When you were a child, you lived next door to a Māori woman who told you the story of Pania and Karitoki. The beautiful sea maiden and her human husband. How her love for a mortal man nearly cost her her divine form, and how his betrayal had locked her to the waters forever, never able to return to land or to him. Mrs. More, who always told you to just call her that, though you'd never met her husband, told you the story as you grew up.
That story was what inspired you to go to New Zealand in the first place. Well, that and Mrs. More's death. She had been like a grandmother to you, and you wanted to feel closer to her. As you travelled around Napier, you loved seeing the references to Pania and her story. Every time you did, you felt a little closer to Mrs. More.
"Are you here for the boat tour?" a handsome man with a deep complexion asked when he saw you reading over the plaque next to Pania's statue.
"I'm thinking about it," you said, looking up at him. "Does it talk about Pania?"
"It does," he nodded, a slight smile on his face. "And her husband a bit, but we also talk about her son, Moremore. We draw connections between the old tales and the wildlife of the area. You can't understand the present without understanding the past."
So, you went on the boat tour, listening to the incredibly handsome man talk. Admittedly, you had a bit of a hard time focusing on much of what he was talking about because he was just so handsome. Your eyes travelled his exposed skin, drinking in the wide variety of tattoos on his body. He caught you looking at him, making you flush, but you couldn't help yourself from doing it again, trying to do so when he wasn't looking.
Once the tour ended, he walked over to you, his smirk deepened as he did. "Did you enjoy the tour?"
"Yes. it was great. Thank you," you muttered, a pink tinge coloring your face.
"I know that it seems like a tragic story, but it does have a sort of happy ending. She at least got to keep her son and be with her people, you know? Karitoki betrayed her and could have killed her by trying to feed her the morsel of cooked food. What kind of husband risks his wife's life like that?" he shook his head, sighing as he leaned back against the boat's interior.
"Most mothers would rather spend the rest of eternity with their child than with a man that risked killing them, no matter how much they loved him," you agreed.
He mused, looking out over the water, a thoughtful look on his face. "I think that you're right. At least out there she was surrounded by people who love her."
"And didn't risk killing her," you added.
He nodded again, turning to look at you with a smile again. The two of you kept chatting even as the sun began to dip under the horizon. The next morning, after having spent all night in your hotel room thinking about him, you take another tour. His smile brightened when he saw you. Once again, you waited for him to approach you.
The two of you went for a swim. He was excellent, which you reason is because he grew up next to the sea. After a little while, he smiled as he swam over to you, where you were sitting on the edge of the dock to a break. There was a mischievous glint in his dark eyes.
"Want to see something that no one will believe if you tell them?" he asked, his voice dropping low.
A soft giggle passed your lips. "Sure."
In a blinding light, where he had been floating in the water, was suddenly a shark. On instinct, you yelped, pulling your feet out of the water. The shark swam right up to you as you frantically looked around for the tour guide. The shark stared at you, seemingly almost grinning. It made your skin crawl. A fish shouldn't be able to look like that. In another blinding light, the shark was gone, back to being replaced with the man.
"Sorry, sorry. Your reaction was just so funny. I knew whatever you did would be hilarious," he laughed, looking up at you. You looked down at him as he treaded water, stunned and unsure of what to say.
"Are you... Moremore?" you asked, confused, your voice tentative.
Another laugh burst from his lips as he grabbed onto the edge of the dock, hoisting himself up beside you. "What? No way. I'm just a sea shifter, but I did move here in part because of him. I came here to feel closer to someone like me."
"I came here to feel closer to someone I lost," you said, your smile faltering slightly before you looked down at your hands, folded in your lap.
"I don't know nay other sea shifters. I was adopted into a human family," he said, looking out over the water. "That's part of why I love Pania and Moremore. No matter what, she has her son, and he has her. He doesn't loose her."
"yours may have been doing what was best for you," you said, reaching over to interlace your fingers with his.
Another smile slowly crept back across his face as he looked over you with interested eyes. "Maybe."
The two of you spent the rest of the night talking, and before the end of it, his lips were on yours. He tasted like saltwater and seaweed, and his hands were cool like the ocean in the early morning as he teased the swell of your breasts as his hands slid underneath your damp shirt. His tongue was rough, but not unpleasantly so as he slid it into your mouth. You parted your lips for him, and with the sounds of the ocean behind you, you had this feeling that you were right where you were supposed to be.
