Bride (The Unity Book 3)

by Gilbert M. Stack

  Kole stood stock still through this explanation as if he were made of granite, but Jewel knew in her heart that this had to be causing him great pain. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but wasn’t sure that was permitted in his culture. The last thing she wanted to do was bring greater shame upon him. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “We’ll find a way to…” She intended to say make this right but realistically, she didn’t know if such a thing was even possible.

  “Physician General,” she said. “Surely a medical examination would suffice to demonstrate that Kole and I have…fulfilled this marital expectation.”

  Adel nodded slowly. “Yes, it would.”

  “And it will take you nearly two days to transit out of the system,” Jewel continued.

  The doctor glanced to the admiral who supplied the information. “Fifty-one hours.”

  Jewel didn’t actually know that much about sexual intercourse, but even if Kole were having performance issues that would seem to be plenty of time. “Surely that should be sufficient,” she said.

  Adel’s mouth turned up in a smile, but all she said was, “I’ll speak to Physician Lieutenant Bree.”

  Jewel grimaced. She was not the physician lieutenant’s favorite person and she hated the idea of being examined by her again.

  Adel had already turned to Farl. “You agree that that is sufficient?” she asked the justiciar general.

  “I do,” he confirmed.

  “Then that settles that,” she stated.

  “I don’t agree,” the rear admiral protested.

  “As members of the tribunal, we out vote you two to one,” Adel told him. “The matter is resolved. Let’s leave the newlyweds in peace to do their duty.”

  Jewel felt the heat of angry embarrassment burning anew in her cheeks but was saved the need to respond by the departure of the Empyreals.

  Delling was the last to walk out the door. “But Kole struck me,” he complained.

  The last thing Jewel heard before the door closed was Justiciar General Farl telling him, “You deserved it.”

  Chapter Three

  You Might Have Physical Problems

  Jewel suddenly realized she was alone for the first time with her new husband.

  Kole was much taller than she was—broad of shoulders and extremely impressive looking. His chest and arms were thick with muscles, his hair cropped close against his skull, and his white skin adorned in the swirling blue-black patterns of his Empyreal tattoos.

  Kole’s eyes returned her complement, examining Jewel even as she looked at him. And he didn’t content himself with her face. He looked her up and down, from the curve of her neck, to the swell of her breasts, to the lean lines of her long legs.

  Jewel was suddenly all too conscious that her mother’s fashionista, Heta Dendara, had constructed the simple wedding dress Jewel wore out of the slip she’d originally designed for the overly-elaborate thirty-million-solar gown Jewel had rejected. She was effectively clothed in underwear—however pretty—and the stranger she had just married was examining her.

  The heat in her cheeks flushed hotter and her mouth went dry.

  Kole’s removed his hat and set it on the table revealing a head of black hair so close cropped that the dark bands of his tattoo were visible on his scalp. His hands went to his belt. “I suppose we should get started fulfilling our responsibilities.”

  With a combination of shock and horror, Jewel realized Kole intended to take her right here and now without any kind of get acquainted talk or foreplay. “Wait a minute,” she demanded.

  Kole stopped. His hands remained on his belt.

  Outrage tinged with fear kept her voice hot and angry. “What are you doing? The first words you say to me in private are I suppose we should get started fulfilling our responsibilities? We go through all of that with the other Empyreals and you think you can just drop your pants and we’ll start having sex?”

  Kole slowly removed his hands from his belt and held them at his sides. He really was quite handsome—rugged and powerful looking with huge muscles and scary tattoos. She’d thought that Erik was very strong when he’d wrapped her in his arms, but looking at Kole up close now she could see he was in another class entirely.

  Guilt suddenly swamped her as Erik’s face clung in the air between her and her new husband. How was she supposed to do this? Erik was still out there, thinking about her in here with Kole…

  Yet, Kole was her husband now—not Erik. And no matter how much pressure her parents and the Armenites had put upon her, she’d still agreed to this marriage. They were husband and wife now and married couples had sex with each other. She and Kole had explicitly committed to trying to have children. So why did being alone with him instead of Erik feel so wrong? And why couldn’t he make things a little bit easier by acting like she was a person and not a potential incubator for his sperm?

