Chapter Twenty-Two
Tristan squatted, thick thighs radiating heat even as sheeting rain poured cold over them. His bare feet sank into wet, soft sand. “Try stretching your spine,” he suggested. “I do that when I first shift. Actually, I do that when I go into the ocean. Try compressing your spine.”
Tristan had pulled him far enough up the beach that the waves weren’t hitting him, but he now sat awkwardly on his dorsal fin, and the way it bent was incredibly uncomfortable.
“I’m trying,” Austin said. But he was too distracted by bodily discomforts to focus on compressing his spine.
And then distracted by—“Why are you hard?” His unspoken complaint was, Why are you so big?
“You’re very beautiful.” Admiring eyes combed Austin’s body. He lightly flicked one of the pectoral fins on Austin’s side, removing a few specks of sand from its edge.
“I’m beached!”
“That does not alter your—”
Austin cut him off with a warning growl.
“Can I carry you to the estate? You might have an easier time focusing indoors.”
Austin tried once more to compress his spine, but his concentration lapsed immediately. That bent fin was so annoying! He turned doubtfully to Tristan. “Can you carry me like this? I’m heavier.”
Tristan smiled. He guided Austin’s arm around his shoulders and scooped him up easily. “I’m used to pulling my weight through the water. I could walk all day with you in my arms.”
Austin grunted.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re being glib.”
“Happy, my dear,” Tristan corrected. “An emotion you seem set on mislabelling.”
Happy. “You’re the one who shows it in strange ways.”
Without missing a step Tristan pecked Austin’s cheek once, twice, three times. Trapped in his arms, Austin could do little to dodge. He growled and felt the rumble of Tristan’s answering chuckle. The man was smiling again. “Why are you so happy?” Austin demanded.
“I spent the night with you, and I will be spending the night with you again.”
“Will you!”
Tristan grinned. “You are being nice to me.”
“Nice!”
“I have received no less than three kisses from you in the last hour. And I can feel you. I could feel you even when I was in the other world fetching your caretaker. We are court now.”
Austin’s brow creased. “What do you mean ‘feel’ me?”
Connor. The name jumped to the forefront of Austin’s mind. He must have stiffened because Tristan stopped walking and carefully studied his face.
Tristan chose his words carefully. “It is not a bad thing. It simply means—”
“I can’t feel Connor.”
He focused hard, casting his mind out toward the ocean, in the direction of the Tear—where unfailingly he felt Connor’s presence when he was in Ireland—but there was nothing.
“I’ve felt him for two years. Being too far from him makes my skin crawl; I can’t stand it.
It’s like being in constant sensory overload. Or it was. It’s gone.”
Tristan’s expression was hard to read in the dark.
“Connor’s my ex.”
“I know who he is.”
Austin re-examined the past few weeks at Tristan’s estate, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt the uncomfortable, irresistible pull of Connor in the distance.
“Being rejected from court can be painful,” Tristan said. “I’m sorry you had to endure that.”
“That’s why I’ve been able to calm down so fast.” The realisation landed strangely. He still got upset, but he hadn’t been triggered into lows that lasted weeks. It passed, and quickly. His brow creased. “When you say it can be painful, do you mean emotionally or physically?”
“It sounds like you experienced unpleasant physical reactions to it,” Tristan said. There was an odd note in his voice, and this one Austin could pin down far better than his strange shades of happy. Anger.
Austin tensed. “It isn’t my fault I felt that way. If I could have not felt like that, you don’t think I would have? I had no control over—put me down! It isn’t my fault! There was nobody else like me, just him, and—”
“Of course it isn’t your fault. I did not say that, did I?” Tristan soothed. “I did not mean to imply such a thing either.”
“Put me down.”
Tristan carefully placed Austin onto the sand. The gale weaponised the rain, and with an unhappy sound, Tristan knelt beside him, shielding some of him from the strikes. He studied Austin’s face carefully.
Austin glared. “Your tone said enough.”
Understanding filled Tristan’s eyes. “My anger is not with you, but with your former court. Allowances should have been made if your reaction to losing it was so painful.” His eyes slid over Austin as he tucked his tail up, wrapping his arms around the shining limb.
A glint of anger grew in his eyes once more.
“It was cruel and negligent to have left you stuck in a bond you did not have the means to shake free of.”
Austin’s grip on his tail tightened. “I never told him. I’m sure your men told you what Laurence said earlier.
Accusing me of being obsessed with Connor, and not being able to let him go.
Saying I kidnapped Kit to threaten Connor into taking me back.
” He swallowed hard. “They hate me. I’m always the villain.
” Gary flashed in his mind. A boy ruined.
Austin shut his mouth as a low, agitated growl rumbled out of Tristan.
“They are fools.”
Austin tensed, and Tristan bowed, cupping his hands over Austin’s.
“My anger is not at you. I am sorry. I will get control of myself.”
Tristan’s breaths steadied.
“You are no villain. You developed in a situation where your powers manifested as defensive in nature. Self-preservation is no sin—it is something even Hal does not punish. Nor does he put citizens on trial simply for being what they are. You are a powerful merman, and that is no sin either.”
“It is what I do with it that is the problem.”
“I gave over my estate to you to do with as you wished. What servants did you whip? What fortune did you spoil? What man did you enslave with your voice? Even when you first arrived here and did not feel safe, you harmed no one.”
