Seduced by Moonlight mg-3 Read online

  "He's talking to Kitto now."

  Doyle started toward the far bedroom, then stopped and glanced down at what he was wearing—or rather wasn't wearing. He sighed, heavily, then padded barefoot across the tiles. He remarked over his shoulder, "If Meredith were dressed thus, it might gain us some advantage, but Kurag does not care for a man's flesh."

  "That is not true," Rhys said, and the bitterness in his voice made me turn and look at him. I was still in his arms, so that just turning my head was somehow intimate. "The goblins love a bit of sidhe flesh."

  Doyle stopped long enough to frown at him. "I did not mean to feast upon."

  "Neither did I," Rhys said.

  That stopped Doyle firmly on his bare feet, so dark against the white and blue tiles. "What are you saying, Rhys?"

  "I am saying that there were many goblins who had never tasted the pleasure of sidhe flesh, male or female, and there were those who did not care that it was male." He rubbed the side of his face against my neck and shoulder, a comfort gesture.

  "Kurag..." Frost began, but he couldn't finish the sentence. The anger at Rhys, or the reporters, or whatever, was gone. His face displayed the outrage they were probably all feeling.

  I stroked Rhys's curls, so soft, and molded myself more tightly in his arms. I drew my fingers down the curve of his neck and shoulder. When the fey are anxious, we touch each other. I think humans would do it if their culture didn't confuse touch with sex so often. Touch can lead to sex, but at that moment I just wanted to hold Rhys and take that look off of his face.

  Doyle came back a few steps, one hand on a slender hip. "Are you saying that Kurag... outraged you."

  Rhys raised his face from the curve of my neck. "He never touched me, but he watched. He sat on his throne and ate snacks as if it were a show."

  "We have all had to sit through entertainments at our own court, Rhys. No one speaks of it, but how many of our fellow guards have agreed to a little one-on-one together for the queen's pleasure, if it would free them of the celibacy even for an hour or two?"

  "I never did it." His hands convulsed around me, fingers digging in painfully.

  "Nor I," Doyle said, "but I did not fault those who did."

  "Rhys, you're hurting me," I said softly.

  He put me down, gently, carefully, as if he didn't trust himself. "It would be one thing to choose it. It is another to be bound and..." He shook his head.

  I let the towel fall to the floor and touched his arm. "Rape is always ugly, Rhys."

  He gave a smile so bitter that it made me hug him, to comfort him and so I wouldn't have to see that look on his face.

  "A lot of the guards don't agree with that, Merry. You're too young, you don't remember what we're like during a war."

  I stayed clinging to him, trying to will him happier just by pressing my skin against his. I didn't want to know that my guards had done horrible things. No, that wasn't it. I didn't want to know that the men I shared my bed with had done horrible things. Then I remembered a conversation that I'd overheard months ago.

  I pulled back enough to look into Rhys's face. "I remember this conversation, Rhys. You said you'd never touched a woman who didn't welcome your touch. Doyle said, outright, that the penalty for the queen's guards to touch any woman but the queen still applied to rape. You go to any other woman and it's death by torture, for you and the woman."

  Rhys's face was suddenly paler even than normal.

  It was Frost who said, "Not all the Unseelie sidhe warriors are members of the Queen's Ravens."

  I looked at him. "I know." I felt like I was missing something. I stepped back from Rhys completely, so I could look at all three of them easily. "What am I not understanding here?"

  "That nothing of which Rhys is accusing the goblins is something that members of the Unseelie have not done," Doyle said. He shook his head. "I must go and speak with Kurag." He seemed about to say something, then stopped and simply turned and walked toward the hallway and its string of bedrooms.

  I looked at both the other men, still feeling as if they'd stopped the conversation early, as if there were secrets they would all keep to the death. The sidhe are a big one for secrets, but I was their princess, and perhaps one day their queen. That they kept secrets from me seemed a bad idea.

  I let out a breath, and even to me the sound was impatient. "Rhys, I told you once that the goblin culture may not give you a choice on sexual contact, but they do let the 'victim' set the rules. They can demand intercourse, but you can dictate how much damage they can do to you."