  Kole awkwardly flexed his fingers as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “I realize that my superiors have just insulted you both intentionally and unintentionally, but we still have a duty to perform. How is it, precisely, that you would like to proceed?”

  At least he didn’t appear to share Ina Adel’s concern that he might not be able to perform in bed, Jewel thought, not that she knew how to answer him. “I, um, don’t know. I’m not very experienced in these matters, but it seems to me that we’re moving very fast.”

  “I have made a point to watch many of your nation’s holos in preparation for our meeting,” Kole informed her. If he thought he was putting her at ease, he was absolutely wrong. From the tone of his voice, he might have been reporting to a superior officer. There was no warmth, no comfort, no excitement in his manner. For all intents he sounded like a man reporting on a routine duty he was expected to perform. “I’m not certain that I can do those things—especially on this ship.”

  Jewel’s head began to hurt. “Do all Armenites gain their knowledge of the Cartelite customs from our vids and holos?” She couldn’t imagine a worse way to form an accurate impression of a people.

  Kole clearly recognized the disapproval in her voice and pitched his reply as if he thought she was going to start shouting again. “They are a common source of information.”

  Unbelievable! How could any people be so stupid? “They’re fiction, Kole. Nobody lives that way.”

  When he didn’t respond Jewel groaned. “This is going to be a lot harder than I ever imagined. Isn’t it? Why don’t we sit down and see what we have?”

  Kole appeared willing to follow her suggestions. He immediately sat down on the chamber’s narrow bed leaving Jewel the choice of joining him there well before she was ready, or putting obvious space between them and sitting at the table. “They couldn’t even give us a couch,” she muttered as she reluctantly joined Kole on the thin mattress.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you nervous at all?” she snapped.

  He took a deep breath before confessing, “Yes.”

  “Well then don’t be in such a rush,” Jewel told him. “Stars, Kole, even if we adhere to the Empyreals’ ridiculous timetable, we’ve got fifty one hours from the time their ship starts back to the Hegemony. Why are you in such a hurry?”

  Kole clearly took her question seriously. “I’m anxious to determine whether or not I will be able to honorably fulfill my responsibilities as your husband.”

  His answer did not calm Jewel’s nerves. “You mean you don’t know?”

  She was fairly certain that Kole didn’t want to answer that question, but he finally did so in the same unemotional cadence with which he had started this conversation. “I’m uncertain.”

  “Oh, this is just great,” Jewel snapped. She jumped to her feet and strode across the room away from him. It didn’t take long because the room was so small.

  She whirled around to face him. “Aren’t I pretty enough for you? My parents spent a void-lost fortune sculpting this body in ways they were certain would entice you Armenites and
you don’t know if you’re attracted to me?”

  “I am attracted,” Kole told her. “But physically…”

  His voice trailed off in uncharacteristic hesitancy.

  A new form of guilt flashed through Jewel. “Oh, damn, that’s right. I’m sorry. The physician general told me that you might have physical problems as a result of your…ascension. I didn’t mean to be insensitive. It’s just that…my whole life has been directed at this moment and now you’re telling me it may have been for nothing. What do we do if you can’t…fulfill your responsibilities?”

  On one level, she realized she was acting fairly bitchy about this, but her whole life had been destroyed in her parents’ quest to marry her to this man and she was more than a little angry at the circumstance she found herself in.

  “Since the fault would be mine, and not yours, House Delling would likely offer your parents my half-brother as an alternate candidate for your hand. This marriage would be annulled and—”

  “And you would be expected to kill yourself to protect the honor of the House,” Jewel finished for him. Suddenly she didn’t feel so bitchy. Kole’s life literally depended on his ability to get an erection. That kind of pressure could give any man performance issues.

  “That is correct.”

