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“Changeling, I’m warning you.” His eyes travel down my body, his gaze so strong it’s almost a touch.
“You’re warning me?” I keep pulling until the fabric passes my knees. “Well I’m warning you.” The hem slips along my thighs. “I will go to the southern mines and free Clotilde. If you don’t want to come, that’s fine. But you aren’t dragging me to the winter realm.”
He stops rowing.
I stop pulling.
Voices across the water restart him, his pace furious, but his eyes more so.
“You are going to the winter realm.”
“No, I’m going to get Clotty.”
“Who is this woman to you?” The words barely pass his gritted teeth. “A friend?”
I laugh low in my throat. “A friend? Clotty? Spires, no. She’s switched me too many times to count, harped on me to be better, smarter, tried to get me to do right, and all-in-all was a royal pain in my ass.”
“Then why by the Ancestors do you want to retrieve her?” He tries to keep his ire under control, but it spills over in a rumbling heap of disagreement, his gaze still on the shadowy space between my thighs.
“Because she’s the only one who ever tried to help me.” I shrug. “Not a friend. Not a mother. Something in-between, or maybe diagonal. I don’t know. But I do know I can’t let her die in the mines on my account.”
“We aren’t going to the mines.” He pins me with a scowl. “And that’s final.”
“Final?” I pull the hem all the way to my hips, and I’m not wearing anything underneath.
His body goes tense, and the low purr that rips from him vibrates through me in the most pleasant waves. “Changeling.” His voice is shattered stone, rough and sharp.
“You want this?” I add honey to my tone, but the breathlessness? That’s all natural.
“It is mine.” His eyes turn to gold, the look in them like an animal watching prey.
“It can be.” I lean back, spreading my legs a bit more.
He stops rowing again, his jaw going slack.
“But you can’t have it,” I chirp.
His growl rolls like thunder.
“Not until you accompany me to the southern mines and free Clotilde. Once you’ve done that …” I shrug. “Then I’m all yours.”
“The mines are dangerous. I can’t take you—”
“Then I guess you can’t have this.” I toss my skirt down, covering the goods.
The boat rocks hard as he slams the oars down. “You are my mate, Beth. My beloved. I can’t take you somewhere like the southern mines where changelings are in constant danger.”
“How can I be in danger when I have a big, strong fae warrior like yourself at my side?” I lean back and study the stars. The mist has cleared now that we’re past the bay, the open ocean beckoning us forward. “I’ll be in good hands.”
“If something happens to me, you’d be locked in irons and sent into the depths of Arin, never to be seen again.”
“Then I suppose you better make sure nothing happens to you.” I sigh and close my eyes, my ears attuned to the lapping of the gentle waves and the soft breeze. Despite living in the bay city of Byrn Varyndr for my whole life, I’ve never been out on the sea. It’s a different taste of freedom, one with a salty bite.
He launches into a litany of curses, some in the old fae language that I can’t catch, but plenty that I can. “I should have expected this sort of recklessness from you.” More curse words, some so vile they could curdle milk.
“My, my. What a filthy mouth you have, Gareth. I had no idea.” I sigh. “I can’t wait to see what it can do to me after we get Clotty.” I press my thighs together, this time not for show. “It makes me positively tingly.”
He stops rowing again, and inhales deeply. I know he can taste my desire on the air, his fae senses heightened.
I look over at him with innocent eyes (as innocent as I can manage). “What?”
With a hard sigh, he says, “I’ll take you to the southern mines, even if it’s a fool’s errand—one wrapped in danger. But you must agree that afterwards, you’ll come with me to the winter realm and consent to our mating—not necessarily in that order.”
I want to laugh, because that last requirement is no hardship. Not when I’ve been lusting after him since we first met. “I swear it.” The slightest hint of magic perfumes the air.
He nods, though his reluctance is on full display in the thunderclouds of his eyebrows.
I close my eyes again, content to rock on the waves.
“But I promise you this, beloved.” His voice drops to that low purr that caresses me like a lover.
I have to look at him, his eyes dark under the low moonlight. Some invisible tether unwinds between us, a spur on the end that hooks me right beneath my ribs.
His gaze never falters, his voice a rough kiss on my lips. “You will beg me to claim you before it’s done.”
My body ignites, my mind imagining us together—a tangle of limbs, breathless kisses, and a joining that I’ve been teasing him about. But now it’s more. If he’s right, and I’m his mate, this could mean a whole different life. One with a winter realm noble. Then again, I don’t feel the bond. Or, at least I don’t feel any differently than I did before.
I wanted him all along. Is the bond the only reason he wants me? That thought strikes me a bit too hard. Naturally, I try to play it off in the lamest way possible. Time to talk about the weather. “Not a cloud in the sky. It’s kind of ridiculous they call this the Ocean of Storms.” I trail my fingers along the near-placid surface. “The water’s so calm. Must be one of those names that means the opposite. Like when I referred to Wreth as ‘my sweet pussy’ one time. Clotilde had a word for that. She told me it when she was sewing up my scratches, but I can’t remember what it was. I mean, she definitely said ‘stupid’ and ‘foolish’ but there was another word. A smarter one. I just don’t know what it was.”
He looks utterly unsurprised.
I cough awkwardly. “Anyway, Ocean of Storms, my ass.”
14
Gareth
“Ironic!” Beth cries over the peal of thunder. “That’s the word I was looking for. Clotilde said I was being a smartass about Wreth and the ‘sweet pussy’ thing, and then she said I would get nowhere being ironic.”
“Hold on!” I fasten the rope around Beth’s waist as the gale intensifies, the tiny boat no match for the storm that came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. I lash her to me, the fear of losing her beneath the waves like a sword through my gut.
“I thought she said moronic, but—” The next crash of thunder mutes her words as I peer toward shore. I can’t see it, only the white-topped waves that relentlessly swell from the sea and threaten ruin.
Letting out a length of rope, I take the oars again and fight the angry spray, forcing the boat up and over the waves, the weak vessel crashing down the other side, bobbing one hair away from destruction.
A streak of lightning cracks the black sky open, the flood of rain illuminated in a bright arc overhead as another wave builds behind us. Monstrous and dark, it begins to crest, the top falling toward us with a roar.
