Page 116 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

She smiled back. “I was thinking respectable merchants. We could go all over, really. We could sail the seas.”

His eyebrows shot up. “We could go east, see the eastern dragons.”

“We could indeed, my lord.”

He bent down and kissed her. “You’d have to stop calling me that. I would not be a lord anymore.”

“And I wouldn’t be a warrioress,” she said, curving a hand around the back of his neck.

“I do like it,” he said. “I like the idea.”

“We could come back, you know,” she said. “We could come back, briefly, look in on our mothers and then—”

“Leave again,” he said. “And it would be you and me, and we could be together, and we would be on the ocean, and no one could stop it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it might be a dangerous life.”

“Well, I’d have you around to save my life, would I not?”

“Just so, my lord. My… Iahir.”

He kissed her again. “A ship is quite a lot of coin, Gathren.”

“Too much?”

“I guess I’d best go back, then, and make up with Kinsahad, speak to my father, and find some way to finagle it all. Since I have been disgraced with killing the High King, maybe it will not be difficult to convince my father that a little time on a ship, away from the country, would be warranted, however.”

“This is something you think you could do?”

“Oh, yes, I’m very good at getting money,” he said. He got up off the bed. “I can’t entirely say how long it will take, however. It might be weeks. Can you stay here, in this house, so I know where to find you?”

“I do not see why not,” she said. “No one has bothered me thus far, and I have been here for nearly a week.”

He ran a hand through his hair, gazing down on her with a besotted expression on his face. “You’re very brilliant, and very beautiful, and you have perfect breasts, and I don’t know how I got so lucky.”

“You’re very beautiful, too,” she said.

“I’m your golden plaything,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at her. “And I need to provide the gold, don’t I?”

“You have your uses,” she said.

He kissed her again, hard.

Then he was gone, and she rolled over in the bed and hugged a pillow and dared—for the first time in a very long time—to hope for the future.

EPILOGUE

GATHREN GRIPPED HER sword and pressed her back into Iahir, keeping her eyes on the goblins who were closing in on the two of them. There had to be at least twelve of them.

“You take those ten, and I’ll get the other two,” said Iahir, and she could hear he was swinging his blade.

“Always the way with you, my lord,” she gasped. “Leaving most of the work to me.”

“I can’t help it. I’m so very, very delicate, as you know,” he said.

It was dark, which wasn’t helping when it came to fighting off goblins. The ship was there, off the coast, and they had to get to their boat to row out, but they couldn’t very well get there if the goblins were blocking their way, could they?

She thrust with her sword, getting one of the goblins in its shoulder and it shrieked.