Page 15 of Sky’s Edge

Ah, my Gayle. Trying so hard to make things better.

“That kiss he took was good, yes.”

Though, it had not been good.

It had been stellar.

So stellar, if I wasn’t in the midst of failing at trying not to think about how my life was suddenly no longer in my control, all I could think about was that kiss.

“But even if it was, so what?” I finished. “I’ve had a lot of good kisses, and I didn’t want to marry the male.”

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

The tone of her voice took all the serenity of my serenity room clean away.

“What?” I asked hesitantly.

“You know, Sirk knows about all of this,” she said.

Sirk was the male she was seeing. And although we all liked Sirk, because he was a cool being (not to mention gorgeous), Gayle had recently found her fated mate. It was just that her fated mate told her he didn’t want her, then buggered off back to Land’s End.

So, before she met that ass, she’d been putting Sirk off because she wanted what Laura and Aleksei had, what shifters and fae could have (though, not demons): true, fated mates.

However, since Prince bloody Cormac of Land’s End, her fated mate, was an elitist piece of shit and didn’t want anything to do with a half-fae from Night’s Fall, she was with Sirk.

It was hardly sloppy seconds. Sirk wasn’t only cool, he was one of the best chefs in all of the realms, he wasn’t hard on the eyes and Gayle reported he was fantastic in bed.

But a fated mate was a fated mate.

I’d never have one, but I’d been around them, most recently Laura and Aleksei, and anyone would want what they had.

“I know,” I prompted her when she didn’t go on.

“And he told me that Tanyn didn’t fight the trolls.”

I blinked behind the spa-visor.

“What?” I asked, shocked, because I’d been there. I’d seen him, along with Aleksei, his father, his brother, Sirk, Cormac and Prince Bainon of Dawn’s Break jump right into the fray.

“Sirk says Tanyn knew the defense bots had been assigned to the Sceptred Isle. So he didn’t try to fight creatures he couldn’t defeat, knowing, once the bots were deployed, they’d deal with them.”

After saying this, she was silent for so long, I thought I’d lost her.

Finally, she spoke again.

“Sirk says the casualties would have been ten times worse if it wasn’t for Tanyn.”

“What?” I repeated, much more breathlessly this time.

“He didn’t go into fight mode. He went into save and rescue mode. He engaged with a ton of trolls, but only to rescue someone they were targeting and speed them to safety in the palace. Sirk said he easily saved seventy, eighty beings from injury or even certain death.”

I floated as I thought on this, and as I did so, the perfectly acclimatized salt water I drifted on suddenly felt warmer.

“I don’t know,” Gayle carried on. “I don’t get what you’re going through, but I still do. I think about how I’d feel if my life was totally upended without my say, and I can’t imagine it. I hate you’re going through it. I don’t know how to support you. And Prince…I mean, King Tanyn is mysterious. No one really knows much about him. But perhaps, I don’t know, maybe you could try to get to know him? Maybe, if you do, you might like him.”

“Even if I did like him, Gayle, say, I met him like a normal being would, we started dating, and we developed feelings for each other, it would take some seriously deep feelings for me to give up everything, my job, my home, my family, my friends, and move to an entirely different realm for him. And that doesn’t even get into the whole me-being-queen thing. I have no interest in being queen.”

“You’re the queeniest queen I know,” she half joked.