His ears swiveled toward her. What could he hear in her voice that she couldn’t hear herself? “Do you want to go to another faction? I’m sure we can send word to the other Alphas. They’ll be happy to take you.”
Chris’s shoulders slumped. “It’s not that.”
“Marissa said you were disgusted by our village,” he went on. “You’re probably used to a different standard of accommodation. Maybe the Felsite city would suit you better.”
Chris clamped her eyes shut. She couldn’t listen to this. “She said that?”
He tossed a stick into the fire and sent up another plume of sparks. “Marissa has been with the Lycaon long enough to learn from us. She notices more subtle body language and facial expressions now than when she first came to live with us. She can read a person’s thoughts and feelings almost as well as any of us.”
“I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I never should have done that.”
“Done what?” he asked.
“I never should have been disgusted by your village,” she replied. “I should have been grateful that you took me in when I needed it. I shouldn’t have turned up my nose at your food and your houses and your clothes and everything else about you. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Why should you be?” he asked. “Anybody could understand why you would be surprised. It wasn’t what you’re used to, and after the crash, you were shocked at what you found. Marissa told us you were asleep in bed and then woke up on the Romarie ship as it was crashing. Is that true?”
She nodded down at the ground.
“That explains everything,” he told her. “You were in a state of shock at what happened. You were in the crash, and then you found yourself stranded on an alien planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in a state of shock now. That explains why you hit me in the head the way you did.” He touched the side of his head with his finger.
“I had to protect myself,” she replied. “I couldn’t let you attack me and not fight back.”
“I didn’t attack you,” he countered. “You were about to throw that rock at me. I had to protect myself from you.”
Chris opened her mouth to say something else, but she stopped short. “I guess we both read each other wrong.”
He shrugged again. “Anybody who had anything to do with the Romarie could be forgiven for thinking everybody else in the world was as bad as them. They’re the lowest form of life in the galaxy.”
“Do you know much about them?” she asked.
“Everybody on Angondra knows about the Romarie,” he replied. “That’s one thing we all agree on. We don’t want to have anything to do with them. I’m one of the few people on the planet that’s seen them up close. I fought them off our planet when they brought Marissa and her friends here, and I’ll fight again to keep our people free of them. I don’t care how many females they have to sell.”
Chris cocked her head to one side. “The Ursidreans must have been really desperate to let them land here.”
“Everyone was desperate,” he replied. “Being desperate is no reason to open our doors to the Romarie. We’re still desperate, but even the Ursidreans learned their lesson. Anyway, now that Donen has a human mate, he won’t invite the Romarie to Angondra again.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you really desperate? I saw plenty of females with their children in the village.”
“They are exceptions,” he replied. “We keep our females in the Alpha village, at the center of our territory to protect them. The other villages aren’t so well off.”
“What about you?” she asked. “You’re a member of the Alpha’s family. You’re Caleb’s own brother, but you live with your mother and sisters.”
“Now you know why,” he replied. “Caleb couldn’t find a mate until Marissa came. I will stay with my mother until I find a mate of my own. Maybe one of the new women will choose me.”
“Choose you?” she repeated. “Isn’t it you who chooses one of them?”
He studied her with his head tilted to one side. “Me? No, I don’t choose. A female must choose a mate for herself.”
“That doesn’t sound very Alpha,” she remarked.
“I don’t know how it is with the other factions,” he replied. “Maybe the other Alphas pick their own mates and the females have to go with them. But I don’t think so. We might be different factions, but we’re all Angondrans. We have a code of honor, especially when it comes to mating with females. No Angondran male would take a female against her will. The Alphas uphold that code more than anyone else. The others follow our example.”
Chris humphed. “It all sounds a little too flowery and chivalrous to me.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Does it look to you like Marissa is Caleb’s mate against her will? Do you really think she would stay with him if she hadn’t chosen to do so of her own free will?”
“I suppose not,” she replied. “But appearances can be deceiving.”
“When you’ve been here a while, you’ll realize it’s true,” he told her. “You’ll come to trust us the way Marissa and her friends have.”
“I told you I wouldn’t go back to your village,” she snapped. “I don’t care what happens, I don’t plan to stay here long enough to trust you. I’m getting off this planet and going home to Earth.”
He didn’t bother to tell her it was hopeless. He only gazed at her. “How are you going to do that?”
Chris blushed. Her flimsy plans sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth now. “I thought I’d find the other women—the ones in the other factions—Marissa’s friends, as you call them. I planned to ask them to help me find a way back to Earth.”
“They don’t want to go back to Earth,” he replied. “They’re happy with their mates and their lives here.”
“Just because they’re happy with their lives here doesn’t mean they don’t want to go home,” she argued. “If they had a way to get back, they just might take it.”
“So what will you do when you find the other women?” he asked. “What will you suggest you do to get back to Earth?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe the Ursidreans have some technology we could use. I know, I know. The Ursidreans don’t have any space flight capable technology that still works. But maybe we could adapt it to serve our purpose. Maybe Aria knows something that could help us.”
