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.
Chapter 25-27
Chapter Twenty-five
I was snuggled against the sweet scent of Frost's back, one arm across his waist, my hips curving around the firm roundness of his ass. Doyle lay against my back, spooning me just as perfectly. They were a foot and an inch or two taller than I was, so spooning meant we had to choose if we wanted our faces next to each other, or our groins. There was no way to have both.
Doyle snuggled in his sleep, one arm flung across me and over Frost's side. Of all the men, they touched each other the most in their sleep, as if they needed reassurance that not only I was there, but that