Highlander's Pride: Winter Solstice (Against All Odds Series 1)

by Veronica Wilson

  “Do you think our parents would be proud of us?”

  “I hope so,” Dagmar said, a grin splitting his lips. “I know my father would probably slap me on my back and tell me to put you in your place. Then my mother would punch him and tell him to hush.” The memories of their parents, sharing stories of them made both Aila and Dagmar better appreciate their friendship. “I’ve missed you, Aila.”

  “I’ve missed you too,” she whispered. Feeling foolish, Aila inched closer to him, knowing full well those piercing blue eyes were watching her with that intensity that could easily melt her bones. With a half grin on her face she brought her lips to his and sank into him. They moved together easily, as if each of them already knew the other’s movements. She sank into the thick furs of Dagmar’s bed as he laid her back. This was a different Dagmar. The man he’d been yesterday had been patient, kind, achingly tender.

  Today he was hard, brilliant and so wonderfully hungry. “I don’t want to be so tender tonight, Aila,” Dagmar growled.

  “No one’s asking you to,” she exhaled, her breasts rising quickly with each breath she took. Arching, Aila pressed her hips against his, felt the readiness of his thick cock. Memories flashed in her mind of the first time he’d touched her and Aila felt herself grow wet in anticipation. “Will it hurt now?”

  Dagmar had always loved Aila’s blunt honesty. Whenever she spoke, you always knew you were going to get exactly what was on her mind. Smiling, he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I don’t think so, although I’m no judge. I would think the worst of it is over now, but I’ll be gentle if that’s what you need, Aila.”

  “I’m just scared that… that it won’t feel good.”

  “Did it feel bad last time?” Dagmar asked, a scowl marring his chiseled face.

  “No, not bad. It was painful, but not excruciating. Just, noticeable.”

  “Oh,” Dagmar said, suddenly uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry Dagmar,” Aila backtracked. “Forget I said anything.”

  “And how do you propose I do that?”

  Aila, who was always awkward when it came to talk of bedroom affairs, knew that, of all the men she’d known in her life, Dagmar was the only one she’d ever wanted to touch. Knowing that if she didn’t salvage this, she’d spend the night unfulfilled, she rose up on her knees and pulled her tunic over her head. “I don’t know about you, but when you kiss me, when you touch me, I can’t seem to think about anything except how amazing I feel.”

  “Oh, Aila,” Dagmar grinned. “Do you have any idea how lovely you are?”

  “Show me,” she begged, her body already starting to hum. The first kiss rocked her to her core as her body revved up. Dagmar answered her hunger with his own need, lying back and bringing her with him. She straddled him, surprised by the immense power it gave her. His hands were everywhere, stoking the desire that whipped through her. Garment after garment was stripped away until Aila felt her skin warm against Dagmar’s. She leaned down and kissed him fully, her warm tongue tangling with his as his large hands kneaded her breasts. Then those lovely, callous-roughened hands took hold of her hips and lifted, angling her warm pussy over him. Penetration came quickly this time and Aila winced in anticipation of pain that did not come.

  Dagmar was still a considerable man to deal with, but Aila gloried in the painless act of making love. Mesmerized by him, Aila gave herself up to the intense rhythm that fed her want even as it seemed to fulfill an even hotter need in Dagmar. He pumped into her, using her hips to lift her and using his hands to bring her down again. Each thrust spoke of a need she had to fill, within both of them. Strange that outside of ruling their people, Aila could picture no man who suited her quite the way Dagmar did. So why did she resist the idea of marriage so strongly?

  Feeling the incredible force of Dagmar’s thrusts, Aila closed her mind to everything except the way he made her feel. She moved in time with him, pushing them both to peak. On a cry of pure ecstasy, Aila came hard as Dagmar thrust deep into her wet pussy.

  That night neither of them spoke of the impending decisions that hung over their heads. They spoke of their early days and how their friendship had meant the world to them, for different reasons. Dagmar told Aila about the moment he learned his parents had died on the trip over.

  “I’ll never forget the gut-wrenching pain of it. They were here in my memories and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring them here. I couldn’t give them life through those memories.”

  “I remember feeling numb for the longest time. I ate and I dressed and I worked, but I wasn’t living. I just wasn’t dying, except on the inside. It was you who saved me.”

  “How?” Dagmar asked.

  “By being my friend. By never asking me to be okay or to get over it. You gave me unconditional love and space; two things I needed desperately. I remember that afternoon, after we learned your parents had died. I bawled and bawled. I cried until my whole body hurt. It wasn’t fair that we should both lose our parents in such senseless ways.”

  “I remember hearing about your parents. I was still reeling from losing mine, and I can’t tell you how hard it was not to go out and beat someone to death. I wanted someone to feel the emptiness I felt inside. I had no idea that it would be you.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Aila said, running her finger through the sparse red hair on Dagmar’s chest. “You saved me, and I think in a way we saved each other.”

  “I know we did,” Dagmar said, caressing her long, dark hair. “If I hadn’t had you I would have gone insane. I probably would have tried to kill myself. You were the one who showed me that we could still go on. We could still live despite the tremendous loss of our parents.”

