by Poppy Rhys
THE
MELIER
HOME WORLD
Erotic Science Fiction Romance
by
Poppy Rhys
J.T. Wynne
Copyright 2016 by Poppy Rhys
Edited by J.T. Wynne
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
WARNING
This story contains explicit sexual content involving multiple heterosexual males (m/f/m), graphic language, and situations intended for mature readers.
FOREWORD
The release of this book is bittersweet for me. I appreciate all of the support from my crazy family, the amazing readers who continued to keep their eyes peeled for the release of this novel, and to my long-time companion that I miss dearly, who kept me on my toes for nearly fifteen years.
I’m so grateful for all of it!
Chapter 1
July 15, 402 A.E. (After Earth)
Year 2515 C.E. – 402 years after Earth’s evacuation
Day 2 – Destination: Melierun
Lucia slowly swiveled back and forth on one of the chairs that decorated the bridge of the Weqna, Gi’Ren’s personal war shuttle. She had Re’Len in her arms, rocking her as she fed and watched the white streaks of stars fly past the large expanse of space around them. It was her favorite part about warp, and maybe her only favorite part about space travel in general. Being confined to a ship in space just made her feel like a caged animal. Thankfully, Melierun was only a two week trip, so she wouldn’t be trapped with three grumpy beasties and a wailing babe for very long.
Lu’s nerves were still a wreck. She’d been to many planets in the five years she had been part of Raz’s crew, but she never had to be diplomatic with royalty or convince a human hating species to erase centuries of prejudice.
What was I thinking?
You should’ve told Zun to suck it.
Yeah, I should have.
The devil walked past her then, specifically avoiding eye contact. They’d only been in the ship for two days, but every time Lucia whipped out a breast to feed Re’Len, everything but Lucia was interesting to Gi’Ren and Val’Zun. It was comical how squeamish they were when she breast fed. She’d begun to purposefully strike up conversations with them while feeding Lenny, just because it tickled her pink as they tried to avoid looking at her while speaking.
They still hadn’t caught onto her game yet.
“So, Zunny,” Lu started, her cheesy grin widening as he boiled while glaring at the screen in front of him. “How old are you? Please don’t tell me Soren is an old man.”
Lucia hadn’t even thought about it. What did Melier look like as they aged? Did they get wrinkles? Did they look youthful until they just keeled over one day?
Val’Zun looked like he almost smiled before he went back to glaring. “We are not old men. I am twenty-nine, and Val’Ja is twenty-eight, Gi’Ren is thirty-two… at least by human years.”
She made a gasping sound, “That’s ancient.”
And that made Zun’s concentration break.
His eyes whipped to her, insulted, and then when he realized he’d fallen right into her trap, his pupils dilated and he stood up abruptly. Lucia peeled her delight, continuing to swivel in her chair while Zun stalked from the room.
“Unca Zunny and Unca GiGi are so easy to fluster,” she cooed at Lenny. Lucia heard a pan crash and clang from the mess room, followed by a groan. “Yes they are.”
“You do it on purpose,” Soren grinned as he walked into the room and sunk down beside her. He wasn’t squeamish at all about her feeding ritual with Lenny.
“They make it so easy,” Lu smiled and leaned forward to peck Soren on the lips. She stared down at Lenny for a long moment, and her smile faded.
Her nerves were back to bouncing and bunching again and she just didn’t know what to do about it. Part of her wanted them to turn the ship back around so she could go be herself and raise her youngling with her family. Then another part of Lucia kept telling her that wouldn’t be fair to Lenny or Soren, since Melierun is part of them.
Warm knuckles brushed along her arm.
“What is wrong, Loo-Sha?” Soren rasped, forehead wrinkling with concern.
Lucia sighed.
“Soren, I know Val’Zun has all this confidence in me that I can convince your people to like humans, or tolerate them. It’s flattering and all…” she raised her own brows, thoughts momentarily veering, as Val’Zun and Gi’Ren both walked into the room looking at her while she was still feeding Lenny.
“But I wasn’t trying to be modest when I said I’m a terrible candidate for the task. I really don’t know when to shut up, my brain to mouth filter is glitchy at best, and I know nothing about your world. What if I step on some sacred bug and I’m executed?”
Val’Zun and Gi’Ren scoffed at this.
“I’m just saying, it could happen.”
Re’Len decided to detach and wail at that moment. Val’Zun scrubbed his eyes and looked away, making Lucia snicker softly despite her serious worry about her assigned task.
Righting herself so she was back to being covered, she sat Lenny on her lap to support her chin and encourage her to burp. She’d barely finished wiping her mouth before Gi’Ren was gently grabbing for her. Lucia gave her up and watched as the scarred and imposing Ren transformed into a giant teddy bear.
“I’m just a cow, aren’t I?” Lucia complained. It seemed all she did was feed Lenny only to have her snatched away afterward. Lu sucked in her lips to keep from grinning, because she really wasn’t mad about it; she just enjoyed giving them a hard time.
