How Not to Date a Fae

  How Not to Date a Fae

  Stephanie Burke

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ©2020 Stephanie Burke

  BIN: 04773-01532

  Second Edition

  Formats Available:

  Adobe PDF, Epub

  Mobi/PRC

  Publisher:

  Changeling Press LLC

  315 N. Centre St.

  Martinsburg, WV 25404

  www.ChangelingPress.com

  Editor: Katriena Knights

  Cover Artist: Bryan Keller

  Adult Sexual Content

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  Table of Contents

  How Not to Date a Fae

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Stephanie Burke

  How Not to Date a Fae

  Stephanie Burke

  Deception and betrayal have driven Ario from the only home he’s ever known. He’s determined to never look back, and never use magic again -- until he gets hit with pixies, fate, and an irresistible red-headed Fae.

  Cailte was one of the Finnian army, Finn mac Cool’s right hand. Waking from his centuries-long sleep, the large warrior finds himself at the mercies of a different time -- and a man unlike any other.

  If they’re to survive, they must forge a bond strong enough to defy the gods. And Ario may discover dating a Fae isn’t so bad, after all.

  Chapter One

  Ario moaned, his head flying back, his shoulder-length black hair falling to frame his face in ebony locks of silk. Sweat lent his body a golden aura that was picked up and reflected in the light of the five candles that lit his darkened bedroom, creating a spotlight for a one-man show that no one would ever see.

  Or so he thought.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as his arousal and loneliness seemed to fill his chest. He concentrated on one and pushed the other away, his hand pulling ever more rapidly at his hot, throbbing dick, which had been in an unusual state of arousal all damn day.

  Nothing he did made his dick behave -- not the cold showers, not the hard, backbreaking labor, not the thought of all he’d left behind to venture here into the wilds. Nothing worked, so he was forced to resort to one of his most hated and beloved activities.

  A sobbing cry left his lips as he rose to his knees, his thighs spreading wide as he pounded away at his dick. He ran his free hand over his chest, pulling at his nipple rings, hissing as the small pain drove him closer to what he desired but not far enough to topple him over the edge.

  He tugged harder, almost angrily, and his dick got harder, the precum flowing more furiously, but he was no closer to release. He was almost sobbing as the tension built with no release in sight. He was afraid he would go mad before he obtained his elusive orgasm.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks, mixing and falling with the sweat that freely fell from his body as his hand released his balls -- and then it struck.

  Combined pain and pleasure, the ultimate agony mingled with the ultimate ecstasy. The electric sensation ran through his body; he lost all control and fell to the damp sheets below him. The screams that tore from his mouth were both rapturous and agonized as he sobbed out his body’s release.

  “No more,” he gasped between sobs as the sensitivity in his body began to decrease, as his screaming nerves subsided into the soreness that would plague the surface of his skin for days. “No more.”

  “No more,” a small voice promised as its owner leaned against the window. Eyes no larger than copper pennies gleamed with determination as tiny hands pressed against the glass. Then, quick as a flit, the tiny being was gone, its silvery gleam lost in the night sky, like so many dancing fireflies. It had work to do. The decision had been made.

  * * *

  “You will do this!”

  “I refuse,” Ario snarled at his laptop screen. “I have done everything that you have asked of me, and I have slowly felt my soul die.” Oddly enough, the words uttered in pain and in pleasure the night before were once again fitting. “No more!”

  “You would deny us, the Komiko of the Tagata Jinja?”

  “What have I ever denied the priests of the Tagata Jinja shrine, Grandfather? But this time you ask too much!”

  “How can we ask too much of the half-breed mongrel who owes us his life?”

  “I know what I owe you, Grandfather.” Ario closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Have you not reminded me of this every day of my miserable existence?”

  “You are a Komiko, and as such you have a duty to the bloodline --”

  “That is not my responsibility, Grandfather. As you have told me my entire life, that job falls to Tama as the respected first son of the first son.”

  And then there was blessed silence. For a moment, Ario relished it, for he knew that it would not last. “There is a problem with Tama,” Grandfather finally said.

  “What happened?” Fear sent adrenaline zinging through Ario’s blood.

  He might not be Tama’s biggest fan -- in fact, he could say that he spent more time hating his bastard of an older first cousin than anyone else at the shrine. Tama was a liar, a braggart, and the golden child of the temple. It was always assumed that the full force of the Komiko power flowed through legitimate veins.

  In legend, the Komiko was the one granted the ability to deliver true love and fertility through means of sexual contact. And the one with the fullest amount of that power was pampered, his or her virginity guarded until such time as a patron could come up with a large enough offering for the privilege of taking it. Ario, as the bastard half-breed, would never find himself in such an exalted position.

