by H. E. Trent
While pulling Duke’s pretty dick back into his throat, he sneaked his fingers between Duke’s cheeks and probed the clenched hole. He massaged it, wriggling his fingertip side-to-side until Duke relented, and bucked up into his mouth again.
Just a tiny little breach and already he was thicker, throbbing, desperate to come.
Apparently, his royal pain in the ass wanted to feel things, and Luke was going to let him off the hook. He’d only meant to get a taste, and that would be it. Duke could go be Duke, and Luke could marry someone who wasn’t him.
He concentrated on sucking on the tip, and worked his hand up and down Duke’s wet cock fast.
Duke slapped a hand over his mouth just in time to muffle his shout. Just in time for his cock to thicken once more.
Just in time for Luke to pull away and watch the arc of seed shoot onto Duke’s belly and chest.
As Luke gazed upon his good work, Duke concentrated on breathing. His belly was quivering as though being held hostage by a series of coughs he needed to but couldn’t let out. His hands were open, fingers splayed at his sides. Gaze on the ceiling.
Luke bent and landed one last kiss on the tip of Duke’s cock, and then reached over the bedside to find someone’s—anyone’s—undershirt.
He cleaned Duke’s skin and then tossed the wadded garment toward the neighboring bed. “I guess that’ll do.”
Duke pulled in a shuddering breath and let it out. “You’d…do that to me, and then not want me?”
“It’s not about wanting.” Feeling guilty, Luke tapped his COM’s face and looked at the time. Only six. Not as late as he’d feared.
She wouldn’t have been up waiting for him.
She wouldn’t have been up wondering what was going to happen, and plenty needed to happen. Luke just wasn’t certain what that would be until he had a chance to ask her some questions. He needed to give her an opportunity to explain herself—to tell him that circumstances weren’t as suspicious as they seemed.
And if she couldn’t…well, he didn’t know what he needed to do.
As pretty as she was, he wouldn’t keep her if she was a liar. He wasn’t going to be responsible for importing a liar to Jekh. As badly as he wanted to have someone in his life, his home, he didn’t want someone like that.
Luke settled onto the bed beside Duke and twined his fingers behind his head.
Duke rolled onto his side and locked his bright gaze onto his face. Then he eased closer and pulled the covers up over them. “Why does this have to be so difficult?”
“What you’re really asking is why I couldn’t have been born a woman.”
“I don’t mean to make it sound like that.”
“It is what it is, Duke. You accept things as they are, or not. I can’t.”
“So it’s all up to me? If I tell you that I’ll figure this out, would you send her away?”
Luke opened his mouth to say yes so quickly that his jaw almost cramped, but he didn’t let the word out.
He couldn’t say yes.
He’d done what he’d done—brought Autumn all the way to Jekh because Duke hadn’t been interested in figuring things out before. Now that Luke was slipping out of his reach, he’d simply gotten more motivated. He should have been motivated enough before Luke had gone to such measures, and that was the kind of cowardly shit Luke couldn’t forgive.
So Luke didn’t respond. He closed his eyes, twined his fingers through Duke’s, and kept his fucking mouth shut.
CHAPTER NINE
BESHNI FARM, OUTSIDE LITTLE GITANO
Yawning, Brenna Zachary stretched her arms over her head and jolted herself into a state of greater wakefulness. She’d caught a glimpse of the clock mounted over the door in the farm office. She’d had no idea it was so late.
Or early, rather. It was barely seven hundred hours.
“Ara!” Brenna pushed back from the desk and stumbled to the nearest window. She yanked the light-blocking curtains open, and immediately covered her eyes. Her brain was mush. If it wasn’t, she would have remembered that the window faced the rising sun. “My goodness, we worked all night.”
The Jekhan woman seated on the opposite side of the desk shut down her holo-relayer and rubbed her wine-colored eyes. She swore under her breath in Jekhani and then rolled back her shoulders. “And still not caught up.”
“But we will be soon,” Brenna said and hoped she sounded more optimistic than she’d felt.
The Jekhan “Singles Book” was an electronic spin on a local tradition. It had started small—only the local unmarried population who wanted to look for prospects outside of the tiny farming community. And then people from faraway cities like Buinet had asked if they could be listed, too. People on Earth began responding—mostly women. There were far more men on Jekh than women, and the site was a way of helping to balance the population. While the women could have certainly resorted to selective breeding and only having female embryos implanted, they were still a generation out from seeing any improvement in the figures. Further, there was no guarantee that the following generation would be born at a viable ratio or if it’d revert to the same one of their parents and grandparents. The Tyneali had tweaked the Jekhan genome so much that the hybrids would probably need three or four generations of pure human infusion to truly offset the Tyneali genes. For the most part, the Jekhans didn’t mind. They were, after all, at least half human and most didn’t cling to any aspects of Tyneali heritage. For the time being, they needed more women on the planet to solve the immediate shortfall.
Brenna administered the site with her partner Ara Merridon, and in the six months since originating the database, they’d gotten a bit overwhelmed.
So many profiles to review and approve.
So many meetings to coordinate.
