Brii leaned those full red lips, the most beautiful lips in either court, near my mouth and whispered, “Say yes.”

I said, “Yes.”

He smiled, then he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and then he began to push his way inside me.

Chapter Twenty-three

He stayed up on his arms as Ivi had done. Both of them were too tall to do the standard missionary position with me. Brii slid inside me more easily than Ivi had, but it wasn’t because he was smaller.

“Goddess, she’s so wet, but tight.”

“Not as tight as she was before I had my turn,” Ivi said. He moved up enough so I could see him past the sweep of Brii’s shoulders. He looked down at me as the other man found his rhythm and began to dance his way in and out of me, his body pumping above mine, while Ivi held me for him.

Brii raised one hand from the floor where he was holding himself above me, and put his fingers on either side of my face. “I want you looking at me while I fuck you, Princess, not him.” As if I’d insulted him by looking away, he proved that he might prefer gentle, but he had other speeds. He began to pound himself into me as hard and fast as he could, so that the sound of flesh hitting flesh, his labored breathing, and my small sounds of protest were all the world could hold.

It had been too soon since Ivi’s good work, and Briac brought me quickly. One moment I was riding the building pleasure, the next my body was bucking and straining underneath him, fighting the orgasm, fighting the vines that held me down, my spine bowing, my neck thrown back so I screamed his name against the glass.

Briac rode my body until it quieted, and I was left blind and limp underneath him, and then and only then did he let his body do that one last thrust, so that he screamed wordlessly above me. Then he fell on top of me, limp, but his weight felt good and right. His heart pounded against my body, his breathing so harsh it sounded like he was still running as fast as he could as he lay there on top of me, too exhausted to move, too tired to do more than throw his body a little to the side so I wasn’t smothered under his chest and stomach.

When he could finally move, he drew himself out of me, and that made me cry out again, and caused him to make a sound that was pleasure edged with pain.

He lay on his side beside me, and I could focus my eyes enough to see his own fluttering shut. He spoke in a voice that was hoarse and thick, “Goddess, that felt so good, almost too good.”

“It almost hurts, doesn’t it, after so long?” Ivi said, and I could see him now sitting on the couch, close enough that he’d had a ringside seat for the sex.

“Yes,” Brii answered.

“Princess, can you hear me?” Ivi asked.

I blinked up at him and finally managed a breathy “Yes.”

“Can you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Say something besides yes.”

I gave a small smile and said, “What do you want me to say?”

He smiled. “Good, you really can hear me. I thought we might get you to pass out from pleasure.”

“Not quite,” I said.

“Maybe next time,” he said.

That made me look at him a little harder, trying to chase back the amazing afterglow of it all. Dawn had come to the east, so there was white light to the western sky. The night had slipped away during all that sex.

“Didn’t think there’d be next time,” I said, and I realized that my voice was hoarse from screaming their names.

He smiled more widely, and his eyes held that knowledge that a man’s eyes can after they’ve been with you in that most intimate of ways. “You ordered us to fuck someone else as soon as possible. You didn’t order us never to fuck you again.”

I couldn’t argue with that, though it seemed like I should have, but I wasn’t thinking quite clearly yet. My body still felt loose and liquid, as if I was only half inside it. I hadn’t passed out, but it had been a near thing.

The vines began to unwind from my arms and legs, rolling away like they had muscles and minds of their own. I smelled flowers, but it was neither roses nor apple blossoms.

I looked past Brii, where he still lay on his side against the glass. There was a tree growing against the glass, just a few yards away from us. It had gray-white bark, and it rose at least ten feet above us. It was covered in white and pink blossoms, and the whole room smelled sweet with it.

I fought to support myself on my elbows enough to get a better look at it. I realized that the bark was the same ash-white color as Briac’s skin. I’d always known he was a vegetative deity of some kind, but his name gave no clue. I stared up at the blossoming tree, then down at the man who was apparently passed out at my side.

“It’s a …”

“Cherry tree,” Ivi finished for me.

Chapter Twenty-four

We weren’t sure if the vines and the tree would last, or if they would fade away like the apple tree had at the main house after Maeve Reed and I had had sex there. So, without really discussing it, we had breakfast in the formal living room around the table, under the spreading branches of the cherry tree with its blossoms and its breath of spring.

It was a longer walk for Galen and Hafwyn to bring the food, but everyone helped, and no one thought it a hardship as the first petals fell onto our plates. Before we had finished breakfast we were sitting in a room full of pink and white snow formed of petals, and where the blossoms had been there was the beginning of leaves, and the barest beginnings of fruit.

We talked quietly under the fall of blossoms and the growing greenery. And nothing we had to share seemed as bad, or as harsh, or as dangerous as it might have been, as if the very air were sweeter and calmer, and nothing could upset us.

I knew it wouldn’t last, but while it did, we all enjoyed it. So, where Doyle and Frost might have been upset that they had slept through the night, they weren’t. Rhys and I shared the dream about Brennan and his men, and we all discussed what it might mean, and what it meant that the soldiers whom I’d healed were healing others.

We talked of hard things, but nothing seemed that hard while the tree grew above us, and the light spilled across the sea. It was one of the most peaceful Sundays I’d ever known, full of quiet talk, touching, and being held, and even the news that Rhys had a sithen of his own here didn’t cause alarm. It was as if we could have given each other any news, no matter how important or grim, and it simply wouldn’t have been that important or that bad.

We had a blessed day, and though we’d planned on going back to the main house that night, somehow we didn’t. None of us wanted to break the spell, for spell it was, or blessing. Whatever magic you wished to call it, we wanted it to last. It did last all that day, and all that night, but Monday morning always comes, and the magic of the weekend never lasts. Not even for fairy princesses and immortal warriors. More’s the pity.