  "I know, I know," he said, avoiding my gaze and starting to pace the room. "You've told me before that if I had known more of their culture I wouldn't be short an eye." He looked at me, and the anger was back, but it was directed at me now.

  He didn't have any right to be angry with me. Rhys was totally reasonable on almost every topic, except the goblins. The goblins were my allies for two more months. For two more months, if the Unseelie happened to go to war you would ask me, not Queen Andais, for goblin aid. Moreover, my enemies were the goblins' enemies for two more months. I believed, and Doyle believed, and Frost believed, oh, hell, even Rhys believed that it was this alliance that had kept the assassination attempts to a bare minimum.

  I was in the middle of trying to negotiate for more time on that alliance. We needed the goblins. We needed them badly. Every time I thought Rhys had worked through his issues on the topic, I was wrong.

  "You're right on one thing, Rhys, the goblins do not see same-sex sex as a bad or a shameful thing. If it's the way you swing, it's the way you swing. They also are much more likely than the sidhe to be opportunistically bisexual. If they have a chance to enjoy something they've never had, or something they may never get again, they'll take it."

  Rhys had gone to the huge bank of windows that looked out over the pool. He gave me a view of his lovely backside, but his arms were crossed and his shoulders hunched with his anger.

  "But just as you can negotiate for no damage done to your body, you can negotiate on the sex of your partners. There are some even among the goblins who are simply too heterosexual to be interested in exploring the possibilities. If you'd negotiated, then no male could have touched you."

  Frost made some small movement, as if he wanted to go to Rhys. He gave me a look that wasn't entirely friendly.

  Rhys's voice brought us back to him. "Do you delight in reminding me that my worst nightmare was my own doing? That if I hadn't been an arrogant sidhe who couldn't be bothered learning about any people but my own, I might have known that I had rights among the goblins. That even the victims of torture have rights." He turned, and rage filled his single blue eye with light. That circle of sky blue, the ring of winter sky, and that brilliant line of cornflower around the pupil blazed. The separate colors literally glowed with his rage, and a faint milky light began to flit behind his skin. His power raised with his anger.

  There was a time when I'd feared Rhys when he was like this, but I'd seen his anger too often to fear it. As Frost with his pouting, so Rhys with his anger; it was just a part of them. You accepted it and moved on.

  If Rhys had suddenly blazed to life like some pale sun, then I'd have been worried. But this was a small display; it meant nothing.

  "You're still being arrogant about their culture, Rhys. You act as if what they did to you is nothing that could ever have happened in the high courts of the sidhe. If the Queen of Air and Darkness bid it, or the King of Light and Illusion wanted it, it would be done. And the sidhe have no laws protecting the victims of torture. You're just tortured. The goblins may do more torture, maiming, and rape than the sidhe, but they've got more laws in place to protect the people who end up on the wrong end of the punishment. You get fucked over by the sidhe, and they fuck you any way they want to. So you tell me, Rhys, which race is the more civilized?"

  "You cannot compare the sidhe to the goblins," Frost said, his voice dripping with that arrogance that has been more than one sidhe'
s undoing. I guess if you've been the ruling class for a few thousand years, you forget what it's like to be ruled.

  "You can't honestly mean that you prefer the goblins' world to ours," Rhys said, and his surprise was overcoming his anger.

  "I didn't say that."

  "What did you say?" he asked.

  "I'm saying that this attitude the sidhe have that nothing and no one is as good as they are isn't necessarily so. My father used to say that the goblins are the foot soldiers of the sidhe armies. That without the goblins as our allies the Unseelie would have been destroyed by the Seelie centuries ago."

  "The goblins and the sluagh," Rhys said.

  The sluagh were the nightmares of the Unseelie court. They were all that was most frightening, most monstrous. All fey, sidhe or no, feared the sluagh. They were the Unseelie's version of the wild hunt, and there was nowhere you could hide, no place you could run to, that sluagh would not find you. On rare occasions it had taken years, but the sluagh never give up unless called off by the Queen of Air and Darkness. The sluagh were the queen's big scary gun. It is said that even King Taranis himself fears the sound of wings in the dark.