They needed help, but they had that age-old chicken-and-egg problem. There was an eligible worker shortage, and they needed more people on the planet before they could get help getting more people on the planet.
Ara smoothed a hand over her red-brown hair and blew an assertive raspberry. “Let’s go nap and get back to work later. Breakfast should be ready at the farmhouse soon.”
“We’re almost late on approving the front batch, though. I feel bad about that. The site says that approvals will happen within five to seven business days, and the people currently at the top of the list have been waiting for about six and a half.”
Ara grimaced and drummed her long black nails against her arms. Her nails had been red, brown, and violent green in the past seven days. The frequency in which she changed her polish might have seemed excessive to some people, but Jekhan women were still getting accustomed to human luxuries. Nail polish was cheap and made her feel pretty, so her brother Trigrian kept her fully stocked with the stuff. After what she’d endured during the Terran occupation, he’d probably let her polish her nails with his blood if he thought it’d lift her mood.
“I suppose we could ask Sera to help us again,” Ara mused. “I think she’s too sweet, though.”
Brenna agreed, and that was saying something. If “naive” had an illustration in the dictionary, the picture would have been of Brenna.
She’d been on Jekh since arriving with her father as a child and had seen him and other men do a lot of bad things. She’d endured a lot of bad things, too, when she hadn’t been able to go along with their program anymore. Her brother had told their father of her sympathies to the Jekhans, and her father had her tossed into jail to distract from his own misdeeds.
But when it came to love and romance, she was worse than naive. She was clueless.
On a planet where every unattached woman was a hot prospect, she was overlooked. Sometimes, by her own design. Sometimes, simply because she wasn’t especially memorable.
People didn’t look at her the way they looked at gorgeous, headstrong Ara, or Brenna’s friends Eileen or Amy.
Mostly, people didn’t look at her at all.
She’d learned how to root out questionable ch
aracters, though. Sera wanted to give people a chance, in spite of all the red flags. She thought they were being too picky, and Brenna was fine with that. She wasn’t going to risk losing her hard-fought relationship with the immigration authority over a dud from a website. Hell, she might have to lean on the immigration one day to get herself a man, seeing as how her batting average on Jekh was running about zero.
Brenna sighed and swiped a hand through her messy ponytail. “Let’s go have breakfast and take naps. We’ll come back later to rip through the profiles that are due for approval today, and we’ll just assign them all a probationary status. We’ll say they’re in the system pending further vetting, and that we won’t charge them until they have full site access.”
Ara slipped her hands into the pockets of her hippie-style patchwork skirt and clucked her tongue. “So, they’ll be able to search the listings and see the profile information.”
“Most of it. We’ll figure out how to keep the most sensitive stuff behind the pay wall.” Brenna rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. “Precious set up the site in a way that should make that easy enough for us to do.”
“And they won’t be able to contact any of the members through the site?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m fine with that.” Ara gestured toward the door. “Let’s go eat.”
They filed outside and onto the stone path, pausing briefly outside the small building to let their eyes adjust to the sun.
“Ugh. We’re turning into vampires,” Brenna murmured.
“I suppose we do tend to keep odd hours as of late.”
“That can’t be healthy.”
Ara shrugged and then looped her arm around Brenna’s shoulder. “If it isn’t, I’m sure Dorro will come around soon enough and tell us. He didn’t meddle so much when my siblings and I were children, but he’s certainly developed the knack for it in the past twenty years.”
“He’s a good doctor. Don’t you trust him?”
“Of course I do. He just makes me sigh a lot.”
They both giggled.
Brenna lifted her glasses to rub her tired eyes once more and stumbled over an uneven patch of ground when Ara came to a sudden stop.
“What’s wrong?”
“Look ahead. Who is that?” Ara pointed to the back of the farmhouse, where a group of people lingered outside the door.
Looked like the usual suspects to Brenna. She saw her first real friend Courtney, who owned the farm along with her lovers Trigrian—Ara’s brother—and Murki. Court’s sister Erin was outside, too. Where one McGarry sister went, the other was sure to follow. Their constant proximity saved them from having to pass on information. There were also a couple of farmhands in the mix.
Brenna squinted and counted heads again. “Huh. You’re right,” she said to Ara. “There are definitely a few extra bodies over there.”
“Not neighbors. Folks from Little Gitano, maybe?”
“Not dressed like that. Locals like brighter clothes. Those grays are more typical of the Jekhans I used to know in Buinet. In fact, there’s this particular color of dress that—”
She cut off her words because the possibility her brain was homing in on didn’t seem legitimate.
“That what?” Ara insisted.
“Uh…” Taking a breath, Brenna gave her head a slow shake and willed her eyes to see better and farther. Frustratingly, they didn’t.
That can’t be right.
“That… That a certain sect wears,” she said when Ara tugged her sleeve with impatience. “The Bouks.”
“Bouks died out.”
Brenna shook her head again. “No. They got forced into the ghettos in cities when the Terrans arrived, just like everyone else.”
It’d been ages since she’d Brenna had seen that specific conservative, taupey-brown shade of garment, and even longer since she’d seen a dress with a collar as high as the matronly woman in the clump was wearing.
She knew that woman. That woman had kept Brenna clean and fed for years during puberty.
