She looked around when she’d settled and saw that most of the party had already formed up. Kadin looked at her, flicked a look at Hauk and then turned his attention to the warriors at the back.
Emma felt a little snubbed that he didn’t smile at her, but it did occur to her that she’d noticed they weren’t prone to smiling in greeting like she was used to.
So—he didn’t frown. Maybe she was reading too much into it?
She recalled what Hauk had said down by the stream and wondered if there was any possibility that he was at least interested in her, but she couldn’t think of anything he’d said or done that seemed to support that. Granted he had always been courteous and polite and protective of her, but she’d thought that was just his personality.
Like Gaelen and Hauk were.
They were well mannered, kind people.
Of course she had wanted it to be at least a little more than that, especially when they were forced to ‘breed’. It made her feel better to think they at least felt attracted to her if they were going to be that intimate.
Well, and she liked them and that was part of the reason she wanted to think they liked her. It honestly hadn’t occurred to her to think, or hope, they would feel anything stronger than that. She couldn’t possibly be more different from the women they were used to.
Of course ditto for her.
They were different from every man she’d ever known in so many ways it didn’t bear counting.
Oddly enough, though, she thought that was why she liked them so much—because they were night from day different from the men she’d known. They were so gallant, and respectful, and well mannered. They never made nasty, disgusting remarks around her or did anything nasty and disgusting. They were neat and clean and had always gone out of their way to protect her when they didn’t even know her. That was hero quality in her book, not just brave.
She was attracted to them on a pure physical level, too.
She honestly thought any woman would have to be off her rocker not to see how strong and manly and well built and purely handsome the three of them were—alien or not.
She damned sure hadn’t run into many men that were built as well as they were—strong and hard muscled without them being bodybuilding nuts more interested in their own beautiful selves than any woman.
In fact, just about the only men she’d ever known that were really interested in taking care of themselves were more interested in other men than women. The rest of them just wanted to ‘be themselves’ and be wanted.
And, unfortunately, they still managed to catch a woman most of the time because women were so desperate for a man they’d put up with all sorts of shit just to have a little help and company.
It was shame nothing could come of her having a crush on any of them, but she was no royal person and she was pretty sure they were expected to marry other royal people.
Just supposing they actually married or had a custom similar to that.
Besides the fact that she’d been used as a breed mare and they all knew she’d screwed Kadin and Gaelen. Men were so territorial they would never have a woman like that and she thought it was probably the same here.
And she was pretty sure, now, that it had ‘took’.
One anyway.
And she had no clue of which one.
Which was another thing ….
No point in thinking about it. None. If that idiot Valee thought the guys had a thing for her—well, she might be right, but only in the sense that they were probably interested in screwing her and she wasn’t convinced there was even that much interest.
On their part.
For her part, she was very interested. She’d never, ever, had a lover that even began to compare to any one of them in any way.
Well, she hadn’t slept with Hauk, but he was the best kisser she’d ever met in her life.
Except for Gaelen and Kadin who were close enough it was hard to grade them—Like on a scale of one to ten they were all fifteens.
“You are thinking very hard about something,” Hauk said, breaking into her thoughts abruptly. “I do hope it is not something drastic concerning Valee.”
Emma jumped, feeling her face redden as she whipped a self-conscious look at him.
His lips twitched as he studied her face. “Hmmm—I am thinking mayhap it had nothing to do with Valee after all.”
“Why would you say that?” Emma said quickly.
He grinned. “The guilty start. Somehow your expression suggested … something a bit less violent.”
Emma felt her face grow so heated, sweat broke from her pores.
Hauk laughed outright at that. “You must never play games of chance, dear heart. You are very bad at hiding the things you feel.”
Emma didn’t know how to respond to that but, as it happened, Valee created a disturbance that completely distracted everyone when she let out a furious scream barely five seconds after that exchange and came boiling out of the curtained window of the speti. “Stop! I have to get out! Stop! Now! He puked on me!”
“Uh oh,” Emma murmured. “I was afraid it probably wasn’t a good idea to feed him in that thing. Poor baby. Help me down! I should go get him and change him.”
Hauk flicked a suspicious look at her, but he could see she was worried about Nye, who was screaming louder than Valee by that time.
The troupe came to a halt.
Valee half climbed half fell out of the speti in her rush to escape the mess—most of which she appeared to be wearing.
Kadin plucked Nye from the speti and then held him at arm’s length when the smell hit him.
Emma slipped down the side of the beast with Hauk’s help and rushed over to take the baby, who thankfully began to quiet as soon as he saw her.
She cuddled him, rocking him and trying to quiet him.
“I need a bath!” Valee demanded.
“There is no place for bathing here,” Gaelen growled. “You will have to suffer the smell until we reach the sea tonight.”
“You can say that when you are not wearing puke!” Valee shrieked at him.
One of the escorts volunteered his water skin so she could bathe off. Instead of thanking him, she snatched it out of his hand and stalked to the beast carrying her belonging to search for a change of clothing.
