Cutie Pi (Holidays of Love Book 3)

by Ellen Mint

  His body pitched forward, curling around mine until Nolan’s lips brushed against my ear. “It is different,” he whispered. “Far different from what…how human mating is.”

  “I understand,” I said, licking my drying lips. “But I still want to. Please, can you teach me? Show me how to…?”

  A snicker wafted from his tongues. Nolan’s hand slid up my forearm until it cupped behind my palm. Nuzzling against my throat, he drew a kiss up the length of my neck and nibbled on my ear. “You’ve already started,” he whispered, resuming my gentle caress across his stomach.

  I gave in to his direction, my hand swirling up and down the middle of his stomach. Heat rose under my palm, and Nolan began to whimper deep in his throat. Concerned, I looked up, only to have him catch my lips in a kiss. His other hand wrapped around my cheek, pinning me in place while red bloomed from his belly up to his chest.

  Curiosity got the better of me, and I began to take control. My palm slid lower down his trembling abs, further under where the belly button no longer was. I felt a bone shape familiar to hips but not the same. A sharp one curled over the front of his pelvis. It formed a ridge right above the waistband of his pants and called to me.

  Before I knew it, I drifted my hand down the skin-tight trousers. Nolan sputtered in my mouth, all five tendril nubs on his forehead bouncing into mine as he guzzled air. Pleased with myself, I reached for the side of his pants and started to tug.

  “W…w…wait,” he broke from me, his scales erupting in a changing array of bright colors. I tried to hide my disappointment, but I was shit at pretending. Nolan adjusted his stance on the bed, his knees digging back and forth into the mattress while he wiped his forehead.

  Dejected, I began to squirm away from him when his gaze landed on me. With our eyes locked, he slipped a hand down his pants and another graced my shoulder. Slowly, he lowered me onto my back and I followed him. His long torso was all I could see as Nolan shook off the pants.

  “I’m not ready to share everything, but…” Fingers drew up the bottom of my thighs, pushing on my knees. His cheek slipped against mine, every soft scale setting off a cascade of tingling nerves that soothed to my soul. “I want you,” Nolan whispered, positioning himself between my legs.

  I spread them wide, my heart pounding in anticipation and the vast gulf of uncertainty. My chin tipped down, trying to catch a peek, when Nolan cupped it in his palm. “Let go of your concerns,” he said, and a shaft slid inside of me. I couldn’t make out the shape, but it felt soft and flexible—like silly putty.

  Nolan brushed back my fallen hair as he lowered to me. The full length of his scales caressed across my chest, causing me to gasp in surprise. Longing stirred deep inside of me. “Choose the form of your destructor,” he commanded.

  “I… What?”

  A smile wound about his lips and he shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to say that.” With his gaze locked on mine, Nolan thrust himself out. As he went, I realized how he’d filled me. Not in a sharp thrust but gently like a summer rain. My body felt empty without him inside of me.

  “More?” I asked, hoping that wasn’t the end of it.

  “Is that a request or…?”

  “Yes.” I nodded hard, locking my legs around the back of his thighs. “More. Now!”

  Red swept across his scales like a scarlet ribbon twisting in the wind. Nolan groaned and he began to thrust hard. What had once been pliable hardened to granite while slipping deeper inside. A hand slapped the bed beside my head, Nolan having to arch his back so he could both kiss and stay inside me.

  “Oh, God!” I sputtered. That ridged bone over his pelvis slid right down to perfectly ensnare my clit. Nolan’s skin burst brighter at my reaction, and he lowered so every thrust swept and cuddled my clitoris. All the while, his scales would soothe and caress against the whole of my skin.

  I tried to reach between us to do the one move he taught me, but Nolan grabbed my wrists and pinned my hands back. He brushed his face against my nose. “I’ve got you right where I want you,” he said as he dove down to kiss me hard on the lips.

  All the while, his hips picked up speed. I tried to thrust back, to plunge myself onto him, but that sweep of him against my clit was too perfect to lose. My body began to grind against it, causing me to swirl over him, and Nolan sputtered the same prayer as before.

