when my mortality seemed too real and his immortality too large a reminder.
"Am I not enough to please you without Doyle by my side?"
That made me turn and look at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent at the knee toward me. His pants gapped where he'd undone the buttons but not the zipper, his belt framing the undone work. He was slumping a little so that the fine muscles and lines of his stomach bunched. I had a choice of looking down to his lap and what I knew was still covered by his pants, or up to the beauty of his chest and shoulders and that face. In a different mood I would have gone down, but sometimes a man needs you to pay attention to things above the waist before you move below.
I sat up, keeping the cover in front of my breasts, because with me nude sometimes Frost forgot to listen, and I wanted him to hear me.
He sat there with his hair pooling like silver fire around his bare skin. He would not look at me, even though I knew he could feel the bed move as I inched close enough to touch his arm.
"Frost, I love you."
His gray eyes rose once, then went back to staring at his big hands where they lay in his lap. "Do you love me alone without Doyle's body beside me?"
My hand tightened on his arm while I tried to think what to say. This was certainly a conversation I hadn't expected to be having. I did love Frost, but I did not always love his moods. "I find you as desirable now as I did that first night."
He rewarded me with a small smile. "That was a very good night, but you avoided answering my question." He gave me the full force of his eyes then. "Which is answer enough." He started to get up, and I pressed my hand on his arm, not to force him, but to try to keep him where he was. He let me keep him sitting on the bed though he was stronger than I would ever be. There, that note of regret again.
I sighed, and tried to cut through his mood and mine to get to something better. "Is it because I turned away and did not watch you undress?"
He nodded.
"I don't feel well. I think I am coming down with a cold."
He looked at me uncomprehendingly.
"Remember that some of you thought that what happened inside faerie had made me immortal like the rest of you?"
He nodded again.
"If I'm coming down with a cold then it is not so. I am still mortal."
He put his hand over mine where it lay against his arm. "Why would that make you look away from me?"
"I love you, Frost, but loving you means that I will have to watch you stay young and handsome and perfect while I age. This body that you love will not remain. I will grow old and I will know death, and I will be forced to look at you every day and know that you do not understand. When I am very old, you will still take off your clothes and be as beautiful as you are now."
"You will always be our princess," he said, and his face showed that he was trying to understand.
I took my hand away and lay back on the bed, staring up at that impossibly lovely face. Tears burned at the back of my eyes and tightened my throat so that I could choke on regret. With everything that had happened today, all that had gone wrong, all the danger around us, I was ready to cry because the men I loved would always remain as beautiful as they were today but I would not. It wasn't death I feared, really, it was the slow decay. How had Maeve Reed's husband borne watching her remain while he grew old? How do love and sanity survive such a thing?
Frost leaned over me, and his shoulders were so broad that his hair fanned out around me like some shining tent, a waterfall caught in mid-motion to glitter in the dim light of my room. "You are young and you are beautiful this night. Why do you borrow such sorrows when they are far away, and I am right here?" He whispered the last words above my lips, and ended with a kiss.
I let him kiss me, but didn't kiss