Page 62 of The Fae Menagerie
I loved Parker, a hopeless, overbearing love I could never bestow upon him the way he deserved. He should be cherished and worshipped for being the perfect mionblath he was for me, but I needed to find the coin and send him home before my grandmother got ahold of him and ripped him limb from limb.
The only way I could prove myself worthy of my family name was by rejecting my fated mate. It wasn't what I wanted, now that I'd met him and fallen for him, but it was the best possible outcome. The other option was unthinkable. I refused to let her hurt Parker.
"You need another distraction," Parker said over breakfast on the morning of the full moon.
He meant sex. He'd been distracting me with sex for the last fortnight, and it had worked, but now …
"I don't think I can."
"Are you ill?"
I was coming down with a giant case of conscience, but I couldn't tell him that. I stuffed the kitchen-supplied banana nut muffin in my mouth and chewed mindlessly.
"Is it time?" he whispered.
"Today or tomorrow," I answered.
"Maybe she'll ignore it," he said. "Or maybe she'll wait so long I'll be dead before she knows I existed."
He didn't know my grandmother. She would turn back time itself to punish me for claiming my fated mate, mark or no mark.
When the sunset on the first perfect day after the full moon, my anxiety reached a breaking point. I'd wasted two entire days worrying about the inevitable, and it hadn't happened. My grandmother did not interrupt viewing hours to slaughter Parker in my viewing room. She hadn't popped into my library to chain us both to the bookcases and set the place on fire. She hadn't even flitted into my kitchen with every poison known to man.
While I was grateful Parker was still with me, I was furious with myself. I'd ruined two days worrying about a future I couldn't predict, two days with Parker I couldn't get back. Grandmother or no, my time with Parker was precious, made even more so by its inevitable conclusion. He was human, and humans only lived a fraction of the time I would.
I'd once heard that fated mates, no matter the species or type of fae, gained the longevity of the longer-living mate so they could remain together until their final breaths, but Grandmother had thrown that away when she'd denied her match. She'd cursed our line to war, unhappy alliances, and furious potential suitors such as Prince Drummond.
Yes, the Unseelie Prince was just as much my failure as my grandmother's, but if I wasn't so terrified of meeting and bonding my potential mate, I wouldn't have loved him and left him.
No, it would have been far worse. We would have grown tired of each other, both bored out of our minds, and then he would have returned to his betrothed.
I hadn't changed Drummond's future one bit, yet here I was, stuck in fae prison for the perceived crime I'd committed. I'd also compelled his guards to let me go, a crime for which I had paid my debt millennia ago.
Now, I needed to solve Mother's riddle and discover the meaning of love before it was too late. I had a feeling I already knew the meaning of love. I'd become more certain of it over the last several months, as Parker and I grew closer. I loved him. I was in love with him. As much as I had to save him from my grandmother, I also needed him to stay.
"Are you coming to bed?" Parker asked from the bedroom door. He came to stand beside me and gasped in awe of the gorgeous full moon. "We should sleep out here."
"Not on the couch," I pleaded.
"On the floor, in a nest of blankets and pillows."
I snorted. "That would be better suited for the viewing room. We would cause all kinds of commotion tomorrow."
Despite all my teasing about painting my enclosure with his cum, Parker and I had kept our activities to the bedroom. We occasionally kissed when the cuddlebug children pressed, but even that was rare.
Parker grinned up at me before rising on his tiptoes and brushing his lips against mine. "Yes. Let's do it."
We each brought as many pillows, blankets, and covers as we could carry from my bed. We shoved the couch and end tables back against the inner wall to provide room for our pile, and then we curled up in it, my head on a pile of pillows, and Parker's head on my chest as we watched the night sky in all its splendor.
"If someone summons you, could you take me with you?" he asked after we saw our first shooting star.
The thought made me pause. "I could try, but you're human. Even if you made it out of here, you would be stuck in the ground in the human realm, unable to dig through concrete, rock, and dirt to arrive in a summoning circle." I kissed the top of his head to take the sting from my words. "I can't let you die, let alone be the cause of it, so I would leave you here."
"You'd leave me here to die without you."
"I would try," I teased, "but they would summon me back. I am still a prisoner here. I won't be free until I answer my mother's riddle to her satisfaction." That would set us both free, I hoped.
"Do you think seeing us in a mess of blankets on the viewing room floor will do it?"
