“I suppose it is now,” she says quietly. When I look up, she is looking at me again, but not like she was before, like she couldn’t wait to devour me. Her eyes shine with something like admiration. “Thank you,” she says, the playful lilt in her voice gone for the moment. “Truly. You had no need to risk yourself like that for me, but I am grateful that you did. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to get out of there alone.”
I blush for a whole new reason now and go back to studying my toes. “It’s … I …” I fight the urge to fidget under her gaze. “I … didn’t want to be stuck up here alone. Without you. As, as a guide, I mean.”
“Oh?” is all she answers with. I can hear her smile as she says it. There is silence for several seconds, during which I succumb and fidget with my hands behind my back while I wait for this strange tension to pass. Then she laughs again, and it helps. “Seems I’ve charmed myself a mermaid,” she says, walking away with her clothes to the cabin.
I take a deep, calming breath and wonder if I should protest, and if doing so would be in any way helpful or convincing to either of us.
“You know it’s part magic, right?” she asks when she comes out again a moment later, leaning against the closed door. The cloth around her head and the necklace are also gone now, leaving her bandages as the only things between her and nature. “Court fae all have a bewitching aura about them we can never quite turn off.”
I slowly lower myself to the deck as I let her words sink in. “Are you saying I’m under a spell?” I ask.
“Somewhat, mayhap,” she says. “I’m not so magically adept as most, but a bit is innate.” Then, with that note of uncertainty that does not become her, “You don’t mind?”
I remember her asking me this question before, back when she had me tied and quivering to the mast beneath her touch. “Do you mind?” she had challenged with a smile, and I found to my horror that perhaps I did not. Now, out here on the open water with the gentle lap of soft waves against the keel of the ship the only sound besides our own voices, I find that my own feelings are no longer quite so terrifying. I feel calm and tranquil, more at peace at the moment even in this strange world than I remember being for a long time — except when my Captain turns her possessive attention on me and I feel something altogether different. That I would not call peace or tranquility. Bewitchment, perhaps, now that the idea has been breached. It certainly sounds more accurate.
As for whether or not I mind? Well …
“Do you still want to take me back home now?” I ask, meeting her gaze finally.
“I never wanted to,” she says carefully. “I just said I would anyway.”
“And would you still?”
“I dunno.” She narrows her gaze and quirks an eyebrow at me. “Would you would me?”
We gaze each other down for several seconds, both thinking. “My father will no doubt have started worrying about me by now,” I say. “There could be a search going.”
“Ah, right,” she says, taking her chin in her hand. “Your father the king. Hrm …”
When she says nothing else for several more seconds, I feel a sudden growing worry that she might be about to make a decision that I will not like as much as I should.
Then she says, “They left us a few scraps of parchment. Write him a letter and we’ll throw it overboard when we head that way.”
“Parchment?” I echo. Though her word choice is unfamiliar, the gist of her idea threatens to make my heart soar.
“You don’t have that down there?” she asks. “Ah, right, you wouldn’t, would you? Not for very long. Hm …”
“Like … paper?” I continue. “Like, this thin, crumbly film that dissolves into a kind of slime if touched too much?”
She laughs aloud then. Betimes her mirth irritates me, but at the moment I find it endearing. “When you talk like that, Princess, I somewhat wish I could grow a tail and see the world from your eyes. How exotic everything must be.”
I giggle. It startles me a little, which makes me giggle again.
My Captain smiles as she crosses the deck to me. “We’ll put it in a bottle,” she says, slipping her fingers into my hair. “Put your fin in with it, perhaps, or those shells you were wearing. So they know at a glance it’s from you.” Her stroking turns into a firm grip on the hair behind my head, which she tugs down to tilt my face up. “A proper ransom note. Let’s be proper pirates about it.”
I want to ask what “pirates” are, but she bends at the waist and captures my lips in hers again as her hands sink lower, exploring her new treasure. Her now-willingly stolen pearl.
And I part my lips and surrender my breath as my hands trail up her perfect, amazing legs, as strong and graceful as I hope mine may one day be.
My captor.
My Captain.
Her fingers slip lower still.
My gods ...
About the Author
D.B. Francais loves complex characters, easy banter, and kinky situations, and can be contacted at [email protected] for those who wish to send fan mail or suggestions for later episodes, discuss possible writing commissions, or just say hi.
This is the author’s first erotica book. Look for the next episode in The Queen’s Runner series, The Magic Touch, available at most online retailers. Continue reading for a preview of The Magic Touch.
If you like them, consider supporting them further through Patreon at patreon.com/queensrunner. Please feel free to leave an honest review on Smashwords or Goodreads. You can also visit them at their Facebook page. And thanks for reading.
Preview of
The Magic Touch
Episode 2 of The Queen’s Runner
To King Pontus of Proserpia, urgent
Dear Father,
Let me begin with an apology. I know I must have worried you and my siblings terribly by now, and for that I am deeply sorry. Current events have been passing strange for me lately, but suffice it to say that circumstances unforeseen have brought me for the first time to the surface, where I am experiencing many new, often wondrous events and learning quite a good deal about myself in the process.
I know what that must sound like, but please, I implore you, fret not for me or my safety. I am here now of my own will and accord, safe and unmolested, and do plan to continue as such for a while yet. Know, however, that I am free to return home whensoever I choose, and shall do so once I have seen my fill of life above water. I regret if this should cause you yet further worry, but you have my most heartfelt assurance that I am in good hands and good company. So long as it is conceivably possible, I shall not come to harm before I return to you all. What my punishment may be once I do so I leave to your wisdom.
