His fuzzy pajamas are green, contrasting beautifully with his red skin. Quintin has arranged a meal for us at my table near the window. I look out onto the night sea, a shiver going down my spine as I remember the Bashesda attack. Uri lights a fire in the hearth and I open the patio door to let in the night air.
We sit together at the table and enjoy a late-night feast of fried gow legs, puffed-cheese, sea green salad, and spiced merrow wine.
Gigi bounces over to me and I invite her up. My little puffkin jumps quickly, taking her place in my lap. Taking care of Gigi has been hard with all my mates vying for attention.
“I didn’t know you had a puffkin,” Uri says.
“I have Quintin walk her. It’s been hard for her with me being away so much. I’ve been so distracted with all my mates and everything happening around the palace.”
“I want to make up for that,” Uri says, sitting back in his chair and taking a long sip of wine. “I haven’t been myself.”
“You more than compensated by saving my life on the beach.”
“You would have been fine,” he says dismissively.
“I doubt it,” I mutter.
“You did completely freeze up like a scared gow doe.”
“Don’t rub it in,” I whine.
Uri chuckles and Gigi jumps from my lap and onto his.
“That’s Gigi,” I say. “She likes you.”
“I love puffkins. I have a bullkin named Maxxus at home. Gigi is a minikin, isn’t she?”
“Yep. You should bring Maxxus here,” I suggest, feeling warm and happy.
“He’d eat little Gigi alive,” he says in a baby voice, scratching her chin.
“On second thought,” I giggle, “maybe not.”
“In all seriousness, dear Joon, I want to make amends for my behavior. I know how important your work is to you. What can I do to help?”
“Well, honestly, just not starting fights every day would be a good start.”
“Done.”
“And you can walk Gigi if you want. Give you a little puffkin bonding time.”
“Ha. Yeah, that sounds fun,” he says, petting little Gigi.
Gigi’s tongue lolls and her bright eyes seem to cross as Uri runs his big hand over her body. It’s funny; that’s exactly what he does to me.
Chapter 27
I have something special to share with you,” I tell my mates, lifting a glass of spiced merrow wine. “My brother Sysko and I have made a huge breakthrough. Thanks to Donte's help in getting into the library of Remotis, we were able to find important information in an ancient book of mythology. This discovery could prevent the demise of our species. And possibly cure the plague.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Mika asks.
“For now, let's just focus on our dates. Everything is going better than expected,” I say. “Now everyone can relax and eat their morning meal.”
I take a sip of black tea and devour my gow cheese and starfruit pastries. I'm dressed in a sleek blue jumpsuit and nano sandals that I chose specifically for my date with Reese. I’m hoping he’ll take me for a swim.
“Did you sleep well, my Queen?” he asks me.
“I did. Very well. What do you have planned for us today, Reese?” I ask him.
“I want to take you to my home on Umbria.”
“I thought we already saw that.”
“That was my parents’ home, the royal palace. I want to show you my own palace.”
“I can't wait to see it,” I say with a smile.
The last time we were together was so unexpectedly erotic, it makes my lady parts quiver to think about.
I bid my mates farewell, and Reese and I depart for Umbria. We ride in Reese's luxury speeder, breaking through the atmosphere of Arcadia. It is good to get away for a break that doesn't have anything to do with my research. I need a break. I need to clear my head and think about something else.
The work before me will be arduous and challenging. The shipment of physical human genetic material will not arrive for a few days and when it does, I will be consumed by experiments.
I try to push thoughts of my work from my mind as we break through the atmosphere of Umbria and dive into the ocean. Reese looks over at me, with a bright smile on his face, and takes my hand in his.
He is so sweet and sensitive. My other mates are all very masculine males. Even Mika was an athlete on the air spree team for the Academy of Bones. My Poet Prince, while obviously a strong enough fighter to hold his own against Uri, doesn't have those stereotypical markers of masculinity. But that isn't what I want from him. What I want is to connect with him for who he really is. To see inside his soul and to find ourselves together, in the most honest and whole way we can.
Some would say that my scientific obsession and my drive to find a cure is not exactly a feminine quality. Especially now that women are being cloistered more and more every day. Many families restrict their girls’ activities. Luckily for me, my parents did not. I can't even imagine who I would be without my work.
I long for Reese’s touch and the tenderness inside him. I want to go to that deep and passionate place we shared the last time we were together. I hunger for the soul connection Reese evokes with me.
We dive below the waves and continue on for several leagues until we come to a cave inside a wall of blue coral. We continue into the cave and turn several corners.
A crystal palace juts up from inside the coral reef. Lights shine inside the dome, illuminating the entire reef. Reese hurries for the porthole and enters a password to open the hatch. We zoom inside and the hatch closes, depressurizing the space. After the water drains, the second hatch opens, allowing us inside.
We land in front of the palace and exit the speeder. Under the crystal dome, his front garden. The air is so still under the small glass dome, I look around, feeling the damp atmosphere. My inner dragon breathes out a puff of icy air.
