Holographic Princess (Planet Origins Book 3)

by Lucia Ashta

  I stared at the soundless interaction between the two friends until Dolpheus nodded his understanding. Then Dolpheus grabbed Kai and headed off in the direction of the remaining guards and their horses, leaving Lila behind, staring at their retreating forms.

  “Captain Chauncy, will you please bring Lord Billius’ comm to me?”

  “Yes, Lord Tanus.” Chauncy put his hand out and waited, but Billius wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Lord Billius, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s your choice,” Tanus said. I tensed. I remembered what the hard way had looked like with the ninja kidnappers. I imagined Tanus wouldn’t have reason to take it that far, but I already knew what he and Dolpheus were capable of when the need arose.

  Billius glared at Tanus. Tanus stared back, unaffected by Billius’ protest.

  Again, Tanus said, “It’s your choice. Either way, I’m going to need your comm.”

  Billius glared until he finally realized the stare down wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Then he yanked a crystalline-looking cone from his ear and the crystalline bar that attached it to his head across his crown. I couldn’t tell if it was made of some kind of crystal or not, but it sparkled in the purple Plune Moon as if it were made of diamonds. Billius slammed the delicate-looking device into Chauncy’s waiting hand.

  Chauncy brought it over to Tanus.

  “I’m going to need yours as well, Chauncy.”

  Without complaint, Chauncy carefully slid his from his head and placed both comm devices in Tanus’ hand.

  “Thank you, Chauncy. Now you can take Billius over to join Dolpheus.”

  Chauncy nodded and half-dragged, half-led the recalcitrant older man where he was told.

  “Lila, will you come over here please?” Tanus asked as he turned to address the now standing but still waiting tribespeople. Even though this was their home, they awaited direction. Was this because of me, the princess, or was it because they were used to being treated as if they were lower on the totem pole than everyone else?

  Lila waited at Tanus’ side while he addressed the dozens of people in front of of him. “The princess and my companions and I are grateful for the welcome you’ve given us, along with your kind treatment. We regret that our being here has brought the Royal Guard to your community. But we’ll make sure they leave with us when we go and that no further harm comes to you at their hand.”

  Receptive faces—of the old and young—looked back at us, waiting for someone else to determine their fate. I wished with all my heart then that something that I might do in my time upon O might empower these people to take their fate into their own hands. Although I knew basically nothing about the rest of the population of O, I suspected that these people might be more connected to the ebbs of life than most. They set themselves apart from artifice. That single fact alone would allow them to respond more readily to the true rhythms of life, those that continued to seem more evident than ever beneath the transcendental Plune Moon.

  “However,” Tanus continued, “the princess has traveled from far away to be here.”

  I nearly chortled at that understatement, but aware of the sea of faces that watched us, I kept a straight face when all I wanted in that moment was to throw my head back and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  “We could all do with some rest before we prepare to face the reactions to news of the princess’ survival,” he said. “I realize you don’t have accommodations to spare, but if you could arrange yourselves to provide us two dwellings for our use, we’d be most appreciative. Will that be possible?”

  The elder who’d hidden us from the Royal Guard was the one to reply. “Of course.” The smile to accompany his response was so brilliant that I instantly liked these people even more than I already did. Why couldn’t more people be like them? They lacked all the apparent wealth I noticed in Tanus’ home, the only other dwelling I’d been in so far, but they seemed far richer in the ways that mattered most.

  The elder stepped forward. “If you give a few of the women and me leave to do so, we can arrange things for your rest quickly.”

  “Thank you,” Tanus said. “Please do. And Lila, will you please accompany them and help in any way you can?”

  I half expected Lila to protest, based on Tanus and Dolpheus’ earlier reactions to her. But she complied wordlessly, falling into step with a group of five tribespeople.

  Tanus addressed the rest of the villagers. “You all are free to go, with our thanks. We’ll keep watch of the Royal Guards tonight. You may rest easy, knowing you’re safe from them.”

  Like a procession that lacked organization, they filed past me, curtsying and bowing as they passed. I had no idea what was expected of me in response, so I simply smiled. With these people, that seemed to be enough.

  It didn’t take long for the villagers to disappear into their huts. As I understood it, the Plune Moon would soon set, the Auxle Sun rise, and the people of this planet sleep. It seemed a bit bizarre, but it’s how they’d said it was, and so I imagined the villagers would be quiet for a good while.

  The purple glow of the night seemed to play tricks on my vision, but I could still make out Dolpheus and Kai, perhaps a hundred yards removed from the village, upon the hill. They’d moved the dozen or so guards back and apparently allowed them to erect portable tents of some sort, because the hill was now dotted with them in different stages of setup. The guards’ horses were beyond their tents, ours were at the opposite edge of the village, beyond the borders of their huts.

  When Lila finally came to get Tanus and me, it seemed that everything was settled. With a hand to the small of my back, Tanus and I followed Lila toward one of two huts the villagers set aside for us.

  At the entrance to the larger one, Tanus whispered something in Lila’s ear that I couldn’t hear. Then he pulled the entrance to the hut closed behind us.