  "Yes, the sluagh, those of our kind that most sidhe would rather not admit even belong in faerie, let alone that we could share a bloodline or two."

  "We are not related to those creatures," Frost said.

  "Their king, Sholto, is half-sidhe, Frost. You've seen him. His mother was Unseelie sidhe."

  "Him, perhaps, but not the rest."

  I shook my head. "The sluagh are the Unseelie, Frost, more than the sidhe themselves. Our one strength as a court is that we take in anyone. The Seelie Court keeps rejecting anyone who isn't good enough for them, and that has been the Unseelie's strength for centuries. We take in the fey they don't want. It's what makes us different from them; better, I think."

  "What do you want from us?" Rhys asked, and he wasn't so much angry now as puzzled.

  "Kurag is like a schoolyard bully. He only continues to pick at you because he gets such nice reactions from you. If you could act as if it didn't bother you, then he'd tire of the game."

  Rhys hugged himself tighter. "It isn't a game to me."

  "It is to him, Rhys. It's wonderful that you've overcome your feelings enough to sit beside me when I speak with the goblins, but truthfully, I spend so much time worrying about your feelings that I'm not as focused as I need to be."

  "Fine," he said, "I won't go in with you. Consort knows, I'd rather not have to see his ugly face."

  "When you're not there, Kurag spends time asking after you. He keeps asking, Where's my delicious guard? The pale one."

  "I didn't know he did that," Rhys said.

  I shrugged. "He does."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "Doyle said it would just upset you, and there wasn't anything you could do about it." I closed the distance between Rhys and me, laid a hand on his crossed arms. "I disagree. I think you're stronger than Doyle knows. I believe that you can swallow this hurt, and help me turn the tables on Kurag."

  He looked suspicious. "How?"

  I dropped my hand from his arm. "Never mind, Rhys." I turned toward the hallway.

  "No, Merry, I mean it. How could I help you negotiate with... him?"

  "Doyle's right, if I lose most of my swimsuit it will make it easier to negotiate with Kurag. He's a terrible letch."

  Rhys shrugged. "And where do I come in?"

  "Put on a robe and flash some of that gorgeous white flesh if Kurag gets stubborn. If you could keep your temper, no matter what he said, you beside me like this would distract him, not because of sex, but because all goblins love the taste of sidhe flesh. One of the things the goblins hated the most about making peace with the sidhe was that they couldn't eat us anymore."

  "You ask too much," Frost said.

  I looked at that handsome, arrogant face and shook my head again. "I haven't asked anything of you, Frost."

  "How can you ask Rhys to sit there and let a goblin think of him as food? It is beneath us."

  "If Kurag agrees to lengthen the alliance, I'll be beneath a lot of goblins." I'd said the last almost to be cruel. I was tired of hearing how much they hated my plan.

  Frost's face showed the disgust he felt. "The thought of any sidhe woman giving herself to goblin men is repulsive. The thought of a princess of the blood, and a future queen, lying with them is beyond anything I have words for. Even Queen Andais has never stooped so low to gain the goblins' favors."

  "Kitto is half-goblin and half-sidhe, and for better or worse I brought him into his powers, full-sidhe powers, through sex. No one thought that any goblin half-breed could be full-sidhe."

  "Their blood is not pure enough," Frost said.

  "I may hate it," Rhys said, "but Kitto's magic is the magic of our blood. I've seen him glow with it." He looked suddenly tired. "Kitto's not even half bad for a goblin."

  "Merry," Frost said, and took a step toward me. "Merry, please don't do this. Don't say that you will bring over more of the goblin half-breeds. You have not seen them. Few of them are as fair as Kitto. Most are much more goblin-like than sidhe-like."

  "I know, Frost."

  "Then how can you offer yourself?"

  "First, I want the alliance lengthened, at almost any cost. Second, the sidhe have been dying out for centuries, but if Kitto can be full-sidhe, then maybe other half-sidhe could be brought into their full powers. It would mean that the Unseelie Court would suddenly be stronger than it has ever been."