  “You showed me that I was still needed,” Aila smiled, pressing a kiss to his mouth. “I like being needed by you.”

  “I do need you, Aila,” Dagmar smiled. “More than I would have admitted to, even six days ago. Whatever we decide, I’m always with you, okay? I’ll always support you.”

  “But not enough to step aside and let me lead?”

  “No,” Dagmar sighed. “How could I live with myself if someone or something hurt you? I wouldn’t survive losing you. You were there to help me with losing my parents. No one would be there to console me to the degree I’d need if you got hurt because you were leading our people.”

  “Oh, I get it. It’s okay for me to do anything else that puts my life in danger, like hunt or go to war. But leading, that sort of thing is for real men to do, right?”

  “Would you quit putting words in my mouth?” Dagmar said. “All I’m saying is that being the ruler of a people comes with a known danger that others might not like you. If they don’t like you and they see you as a threat, they would easily try to snuff you out. I couldn’t live with myself if you died because I gave in and let you become the official ruler of our people.”

  “Then I guess there’s nothing else for us to say to each other,” Aila said. She stood and dressed, all the while ignoring Dagmar’s pleas to stay inside where it was warm. When she was finally dressed, Aila opened his tent and walked over to her own. She looked up one last time, seeing Dagmar watching her, before she stepped into her own tent and closed the flap behind her.

  THE END

  *** Thank you for reading this story ***

  To read the second story in the ‘Against All Odds’ Series CLICK HERE.

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  Just keep reading, the stories are just below!

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  Q: I am very easy to get into, but it is hard to get out of me.

  What am I?

  SHOW ANSWER!

  Desired by the Alien King

  Blinking her bleary, groggy eyes, Gwendolyn tried to focus her mind on the
last thing she could remember. The shooting pain in her head—where did that come from?—did not make it any easier.

  She and her archaeological team had been going through the Sarmian excavation. The desert around them was gorgeous. It reminded them of the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert of North America back on Earth, except the browns and tans and the ruddy and rusty colors were streaked with green and grey. Being surrounded by all that beauty had made them wish they were tourists instead of scientists. But they had gotten to work well enough, for each of them was well accustomed to interplanetary travel. More exciting than Sarma itself was the idea of who lived there and what first contact with them meant. Gwendolyn and her people were living the dream of not only every archaeologist on Earth, but every biologist, every biochemist, every political scientist and historian, every philosopher—practically the whole of humanity. They were on the cutting edge of the most exciting thing to happen in human history since the confirmation of extraterrestrial life itself.

  The Sarmians were not merely extraterrestrial—they were humanoid. They had human forms, human anatomy. Except for the trail of hair descending from the hairline of the scalp to the bridge of the nose, they could easily pass for human, at least physically. It was something that science had always deemed biologically impossible, but it turned out to be one of the times when the universe yanked the rug out from under science. The Sarmians had become Earth's great obsession and people from every discipline were all but foaming at the mouth to have a crack at studying the planet and those who lived there.

  And Gwendolyn Rush had snagged for herself the singular honor of leading an archaeological team to the desert wilderness of Sarma, into the ruins of an ancient Sarmian society, to dig for clues to why the Sarmians were so much like humans.

  What they were seeking was not just insights into how ancient and prehistoric Sarmians might have lived, but also confirmation of the only theory that could explain them, a theory so radical that it could have been easily dismissed if the very existence of the Sarmians were not such a radical thing. What the scientists of Earth hoped the planet Sarma might yield was any clue to the identity and nature of the aliens who, the theory held, had come to Earth eons ago and abducted prehistoric humans, taking them across the stars to guide and shape their evolution for some unknowable purpose. The Sarmians were one riddle whose answer might expose a greater one.

  And that was what brought Gwendolyn light years from Earth into the heat and dust and undeniable beauty of another planet, supervising other archaeologists and students in the digging and scraping and sorting and categorizing for later study of structures buried in the sand and the objects and artifacts that they contained. As much as Gwendolyn loved and cared about the work, it made her wish that she were a leaner and lighter woman. Gwen was pretty—an almost luminous beauty in fact—with a soft round face, bright blue eyes, and an incandescent smile. When she did not have her hair bound up in a scarf or rolled up under a hat, it fell in loose black curls about her shoulders. But it was in the mid section that she felt a bit ponderous when she went to work on a dig. Her hips, buttocks, and thighs had somewhat more of a spread than she would have liked. At times she would watch the female students who accompanied her on digs, note their hips and thighs that lacked the same spread, and think, A decade and a half ago, that was me.

  But then, a decade and a half ago Gwendolyn was not one of the youngest leaders of the field of xenoarchaeology, whose perseverance had contributed to humanity's greater understanding of the non-human species of the galaxy. A decade and a half ago she could only dream of leading the effort to understand the other human-like species in the galaxy, something that biology had predicted man would never see. Even if she was not what the most desirable men wanted to take to bed, there were compensations.

