While she was distracted, Geminus suddenly grabbed her and threw her onto the divan. She screamed and he smashed her across the face with his talon hand. Pain erupted across her cheek and stars flashed in front of her eyes.
“It would go better for you if you don’t fight me,” Geminus said, clambering on top of her. “I will have you whether you enjoy it for not.”
Kayla thrashed wildly, transported back to that grimy warehouse all those years before, but the Raven King was too strong for her. She moaned softly, thinking of Leos. He was dead now and she was all alone. All the energy went out of her. She had lost her chance of happiness even before she had accepted it.
The sound of pounding feet on the staircase outside brought her back to her senses. She looked to the door of the chamber as Virgon’s huge bulk burst through it. The Fool turned and screeched, raising the pistol at the large Zodian. Virgon grabbed him by the throat and literally flung him across the chamber. He smashed into the wall and collapsed in a heap.
“What!” exclaimed Geminus. He loosened Kayla and she took the advantage to struggle free. She bolted towards Virgon.
“Virgon! What is the meaning of this? I will have your head!” Geminus thundered.
“No brother, you will not!” Leos’ voice came from behind the bodyguard. He stepped forward and Kayla flung her arms around his neck.
“Leos!” she sobbed. “Oh Leos, he said you were dead!”
“I would have been if his assassin had had his way. Fortunately Virgon got to me just in time.”
“You dare betray me, Virgon!” Geminus snarled. “You have dishonoured yourself and your family! The King’s Bodyguard in the most sacred role in the Kingdom, you have tainted it with this transgression!”
“There is no transgression when you are not the rightful Raven King,” Virgon rumbled.
Geminus frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Virgon discovered your secret, brother,” Leos said sadly. “You and the Fool killed our father. He did not die from the Crow Sickness, you poisoned him.”
“I had my suspicions for some time,” Virgon put in, “but only now have I discovered the truth and the proof. I waited until now to speak to Leos and found him struggling with your assassin. It was the Will of the Astral Bird that I came to his aid.”
“Why, Geminus?” Leos asked, his voice bleeding with emotional pain. “I know he was cruel to you, but did you have to kill him?”
“I would have endured all the punishments and suffering he inflicted on me if only I was to have my birthright one day, but he even tried to deny me that,” Geminus retorted, his face twisted with bitterness.
Leos stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
Geminus brandished his talon hand. “He told me after you saved me from that battle,” he snarled. “You were to be Raven King, not me! You were a hero, a focal point for the people to believe in! He knew I would never be popular, my nature was too close to his, my urges just as unnatural as his were.
You were different though. You had taken after our sweet, dead mother. Do you understand now, brother? I was never going to be Raven King because of that selfish old man! He was going to make a royal decree changing the rules of succession! I had to kill him!”
“You are not the true Raven King,” Virgon said flatly. “You must make way for Leos.”
“Geminus, we can work through this,” Leos said. “You do not have to abdicate, but there will have to be changes. The Raven Kingdom, Zodia itself, must enter a new era of peace and cooperation. I have been talking about this with Kayla. We can build something beautiful on the ruins of war. The three of us working together, let go of the past and help me.”
Kayla clutched Leos’ hand and watched as Geminus moved slowly over to where the Fool lay. The man had died as soon as he hit the wall and Geminus carefully picked up the broken heap, holding it tenderly.
“He was more of a father to me than ours ever was,” the Raven King said quietly, gazing into the Fool’s face.
“Geminus!” Leos roared springing forward.
Kayla let out a startled scream as Geminus bounded across the chamber and hurled himself through the glass dome, clutching the Fool tightly to him. Leos reached him a fraction too late. The observation dome extended out over the sky platform itself and it was a sheer drop to the valley floor below.
A terrible silence hit the chamber and nobody could move. At last, Kayla stirred into life and reached out for Leos. She hugged him tightly and after a few moments he returned her embrace with equal force, his body shaking like a new born chick.
* * *
The Mating Ceremony came on the heels of Leos’ coronation. Kayla was dressed from head to foot in robes of cloth of gold bedecked with jewels, while Leos looked gorgeous in white silk. It all seemed like a dream as she listened to the High Priest invoke the ancient rites and took a sip of the nectar of Eternal Union which was provided for these ceremonies.