A robot rolls out of the palace and greets us. Reese instructs his robot butler to prepare a meal of fresh fish over a fire. We walk hand-in-hand into Reese’s home.
“You live here by yourself?” I ask him.
“I do, indeed,” he says. “I come here when I need to get away from my family and contemplate my life. This is where I do my best work.”
“I've read most of your poetry in the pages of Bone and Ash,” I tell him.
“You have?”
“Who hasn't?”
“None of those words can compare to what it is to be mated with you, dear Joon,” he says, turning to me and taking my hands.
He holds them to his chest as we stand in the front hallway. The foyer rises into a three-story domed ceiling that looks out onto the sea above. Lights sparkle all around us.
“We will take our meal by the pool,” he says. “I want to show you something special.”
We take an antigrav lift to the second floor and emerge into a hallway lined with modern art and stained-glass sculptures. Stepping through a sliding door, we walk into a massive pool room. There is a large circular pool on the glass floor. Above the pool is a circular hatch that is the same size as the pool.
“What is this?” I ask, examining the strange pool.
“You’ll see. But first let us enjoy our meal.”
There's a table set for two by a window that overlooks a garden with the glass dome wall beyond. Creatures flit by in massive schools in vibrant pinks, yellows, neon green, and purple. We sit at the table and I nibble on the ocean delicacies grilled over an open fire. When we finish, Reese rises and takes my hand.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say, as we begin toward the pool.
We step inside and the water is cool and buoyant with salt. Reese gathers me in his arms as we stand in chest deep water. As he kisses me, I feel him blow air into my mouth. I take his air down into my lungs as the glass tube descends over the pool. Water rushes up around us, and I shriek as it reaches my neck.
“Don’t worry, you can breathe in the water.”
I gasp as the water covers my mouth, taking it into my lungs. Water fills the tube, and I hold Reese’s hand, remembering the royal water dragon’s ability to fill another’s lungs with a special gas that allows for a short period of underwater breathing.
“Come,” he says, under the water.
He pushes upward, his nanotech clothes disappearing as his tail emerges from his body. We swim through the tube, emerging at the top of his dome, and swim through a water leveling chamber and emerge in the reef.
The beautiful sea life swims all around. The tendrils of jellyfish flutter on the ocean currents as they swim past. My heart is pounding like crazy, still stunned that I can breathe underwater.
Reese uses his powerful tail to swim us over the reef and down into the trenches with the fish. He gathers me in his arms as wisps of sea light lichen glow around us. We kiss passionately as Reese’s tail treads water.
He pulls my legs around his waist and I can feel the full length of his cock under me. His hands grasp my behind, as we float weightless over the reef. I can see the surface of the water, not far overhead. Sunlight streams down onto the blue towers of coral all around.
I am surprisingly at ease and completely turned on as Reese holds me in his arms. I dematerialize my nanotech outfit, and it recedes into my wrist com.
What felt like a spongy, moist pad before has now extended into a full-sized phallus. Reese rubs me up and down on it, our desire twisting around us like the schools of yellow gill fish swimming through the coral trenches.
He slips inside me, activating every pleasure button on my body as his wet, vibrating base connects with my core. I gasp in the water, bubbles floating to the surface.
His hands hold me tight as he uses his powerful tail to thrust into me as we float in the water. I arch my back, and let my arms float out to the sides. I gaze at the surface light streaming down around us. Reese takes my body in a swirling rush of blinding light. I climax magnificently and repeatedly, letting go of so much pressure as Reese holds me weightless in the ocean.
He kisses me again, blowing more air into my lungs as he grows thick. He explodes inside me with a burst of heat. It feels like a firehose inside me. The force of it shoots me into another orgasm.
I groan and hold his shoulders, taking all of it. Reese pulls me to him, holding me tight as our hearts beat against each other’s chests.
After a moment, we begin to swim back to his palace. When we emerge from the pool holding hands, I feel as if I’ve been cleansed in some way.
“You have a way of getting me out of my head and bringing me into your world,” I say, toweling off by the pool.
“I will always be there to remind you of our world, my lady,” Reese says, kissing the back of my hand.
I watch him reconstitute his clothing, smiling as I take a nibble of sea foam sweets. I sigh, happy, knowing that he will.
We spend the rest of the day at Reese’s palace, exploring the rooms and changing our costumes to pretend we live in different times. We create entire playful scenarios, taking on characters from our imaginations.
Play acting with Reese lets me pretend to be someone else for a while. Someone without the pressure of the world on her shoulders. We sleep in his big pillow bed with the view of the ocean above us. I rest on his chest, feeling his precious heartbeat.
I want to stay here with him and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. This is how I always feel with Reese. As I drift off to sleep, I let go of my guilt. Tonight, I find a slice of peace in the storm. Tomorrow, I return to my life above the surface, and stand up against the horrors that would destroy us all.
Reese kisses my forehead, and I let go, falling into a blissful and dreamless sleep.
Chapter 28
As soon as I get word that my human samples have arrived, I hurry out of the palace. It's deep in the night and darkness grips the coast of Arcadia. The glow of the planet Umbria hangs in the sky as I board my new luxury speeder and hurry to the lab.