  His grandfather sighed. “The power inherent in the family bloodline may not be as strong as we thought. He is… having some difficulties.”

  “What difficulties?” Ario finally snapped, growing impatient with this conversation. “His silk underwear too tight? The gold around his neck is not pure enough?”

  “Your disrespect is not welcome.”

  “Well, excuse me, Grandfather.” He rolled his eyes as he glared at the man. “News of my cousin is not welcome. I have been banished to the other side of the country at his words, and now that I have made a life for myself, I find it hard to have any feelings for the great Komiko of our bloodline.”

  “He is impotent!” Grandfather suddenly shouted, losing his calm for a moment before he resettled into his cold, stern visage. “He is impotent.”

  “And is he blaming that one on me, too
?” Ario felt no pity.

  “That is not why I am on this cursed machine calling for you, Ario,” his grandfather shouted.

  “Then why?”

  “The family needs you. Tama needs you.”

  “For what?” Green eyes narrowed in suspicion as they stared at the old man in the computer screen.

  “To take his place and carry the family reputation until such a time that we can discover the cause of his curse.”

  “No.” Ario’s answer was direct and to the point.

  “No?” Again his grandfather was raising his voice.

  “No,” Ario repeated.

  “You have a responsibility to this family --”

  “I have no family!” Ario roared, jumping to his feet and leaning onto his desk so that he could be closer to the computer camera. “That is what you shouted at me as you cast me from your home. You disowned me, disavowed any knowledge of me, and told me that if I were to show my face again, my life would be forfeit.”

  “Perhaps I was hasty,” his grandfather allowed, trying to hide the trembling that shook his thin form.

  “Perhaps now it is too late,” Ario returned.

  “Tama has relented,” Grandfather spoke slowly, as if each word were a painful knife stab as it exited his mouth. “He has admitted that he was possibly mistaken about his claims that you assaulted him…”

  “He told you that I attempted to destroy his prized virginity.” Ario’s breathing was growing harder with every word. “And you believed every word.”

  “He -- his room was destroyed…”

  “He claimed that he fought me off, yet I had not a bruise or a blemish upon my face or body.”

  “He had never lied…”

  “He claimed that I waited in the night to harm him, yet that was the night I was with Akio.”

  His grandfather fell silent.

  “Akio heard and believed those lies, Grandfather. And my lover of three years beat me to teach me the punishment to those who flout the rules. After all this, do you actually think I would lift one finger to assist Tama or you with anything?”

  “Family honor --”

  Ario sneered. “Between Tama and you, I have nothing but what I earned with my two hands. There is nothing more that you can do to me, can threaten me with.”

  “To think I placed my trust in a mongrel like you.” His grandfather finally broke. “You are not my grandson!”

  “I learned that fifteen years ago,” Ario shot back. “And if there is nothing more, O-Tagata Jinja of the Kato line?”

  He gave an insultingly short bow as his grandfather huffed and broke their connection.

  “Fuck you, too.” Ario sighed, running his hands over his face and scrubbing them through his hair.

  Finally, he straightened his shoulders and rose from his seat. “Enough of this.” He moved toward his back deck to stare out at the cypress trees that surrounded his home.

  The odd thing was that he wasn’t sure if he should feel guilty about his lack of guilt.

  * * *

  Ario was seriously contemplating hiring some big, strong, strapping men to do the scut work on his unfinished deck.

  It had to be near the nineties, and it wasn’t even noon. Already he had stripped down to his obscenely short cut-off shorts and his work boots, and he was still suffering. There wasn’t even a breeze to cool his brow.

  He glared up at the sun before he reached for another hewn plank. According to his plans, he should have had the deck made days ago, but all those family interruptions had held him back. In a way it pissed him off, but because of his earlier training, he would never show it. It would not be civilized, and that pissed him off even more.

  “Damn Grandfather,” he muttered, dragging the plank into place and then bending to pick up his hammer.

  Thoughts of a peaceful place to sit and relax put a smile on his face as he reached into his nail pouch and pulled out another nail. It took a few taps to settle the wood into place, and then he was happily banging away. At least pounding wood dealt with the frustrations in his life.

  He was reaching for another nail when his phone began to buzz softly in his pocket. “Great. Just when I was getting into the swing of things.” He stood up and swiped the sweat from his brow, head tilted to the side as he stared at something that looked odd in the woods on his property. What the hell was that? Then he looked at the caller ID. Japan.

  “Who do they think they are?” he shouted to the heavens. “Fuck!”

  His anger and frustration boiling over, Ario gripped his phone like a baseball and, with another roar of anger, hurled it as hard as he could into the woods.

