“I’m also not making love to my wife the first bloody time on a pallet in a tent with five hundred fucking soldiers camped close by.”

I clenched my teeth in frustration.

“It’s going to be you and me,” he declared.

“But—”

“Just you and me.”

That was very endearing.

However.

“It’s just you and me right now,” I pointed out.

“It’s going to be special.”

My frame froze solid.

Special?

“We will live our lives. We will have children. We will have grandchildren,” he declared. “And through it all, you will always remember the first time we joined. The first time your husband entered your body and made us one. The time I became truly your husband, and you my wife. You will remember it as a time of splendor. Of passion. Of joy. Not with half your mind consumed with how irritating the sand feels in places it will undoubtedly get that it should not be or who might hear and what they might say.”

One could definitely say, in that moment, I did not care what others might say.

Though he had a point about the sand.

“And when will this time of splendor happen, husband?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out,” he muttered irritably.

“We’ve been married for over—”

“I know, Ha-Lah, bloody trust me, I know,” he rumbled, far more irritably.

Which made me, for some reason, giggle.

“This is not funny,” he grumbled.

“It’s sort of funny,” I teased.

“It is not funny at all,” he returned.

I subdued my giggles but could not stop myself from smiling up at him.

I had a place in his heart.

He knew of my powers.

He might not have moved heaven and earth, but he did move five hundred soldiers, and he did this on a direct path to the sea.

For me.

And the very thought of something harming me terrified him.

Terrified King Aramus of Mar-el.

The mightiest king in Triton.

I had a feeling I could tell him I was a mermaid and he’d care naught about it, except to do all in his power to keep that secret safe.

Me safe.

And I would tell him.

Eventually.

My auntie had told me that to win my mother, my father would have found a way to travel into the skies to gather a star to bring it to her, if this was what she desired.

I did not want a star.

I wanted to be free.

I also told my husband that.

And in a time when I did not think I would ever feel that again, Aramus had found a way to give it to me.

I stroked the back of his neck with my fingers, asking, “Can we kiss some more?”