Divine Misdemeanors (16 page)

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We’re saying that a lot tonight. I don’t like it.”

“Me, either, but she’s the Goddess. A real one like your nameless death deity.”

“You’re not going to let that go, are you?”

“No, because when I asked if he was harming people here, you wouldn’t answer me.”

“Fine, let’s go down to the sea.” He put his coffee down and held a hand out to me.

“Just like that, you’ll go with me without knowing why.”

“Yes.”

“Because you don’t want to talk about the death deity anymore,” I said.

He smiled and made a wobbling motion with his head. “Partly, but the Goddess helped you save Brennan and his men. The Black Coach has chosen a new shape that will allow it to move through the war zone. The Goddess covered our bed with pink rose petals. She’s never done that outside of faerie, or on nights when the wild magic is loose. Soldiers are healing people in your name. I think after all that that I’ll take it on faith that she wants us down by the surf for a good reason.”

I slid off the stool and put a hand in his. He grabbed his weapons as he moved past, and we went for the sliding-glass doors. He did add just before he let go of my hand to open the door, “If you get salt water on that silk robe it’s ruined.”

“You’re right,” I said, and undid the sash and let the robe fall to the floor.

He gave me the look that he’d been giving me since I was about sixteen, but now the look held knowledge and not just lust, but love. It was a good look.

“I don’t think I’ll need the robe,” I said.

“The water’s cold,” he said.

I laughed. “Then I’m on top.”

“There may be other problems with the cold.”

“Ah, the guy problem with cold water,” I said.

He nodded.

“Fertility deity, sort of. I think I can help you work around it,” I said.

“Why does the Goddess want death and fertility at the water’s edge?”

“She hasn’t told me that part.”

“Will she?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

That made him shake his head, but he took my hand in his and we went out into the cool night air and the smell of the sea. We went out to do as the Goddess bid without knowing why, because sometimes faith is about that blind trust even if you were once worshipped as a god yourself.

THE SAND WAS COOL UNDER OUR BARE FEET, WHICH DIDN’T PROMISE
well for the water. I shivered, and Rhys put an arm across my shoulders, drawing me in against his muscled firmness. More than any of the other guards he was honed down to his essence, all muscle. He didn’t have a six-pack, he had an eight-pack, which I hadn’t known was possible.

He wrapped me in his arms and held me in the warmth of his embrace, though the metal of his gun was not warm against my bare back. He had the leather sheath of the short sword in the same hand, so it swung gently against my body. I clung to his warmth, wiggling a little closer and away from the hard press of the gun’s lines.

“Sorry,” he said, and moved the gun a little so it wouldn’t dig into me. He laid his face against my hair. “I have weapons, but once we start having sex I won’t be able to use them. I’ll be too busy using my favorite weapon to worry about guns and swords.”

“Weapon, is it?” I said smiling.

I felt his smile just by the flexing of his lips against my head. “Well, I don’t mean to brag.”

I laughed and looked up at him. He was grinning down at me. His face was half in moonlight and half in shadow. It hid his good eye and left his scars painted silver, his face looking smooth and perfect except
for that glimmer of scar, so that the scar simply became another part of that perfection.

“Why so solemn?” he asked.

“Kiss me and find out.”

“Wait. Before we get distracted, my point was a good one.”

“Why, yes it is,” I said, and I traced my fingers over the firm muscles of his stomach toward lower things.

He caught my hands in his empty hand, and used the hand full of weapons to help hold me still. “No, Merry, not until you hear me on this.” He moved his face so all of him was in the bright, soft moonlight. The light grayed his eye so that it was no longer blue at all.

“Once the sex starts I will be too distracted to guard you. Everyone else is in what amounts to an enchanted sleep, so there will be no help if we need it.”

I thought about what he’d said, and finally nodded. “You’re right, but first we’ve made it clear to all of faerie that we want no throne of either kingdom, so killing me gains them nothing. Second, I don’t believe the Goddess brought us out here to be attacked.”

“You think she’ll keep us safe?”

