"How are we going to deal with the government?" Fin asked while Shang stared at Erena thoughtfully.
"God only knows," Paolo shrugged, "We can't even know how many years it's been. With how many star systems we crossed through the effects of relativity would take a month to figure out."
"It's going to be a mess," Sergei grumbled, "We stay together. We back each other up. I would suggest Davina and Shang stay in the ship until we have a good idea of their reactions down there, so they can take off easily if it looks like things are going in an 'E.T.' sort of direction..."
There were a lot more preparations to make, but Erena wasn't listening. She'd been quietly dreading this moment as much as she was looking forward to it.
She wanted to go home, but going home meant deciding what her future would be. Not just for her, but for the life growing inside her. And Shang as well. She glanced at him again and saw he was staring at her.
Quietly, they dismissed themselves from the conversation and he walked with her back to the cargo bay.
"Whatever you want," Shang said as soon as they were alone, "I'm not going to force anything else on you. If you want to stay on Earth, if you want me to leave..."
"No," Erena said quickly, "No, I want you there. Wherever I go, I want you there."
She blushed with embarrassment realizing what she was confessing there, but he just grinned, reaching out to pull her close. He kissed her hard, their first since the brief brush of lips back before Rin'rokir's attack.
"I've been thinking it's time for me to retire," Shang said when they broke for breath, "Raise a family, maybe. Earth seems like a nice place to do it. Quiet, out of the way."
She giggled, still close enough for her lips to brush his.
"That sounds good to me too," she said, her eyes soft with affection as she looked up at him, "I've been thinking that I wanted to live with you since that first night in the crystal city. There's so much I can't wait to show you. Both of you."
He ran his hands over her stomach and kissed her again and Erena felt like her heart was lifting out of her body, soaring off towards the stars even as their ship was sliding into Earth's atmosphere.
Chapter Nineteen
As Sergei had predicted, things were chaotic for a while. They'd been gone about ten years, not long enough to be forgotten, but long enough for many things to be unfamiliar.
There was a lot of talk for a bit about keeping the ship, studying the aliens, during which Paolo and Davina decided they'd seen enough of Earth and left.
As far as everyone else knew, Shang went with them, returning to space where he belonged. Erena retired shortly after, turning her back on the space program. And things quieted down.
"What do you think?" Erena asked, looking up at the colorful little house. It was cozy, but big enough for a family, and on the coast with the ocean in its back yard.
The man standing beside her was tall, with long dark hair and bronze skin. His face had harsh angles that tended to make him look a little intense even when he was happy. But when he turned his dark, piercing eyes on Erena, his face softened into something only touched by love.
"I think it's perfect," he said, and behind his smile his teeth were still sharp.
"That disguise is too good," Erena led him up the porch to the door, holding his hand, "I miss your horns and claws."
"I can still take it off in private," Shang said with a laugh, "Do something nice for me and I'll even pretend to be a scary alien again."
"Like you wouldn't enjoy that too."
"That's beside the point."
The house was already furnished, though a bit bare with only the essentials right now. There was a bed in the master bedroom, and that was all that mattered to Erena as Shang pulled her close to kiss her as soon as the door closed behind them.
He couldn't pull her as close as he'd like to at the moment. She heavily pregnant by now. Shang had been exchanging messages with Yll regularly, but so far it had been going smoothly and, though she couldn't exactly go to a regular doctor about it, the baby seemed healthy.
Yll had promised to fly in for the birth, which was a relief. In the meantime, if was just her and Shang, and she intended to relish that as long as she could.
His hand slid under her shirt and over her rounded stomach, then up to her breasts, tender and swollen. She moaned into the kiss as he squeezed them, heat pooling low with excitement.
"You get excited so easily lately," he chuckled, his human disguise melting away as he picked her up and carried her towards the bedroom, "I like it."
"It's the hormones," Erena huffed, already breathless from the kiss and embarrassed, "I can't help it."
"Then I want you like this all the time," he purred, and laid her on the bed, tugging at her pants. She let him pull them away, gasping as he dove between her legs, not even pulling her panties aside before he ran his tongue over her, hot even through the cotton barrier of her underwear.
She whimpered and squirmed as he peeled her underwear away and dove into her, teasing her mercilessly, knowing she had no restraint lately and would cum almost at once, especially when his tongue was flicking against her clit so directly, like he was just trying to drive her crazy.
"Hurry," she gasped, already trembling, "I want you inside me."
"So impatient," he sat back to shrug out of his shirt and unbutton his pants, "You're going to end up a spoiled pet at this rate."
"So spoil me," Erena demanded, holding out her arms to him, "Make it so no one can satisfy me but you."
She saw the flash of hunger in his eyes at that and he dove to kiss her hard, squeezing her hips as his tongue ravished her mouth. He kissed his way down her throat and to her breasts, grazing her nipple with his teeth as he pressed into her.
She inhaled sharply as she felt him spreading her open, clinging to him as he filled her up. When he was seated in her, he looked down at her, his face flushed and his eyes hazy with desire.
"You look so gorgeous like this," he said gently, hand stroking her swollen belly, "I want to look down at you like this every day for the rest of my life."
