“What if I don’t drop it?”

“What is wrong with you today, Meredith?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“I had a meeting at the studio and they’re already trying to pressure me to go right back to filming. I told them I wanted some time with my son, but I’m one of their solid moneymakers and any year without a Maeve Reed film hits their profits.”

“You haven’t been home a week yet,” I said.

“If I leave again, Liam is going to just forget who I am.”

I went to her then and touched her arm. “Can you say no?”

“I can always say no.”

“Will it hurt your career, or put you in breach of a contract?”

She smiled and put her hand over mine where I was touching her arm. “You understand more than most people do about what really goes on at this level of ‘stardom.’” She raised her hand to do one set of quote marks.

“I’ve watched what you’ve been through in the last year. I’m amazed at how badly you get treated sometimes.”

“I have true power in this town; imagine what happens to actors who don’t.”

“It must be brutal,” I said.

“Hollywood will eat you, if you let it.”

“I wonder if reality TV stars have as big a challenge?”

“I don’t know, honestly; I only meet them after they’ve become stars and then it’s about their publicists trying to keep them in the news. I don’t know how different it is in the beginning, but you wouldn’t be like most reality stars. You’re already famous.”

“And that fame, like all my noble titles, doesn’t pay the bills.”

“You could go back to being a private detective.”

“That won’t help you say no to the studio. For that, we need more money than a detective makes.”

“Thirty million dollars, Meredith; that is what I made for my last film. Nothing you can do will bring that kind of money in. I’m sorry, but it just won’t.”

“We have offers for a million here, a few hundred thousand there.”

“What’s the million dollars for?”

“They’ve been after me for a while to be a centerfold.”

“No, no, because I know some of your publicity offers are from family-oriented things. You can be the sexy young thing, or the beautiful mother with babies, but you can’t do both in the media, not in this country anyway.”

“I’d appreciate your advice on the offers coming in, then, because I’m tempted to go for the most money. I hadn’t thought about building an image.”

“I’d be happy to help, but you will have to choose what kind of image you want to project.”

I laughed. “Isn’t it a little late for me to be the perfect mother since I’ve just given birth to triplets out of wedlock?”

“It’s not that making the mother image hard to sell, it’s the multiple fathers, and the fact that rumor has it that Frost and Doyle are lovers, too, that has really hurt their image in the mainstream media.”

“Very homophobic,” I said.

“Yes, it is, but it’s still the truth.”

“Can I be the sexy young thing having just given birth to triplets?” I asked.

It was her turn to laugh. “I don’t know; I’ve never seen anyone recover their figure as fast as you who wasn’t full-blooded sidhe. You’re built human, but you’re certainly getting your figure back more like a sidhe.”

“Especially with triplets,” I said.

She laughed again. “Yes, especially with triplets. The human media will want to know your secret for postbaby weight loss.”

“There’s no secret; apparently it’s just good genetics.”

“They won’t want to hear that, Meredith. They want some exercise plan, or better yet some magic food, or pill, that will make them all pre-baby thin without any effort on their part.”

“I’m getting my figure back without much effort, but every other good thing in my life has come with a lot of effort.”

Her face sobered, and she hugged me. “I know that, and I’m sorry that I’ve been taking my mood out on you.”

I hugged her back. “Now I’m supposed to say, ‘That’s all right,’ but it’s not. I will never again be anyone’s whipping girl for their issues.” I hugged her tighter and looked up into the face that had launched a thousand blockbuster movies. “Not even the most beautiful movie star in Hollywood.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked, looking down from all that six-plus feet height in her high heels.

I smiled. “Of course I do.”

She leaned down, and I went up on tiptoe to meet her kiss. It was a chaste kiss by fey standards, though if some paparazzi had gotten a picture they’d have sold it for a bundle, and the rumor would have been that Maeve and I were lovers. We had made wonderful magical love once, but it wasn’t what we were to each other. I wasn’t sure if we were extended family, or if she was a member of my inner circle of courtiers. Once such things had been more formalized, and they still were at the Seelie Court, but less so at the Unseelie, and if this was a court then it was the most informal of all.

She smiled down at me, her pinkish lipstick slightly smeared. I wasn’t wearing lipstick, just not bothering with glamour so my lips looked red. Humans would assume I was wearing something, but the proof was in the kissing, and the only lipstick smeared was hers.

I pulled out of the embrace with a smile.

“I appreciate you letting me choose lovers from among the new sidhe guards,” she said.

“They are free to choose and so are you.”

“It’s been a long time since I was surrounded by people who truly felt that way. Among humans and the Seelie there is always a price to pay, or strings attached.”

“The Unseelie who are not under the queen’s direct control are more like the rest of the fey. Sex is another need, like food.”

“Yes, but your steak doesn’t have feelings and emotional baggage; people, even the sidhe, do.”

I nodded. “I can’t argue that. The lesser fey treat it more sensibly.”

“I think you’ll find, Princess, that the lesser fey treat sex with the sidhe sensibly, because they expect it to be a onetime thing, or a fling. Very few non-sidhe ever become a marrying match for the sidhe.”

“My grandmother did,” I said.

“Your grandfather wanted to end his curse, and only willing marriage to another fey would do that.”

“At least the curse didn’t demand a love match. My grandfather wasn’t called Uar the Cruel for nothing; he’d have never found someone to love him.”

“How are his sons, your uncles?”

“They’ve seen modern doctors and nothing seems to be able to stop the venom from dripping out of the pores of their fingers, but modern plastic gloves have helped. They don’t accidentally poison people now.”

“Good, they did nothing to earn their curse. I always thought it was unfair that Uar’s curse manifested in all his children being born with that birth defect,” she said.

“Agreed, but then are curses ever fair? I mean, most of the fairy tales have a grain of truth, and so many of them talk about a curse on the prince, or princess, spreading to everyone in the castle, or kingdom.”