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The air crackled with energy. Sounds of celebration carried far across the land. Wine flowed freely, and exotic dancers from distant lands swayed to the drums and lutes.
Aaron found himself swept up in the merriment. Joy was infectious, and he couldn’t resist. As for the marriage itself, it mattered little to him. He would ensure she lacked nothing, running his household and engaging in whatever pleased her—discreetly... of course.
He had no wish to possess her. As alluring as Nia was, he had never held her back. She had come to him willingly; staying with him was entirely her choice.
He lifted his goblet to his lips when a sudden hush fell. Over the rim of his cup, he saw the reason. A lone maid dressed in simple white that reached her ankles walked purposefully toward him. A white lace veil covered her face and trailed behind her in a delicate train. She knelt with her head bowed, holding a bunch of red grapes.
A gray-haired man, bent with age, stepped into the middle of the hall.
“The time has come for our King to take his bride. Tomorrow, we shall meet our queen.”
Aaron stared at the petite figure before him, a sense of familiarity gnawing at him. The veil hid everything but her size. She was very obviously small, far from the "tall dainty beauty" he had imagined. He rubbed his forehead and shot a glare at his cabinet, catching a smirk or two.
The maid’s hands remained steady, holding the grapes. Aaron knew he could leave, express displeasure, and force the ceremony to be redone. But he didn’t. He took a grape, popping a couple into his mouth as a cheer rose from the hall. Squatting before her, he placed both hands on her shoulders and lifted her. A rush of familiar scents—honey-colored skin, wild brown curls, sunlight—hit him. His grip tightened reflexively, and she gasped.
He immediately released her. “I’m sorry. My mind’s in a bit of a mess. Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head quickly. Aaron’s eyes narrowed at her, then he touched the end of her veil and threw it back with a swift motion.
Wide brown eyes stared back at him.
---
The moment she saw him seated on his throne, her stomach flipped. Walking from the doors to his chair brought a flurry of conflicting emotions. He wasn’t old or terrible-looking, thankfully. But she couldn’t forget how they had met earlier in the day. What would he think of her?
While she offered him the grapes, she counted the seconds he took to accept them. Would he reject her, publicly disgrace her, then dismiss her? Relief washed over her when he accepted them. His hands rested warmly on her shoulders—then withdrew—and her heart leapt to her throat.
She forgot her etiquette training, shaking her head too hard in response to his question. Her veil was snatched away, and she froze.
Aaron arched a brow at his little water sprite. His? He frowned at the thought. The gray-haired man was preparing to speak again, but Aaron grabbed Melei’s hand and tugged her toward his bedroom, ignoring the applause, laughter, and clinking of cups.
“What is your name?” Aaron asked as he lounged casually in a chair across from the bed where Melei sat.
“Melei of the Meadows,” she replied calmly.
Something about her voice seemed off. Aaron leaned back slightly, attempting to appear smaller, less intimidating, reassuring her.
“The Meadows… that explains your toned body.”
Melei’s eyes flashed. “Are you saying I’m muscular?!”
His brows shot up.
“I didn’t mean to offend. Not muscular—fit. You look strong for a girl of your stature.”
Her glare did not soften. He cleared his throat and changed the subject.
“Have you been with a man before?” he asked softly.
Melei lifted her chin in defiance. “I’m not a novice,” she said, her voice tight.
“I know. I’ve seen you,” he replied knowingly. She flustered, averting her gaze. A strange satisfaction at her reaction lifted a corner of his lips. He continued, “Being with a man is very different from playing with those tiny fingers.”
Her mouth fell open at his comment. Aaron’s lips curved in a full smirk. Melei shut her mouth sharply, narrowing her eyes and clenching her fists on her hips. She looked ready to chastise a child. Aaron couldn’t tear his eyes away.
“My fingers aren’t tiny, and I know what a ‘man’ is!” She settled back on the pillows, pleased with herself.
Aaron paused, stunned, then threw back his head and laughed. The rich sound rolled from his chest, genuine and deep. Melei felt it, from the soles of her feet to the tips of her hair, pulling her as if by invisible threads. Two sharp points dotted the bodice of her silk dress. She pressed her thighs together, soothing the throbbing at her core. Her lips were dry, and her tongue darted out to wet them.
