by Roxie Ray
Interesting. My tongue flicked out between my lips as my eyes widened, then narrowed with interest. If she had been trying to leave her betrothed even before she had come into my care, perhaps Sawyer would be more amenable to finding a different mate after all.
Perhaps she would be more amenable to me.
I opened my mouth to proposition her, but before I could, the trumpets of heralds sounded from the other side of the courtyard. I glanced up at the banners that accompanied the horns—the red and green of House Brixta. Prince Calix, it appeared, worked fast.
Sawyer yelped at the racket, clamping her hands over her ears and flinching at the sound. Immediately, I dropped to my knees next to her, my brow lowered in a concerned scowl.
“Are you all right, Sawyer?” I asked, placing my hands on her shoulder and turning her toward me.
“I’m…ugh. I’m fine. This is just the second time this hour.” She sighed, then shook her head. “They caught me while I was swimming earlier, some messenger with blue and orange banners asking me to come dine with Prince So-and-So.” When she opened her eyes again, her piercing blues nearly took my breath from my lungs. “I don’t like how they look at me here. Like I’m a piece of meat they’re just waiting to sink their teeth into.”
I smoothed a hand down her back and laughed self-deprecatingly. “I fear I have looked at you like that myself from time to time. You are, as I have said…incredibly beautiful. Sometimes, admittedly, it is difficult not to stare.”
“At me?” Sawyer looked confused, then giggled. “Well, I don’t mind when you look at me like that.” She cast a glance over her shoulder at the rapidly approaching retinue of banners and horns. “It’s them that I have a problem with.”
An idea came to my mind—a cruel one, but one I would take great pleasure in if she would allow it.
“Do you want me to make them go away?” I asked.
Sawyer blinked. “You can do that? How?” With another blast of the horns, she flinched again then growled in frustration. “Actually, never mind. Make it happen, big guy. Whatever it takes.”
Smiling, I moved my hand from her shoulder to her cheek. My claws were sharp, but my touch was soft as I turned her face to mine. I tilted her lips upward and ran my hand down her throat possessively—then, before all the House Brixta manservants and bannermen, I moved my mouth to hers. She stiffened at first, making me fear that perhaps a kiss was not what she’d had in mind when she said whatever it takes—but then, slowly, she eased into my kiss as she had done that first time, back in the safe room aboard the ship.
This was not the same context as our first kiss. Not by leagues. Bloodlust did not course through my veins this time, nor did Sawyer tremble with fear. But the change in situation meant that this time, I could be more tender in how I kissed her—and she in how she reciprocated. Her fingers reached up to the soft stubble on the side of my head where the hair was shaved down. They climbed higher, clawing against my scalp and pushing through my waves. This time, when my tongue slipped between her lips, she met it with her own tongue eagerly. A tiny moan escaped her throat, happy and satisfied.
I did not know for how long the kiss lasted, but when it finally broke, the House Brixta men were gone. Beneath my hands, Sawyer’s body was heaving slightly, as though she had just run miles without moving.
I could not blame her. My chest was rising and falling in the same way.
“There,” I said, smiling as I stood and backed away. “You should not have any more problems with gentlemen callers now.”
“No,” she said softly, blinking and looking dazed as I left her sitting there. “No…I don’t suppose I will.”
13
Sawyer
“And then he kissed you?” Bria’s eyes were wide as flying saucers as she cradled Kaliope in her arms. “That doesn’t sound like Haelian at all.”
“I don’t know what else I would call it. Definitely a kiss,” I confirmed. As soon as I’d come in from the gardens, I’d gone straight to Bria’s rooms in the palace. Not because I was the kiss-and-tell type or anything, but because honestly, I didn’t know what to do now—and as far as I knew, Bria was the only person on the entire planet who could give me advice on the matter at hand. Who better to give me Lunarian romance advice than the only human woman who was actually married to a Lunarian, after all? “But then he left right after, which was…”
Bria closed her eyes and giggled, nodding sagely. “Yes. That sounds much more like the Haelian I know. But…wow. Okay. This is kinda huge, then.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“It’s just…” Bria shrugged and sighed. “I mean, it’s probably not my place to say, but from what I’ve heard from Kloran, Haelian isn’t really the kissing type. He’s always struck me as, I don’t know, kinda cold, honestly? Not in a bad way or anything, but he’s a pretty wealthy guy. Good-looking, too.”