He studied her with his direct, inscrutable eyes. “Anything else?”
The words rushed out of her before she could stop them. “If even one of those women wants to leave Angondra, I have to find her. I have to find one person who feels the way I do and won’t keep telling me I’ll be happy here and come to trust you people.”
He didn’t react at all. His eyes never wavered from her face. He sat in silence so long she wondered if he’d abandoned the conversation. Then he shot up to his feet and strode to the edge of the circle of firelight. “Alright. So you want to find the other women. Do you have any idea where you’re going to find one of them?”
Chris stared down at her shoes. “Well, no. I hadn’t planned that far in advance.”
He nodded. “Hmm. Yes. I have to admit I think Marissa was right about you. If I leave you out here alone, you’ll be dead in a few days. You made it this far, but I can’t let you go on alone.”
She stole a glance at him. “You won’t take me back to the village, will you?”
He shook his head. “I won’t take you back to the village, but you can’t stay out here alone. Look. You couldn’t even get a fire going until I showed up. If you’re determined to go on, I’ll go with you.”
Her head whipped around. “You... you will?”
He nodded again. “It’s the only thing to do. Besides, you can’t show up in one of the other factions’ territory without some plausible explanation for why you’re there. If I go with you, I can explain the situation.”
“Won’t the other factions mistrust you?” she asked. “Won’t they consider
your presence in their territory an incursion?”
He paced back and forth in front of the fire. “That is possible. We’ll have to be cautious in our choice of which faction to visit. Of course, it would be more helpful if Marissa went with us. She could explain everything to her friend.”
Chris turned away. “I don’t want Marissa to go with us. I don’t want her explaining to her friends how cracked I am in the head.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He only nodded. “Then it’s just you and me. We’ll go to the Felsite first. The Lycaon are on better terms with Renier than any of the other Alphas. He won’t start a war if we show up at his city and ask to visit his mate.”
Chris cringed. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
Turk examined her. “Don’t tell me you’re losing heart already when we haven’t even begun. You started this. You better finish it. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have been. Renier’s mate Carmen is a reasonable woman, and she suffered the worst when her friends went to other factions.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I was there,” he replied. “I was there when Marissa told her she planned to stay with the Lycaon. She broke down in tears.”
Chris made a face. “She doesn’t sound like a reasonable woman. She sounds like a cry-baby.”
“Don’t be too hard on her,” Turk replied. “You crashed here with dozens of others of your kind and found Marissa waiting for you. If you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life here alone and never see another human face, you would probably react the same way.”
“Maybe we should visit one of the other factions first,” Chris suggested.
Turk shook his head. “No. The Felsite are the closest to us by land, and we’ll be much better visiting the others after we get Renier on our side. Carmen had ideas about finding a way off this planet, too, before her friends decided to settle here. She was the last to give up. She might have some ideas on how to proceed. After we talk to her and Renier, we’ll decide who to visit next.”
“Do you know anything about the other Alphas?” she asked.
“I know as much as anybody outside their factions can know,” he replied. “Aquilla won’t be happy about losing his mate. None of the Alphas will be, but their mates might know a way to convince them.”
“They don’t have to leave if they don’t want to,” she pointed out. “If they’re as happy as everybody says they are, they’ll want to stay. But that’s no reason I should want to stay. I don’t have a life here, or a mate, or a faction to belong to.”
He cocked his head to one side. “You could.”
Chapter 8
Chris rolled over and pulled the heavy robe around her shoulders against the night chill. That’s when she woke up and realized there was a heavy robe over her. She lifted her head off the ground and looked around. Turk watched her from nearby. “Aren’t you going to sleep?”
“I already did,” he replied.
She blinked the sleep out of her eyes. “Is it getting close to dawn?”
He looked up at the sky. “No, not for a while.”
She frowned, but sleep fogged her mind.
“We don’t sleep the same way you do,” he told her. “We sleep in short bursts, mostly during the day.”
“How’s that going to work out with traveling long distances?” she asked.
“We can go without sleep when we need to,” he replied.
She let her head fall back onto the ground. Her back and hips ached from sleeping on the hard ground, but at least the fire kept her warm. Her eyes relaxed in the flickering flames. Turk must be keeping it going.
The warmth permeated her exhausted bones, and her eyes drifted shut. She drifted back toward sleep, and the mellow buzz of firelight vibrated all the way out to her fingertips. All of a sudden, she snapped awake again when she remembered Turk was sitting right there watching her.
She dragged her eyes open, but when she checked, he hadn’t moved. The flames glittered off his eyes until orange licks of light shot out at her. She closed her own eyes so she wouldn’t see them. In an instant, sleep washed over her and pulled her down into dreams. Her body softened under the robe, and heat spread over her cheeks.