Erena, looking up at him, biting her lip, her expression wracked with pleasure, trembling with desire, couldn't help smiling.
"I was thinking the same thing."
He surged within her and she threw her head back in delight as he drove into with long, steady strokes, taking all of her and taking his time, drawing it out.
She raised her hips to meet him as much as she could, shaking with ecstasy as the way he felt inside her, burning hot and big enough to fill the emptiness she'd never realized was there.
She'd been waiting for him all this time, she realized. Looking up at the stars and knowing somewhere inside that he was out there waiting for her.
He pulled her close suddenly, sitting back to pull her nearly into his lap so that he could bury his face in her throat, covering it in kisses and bites, wanting to mark her always as his.
She understood now what he meant when he'd said she belonged to him. He'd never own her like that. But her heart had been his from the beginning. And his belonged to her as well.
His hands beneath her thighs helped to raise her and, lightheaded, she felt like she might take off, fall off the surface of the Earth and into the stars. And then he brought her down and she was nowhere but here in this raw moment.
Their voices and the sounds of their bodies echoing in the mostly empty house. The sand they'd tracked on the floor, the creak of the bed, his breath gasping in her ear, whispering her name, all of it was so real and close against the backdrop of the ocean's roar in the distance. She could feel his skin under her fingers, sweat slicked, hot and real. This was all real.
He thrust up into her, his teeth pressing against the skin of her throat and she shook like a tree in a storm as he poured himself out into her and she knew an absolute truth.
She never wanted to be anywhere else but right here, with him, forever. He kissed her again and laid her down, still ins
ide her, warm and close.
"Love you, Fluffy," he mumbled into her hair, and she laughed quietly, squeezing him close.
"I love you too, Shang," she whispered, "Forever."
"Forever," he agreed, and took her hand, lancing their fingers on the sheets beside them.
The ocean rushed on outside and the stars wheeled on above but inside the house time might as well have stopped, no longer necessary for the two on the bed. Forever was already there.
***
PREVIEW OF ‘THE BARBARIAN’S OWNED’ BY MARLA THERRON
Chapter One
It was a normal Saturday for the rest of the world, but it was supposed to be the most important day in Rae’s life. Not her final most-important day, of course, but one in a series of most-important days, each bigger than the one before.
The last was six months ago when she’d graduated with Ph.D.s in genetics and astrophysics; before that, it was the day she left for university, and before that, the day she dosed Cory Wilson’s Gatorade and turned his urine green, thus establishing her reputation in junior high as “that girl.” The girl who took no B.S. from Cory Wilson, yes, but also who knew the kinds of science her teachers worried about.
To Rae, if science couldn’t be used to turn an obnoxious junior’s urine an alarming shade of neon, it wasn’t worth doing.
She mentally walked through her day in the shower, dressed, ordered a cab to the Chicago conference center, and checked her word of the day.
Conjuncture.
No matter how many peer-reviewed journals she published in, Rae could never shake the last remnant of her Midwestern faith in a universe without coincidences. That word of the day seemed inauspicious. Recalling her earliest research lectures, a favorite professor taught her that the foundation of science was in understanding the word “conjuncture.”
There were only two types of thing in all existence. The first was the domain of science. These were the built-in things, the normal patterns in the universe. The software and GPS churning out her location to a cab driver, the locomotion of his engine, even the day’s typical weather: Chicago wind rippled her open jacket as she exited her hotel.
The jacket’s closely patterned white-and-black colors would smudge and appear gray from a distance, offsetting the dark of her slacks and blouse. From engineering to optics, all those variables could be understood. They were… reliable.
Rae was good at these variables. She had them figured; she always had. But conjunctures were the second type of thing in the universe. The one-offs. The strange combination of circumstances that couldn’t be anticipated, accounted for in a model, that by their very definition existed outside the normal order—and therefore, outside the reach of her discipline. They could be described, but never predicted.
Rae did not want any conjunctures today.
Her presentation was at 2 p.m., which was primetime. Even astrophysicists liked a drink on Friday night, but 2 p.m. on Saturday was late enough that the last straggler had kicked their hangover. It was far enough from lunch that no one was in a food coma, and not yet so late that it bled over into the cocktail hour.
If anything had surprised Dr. Rae Ashburn about her discipline, it was how much alcohol fueled the whole social end of the enterprise. Put a thousand egotistical nerds into a room and more than a glass or two of wine was needed to lubricate those rusted social gears.
By a quarter till, she’d set up her PowerPoint and was patiently waiting as the room filled. They’d headlined the day with her paper, whose subject had made a splash. It made the newspapers, and science and tech journalists were jockeying for a position at front.
She did a summary check of her discussant panel, whose job it was to say useful things about the working paper. There were three. She guessed, based on age and tenure, that maybe one of them had read it ahead of time.
The normal thing was to shred through it fifteen minutes before; she could guess what each would say based on their research areas. There was no sign of her dreaded conjuncture, and Rae breathed easier.
“What are you thinking?” asked her former advisor, Dr. Ravi, seated to her left.
“That Midwestern superstition loses again,” Rae said with a grin.
“Pardon?”