When I arrive, Taylon escorts me to the receiving bay, a room adjoining the research databases. I fist my hands so hard my fingernails puncture my palms. I grit my teeth until my jaw hurts, but Taylon vigorously rubs my back.
“This is a big moment for you, Joon, and for us all.”
The minutes tick by and I can barely keep myself from jumping out of my skin. I've run the computer simulations on combinations of human and Draxos genetics so many times in the last several days that I imagine I could do the mathematics in my head at this point.
I anticipate the experiments on physical specimen will be even more eye-opening. To think that these samples could give us what we need to cure the plague after five hundred cycles, fills me with so much agitation that I don't know if I will be able to keep a cool head in a lab.
When the shuttle finally descends from the sky through the dome in the roof of the receiving bay, I let out a strangled moan. It slowly descends on an elevator that brings it to the holding case where the contents are checked for radiation. When the computer beeps the all clear the door slides opened. The shuttle with the human genetic samples pops out in front of us.
I don't know if it's my imagination, or the fact that all my blood is rushing to my pounding heart, but the sample container seems to glow majestically. I want to reach out to take it, but my hands won't move. Taylon lifts the container from the table and we take it to a secure laboratory.
He opens the container and we find a dozen vials full of human genetic material. It is blood and bone marrow from multiple human sources.
“Nine of the samples contain human genetic material with recessive dragonoid genes in them. The other three are samples without the gene,” Taylon says, reading the labels.
“We have our work cut out for us,” I say, pulling a pair of gloves onto my hands.
Taylon finds a flash drive of information and plugs it into the computer.
“This is the readout of all of the samples from Earth,” he says.
We study the samples on a holographic screen that floats three dimensionally above our terminal. After pulling a blood sample with dragonoid genes from the case, I insert a pipette and withdraw a few drops. I squeeze them onto an analysis plate so the computer can identify the components of the sample. Already familiar with the human genome after my previous experiments, the computer feeds back information instantly.
“I see our computers agree on the contents of the substance,” I say.
My original simulations were done on generic human DNA. These samples are specific. Before I start physical experiments, I want to get an idea of what I can expect with the new data. My computers will need time to run the simulations.
I spend the rest of the day with the computers, processing the samples and scanning readouts of my previous data. I want to see if I can find any patterns that will give me clues to the best possible measurement combinations for specific samples.
By the time midday rolls around, I can feel my exhaustion set in. That is exactly the moment I get a message from my lab assistants that Mika is waiting for me outside.
I groan and rub my temples, realizing I still haven't gone on my date with him. I don't want him to feel like I’m neglecting him.
After tidying up my terminal, I throw my lab coat in a wash basket on the way out of the lab. Mika is waiting for me outside, with the clear winter sunshine sparkling in his golden hair.
“I've come to take you home,” he says. “Me and the rest of the guys decided it was time for you to eat and go to bed.”
“You're right, you're right,” I acquiesce.
He puts out his elbow for me to hold, and I take it, realizing I am shaky on my feet.
“No more lab work until you've gotten a good night’s sleep,” he chides.
“Yes, Sir,” I say with a giggle and a hiccup.
We board my speeder and he drives me home. When we arrive, Mika takes me to my room where a morning meal is set out on
the table by my window. The snow has been falling steadily all night and has settled in large drifts outside. Mika tells me to sit and eat.
“No black tea for you,” he says, giving me a cup of starfruit juice. “I'm sending you to bed and you're sleeping till tomorrow morning.”
I love that Mika is bossing me around like this. It wouldn't be nearly as cute coming from Donte or Uri.
I eat the warm cereal, fruit, and cheese that Mika ordered for me. When my belly is full, he ushers me off to bed. With a chaste kiss on the forehead, he leaves me with my bedspread tucked under my chin.
I watch him walk away and admire his youthful form. He glances over his shoulder, his golden curls bouncing around his face. He winks and smiles at me.
“Sleep, now,” he commands.
“Okay, okay,” I say, falling back into bed.
I close my eyes, thinking of all the work I have tomorrow. I sleep soundly and wake early the next morning. After washing and dressing in a comfortable pair of nanotech slacks, a fluffy sweater, and a pair of nano ankle boots. I make my way down to the dining hall. The guys are there, chatting amicably over their morning meal.
“Good morning,” Uri says, standing at attention.
Since we made love, his aggression has diminished, and he's become much more manageable around the house. My mates smile and lift their glasses in greeting.
“Good morning,” I say in a sing-song voice.
My heart is filled with love and pride to see their shining eyes and happy faces first thing in the morning. My mind is so preoccupied with my work that I know I am neglecting them. I sit at the head of the table and Quintin brings me a plate and a pitcher of black tea.
I take a long draw of tea, almost emptying the cup.
“I'm going to try to steal you away from the lab for our date today,” Mika says as he sits next to me and pops a piece of gow cheese in his mouth.
“I know I owe you time,” I tell him, resting my palm on his hand. He covers my hand with his and looks into my eyes.
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