Secret Prince's Bride (Imperial Draka Book 2)

by Alyse Zaftig

  I didn't understand why they were running away. I realized as they vanished that all the children were barefoot. I looked down at my Draka clothes. While they weren't as formal as the clothing that I'd worn to watch Xuan fight, they didn't fit in down here either.

  An old woman came down, her hands on her hips. She glared at me and caught my eyes, not letting them go.

  I fell on my butt as I saw a symbol flash in front of my eyes. I could feel her ire and the fear behind it. I saw the kids at different ages and the baby that this woman cared for inside of a hut.

  The wild Yore were telepathic. It was hard to sort through the images and emotions that I was being bombarded with. My polite society face didn't let people know my true emotions. I was taught that they were rude. And here I was, being assailed with emotions and images by a total stranger.

  I struggled to fight the tears that were filling my eyes. Being so emotional was allowed for little kids. I’d had emotional displays like this trained out of me at a young age with long punishments where I sat in a chair facing the wall. But as I relaxed a little bit, I could sort through the emotions a little better than before.

  Swallowing hard, I turned back to her and tried to open my mind up. She gave me more images, more babies, and the drooling mouths of babies she’d cared for made me smile.

  She smiled in return. Then she touched my hand.

  And I fainted.

  “Arienne,” Xuan said, shaking my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “Where am I?” I asked, looking around.

  “You’re on the ship.” He shrugged. “I carried you back up while you were out. You were unconscious the whole time?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I blew out a long breath. “What an interesting experience.”

  “Sorry for not warning you about it,” Xuan apologized. “I worried that you might tense up and close them out. Your mental shields could have kept them away from you, but you did very well.”

  “I passed out,” I protested, wrapping the blanket on top of me around myself. “I don’t think that I did well at all.”

  “I called the ship back when you fainted and climbed out of the cave with you. They like you.”

  “They like me? We barely met.”

  “When they send images to you, the link is open both ways. She saw into your mind and saw how much you loved the babies. She also saw that you’re half Yore.”

  “It’s the half of me that most people like to forget.”

  “I like all of you, Draka or Yore, it doesn’t matter.”

  Xuan lowered his mouth on mine. I could feel him tasting the temperature of our relationship, trying to gauge how I felt. I wrapped my arms around him, drawing him closer.

  When I was breathless, I let go of him and tried to look down at the floor.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “We’re not heading straight back, not if you’re okay.”

  “I am.”

  “Then we’ll go to a lagoon that I like. You need some training.”

  “Training?”

  “There was an old woman who taught my sister just a little bit about being Yore. The wild Yore are working up to this kind of thing. It’s what you learn as a teenager. We’re far past the age where we should be learning this, but the wild Yore don’t want to get it wrong. You can try it, if you like.”

  “What?” I said in a wary tone. he had sprung the Yore telepathy on me as a surprise.

  “Auras.”

  “What are those?”

  “I’ll show you when we disembark in the lagoon.”

  When the ship stopped, he wrapped my arms around him as we descended. I just kept my eyes closed. We walked a little bit away from the ship.

  Xuan said, “Close your eyes. Open yourself.”

  I didn’t know how to do it, but I tried. I could feel his heartbeat thrumming in his wrists. I could hear birdsong and the soft lapping of waves on the shore.

  Then I saw what he was talking about. I could see with my eyes closed. All around me was flickering light. I opened my eyes but could still see it.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Welcome to your aura,” Xuan laughed. I twirled in a circle. It was like a light show centered on my body.

  “What’s it made of?”

  “The ancestors’ blessings,” Xuan replied, wrapping his big arms around me. “Their love is always with you, no matter what you’ve been told.”

  18

  Loving Lagoon

  Xuan

  Her eyes were filled with wonder. I got the impression that she had never been told that sort of thing.

  "But I..." she said. I cut her off by touching my mouth to hers. After a moment of shock, she let her mouth open under mine.

  "Close your eyes," I said with the air left in my lungs. She was unbelievably lovely and all mine right now. "Watch the light show."

  "Light show?" she asked.

  Instead of telling her what I meant, I showed her. I kissed her neck.

  "The lights around us are mingling," she marveled. I bit my way along her jaw and felt her vocal cords vibrating with a light hand on her throat.

  I leaned her back, settling my much heavier body on top of hers. I could feel her panting a little bit as I kissed my way down. I yanked her clothes off until she was naked beneath me. I pulled off my own clothes and settled between her legs.

  "We had a bedroom last time," I told her.

  "I like it like this, too," she whispered. She gestured at the lagoon and the emptiness. "It's nice."

  Her breath came in as a quick gasp as I pushed inside of her. She felt good around me, wet and ready for a quick bit of loving outside. She arched her back as I seated myself fully inside of her, moaning gently. I bit the upper curve of one breast and she screamed, her voice echoing off the mountains for only the two of us to hear. She orgasmed beneath me, shaking with the force of it.

  When she opened her eyes again, I leaned back and crossed her legs at the ankle.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Something new." I put one hand around her ankles to hold them together, then I began my rhythm again. She couldn't move much in this position.