“Have you no faith left, Rhys?” I studied his face as I asked it.

He looked very sad and sighed. “Once I did.”

“Let us go down to the sea and find it again for you.”

He smiled, but it was sad around the edges. I wanted that sorrow gone.

I pulled gently on his hand and he let me pull away. I leaned up and kissed him, soft and full of lips, and let my body fall against his so he made a small surprised sound, still kissing me. Then his arms came up with gun and sword still in one, so I could feel the press of them against my back again.

I drew back from the kiss to find him a little breathless, lips parted, eye wide. I could feel his body growing hard and firm against mine.

He didn’t protest again, but let me lead him toward the sighing of the sea.

THE SURF BECKONED LIKE WHITE FOAMING LACE, THE WATER BLACK
and silver in the moonlight. The tide had grown and deepened around the bottom steps, so that I walked into the cold foam of the sea to find it spilling around my knees, while I could still touch the railing. It was cold enough to make me shiver, but the sight of Rhys there nude, suspicious, and very Rhys helped the shiver be more. The pull of the ocean made my legs move and the sand shift, as if the very world wasn’t certain it would hold still.

“I’ll have to pin everything down so the tide doesn’t take it, Merry. Once I do that the weapons will be slow to draw.”

I should have said no, or cautioned him, or tried to wake other guards, but I didn’t. I said, “It will be all right, Rhys.” Somehow, I knew it would be.

He didn’t say a word, just moved down into the swirling water until he could touch my outstretched hand. The moment our hands touched, there was power, magic.

“We stand in a place betwixt and between neither land nor sea,” I said.

“The closest we’ll get to faerie here on the Western sea,” he said.

I nodded.

Rhys threaded the straps of the sword sheath around the gun, and used the naked blade to pin the sheath to the sand. He knelt in the water, so that it was above his waist, to thrust the sword almost hilt deep into the shifting sand, so that it would not be pulled away by the sea.

He grinned up at me, still kneeling in the water, and the edge of it playing with the ends of his curls. “Most of the positions I’m thinking of will drown one of us.”

“You can’t drown, you’re sidhe.”

“Maybe I can’t die from drowning, Merry, but trust me, it hurts like a son of a bitch to swallow that kind of water.” He made a face and shivered, and I didn’t think it was entirely the chill of the water.

I wondered what old memory was shaking him. I almost asked, but the scent of roses came mingled with the salt of the next wave. No bad memories tonight; we would make new and better ones.

I went to stand so that I could touch his shoulders and his face, and made him look up at me. There was a moment where the shadow of that old hurt was there in his face, and then he smiled up at me, wrapped his strong arms around my hips, and drew me in against his body. He kissed his way up my stomach, my chest, and my neck, as if the kisses themselves drew him to his feet until he could lay his lips against mine.

He kissed me. He kissed me as the water swirled and moved around us so that the pull and push of it was like more hands to caress our bodies, as our lips, hands, and arms explored the skin above the water’s edge.

He leaned down, and used his hand to mound my breast up so his mouth could lick and suck, until just the pull of his mouth on my nipple made me cry out for him. He mounded the other breast with his other hand, and did the same again. He went back and forth between them as the water rose around us, until I cried out his name. Only then did he drop back to his knees, chest deep in the water, and lift me so that my knees were on his shoulders, and his face was between my legs.

I protested, “You can’t hold this position long enough.”

He gazed up the line of my body, his mouth close to that most intimate part, but not quite touching me yet. “Probably not,” he said.

“Then why do it?”

He grinned. “Because I want to try.” And that was very Rhys. It made me smile, and then his mouth found me, and it wasn’t smiles he got from me.

He bowed my body backward with the strength of his hands and arms so that he could reach all of me to lick and suck. His hands were actually supporting my weight at the small of my back, my legs on his shoulders like some impossible act. I kept meaning to tell him to put me down, to be reasonable, but every time I came close to saying it, he would do something with his mouth, his tongue, and he would steal my words away with pleasure.

