The Warrior's Mate by Susan Trombley

Author:Susan Trombley [Trombley, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Theresa

We left the following day for Tirel’s tribal lands, riding from the hotel in a ground skimmer that zoomed over the streets beneath the pedestrian promenades to the edge of the city, where air traffic was permitted again and we caught a shuttle to take us the rest of the way out into the rural area.

I snuggled against Tirel, tired from the night before, which I’d spent with Tarin instead of my mate, because I felt like she needed the company, and I would have a lifetime to make love to Tirel. I had no idea how long Tarin would be content to remain on Akrellia, even though Tirel and Sorela had offered her a home on their tribal lands.

I wanted her to stay, and for the moment, she was willing to, though like me, she was homesick and missed her family. We both knew from previous experience that we couldn’t go home again and just pick up where we’d left off. This time, we’d made a conscious decision to leave Earth, aware that we might never see our families again.

I only wished Tarin’s experience had as happy an ending as my own. I wished Halian hadn’t been the bastard he’d turned out to be, and I could only hope she would find it in her to let him go and forget about him.

She wasn’t oblivious to the many attractive Akrellian males that surrounded us, but she kept insisting they were “too alien” for her taste.

I knew better. I suspected it was more that Tarin was afraid to open herself up to yet another bad choice. She was certain she was cursed, and that every man she met would turn out to be an abusive bastard, just like her real father had been, before he’d had the good manners to die in a drug overdose, freeing her and her mother from his reign of terror, but unfortunately, not freeing the egg donor from her own addiction that put Tarin in foster care.

Tarin’s adoptive parents were absolute angels, especially considering the early life she’d had, but it hadn’t been enough to save her from her past. She kept searching for the “right” man by attracting all the wrong ones. Something about her seemed to make her vulnerable to them, and I worried that she was looking for the wounded, dangerous types because she thought she could fix them—the way a tortured and traumatized child had tried to “fix” her biological parents so they could be a “real” family.

Halian was gone, but his influence could still be felt in Tarin’s behavior. She’d fallen hard and very fast, and it wasn’t surprising, because he had been truly gorgeous in a way that was the human “ideal,” with a face that was so stunning it seemed unreal. He’d had the ethereal beauty of a male fae or a fantasy elf, and the wings had certainly added to that aesthetic. For Tarin, who’d always lamented about being plain and overweight and therefore invisible to men, his focused attention on her had seemed heady and dreamlike—like a fairytale come true.

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