Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
I’m more than ready. I want the hard clench of it, I want to be violently shaken and let loose into stardust. The need to climax claws up my spine, threatening to destroy me and I brace for an orgasm.
“Let go,” he says, biting my neck but not piercing the skin. “Now.”
“Aye Captain,” I manage to say which brings out a huff of amusement from him, his breath hot on my neck.
It takes another hard rub from his fingers to set me off and I choke on the noises rising up from my throat. Heat prickles across my body like an electric storm and I’m gasping for breath, calling out his name, seeing stars.
“Fuck,” he grunts in my ear.
His muscles tremble, his sounds growing louder and he’s driving in deeper and faster, until I feel like I’m being fucked to death in a wild, messy fervor. He hammers into me as if he’s lost to madness, as if he’d die without spilling his seed inside me.
Then he’s brought to completion and I feel his hot spurts inside of me, his hips slowing down into three hard shoves.
And he stills, holding my body against his, his breath short and ragged. I collapse against the bed, against him, and he pulls out as we both lay on our backs.
I swallow, my heart beating like butterfly wings in my chest, and stare up at the wood planks of the ceiling. With my body slowly returning back to normal, my mind does too. It returns to the sorrow. It returns to the future of unknowns.
“Maren,” he whispers, brushing the hair off my forehead and kissing my cheek with such tenderness that my heart skips a beat. When he’s this soft it completely disarms me.
“Yes?”
“We’ll be anchored in the Bay of Banderas soon,” he says. “I don’t know what you wish to do.”
I think that over, sucking my lip between my teeth.
“I know we both have our revenge,” he begins. “I know you deserve to get yours. But I worry. I worry that by doing that, I’ll lose you to her. Lose you to the person you once were. And I don’t know if my heart can take anymore loss, my luv.”
I swallow hard. His words, these words, they mark me.
“Stay with me,” he whispers. “Don’t go back to the deep. Stay with me at the surface. With the sun and the moon and the stars.”
I close my eyes and relax against him, resting my head on his chest, hearing the steady slow beat of his heart beneath, and I can’t help but imagine that it belongs to me. By nature, Syrens crave the hearts of men, but I only want his heart to love me.
“If I don’t get revenge, then who am I?” I ask in a hush. “All I’ve known as an adult is trying to return to the creature I once was. To the girl I was. If I let that go, then I have to make peace with what I am now.”
“So then you make peace with it,” he says, pressing his lips against my head. “As long as you know that the path to peace is a hard one, perhaps as hard as the one you’d take for vengeance. But it’s the right one, and that’s what counts in the end.”
I take a moment to think that over. He’s right, of course, but it’s always easier said than done. There’s something so passive about acceptance that bucks against my personality, perhaps because for so long that’s what I was. I just sat back and took what was dealt my way in the way of Aerik and my life as a princess. The fact that I finally have been given an opportunity for agency and to take action and I’m turning my back on it, it feels like I’m giving up.
“I’m just afraid that I’ll make a mistake, yet another one I won’t be able to live with,” I say.
He stiffens. “You think I’m a mistake?”
“No,” I say quickly, looking up at him. “You are not a mistake, Ramsay. You are a choice and, what you’ve said before, a different path to take.”
“So do you choose me, luv?” he asks and I’ve never seen him look so vulnerable. It causes a dull ache in my chest.
Because this is the question, isn’t it? Do I choose him and my legs and this life above the sea? Or do I say goodbye and go back to living under the water, back in a kingdom without my father, mother, or sister, with my other sister elsewhere?
The latter was all I had ever wanted for the last ten years.
The former is all I’ve ever wanted over the last few weeks.
“You don’t need to answer me,” he says, giving me a squeeze. “We still have time.”
I don’t need to look at an hourglass to know that time is running out.