I felt his arms begin to tremble, ever so slightly, as that delicious pressure began to build between my legs, so that it would be a race to see if he could spill me over that edge before he had to put me down. A few sensations earlier and I would have told him to put me down when I felt his muscles begin to tremble, but the pleasure had passed to that point of selfishness so that I wanted release more than I wanted to be kind or generous. I wanted him to finish what he had begun. I wanted him to spill me over that wet, warm edge.

My skin had begun to glow as if I was some still pool that could reflect the moon’s glow to herself. Rhys had called my magic to life.

In the end he moved on his knees, so that my back touched the railing. The water was high enough that the lower steps were underwater, and I leaned back against the wood, using the railing as I would have used the headboard of a bed to support my weight, to keep me at the angle he needed. He moved up the water-covered steps so that they helped him support my weight as he licked and sucked, and made love to me there with his mouth as he would make love to me later with other things.

I caught the glow of my own hair and eyes; crimson, emerald, and gold. His own skin had begun to glow white with a play of light underneath
it as if clouds or something else moved inside his body, things I couldn’t see or understand.

I was almost there, almost there, almost there, then between one caress of his tongue and the next that building warmth between my legs spilled out and over and through me in a warm rush that danced over my body, and made me grind my hips against his face. He sucked harder, drawing the pleasure out, making it last, growing one orgasm into another, into another, until I shrieked, and screamed at the moon above us.

Only when I sagged, limp, and couldn’t quite make my hands keep their hold on the railing did he stop and stand on the steps to lift me with his arms, and let the rising water buoy me up. I felt him push against the front of my body. The cold water had done him no harm, because he was long and hard and eager as he pushed against my opening.

The sea came spilling between our legs. It was too soon since his kiss there, so that it made me cry out as he pushed his way inside me, as if the sea and Rhys were both making love to me at the same time.

Then he was inside me, as deep as he could go, pinning me against the railing, his hands holding onto the wood to keep the waves from chasing us down into the sea. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his shoulders, and I kissed him. I kissed him and tasted me on his lips, fresh and salty, my body mingled with the ocean so that it was different, as if he’d gone down on someone else, someone who tasted of the sea.

His eye with its three circles of color had regained its blue, because his magic had its own light to show me the day’s blue sky in his eye, if the sky could burn blue.

He slid in and out of me, with the waves helping some of the time, and some of the time they seemed determined to pull us apart, as if they were jealous of what we were doing. I began to feel that growing weight of pleasure again, but deeper inside me this time.

I wasn’t sure if I shouted or whispered against his face, “Soon, soon.”

He understood, and he began to work his hips faster, driving himself deeper and quicker, so that each thrust ran over that part of me, and the waves tried to help find that spot inside me, but Rhys gave them no room. He filled me up, and then between one thrust and the next I was screaming his name again, my nails pinning into his back, tracing my pleasure in half-moons on his pale skin.

I screamed his name as he rode me, in the sea and the steps leading up. I felt him fight his body to keep the rhythm that had brought me so that he could bring me again and again, and only when I’d lost count did he finally allow himself that last deep thrust that spasmed him backward, so that he was staring at the sky as he finally let himself go.

That last deep thrust brought me one final time, and it was then that the scent of roses fell around us in a shower of pink petals that glided out to sea with the waves. The magic rushed across our skin like a different kind of orgasm, so that our skin ran in shivers, but it was warm, so warm. Warm enough that the sea could not be cold for us. The twin glow of our bodies merged and became one, as if together we could make a new moon to send into the sky—a moon that had eyes of liquid fire, burning emeralds, spun garnets, melting gold, and sapphires so blue they would make you weep to see them. His hair was white foam around his face, across his shoulders, merging with the white glow of our bodies.

It was only then that I realized we should have put up a circle to keep in the power, or to control it, but it was too late. The power surged through us and went up and out into the night. I’d felt a release of power before, but never one with such purpose. Always before it had been almost accidental, but I felt our merged energies seeking something, like a magical missile aimed at a target.