“Earlier today I hurt everyone with my voice.”
“You did not do so on purpose.”
That was true, but—“I still hurt them!”
Tristan didn’t yield. “I will not condemn you as guilty for something you do unintentionally when you’re upset. Especially when the harm seems to wound you far more deeply than it wounded them.”
Austin bristled. He released his tail, straightening his spine.
“I told Reba he’s only allowed to eat food prepared on the beach until he learns how to fly.”
Tristan looked downright puzzled. “I…see?”
Austin scowled. “You know he had to watch Lassie cook for a year before he trusted to eat what she prepared when he wasn’t looking?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Because where he grew up was filthy, and the food would be tainted.”
“I see.”
“So having to eat food prepared on a sandy beach is—stop making that face. The point is, the order was cruel.”
Tristan blinked, looking appallingly unconvinced.
Before Austin could explain that Reba was too heavy to learn how to fly, so the order was impossible to fulfil, his fight waned. He got the feeling Tristan wouldn’t be persuaded either way.
“You’re so annoying.”
Tristan nodded. “May I lift you?”
“Fine.”
They were only a few hundred metres away from the estate.
Austin settled into Tristan’s arms, and his body moved without his conscious consent.
He nuzzled Tristan’s firm shoulder, then kissed it.
He studied Tristan out of the corner of his eye, but he detected no anger or even annoyance.
Tristan’s lips curved at the kiss, his hands tightening on Austin’s body.
“Will you tell Reba he doesn’t have to eat food prepared on the beach?” Austin asked.
“I will.”
“And will you check on Inx’s arm? He said it’s okay, but…will you check? It’s my fault he got hurt.”
“I’ll check.”
“And you’ll spend the night with me?”
His hum was pleased. “Yes.”
Charybdis seethed on the estate’s doorstep, so Tristan cut inland and walked through the Troop’s housing to get to the heart of the estate. He stopped in a shielded walkway where three paths branched off.
“Bed, food, or Liam.”
Austin stared at Tristan. “Liam?”
“You had me fetch him for you,” Tristan reminded him.
Austin’s mouth dropped open.
“Eli is keeping him company,” Tristan added. “If you wish to sleep first, he’ll be taken care of.”
“Liam only knows English.”
“Eli is proficient in your native language,” Tristan assured him. “Hal sent several attendants to Vi, at Goldilocks’ estate, to learn. I believe Eli snuck into the group.”
Austin looked down at his tail. Should he wait for morning?
Hope he would be back to normal by then?
He caught his inner cheek in his teeth as he thought it out.
The main thing he assessed was his voice: was he in control?
His power hadn’t emerged at all during his argument with Tristan on the beach.
“I’ll see him first.”
Tristan took the path leading to Austin’s drawing room.
A fire roared in the fireplace, the gale from the storm surging down the chimney to feed the coals.
Eli and Liam were at the window. Eli leaned against it, both hands pressed to the panes.
Liam stood with his hands in his pockets, the line of his shoulders tense.
Between them, Austin saw a sliver of Charybdis.
Tristan nudged the door shut, the soft snick making Liam whirl around, hand reaching to his side for a weapon that hadn’t been there in over a year.
A hard, urgent look brightened the man’s eyes.
His gaze collided with Austin’s for an assessing second, then swept down the length of his tail.
Up again. To where Tristan’s arms securely held Austin. Then down.
An undignified squeal tore from Austin’s throat. He twisted in Tristan’s arms. “Your dick’s out! Put it away!”
Mortification baked Austin’s face bright red. Wide-eyed, he whispered, “Are you still hard?”
Tristan looked serenely unapologetic.
Austin had grown up in a lab where every inch of him was exposed regularly.
He didn’t even know he should be shy about his naked body until boarding school, where his classmates reacted with utter shock when he stripped down in front of them for gym.
His “What’s wrong?” to the boy next to him had been answered with beet-red cheeks and averted eyes.
Even after seeing their reactions, Austin never really learned to be shy.
But Tristan standing there with Austin in his arms while visibly aroused, and Liam right there to see it, was embarrassing beyond articulation.
“Eli,” Austin said, shocked when his voice didn’t come out weaponised, “can you fetch Tristan a robe?”
Eli strode to the fire, where two robes hung warming by its flickering light.
Austin squeezed Tristan’s biceps. “My chair,” he requested.
Tristan carefully set Austin onto his chaise lounge, sturdy legs accepting the extra weight of his tail without difficulty.
Austin roughly pulled the silk sheet resting on the back half over some of his tail, fussing with the fabric as he watched Tristan put on the robe.
Only when his cock was hidden did he look back at Liam.
Liam stood where Austin’s tail ended, his calf a mere inch from the edge of his fin. His hand rested on his hip, where his gun no longer was, and he was studying Tristan. His appraisal moved from Tristan’s reddened, injured skin to Austin’s unblemished self.
Tristan’s fingers brushed over Austin’s shoulder. “Would you like some privacy?”
Austin thought about it, then nodded. “I’m quite hungry.”
“I’ll get food.”
“Do you want music?” Eli asked, just before he went outside. “Kada and Jaris were waiting up to see if they’d be needed for entertainment.”
“No. Can you find Liam something dry to wear?”
“I think Inx is his size; I’ll go borrow something from him.” He cackled as he left.