Gaelen let out a long suffering breath and swiveled his head on his neck to glare at her. “What the fuck?”
Valee shrugged. “I am assigned to wait upon the king and from the looks of things, that is a good thing because his ‘mama’ is preoccupied.”
Emma glanced from one to the other, unable to follow the conversation since they’d both switched to their native tongue. It seemed pretty clear, though, that Princess Bitch thought she had some dirt on Emma she could use to her advantage.
Emma forgot her embarrassment as that realization hit her like a snow ball to the face.
What had possessed her to let Gaelen make love to her—screw her—with the baby in the room?
Sure he was asleep and he was an infant besides—and if she’d been his real mother in a similar position she wouldn’t have thought it was anything to get too worked up about. He was too little to know what was going on if he’d woken up. If parents never took a chance there wouldn’t be any but ‘first borns’ in the world.
This was a completely different ball game, however.
She was already in a precarious position.
Valee didn’t like her any more than vice versa and Emma had a bad feeling she was going to use this against her.
The question was, could she use it to get rid of her? Not would she.
Emma didn’t think she would hesitate and she didn’t give a damn what it might do to Nye to have her torn away from him after all he’d been through.
She glanced toward Nye at that thought and saw that he’d sat up in his bed to see what all the commotion was about.
And he looked distressed because he could understand that there was a disagreement of some sort in progress.
Her first impulse was to leap up, but there were two problems with that. She was pinned to the bed by a very naked man who still had his cock in her and she was naked.
She didn’t think that would disturb the baby. He’d seen her naked.
The cabin was tiny and they’d lived under each other. She wasn’t inclined to stroll around naked, but … well, she hadn’t worried too much about him getting a peak if he woke up while she was looking for clothes or trying to change.
She looked at Gaelen, whose attention was still focused on his sister. “I need to get up to see about Nye,” she said quietly.
“I see to Nye!” Valee said at once and started across the cabin.
Emma was on her feet and reaching for the baby before her brain had fully calculated what it would take to dislodge Gaelen and get there.
Nye grabbed her around the neck when she lifted him and burrowed his face against her, clinging tightly.
Valee stopped abruptly, pursing her lips. “Gib bebe!”
Gaelen got up, grabbed his sister by one arm and forcibly marched her across the room.
Emma didn’t wait around to see what was going to happen next. She took Nye and headed into the tank room/bathroom.
When she’d bathed off, she managed to find a towel and dry herself and wrap up in it.
Thankfully, when she returned to the main room both Gaelen and his sister had left.
She wished that was enough to make her feel better, but it wasn’t.
Gathering Nye close, she rocked him until he fell asleep again and then settled on her bed with the baby snuggled against her.
Princess Valee didn’t return. Emma focused on trying to ignore the let down and empty her mind of what had happened. She didn’t want to analyze it. She was afraid of the conclusions she might draw from the actions of both members of that family.
Eventually, she was able to find sleep, but even that was disturbed by unpleasant dreams.
It was actually a relief when Nye woke her for a feeding in the wee hours—her least favorite time to get up and make a bottle—but that was short lived.
She couldn’t remember the dreams but the earlier debacle came back with a vengeance in excruciating detail.
Chapter Sixteen
Hauk set his plate on the table and settled in the chair across from Gaelen and Kadin, flicking a glance and a polite if absent nod at each. Gaelen snagged his attention, however. Generally way too fucking cheerful first thing in the morning than Hauk cared for, he was scowling at his plate and eating mechanically.
After studying his thunderous expression for several moments, Hauk flicked a questioning look at Kadin.
Kadin shrugged. “No clue. At a guess, I would suppose the gift was not received with quite the enthusiasm he had hoped and expected.”
The comment penetrated the black cloud hovering over Gaelen and he sent Kadin a resentful glare. “She received it well,” he growled. “She was happy with it. Very happy.”
Surprise flickered through Hauk and more than a little annoyance. He hadn’t expected the others to move in on Emma quite that fast and was not happy to find himself last man out. “What gift?”
“I found the clothing Emma was wearing when you kidnapped her, that the Sheloni took, and returned them to her.”
“I did not kidnap her,” Hauk growled. “I rescued her from getting her head blown off!”
Gaelen shrugged, as if to say it was splitting hairs when it damned well wasn’t! It was the damned truth! “You gave her her own clothing as a gift?”
Gaelen scowled at him for a long moment. “That was not the gift, gods damn it! I thought about it! I went and searched for them and found and then returned them to her. That was the gift.”
Hauk seemed to wrestle with himself. “And she was delighted?”
“She was,” Gaelen snarled belligerently.
“Which is what has put him in such a glorious mood this morning,” Kadin said dryly.
Princess Valee planted her plate noisily on the table top at that moment, distracting all three, who had been so deeply into their discussion they had not noticed that she had entered the dining hall—rare for her since she generally slept till nearly noon.
“Good morning, Lord Hauk, Prince Kadin,” she said cheerfully.