Aaron wiped tears from his eyes, still laughing, when he caught that movement. His laughter faltered as he watched her red tongue brush her lips and retreat. A surge of lust pulsed through him, sharp and living, and he drew back.
Melei felt it the moment the connection cut. The blanket of warm air surrounding her cooled, and she hugged herself, leaning into the mattress for comfort.
Aaron rose fluidly, extinguishing the candles one by one. When he reached the one illuminating the bedside, he spoke in a raspy whisper. “Go to sleep. I’ll be out most of the night. Sleep well. We’ll speak in the morning.”
He blew out the candle, plunging the room into darkness. Stripping his robe and pants, he strode to the window. His night vision caught her wide eyes searching the dark for him. He grinned and leapt, twisting into his jaguar form mid-air.
The lone jaguar slipped into the night, stalking toward the hunt that would sate the animalistic hunger rising within him.
Laces for a Lady - 18th century poly shifter romance (Part one, sfw)
Disclaimer which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.
Well folks, here it is. You said you were interested, so I hope it meets expectations! Here's part one for you, of a multi part story. If you want to kno wmore about it, you can find some more info here, as well as a little 'mood board'.
Content: sfw, the daughter of a country gentleman from Sussex relocates to a sleepy fishing village in Cornwall in order to become the paid companion of a young widow, and meets some of the locals on her arrival.
Wordcount: 3972
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!
~ from ‘A Smugglers’ Song’, Rudyard Kipling (1906)
In the cool, lavender light of a late spring dawn, a gaff-rigged cutter drew into the sheltering arms of a small bay at high tide, and quietly dropped anchor. As if the soft splash had awoken him, a cockerel spluttered to life in a farmyard somewhere inland, but most of the villagers were already up and awake and steering their small, secret fleet of boats out from the golden crescent of sand beneath the cliffs to meet the waiting ship fresh from Roscoff.
Beneath the waves, where churning kelp moored itself in unyielding handfuls to the ancient granite of the sea floor, a long, serpentine shadow snaked between the stalks, and the currents of the coastline subtly shifted. Any revenue men trying to sail along the coast from Fowey to catch the smugglers would have found the wind and tide set dead against them, and in the subtle wake that wafted from the mottled, eel-like tail as it passed unseen, the waters of the secluded inlet calmed beneath the keels of the scurrying fishing boats. The drag of the oars through the waves lessened, and muscles already tired from heaving and hefting goods up the cliff moved a fraction easier for the unexpected boon.
Between them over the next hour, the gathered men and women shifted their haul of half anker barrels and dozens of crates and boxes of goods ashore. The small kegs of rich, French cognac would fetch a pretty price all across Cornwall, and along with the liquor came smaller luxuries like lace and silk, and bundles of tobacco and spiced tea, all meticulously wrapped in oil cloth to keep the sea and the salt and the water out.
And when the speedy, slender ship was riding noticeably higher in the water, the locals simply melted away into the countryside like so many mice from a late summer granary before the excise men even knew the ship from Guernsey had visited the cove at all.
Fifteen miles away, as the sun breached the horizon and cast its first rays of warmth along bellies of fleecy clouds and the flanks of blossoming hedgerows below, a stagecoach lurched and rumbled westwards along potholed roads, and a young woman stared out of the grimy window as the horses carried her into a new chapter of her life.
After leapfrogging some two hundred miles or so along the staging stations that dotted the South Coast, with nothing but a small trunk of her belongings and a thrice-read, dog-eared novel for company, Eleanor Bywater was more than ready to see the back of that infernal stagecoach. Had it not been for the small but inconveniently bulky travelling case sitting at her feet, she might have hired a horse and ridden from the last staging inn at Plymouth to reach the secluded fishing village of Polgarrack, but given that the trunk held all her worldly belongings, she had not been quite desperate enough to escape the discomfort of hard seats and poor suspension to abandon it.
Bouncing along in the nearly-empty stagecoach, she studiously tried to ignore the older woman sitting opposite her. She’d stared intently at Nel since they'd left Plymouth behind that morning, and her scrutiny had begun to make that last twenty mile stretch feel much, much longer.