Emma carried the baby back to Hauk and took the water skin he offered her and then settled to bathe Nye off. Fortunately, most of the mess seemed to have landed on Valee. He needed a change because he’d soiled himself and been left in it, but she saw he would be fine with just being wiped down.
Valee used the entire contents of the water skin and changed every article of clothing and still bitched the rest of the day that she could smell the stench on her skin.
“I hope it was just the rocking and a full stomach,” Emma said worriedly, checking Nye for fever every half hour or so.
Chapter Nineteen
They lost so much time doing clean up that it was full dark by the time they reached the shore. It was brightly lit, however, by the huge moon hanging in the sky and two tiny ones further out.
Emma thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen and that she was never going to get used to seeing such things.
There wasn’t a sign of a boat as far as the eye could see, but the party halted and dismounted and the warriors began unpacking the animals and placing the packs on the beach.
Expecting them to begin to set up the tent and build a campfire soon, Emma took the baby down to the beach to clean him up.
He got more excited the closer they got to the water until he was virtually bouncing up and down and she was having a hard time holding him. Emma had never seen him so excited. Torn between irritation that he was bouncing so hard she was afraid she was going to lose her grip on him, fond amusement, and uneasiness, she laughed a little nervously. “My goodness we’re excited about bath time tonight,” she murmured as she knelt in the sand and sat him down to strip his clothes off.
He
kept trying to get free of her, kicking and squirming, making Emma more uneasy. Every time she let go of him, he dove toward the water’s edge, trying to scramble across the sand to reach it before she could stop him until her nerves were frayed. “Behave yourself! You can’t get in. It’s too dark already. I’d never be able to find you again.”
Despite every effort to hold him, he managed to get loose as soon as he got slippery wet and moved like greased lightening toward the water. Emma screamed his name, racing to catch him, falling flat, scrambling on her hands and knees in an effort to catch up to him before he could get to the water and he still managed to reach the water. Not just reach it, but caught a wave and disappeared beneath the surface.
Pure terror gripped her.
She raced to catch him while she still had some hope of seeing him in the darkness. “Nye! Nye! Oh my god, Nye!”
She was hardly aware of the stampeed of feet as the men charged toward her in response to her screams of distress.
“What is it?”
“What happened?”
She was crying so hard she could hardly speak, scrambling around on her hands and knees feeling the ground beneath the water. “He got loose! I can’t see him! He got into the water!”
“He is fine,” Kadin said. “Nye! Come back. Now! You upset your mother!”
“You see him?” she asked hopefully.
“Kadin is right,” Gaelen said. “He is fine.”
Emma wasn’t fine. She was confused and terrified.
Abruptly Nye’s little head surfaced and he swam toward her, grinning ear to ear.
Emma swooped on him immediately, scooping him up and clutching him thankfully. Nearby she heard a derisive female laugh.
“Dat fool tink he sink in de water? He Hirachi, idiot!”
Emma turned to look at the woman blankly, still too upset to fully grasp what she’d said.
Nye pushed away from her and bellowed at the woman.
As if a giant invisible hand had slapped her, she flew up from the ground and backward so hard and fast it flung her arms and legs forward so that she flopped like a ragdoll.
It hit Emma instantly that Nye had done it—just as he had tried to do when the men had caught up with them and she thought they were a threat.
“Oh my god! Is she hurt?” she gasped as she saw Gaelen and Hauk crouch beside Valee to examine her and then, thankfully, help her up.
Emma caught Nye’s face. “Baby, did you do that?” she whispered.
He turned to look at her steadily and then reached up and patted her cheek. Not just patted, touched. ‘Wub mama.’
Emma heard it as if he’d spoken out loud. In fact, she thought he had spoken just at first. “I love you, too, baby, but you mustn’t do something like that again. Ok? You could have hurt her really bad. And that’s a no no.”
‘Bad woman.’
She kissed his cheek. “Stupid woman—not worth the trouble, ok? She didn’t hurt me. I know you think she did, but she didn’t.”
He looked confused, but he merely turned and gave the woman an angry look.
Emma turned her head to look at the princess, too.
She looked so shook up Emma actually felt sorry for her.
For a couple of seconds.
“She told him to do that!” Valee screamed furiously.
“I didn’t!” Emma gasped. “I would never tell my baby to do anything bad.”
“She did no such thing!” Kadin growled almost before she’d gotten her denial out. “You did that. You frightened the baby and he reacted.”
Emma glanced around the group uneasily, wondering how many of them believed the lie Valee had told. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell anything from their expressions.
She was responsible, she thought guiltily. She hadn’t made any secret of the fact that she disliked Valee intensely and she was pretty sure that was fairly well known.
If she was in trouble, she’d done it to herself.
She just wished she had some idea whether or not she was in trouble.
Yes—if Valee had anything to do with it.
Thankfully, instead of arguing further, Valee stalked off—straight into the water.