I bit my lip, remembering the feel of the soft stubble on the side of Haelian’s head beneath my fingertips. The gorgeous way his lips curled when he smiled. How good he smelled—clean and fresh. “Yeah, I’ve, uh, I’ve noticed.”
“There aren’t many unmarried women who are of age here on Lunaria right now, but what few are left…” Bria shifted Kaliope against her shoulder and rubbed the chubby baby’s back to burp her. “Let’s just say they’ve all tried their luck with him.”
“Oh.” Now I knew what she meant by not the kissing type. “So, he’s, um, a bit of a horndog then, huh?”
Just my luck. Another guy who didn’t know how to keep it in his pants. Apparently, I had a type, and it was guys who liked women a little too much.
But Bria shook her head. “Not at all, actually. From what I understand from Kloran…” Bria stopped, furrowed her brow, and shook her head again. “No, I shouldn’t say.”
“Bria! Come on, you have to say.” I’d only known Bria for a few days now. She definitely wasn’t a gossip. But I’d just had the best kiss of my life with Haelian in the gardens, and if she had dirt on him, I needed her to dish. “Please? I’m trying to get my head straight here.”
Slowly, Bria smiled. “I just didn’t even realize that he knew how to kiss. Kloran says he doesn’t believe in marriage—or courting, for that matter.”
“So he just has sex with random women and strings them along?” My stomach rolled with nausea. After all the cat-and-mouse we’d been playing since he’d rescued me, I’d kind of been of the opinion that maybe Haelian, well…liked me. And maybe he did—but from the sounds of things, he liked everyone. Just like Aiden.
Just my freakin’ luck.
But again, Bria shook her head. “I don’t think he’s slept with anyone at all, Sawyer. He’s, you know. That strong, stoic, noble type.”
“I’ve noticed that, at least.” He was definitely the type who kept his feelings under wraps as much as possible. If it hadn’t been for the color changes in Haelian’s eyes, I wouldn’t have been able to read him at all.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t think he’s ever slept with anyone.” Bria let out another little laugh. “Kloran certainly hadn’t when I first met him. The shortage of women here on Lunaria…I don’t know. It sounds like some of the upper-class guys are able to pay lower-class women for, you know, pleasure. But Kloran definitely wasn’t that type, and I don’t think Haelian is either.”
Now, it was my turn to be all wide-eyed and shocked. “You mean…he’s a virgin?”
“Probably.” Bria bounced Kaliope a little higher on her shoulder, which made the baby coo and squirm. “But that’s not a bad thing, you know. Not to give TMI or anything, but Kloran, uh…he seemed to know what he was doing.”
We both giggled then as we saw each other’s cheeks go a little pink. Boy talk and babies—pretty much the last things I would have imagined I’d be dealing with on an alien planet. If I’d ever imagined I’d even ever be on an alien planet. But it was kind of nice, actually, having girl talk with another human like this. The few friends I’d had in
college, I’d lost touch with after graduation or when I moved to the nicer part of town to live with Aiden—and Bria was definitely nicer than any of them ever had been. Even if we were talking about, well, sex with alien men instead of study notes and exams.
“Do you think he likes me?” I crossed my arms over my ribs and rose from my chair to pace a little. “That, um…that wasn’t even our first kiss, actually.”
“Two kisses from the honorable General Haelian?” Bria’s eyebrows shot up toward her dark brown hairline in amusement. “There’s no way to tell for sure, but if I had to guess…”
But before Bria could make any guesses, the door swung open and Leonix burst through it with a triumphant grin on her face.
“Sawyer, I thought I might find you here.” She strode through the room like a woman on a mission, which was only exacerbated by the fact that she was dressed in her military uniform from the ship. “You will never imagine who I was just talking to.”