  Jewel sat down beside him again. “And would you do it this time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that?” Jewel asked. “No hesitation? No uncertainty? You’d just kill yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  How can you be so sure? She wanted to ask. They wanted you to kill yourself before and you didn’t. What’s different this time? But she couldn’t ask those questions. Despite his cold exterior, the threat to his life generated a lot of sympathy for him inside of Jewel.

  She covered his hand with her own. Her fingertips tingled where they touched his tattooed flesh. “We’re not going to let it come to that,” she promised him.

  ****

  “So even though you’d broken your arm and sprained your ankle, you still finished the race?” Jewel asked.

  Kole nodded. He wasn’t really a very talkative guy, which meant that Jewel had to do a lot more work in the conversation than she was used to, but at least she’d gotten him speaking to her about something other than their marital duty.

  “Haven’t your people ever heard of med-evac?”

  A bark of laughter escaped Kole and for the first time since Jewel had met him, his eyes lit up with pleasure. “You Cartelites are so soft.” The words were accusatory but there was no condemnation in them. It felt as if Kole was actually teasing her, which meant they’d come a very long way in the past hour. “Med-evac in a school competition is for losers. A couple of broken bones and a sprained ankle wasn’t going to knock me out of the race.”

  “A couple of broken bones? You only mentioned your arm.”

  Kole shrugged as if to suggest that these others were of no consequence. “I had three cracked ribs, a concussion, torn ligaments, half a dozen significant cuts and an awful lot of bruises—it was a long fall.”

  Jewel couldn’t help cringing at the list of injuries. “So why is this one of your favorite childhood memories?”

  This time Kole laughed outright. “Because it was the first time I beat my half-brother, Hollis. When he tripped me on the descent, I managed to reach back, grab his ankle and pull him down with me. He couldn’t keep going afterward, so I beat him.”

  Jewel felt her eyes widen with shock and horror. “That’s terrible. Your brother really did that to you?”

  Kole laughed again. He had a beautiful baritone that lit up the room when he let loose like this. “Like I said, you Cartelites are soft. But then, you didn’t have any siblings growing up, did you? So you don’t know how competitive it can get.”

  There he was teasing her again. Jewel decided to encourage this behavior by returning the favor. “Sure we’re soft—at least until you put some money on the table. Then we’ll beat anyone every time.”

  “Oh, you think so, do you?” Kole picked up the challenge and loomed playfully over her from his seat beside her on the narrow bed.

  “I know so,” Jewel teased back. “Want to put a wager on it?”

  They both broke down laughing this time, collapsing against each other to help maintain their balance.

  Suddenly Jewel was acutely aware that Kole’s arms were around her and she was leaning hard against his muscular chest. Startled, she looked up to see that Kole had just enjoyed exactly the same revelation. His dark eyes met hers. “Are you ready now?”

  Jewel tried to swallow her nerves and insecurity and pushed down another wave of Erik-inspired guilt. “I think so.”

  She lifted her face to kiss him, but Kole picked her up and moved her fully onto the bed. Before she’d really adjusted to their change in position, his hands slid underneath her dress. His fingertips glided up her thighs igniting swaths of her skin as if a mild electric current connected their two bodies. His hands found her Eridian silk panties and slid the nearly frictionless material down and off her legs leaving her exposed from the waist down.

  Jewel’s mother’s stylist, Ife Gyasi, had spent the better part of an hour grooming Jewel down there just for this moment.

  Evidently, Kole liked what he saw for he reared up over her body and opened his pants and...sighed in disappointment.

  “I’m sorry. It truly isn’t you. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. It’s just—since my ascension I haven’t been able to get an erection.” He glanced up at her, then quickly looked down again as if he were far too ashamed to meet her gaze. “It’s an unfortunately common problem for Empyreals.”