Emma stared, waiting for her to reappear, struggling to regulate her breath and heartbeat.
She knew Gaelen was a water person. She’d accepted that, or thought she had, long since, but it was an entirely different thing to say this is so and to see it. A few minutes behind Valee, the warriors that had escorted them followed suit. Grabbing the supplies they had lined up along the beach, they headed out into the water and soon disappeared, as well. When they had disappeared into the sea, Emma finally looked around. She discovered then that she and Nye, Gaelen, Kadin and Hauk were all that were left.
Kadin spoke when she turned around.
“A conveyance was constructed to carry the royal family when they learned that the High King and his family would come since the Queen Mother was not of this world and not of the sea and the infant was deemed too young for such a long trek. They are bringing it now to carry you to the king’s capitol city.”
Under the sea.
The Hirachi were air breathers, though.
It was strange to think they lived in the sea. That had never occurred to her at all. She supposed it should have, but it hadn’t.
“Hirachi hab no libed in de sea for … long time, many ….” He stopped and asked Kadin something. “Genrations. Den de Sheloni come an take de young and many times kill oldest and youngest. De Hirachi moob back to de sea den.”
Emma stared at him—not because she had trouble following. She’d gotten so used to his broken English she hardly noticed it anymore.
It was the history he’d told that made her stare, that made her stomach knot with empathy.
The Sheloni had been preying upon them so long that they’d had to move back into the sea to protect themselves!
And even that hadn’t stopped it.
Because they were air breathers, land dwellers.
It made her so sad for them she felt like crying.
And angry, too.
Those bastards needed killing!
They had robots and that meant they had the technology to do what they needed to to support their civilization! There was no excuse for preying upon other people!
“We’ll get them,” she told Gaelen. “Teach them they can’t get away with preying on other people, destroying their lives.”
He gave her a strange look she had trouble interpreting and then gathered her and Nye into his arms and hugged them. When he set her away, he lifted a hand to stroke her cheek. “Yes. We do dat.”
The slap of water against something solid distracted both of them and they turned to watch as about a dozen warriors emerged from the sea guiding a lozenge shaped object. It looked a lot like a small submarine.
Emma had mixed feelings about that.
It was reassuring on a lot of levels.
And still unnerving.
She’d never been in a submarine—never been underwater in anything where she would only have that between her and … well, death.
Nye patted her. She doubted it was for reassurance, but it was love and her baby was from this place she was going to and needed to go there. So she straightened her back and ignored the fears hammering at the fringes of her mind and got in when they opened the door for her.
The interior was a surprise. It was softly lit with something. She wasn’t certain what. The light seemed to be more of a glow than centralized anywhere, dim, but bright enough to see the interior.
There was a crib like thing in the back—and a bottle waiting for baby!
The forward area was mostly filled with a very large lounging seat rather like a day bed.
She was told there were facilities in the rear.
Oh my! Facilities! Yay!
She headed to the crib to grab the bottle as the carriers closed the hatch and then settled near the arm end of the lounge.
Movement was a bi
t bumpy at first since the men carried the thing into the water and the waves washing onto shore battered it until they were completely submerged. Emma’s fear level leapt to high alert and stayed there until the smoother movements began to lull her.
She was still tense as she settled to feed the baby, but cuddling him was comforting, watching him eat, and then dosing off.
He was so sweet when he was asleep! Like a little angel. Not that he wasn’t a sweet child at all times! But the calmness of sleep just emphasized his sweetness and innocence.
“Let me take him and settle him,” Hauk said.
Emma shook her head. “It’s hard to settle him without waking him. I’ll do it.”
He looked doubtful, but he just helped her up from the lounge and steadied her. Nye shifted and complained a little when she put him in the crib but the gentle rocking of the pod seemed to soothe him and he settled after a few moments.
Hauk was standing at a porthole Emma saw when she turned. She studied him for several moments and finally approached him.
He surprised her by gathering her into a light embrace with her back against his chest so that she could look out, as well. One big hand settled on the slight roundness of her belly, almost as if he knew there was a child nestled there.
It made her uncomfortable since there was no doubt it wasn’t his.
“You did not ask if I was enamored,” he said, referring to the conversation they had had regarding Valee and the motives for her maliciousness.
Emma twisted her head to look up at him, studying him. Because she had thought it very unlikely that he thought of her that way at all. “Are you?”
“I think it was the stick,” he said pensively.
Emma’s mind went blank. “The stick?”
“When we had chased you from the house and you snatched up that rotted branch and waved it at us as if it was a sword.”
Emma felt her face redden. “And that was all it took and you were … uh … smitten?”
“Pretty much,” he said, chuckling wryly. “Of course there was the fact that you made my dick hard the moment I saw how beautifully you were made—that was the finest ass I’d ever seen cutting across the back lawn—and your pretty face made my mind go blank. Eyes wide as saucers in fear, face pale as death, and determination in every line of your jaw. I knew in that very moment that I wanted you for my own.”
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