"What?" she wondered aloud.
"In bringing diverse minds together, making us live as one with our differences, the Shapers made us live one another's lives as we ourselves live them. To know the hearts of others is the antidote to aggression and hatred and fear. Where there is understanding, these things wither away. I think that was what the Shapers finally intended for us. I think that was their dying wish. When we take that experience from this place into the galaxy beyond, who is to say what may happen next?"
"Maybe something good," Norah guessed.
"Perhaps so," said Vashar.
A bit of time passed with the two of them just sitting together looking out and up at the vast wash of stars beyond Sarma and reflecting on the ripples of discovery that must surely be passing among them even now. By this time the media had enthusiastically broken the story of the activation of the device and what the Shaper said, and there was no doubt that it was all anyone was talking about on a thousand planets. Norah could hardly remember what she had said to the media people on her way out of the presentation. She only hoped that she sounded coherent and intelligent. She supposed she would have to log onto the galactic nets to see how the story was playing out—but that could wait for tomorrow. At the moment, everything to her was about this night—and the company sharing it with her.
She switched her attention from the stars back to Vashar when he said to her, "Norah, I should very much like to discuss what else was learned today."
Norah gulped. Her heart fluttered. " 'What else...?' " she repeated.
"There is more," said Vashar. "Let us not pretend it is not so. When our minds were together I saw everything about you, all that you are. I saw what science means to you, and the importance of your work. And I saw something more in you. I experienced from inside your being how kind and caring you are. You care about life, about other people, about the future. But there is something missing from your life. There is a deep desire in your heart, a desire to know a man of my type. Such men on Earth have never seen you, or wanted you only as a friend. They did not want what they did not know. I know you, Norah. I may not remember the full content of your life, but I know the content of your heart. I liked what I saw in you. I offer what you have long desired, the fulfillment of your desire—if you will accept it."
In a moment as awe-inspiring as the appearance of the Shaper, Vashar gently took Norah's hand and kissed her wrist, making her feel like another Shaper machine with its circuits humming and glowing to life. With his other hand, he pulled open just the upper part of his robe and moved Norah's hand to his chest.
At the feeling of her hand meeting the wonderful plates of his chest, Norah inhaled as if she were breathing in all the life in the galaxy. Vashar let her run her hand along his chest and savor his hard, smooth, warm male flesh, while at the same time he ran his fingertips up her arm to her shoulder and sifted his fingers through her hair until they came to rest on her cheek. She was aware of nothing now but her own breathing and him.
Sensing how much he was pleasing her, Vashar brought his hand down her shoulder again, took hold of one strap of her gown, and pulled it down, exposing more of her soft flesh and baring a little more of her breast. He stroked the skin of her breast as if playing a love song on a living musical instrument, and a coo of delight escaped her lips in response.
Vashar took his hand away and, while she almost hypnotically continued caressing his chest, he undid the belt of his robe, beneath which lay nothing but what Norah most wanted. With the hand that had partially exposed her breast, he took her free hand again and guided it beneath the fabric of his robe to grasp something far more wonderful and awesome than any work of technology. She breathed more loudly, almost gasping, at the amazement of her fingers enclosing something long and thick and fantastically stiff. "Ooohhh...," she sighed, pulling the ample foreskin up over the delicate tip and feeling the slickness exude from it onto her fingertips. Vashar's eyes penetrated her just as the thing she was grasping soon would. He smiled sweetly, pleased that he was pleasing her and wanting to please her all the more.
He leaned slowly forward and brought his mouth to hers. He returned the embrace of her fingers under his robe with the embrace of his mouth and the sensuous sliding of his tongue. Norah moved the hand on his chest to his nipple, which she found deliciously hard, and Vashar deepened the kiss. He kept their mouths together for a long time, one kiss melting into the next while she continued to stroke and fondle the hardness of his member. At the end of one long kiss, he let his lips slip away and hovered his face close to hers, and whispered, "Let us to bed, then. All night and on into morning."