  Jewel’s mind spun with how fast things had suddenly started moving. Could Kole really think they had already failed? They hadn’t even started yet—hadn’t kissed, hadn’t touched, hadn’t caressed or fondled or…

  Her cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment as she realized what kind of images were flashing through her mind. Then she felt shame again for even momentarily wanting to try them. Erik was the man she loved, not Kole. How was she—

  Kole interrupted her thoughts by standing up and refastening his pants.

  He really did think they’d failed, didn’t he? She wondered if he had a weapon on him. Being Armenite the answer was probably yes. Did that mean he was going to shoot himself right now in their bridal chamber?

  Jewel sat up and pulled her dress down over her crotch. She didn’t know an awful lot about sex—Erik was her only lover and they hadn’t actually done it that many times—but she’d seen more than enough vids and holos in her youth to understand some basics about male sexual psychology.

  She patted the bed beside her. “Why don’t you sit back down here, Kole? You’re rushing things and putting way too much pressure on yourself. You’ve been under tremendous stress both this morning and in the time since your ascension went—well I don’t really understand what happened there but something went terribly wrong. You have to be seriously depressed. You’ve suffered a major setback in your career and no one is really supporting you. Stars, your own family wants you to kill yourself. Pressures like that can…” she paused looking for the right word. “They can affect a man’s…performance.”

  Kole didn’t move. He just stood there beside the bed looking straight ahead at the wall in front of him. She couldn’t tell for certain but she thought he was trembling. She felt so bad for him. Somehow marrying her was his second chance and he believed he’d just blown it. She had to do something, but she was afraid that whatever she would try would be wrong. Still if she did nothing…

  Jewel stood up, slid her hand on to one of his broad shoulders and leaned against him. “But I’m not judging you by their standards, Kole. I’m a Cartelite and I have my own expectations and goals.”

  She took a deep breath and decide to share some intensely personal feelings with this stranger in the hopes of getting him mentally to a place where together they could save his life—not to mention
keep her from getting passed to his half-brother like a used starship nobody seems to want anymore. “Frankly, I’m not looking for thirty-seconds of friction between the sheets that can’t do more than hurt me a little and make a mess.” A tremor of regret worked its way up her body. What she’d just said was true, but the thoughts she was expressing were for Erik, not Kole.

  Her voice choked up a little as she thought about the lover she would never have again. “I want to have fun with my…husband—learn to make love with him. So I’m not unhappy you weren’t hard yet a minute ago. Truth to tell, if you’d tried to stick your thing in me without even kissing me first, I’d have kicked you out of bed and onto the floor.”

  This last statement seemed to have some impact on Kole because he stirred beside her even though he still wouldn’t look at her. “You’re my wife, Jewel, not some courtesan. I’m not going to disrespect you.”

  This was not the response Jewel had expected from him. “Disrespect me how?”

  Kole’s voice dropped half an octave strangled with barely suppressed emotion. “By using you for my pleasure. We certainly have duties to perform, but I would never ask you to go beyond them.”

  Jewel removed her arm from Kole’s shoulder. “What are you talking about? Are you saying you don’t plan to make love to me?”

  Her question confused Kole enough that he twisted his neck so he could glance down at her. “That’s a cultural term, right? It means to have sex?”

  Jewel hoped her eyes weren’t bulging out of her skull. The Armenites didn’t make love? What the hell had she gotten herself into? She tried to keep her voice calm and reasonable sounding, but she was pretty certain she failed. “No, it’s not just sex. Making love is…” She broke off trying to figure out how to define the term. “Well it is sex, but it’s sex with an…emotional content. Making love should be fun, meaningful, wonderful—not a duty to be performed because we’re husband and wife.”

  Kole went back to not looking at her while he considered her words. He stood with his back rigid and hands twitching for several seconds as he tried to wrap his head around the concept Jewel had just described to him. “On Armen,” he finally explained, “marriage is an extension of the responsibility to procreate. It’s not actually very common because it limits our freedom to help broaden our people’s gene pool. It’s especially uncommon for people on the path to ascension because our genes are deemed to be especially important—and afterwards, of course, most males are physically incapable of sexual intercourse.”