WE ENDED WITH HIM ABOVE ME. HIS HAIR HAD COME UNBOUND and fell around us like silver rain, if rain could be soft as silk and warm as your lover's body. Our skin glowed as if we'd swallowed the moon, and it was shining out of every inch of our skin. I knew my hair was a mass of red shining fire, because I could see the light of it from the edges of my eyes. His hair began to spark and shine as he moved above me, catching the light the way snow glitters in moonlight. I'd had other lovers who brought the sun to bed with them, but Frost was a winter's night with all its beauty and harshness.
He was too tall, or I was too short for him to lie down on top of me. It was neither enjoyable for me nor easy to breathe, so he held his upper body above me with the shining strength of pale, muscled arms. Gazing down the length of our bodies, watching him slide in and out of me, made me cry out, made me look away as if the sight of it was too wonderful and I had to find something else for my eyes to meet. What I met were his eyes. His eyes were gray like a winter's sky, but now with his power riding him they were more than just gray.
In the gray of his eyes was a glimpse of a snow-covered hill with a bare winter tree upon it. There was a moment of vertigo, as if I could have fallen into that landscape, into his eyes, and been somewhere else. I closed my eyes then, because I was never certain where that hill was, or what tree it would be.
The rhythm of his body in and out of mine, the size of him gliding in and out of my body, was beginning to fill me up. The first faint glow of orgasm began to build.
"Merry, Merry, look at me." There was urgency in his voice, that rough urgency that said that he too was close.
I opened my eyes, and his were just above mine, wide, staring, demanding that I not look away. He moved one hand so that he gripped my hair near one cheek. "I want to watch your face," he said, his voice breathy and deep with effort.
There was snow in his eyes, falling on that lonely tree and the hillside beyond. Something moved in his eyes, a figure.
The rhythm of his body changed, grew more urgent, and it was too much. I could not watch his eyes while his body ran through mine. I tried to watch his body moving above mine, but his grip on my hair tightened, forcing my face to look up into his. His face was the face of my beloved, Frost. There was no vision in his eyes to distract me from the beauty of his face, the fierceness in his eyes.
I whispered, "Almost, almost, almost." Then one last thrust, and almost was now.
I screamed, and only his grip, gone almost cruel in my hair, kept my neck from bowing. He kept our faces staring into each other, tolerated no looking away. We stared at each other as our bodies rode the pleasure. His strength demanded that we share this, the most intimate of moments, with no flinching, no looking away, nothing to save us from the wildness in each other's eyes.
We fell into that wildness, that near-frantic fierceness. He cried out above me as I screamed my pleasure, then his body collapsed atop mine, and he lifted me in his arms, with his body still sheathed inside me. He knelt, pinning me to the headboard. I grabbed the wood to keep me where he seemed to want me. He had gone, but he was not spent. He proved that as he began to pound me against the wood, the bed shivering with the strength of it, the entire frame of the bed protesting the abuse.
I screamed for him, and fought to keep my hands on the wood to hold myself in place as he plunged inside me as deeply as he could. Deep enough from this angle that pleasure and pain rode each other, as Frost rode me.
I let go of the bed and ran my nails down his white skin. Where I bled him the glow of his skin split, but it wasn't blood that ran out. Blue glowing lines followed the lines of my mails and painted our skin. There was a moment when I saw a thorn vine around my forearm, and the head of a stag traced across his chest. His body shuddered against mine, inside mine as I painted his body with my pleasure and his pain.
He pressed me in his arms so that I saw the glow on his shoulder, and that sign of power I had seen before as the vine on my arm. I realized that the tattoo that had first appeared in faerie was the same image as in his eyes.
We stayed frozen a moment, pressed against the headboard. His heart beat so fast and so hard I felt it against the side of my face like a hand. He took us slowly to our sides so that we finally lay across the head of the bed on what pillows had not been knocked off.
"I had forgotten how magnificent you could be, Frost." The voice was not mine; it came from the mirror. Where a second before I could not have moved, fear made me sit up and grab for spilled sheets.
"Don't cover yourselves," Andais said from the mirror.
We drew the sheets over us.
"I said, do not cover yourselves, or have I ceased to be your queen?" There was an evil tone in her voice that made us push the sheets back. She'd seen the end of our lovemaking; no reason to be shy now, I supposed.
Frost kept himself pressed against me so that he was as hidden as he could manage. I found my voice first, and said, "My queen, what brings you to our mirror?"
"I thought I would see Rhys with you, or was that a lie when you said you'd be with him?"
"Rhys will have his turn, my queen."
She stared at Frost, as if I were not there. I looked at him, his body dewed with the sweat of his exertions, his hair a glorious tangle of silver, to decorate all that pale muscled strength. He was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that even among the sidhe not everyone could boast. Ironic that one who had not begun as sidhe would be among our most handsome men. But now that I knew that he had been shaped by love, not a desire for power, but selfless love, I understood. For love makes us all beautiful.
"The look on your face, Meredith, as you gaze upon him, what are you thinking?"
"Love, Aunt Andais, I am thinking of love."
She made a disgusted sound. "Know this, niece of mine. If the Killing Frost is not your king, I will have him back, and I will see if he is as good as he looks."
"He was your lover once, hundreds of years ago."
"I remember," she said, but not like it made her happy.
I didn't understand the look on her face, or the tone of her voice. I didn't truly understand why she had been so determined to catch me with Rhys - or, was she eager to catch me without him? Was she looking for an excuse to order Rhys back to faerie? If yes, then why? She had never treated him as one of her favorites, not in the memory of anyone I knew.
"I see fear in your eyes, my Killing Frost," she said.