Gaelen slammed his utensil down on the table, shoved his chair back so abruptly it screamed its way across the floor before flipping over and shot to his feet.
For a moment Hauk thought he might have to intervene between the siblings for Galen looked as if he was struggling with the urge to throttle Valee—who was stupid enough to smirk at him when he was in a mood most foul and unlike his generally impassive self.
Instead, thankfully, he merely scooped his plate up and stalked off.
Kadin and Hauk exchanged a long look.
Kadin shrugged.
Hauk looked down at the food he had not even touched yet, wondering if Valee would take it as an insult if he excused himself and finally decided to eat what he could while he had the chance. In any case, he was curious to know what had transpired between the two and knew there was probably a very good chance Valee would spill it fairly quickly.
“I suppose he is still angry that I interrupted him last eve,” she said casually.
Kadin and Hauk both looked at her in dawning suspicion.
Realizing she was waiting for a prompt, Kadin obliged. “You interrupted?”
She snickered. “I had no idea. Well, I headed to my quarters to go to bed and there they were, fucking like two jackadoos—His Majesty staring at them like he thought they might be fighting but was not sure. Gaelen’s ass in the air ….”
Hauk stared at her in disbelief for a long moment and then abruptly got to his feet. “Excuse me, I think I may be late … for something.”
“Hold up!” Kadin said, getting to his feet, as well. “I will walk with you. I want to see how the repairs are coming.”
“No wonder he looked like he wanted to choke her to death,” Kadin muttered as they got to the corridor.
Hauk grunted non-commitally. “It is his own fault for having bungled the entire courtship.”
Kadin was taken aback. “But …this is the way it has always been done. If she accepted him and his gift, I am certain that he thought it w
ould be acceptable.”
“In the first place,” Hauk growled, “it may be the Hirachi custom, but she is not Hirachi and you cannot expect it to be the same. And, in point of fact, it is not the same.”
“It is not?” Kadin echoed, clearly dismayed. “Well, I am glad he beat me to the … uh … punch.” Because he had thought it might be best to allow her time to get past what he had told her that he had done and, possibly, the sense that he had taken unfair advantage by using the mating kiss to subdue her—which the Satren typically did because their females were very reluctant to be bred at all and the Hirachi never did because they could not. But would not have done away, he was convinced, because it offended their sense of fair play. The females decided who they wanted to sire their offspring—period. “How is it that you would have this knowledge? And how is it that their mating practices differ?”
“The differences would be subtle and seem insignificant to you,” Hauk said dismissively, having no real desire to give up information that might give him an advantage.
Not that he really felt he needed one.
He was no prince as Kadin and Gaelen were, but he was a lord of some distinction on his own world.
And, he knew that Earth women were far more susceptible to the mating enzymes Satren males produced than their own women—who still had to fight hard to overcome it. Little short of absolute hatred prevented them from succumbing to any male who had the chance to use it.
“I have a reasonably good understanding of things,” Kadin said tightly.
Hauk shrugged. “They will not accept any gift if it is too intimate or too expensive—only love tokens and pretty words. And at that, you cannot tell if they are willing to accept. You must dance attendance upon them until they decide to give you the boot or accept you.”
Kadin was outraged. “I am a prince, gods damn it!”
“Which may grant you points,” Hauk said cheerfully. “But as it was you who told the Sheloni that she was our love slave, I think that that might be a stalemate at best.”
That was even more outrageous. “You know that I did it to protect her! I could think of nothing else that would not convince them that she would be more useful to torture to keep us in line. And I did not hear you or Gaelen objecting or suggesting anything else.”
“I know this and you know this and I am not convinced that will weigh with her.”
Kadin felt like choking him, but he was afraid he might be right.
Not that he planned to bow out without a damned good try, but he felt like the odds were stacked against him.
He was not pleased when Hauk laughed.
“This is humorous to you?”
“What? Oh that! Well, actually, yes, but I was laughing at the image of Gaelen’s ass in the air when Princess Bitch decided to barge in. You think it was purely bad luck?”
Kadin grinned despite his own problems. “Hell no. I know Gaelen. He is not a fool. He would have bribed the guards … just in case.”
“That is what I was thinking.” He was silent for a few moments. “I do hope I can avoid getting on her wrong side.”
Kadin laughed outright. “I would not count on that. I am fairly certain that she has her eye on you as a potential mate.”
Hauk had feared as much. “You are far more appropriate and I am convinced she has her eye on you.”
It was just as well that the banter had improved their humor because when they got over to the damaged ship to have a look at the progress of repairs they discovered the news was not particularly good.
They had managed to repair the ship well enough that it could limp along on its own steam without the need to tow it, but it was going to have to be landed before it could be fully restored and in a place where they would have access to the tools and materials needed. That meant limping all the way back to the Hirachi home world, Ach.
That also meant running the risk of having to fight another battle, or more than that, before they could get the king safely home.
On the other hand, the alternative was not something anyone was happy about.