“Oh my God,” she whispered and took off running.
“Who is it?” Ara called after her, and she ran, too.
“That can’t be them. What are they doing here?”
“Who, woman?”
“My old housekeeper from Buinet,” Brenna said breathlessly. “I haven’t seen her since the riots! What the hell is she doing in Little Gitano?”
She hadn’t seen the woman in around two years. Brenna had been in jail, and she’d been the only person who’d visited her. She’d been the only person she knew from childhood who cared at all about what was happening to Brenna.
Brenna sprinted toward the door, patting her hair down as she went. She suspected she looked like a hot mess, but they’d just have to understand. She wouldn’t have normally presented herself in such a way.
As she got near, the sound of her sneakers slapping against the poured gravel made the group collectively turn. The old woman’s eyes softened with recognition, and she opened her arms wide. Brenna practically fell into them.
“I knew you’d be fine,” she whispered as she squeezed Brenna into one of her trademarked constricting hugs and rocked her. When Restaden had embraced her that way as a child, Brenna had almost been able to forget about where she was and what was happening around her. She could almost pretend that her father wasn’t there cutting bad deals for the Jekhans and looking for any opportunity to self-enrich, even going as far as to seed public doubt about his daughter’s honor and veracity to keep his status.
Restaden had always believed Brenna—had always understood her heart, and Brenna, child though she may have been, had tried to do the same for her.
“I hope you don’t mind that we visited.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” Brenna said breathlessly.
Restaden held her out at arm’s length and smiled as she gave Brenna an assessing look. “You look well. You’ve put on some weight.”
Oh God.
Brenna’s cheeks flamed hot and she would have hidden her face in her hands if she wouldn’t have been so obvious.
“Does she not look well?” Restaden asked the collective, obviously seeking assurances for Brenna’s sake.
“If you put ‘You look well’ and ‘You’re fat’ in abutting sentences,” Brenna said, dropping her hand, “a lady’s going to think instinctively that they cancel out.”
The line between Restaden’s brows deepened.
Cet, the farm’s resident scolding Jekhan mother, clucked her tongue and poked her head into the huddle. She muttered something in Jekhani, which Trigrian helpfully translated as, “You’re height-weight proportionate.”
“That says nothing. There’s a huge range of proportionality.” Farm living had been good to a lot of people, but it had made once-skinny Brenna more stout. She had more muscle, sure, but she also had some fluff. She wasn’t sure what, or who, she could blame for the fluff, but to date, she hadn’t been motivated enough to do anything about it. It would have been a different story if she ever outgrew her sweatpants.
Trigrian shrugged. “Not that anyone asked for my opinion, but the trend in Little Gitano before the Terrans came was for women to have softer figures.”
“You don’t have to tell me that just to make me feel better. Besides.” Brenna scoffed. “I’m overreacting for no damn reason. Don’t mind me.”
“He’s being truthful,” Ara said. “Roundness hints at fertility. Given our reproductive issues, you could understand the appeal.”
“In theory…”
No local person would have mistaken Brenna for being pregnant. The only men she’d ever been seen with were the ones on the farm, and most were either already partnered or were, in Courtney’s estimation, too old for her.
Restaden pulled her against her chest again and rubbed her hair. “Ah, I hoped that one day you’d grow to be bold and self-assured, but perhaps what your father planted in you will never allow it.”
“Maybe.” Brenn
a let herself grin. “I’m so glad to see you. What are you doing in the area?”
“We came specifically to see you, dear.”
“Me?” Brenna put a little breathing room between her and the older woman so she could see her face. “What do you mean?”
“We were living down near The Barrens, deciding where we would go. We were staying with friends who were doing well for themselves, and they’d been looking to have their son paired off. They told us about your system.”
“You mean the Single’s Book? I didn’t think we had any profiles in it from people way down in The Barrens. That’s pretty damn far from here.” She looked to Ara for confirmation.
Ara grimaced and said in an aside, “There may be a few in the pending queue.”
Brenna cringed.
“And then we saw your picture on the contact page.” Restaden put her hand to her chest and let out an indulgent breath. “My Brenna. You’re doing well.”
“Well, I… Yeah. I am. I’m doing pretty good now.” She could admit that. “Happier, anyway.”
“Of course, we had to come see you. We had to see Little Gitano.”
She kept saying “we,” and Brenna was about to ask her why, but then she noticed that there was another newcomer in the group, and he had a hint of familiarity about him.
“We?” she murmured and furrowed her brow.
“Yes.” Restaden pointed to the tall, broad, smiling young man standing nearby.
He had the stiff, erect posture typical of Jekhan men in formal situations, and the perfectly contained twisted bun at his nape. Jekhan men rarely let their hair down in public, and short hair was generally either a cry for help or a purposeful protest against the convention. Brenna had come to like the norm in her many years on Jekh. She liked that there was something secret and mysterious about the men—something they held back and allowed only a select few to see.
“Rajan,” Restaden said. “Do you remember my son?”
“Your…son.” Brenna’s head tilted in the way her father had always told her made her look like a broken-necked Barbie doll. She’d almost rid herself of the habit.