  He stood there, chest heaving, face scrunched up into an angry visage, heart pounding, when he realized that he had just tossed away his only form of communication.

  “Damn,” he snipped, before he started to laugh.

  And he laughed and laughed until the tears running down his face blended in with the perspiration pouring from him in sheets.

  “Kami-sama,” he gasped, bending over and clutching his knees as he sought some sort of balance. “I can’t believe them.”

  Swiping his hands over his eyes one last time, he rose up and looked around his land again. His. No one would ever be able to take that away from him.

  He spun around and looked at his house and relaxed more.

  It was a cream-colored affair, two stories high and with a nice sunroom built on the left side. It was nearly surrounded by the small forest, ripe with cypress trees and wonderful old oak and chestnut trees. The house sat on about an acre of cleared land that naturally blended back into the woods. There was a lake nearby, and the famed Browne’s Hill Dolmen.

  It was a nice tract of land, and aside from the few tourists who wandered by occasionally, taking delight in the wide-open fields, he was left alone.

  And he knew that if he wanted to keep it that way, he had better do something about the numerous phone calls.

  He reached for his phone, only to curse softly as he remembered that he had just thrown it into the woods in his back forty, so to speak.

  “This is why I don’t throw temper tantrums,” he grumbled to himself, stepping around the flattened land and the sand that made up the base of his wooden deck. “I hate the clean-up.”

  Despite the heat, he retrieved his damp T-shirt and donned it before venturing off into the woods where he thought his phone had landed. He sighed when the healthy canopy of leaves and branches above him blocked the sun, but relaxed more as he realized that it indeed felt magical wandering around this small forest.

  Through the breaks in the branches, yellow sunbeams highlighted pollen that looked like magical floating fairy dust, giving the place an ethereal feel. Fallen leaves cushioned his boots as he moved around his unexplored territory. The place smelled faintly of rotting vegetation and of rebirth as new shoots grew up at the base of their parent trees.

  And the sounds… He could hear the fat gurgle of the small river not far from this forest and the sounds of the returning birds chirping at each other. There was the chittering of ground squirrels and the rush of leaves as rabbits hopped away from the human presence invading their sanctuary.

  “Beautiful,” he breathed, not realizing he’d given up searching for his phone and was just wandering through the trees, looking at everything with new eyes, forgetting some of the worries that had driven him all the way to Ireland, so far from his native Japan.

  This was where he belonged, he mused, feeling more comfortable in the woods than he ever had at the temple in Japan or in either of the host clubs he’d opened up in the States before selling all but a few shares of his business and making his way here, as far away as he could get from the reach of his grandfather and the taint of his Komiko blood.

  He closed his eyes to inhale the scents of new life and rebirth, for the forest saplings and for himself, when a buzzing sounded in his ears. For a moment, he ignored the insect, his Shinto upbringing making it hard for him to want to swat th
e bug. But the small thing was just plain insistent. It buzzed around his head and over his face and finally butted him on the right cheek.

  He opened his eyes, prepared to brush away what he thought was a huge beetle, but froze when he saw a pair of human eyes glaring at him. “What the fuck?” he gasped, stumbling back a few steps as he stared in awe at the small body that floated before him.

  It was a man, a small man with a set of rainbow-hued dragonfly wings. The fact that the tiny man was totally naked escaped Ario as he stared at the small person, who seemed to be laughing at him. “F -- fairy?” he stuttered as the small man frowned.

  “The hell you say,” the creature gritted out between tiny pointed teeth. “I am a pixy and proud of it. We drove those awful fairies out of our land centuries ago.”

  The voice was small, like the body it came from, but it was a rich, masculine sound.

  “P-pixy?” It was almost too much to be believed. But then Ario was supposedly descended from gods and had the power to grant erections with his touch. “Shouyousei?”

  It circled around him twice, leaving a trail of glittering dust in its wake. “You are male?” it asked, wrinkling its nose.

  “Of course I’m male,” he snapped, the perceived insult rankling.

  “You have the form and figure of a female. Are you sure?”

  “I am thin!” Ario rolled his eyes, tired of hearing the same old lines even if they were coming from this small magical being. “But I am a man.”

  “And you are rather pretty.”

  Ario snorted. “Have you seen your reflection, Shouyousei? You look like a very small female.”

  In response the fairy grinned and pointed down to his bare crotch. “Don’t think so, pretty boy. All one hundred percent pure male pixy. Though if all the males now look like you, I can see why you were confused.”

  Ario blinked at that. Snark from a miniature male. It was unique.

  “You speak oddly,” the pixy said.