Norah almost hated to release what she was holding down there. Only the thought of what he meant to do to her with it enabled her to let him help her up and lead her from the window to the bed.
She lay on the spread and watched Vashar stand at the bedside and slip the robe from a body that she found more exquisite than she had imagined. Every immaculately cut muscle fitted together as perfectly as the pieces of the Shaper machine. A triangle of hair adorned the middle of his chest, and from a bush between his beauteous legs hung a bough of maleness, its head and opening just poking out of the turtleneck of foreskin. Orbs ripe and filled with man-juice nestled in a luscious sac of skin at the base of the bough. Vashar stroked and tugged on his zazansa as he had let her do, promising her the bliss that only a perfect man could bring her. Norah's whole body trembled at what awaited her now. Vashar climbed onto the bed with her and delicately stripped away her nightgown, bra, and panties, discarding them onto the floor along with his robe. He let her settle prone onto the bed, and parted her thighs for access to her pink and slippery womanhood. He lowered his face down there and began to partake of it.
Norah poured sighs and whines and whimpers of incoherent rapture into the air over the bed as Vashar took her with his lips and tongue. His tongue flickered wetly up and down her folds and its tip expertly served the pulpy knob of her womanly joy. Norah tossed her head, bombarded with ecstasy as if she were a primeval planet bombarded with meteors. Vashar licked her sex up and down, stoking his tongue in and out of her opening, and returned again and again to her joy bud, hitting her with pleasure that, if she had the means to express it, she could only describe as "cosmic". As if this were not wondrous enough, he changed his tactics, switching from licking to kissing and sucking. He enveloped her sex with his mouth and drew the petals of her womanhood into it, almost making her scream. Her sounds melted into half-sobs at this deep kissing of her most intimate place.
He finished with a few last, long licks on her opening before at last coming up on all fours, moving the breathtaking length and stiffness between his legs to her wetness, and aiming the head of it where his mouth had been. In a dizzying moment of euphoria, Norah permitted Vashar to lay the utter perfection of his body on top of hers and to slip his tool all the way inside her.
All the wonders of the universe that Norah had ever known were as nothing compared to the wonder of Vashar lying upon her and briskly, urgently pumping in and out of her. The uncanny sense of shared selves that accompanied the finishing of the Shaper device seemed a small thing now. The sharing of their bodies was a thrill that Norah could not measure or quantify. Vashar's body—this delicious, heaving thing of muscle and hair—and his tool—this phenomenal, hard, probing and thrusting thing of purest joy—became for her not only her entire being but her entire cosmos. Every thrust propelled her into orbit. She kneaded the straining and releasing muscles of his back and buttocks, urging him on, and he gave her everything that his breathtaking body had to offer. She squeezed the rising and falling mounds of his perfect bottom, making him grunt and huff in her ears, muttering what she could only guess were sex-drenched curses of passion in some alien tongue. At the sound of her whimpers from his pounding atop her, Vashar captured and plundered her mouth in kisses like burning meteors, taking her more like the warriors of his heritage than like the urbane lord that he had raised himself up to be.
He pounded his throbbing piece in and out of her as if to take the place of every magnificently beautiful man who had ever not wanted her. And Norah cried out as his every deep and savage thrust took away a moment of disappointment and fulfillment she had ever known.
Vashar humped and beat away on top of her, harder and faster with every stroke, until he reached his pinnacle and could hold back no more. With a long grunt that sounded almost like the growl of some prehistoric beast, he rammed his hardened length all the way into her one last time and poured forth his seed, deluging Norah's depths with white wetness. His milkiness surged copiously into her, making her tremble from head to toes at the fleshy thunder of Vashar's orgasm.
He held himself all the way inside her until his piece was too soft, though still long and thick, to go on. As if in a trance, he climbed back down to the tingling wetness between her thighs and concentrated the full attention of his flicking tongue on her joy bud until Norah heaved like a quaking mountain and cried out in a fever of bliss at her own release. It was a big bang that seemed to create a universe of satisfaction inside her, and as Vashar rested his head on her stomach and strummed at her sex with his fingers, she gloried in the aftershocks.