  I turned with the sudden realization that only he and I would rest inside this hut.

  For the first time since I crash landed into his world, he and I were alone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I WAS NO BLUSHING VIRGIN. Several years ago, I’d figured out that life was one big giant mess. You could be riding the crest of awesomeness one moment, and then plunging to the lowest low the next. It was, quite truly, a rollercoaster ride. The blessings could arrive when you least expected them, and they could be snatched away when you blinked, leaving you crushed and ruined.

  Since life was a crapshoot, I thought I should live it to its fullest in any given moment, whatever that looked like. I was twenty-six and free of regrets. If given the chance, I might choose to go back and do a few things differently, but since that wasn’t possible, I kept moving forward, with my eyes trained ahead instead of behind me.

  I’d loved freely, by no one’s rules. If I followed any rules at all, they were those of my heart, and those could be as big of a mystery as any other aspect of life.

  I was habitually confident and assured, because doubting myself never got me anywhere good. When you didn’t second guess your choices, life became a lot simpler.

  However, beneath Tanus’ hungry gaze, I felt like all the things I wasn’t. I could barely see his eyes in the little purple light that filtered in through the walls of the hut, not even as bright as a nightlight. But I could see enough to realize precisely what was on his mind.

  He’d already warned me that he was just waiting to secure time alone with me. And now I could see that he had every intention of following through.

  Uncharacteristically, I shied away from him. I pretended I didn’t know what he was thinking—an unlikely ruse, I realized, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever shied away from a man before. Perhaps the first time, but even then, maybe not.

  I pulled my skirt down, another fruitless action. With my very next movement it rode up to the curve of my ass. I didn’t bother to pull my crop top down. It bared a stretch of flesh between my waist and breasts. I was a far cry from the princesses
on Earth, with their respectable skirted suits and covered necklines.

  But Tanus liked me precisely how I was, it was evident. And if this was how princesses on this planet dressed, then more power to them. A strange thought given that I was apparently the only princess upon the planet. At least, I hadn’t heard my companions mention another one.

  “Ilara,” Tanus said, his voice already smoky. He closed the distance between us far too quickly, and there was nowhere for me to retreat. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to or not—maybe I did, maybe I didn’t—I’d never felt this way. I’d never been in a situation anything like this one.

  “I’ve missed you so much. The last three years, and more even, have been agonizing without you with me.” He took another step toward me, encroaching upon my personal space.

  There was nowhere for me to go to get out of his way but down, and down was where the single mattress was. At first glance, it looked to be stuffed with grasses or something equally lumpy, but it was covered in a comfortable looking fabric. I didn’t want to inspect our intended bed more closely for fear of bringing the inevitable upon me more quickly. Already, it seemed like Tanus would make quick work of it.

  He reached out a callused hand—from his weapons, I guessed—and brushed my cheek with an unexpectedly gentle touch. “It made me feel desperate not to be able to feel you in here”—he tapped a finger to his temple—“when I’d grown so used to feeling you, always teasing me, trying to sneak into my head and surprise me before I could discover you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, for I didn’t know what else I could say. None of this was my fault, I realized, but it stunk just the same. More so for him than me. At least I hadn’t missed him for more than three years. In many situations, it was true, and ignorance was bliss. He’d suffered my absence, I hadn’t even felt his. If I was who he thought I was. I kept coming back to this one important point because I just didn’t know. But who else would I be? I was starting to believe that I must be the princess. It was the only logical conclusion I could come up with. I looked like the princess, I talked and walked like the princess. If you quack like a duck, then you’re a duck. I certainly felt a bit like a quack since arriving upon O.

  While my mind strayed, Tanus gazed into my eyes. I tried to rein my focus in where he deserved it to be. Even if I didn’t remember him, he seemed an honorable man, one who loved me enough to suffer in my absence.

  He was saying, “But I continued to feel you in here.” He tapped his heart. “No matter how far away from O you were, I could feel you. It’s how I realized you must still live and that you couldn’t be dead like everyone said you were. Like your father said you were.”

  I blinked up at him, wide-eyed. I’d dropped into someone else’s life—perhaps my life even—and Tanus’ words and the green of his eyes, sparkling their truths in the purple light, were drawing me toward him, even if he hadn’t stepped any closer.

  “I knew I loved you before you disappeared, before the assassination attempt. We’d told each other we loved each other before then, something neither one of us expected to happen. Neither one of us thought we’d even find love in this life. But we did, and once you left…” He cleared his throat. “Once you left, I realized you meant more to me than I’d realized. You’d become such an important part of me that it actually physically hurt not to feel you close anymore. I didn’t know what to do to find you. But I tried. Dolpheus helped me, as he always does, and we went to the ends of O to find you. But you were nowhere.”

  I gulped. He held me captivated.

  “We’ve gone through so much to bring you here, you’ve gone through so much to get here, and now… here you are.”

  His green eyes threatened to consume me, and my nervousness transformed into something else. If I shared my body with him now, would I be able to hold my heart back? Would I be able to keep the part of myself that I always protected away from him, the way I needed it to be? Or maybe I didn’t anymore. Maybe it was safe to love here, on an alien planet, in a way it hadn’t been safe to love on Earth.