“You can do this, Loo-Sha,” Val’Zun said, coming to stand on the other side of her and sink down. “You have a strong mind,” he scowled, like this was hard to admit. “Our people will respect you. Eventually.”
“That’s not helping me feel any better,” Lu huffed.
“Loo-Sha,” Soren warned. “Do not stress.”
“You aren’t allowed to say that,” Lu whipped her eyes back to him. “I’m not pregnant anymore; I can stress all I want dammit!”
“Look what you have started,” Val’Zun accused Soren, who groaned.
And that is how Soren got the next diaper duty.
****
Val’Zun rubbed his nose absently and huffed a breath as he read over the same paragraph for the eighth time, still not registering what it actually said. No, because his mind was on the human wandering about the ship.
Loo-Sha, he corrected himself. He tried not to call her human anymore, in his mind that is. It was sometimes hard to remember it was insulting to the Therran’s.
Therran’s. He noticed too, Dor Nye inhabitants called their old planet ‘Earth’ still. To the rest of the universe, it was known as Therra. It was registered as such in the Intergalactic Coalition’s official planet registry. Why the humans still insisted on calling it Earth was a mystery to him. They were overly sentimental beings.
Val’Zun rubbed his nose again, and then shook his head to himself after he read the paragraph for the tenth time, still without comprehending.
All he could think about was her. His sinuses were so sore, constantly smelling her scent flood his brother’s ship.
“I cannot stand it,” he moaned to himself, and rested his forehead against the wall above the circuitry panel he was in front of. He set his thin tablet down and gave up trying to read the manual on how to reroute the air circulation. All he wanted was a little pheromone free air. Just for a while.
Her scent was making his entire being throb, and he could barely concentrate on much of anything.
A ripple shrieked through his body as he felt himself harden just thinking about Lucia and her breasts that she so unabashedly revealed, no matter where she was or who was in the room.
He felt a slight guilt, since he knew she uncovered herself to feed the youngling, and not because she was acting lewdly.
He tapped his forehead against the wall as he growled with frustration. Val’Zun tried not to think about the fleshy mounds that tremored with even the slightest movement, but that was near impossible. His fingers twitched as he imagined what the weight of them would feel like in his hands, or if the skin there was as soft as it appeared.
The oxygen circulation began its cycle once more, and to make matters worse, a fresh gust of Lucia’s pheromones flooded the room around him. His hips jerked involuntarily, nostrils flaring, and claws lengthening with his mixed arousal and anger. Anger because he couldn’t seem to control himself at all when it came to the human - Loo-Sha – or prevent his annex from hardening.
It was uncomfortable.
And disconcerting.
Val’Zun had always had trouble when it came to control. He didn’t understand why it was so much harder for him to be acceptable or normal, like other males; like his brothers or his father. Everything always seemed more difficult for him to do.
Mating was a tragedy waiting to happen, his anger was hard to control if he let it get to a boiling point, and because of these things, he never expected to actually ever have a mate.
He had expected his request to join with Lucia would be denied by Val’Ja, which was his right since he found her first. It would be frowned upon by his people, but it was still Val’Ja’s right.
The stipulation was tough, however. Lucia was from a monogamous society, and trying to convince her to pair with him would be a challenge. He wondered if it would be worth it. Was it just the pheromones that caused his strange attraction to her? Or did he actually enjoy her company?
She is infuriating.
“A’Drast,” he sighed, and snorted through his nasal passage.
It wasn’t a physical attraction, not in the traditional sense. She wasn’t beautiful, not as other females of his race were. No, she didn’t have any strength. Not truly. He could hold her down with one hand without any effort. It was pitiful.
She was short, she had no natural defenses, unless her jabbering counted, and she was most obviously, not Melier.
She is brave.
Despite her physical shortcomings, she had survived Trepnils. It was baffling the humans had survived as a race at all, being so disadvantaged, but for Lucia to have survived Trepnils… it said something to him.
That she was still sane, also spoke of strength of a different kind.
The hu- Loo-Sha, may not be physically strong, but she was mentally. She had life in her. Maybe this was what caused his attraction.
Another fresh waft of her pheromones rode the air and circled around his being.
He choked, his claws curled while his hips jerked again and he was nearly humping the wall.
Another frustrated groan vibrated through his throat as he willed his hands to not stray to his straining pants.
He closed his eyes, letting the memory of his tutor’s monotone droning flood his mind. The lecture looped in his brain until he felt his blood begin to cool, and his annex deflate just enough to stop the nearly painful throbbing.
“A’Drast,” he sighed again, wondering what he was getting himself into. He decided then, he would not ask Lucia to pair with him until he could control himself around her.
****
The final day of their journey, everyone was in the mess hall, eating a bowl of some surprisingly tasty mash Gi’Ren had made. It was sweet and a little salty and unfortunately yellow. Lucia tried not to look at it as she ate, otherwise the fact that it looked like a bowl of mucus would make her gag.