Finally, after jouncing over a pothole deep enough to start prospecting for copper ore at the bottom, Nel gasped and then raised her eyes to meet the woman’s openly curious stare. She found sympathy for her own discomfort, and a small degree of kindly amusement too.
“Where are you headed, miss?” the stranger asked after Nel raised the hint of an eyebrow at her as the silence stretched.
“Polgarrack.”
At that, the woman’s grey eyes narrowed in confusion. “Now what takes a young miss like you to an old fishing village like Polgarrack?”
She looked to be in her fifties, though a life beside the harsh sea had weathered her features somewhat, and her wiry grey hair was covered by a simple linen cap. Her dress was dark and plain, though there was a hint of tired lace around the neck and cuffs. Her hands had the tough, reddened look of someone who scrubbed pots and salted fish, while Nel’s own hands were smooth and soft, if a little ink stained from sending a letter to her friend before leaving the inn that morning.
Nel laughed quietly and shrugged. “There’s no mystery to it,” she said. “I am to be employed as a companion to the widowed Lady Penrose at Heath Top House. I am expected there this afternoon.”
Given that only ladies of relatively high social standing themselves tended to become a ‘lady’s companion’, the older woman made a hasty re-evaluation of her fellow traveller, and her already ruddy cheeks flushed a darker shade as she cleared her throat and looked away.
“Begging your pardon, miss,” she said. “We don’t get many new faces in Polgarrack, is all. I didn’t mean to pry or cause offence with my questions.”
“No harm in a little curiosity,” Nel said, trying to put the stranger at ease to avoid any further awkwardness between them on the remainder of their journey. “I take it you’re from Polgarrack yourself then?”
“Oh, born and raised, miss,” she chortled. She eyed the forest green redingote Nel wore, with its rather masculine high collar, wide lapels and small, gold pocket watch dangling on a chain, and the contrasting sage green skirts beneath, and no doubt made one or two judgements of her own about the young lady. “And yourself? You don’t sound as though you’re from these parts at all, if I may be so bold.”
Nel smiled. “I’ve come from Sussex.”
The woman’s watery, grey-blue eyes widened almost comically and she gasped. “’at's a bloody long way, miss! And all on your own?” She shook her head but remembered herself and mumbled, “Begging your pardon.”
“You’re right,” Nel sighed, letting her gaze slide to the window to watch the countryside roll past in a blur of salt-bleached grass and vibrant yellow gorse flowers. “It is a bloody long way.” And her spine and backside felt every lump and bump and lurch of the stagecoaches from Sussex to Cornwall. With a warmer smile, she turned back to the woman. “My name is Eleanor, but most people call me Nel.”
“Agatha,” she replied with a grandmotherly smile of her own for the young woman. “But everyone calls me Aggie. My husband, Martin, is the village carter and smith, and we’ve got four boys, all of them either fishermen or miners. They all married too, so I’ve got nine grandchildren, if you can believe it!”
Nel offered Aggie her congratulations and another little smile, and then ventured to ask, “Will you tell me a bit about the place? I should like to know more about it, since it is to be my home for the foreseeable future.”
Aggie brightened even more and shuffled her plain, dark skirts, giving a wince and a grunt as the coach lurched over a pothole and the driver cursed audibly above them. Settled, if not entirely comfortable, she began.
“Well, see now. Folks has been fishing these waters for time out of mind. Pilchards is our mainstay, o’course, but the folks over St. Austell way mine clay, and obviously there’s copper and tin mines all over in the north of Cornwall. Mining here is as old as fishing, but it’s starting to dry up here and there now, o’course.”
She barely paused to draw breath before barrelling on, and Nel sat and listened while the older woman talked.
“Now, your Lady Penrose married into the Penrose family — see, she’s from Bath herself originally, though I can’t rightly remember what her family name was, but…” Nel let Agatha's potted history of the fishing and mining community wash over her, paying just enough attention to make polite sounds at the right pauses, but the discomfort of the journey and a decided lack of sleep was beginning to wear her attention span down to a single, fraying thread.