  A shiver of nerves ran through me. It was the premonition that if I gave even a little of myself to him, it would be no different than giving all to him from the beginning. The result would be the same.

  He was drawing me toward him, a magnet I couldn’t resist, despite the fear that once I entered his gravitational pull I’d lose myself entirely. I barely had a notion of who I was now without this muddling things further.

  But it was then that I realized I had no choice, not a real one, anyway. Something or someone had orchestrated all of this. A force, a god, a gale of wind and chance, whatever, had brought me here. How it could be that I could lead a life on Earth and simultaneously another one on Origins, I had no fucking idea. But it was what it was, and whatever it was, it was pulling me along with it.

  I didn’t like to think of myself as a puppet, a recipient of the whims of fate or what-have-you. I preferred to be a willing passenger on this rollercoaster ride. With that in mind, I ran to the front seats, pulling Tanus by the hand, and I jumped in and pulled the safety bar around us, realizing it never kept us from jostling.

  Wherever the ride ended, its duration would be fast, wild, thrilling, and replete with unexpected upside-down turns and tilts that wiped all thought from your brain but the single one you managed to hang on to as your hair whipped frantically in the face of speed: Holy fuck. What a wild ride.

  Undoubtedly, that’s what this ride would be. I surrendered all of me, every fear and worry, atypical to me in the first place. I just settled into my seat and squeezed my companion’s hand harder still. Wherever the ride took me, it would take him with me.

  With those green eyes already wild with passion, Tanus stepped in to kiss me. I parted my lips for him.

  I was prepared to give him everything.

  THIRTY

  ALL THE PRACTICE in the world—any world—couldn’t have prepared me for this. Within the first few minutes, I realized I was a goner. But Tanus was a goner too. I thought I’d already decided to give myself entirely to him. But within moments of his passionate lips upon mine I discovered that I hadn’t really meant it. I’d been fooling myself, hoping to enjoy a bit of this and that—and quite a lot—but still hold back enough of myself so I wouldn’t risk hurting later, so there could be no crash and burn.

  I was trying to live my life safely when I should have known that never works. All the best things in life, even if it was a borrowed one, involved risks. Loving this man, this strong, honorable, and hmmm-delicious man was risky in all ways.

  Every one of his actions proved his earlier words to me. He’d missed me. A lot. That much was abundantly clear by the frenzied way in which his hands tried to cover all parts of my body at once. His lips never broke contact with me. They migrated from my face only to try to take in more of me. Frustrated that I was still fully dressed, his lips rose back up to pepper my neck, to nibble at my earlobe, then to kiss my cheeks. It was an uneven combination of tenderness and desperation.

  His passion was bubbling over to claim me. I might not remember this man, but my body was responding as if I’d been loving him all my life. I wanted him, and every motion of my body communicated it. I met all his kisses with my own. Everywhere his hands moved to touch my body, I mirrored his motions, trying to get to muscle, skin, even bone.

  I wanted to know this man as he already knew me. I wanted to revel in the way a man’s body is perfectly made to fit a woman’s. I wanted to sing the hallelujah, and I was ready to do it right this second. My body was squirming to lose the mutable leggings and the barely-there skirt. To free my aching breasts from their bindings, to allow them to travel to his mouth as they so desperately wanted to do.

  When he cupped one of my breasts and used his other hand to squeeze my ass, flattening my body against his as if it were possible to meld two bodies into one, I moaned without meaning to, into his open mouth that was upon mine, understanding that I was close to that place where I lose control of
myself, where I let go of any self-censure and restraint, something I had very little of to begin with.

  I welcomed the release of control. Tanus was waking something wild within me that I was unaware of, and now it begged me to free it. Already, I knew I would. There was nothing to hold me back from doing it here upon this alien world.

  There was a point at which things became so bizarre that there was no longer any concern or judgment of it as bizarre. My life was already too far gone across the barrier of the normal to recall it. Prudence was long gone. Now, all that was left was to reach as far as I could to see how far this winding, incredible path could take me. Once I crashed through the portal between our worlds to land atop Tanus, I’d begun to walk the yellow brick road. Now, I was off-roading, discovering how wild this world—this life—could really be.

  And the wildest thing of it all was the one thing I could now taste upon the warm waves of Tanus’ tongue against mine. There was nothing more wild and dangerous and all-consuming than love. It was sucking me into Tanus and into myself as fiercely as the undertow of an ocean that contained more mysteries than any human alive knew.

  It was the same with the human heart.

  And even though Tanus and I—perhaps—came from different planets, the hearts that beat inside us were still bloody masses of tissue that somehow, miraculously, did the inexplicable, animating bodies that were as unexplainable as the workings of the heart.

  A spark of love sprang to life within my furiously beating heart. It would soon spread like an infectious disease that had no cure and that had the terrible possible conclusion of heartbreak. But not even thoughts of loss could stop the raging freight train that plowed forward at full speed.

  I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I could.

  This was too delicious, too imbued with the promise of ecstasy and bliss beyond any I’d ever experienced to consider slowing down.