  "Feel," I told her. "And look at what we are together."

  "I can see stars," she said, her eyes taking in the lovely colors that we created when our auras overlapped.

  "It's all you," I said.

  "And you," she replied, although she was nearly out of breath.

  Something inside of me tightened, then I picked up the pace. I should have worried about the impact of the rough ground on her soft back, but all I could do was think about the flame inside of me burning and bursting into something with the force of a thousand suns. I spilled inside of her and pulled out.

  "We don't have sonic shower," she observed.

  "We can go back into the ship," I said. "We'd probably get arrested for contaminating fresh water."

  We looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was true, but for some reason it seemed incredibly silly. Here we were, part Draka and Yore, sitting in the middle of nowhere and thinking about the laws that applied elsewhere. And in another place, maybe we would have had to think about them. But right here and now, we were the only people on the planet.

  Arienne leaned forward and kissed my collarbone. "Let's go back to the ship."

  She gathered our clothes and made them into a bundle. I pulled her into my arms and whistled as I carried her back to the ship. She smelled like a mixture of both of us.

  Abruptly, I thought about what a baby would be like. I hoped that the baby would have Arienne's eyes and some of our Yore capabilities. With a quarter Draka in the mix, though, would the baby be able to shift into a dragon?

  "Can you shift into smoke or dragon form?"

  Arienne blinked up at me. We were almost back at the ship.

  "I can become smoke, but I don't really enjoy being a dragon. I'm such a klutz as it is, I can't imagine the damage I'd do in dragon form."

  "
I see," I said to her.

  "Why do you ask?"

  I kissed her mouth. "I was just curious."

  We finally reached the ship. After I put her back on her feet, we ported upwards. We ran for the sonic shower and let it wash away everything that we'd done. I charted a course back to the city. When I was done, I saw that Arienne was in the small bedroom. She patted a spot next to her on the bed. I wrapped my body around her much smaller one.

  "I wish this was real life," she confessed. I kissed the back of her neck and felt her body flex like a cat's in the sun.

  "When we're together, I can believe it's real." I stroked her cheek and knew I was one of the luckiest men in the world.

  19

  Tabloid

  Arienne

  NEXT MORNING

  "What in the world?" I looked at the newspaper that had been left on my night stand. I normally didn't read society gossip, but it was hard to miss that a giant photograph of my face was taking up half the page. I read the article, my heart sinking as I found out more. Apparently my mother had been busy while I was out with Xuan yesterday smearing his name with mud and calling him a Yore savage.

  It didn't seem to matter to her that he was the brother-in-law of two powerful princes. I frowned as I read a quote that was supposed to be from me explaining that Xuan was just a dalliance and nothing more, that I wasn't a blood traitor.

  I hunched my shoulders as I read a quote from one of my schoolmates saying that blood would tell, and of course a half-Yore wouldn't mind being a blood traitor.

  My fists clenched up. I wasn't a blood traitor. I liked that Xuan was teaching me about being Yore and introducing me to them. In our household, they were absolutely forbidden to speak to me at all. I'd had a Draka nanny and when I was older, a personal maid. They were more expensive, but it was part of my mother's plan to help me forget that I was half Yore. Xuan was undoing all those years of work with a few days of immersion in another culture. I was grateful that he was taking the time to help me and that he cared about me so much. She just didn't understand.

  I decided to storm downstairs to confront my mother, and afterward I could go apologize to Xuan and explain that I hadn't said anything reported in that horrible article. But when I tried the knob, my door was locked. I was locked into my room.

  It wasn't the first time that my mother had decided to control me this way. It certainly wouldn't be the last. And she didn't know that I'd kept a secret escape route through the servants' tunnels that led to my room but nobody would dare use. No Draka would use them and the Yore were forbidden from speaking to me or really being near me. I kept my room swept very well, so that my mother couldn't see the door opening from the dust patterns.

  I got my comm and snuck out. Who knew when she'd check on me? I just hoped that I was back before she noticed.

  I sent Xuan a comm message.

  I'm on my way.

  No response. I needed to get to the antique store so that I could see him. They probably wouldn't let me into the palace. I called a levi-car to the corner near my house. I winced at the expense, but it was an emergency. I jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped in front of Xuan's place, smoothing down my skirt and hair.

  When I got in there, ten interested parties turned to look at me. I knew that I must look like a mess, and maybe they read the society pages. I couldn't bear to think about it. Xuan was in the back, talking to a customer about a tiny porcelain tea set.

  "I have to talk to you," I said. "You didn't answer my comm message."

  "Busy," he said. "You'll have to wait in line."

  I turned and saw a line of five people trying to buy things. I didn't want to mess up his livelihood.

  "I'll wait," I told him, and I went to sit on a bench beside the wall. I closed my eyes because I was close to tears. Yesterday, everything had been so beautiful. Our relationship was really growing stronger. But now my mother had to go in and ruin my chance at happiness.