  Work on Sarma proceeded uneventfully until Gwen and the crew noticed a greying of what had been a perfect blue sky, and a low sound like a million heavy breaths exhaling coming in from the distance. They all looked up from their tools and their excavations and found something growing and looming into view on the horizon. It was a spreading vastness of ruddy brown emerging over the hills in the distance, and it could mean only one thing. Gwen cursed the luck. While modern Sarmian society was as advanced as Earth in many ways, they did not have a lot of the niceties of Earth, such as weather-tracking and severe weather dissipation systems. On Earth, massive sandstorms rising out of nowhere had ceased to be a problem long ago. Sarma, damn it all, still had them.

  As the airborne tsunami of sand came rushing in, Gwen ordered everyone to cover up their work, throw on scarves and goggles, and take cover themselves. She had just gotten her tools into an electric wheelbarrow along with some pottery whose markings and symbols she wanted to study and covered her eyes and her face when everything around her disappeared into flying sand. She pulled her electrolocator out of her pocket and turned it on, meaning to use it to find her way around by detecting masses and other moving bodies in the low visibility of the sandstorm. The screen on the device showed the shapes of structures and devices around her and the moving forms of the rest of her party. It also detected two other moving bodies coming up behind her, which she took to be simply two other members of her team looking for shelter.

  And it was then—ah-ha, then!—when that damn pain in her head started. She wondered now if she might have accidentally backed into something, but no, she remembered that the electrolocator showed nothing in the flying sand behind her but those two moving bodies. Her next assumption was that one of them had run into her. What sense did that make, one of them running into the back of her head? Which led to her next hypothesis: she had been struck on the back of the head, deliberately hit. And that was when the sandstorm and everything else disappeared into blackness in her memory.

  Now, opening her eyes and wincing from that nagging throb in her skull, Gwen started to become aware of other things. There was something unfamiliar under her, soft and cushiony and satiny. And whatever she had on, it wasn't the durable fatigues that she had been wearing on the dig. It was soft too, luxurious and flowing. Getting her vision back into focus, Gwen saw that she was in a circular room with windows from floor to ceiling on every side. Outside and stretching out all around was a panorama of the Sarmian countryside in which she had been digging, with whirling and billowing clouds of sandstorm whipping through it, thinning here and thickening there. Inside the room, everything was red and gold and magenta. It was all silky, satiny fabrics, drapes and blankets and carpets, divans and cushions and Ottomans, and a very large bed on which she was resting. And Gwen was dressed not for an archaeological dig, but in a flowing gown that suggested activities of a totally different sort.

  After a moment of utter bewilderment taking this all in, Gwen sat up on the bed and blurted out her confusion: "What in the name of hell am I doing here?"

  Her voice bounced off the walls and windows of her surroundings, and only silence greeted her outburst. She half expected she had no answer forthcoming and would have to get up and start looking for one. That was when a portal at the far end of the chamber hissed and slid open, and he came striding in.

  He was a Sarmian, no question about that. But in Gwen's unscientific opinion he was the most jaw-dropping specimen of manhood ever to appear before her wondering eyes. He was tall, like a pillar on a monument to masculinity. He wore nothing but loose-fitting silken leggings and thin, solid-gold armbands on a body built to be naked. It seemed to her that nature had taken on the role of a sculptor and hewn the most perfect body humanly imaginable from solid marble, then rendered it into flesh. The face was as chiseled as the rest of him, with a handsomeness that appeared to command without words, Submit to desire. Short brown hair crowned his head. Eyes the color of the desert sands blazed hotly at her. In his expression was no violence, no threat, but the unspoken understanding that he was accustomed to being obeyed. But even in this tone, the words that he poured out in a low voice like a desert wind were surprisingly gentle: "Gwend
olyn, you are awake. It is good. I have been most anxious to know you. I bid you welcome."

  Gwendolyn squinted at the awesomely sexy stranger addressing her by her first name. "You've got me at a disadvantage, whoever you are. And by the way, who are you? And what am I doing here, and where are my clothes and what am I doing wearing this?"

  The tower of sex before her said, "There is nothing to fear. My people brought you here, out of the storm, at my command. This, of course, is one of our royal bedchambers. And I am Dantar of Sarma, your liege and king and future husband." This he said with a smile devoid of irony. Gwendolyn blinked at him. He actually meant it.

  She leaned forward to shake a demanding finger in the air at him, and her sudden motion sent a hot spike of pain into the back of her skull and made her wince and grow dizzy. But even through this she held fast to her shock and indignation, enough to challenge his patently ridiculous claim. "What the hell do you mean, future husband?" Grimacing, she fell back on the bed a bit and watched him through a squint. His expression was her next surprise.

  This Dantar actually wore a look of gentle concern. "Are you injured, my bride? Did they hurt you?"

  "I am not your bride," she winced back at him. "And someone came up behind me in the sandstorm and clocked me over the head with something. Is that your idea of courtship?"

  Dantar's expression now turned to wrath. "I instructed the guards who brought you here that you were not to be injured. This infliction of pain upon the person of their queen shall be summarily punished. I'll have them chained in the chamber of hot stones for this."

  Rubbing her head and carefully studying this man she now understood to be her captor, Gwen said, "Do whatever you want with your guards, but I'm nobody's queen. I'm a citizen of Earth and you're going to let me out of here or risk an interplanetary incident."