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Together. How to be more than lovers, more than mates. How to love one another.

A journey we’d started that first day in the clearing. All those months ago.

Enemies. Lovers. Mates.

More.

“I love you,” I said fiercely.

I gripped his shoulders, levering myself forward so that I could take him deeper. That smile on his face was gone, replaced by a look of deep concentration. He was trying hard not to spend himself quickly. He needed me as badly as I needed him.

Lucky for both of us, I was already so close.

“I love you, my fierce and headstrong mate,” Arran groaned.

I tangled my fingers in his hair, shredding apart the leather thong that held it in place. “I love you more.”

He set his teeth to my throat. “Why do you always have to argue?”

Then he sank them into my neck.

I came instantly, the sharp bite of his canines in my throat just above my collarbone—the heat of the water on my clit—that magnificent cock inside of me. It was too much. It was everything. I was floating. I was dead, but still breathing. I was in another realm—one of pure bliss and pleasure. Where everything else ceased to exist. Just me and Arran.

The male that I loved—the male I would love until the end of my life. Whether I be in this realm, in Annwyn, or any of the others I’d glimpsed when thrown through time and space.

Arran tried to hold on, but I couldn’t have that. I wanted him there with me on our own private plane of existence.

I rocked against him, hard and fast, tugging on his hair, edging our fucking with that brutality that I knew sent fire shooting through his veins. He threw back his head and howled his pleasure to the night sky above. As he coated my pussy with rope after rope of thick burning come, I came again. My pussy quivered around his cock, pulsing in the hot water, my flood of wetness lost on the decadent heat that enveloped us from all sides.

Arran caught me around the waist, pulling me tighter against him. I didn’t resist. If I could stay like this, with him buried inside of me and his words ringing in my ears for the rest of my life...but…

His mouth crashed against mine in challenge and promise. To keep me in the moment, to remind me that we were far from done with the faerie pools.

When I finally laid my head on his shoulder, my mind was blissfully blank once again.

“I love you,” Arran murmured into my hair. “I would have loved you for a thousand years, even if you were never able to say it back.”

“A thousand years and a thousand more,” I whispered, reciting the words of our joining. But this vow wasn’t for Annwyn. It was for us.

75

VEYKA

I walked around in a daze for the entirety of the next day. Arran? He was functioning just fine. Apparently because he’d had months and months to deal with the fact that he was in love with me.

But me? I saw my mate, and my legs turned to jelly. I woke up in the morning, smelled him in, and my mouth started to water in league with my pussy.

Lyrena had taken to making rude gestures every time she saw us together.

I stopped counting the number of times we’d fucked in a twenty-four-hour period when I got to five.

I was sitting alone in the central chamber of our quarters, trying to pay attention to the sensation in my chest. I was determined to quantify the ache of the mating bond. Arran had left to find Osheen, who’d been casually talking to the parents of the faerie children that Maisri had made friends with. They usually played in the main atrium. How far away was that?

The rustle of clothing.

A soft flutter of wings.

Cyara crawled through the archway from the tunnel into the alcove.