Page 42 of Courting the Fae Captain (Romancing the Realms #4)

‘What is greater than love? Even the strongest foe cannot cleave through the bonds of fate. Even the most stubborn of Fae cannot deny what resides in their heart.’

Fake It Till You Make It: Romance Edition

“ A ll this time,” I said once we were back at the cove on the mainland and tying the boat to the mooring point. “I have been so angry at her for leaving for so long, and she was trapped there all this time.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Raithe said gently as he gave me a hand up out of the boat.

“You were a child, still innocent to the ways of our world and the people in it.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

“When we are young, we look for monsters in the darkness. We often miss the ones hiding in the daylight.”

Monsters like my father. Both our fathers.

“Growing up, I always thought she’d chosen freedom over me.

I thought she’d left me to rot under his care.

Now I’m the one who left her to rot, even as they actively tortured her in front of us.

” My fingers curled, and my shoulders slumped.

The tears came thick and fast, streaming down my cheeks before I could stop them.

“At first, I mourned her loss, then I resented it—her. How could I have been so wrong?”

Raithe’s hands moved to my shoulders, his touch firm, though they shook with the slightest tremor.

His ocean eyes raged, and I knew he was only holding himself together for my sake.

“Perhaps you were wrong, but you now have the tools to make it right. We’ll be back for them.

We will fix this. Together.” He wiped my tears.

“You’re shivering. Come, there’s somewhere I want to take you. ”

I hadn’t even realised I was shaking, but he was right.

My body quivered with cold even as the contents of my stomach lurched, as if by a wave made of guilt and rage, crashing over and over.

I didn’t protest as Raithe took my hand and guided me from the wooden docks over the slippery rocks of the cove.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked after the maelstrom of my thoughts became too much, and I needed the distraction.

Raithe’s answer was a purr. “You’ll see. It’s not much further.”

I wrinkled my nose as he led me into a tunnel, different from the one we’d used to get down here.

The air was clear, if still salt-scented, and I breathed it in deeply, trying to calm my mind.

I needed a hot meal and a bath. I needed to free our mothers.

I needed to rip my enemies limb from fucking limb as I?—

“Oh,” I breathed as the tunnel opened into a small cavern.

Glowworms gleamed from stalactites and stalagmites throughout the space, making the chamber look like a glittering starry night.

Small pools of water littered the floor, with one larger crater dead ahead that had steam rising from its depths.

“Raithe, it’s beautiful,” I said under my breath so as not to scare the glowworms.

“I come here to escape reality once in a while. It has always served as a place to think—and to bathe.” He shucked off his clothes, the muscles in his back and powerful thighs rippling as he removed his garb and waded into the pool.

I stared at the male before me, closer to how I imagined a god than any Fae I’d ever seen.

As he settled into the water and rested his arms around the smooth, rounded edges, his short hair curled up from the steam, and his eyes closed in momentary bliss.

It occurred to me how ironic the Rite truly was.

That I had been forced to fight for something I did not want, and was now fighting, in part, to lose someone who wasn’t really mine.

I wanted Raithe to be mine. I didn’t know when exactly it had happened.

Maybe it was when our powers combined, but I had a feeling it was before even that.

I didn’t know why such things mattered at all, considering the weight of the tasks placed on our shoulders.

Perhaps it was the looming threat of death that put things into perspective.

Perhaps it was because, despite that threat, I had never felt more alive than I did now with him.

I looked at the magic of the place we were in and the person who had wanted to share it with me.

With Raithe, I felt empowered and vulnerable all at once.

Like he saw the deepest parts of me and had understood, truly, deeply understood the inner turmoil tucked away in a locked box in my chest. Or perhaps it was simply that when I was with him, I felt free.

I could imagine a freedom spent with him.

He had pried me open rib by rib and found a space to curl into by my heart.

Warm and safe. My eyes found his from across the cavern, staring at me with a mix of curiosity, longing, and pain.

The cold sapphires of his eyes burned as he gazed at me, and I felt myself drawn to their depths.

My shadows stirred without prompt, floating up in swirling tendrils around me.

His own answered, flooding the floor in a soft, rolling wave that caressed my power with gentle tugs.

It felt … intimate. Like we were crossing some kind of line I didn’t want to go back from.

Like I was scooping his very essence from his soul and bathing in it.

And I didn’t want to stop. Never wanted to stop.

Maybe it was because we were both hurting, but I needed his comfort.

Needed his steady hands on me and his distracting gaze.

I thought about the moment our power touched in the apothecary—at the notion I’d never heard of power melding together in such a way.

At the same moment, something Sherai said popped into my head when she’d joked about one of us being the captain’s true mate.

I’d read about it, of course, but I’d never given much thought to such a thing, given the rarity. But it couldn’t be … could it?

Raithe watched me carefully, and he could have been a statue for how still he was. How silent he breathed.

“Raithe,” I breathed, unsure what I even wanted to say.

“Come to me,” he demanded in a primal purr.

Something inside me delighted at that command. I stripped off my clothes and untied my hair, basking in the way he drank in every detail. No part of me was embarrassed or afraid. It just felt … right. I stepped over the lip of the pool and waded towards him, the water deliciously warm and soothing.

I stopped just before him, my breasts on full display, my hair now free of its braid and fanning around me.

And I knew that he saw all of me. Not just the vessel but everything inside, too.

All the chipped edges and the jagged holes.

