That, he also felt.

But he ignored it and carried on speaking.

“Why you were brought to me was to show me your love and allow me to give you mine. It was to open my eyes to the true understanding of what being the Sea King meant and delivering me to the place I would do something about it. It was to mitigate my temper so I would be a more patient ruler. It was to make children with me. It was to reign at my side. It was to leave Mar-el to our son stronger, showing him the way for any future is to be brave enough to make righteous change. It was so that we could argue and reconcile, debate and decide, make each other laugh and make each other climax.”

He took her head in both hands, bent to her and finished.

“I refuse to believe the Beast had anything to do with us finding each other, Ha-Lah. What I believe is that you were destined to be mine and I was destined to be yours and that is the beginning and the end of it.”

Her crystal eyes warm on him, she pushed up to her knees, skating her hands up his bare chest as she did so, and curling her fingers around his shoulder in the end.

“A love like that can defeat all evil,” she whispered.

He wished he had that same conviction.

“You must trust in that, my darling,” she pushed, one hand disengaging from his shoulder to glide down his chest. “And you must admit, there is a lot to trust in.”

He definitely could admit that.

Though in the now, he did not for he made an unintelligible noise when she pressed her hand into his sleep pants and found his cock.

“Wife,” he grunted.

“Trust in us. Trust in our friends,” she urged, her fingers tightening, and he automatically thrust in her hand. “Trust in love.”

“I trust in your love,” he muttered.

Her eyes smiled. “That will work.”

Then her body dropped, she released his shaft, pulled his sleep pants down and treated him to the vision of her beauty on her knees at the edge of the bed, working his cock with her mouth.

When her fingernails dug into his arse, he took her cue and thrust gently into her moist suckling, groaning when she began to suckle harder.

He was about to drop his head back and close his eyes to concentrate on it fully, when her gaze shifted up to his.

At what he saw, at what he had never seen before, but it was right there before him in that moment—the blue crystal of her gaze turning to the blue and white crash of the waves of the sea—Aramus suddenly withdrew.