With all my love and respect,
Lorelei,
Sixth princess of Proserpia
***
“Safe and unmolested?” my Captain’s voice mocks over my shoulder. “Lorelei, you little liar, you…”
“Relatively,” I argue with a stark blush. “And the technicalities of the matter do not merit discussion with one’s father or siblings.”
She chuckles at that, that low, throaty sound of amusement she has that makes me quiver a little inside, then wraps her arms around me from behind and slides her head over my shoulder. With a finger and a casual air of entitlement, she turns my face to hers, finding my lips with her own and letting them linger a while. Her ample chest I feel pressed warm and bare against my shoulder blades, and her free hand slips my strapless sundress down past my own small breasts before cupping one and simply holding it, firm and gentle and possessive. None of this helps with my blush, but I imagine that she realizes this even if it is not, against all prior evidence, one of the motivations for her actions.
Her hands and lips and presence release me just as my letter slips from my hands. She smiles and reaches forward, snatching it from the air before it can drift down to the deck, then spins on her heel and strides away across the ship with it. Self-consciously I adjust my dress, tugging it
back up over my now-sensitized breasts, though this is more of an affectation of normalcy than for any practical purpose of modesty; after almost two weeks of being held captive on The Queen’s Runner, there is no longer any part of me that my captor Captain Vine has not seen or felt.
These past few days especially, she has even had my permission. Not that she has ever needed or asked for it thus far. Still, she always seemed to end up with it by the end, even from the beginning, though I never actually granted it. Or not exactly. Not in the strictest sense of the word.
It is … complicated.
“‘Sixth princess?’” she asks, turning back to me and waving my letter, eyebrows raised. She still has not put her clothes back on since removing them a few nights ago to bandage her wounds, so she stands before me now wearing only her ever-present talisman of pale wood hanging on a necklace between her breasts. If she even knows what modesty means, she decided against it long before I ever met her. It does make conversation hard at times, but I am learning. “You have five other brothers and sisters?”
“No,” I say, taking my letter back, “I am the sixth princess. I have five other sisters.” Carefully, I roll the parchment into a tight cylinder and slip it into the empty bottle she’s found for me among the scant supplies left on our ship after Rockquay. “I only have three brothers.”
“Sweet Mother,” she mutters. “You sure this is even necessary, then? How are they gonna even notice you’re gone with that many of them?”
“Because I am the youngest,” I explain, sitting down beneath the mast. “I am the most pampered, the most sheltered, the least expected to do anything reckless or foolhardy. If any of my brothers or a number of my sisters were to go missing for a few days, we would assume that they have gone to explore the realm and fret not. If I am absent for even a full night, the rest of them assume — not without good reason — that I have gotten myself lost and require aid.”
“Hmm,” is the entirety of my Captain’s reply. She watches me thoughtfully for a moment, then strides purposefully toward me. I brace myself for another sudden onslaught of her spontaneous affection, but instead she leaps nimbly up over my head and scurries up the mast like a crab into its hiding hole. Left alone and un-fondled on the deck for the moment, I return to the task at hand.
There are four final components left to this package I am assembling: the two alabaster scallop shells I wore upon first surfacing, a water-proof bottle stopper to which to fasten them, a length of thin but sturdy string with which to fasten them, and my discarded fin. Captain Vine assures me that I no longer need it for any practical purpose, that I will grow a new one when I allow my legs to form back into a tail. I have decided to trust her in this; so far, at least, everything else she has told me about the world outside my scope of experience has been proven true, even a few things about myself that I did not know before our meeting.
And in any event, a fin is of little compensation on a tail without scales, and my old scales are long since lost beyond our acquisition, unfairly confiscated by the port authority back at Rockquay along with my Captain’s wardrobe, our supplies of food, and everything else of obvious value onboard that could be lifted and removed. I shall either grow everything back or none of it, logic suggests, so this one dried-up part of me does me no good either way.
I roll my fin into a loose cylinder and slip it into the bottle as well around the note, then set to tying both shells to the stopper. Hopefully, when all is done and my message is dropped into the last place where my sisters saw me, it will be recognized as a clue to my whereabouts as opposed to regular surface flotsam. It is not a brilliant plan, I realize, but I must let my family know what has become of me and that I am safe — and my only other option is to return home and inform them personally, but if I do that I am afraid I will not come back. Either Father will forbid it, and understandably so, or else I shall simply … lose my nerve. I confess I have never really had it until just recently, and I am not yet sure how confident I am in its hold. I am not yet sure of many things, not least of which that I am even here now for any good or sound reason. Captain Vine has freely admitted that part of the draw I feel toward her is sorcerous in nature, a charming enchantment innate to her people that she cannot entirely enforce or revoke. And she has offered to return me to my home of her own free will and end my bondage to her if I but choose it. And, on that note, I am technically a victim of abduction and hostage…
“Hey, Lei!” Captain calls from the rigging high above my head. “Pretty sure we’re here!”
But it is an old argument, one I have had with myself daily since this ordeal began. I am sure I will continue to have it with myself in the days to come. So far, I have managed to produce only a scant few answers to the many questions it generates. They are enough for now.
“Almost done!” I call back, tying off the last knot and sealing the bottle as my Captain descends from the ropes with all the natural grace of a bird in flight coming in to roost.
When I have answers to all of my questions, then I will carry them home with me. This is my decision, and for now I will adhere to it.
O Captain, My Captor Page 11