“Haelian?” Bria and I said simultaneously.
Leonix’s mouth gaped open for a moment. “Well. Yes, actually. How did you know?”
Bria giggled. “I think a little birdie must have told us.”
“But the chicklings on Lunaria do not talk…” Leonix tilted her head, confused. “Do they speak on Earth? I was not aware—”
“Never mind.” Bria rose, still patting Kaliope on the back as she tried to earn a burp. “What did he say?”
Leonix’s smirk returned in full force. “Well…it surprised me, admittedly, but seeing how he has been looking at Sawyer ever since she came to be with us, it surprised me less than I thought it would. He was hoping that, perhaps, if Sawyer was agreeable to the idea, she might be interested in a—”
Leonix was cut off by a massive burp from Kaliope, the kind that left us all snickering afterward. But as soon as Leonix finished her thought, my laughter stopped abruptly.
“A date,” Leonix told me. “He would like to know if you would go on a date.”
“A what?” If I blurted the word out any harder, I was pretty sure my tongue would have flown right out of my mouth and landed wiggling across the room.
“Well, at least now we know he likes you.” Bria looked smug as she passed a now-giggling Kaliope over to Leonix. “Are you going to go?”
“I didn’t—well, I don’t—” I clenched my jaw and screwed up my face. On the one hand, Bria was right. At least I didn’t have to wonder anymore about how Haelian felt about me. But on the other hand…a date with an alien? Haelian was a general, and from what I understood about the Lunarian social system, he and his family would have essentially been gold-class citizens if they’d been back in the sectors on Earth. I’d felt completely out of place in Aiden’s blue-class lifestyle when we’d started dating—but at least then, I’d kind of had an idea of what to expect. When it came to alien dating, I genuinely had no idea. “What would I even wear?”
Bria and Leonix exchanged a look, then laughed.
“Come on,” Bria said. She came back over to me and placed a hand on my back, guiding me toward the door to her bedroom. “I think I have exactly the thing.”
Four hours later, I’d been primped, plucked and pampered more thoroughly than I ever had in my life. When I’d first started dating Aiden, I’d had to rush home after a long day at work, shower, shave, and wax as fast as I possibly could in my cramped little bathroom, only to slap on makeup and pull on a dress at lightning speed before he came to pick me up in a car that cost more than I made in a year.
But obviously, that wasn’t how things went here on Lunaria. Bria had an entire team of servants at work for her within the castle, alien girls of a dozen different species whose job it was to attend to us in every conceivable luxury. A woman with tentacles for arms massaged my shoulders while Bria, Leonix, Kaliope and I soaked in a massive tub fed by piping-hot Lunarian springs. Another woman with six different sets of hands plucked my eyebrows, did my makeup and braided my hair all at once. By the time Bria’s team was done with me, I felt like a movie star—and when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror after, I realized I looked like one, too.
My hair had been arranged in an intricate set of braids that circled my head like a crown until they cascaded down into one massive braid that fell over my shoulder, heavy and glistening pale gold. Bria had selected an all-white outfit for me to wear—more harem pants, along with an incredibly low-cut, midriff-baring top. My makeup was tasteful. Nothing dark or gaudy—it only served to enhance my best features, which shocked me. Back when I’d been with Aiden, I hadn’t even realized that I had best features. But now, I could tell that I had nice eyebrows, thick and arched prettily. My lips looked sensual and full, and my blue eyes shimmered in a way I hadn’t seen them shine in a long time. Maybe not ever.
I was still getting used to how I looked now, but every time I saw myself, I was starting to recognize myself a little more. This definitely wasn’t how I’d looked back on Earth, though I couldn’t quite figure out what had changed. Whatever it was, though…I kind of liked it.
Actually, I liked it a lot.
“There,” Bria said as she slipped a gold comb into my hair just behind my ear. She cupped my face in her hands and smiled up at me. “Perfect. He’s going to love you.”