  “Blessed shadows, give me strength to…to…” he pleaded against my cheek, his hot words beading dew across my skin.

  The sight of him in exquisite agony, flagellating himself to keep going, and my body on fire, kicked off another round of orgasmic bliss. Not as sharp as the first, this one ebbed satiety through me as my being wrapped around him. Legs, arms, my face even dove into his shoulder as I cried out. And my vagina pulsed its gratitude around the once hard core softening to meet its grip.

  “Trini?”

  I had to pinch myself to realize he was talking to me. Shaking my head, I emerged from the safety of his chest to stare up into his stars. His skin had returned to its purple and blue state, though the belly remained a soft pink. “Was that…acceptable?”

  “It was fucking brilliant,” I screamed in shock, then slapped a hand over my mouth for the loud curse.

  “Ha,” he laughed once and slipped out of my snare. My wobbly, shivering legs tumbled to the bed, and this time I let Nolan slide up beside me. “I need to learn to stop underestimating you,” he said. His double-jointed arms swept me up into a twice embrace and pulled me onto his chest. I was so short, my feet dangled near his upper thigh. Curious, I tried to peek at what my toes nearly glanced against when Nolan cupped my chin.

  The kiss was both the same as that first night on his ship, safe and natural, while also deeper than anything I’d ever known. “Your skin is,” he murmured, swiping his palms over my back, “mesmerizing to touch.”

  I smiled, wanting to tell him the same, when my mind played back the last few minutes of our performance. “Did you…?” He’d been so concerned I wouldn’t enjoy myself, I completely forgot to worry if he’d found my body good enough for him. “Nolan, did you come?”

  “That…will require more explanation later. But if you’re wondering did I reach a state of bodily nirvana few can dream of? A thousand times, yes.”

  Satisfied, and exhausted beyond reach, I snuggled against his body. The skeleton was strange, the muscles made no sense, but I’d never felt more comfortable in my life. “I could sleep here forever,” I whispered, already on the edge of drifting off.

  Nolan didn’t answer save a single finger caressing down my cheek, the scales welcoming to my body the way no human’s touch could be.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WHAT NOW?

  My head raised as Nolan’s chest expanded with a deep breath. We passed out together, our limbs piled like a failed Jenga puzzle. But the sleep couldn’t be peaceful as my brain kept butting in with questions I had no way to answer.

  You like him.

  It was hard not to. After the third rescue from deadly harm, a failsafe clicks in locking the hero safely in a woman’s heart. There’s probably a study on it back home.

  It’s more than that, Trini.

  Alien, he was a space alien with soothing scales all along his body. I couldn’t stop staring. As Nolan dreamed, his natural camouflage shifted. Once, he transformed into a spring blue sky with realistic fluffy clouds rolling across his chest. For now, his scale colors fluttered, the natural purples and blues trading places like an old screensaver up and down his chest.

  What did we have in common? When I thought he was human I could at least point to that. Two humans alone in the big galaxy together, struggling to survive but finding comfort in each other’s arms.

  His body twitched and those once slumbering hands rose to cup my shoulders. The purple eyelids twitched fast and Nolan pivoted his chin to find me resting on top of him. “Good morning,” he said, his lush voice crackling.

  I kept staring downward, my hand soothing across the vast expanse
of his chest. For a moment, Nolan followed my gaze as if he feared he’d tossed away his pants in a fit of sleep-undressing. One more secret he didn’t feel ready to share.

  “Can I ask you something?” I started, unable to look anywhere but the tremble of colors trailing my fingers as I caressed him.

  “Of course,” Nolan answered. He picked up my hand and placed the palm to his lips.

  I stared at the divot in his chin, unable to handle the full weight of his eyes. “Why did you become a bounty hunter?”

  The tender kiss paused, but he didn’t release my fingers. “That’s a… No, I suppose you deserve to hear the full of it.”

  I moved to sit up, but Nolan locked his hands around my back. “Please, stay here with me. Let me…let me know you remained.”