She figured it was the perfect time to try and cram some much needed information about the people she was going to have to convince.
“Is it just you three or do you have more siblings?” Lucia thought that was a good place to start.
“We have two more siblings; Val’Koy and Gi’Calla,” Gi’Ren supplied as he watched Lenny try to grab onto his big fingers.
Lucia took another bite while trying to look to the ceiling and shove the spoon in her mouth without getting it everywhere.
“How old are they? Are they males too?”
“Val’Koy is male, and Gi’Calla is female, both are thirty-three human years. They are twins.”
“Why do you keep making that distinction, ‘human years’?”
“Time is calculated differently on Melierun.”
Lucia ‘hmm’d’, “Shorter years?”
“No,” Zun shook his head once. “Longer, as the days are longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Not by much. Twenty-six Dor Nye hours in a day, four-hundred and five days in a year.”
Lucia tried to do the math in her head and it began to hurt. “Does that mean you’re actually younger in Melierun years?”
“Yes. On Melierun, I am twenty-six.”
Lucia wasn’t sure what to think of that. For a second, she stirred the goop in her bowl idly. If the year was longer on Melierun, maybe that meant they really did age slower than humans.
She assumed it was more likely though, that the longer day was due to the size of Melierun, and its rotation speed, rather than time actually slowing down because of gravitational anomalies. There were a few other planets of various sizes she had visited that had longer days, or shorter, than her home world of Dor Nye. And plenty of planets had their own calculation of time as well. Some didn’t have ‘years’ or ‘months’ they went by, while others had longer years, or shorter months.
Lu was just glad Dor Nye matched up with the Intergalactic Coalition’s base of universal time. It meant less calculating on her part, which meant less headaches.
“Will Val’Koy be the next king? And why are you all named after your parents? Is ‘Val’ and ‘Gi’ something important?”
“Gi’Calla will be the next queen,” Val’Zun corrected. “The first female always ascends the throne because Melierun has a matriarchal monarchy. The power is always passed to the eldest female of the reigning queen. If the reigning queen has no female progeny, power will be passed to her eldest female grandchild, niece, or cousin.”
Duh. She remembered now. When she last read about Melierun’s government before Lenny was born, she skimmed it once she saw what type of government it was. At the time, that was all she really cared to know, since Soren had yet to remember he was actually part of the ruling family.
“We are named after our parents because they are prideful,” Zun rolled his eyes at this which made Lu snort. “It has no special meaning.”
“What’s the proper greeting when meeting the king and queen?” Lucia was instantly reminded of her mother. Nova would probably already know, since she was adept at all things proper.
“To bow from the waist down and always address them formally as Queen Gi’Moy, and King Val’Qa,” Val’Zun instructed. “Only their progeny may address them informally in public as ‘mother’ or ‘father’. In private, you may call them whatever they allow you to.”
Lucia wiped her brow as she gave up trying to not look at the yellow mash because she was positive she was going to screw something up. She continued to stir it for no reason, and exhaled. “How am I to address your siblings or, you? Prince Val’Zun? Prin
ce Gi’Ren?”
“That has a nice ring to it.” The smug look on Zun’s face made Lucia narrow her eyes and her fingers took over control, flinging a spoonful of the slop at him.
It splattered against his cheek and lazily dribbled onto the table. Zun blinked slowly, his pupils blowing up as he continued to stare at her.
“See!” Lucia tried to explain and shake out her hands. “I can’t control myself.” She covered her face with her wicked fingers and moaned. “I’m going to offend the queen and she’s going to have me killed. Lenny will grow up without me and-”
“Loo-Sha,” Soren humorously soothed, tossing a cloth at Val’Zun. “You are worrying too much. Our people will not expect you to know proper Melierun etiquette.”
“Once again, that isn’t making me feel any better,” she whined, breathing faster as she felt panic set in. “You two are terrible at consoling. No offense.” Lucia clutched at her chest.
“Some taken,” Soren said before he coached her calming mantra and rubbed his warm, large hands up and down her arms soothingly. “Breathe slowly, Loo-Sha. You are safe. We will not let anyone harm you.”
Lucia tried her damnedest to calm down and breathe slowly, as Soren instructed. Closing her eyes, she inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth.
I can do this. I’m Lucia Herana. Mother, survivor, and I’m amazing.
Yes, mostly amazing.
Not helping.
Woosahhhh.
Her breathing went back to normal and she opened her eyes. She had to remember, five years ago when she hopped that ship with Mima to join Raz’s crew, she was looking for adventure and to help people. She had to remember to look at this like an adventure. She’d be meeting new people, a new species, seeing a new planet and helping bring two worlds together that may never otherwise.
Lucia had this.
“Okay,” she sagged in the chair, nodding once and then sitting up straight with renewed determination. “I’m better now. I apologize, Val’Zun.” Lucia did truly mean it, and she tried to convey that sincerity through her gaze. Zun’s pupils slowly went back to normal and he relaxed in his chair once more, accepting her apology. “I still have more questions.”