“Or at the very least, he will desire you,” Leonix agreed from across the room with Kaliope on her lap. She took the baby’s little orange-skinned fist into her hand and shaped Kaliope’s fingers to give me a thumbs-up, which made me laugh. “The only thing you need to remember is—”
A heavy knock sounded at the door. The servants immediately turned to Bria, who shot me a grin, then nodded.
“Go on then,” she urged the alien woman with the tentacle hands. “Open it. Let Haelian see how well we’ve done.”
I turned to Leonix as my heart did backflips in my chest. “What do I need to remember?” I hissed at her.
Leonix only shrugged and smirked. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll figure it out.”
As the servants pulled the door open, I held my breath. Haelian had kissed me twice and asked me out on a date, of all things. But would he like me? Like, actually like me? There was a difference between kissing someone and actually liking them. Aiden had assured me of that more times than I could count. And who was to say that Haelian wasn’t just courting me to stop someone else from taking me out instead? Maybe he knew something about my other would-be suitors that I didn’t. Maybe this was just his way of staking his claim, not because he was really interested in me, but to keep me safe from everyone else.
Either way, when the door opened, my heart practically stopped.
Haelian’s red waves were brushed back and secured in a short ponytail at the nape of his neck, bound with a blue ribbon. His shirt was blue as well and looked soft, like fresh linen. It billowed around him loosely, with a deep neckline that gave me a tantalizing glimpse of the hard, carved muscles of his chest. He wore trousers, like some kind of old-timey prince, that hugged his waist tight and just barely showed off the muscles in his legs. His boots were knee-high and shone to the point that I bet if he looked down, he could see his own reflection in them.
He looked like something out of a book of fairy tales. Like a gentleman pirate, about to sail the Seven Seas. Like a hero off the cover of a paperback bodice ripper, the kind my mother pretended weren’t secretly stashed beneath her bed.
But more importantly than how he looked was the way he was looking at me.
I blushed as his eyes raked over me. If I’d been worried about him liking me earlier, I definitely wasn’t any more. His eyes flashed a dark, deep blue immediately, the same color they’d turned when he kissed me the first time. I felt like he was stripping me down with his gaze alone, imagining every inch of my body without a lick of clothes on it.
Until Leonix cleared her throat and Bria giggled, I don’t think either of us remembered that anyone else was even in the room.
“Hello, Sawyer.” A slow, prideful smirk spread acr
oss his lips as he said my name. “Hello, Bria, Leonix.” Haelian gave them each a nod before he turned back to me. “Are you, ah…ready to go?”
“Um. Yeah, I guess so.” He offered me his arm and I moved across the room like I was floating. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had me completely entranced—but not so under his spell, thankfully, that I couldn’t still be a little curious about what our plans for the night were. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a secret,” Haelian revealed with a small smile. “Do you mind walking?”
I curled my fingers around his arm and felt electricity spool from the place where I touched him all the way through my entire body.
“I guess not,” I said softly, then giggled. This was ridiculous, the way I was feeling right now. Ridiculous…but still pretty fun. “A walk could be nice.”
As Haelian guided me out, I heard Bria and Leonix erupt in laughter behind us.
“Have fun, you crazy kids!” Bria called after us.
I found myself smiling the entire way down the hall.
I had a funny feeling that we just might.
14
Haelian
As I guided Sawyer through the night marketplace, we attracted stares from every Lunarian we met. The men gawked at her, mouths gaping open as they took in her beauty. I heard more than one of them swear beneath his breath. And the Lunarian females—I had never seen them in such a jealous frenzy before. We were bathed in the hisses of furious whispers as they turned to each other, barely stifling their envious words behind their hands as their eyes turned poisonous green.
I could not blame them, either. The way the fairy lights were strung overhead made Sawyer’s golden braids sparkle and shine. Her skin, moonbeam pale, seemed to glow from within as though she was full of light herself. She was the finest female I had ever laid eyes on. Finer than anything I had ever known. My chest swelled with pride to have her there at my side, her delicate fingers curled around the firmness of my bicep and her body pulled close to my own.