  Remained? I slipped back to the comfortable embrace, my chin using his chest for a pillow.

  “Where to even begin?” he whispered to himself. “You probably wonder why my people are so hated.”

  “Because you can be anyone,” I said.

  “Because we think nothing of it. On our planet, it’s normal for a person to change his face, his hair, his height from one hour to the next for no reason beyond he wanted to. And the galaxy found that talent highly useful for their personal purposes.”

  “Your DNA swapping tech.” I glanced at the looming chamber that set Nolan’s teeth on edge.

  “A creation of our scientists because we discovered a galaxy festooned with people and creatures we could not easily mimic. Rather unsettling fact for a natural camouflager. Once knowledge of its existence reached beyond our atmosphere, a Dra’id was in high demand across the universe. To be a spy, an infiltrator, to sneak and steal for others.”

  His voice grew sharper with each word, Nolan shaking a fist at the stars as if they all wronged him. “In less than a generation, we went from being an intrinsic member of an army or intelligence agency to outcasts. Yaxhas.”

  “What does Yaxha mean?” They threw it around so regularly as if it was obvious to everyone what Nolan was in a single glance.

  He opened his clenched palm and cupped it to my shoulder, but the anger in his voice wasn’t sated. “Liar, betrayer, thief, saboteur. To the galaxy, that’s all we are, and all we can ever be. They sanctioned us with embargoes, flight restrictions, immigration caps. Before we realized it, the only way a Yax…a Dra’id could even leave the planet was…”

  “As a bounty hunter?” I said, understanding socking me in the jaw.

  “My father,” Nolan scoffed, “he raised me and my fifteen siblings…”

  “Fifteen!” I gasped. “And people are shocked when they find out I have two.”

  His laugh rumbled down the chest pressed below me. My curiosity grew, and I hooked my leg over his and switched to resting on my stomach. Nolan didn’t even pause as he went from stroking my shoulder to my back.

  “We were all given the same speech by him upon entering our adulthood. Earn your keep hunting in one year, or return to the ground. Now I know how damn near impossible that task is. Hunting, proper bounty hunting, takes time. But that was the trick. He wanted us to fail, to limit his competition.”

  “I’m getting the impression you don’t much care for your father,” I said, my stomach bubbling from the cascade of emotions sweeping over him that I had no hope of reading.

  “You don’t even know the whole of it. Because I beat his system. I found a bounty worth enough to buy my own ship and start my operation without him.”

  “The pies!” I exclaimed as if I solved an ancient riddle.

  At least Nolan was kind enough to smile down at me, though his body didn’t turn brighter. “Even then, he screwed me over. While a bounty is a nice sum of dineros, it’s the Owner Title where the real money lies. My father insisted he be given the title to any bounty we claimed, believed that he deserved it after all that work he put in to train us.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pie took the galaxy by storm. Every time a new restaurant adds it to the menu, every time a chef releases it in a cookbook, a percentage of those profits are sent to the Title’s Owner. My father became rich, richer than he could have ever managed on his own. And what did he do with that? Had me banned from the small moon he bought. Made certain that I could not, and would not, challenge him on my hard work filling his pockets.

  “Sometimes I wonder if we believe what they say about us. If our entire species has warped itself into being liars and cheats. To behave otherwise would mean that…that the chaos from their hatred is beyond our control.”

  Nolan fell quiet, only the hum of the ship’s engines breaking through the cloying silence. My mind couldn’t stop churning with thoughts, but every time I opened my lips to ask, I chickened out. It seemed better to sit in the eternal unknown than risk pain.

  “Isn’t that what you were going to do to me?” Oh shit. I tried to slap my mouth, but it was too late. Nolan sat up, taking me with.

  “What?”

  I slid up into a hunched over sit, my hands picking at the mattress in the hopes a blanket would appear that I could hide under. “I mean, you were going to take my hard work and claim it for yourself. Get rich off of that.”

  “This is…” He snorted, his body shifting to yellow. That probably wasn’t good. “You’re not of the galaxy. You can’t accept credits.”