After two hours in the swaying, rolling coach, she felt woozy and weak-stomached, but with Aggie’s near-constant chatter, she at least had a better understanding of the politics of the little village than she’d ever have gained in six months on her own. She’d also learned why Aggie had been in Plymouth, since most folks never had any reason to travel further than the bounds of their own parish. Agatha’s sister’s husband had apparently been killed in the American Revolutionary War some ten years earlier, and since the widow’s health wasn’t the best these days, Aggie made the trip along the coast when she could to see her and take care of her.
Nel’s ticket took her as far as Whitcross, a desolate intersection of paler roads on a clifftop overlooking the tightly-nestled fishing port below, and away across the heather and tufted grass of the heath, she could just see an old manor house in the distance, flanked by tall copper beeches and ash trees. It looked slightly further away than she had anticipated, and she glanced apprehensively down at the travelling trunk at her feet.
Still, she was aching for fresh air and to be free of the sickening motion of the carriage, so she took the driver’s hand and allowed him to guide her safely down onto the hard-packed surface of the road before he lifted her case down for her as well.
From inside, Aggie peered out and scowled disapprovingly. “Now just you wait a moment,” she barked at the driver, who cocked an eyebrow but did pause. “Did they not send someone for you, dearie?” she asked Nel, still leaning out of the doorway and peering about like a disgruntled badger, and using the endearment freely. Apparently, two hours of talking non-stop at Nel had removed any pretence of formality or sense of social distance. Nel might as well have been adopted into Aggie Carter’s family as a niece by that point, and she couldn’t help but smile at the warmth it conjured in her chest.
“I… I never thought that far through,” she admitted, with her hand atop her bonnet as the wind gusted up from the sea below, soaring delightedly over the edge of the cliff and racing on inland as if to continue the momentum of the great rolling breakers that foamed and thundered against the shore. The coachman glanced at his pocket watch and groused something about a schedule that was almost immediately lost to the next inward gust.
“No, no, dearie,” the old woman scoffed. “No, you must come into the village. It’s far too far to go all by yourself, and with that case as well. Here, let me —”
“I can manage the case, I assure you,” Nel said with a gentle smile as Aggie half-toppled, half-leaned out of the coach to pick up the case. “How far is it to the house?”
“Two miles up that hill yonder,” Agatha said, pointing with one gnarled and arthritic finger towards the house on the rise to the north. “Come to the Lantern, and we’ll have one of the lads take you up once you’ve caught your breath.” The Lantern, as Nel now knew thanks to Aggie’s detailed prattling, was the inn at the centre of the village, right on the water near the harbour.
She had been about to protest, but with a sigh, she simply nodded. The constant journeying and jolting had worn her down more than she cared to admit, and while she wasn’t the kind of wallflower she’d met any number of times in London during the Season, a life led mostly indoors with few opportunities for physical activity had not prepared her for a two mile walk in heavy, too-fine clothes, carrying an unwieldy case in gusty conditions. Her family had been invited a number of times to Goodwood House to walk the large park there, and she had frequently ridden a rather spirited mare through the parkland of Lavington Hall with her dear friend William, so she was not entirely unused to the great outdoors, but she did have to admit that her experiences had been rather more curated and sanitised than the wild expanse of heathland visible on all sides of the stagecoach from Whitcross.
“You’re kind, Agatha,” she said, and let the woman heft her case into the otherwise empty coach.
The thing about a tiny village was that an outsider stood out a mile, and a young lady in her mid twenties and dressed in impractical, rich green clothes, stood out like a beacon in a dark night. Everyone turned to watch her as she disembarked from the coach. At home, she had barely garnered a look from anyone. Being the centre of everyone’s curiosity there was novel and, in a word, horrifying.
She almost blurted aloud that one would think she was a revenue man come inspecting for smuggled goods, but she bit it back just in time. Cornwall’s so-called ‘free trade’ and smuggling rackets were absolutely none of her concern as an outsider, infamous though they may be, and it would do her no good to start sticking her nose where it did not belong.
The Lantern was a half-timbered, two-storey building that faced the walled harbour. Its painted sign was peeling and sun-bleached, and it squawked something dreadful as it swung back and forth in the squalling wind. Mullioned windows glinted and shimmered, though the small, diamond panes were caked with a haze of salt spray, and alongside the inn, a hand-cart rumbled down from a narrow side alley towards the harbour beyond, where fishing boats bobbed on their mooring lines at the lapping high tide.