“You look amazing,” Leos whispered in her ear as the ceremony concluded. “You are a dream come true.”
“I’m sweating like a pig under all this finery,” she confided, “and my legs are shaking so much I think they’re going to give out on me.”
“Don’t worry, I will catch you if you fall, and I’ll soon get that finery off you when we go up to our chamber,” Leos whispered, trailing kisses down her neck that made her shudder.
The celebration in the great hall was in full swing as they sat at the high table. The whole Raven Kingdom was in celebration, pleased with their new Raven King and his bride. Even the Eagle and the Kestrel Kings welcomed Leos with open arms and there was talk of a new understanding between the Great Kingdoms. Along with Earth, a new era of peace was close to being initiated within the Zodian Confederacy.
“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Kayla said. “I didn’t think anyone would accept what we’d found out about Geminus and how he died.”
“Virgon’s testimony was taken at face value,” Leos replied. “His integrity is unimpeachable. I just wish there had been another way.”
“Geminus was a tortured soul,” Kayla said. “We have to put the past behind us now and move forward.”
“Yes,” said Leos, kissing her softly. “We will, I promise.”
After what seemed like an eternity, the celebrations finally began to wind down and Kayla and Leos could escape to their chamber. There in the privacy of their opulent surroundings, Leos slipped off her clothing slowly kissing every curve of her body. Smiling, she lay him down face first on the silk bed and stripped off his tunic.
Clambering on top of him she slowly massaged sweet smelling oils along the contours of his defined back. He moaned softly as her expert hands worked his joints and she slowly slid off his boots and breeches so she could get to work on his bottom half.
Her hands kneaded his strong calves and got to her on his lower back. She relaxed every inch of him, but when he finally turned over she saw that he was still very much ready for action.
Their mouths locked into a deep, powerful kiss and his hands caressed and teased her, exploring her willing body. She groaned with pleasure as he awakened her inner fire and before long she was ready for his sleek, powerful body.
They joined together with ease and, she on getting on top rode him gently, losing herself in sweet oblivion. He clung to her and took her to heart stopping climax before surrendering to his own pleasure.
Sated and satisfied, they curled up in each others’ arms and she caressed his soft hair as he drifted off to sleep. Kayla closed her own eyes, feeling happy and complete.
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 P
h.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-reviewed 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.
She did a summary check of her discussant panel, whose job it was to say useful things about the working paper. There were three. She guessed, based on age and tenure, that maybe one of them had read it ahead of time.
The normal thing was to shred through it fifteen minutes before; she could guess what each would say based on their research areas. There was no sign of her dreaded conjuncture, and Rae breathed easier.
“What are you thinking?” asked her former advisor, Dr. Ravi, seated to her left.
“That Midwestern superstition loses again,” Rae said with a grin.
“Pardon?”
But it was too late to explain. The moderator introduced her paper topic to the audience: “Defending the Earth from Extra-Solar Threats: Lessons from the K-T Extinction Event.” It was an awful title, but Dr. Ravi had insisted and Rae had finally acquiesced.
She’d wanted to title it, “Were the Dinosaurs Killed? Or Murdered?” She’d discovered, after all, that materials she’d collected near the Chicxulub crater—the impact site of the asteroid that zapped the dinosaurs—had residue from ancient, foreign materials that didn’t exist in nature.
Talking about aliens in astrophysics was dicey. It brought press attention, but not much professional esteem. A lot of Rae’s graduate colleagues snickered behind her back—including Reese, who she noticed in the audience, a possible conjuncture that knotted her stomach.
He was picking at lint on his tweed jacket, a young man with a boyish face who liked to dress up like the real professor he planned to become one day. The disdain in the gesture was obvious. He picked at it the same way he’d picked at Rae every time they’d talked since their break-up.
The competition for tenure-track slots was fierce, and Reese too professionally jealous for their relationship to work. Since then, he’d mocked Rae’s research as either “methodologically flawed” or “kooky.”
Rae shut down her fear instinct and focused, instead, on how good it would feel if he finally mocked her to her face. If, instead of sniping, he attacked her theories in a public forum, she could finally have it out with him.