But it was too late to explain. The moderator introduced her paper topic to the audience: “Defending the Earth from Extra-Solar Threats: Lessons from the K-T Extinction Event.” It was an awful title, but Dr. Ravi had insisted and Rae had finally acquiesced.
She’d wanted to title it, “Were the Dinosaurs Killed? Or Murdered?” She’d discovered, after all, that materials she’d collected near the Chicxulub crater—the impact site of the asteroid that zapped the dinosaurs—had residue from ancient, foreign materials that didn’t exist in nature.
Talking about aliens in astrophysics was dicey. It brought press attention, but not much professional esteem. A lot of Rae’s graduate colleagues snickered behind her back—including Reese, who she noticed in the audience, a possible conjuncture that knotted her stomach.
He was picking at lint on his tweed jacket, a young man with a boyish face who liked to dress up like the real professor he planned to become one day. The disdain in the gesture was obvious. He picked at it the same way he’d picked at Rae every time they’d talked since their break-up.
The competition for tenure-track slots was fierce, and Reese too professionally jealous for their relationship to work. Since then, he’d mocked Rae’s research as either “methodologically flawed” or “kooky.”
Rae shut down her fear instinct and focused, instead, on how good it would feel if he finally mocked her to her face. If, instead of sniping, he attacked her theories in a public forum, she could finally have it out with him.
The moderator signaled her. Time to talk. She stood, took to the microphone, cleared her throat, and began: “I’ll level with you. There are two types of people in this room right now. One, the journalists, who get to write a punchy story about aliens killing the dinosaurs.” Rae’s aside had them in the palm of her hand, and she gave them every watt of her smile.
“The others, of course, are the scientists who hate the fact that the public only cares about space when it’s full of aliens who we imagine to be hilariously like us.”
Just then, her eye caught someone strange. He stood at the room’s edge, a head taller than the professors and scientists around him. He wore what looked like a black kurta, a sort of long jacket that hit knee-level, and white pants beneath that.
Black-eyed with charcoal hair, he seemed to project a bubble of space in the crowd on all sides. Though he had his hands in his pockets, there was something dangerous in his stance. She couldn’t put her finger on what, but the intensity of his stare set her fine hairs on end.
She fumbled her next line and her words stalled.
For two heartbeats, she tried to breathe. The man hadn’t moved. There was no logical reason for him to even draw her gaze, other than his size and that unrelenting, fiery-eyed stare.
Forcing herself to look away, she focused on Reese and reminded herself: If I mess this up, he wins. It put just enough iron in her backbone that she could ignore the kurta-wearing giant.
He hadn’t disappeared, though. She dove into her lecture, acutely aware he still watched her; with heart in throat, she had the strangest sense she was putting on this performance for him.
***
He’d come halfway across the quadrant on the whim of his domé, whose dreams had been disturbed by meddling on this side of the spiral arm; but now that he saw the troublesome female in person, Garr knew his own needs and his goddess’s would align.
Even with domé Kaython translating in his ear through her linguistic microbes, the aliens were hard to comprehend. The problem was their culture. He gathered that he stood in some primitive war council, though they were too backward to have a prime.
He’d noticed they permitted mating-class females to participate. Folly, surely. And they listened to the female at fron
t, whose dangerous tampering had brought him to this world.
Garr could see her pulse race in her throat—smell the faint traces of floral perfume on her body through the crowd. He repressed the impulse to stride up and peel open the collar of that stiff, primitive shirt near her throat and inhale.
What insane male permitted a female so exquisite to head a war council? She was just standing there, publicly, no protector in sight. At any moment, he expected someone to issue a challenge and claim her.
Can you believe that’s her? messaged Vaya from her position in the seats. Kaython’s microbes didn’t just translate: they also let he and his soldier communicate silently. Vaya couldn’t stand among the aliens without them gawping, because this species lacked the bioform diversity that characterized his own. Vaya would… stand out among them. Those scouting reports I showed you didn’t really get it across.
No, Garr had known from the moment he’d seen those reports that this human was special. He’d announced his interest in her then, to the obvious dismay of Vaya. Now that he saw her in person, he wanted her that much more.
I can’t believe someone so soft and small is causing Kaython so much distress, Vaya complained.
Garr wasn’t certain Kaython was distressed. Like all domé, she could be damnably obscure in what she desired. Certainly, Garr didn’t want this alien to be his enemy.
He surveyed the way those trim, primitive fabrics clung to the curves in her hips, body, and bust—she’d be softer than a Ythirian female. She kept her golden hair in a tight braid like a warrior, and he wanted to comb it out with his fingers.
Are you seriously still interested in her? Vaya asked, distaste obvious. You won’t claim a 98 percent match, but you’re interested in the one whose genetics are twenty cycles behind ours?
I do as I will, Vaya.
Fine. But mark my words, boss. The short ones are always trouble.
Hold position. I want a closer look. He needed one, really, and soon had the opportunity: the female’s gaze had shifted elsewhere during her talk, and he crept toward the stage.
Alien Romance: The Alien's Pregnant Mate: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Romance, Alien Invasion Romance, BBW) (Celestial Mates Book 2) Page 11