Page 55 of Bride of the Sea King

ARIA

Back in the grotto,Triton basically forced me to climb into bed with a book. He wanted me to rest so my muscles could heal and recover. Now that I’d eaten and ventured out into the castle, I was definitely on board with that plan.

My body hurt.

Badly.

I read and dozed for the rest of the day, which wasn’t long, because I’d slept so much the night before. Triton was settled in a chair near the bed, his massive body sprawled out in a way that made him look both comfortable and ridiculously attractive.

Then again, he was always ridiculously attractive.

I was studying him on the sly, from behind the pages of my book, when I noticed his eyelids getting heavy.

Guilt hit me hard.

He was a good guy. Or at least, it seemed like he was. A few days with him wasn’t long enough to really make that determination, but he’d been good to me and to everyone else I had seen himwith. I wasn’t sure how much he had even slept during the last night, considering he’d been gone when I woke up.

Yet I had been making him sleep in a chair.

The first night, it was understandable.

There was an argument to be made for the second night, too.

But the third?

I didn’t have an excuse that wouldn’t make me feel like shit. Or that he really deserved. It wasn’t like sharing a bed was more intimate than screwing, right? And I could always put pillows between us or something.

Triton’s eyes closed completely for a moment before he jerked awake and rubbed them, muttering a curse under his breath.

He looked at me, and our gazes collided.

Guess I’d been caught snooping.

His lips tilted upward just a tiny bit before his smile faded. “There’s an issue in the castle. Rayna needs me to deal with it.”

“What’s the issue?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m pretty smart.”

He dipped his head slightly. “There’s a merrae couple who mated right after the Dragons’ War ended. Greta and Platt. They were friends, and they both led separate branches of our warriors. They were the only fighters in their families, and they had both lost everyone they loved to the plague.”

“There was a lot of talk about the possibility of our kind going extinct. They were mourning, but they both wanted to help repopulate. So they mated. And they have been a nightmare ever since,” he admitted.

My forehead creased. “I thought they were friends. What was the problem?”

“They became friends when they worked together in the war, but they were both leaders. They never made decisions together. They reported to me. The day after they sealed their bond, they had a disagreement about their living situation. It grew loud, and the warriors from their teams got involved. It was a distraction from the mourning, and it escalated quickly. Everyone had something to say. I ended up having to mediate, and we came to an agreement that they both settled for. The peace lasted about twelve hours.”

My eyebrows shot upward. “Only twelve hours?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.”

He nodded. “It’s been like that ever since. When their first child was born nine months later, the arguments grew more intense. When the second came a year after that, it was worse. By the time the sixth joined us, they were straight-up enemies, each of them raising three of the children separately from the others. It didn’t get better when the fading merrae who never had kids started adopting their children a dozen years in, either.”

My eyes were massively round. “They took the breeding thing that seriously?”

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