The moderator signaled her. Time to talk. She stood, took to the microphone, cleared her throat, and began: “I’ll level with you. There are two types of people in this room right now. One, the journalists, who get to write a punchy story about aliens killing the dinosaurs.” Rae’s aside had them in the palm of her hand, and she gave them every watt of her smile.
“The others, of course, are the scientists who hate the fact that the public only cares about space when it’s full of aliens who we imagine to be hilariously like us.”
Just then, her eye caught someone strange. He stood at the room’s edge, a head taller than the professors and scientists around him. He wore what looked like a black kurta, a sort of long jacket that hit knee-level, and white pants beneath that.
Black-eyed with charcoal hair, he seemed to project a bubble of space in the crowd on all sides. Though he had his hands in his pockets, there was something dangerous in his stance. She couldn’t put her finger on what, but the intensity of his stare set her fine hairs on end.
She fumbled her next line and her words stalled.
For two heartbeats, she tried to breathe. The man hadn’t moved. There was no logical reason for him to even draw her gaze, other than his size and that unrelenting, fiery-eyed stare.
Forcing herself to look away, she focused on Reese and reminded herself: If I mess this up, he wins. It put just enough iron in her backbone that she could ignore the kurta-wearing giant.
He hadn’t disappeared, though. She dove into her lecture, acutely aware he still watched her; with heart in throat, she had the strangest sense she was putting on this performance for him.
***
He’d come halfway across the quadrant on the whim of his domé, whose dreams had been disturbed by meddling on this side of the spiral arm; but now that he saw the troublesome female in person, Garr knew his own needs and his goddess’s would align.
Even with domé Kaython translating in his ear through her linguistic microbes, the aliens were hard to comprehend. The problem was their culture. He gathered that he stood in some primitive war council, though they were too backward to have a prime.
He’d noticed they permitted mating-class females to participate. Folly, surely. And they listened to the female at front, whose dangerous tampering had brought him to this world.
Garr could see her pulse race in her throat—smell the faint traces of floral perfume on her body through the crowd. He repressed the impulse to stride up and peel open the collar of that stiff, primitive shirt near her throat and inhale.
What insane male permitted a female so exquisite to head a war council? She was just standing there, publicly, no protector in sight. At any moment, he expected someone to issue a challenge and claim her.
Can you believe that’s her? messaged Vaya from her position in the seats. Kaython’s microbes didn’t just translate: they also let he and his soldier communicate silently. Vaya couldn’t stand among the aliens without them gawping, because this species lacked the bioform diversity that characterized his own. Vaya would… stand out among them. Those scouting reports I showed you didn’t really get it across.
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No, Garr had known from the moment he’d seen those reports that this human was special. He’d announced his interest in her then, to the obvious dismay of Vaya. Now that he saw her in person, he wanted her that much more.
I can’t believe someone so soft and small is causing Kaython so much distress, Vaya complained.
Garr wasn’t certain Kaython was distressed. Like all domé, she could be damnably obscure in what she desired. Certainly, Garr didn’t want this alien to be his enemy.
He surveyed the way those trim, primitive fabrics clung to the curves in her hips, body, and bust—she’d be softer than a Ythirian female. She kept her golden hair in a tight braid like a warrior, and he wanted to comb it out with his fingers.
Are you seriously still interested in her? Vaya asked, distaste obvious. You won’t claim a 98 percent match, but you’re interested in the one whose genetics are twenty cycles behind ours?
I do as I will, Vaya.
Fine. But mark my words, boss. The short ones are always trouble.
Hold position. I want a closer look. He needed one, really, and soon had the opportunity: the female’s gaze had shifted elsewhere during her talk, and he crept toward the stage.
There appeared to be a debate now, between her and a tiny male near the front, who Garr had momentarily mistaken for a child.
Apparently, these aliens would let anyone into a war council.
***
Rae kept her lecture short, explaining the mathematical model she’d used to locate the asteroid debris, then the analysis of metals that supported her conclusion. In its essence, the paper was simple.
The most complex part of the task had been calculating the best location for harvesting intact materials from the region surrounding the impact crater.
Naturally, Reese interrupted her roughly halfway through. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But are you really standing in front of your peers and arguing that aliens smashed an asteroid into our planet?”
Royal Protector: Battle Of Love (Celestial Mates Book 8) Page 7