Agatha pushed open the black-painted door but came to an abrupt halt as someone appeared to be leaving the inn at the exact same moment, and nearly barrelled into her and Nel.
“Oh, excuse me,” came a young man’s hoarse tenor, and he stepped aside within the inn’s small porch to allow the two women to enter before he left.
Nel noted briefly that he wore well-made but plain clothes, and carried a hefty looking cane in his left hand, upon which he leaned while he waited for them to pass. He was pale and thin, his undyed linen shirt hanging loosely off his shoulders, and his light brown hair was tied back at the nape of his neck into a horsetail. The moment he met her eye, he inhaled in surprise and almost immediately looked away, his large, dark brown eyes turning shy and uncertain. “M’lady,” he mumbled without looking up.
She didn’t have time to correct him and tell him she had no such title, because the moment she had stepped inside, he was off out into the day beyond, limping markedly on his right leg as he went.
Nel turned back to find Agatha waiting for her, watching. “That there was young Edmund Nancarrow,” she supplied as Nel caught up with her. “Local lad. Lots of Nancarrows in this area,” she chuckled. “Can’t move for tripping over a Nancarrow. He was a shy, skittish thing even before he went off to war in the Colonies and came back with a bad leg,” she added. “But he’s a sweetheart if ever I saw one. Tailor’s ’prentice he is now.”
At that, Nel just nodded. Something in her ached when she realised she probably wouldn’t have much to do with the folk from the village once she was ensconced up at Heath Top House, and she half wised she could. They already sounded far more interesting than the Lady Winnifred Penrose, with whom Nel had only exchanged a short flurry of letters before becoming formally engaged as her ‘companion’.
Still, an unmarried woman of Nel’s age and social standing was considered almost past her prime, and given that the few marriage proposals she had received had faded into the mists of her very early adulthood, she had had to find another respectable way to support herself. Hence, Heath Top House.
Aggie bustled her into the main room of the pub, and their arrival caused a flurry of activity that drew the eyes of a good few patrons.
Seated at the wooden bar inside, hunched over a pewter tankard, sat a tall, bulky man in his late-thirties or early forties, with long, thick, dark grey hair shot through with a shimmer of silver white. He had it tied back off his face in a low ponytail at the nape of his neck and as he turned to regard Nel’s arrival, she met unusually deep green eyes surrounded by a web of crows’ feet lines in a tanned, weathered face. His scowl was dark and full of suspicion, but even the storm clouds in his expression couldn’t mask the fact that he was handsome, in a rugged, rough-hewn kind of way.
When she saw where Nel’s attention had snagged, Aggie let out a little gasp and snatched her by the upper arm to steer her towards an empty table in a bay window, about as far from the wooden bar where the man still sat and glared at them as it was possible to be.
“And that’s Locryn Trevethan,” Aggie hissed as she saw Nel settled into a seat. “Can’t say as I’ve seen him in here more than a handful of times this year though. He’s usually out on the water. Lives alone in an old stone cottage round the bay from here, up at Pilchard Sands. You’d probably best be giving him a wide berth, miss. Not that he should give you any trouble, mind,” she amended carefully, “But he’s not for the likes of you to go mingling with.”
Nel smiled at the protective tone in the older woman’s voice, and nodded once.
With her warning given, Aggie raised her voice and called over to the old man behind the bar. “’ere, Tom! This young lady needs a ride up to Heath Top. You think you can arrange that for her?”
The stoop-shouldered, white-haired man nodded and knuckled his forehead at Nel across the space. “Not the finest, but we got a cart.”
“If you have a horse, I could ride,” she said, trying to be helpful.
“Ain’t got a saddle for a lady,” he said regretfully.
Memories of galloping through the leafy trees of Lavington Hall’s parkland with William flashed across her mind and she suppressed a smile. She certainly hadn’t ridden the grey mare side-saddle while keeping up with her childhood friend, and although it had been a year or so since she’d sat astride a horse instead of side-saddle, she thought she could manage well enough. “I know how to ride a man’s saddle,” she said, “But I do have a travel case I’d need to send someone back for.”
“I could get one of the lads to bring that up for you after,” said Tom, “But it’s almost as much effort to hitch up a cart as it is to tack up a horse for riding, ma’am.”
“Whatever is the least trouble for you will do fine,” she said, and the stoic, weather-beaten old man’s red cheeks darkened and he ducked his head.