They could take the two able ships and get the young king to safety while the damaged ship was manned by a skeleton crew and left to its own devices until they could settle the king and return.
No one liked that possibility, but they finally decided there was really no contest. The little king had been through enough already. They had to get him to a place of safety as quickly as was possible.
They took volunteers to stay behind and then prepared the able ships for the jumps they would have to take to get home.
* * * *
Emma didn’t know what was more amazing—looking down at an alien world, knowing it was inhabited by intelligent life—or the swiftness of the trip.
It seemed like it should have taken a lot more time.
Granted, it was really hard to keep up with the time—the day, the time of day—week or month. It had been difficult from the start to work by her body’s schedule/rhythm. After the capture by the Sheloni she’d lost even that much of a sense of passing time because she’d been knocked out and had no way to know for how long any of those episodes lasted.
And once they were rescued/escaped the slavers, she had had to rely on the ship’s clocks with no way of knowing if they were even close to the time she’d known before.
But in sleeping/eating cycles, certainly not that many had passed since the capture of the Sheloni ship and the decision to head straight to the Hirachi home world of Ach.
Little more than a week after the horribly embarrassing and potentially life altering event with Gaelen and his sister, they were already within sight of their destination.
And she still had no idea if this was going to be the end of her time with Nye.
She supposed it would have been easier if she’d known one way or another, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask even if she’d known who would have the answers for her.
She didn’t know who had assigned Princess Valee the task to start with, if it was someone that was traveling with them or someone from their home world.
She certainly wasn’t going to ask Valee. It made her very uneasy that Valee was so damned cheerful afterwards. She felt like the woman wouldn’t be so happy if she wasn’t convinced she’d destroyed lives—or at least hers. No doubt she didn’t think it would bother poor little Nye because he was ‘just a baby’.
But she didn’t know that it was certainty that made Valee so damned cheerful or just hopefulness.
She thought she would soon, though, and it tied her belly into fearful knots.
Gaelen had been distant since the fiasco.
Not that she blamed him, but so, too, had Kadin and Hauk and she didn’t understand why they would give her a wide berth.
Unless it was just her imagination and they’d been busy?
Or because they didn’t want to take a chance that Princess Bitch would screw them over, too?
She decided that supposition had to be wrong. After all, they were both high ranking people, at least as high as Valee, she thought.
But maybe it was because they knew she’d slept with Gaelen?
Not that they’d actually slept, but that sounded so much better than fucked—or screwed like rabbits.
Sigh.
She would’ve felt better if they’d actually gotten to finish.
In the first place, she wouldn’t have been left hanging. In the second, it just didn’t look as bad to be laying with somebody—even naked, sweaty, and panting for breath—as it did to catch them in the act. There was no denying it then. They might have had plausible deniability if they hadn’t been caught doing it.
The problem was, she had no idea what constituted ‘moral’ with these people.
Or even how much that mattered.
She did know that humans had a tendency to get very up tight and moral for a while and then loose and wild. And that the hymen had been valued for untold centuries as the epitome of virtue—if a female had one—and
not having one automatically meant you were so sorry you were hardly worth killing.
Was their society comparable to anything humans had ever had, though?
Well, Valee wasn’t gleeful for nothing, she reminded herself.
Clearly she thought it meant very bad things for Emma.
It made it worse that the baby had been especially clingy since the incident and screamed whenever Valee tried to take him. Valee blamed that on her, but she thought it was the bitch that had traumatized the baby with the tirade she’d enacted.
As if she had been taken by surprise! When it was as clear as bell that she’d found exactly what she’d expected to find.
It teased at the back of Emma’s mind that it had been a total setup, but she just couldn’t believe Gaelen would do such a thing. She couldn’t think of any motive he’d have for doing it quite aside from the fact that it didn’t fit the personality she believed she knew.
And then there was the fact that he seemed pretty damned pissed off about being interrupted.
Unfortunately, he’d kept his distance since and not allowed her the chance to talk to him about it.
Sighing, she moved away from the window where she’d been staring at the planet they were approaching.
She was going to know soon where she stood and what was to become of her.
Chapter Seventeen
Despite Emma’s misgivings, she was excited when the ship carrying her landed at last. The excitement waned somewhat while she waited to disembark, but she spent the time moving from one porthole to another to look outside and see what was happening.
She saw no sign of a city and actually no one that she was convinced hadn’t been on the ship the whole time.
So … no great fanfare for the arrival of the High King?
Or was that part of the delay? They were waiting for some kind of welcoming party?
The activity she could see seemed to be focused on concealing the craft.
There had been great beasts waiting on their arrival and those were harnessed to the ship and began to drag it slowly. Eventually, she saw that there was an opening that looked like the mouth of a massive cavern—or at least a massive opening. The ship was dragged mostly inside and then stopped and the beasts were unharnessed and led away to what appeared to be a small pond or creak where they were allowed to wander and feed and drink. Then the people who’d brought the ship began to cover the part that was still exposed. They were still working at it when Kadin arrived.
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