  "The queen is excited about Merry bringing Kitto to us," Rhys said. "The queen wants Merry to try other half-breeds in her bed."

  "And what if one of them gets you with child?" Frost asked. "No sidhe will accept a half-goblin king."

  "At this point, Frost, I'd settle for just being pregnant. It's been four months of sharing my bed with all of you, and there's no child. I think I'm going to worry about winning the race first. Then I'll worry about who sits beside me."

  "The sidhe will not accept a goblin king." He said it with such finality.

  "I hate the plan as much as Frost does, maybe more," Rhys said, "but it's not my lily-white body that's being bartered over." He took a deep, shaking breath, as if he pulled the air from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. He finally said, in a voice so calm that it was empty of all emotion, "If you can agree to fuck them, I guess I can flaunt myself in front of their king."

  "Rhys!" Frost looked as shocked as that one word sounded.

  Rhys gazed at the bigger man. "No, Frost, it's time. Merry is right." He looked at me, and the ghost of his usual grin flickered on his mouth. "How distracting to Kurag will it be to see me nearly nude?"

  "About as distracting as this." I ran my hands over the mounds of my breasts where they lay barely contained in the red bathing suit. My hands slid lower, down my ribs, my waist, to frame my hips. Rhys's gaze followed my hands like a starving man. Nude as he was, he couldn't hide how watching me touch my body affected him.

  He was one of those men who looked small until he grew, and then you knew he wasn't small in anything but stature. It was Rhys's laugh that brought my gaze back to his face. "Consort thank you, I love seeing that look on a woman's face."

  A human would have blushed to be caught staring, but my cheeks held no heat as I raised my eyes to meet his laughter. If I had not stared at Rhys's lovely body, it would have implied that he wasn't worth noticing. My eyes held all the heat that would have blushed across my face if I'd been just a little more human, a little less fey. The heat in my eyes sobered his face, drenched his tricolored eye in heat of its own.

  He had to clear his throat to say, "As distracting as all that, my, my." A smile flashed across his face. "So you're the tits and I'm the ass?"

  That made me laugh. "That's one way to put it."

  He stepped closer to me, letting his eye linger in one of those looks that is almost more intimate than a touch. A look that made my skin begin to glow, softly, as if I'd sw
allowed the moon and it was shining underneath my skin. It raised the hair along my body, caught my breath in my throat. All this from a look.

  I had trouble focusing on him as he smiled down at me. "To see your body react to my gaze like that" —he let out a shaking breath—"I'd face a thousand ogling goblins to watch the play of light under your skin."

  My voice came out breathy, very early Marilyn Monroe, but I couldn't seem to help it. "Why is it that you're the only one who can do that with just a look?"

  His smile quirked into a grin, and his gaze slid briefly toward Frost, who was scowling at us both. "I could say it was because I'm the best lover you have." He held up a hand, as Frost took a step forward. "But I'd rather not have to fight a duel later."

  "Then why?" I breathed.

  The humor faded, replaced by a depth of emotion, intelligence, everything, that Rhys had managed to hide for centuries. A month ago, more by accident than design, Rhys had recovered powers that had been stripped from him centuries ago. All of the guards had recovered lost magic, but it was Rhys who had recovered the most because it was Rhys who had been stripped of most of his power. The price for the fey coming to the United States after they'd been kicked out of Europe was that there were to be no more large-scale fights among us. If we went to war against one another on American soil, they'd exile us, and we were out of countries that would take us. The answer to keep that from happening had been the Nameless: a creature made up of the wildest magic the sidhe of both courts had left. But as with all spells dealing with wild magic, it was unpredictable. Some sidhe had barely lost any powers; others had been nearly stripped dry. The Nameless wasn't the first time the sidhe had done this. The first time was trying to stay in Europe after the great human-fey war. That one didn't take, but Rhys had lost a lot in the first great spell. The Nameless had taken most of the rest. Rhys had been transformed from a major deity to one of the less powerful of the sidhe. He'd lost so much, he would no longer allow anyone to mention his old name. Out of respect, and horror that it might have been one of them, all the sidhe honored his wish. He was simply Rhys now, and what he had been was lost.