While Tom left to sort out transportation to the house, Aggie flapped about getting some refreshments for Nel, leaving her to wait at the table alone.
In the wake of the hubbub and pother Agatha left behind her, Nel took a long, deep breath looked around to find Locryn Trevethan still staring across the room at her. Taken aback by his directness and the intensity of his glare, she tried to smile, but his expression remained thunderous beneath strong, dark brows, and she quickly looked away, embarrassed.
In a face turned to leather by the sun and sea-wind, wide cheekbones and a heavy brow framed his piercingly green eyes. Never mind that marked crow’s feet around his eyes that made him look like he would rather have been laughing; the contrast between the dark, hostile glower and the soft laughter lines unnerved her and made her feel off-balance, as though her stranger’s presence in their local pub had unknowingly raised the ire of a usually gentle man.
He had a short, neatly-trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard around full lips that were currently turned down at the corners and which bore a silver-pink scar across the middle. Despite the warm day, he wore a fisherman’s dense, woollen sweater, and when she risked another look back at him, she found him still frowning openly across the bar at her.
Nel didn’t relax until Aggie returned, at which point the man snapped abruptly out of his trance, slammed a coin down on the bar, and strode from the pub on long legs that were thick as tree trucks at the thigh. The door bounced back off the plasterwork in his wake and his boots rang on the flagstones outside.
“Not one to welcome strangers, I take it,” Nel muttered, and downed half of the cheap, watered-down wine that Agatha had set on the table for her.
“Oh don’t you pay him no mind, miss,” Aggie scoffed, settling herself down into the seat opposite her like a brooding hen and glaring at the pub door. “He don’t seem to like no one in Polgarrack save for sweet Ned Nancarrow, strangely enough. Then again, I ain’t met no one who’s taken a disliking to sweet Ned. Now, Tom will have the horse and cart ready for you in just a moment, but you just take your time and recover after your journey.”
Nel, who had felt ten times better the moment she’d taken her first proper lungful of sea air on stepping out of the swaying stagecoach, looked across the table into the older woman’s face and found a mother’s kindness and compassion in her wrinkled face, and something twisted in her gut. “You’re very kind,” she whispered, unable to muster anything more. “Thank you.”
She chuckled. “You know, and don’t you take this amiss, but you remind me of my niece a little, though she’s a little younger than you.”
Nel’s eyebrows twitched in wry amusement, and Agatha blushed at the impropriety of her words. Nel didn’t get the chance to reassure her because Tom shuffled back in and told her the cart was ready for her.
She laid a coin on the table for the wine and stood, following the innkeep out into the yard and clambering up with her case into the back of the cart. It was hardly a very dignified mode of transport for someone of her station, and when Tom said as much while they rumbled out of the inn’s yard, Nel just laughed and said she didn’t mind.
“Anything is better than that awful rolling stagecoach,” she beamed, and swung her legs back and forth like a child off the back of the cart bed while Tom clucked his tongue at the horse to hurry up.
As they trundled up the narrow, cobbled street from the harbour, they passed Edmund Nancarrow standing outside a tailor’s shop, talking with the beast of a man from the bar. Both men looked up and watched her pass like she was some kind of rare spectacle.
In a way, she supposed she was.
Still, she smiled at them despite her nerves, and Edmund knuckled a non-existent cap at her with a shy smile, while Locryn just glared.
She sighed and wondered what this next chapter in her life would bring.
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Next chapter ->
Well, what did you think of it so far? I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it, as always!
I hope you’ll consider reblogging as well as leaving a like if you enjoyed it. Take care, and I hope you have a lovely day/night wherever you are, and whenever you read this.
Original shapeshifter romance ; traditional Beauty and the Beast fairy tale elements ; Irish mythology influences ; historical fantasy ; complete
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Tumblr chapters to be added as they are posted!!
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also available on Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, Fictionpress, & Quotev ; triggers/warnings ; main character death, very mild profanity ; feel free to reblog!
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Athena Everleigh is a curious lass living in a village on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland in 1905. Nearing her sixteenth birthday, she faces a choice: to either live the life her mother prepared for her, full of magic, forests, ancient tales, and shapeshifting—or to become the rising Dublin socialite her father wants her to be. It is not until she begins working in a castle for a mysterious man that the answer becomes clear. Several weeks go by, but the longer she works for him, the more she realizes he may not even be a man at all. It turns out, he has a past all his own. And it is up to Athena to unravel it.
