing humble about the expression on his face. “I was a strumpet passed from one powerful keeper to another for sex. I had to be good at my only job so they valued and protected me.”
“I’ve never asked before. How did you happen to have no master or mistress when Kurag offered you to me?”
“The husband of my last mistress had grown jealous of me, and since that was a sign of weakness, my mistress had to either get rid of me, or challenge her husband to a duel.”
I looked at him. “That is a bit of goblin culture that I didn’t know.”
“Weakness is not tolerated among us.”
“You’re as sidhe as you are goblin, maybe more,” I said.
He gave a little smile that I couldn’t decipher. “Maybe, but for now, please let me go down on you?”
“And when you’ve made me scream your name, what then?”
“Then I would very much like to fuck you.” He said it all formally, but the wording was goblin. Goblins didn’t make love, they fucked. In truth, they made love, some of them, but when asking in public, they fucked.
“No one can hear us, Kitto.”
“I want to go down on you, and then I want to fuck.”
I sighed again, and nodded. “Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
I smiled at the slow spread of happiness on his face. “Yes.”
“Do we want to make them wait dinner on you?”
“Why do you ask?” Because I knew he’d have a reason.
“Because if I bring you more than twice by mouth, and then fuck you as long as I want to, they’ll have to wait dinner.”
I knew it was not an idle boast. “I guess it will have to be a quickie,” I said.
He glanced at the bedside clock. “An hour, that will be a quickie.”
There was more than one reason that I loved having Kitto in my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
KITTO REMINDED ME THAT HIS TONGUE WAS NOT ATTACHED TO THE same muscles that the rest of my lovers had in their mouth and throat. He reminded me that his tongue was longer and thinner, had a partially prehensile tip, and was forked. It meant that he could do things with his tongue that just weren’t possible with someone who was more humanly equipped.
He licked, and touched, and sucked until I screamed his name to the ceiling, and then he pressed his mouth to me again and used his tongue in a series of fast flicking movements that only seemed to work after I’d been brought at least once before, but boy did it work that second time. I drove fingernails into his hair, feeling the silky curls under my fingers, and driving my nails just a little into his scalp. The small pain of it seemed to urge him on to new heights, and encouraging him earned me a third orgasm.
My eyes fluttered back into my head so that I was blind, my hands fallen away from him limp at my side as my body rode the aftershocks of his talented mouth. I felt the bed move, felt his body spreading my thighs wider. I tried to open my eyes to watch him enter me, but I still couldn’t make my body work enough to do it. He’d outdone himself tonight.
But the sensation of him entering me while I was that wet, that eager, that swollen with pleasure made me writhe underneath him. I couldn’t help but move as he pushed himself inside me. He knew he wasn’t as big as some of the men in my bed, but his prep work made up for it, and he wasn’t small by any means. He pushed all that thick, aching hardness into me one slow inch at a time, until I was making small eager noises before he buried himself inside me as far as his body and mine would allow. Then he began to pull himself out of me, just as slowly, just as controlled.
My body didn’t want controlled, or slow. I began to dance my hips underneath him so that I was taking in his length and pulling away from him, so that all his carefulness was undone by my eagerness.
He made a sound low in his throat, almost a cry, and then he gave up on slow and careful. He started moving to the rhythm I had set, and we began to dance together, his body into mine, my body over and around his, until we did dance on the bed in that most intimate of dances.
He was short enough that he could lie down on me and we could still look into each other’s eyes. I wasn’t trapped under him; we could both still move, and writhe for each other. I felt that sweet heavy pleasure begin to build between my legs, and my fingers found his back. My breathing sped and I had to fight to keep the dancing rhythm of my hips meeting his body. Between one stroke, one rise and another, the sweet heaviness spilled up and over, and I shrieked my pleasure, my neck bowed, my nails set into his back as I painted my orgasm on his skin, and my hips bucked underneath him, and I felt somewhere in all that pleasure his body lose its own rhythm. He fought to keep it, trying for another orgasm, but I squeezed him tightly inside me, and that was his undoing. His body shoved into mine in one last deep thrust that brought me screaming, nails digging into his body as if he were the last solid thing in the world, and everything else had washed away on the pulsing of our bodies, the ecstasy of him inside me, and me wrapped around him.He collapsed on top of me, his head cradled in the bend of my shoulder. I lay on my back, his heartbeat pounding against my chest as he fought to catch his breath. I had to swallow twice past my own pulse before I could whisper, “They’ll have to wait dinner a little while.”
He nodded, wordlessly, and then took a deep, shuddering breath and said, “Totally worth it.”
I could only nod wordlessly as I stopped fighting for enough air to talk and relearn how to breathe all at the same time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I WAS DRESSED FOR DINNER, WHICH HAD BECOME A SEMI-FORMAL occasion, which meant I was a little overdressed for the police forensics lab, magical division. Jeremy had phoned before we could actually eat because he’d been called by one of the police wizards to come and give an opinion on Gilda’s confiscated wand. The one that had made a policeman fall down and not wake up for hours.
Jeremy wanted some of us to look at it, because he thought it was sidhe workmanship. He’d offered for me to stay home and eat because he really needed some of the older sidhe guards, Rhys had gone early to commune with his new sithen, and Galen was, like me, too young to know much about our older enchanted sidhe items. But the three of us were the only ones with private-detective licenses. The others could only come as bodyguards. The reporters going through the window had been on all the news and YouTube, so the police believed that I wouldn’t go out without a shitload of guards. So I was “protected” and Jeremy got the sidhe he wanted to look at the wand. The only downside was I had to eat something quickly in the car, and the yellow high heels dyed to match the yellow, belted dress, complete with crinoline to make the skirt sit right, were the wrong shoes for standing on the concrete floors.
The wand was in a Plexiglas rectangle. There were symbols literally pressed into the case. It was a portable anti-magic field so that if something was found the police could put it inside the case and negate it until forensics could figure out a more permanent solution.
We all stood around staring down at the wand, and by all I meant the two police wizards, Wilson and Carmichael, plus Jeremy, Frost, Doyle, Barinthus (who had shown up just as we were leaving), Sholto, Rhys, and me. Rhys had cut his sithen exploration short to solve crime.
The wand was still two feet long but now it was only two feet of pale white and honey-colored wood, clean and free of all the sparkle that Gilda was so fond of, and that I remembered clearly. “It doesn’t look like the same wand,” I said.
“You mean the star tip and the flashy outer covering?” Carmichael asked. She shook her head, sending her brown ponytail bobbing over her lab coat. “Some of the stones had metaphysical properties that helped amp up the magic, but it was all just to make it pretty and to hide this.”