Page 71 of How To Tame A Trickster Fae

Piper puts a firm hand on the small of my back and pushes me to the hearth, where I plop down. My handful of smoked cheese stares up at me forlornly, and I promptly stuff it into my gob, chewing as I attempt to calm my stampeding heart.

And attempt to avoid saying anything else stupid.

“You think the binding went wrong,” Piper murmurs, her face completely serious, eyebrows cinched together.

“Impossible,” Nerissa repeats, this time glancing up at me.

She sighs as she inspects my face and sets her book down on the stones.

“Why do you think something backfired?” Piper presses.

“Because… because…” I trip over the word. How am I supposed to tell them that he said I’m his mate? That he… knotted me?

My face turns beet-red and I shove the rest of the cheese into my mouth and cover my face with my hands.

“Oooooh,” Nerissa says in a low, knowing voice. “No wonder he didn’t try to break the binding or resist at all.”

I glance sidelong at her and she nods at me, a faint smile kicking up the sides of her mouth.

“You’re his mate,” she finally pronounces.

The silence is deafening, and I just shrug.

“They mate?” Piper asks.

I peek at her through my fingers, and she peels my hands from my face.

“They do.” Nerissa sounds positively gleeful. “And Caelan’s must be Wren.”

“But what if it’s my fault and he just thinks I am? What if I messed up? What if everything he’s saying and doing is just some stupid mistake I made?”

Ruby plops down in front of me, her wide, window-pane-print trousers puddling around her legs. She pushes up her glasses. “The fae mating bond can’t be faked.”

“Exactly,” Nerissa agrees.

“It’s primal,” Ruby adds primly.

I look up as a loud conversation breaks out again, all around me.

Everyone here has been listening in on my mental breakdown, but they’re not whispering behind their hands about me, like they would have in my old coven. They’re not staring at me with horrified expressions.

No, they look truly concerned, each piping up with their own stories about the Unseelie fae, about mates, and about binding spells. Well, nearly everyone, the satyress just nods sagely at the various pieces of advice floating around.

“Caelan has a hard shell around him,” Lila advises, a soft smile on her lips. “But he has a good heart, no matter how hard he tries to hide it. Sure, he can be short-tempered, but some of our guests even annoy Druze, and he’s hard to ruffle. He’s a good male, Wren.”

“Binding spells should be easy for the fae to break. I was half-expecting him to easily unwind our spell that night.”

“See?” Piper says, gesturing to everyone. “This is not the end of the world.”

“But we ate your sexy cookie, Piper,” I moan. “What if it interacted with it? It was much, much stronger than it should have been. It was less of an alluring charm and more of an immediately jump your bones charm.”

Her nose wrinkles. “That was a stronger batch than I intended, but it wouldn’t have pushed you that far. And it shouldn’t have worked on a fae at all.”

“Yeah, those cookies are delicious but they don’t work on me,” Lila agrees.

“That’s what he said, but what if?—”

“Nope,” Ruby shakes her head, and Piper grins at her. “We’re not going to support your catastrophizing, are we, team?”

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