The Rebel Foxes is the first book I wrote under my Noah Hawthorne pen name, and this June it will be one year old. It's full of trans rage, found family, and shapeshifting queers. A blend of genres such as dystopia, dieselpunk, and paranormal romance.
Paige Reisenfeld, who also narrated Children of Iverbourne and Princess of Terra, has brought Rajni and her crew to life. The audiobook is now available on Audible, and I'm so excited to share it with you.
It's not as popular as the Levena books, but I love it just as dearly. When I wrote it, I was in a period of deep discovery which involved a lot of anger, grief, and sharp hope. If you are struggling with what's going on today, this will bring you great catharsis.
Also, there's a fun cameo at the end that connects my Iverbourne and Levena worlds to this one! Because multiverse spanning pen names are for the win.
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Welcome to the Dome, a place where flora and fauna are legends brought to life by shifters, a mutant race that the malevolent and overtly wealthy Citadel hunts down endlessly in fear of what they what do if given a foothold in society.
The Rebel Foxes are a powerful gang led by Rajni, a fox shifter hellbent on bringing down the oppressive system impoverishing and endangering humans and shifters alike. They take in those who need shelter, and give away their wealth to the poor.
Her pack is thriving and for the first time in years, they have a counter attack planned for The Hunt, a night of crime sanctioned by the Citadel. A night dedicated to flushing shifters out so anyone can murder them without the worry of standard daily limits and hunting tags.
But, all good things must come to an end, and Rajni's past catches up with her on the night of the Hunt. The human with amber eyes that once saved her life demands her help.
It’s been a while since I read anything by MJD - I think I read the first three or four in her Queen Betsy series about the accidental queen of the vampires - but I do recall enjoying her fun, lighthearted style. So when this first in a new series about the employees of a government agency protecting vulnerable shifter kids popped up for review, I picked it up for a try.
One of the things I liked best about the Queen Betsy series was the way the reader got to figure out how the vampire world worked right alongside Betsy. That doesn’t happen here and it’s a problem, because we get thrown into Annette’s world with no real introduction. She already knows almost all the principal characters, from her love interest (who she’s known two years and done nothing about their mutual attraction) to one of the two kids they have to protect. She knows all this stuff about them and we don’t, and to be honest she’s not a great narrator because she comes across extremely ADHD. She doesn’t focus on anything for more than five minutes and the constant jumps in train of thought mean the reader never gets more than a snippet or two of useful information before Annette’s off like a butterfly to the next subject which crosses her mind. Usually something to do with food.
There are some really weird bits in this book too which breach some standard conventions of fiction, like the following (copied precisely for format):
‘His monthly clothing budget was larger than her car payment. This clearly
“I’ve worn this shirt once. Once!”
wounded him deeply.’
It conveys Annette’s permanently-distracted air perfectly, but it reads super weird and it really pulled me out of the story. And it wasn’t always just used for her point of view either; I saw the exact same thing in David’s multiple times, which I think was a mistake. If it was just in Annette’s, it would have distinguished her PoV. Used for other people, it just made the writing look unedited.
Now, all this might sound like I hated the book, but I really didn’t. There were characters here I loved, like Nadia, the very British, uber-competent were-raptor, and Pat, Annette’s gender-fluid roomie, and Dev, the juvenile delinquent were-fox. They were all fabulous and I wanted Nadia especially to get her own story. The plot, once I finally worked out what was going on, was both righteous and a little tragic (and needs trigger warnings for child abuse), There’s just one sex scene, right at the end of the book, which is very hot and was pretty unexpected having got that far into it with nothing more than some heavy petting.
I’m kind of undecided about what rating to give here. There were elements I liked so much, but I actually found this really hard to read because the writing style just made it impossible for me to focus, and I do think that for the start of a series, we needed a bit more exposition before being thrown in at the deep end and having to figure out stacks of things the protagonist already knew but was too distracted to tell us. I’m giving it three stars… and as much as I enjoyed certain characters, I probably won’t be picking up book 2.
Bears Behaving Badly is available now.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley.
