I lounge near the water’s edge with Ranan’s arms around me. We pick idly through the riches we stole from the slavers, but I’m more concerned with the poor souls we rescued. My husband’s chin rests on my head and we watch as they ravenously tear through our stored supplies that we’d given them, eating everything down to the old, dry bits of fish jerky.

“I don’t think they were fed on those ships,” I tell my husband as his fingers stroke along my arm. “You’re going to have to fish tomorrow to feed all these hungry bellies.”

“I can do that.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “Did you have fun today? You were very convincing.”

“A lot of fun. It occurs to me that we don’t need this gold nearly as much as our new friends do.” I point at the rescued slaves. “The fun is in the stealing anyhow.” After seeing all the riches that pour in from our piracy, I’m less excited about pretty, sparkly things. It’s more fun to give them away to others and to watch them light up with delight. I’ve got a few particularly jade-encrusted pieces I’ve kept aside for Balo. It’s become a tradition for him to give me jewels with rubies and for me to give him jade or emerald. It started when he joked that the red gems matched my hair, so I gave him green for the same reason. Never mind that we both have the same hair color.

The flotilla probably thinks all humans are as silly as the two of us when we get together.

“You want to give all our ill-gotten goods to the slaves?” He just chuckles. “If we keep doing that, my lovely wife, we’re going to be the poorest pirates in all the seas.”

I snuggle in his arms, loving that I’m cocooned in his embrace. There’s nothing quite like a four-armed snuggle to make you feel truly safe. “You’re just annoyed I suggested it before you did.”

“Not annoyed.” He nips at my ear and then notices the big ruby I’m still wearing on my finger. He picks up my hand and admires the ring. “You keeping this one?”

I muse as I admire Lady Dywan’s ring on my finger. “I might. It’s a good reminder.”

“Of what?”

I turn to gaze up at my husband. Five years together, and I never grow tired of looking at him. The proud sail atop his head is a little taller, his cheeks a little leaner, but otherwise he’s as hard and unyielding-looking as the day I met him. Ranan still misspeaks from time to time, but I’m confident in my place at his side, and we’re able to laugh off the worst of it. “It reminds me that pretty words are nice, but sometimes you’re better off picking the sea monster.”

“I’ll show you sea monster, wife,” he snarls, and then tickles me ferociously.

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Author’s Note

Hello there!

Boy, I bet you thought this book was never going to come out! ME TOO FRIEND, ME TOO. Just kidding…sort of. Here’s the thing, I always say that every book wants to be written the way it needs to be written, and every book is different. Most of the time my process is very streamlined. I come up with an idea. I sketch it out and have the idea for a few scenes and where they go from there. I start working on it and rip through the outline until the story is more or less finished.

(There’s a few books here and there that I pick at slowly over time, but 80% of them are drafted from start to finish as the main book on my plate.)

I came up with the concept for this story in 2022 and created my working file then. It was the collision of a few things that interested me at the moment. I was on a huuuuge Trojan War reading kick for a while and I liked the idea of following what happened to one of the women that gets enslaved once the city is taken. Men make the wars but the women were the ones that suffered, and nothing good happened to the women of Troy.

That, and there was a discourse about heroes with two penises in romance. Is two too much? Should he use both? Why or why not? And because I like to challenge myself, I came up with the following plot:

A — Enslaved heroine is desperate to escape her circumstances

B — Big scary sea ogre

C — She decides that the devil she knows is the best and begs to go with him and says she will do ANYTHING.

D — He surprises her with two penises

E — Sex???

As you can see, this is clearly an award winning outline. Clearly. Immediately, though, I ran into problems. I liked Vali. I liked Ranan and his dorky, awkward self. I did not like the power dynamic between them. In my head, this would be a short, smutty story about a girl that gets dicked by a sea-ogre and everyone walks away happy. But I couldn’t get past that power dynamic between them. The whole master/slave thing was killing my lady-boner. How can she possibly be happy with him when he holds all the power and she doesn’t? How is that a happy ever after?

So I put this aside and thought on it for a while. And then Bull Moon Rising needed to be written. And so did a few other books. Once I cleared the decks a bit, I picked this story up again and ran into the same problem, and it’s one that Ranan asks himself through the whole story. How can you know Vali is really happy if she’s used to suppressing how she feels to please the person in charge?

I had to give Vali some power and agency. I wounded Ranan and put his life in her hands. I made them go to his family and had Vali become aware that she didn’t need him. That she could survive and thrive without him. At the end of the day, I was a lot happier with how things turned out. I like to imagine these two pirating their way across the rocky shores, robbing people left and right.

Oh! And for those wondering about Akara, I gave a lot of thought to her, too. If a turtle never submerges, how does she feed? I like to think of her like a basking shark, getting her nutrients from invisible plankton in the waters. She would have the large, terrifying looking mouth that strains things, which would only add to the visual terror of an enormous turtle. Now with scary gaping mouth! But I like to imagine Akara just drifting her way through life, tired of other people’s bullshit…hence her need to go solo.

(Me too girl, me too.)

I hope you enjoyed this story!

— Ruby Dixon

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Want More?

Want more to read? I have a very large backlist in Kindle Unlimited! Here are a few suggestions of things you might like if you enjoyed this story!

The main Aspect & Anchor series

Bound to the Battle God

Sworn to the Shadow God

Wed to the Wild God

Stand-alones in the A&A universe

The Half-Orc’s Maiden Bride

The King’s Spinster Bride

Servant to the Spidae

Stand-alone fantasy romance (not KU but still fun)

Bound to the Shadow Prince

(no relation to A&A series)

Bull Moon Rising

Enjoy!

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