Her exquisite Sarmian Lord remained there in Norah's bed all night and well past dawn, just as he promised. Again and again he mounted her, entered her, thrust his erection and his passion deep inside her. And so both the engineer from Earth and the wondrous machine of another world were complete.
THE END
Desired by the Alien Prince
DANIELLE AND THE ALIEN PRINCE
"All dressed up and don't want to go."
That was the way Danielle Dryden felt while studying herself in the full-length mirror in her suite at the resort. She looked beautiful—at least, as beautiful as she felt capable of being—in her flowing pale yellow-gold gown and elegant gloves that matched the color of the clouds of Saturn and its rings that were at that moment shimmering outside her picture window. She looked lovely with her brown hair all done up in shiny curls falling over her bare shoulders and just to the middle of her bare back.
She was dressed for a ball. She had come all the way out from her parents' estate on Mars to the exclusive and opulent Titan II Resort, orbiting Saturn's largest moon, just for this event. But, if the truth be told, her heart was just not in it. Only her parents' insistence had brought her and her finery all the way out here. Had it not been for them and the occasion of the ball, she would have been happy just to stay home. Forever.
She had not been in a party mood for weeks, not since the thing that happened with Braden. She had been so sure about him, and so sure about the two of them. Here, she had allowed herself to believe, was finally The One. He had never lied to her, never misrepresented himself to her, never pretended to her. Braden was for real. His attentions and his intentions were both genuine. This, she was sure, was going to work. This, she was convinced, was going to be her life and her future. Braden accepted her. Braden was willing to make a life with the face that men always thought was pretty, and everything that went with it—the arms that other men found too stout, the hips that other men found too wide, the bottom that other men thought was too full, the legs that other men thought were too big and sturdy. Braden saw that there was more of her to love and he loved it all.
The trouble was that what he enjoyed better in bed was the slender blonde with the more graceful, lean curves. The slender blonde had far less money and far less girth than Danielle. And it thus became clear to Danielle that what Braden loved best about her was her pretty face, her sparkling wit, the vast holdings and resources of her family and the social, business, and political connections that they afforded. Braden was an attentive, doting, passionate, and oh-so ambitious lover. The greatest part of what he had felt for her, after all, was the private ambition. Danielle examined herself in the mirror now, studied what Braden had told her that he accepted, and felt like the most naive creature in the universe for believing him.
She had believed in him because, in truth, she wanted to believe in him. She needed to believe in him. She had convinced herself that in a space filled with billions of men, on Earth and on far-flung moons and asteroids, there had to be one—just one—whom she would actually want, and who would actually want her in return. After all, in a galaxy full of millions of potentially life-supporting planets, there statistically had to be some that did contain life, and some that contained intelligent life, and some that even harbored life capable of space travel. Reality had borne out the statistics and humanity was now in contact with dozens of such species. If the odds had been on the side of extraterrestrial intelligence, they must surely also be on the side of Danielle Dryden finding the love that she most wanted. Daniel had seized upon Braden as proof of the odds.
And then Braden had gone and demonstrated the probability of a gorgeous, handsome, well-built man being attracted to gorgeous, slender women, proving to her the true order of the universe.
"Well, Danielle sweetie," she told herself with a sigh, "the universe doesn't care what we believe, does it? Or what we need to believe. The universe is what it is and goes on that way regardless."
There was no need to go on checking herself in the mirror. She was put together as well as she was ever going to get, at least on the outside. All she needed to do was get through the next few hours for her parents' sake, and it would all be over and she could go home to Mars and not have to think any more about socializing, or about the company of desirable men who really desired women to whom nature had given less than it had given Danielle Dryden. Just one elegant, glittery, opulent party to get through, filled with VIPs and glitterati from across known space, and she would be done.