  I knew that she thought that she was doing the right thing, which just made it worse. She loved me, I knew that much, but the way that she expressed her love was by trying to control me. I just needed to build my own adult life. I was in my twenties now. She couldn't control me the same way she could when I was a kid, but she thought that she could. I must have dozed off still ruminating about my mother's machinations.

  I woke up when Xuan tapped on my shoulder.

  "I'm about to close the store."

  I looked around me. Everyone was gone.

  "What time is it?"

  "Time for you to go. Isn't it dangerous for you to be seen here?"

  The tears that had been sitting on the edges of my eyes fell.

  "You're wearing very secretive attire," he told me, gesturing down. I was wearing all black.

  "I had to sneak out of the house. She locked me in," I protested.

  "Right," Xuan said. I could hear the skepticism in his voice.

  I'd snuck out of my home to talk to him and clear things up, but he didn't want to hear my side of the story. I didn't want to cry like this in front of him, either.

  "I'm sorry for taking up space," I said in a stiff tone. I marched off, leaving him behind. So much for love and connecting to my Yore heritage.

  20

  Serena’s Advice

  Arienne

  "You need to get out," Serena said, playing with my hair. "It's not good for you to sulk like this."

  "I'm not sulking," I argued. "I'm too tired to go out, that's all. You can have fun without

  me."

  Serena frowned. "You can't stay in here forever."

  "Want to bet?"

  "Your mom isn't happy."

  "When is she ever happy?" I asked.

  "Almost never."

  A knock sounded on my door. My mother opened it.

  "When are you going to stop sulking?"

  I glared at her. My dragon claws came out. "Stay away from me," I said. I didn't care anymore if I ticked my mother off. She'd done what she thought was best, which included ruining my life.

  "I'm going to let you have your way for now, but don't expect me to let you rot in here."

  She closed the door again.

  "Have you seen the newspapers?" Serena asked.

  "Not since I came in here. Why?" I'd turned off my comm device days ago and hadn't bothered turning it back on.

  Serena recited a huge list of gossip that I really didn't care about. She wrinkled her nose when she was done. "You smell."

  "I don't know when the last time I had a shower was."

  "That's so gross." Serena shook her head and opened a curtain.

  I screamed as the sunlight hit my eyes.

  "You're not a cave dweller," Serena said. "You can't stay in a darkened room forever."

  "Try me." I went to wrestle her for control of the curtain, but she wouldn't let go. I sighed and sat next to the window. Outside, life went on just like it always had. I thought about moving out of my home. I had a credit account just like every other Draka noble. There was no law requiring me to live at home with my mother. I just did. And maybe it was time to change that.

  "Xuan will come around," Serena said. She put her hands on my cheeks. "It doesn't matter if he was upset by the news article. Draka society is full of people willing to use knives on each other."

  "I know." But until now, I'd stayed out of the worst of it. "I thought that if I stayed inside of the lines, I'd be fine. But Draka society will never accept the two of us. Our relationship was doomed from the start. I was stupid to think otherwise."

  Serena pulled me into a very tight hug. "You can't let them dictate how you live your life or ruin your chance at real happiness. You can't let them win."

  "I think they've already won." Here I was, in a dark room, with not much to my name but a whole bunch of money.

  "You can fix this. You don't have to be a pawn."

  "A pawn? What are you talking about?"

  Serena bit her lip. "I really shouldn't tell you."
/>
  "Tell me what?"

  "There are some rumors."

  "I don't care about gossip."

  "About you."

  "Are they bad?"

  "No," Serena said, but she didn't sound very convinced. "I think you should talk to Xuan and make up with him.

  21

  Ca Phe

  Xuan

  I sat back with a cup of bitter coffee. It matched my mood. The twins were playing with water beside me, shooting each other with water that they directed. I wanted to nurture their inherent talents, but not today. Their laughter just annoyed me. I was a terrible person for hating the laughter of children. I drank more coffee.

  "Why don't you drink some tea?" Phuong asked as she set a tray down next to me. "Maybe you should stop drinking coffee. I could hear you pacing in your room last night."

  "Wear something over our ears," I told her. "And then my pacing won't disturb you." I pointed to the tablet beside me. "Look, here's the record of all of our sales. The antiquary is doing very well. We've sold a lot of Yore artifacts. It's enough to finance another dig."

  Phuong touched the screen lock button and made the tablet go blank. "Do you love her?" she asked me.

  I snorted. "Does that matter? Does it matter at all when she's just a puppet whose strings are pulled by a mother who would rather see Arienne dead than with me?"

  "Did she really say those things?" Phuong said.

  My eyebrows drew together. "Probably not."

  "Think twice before you let the love of your life slip away." Phuong shook her head. "She could be the one for you. And you won't know unless you try. If you give her up now, that decision might haunt you for the rest of your life. Go find her.“

  "Hey!" I shouted as I came down the path. Lord Georgius held Arienne by her upper arms. His face was very close to hers. Maybe she'd replaced me quickly, but from the look on her face, I got the impression that she didn't want him touching her.