  “Maybe not before.” Not when I was just a Post-Doc chugging away at a keyboard in a university lab. But everything changed. I knew about this alien-filled universe, its people, its cruddy politics. I could belong. “What about now?”

  “Trini, it’s not that simple.” He shot me a patronizing look and I started to shrivel. “Humans are…” His eyes darted away to stare out the windows circling around the room gazing upon the space between stars.

  “Are what?”

  Nolan slipped to his feet, his form rising far above me. I tried to follow by straining up on my knees. But naked and alone in the vast reaches of his bed, I’d never felt so small and helpless. He paced back and forth, worrying a hand over his forehead while his scales shifted from yellow to a deep green. In an instant, he’d have blended into the forest we’d once run through together.

  Pausing, Nolan spun and stared at me. “I care about you,” he spat as if he had to force the words out. “Maybe my thoughts don’t even matter. You probably can’t… This is a lot to deal with,” he said, drawing a hand down the body I was fascinated with.

  “I think I like you too,” I admitted, only the edge of my eyes darting to his. Was this how that big relationship confession was supposed to go? Words of love shouted across the room followed by more restless pacing? I didn’t have much experience, but that didn’t feel right.

  For a moment, Nolan burned brighter, his green lightening to a near neon. But then it faded and his walking to nowhere resumed. “As much as I’d like to, love to keep you here, I can’t.”

  “Why not?” I dropped to my feet and tried to meet him eye to eye. But in his real form, he towered a head and a half, maybe even two above me.

  “Because you’re a poached species.”

  “So?” Tears brimmed in my eyes, threatening to tumble. “We avoided those scanners once before.”

  “That was a small one. Any real station, a proper colonized planet, would have scans it'd be impossible to fool. And…I can’t become a human anymore either to hide you. To think, I almost…” Nolan sighed, and tipped his head back to gaze at the ceiling while my heart cracked into pieces.

  I hadn’t even thought what staying on his ship and traveling with him through the stars would mean for me or my life. But as the option was ripped from me before I could make the choice, I wanted to scream. It wasn’t fair.

  “You almost what?” I asked, swiping the heel of my palm over my eyes to disguise the tears.

  “When I held you in my arms after you nearly burned…I thought about remaining in that body for its natural years.” He tapped his fingers together, pressing the tips so that the padding spre
ad out. A lifetime trapped on earth, to be with me?

  “But the Kirkan stole that too,” Nolan said, shaking his head “All I have left to me is making certain you return home safely before they try to take you away.”

  I reached for him, but Nolan turned before I could make contact. On his long gait, he easily slipped free of the room, leaving me alone with a shattered heart and spinning mind.

  The ship slowed, drawing me out of the bedroom while I knotted on the shawl belt I picked out. It wasn’t until I arrived on the bridge that I realized I could feel and understand the movements of an alien spaceship.

  And I was about to leave it all behind.

  Earth, unaware of the civilizations, discoveries, and technology beyond itself, gently rotated below us. Nolan made use of those tall chairs, which fit his real body better than the human one. He’d slipped on a similar outfit to before, though the one for a Dra’id had a gap between the shoulders and down his back. I stared at his scales, watching them shift from the purples I knew to an off white.

  He couldn’t cease blending in with his own clothing while piloting his ship into orbit. How much of that was subconscious? “We’re here.” The words were unnecessary, but the sound cut through an impenetrable silence.

  I slipped beside him, my significance shrinking to a seed on the wind while staring down at seven billion people. Even that was a single grain of sand compared to the vast cosmos I had to leave behind. A shudder shivered along my shoulders and I tried to bundle my arms around myself.

  “I can see you to your front door,” Nolan said. His lanky form slipped off the chair, and he dropped a hand to me. I skirted the edge of my eyes to him, unable to fully tear them from the planet below.

  “Like the end of a date,” I answered, not taking his hand. Maybe I could stretch out our time together, just another minute in space. “How long have I been away?” The days blended together, but it had to be a week at least. Maybe more?