She rocked on ethereal waves. She levitated off the ground and sailed over the treetops. She looked down on the fire from a great height. Turk sat by the fire and stared down at her sleeping form. An unimaginable gulf separated them. It seared her heart, and her mind searched for some way to bridge that divide.
But he was a different species. They could never come together. Chris herself couldn’t cross the gulf, no matter how much she wanted to. She almost woke herself up with a start. She didn’t want to cross that gulf. She didn't want to come together with him. What was she thinking?
He wasn’t all bad, though. At least he supported her quest to find the other human women. That was more than anybody else did, even Marissa. He certainly didn’t lack other attractive qualities. He followed her because he cared about what happened to her, and he saved her from certain starvation in this wilderness.
So why couldn’t she warm up to him? Why did she have to treat him as an enemy when he protected her and helped her at every turn? Then again, why would she want to warm up to him? What was he to her but a stranger in a strange land? If she succeeded in getting away from this planet, she would never see him again.
That future scenario played itself out in her dreaming brain. She stood in front of a space craft of some kind. She didn’t recognize it. It belonged to some forgotten era of Angondran history. But there she stood, clothed in glory at her own accomplishment.
The other human women, those that crashed with her and those who landed with Marissa, waited near the ship’s door. They admired her from a distance, in awe that she accomplished the impossible and freed them from their imprisonment.
Turk and Caleb stood in front of the bunch of onlookers. Chris surveyed the crowd. Maybe Marissa stood next to Caleb. She wouldn’t go back to Earth. She would stay with her Angondran mate. Penelope Ann waved good-bye to her Avitras mate, but Aria would stay with her children. But the women who crashed with Chris would all go back. They couldn’t wait to reunite with their families back home. They revered Chris for her struggle to free them.
The women entered the ship. Chris raised her hand and saluted the Angondrans who helped her accomplish this feat. She would hold them in her heart for the rest of her life. Turk waved back, and so did Marissa. Then Chris stepped into the craft and closed the door behind her. It rose from the ground and rode off into the sunset.
The Angondrans went back to their lives and the human women flew back to Earth, where they landed in a remote cornfield in Kansas. They traveled back to their homes and reunited with their families. Some people didn’t believe they were ever abducted by aliens, but that didn’t matter. They were back, and they put the whole experience behind them. And they lived happily ever after. The End.
Chris hovered over the fire wrapped in bliss. Whatever happened on this planet wouldn’t affect her life at all. She would go back to her ranch in California and pick up her business training horses. Some of her clients would think she was a little eccentric for talking about the alien planet she visited, but after a while, she would let it go. Life would go on as normal.
What happened here didn’t matter. It was nothing but a vivid dream. The Lycaon were a product of her fevered imagination. Turk was a combination of a number of men Chris found attractive in her life. Only her alarm at finding herself on an alien planet made her hold him at arm’s length.
From her position above the fire, she noticed the woman on the ground open her eyes and looked at Turk. She looked straight into his eyes, with none of the hesitation or hostility she felt for him before. She communicated everything through her eyes.
Turk returned her gaze with a firm, unwavering stare. He understood. He stood up and
crossed the distance between them. He sat down next to her on the ground. When he passed in front of her, his body blocked the fire’s heat from warming her. The night chill stung her back. Then he moved aside, and the heat struck her face again.
When he sat down, the firelight glowed off his cheeks and nose. The line of fur running down his cheekbones gave him an even more powerful expression. He fixed her with his fierce eyes. She’d invited him. Now he was here, and she couldn’t un-invite him.
What would he do? What would she do? Could she really let this happen? Could she open herself up to this alien creature in the wilderness of a strange world? She slid back and forth between her position hovering over the treetops to her bed by the fire. She looked into his eyes at the same time that she observed them together from above. From far away, a shimmer of excitement shot through her being.
Why shouldn’t she enjoy this moment? It would never be anything more than a moment. She would love him and leave him. She would go home to Earth and he would choose an Angondran mate. She would float away into the past for him the same way he would float away into the past for her. They would remember each other and the night they spent together under the stars, but that was all. No one would ever know what she’d done. He would be her delicious little secret.
Her eyes widened and she extended her hand toward him. She traced the line of his cheek in the orange light. His nostrils flared, and his strong hands descended on her body. Her heartbeat quickened, but she didn’t hesitate or pull away. She raised her arms and threaded them around his neck. She pulled him down on top of her.
Turk slid the robe out from between them and stretched out at her side. His arms wound around her, and they closed in a passionate embrace. Chris buried her face in his neck to hide herself from what she was doing. She couldn’t think about it, or she would die of shame. She let his body rock her away on ebbs of delight, but she couldn’t look him in the eye. She couldn’t look herself in the eye.
He had other ideas, though. He wasn’t about to lie down next to her and hide his head in shame. He ran his hand up under the back of her neck and laced his fingers through her hair. He pulled her head back and arched up so his gaze drove directly into her eyes. He caught her in his undeniable stare and held her there.
Angondra Holiday Special Page 23