All the trauma and the pain. But every precious memory, too.

Everything that shaped me into the person I am today and the person I could be.

“Raithe,” I said again, my instincts were screaming at me to confess what I’d already guessed to be true.

“Say it,” he said. “Say the words I’ve been wanting to share since the moment I felt my shadows connect to you in that apothecary, half-dead and on Ryvia’s door. The feelings I could only share on a soul-deep level with one other in this life.”

“You’re my…” I swallowed, because once I said this, it could never be taken back.

He lifted a large, warm hand to my cheek in gentle encouragement.

And those eyes … they looked at me with all the endless depths of the ocean, full of sorrow and rage and courage and chaos and pure, beautiful joy.

Any fear or doubt I had melted away as our shadows once again embraced, and a shiver skittered down my spine.

Tears glimmered in my eyes, and I smiled with unrestrained happiness. “You’re my mate.”

He closed his eyes, as if hearing those words had eased some suffering inside him. “My mate,” he repeated. “Those words from your lips could undo me entirely.”

“You’ve known since you were wounded?” I asked softly.

“I suspected. It is a rare and precious thing to find one’s mate even in our long lifetimes. I never thought I would find mine, especially under such circumstances. Truly, I wonder if it was the bond tethering me to this world—to you. The poison had long been in my veins … I should have died.”

The idea of Raithe dying … I blinked away the unwanted thought and wrapped my arms around him. “You can’t leave me. Not now.”

“Not ever,” he said. “There is nothing that could stop me from being with you. I would burn the world down for you and rip the very fabric of the realm apart from the seams if anything stood between us and forever. I am yours, Aeris. I always will be.”

Pure joy and wonder rippled through me. How had something so horrific as the Rite also brought me something so precious? So rare? I was fated to be this male. This beautiful, brave, kind, good male. Every part of me wanted this. Him.

“Then kiss me, Captain, because I can’t stand another moment where your lips aren’t on mine. I need you—all of you.”

He placed his hands on my waist and lifted me so I was straddling him. “Say that again,” he replied huskily.

“I.” A kiss on his cheek. “Need.” A kiss on the other .

“You.”He claimed the next kiss for himself, hauling me in and tasting me greedily, like he couldn’t get enough.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever get enough either as he curled a hand around the back of my neck, his fingers sliding up through my hair.

The whimper that crawled up my throat was consumed, too, as his tongue twisted around mine in a reckless tangle of need.

His cock pressed against me, nudging near my slick entrance as he shifted me and pressed kisses down my neck, my throat, my collar bones.

I gasped as he then took my nipples in his mouth one after the other, his tongue flicking against their peaks.

“Please,” I groaned as one hand disappeared beneath the water to stroke me.

The water jumped as he worked, the heat of the hot spring only adding to his touch.

Then the hand was gone, lifting me up by the hips and seating me over his cock.

I gasped at the sheer length of it as it slid home, the water’s embrace coaxing it fully inside me.

“Oh gods,” I cried. “It’s—it’s too big. I can’t. ”

“Yes, you can,” he moaned, and the sound alone made me melt around him.

I felt myself stretch and devour him as he pumped deeper and deeper until almost all of him was inside me.

My body responded, moulding to him as if in urgent need to be filled.

“See, you can and you will,” he commanded.

“You said you wanted all of me. Take it.”

I moaned as he slid deeper, then squeezed my hips deliciously tight as he bobbed me up and down.

It was … Fuck. He was everything. He gazed into my eyes, that damnable smile on his face as he watched my every move.

I grinned back and took over, riding him slowly as I ground on his dick, eliciting another moan from him.

Then he gathered my hair in one hand, holding it firm as he leaned back against the pool with half-lidded eyes.

“You are my fucking salvation, Aeris Lockhart,” he said with a groan.

“You are my mate,” I replied breathily, still a little in awe. Our shadows reared up, circling us in a protective barrier. A tendril of his dripped into the pool, sliding towards me to land upon my clit. Oh. “ Oh, fuck.”

“The things I’m going to do to you, little lark,” he sighed. “So many wicked things.”

“Show me,” I whispered as I rode him harder, faster, the air coming in short, sharp gasps as his shadows increased, flicking against me not just on my pussy now but stroking between my ass cheeks, too. “Oh gods, Raithe. It’s too much. Too?—”

“You can take it, baby. I want to fill you with my cum. I want you to writhe on me until you’re so spent my shadows have to hold you.”

Oh my gods. My body shuddered, my legs weakening as sweat beaded over my forehead and over my lips. I tossed my head back and arched my back, giving him access to every part of me as I rode and rode and rode until that wave of pleasure crested, then crashed.

Just before I came, he leaned in and bit my throat, claiming me in one final act of primal possession, just like Sherai had said a male would when claiming his mate.

I screamed his name, and we were plunged into ecstatic darkness.

That last surge of pleasurable pain was enough to shatter me into a million pieces.

As the glowworms gradually alighted once more, they looked like flickering stars on the ceiling, a blur beneath the haze of shadows that swarmed all around us, mine and his, his and mine …

together as one. Fire ripped through my mind and down my body, tearing through me in a blaze so bright I could barely contain the enormous power that shook our bodies and made the earth tremble at our feet.

When our shadows calmed and the fire stopped burning, there was only him, with his arms wrapped around me and my head buried in his chest. Because he was mine, and I was his, and he was…

“My mate.”