She huffed a bit at her reflection. Perhaps, after all, she was taking the wrong attitude about this whole thing. Yes, she would have to get through a whole evening in a ballroom at one of the most posh and high-end guesthouses in the solar system. And yes, she would have to spend the whole evening ignoring her broken heart and smiling and saying all the right things to the most prominent and famous people from dozens of planets. But was it really so much to have to endure? Was it really so bad that her parents had managed to cajole her into coming all this way for this occasion? This evening was a rare thing, to be sure. It wasn't every day that even a woman of Danielle's wealth and in Danielle's position was introduced to a prince.
Yes, the ball was being given for a prince. And not just any prince, but the prince of another planet. And moreover, this was not just any other planet. Sarma and its relationship with the planet Earth had become the talk of the galaxy. Against all odds, against all the laws of biology and probability, Earth had made contact with an extraterrestrial species that so closely resembled humans that it was widely believed they shared a common ancestor. It was practically all that one ever heard about in space these days—how scientists had speculated that unknown aliens visited Earth eons ago, captured early humans and whisked them back to their own planet, molded them into warriors, then disappeared for reasons equally unknown and leaving the descendants of their breeding subjects to their own devices. Those descendants were the proud inhabitants of Sarma, distinguishable from Earth humans only by the hair that descended in a tapering, narrowing pattern from the scalp hairline to the bridge of the nose. The Sarmians: civilized, with their own arts and technology and their own space travel capabilities, yet warriors at heart.
Even Danielle, mourning what she had thought were the prospects of marriage to a desirable man, had taken notice of the Sarmians. She had not actually met any of them yet. She knew only what was most generally known of them—that their planet had been through a time of devastating struggle over the throne of its aging king, and that the royal family had barely won out. The elder prince, Dantar, had thus taken the throne.
It was probably only the badly broken infrastructure of Sarma, and the need for its people to regroup and recover from the wars, that had made their first contact with Earth a peaceful one. Now te
rrestrial humankind, excited and fascinated to have found brothers across the stars, was keenly interested in staying friends. So it was that when Dagin, the younger Prince of Sarma, decided to take some time traveling in human space, the government of Earth wasted no time throwing a party in his honor. And so that was what Danielle Dryden was doing billions of kilometers from home: preparing herself to meet the prince of another world.
Danielle plucked her linker from the discreet pocket on her left glove and checked the opaque crystal for the time. If the party were being given aboard one of the other habitats in the Saturnine system, she would have used the linker to call for a shuttle. Given that her destination was on a lower level of Titan II itself, she had only to walk to the ball. She made for the hatch of her suite and stepped out into the corridor of the resort that rotated so gently above Titan to simulate Earth's gravity. The lights dimmed, the hatch shut itself behind her, and she was on her way.
Already the corridors of Titan II were filled with dignitaries dressed as elegantly as Danielle, all headed in the same direction, and she smiled politely at them as she passed. Among the aliens present, she caught her first glimpse of some Sarmians. There were a couple of them who she assumed actually were a couple, decked out in shiny golden outfits that hugged the contours of their athletic bodies and made them look as if they were wearing the gilded skins of dragons. Gracious, she silently wondered to herself, do they all look like that? She would know in a few minutes. There would be a great many more of them where she was going.
_______________
The ballroom was much as Danielle expected: dignitaries, politicians, diplomats, and celebrities everywhere; people seated amid tables filled with delicacies; servers circulating with drinks; a sprinkling of aliens across the scene; and more Sarmians wearing garments of that same scaly gold fabric. She supposed she really ought to try talking with some of them. The interest of meeting members of a new culture would be a welcome distraction and help to make the evening pass, if nothing else. Then she caught site of the receiving line at one end of the room, and the long queue of people waiting their turn to be introduced to one figure standing at the end. She looked closely at that figure. It was a tall, dark-haired Sarmian, but he was not attired like the others present. He was decked out as if to emphasize the similarity between his kind and terrestrials. Suddenly Danielle was curious enough to want a better look.
Highlander's Pride: Winter Solstice (Against All Odds Series 1) Page 48