Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 137958 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 690(@200wpm)___ 552(@250wpm)___ 460(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137958 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 690(@200wpm)___ 552(@250wpm)___ 460(@300wpm)
“The Beast rises,” he shared.
Her perfectly formed, puffy lips parted.
Right.
And there were those.
Those lips had bewitched him as well.
Bloody hell.
“It seems our marriage was not the greatest beauty of our island mated with her king, as it is now and has been for centuries. Apparently, the fates chose you for me, as you and I consummated will assist to beat the Beast,” he declared.
With that, she shuttered herself away.
“This is not a tale I tell to pry open your legs,” he bit out. “Lena spoke it herself.”
“Then I’ll need to speak with her,” she replied. “For that’s frankly ridiculous.”
“Indeed,” he agreed, staring down at her indifferently. “Great beauty, cold fish. My desire for your charms has faded as the months since our wedding have receded into memory and you’ve kept those charms from me.”
If he was not wrong, those ringlets swayed with a slight jerk of her head.
Aramus no longer cared if he wounded her.
She was his wife and he knew the reasons she withheld were far more than “frankly ridiculous.”
They were, if read a certain way, fucking treasonous.
“But friction, if not passion, will seal the deal,” he concluded.
She had her side partially to him, but at that, she turned to face him full on.
“And as you rode the seas prior to your return a week ago, how many beasts did you kill?” she asked.
He sighed.
“Aramus, you sit on a throne made of the horns of the most magnificent creatures in all of Triton,” she stated impatiently. “Perhaps all of the earth. Did you bring the oil and meat and bone for lamps and perfumes and candles and Airenzian corsets?” She tossed an elegant hand up his way as her crystal gaze heated with ire. “Those horns represent three fathers.”
“These horns are five hundred years old,” he ground out.
“So, five hundred years ago, calves went without their sires, as they probably went without their mothers, though no horns could be displayed from the mothers to pointlessly boast of the might of their murderers.”
He sat back on plush cushions that were bunched at his back against the ornate gold that made his throne.
And he sought patience.
Finding at least some of it, he said what he had been saying most every time he was confronted with his wife.
And he decided to make one last go of it, therefore he tried to do it gently.
“Ha-Lah, it is not lost on you, since you are Mar-el and have lived on this isle since your first breath, this is the way of our people and has been since history has been recorded.”
“And, Your Grace,” he was not surprised she returned without a hint of patience, “it should not be. Not the whales. Not the dolphins. Not the octopus. I’m telling you, they do not only think, they feel.”
“I have sailed the seas since I was a lad, wife, and this is not true.”
“It is.”
“It is not.”
“Does a cow not keen when her bull is taken? When her calf is cornered?” she asked.
He shifted in his seat for the she-beasts did.
It was the most heinous thing he’d ever heard.
And every seaman knew, you did not take a cow if her bull was near, not of any type of whale. You’d lose your ship, and your life, if you enraged the bull when you were close.
“You stop the killing, you will find me not cold, my king,” she shared, not for the first time. “And you stop the killing, I daresay you make allies of the sea you would never have imagined.”
Now that was frankly ridiculous.
“And what will fuel our lamps, make our soaps, fertilize our soils, feed our people, our animals?” he demanded. “What will we sell to add to the treasury to keep our roads clear, roofs on our hospitals, arrows in our quivers?”
“Something else, something from the mainland,” she returned. “They have oil. They have more animals who naturally make fertilizer. Grain by the bushel. Spices—”
“Cease,” he bit. “We do not trade with them, they trade with us.”
“But why?”
“You forget, my wife, my sister, they cast us to this isle years ago when that isle was ours and they conquered it and wrested it from us, banishing our people here and doing it knowing we would not survive. Mar-el’s rocky shores dig deep inland. It does not have vast tracks to roam sheep and cow and sow seeds. We survived on the blessing of the great god Triton. His wife, our goddess, the beneficent Medusa. The spare sympathies of the sirens. They gave us the blessing of the seas. The bounty of the whales.”
“The ire you hold is simply because we were defeated and you cannot abide the idea of Mar-el in defeat,” she retorted on a lift of her chin.
There was the treason.
Aramus ground his teeth.
His wife was not done.
“But even if that is so, now, millennia later, you hold tight to these transgressions that did not befall you, or me, your father or my mother, your grandfather or my grandmother, but beings who are no longer even bones in the earth, but long since ash who have mingled with the rock and the mud. You do this when we hardly suffered. We not only bested their banishment, we own the seas. It was the fates who brought us to this isle, my king. It was the fates who brought us home.”