"Then I'm at least taking something you care about with me," Rokir snarled and jerked his rifle towards Erena, pulling the trigger.
Shang stepped into the path of the blast before Erena even had time to process what was happening. She saw him go down in slow motion while Davina opened fire on Rokir, forcing him to take cover behind the ship. She went down with him, barely aware of her companions ducking rifle fire above her.
There was a burning hole in Shang and he wasn't moving. Shock was giving way in Erena to a molten rage like boil rising in her throat behind a scream. She was taking the pistol he'd dropped before she'd had a second thought, charging the ship he'd taken cover behind so suddenly that her team had no chance to react. She caught Rin'rokir off guard too.
Compound eyes wide he raised his rifle too slow. She slammed one hand down on the burning barrel of that gun to shove it down and pressed the pistol to the bug's head with the other.
Inches from his face, her teeth bared like an animal, she didn't hesitate before she pulled the trigger. She pulled it five more times before she dropped it and picked up the rifle to shoot the puddle Rokir was swiftly becoming.
Paolo wrestled the weapon out of her hands before she could get more than a few shots in, Davina struggling to hold her back. She spat on the insect's corpse and aimed a kick at him as she was pulled away.
"Come back from that one, creep!"
Chapter Eighteen
The rest was a blur as they bundled her onto the ship. Fin was hard at work on Shang already, moving between him and Sergei with the ship's med kit. Davina assured them the kit was paltry, but what it contained seemed like miracle drugs to Fin.
Erena was too far out of her own head to help, just sitting at the back and watching as Davina flew them out of the nebula. She hadn't had time to process yet how horrified she was by what she'd done.
She was six layers of numb around a core of cold horror at the thought that Shang might die before they'd really resolved things. Before she'd had a chance to explain that she felt the same way.
She was covered in cobalt colored blood and her head was spinning, but there was nothing she could do but watch Fin scrabbling to save the man she was beginning to realize she loved. What else could have overcome her that way, enough to make her do a thing like that?
Fin kept the two men alive until they could get back to the Crystal City, where Doctor Yll urged them into her office, her eyes wild with worry at the state they were in. It might have taken hours or days. Erena's sense of time had left her. She could only watch Shang and wait for him to open his eyes.
"He's going to be okay," Yll said at last, sighing in exhaustion as she dragged her gloves off all eight hands, "It seems like he's worse off every time he comes in here. If he doesn't retire this time, next time he'll come in dead."
Erena barely heard the end of Yll's statement. Relief overwhelmed her, allowing all the stress and injury to catch up with her at last. She slumped into unconsciousness, her thoughts clinging to those words. He was going to be okay.
When she woke, Yll had treated her for her head wound as well as her exhaustion. She was once again in that clean white room, this time sharing it with Fin, though Fin hadn't left Sergei's side since they'd arrived.
Erena suddenly had a theory as to why Paolo had never succeeded in convincing Sergei to date him. She'd never considered the man might already be taken.
She was still shaken by what she'd done to Rin'rokir, but being with her team mates again helped a lot. She told them about the pregnancy at last.
Fin, who still didn't approve of Shang, tried to insist she get rid of it, but Paolo was on her side, and it wasn't hard to guess why, judging by the moon eyed way he gazed at Davina every time the subject came up.
After a few days, Shang woke up. Erena was there as soon as he opened his eyes.
"Welcome back," she smiled down at him and he smiled back, those dark eyes full of love as he took her hand.
After a few more days, he was back on his feet. While he recovered, he and Erena talked about anything and everything they could think of. Anything but the future.
He told her about growing up in the Labyrinth City alone after his mother passed, and about the legends she'd told him of his people, about giant elders thousands of years old, their lives tied to massive oak trees.
She told him about growing up on earth, trying to convince people to take her love of science seriously, and about the movies she loved and the books she'd read.
With everything he told her and with everything she told him, Erena became more certain that she loved him. And more than that, she became certain she could build a life with him.
When Shang was well enough, they took Shang's ship out into the darkness. It was cramped and uncomfortable, but the humans had trained for those sorts of conditions, and though Shang and Davina got irritable, for the most part things were uneventful.
They stopped frequently, a last tour of the stars on the way back to earth. In a roundabout way, Erena thought, they'd still completed their mission out here.
And then one day she looked through the view screen and saw Earth floating in front of them, as though it had crept up on her. Suddenly, she didn't know what to do.
"I can't wait to feel grass under my toes again," Finn sighed with longing, looking out at Earth as they approached, "This has been the most amazing ride of my life, but I'm glad to be home."
"Me too," Erena said softly, glancing at Shang, who sat silent in the pilot's seat.
"It will be nice to see home again," Paolo agreed, "But I'm not staying."
"What?" Sergei sputtered and everyone turned to look at the other man.
"I don't intend to stay on earth," he repeated, "I plan to go on traveling with Davina. We're going to go back to that nebula and try to repair her ship. There was never much for me on Earth. I said my good byes to it when we left. But there's love and a whole universe out here! Why wouldn't I choose to stay out here?"
"I suppose you're right," Fin said, blinking in surprise, then smiled and shifted closer to Sergei, "But I think everything I'm looking for is going to be on Earth."
"So do I," Sergei agreed, smiling.
"What about you Erena?" Paolo asked, and Erena looked up at him in surprise, "Will you stay on Earth?"
Erena stared back at him for a long moment, then shrugged, shaking her head.
"I don't know," she said, "I haven't decided yet. I just... want to go home."
"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 inside 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-re
viewed 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.
The Warrior's Proposal (Celestial Mates Book 7) Page 38
