“Yeah, they think they got us figured out pretty good. I don’t think on it much. I mean, I have tons of experience with women—back on Earth I got some pretty good play an’ all. But I’d take one night with Mary over any of ‘em, or all of ‘em put together. And I think that’s how I knew she was it for me. She sort of put everyone else in the background, I guess.”
Graham had heard about ‘love’ before. He had tried to translate it, but he was beginning to think what he was translating it to, which was affection and care for, was not cutting it. Humans used the word for everything, however. They used it for a good drink, they used it for the best jokes, they used it to describe the relationship with their children, and they would also use it to describe the relationship between themselves and their mates. He wasn’t sure if the human vocabulary was incredibly lazy, or if humans felt very strongly about everything, or perhaps very weakly about everything. When he had asked humans before how they chose a mate, they had said it was love, but Graham couldn’t understand how the whole population chose a bride like he’d choose between two drinks.
“Ellie’s gonna be a tough nut,” Peyton admitted freely to Graham. “I don’t think she likes guys. She doesn’t like girls either. She’s a pretty girl, but she’s never looked at anyone in that way as far as I know. She’s not a traditional lady. I think if she had stayed on Earth, she’d probably just marry a guy who’d really be the wife while she’d bring home the bacon. That kinda thing.”
Graham and Thorton both couldn’t keep from laughing at the idea of Graham doing anything even remotely female. “Now that she sees me as her mate, she’ll naturally slip into her role and be happy about it. She’ll be submissive and—” Peyton was laughing now.
Graham raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Submissive?” Peyton echoed, then laughed harder. “Right. Good luck with that. Personally, I think you’ve got another think comin’. I mean, with trainin’, I’ve seen guys make tigers ride tricycles, but I’ve never seen a guy make a tiger enjoy doin’ that.”
Graham frowned, trying to imagine a non-submissive mate. He could be certain that he’d never met the like. “Well,” he said, feeling slightly frustrated as he began to suspect that he was on more untraveled ground than he had anticipated. “What do you suggest I do? In your opinion, do you think I should just give her control?”
Peyton snorted. “Hell, no. She’s way too immature for control. She just doesn’t follow orders well or without at least whining about it. She’s a woman in any case. She doesn’t know what she wants. I’d start storing up patience now, because you’re gonna need it while you figure her out. Don’t let her play you, though. You want her to actually respect you, not just pretend. She’ll do most anything to get her way, so you better make sure her way turns out to be your way.”
Graham felt his headache returning. He pressed his palms over his eyes. “Urgh,” he said, exhausted whenever he tried to picture the future. “Why is my life so hard?” he asked aloud.
“Well, it could have been worse,” Thorton mused. “I mean, sure, she’s not Swarii, but she’s got a hot little body. She’s not too hard on the eyes. They didn’t pick your name in the lottery, in any case. You’re lucky you got a mate at all.”
Graham immediately conceded that point, hopefully before his impatience with fate earned him any bad luck. Peyton just grunted in confusion.
“What do you mean lottery?” the giant human asked.
Graham sighed. “Well, it’s a program where names are drawn—”
“I know what a lottery is,” Peyton interrupted, his tone very dry. “I just don’t know what you’re talking about. If your mating’s tied to fate, then where does a lottery come in?”
“Our female population was cut very low because of a virus the Frians unleashed on us,” Thorton said. Graham usually couldn’t talk about it without going into a rant, or at least a depression. Thorton had grieved after the plague, but his mother had already died of a different illness years before. Graham, however, lost his own mother and all of his sisters in one fell swoop.
Thorton, therefore, was more able to explain the story to an outsider without being overcome with rage and sadness. “More than half our women died on our home planet in less than three weeks. The Union creates a connection between men and women. Men feel it more strongly than women do. The Union creates extreme depression upon being parted from your mate for too long, and upon the death of the female, most of the time the male will follow. So, when most of the women died… their mates chose not to survive afterward. I think that’s why the Frians dropped it—they expected complete societal collapse. But it wasn’t as devastating as the Frians had hoped. I know a few men who didn’t kill themselves, even. Graham’s father’s one of them. He trucked on somehow, mostly fueled by rage.
“But many of the women that died were young and unmated, and so the generation of men who hadn’t been mated yet—Graham and my generation—couldn’t all get a female. There were four of us to every one of them at the end of the day. So not everyone is given the opportunity to find their mate. It’s normally all done through giant mating festivals—all the single women that year and all the eligible men show up and touch each other’s skin until sparks fly. If they don’t fly, then they just come back the next year and try to find their mate again. But, with our generation, they had to limit the number of men that can find a mate. If there’re leftover females, there’s another drawing, and another, until they’re all mated.
“Graham never got drawn during his eligibility, even to be on the backup lists.” Thorton concluded, and then shrugged his bulky shoulders. “So Graham finding his mate just randomly out in the universe is pretty…” He pursed his lips and waggled his head indecisively before landing on the word, “lucky.”
Graham chuckled at the word used to describe it. He knew he had been extremely blessed in the matter. He had been depressed for a few years, thinking there was never any hope of him having a family. Now, there were some questions to be answered, but his faith had been renewed.
“But then, I’m lucky, too,” Thorton admitted loftily. “My name actually got picked!” He cracked his knuckles and chuckled. “Next spring, baby!” he hooted. “A few more months and it’ll be my mate who’s complaining that I’m hung like a moose creature!”
Graham’s expression was suddenly blank, and he fought himself so that he wouldn’t blush. “Could you hear what was going on in there?” he asked, reaching back to point in the direction of the room Eleanor was presently sleeping within.
“Not from here,” Thorton replied innocently. “But if you were standing in the hallway, then yeah. You can pretty much hear anything. This ship has surprisingly bad sound cancelation. I’m surprised that you guys didn’t distract each other,” he said without any shame at all, waving between Graham and Peyton.
Graham didn’t know whether or not to be angry, but he looked at Peyton with curiosity and saw the man’s face heating red. “Don’t you have anything better to do than listen to me finally be able to have sex with my own wife?” Peyton demanded.
Thorton grinned. “Actually, no. There wasn’t anything better to do.” He winked at him and added teasingly, “You stud, you.”
Graham was now stifling a laugh. “Don’t make him angry,” Graham suggested frankly, slapping Thorton’s shoulder. “He snapped a Frian’s neck back at the palace—with his bare hands.”
Thorton raised an eyebrow, appearing dubious despite the fact that Graham never made things up. “No way,” he doubted.
“Yes way,” Graham assured. He spun around in his chair and faced the console to log into the ship’s interface. He added, “He’s not a human. He’s a beast.”
* * *
Ellie woke up slowly, not feeling well rested. How long she had slept, she couldn’t be certain. The room had no windows, and there was no daylight outside to give her any clues. But she felt raw, inside and out.
As she remembered where she was, and what had happene
d before she fell asleep, she nearly expected to feel a gigantic, smooth phallus rubbing up against her behind. But she didn’t feel anything of the sort. She did hear a gentle but manly snore from behind her head.
Being careful, she rolled over and saw a completely dressed and showered Graham sleeping in cleaned clothes on the outside of the sheets. Graham looked extremely tired as well, although his color wasn’t pink with fever any longer, and he looked deep asleep. She was surprised that he had even bothered to kick his boots off before climbing into bed.
She slowly sat up and studied him.
You should get up and prepare him breakfast, a voice in her head lectured her. You’re his mate, now. You should take care of these things.
It wasn’t a real voice; she was quite sure that she wasn’t crazy, but if it had been a voice she might have been less concerned. The voice, she knew, had come from within, expressing a sudden yet immediate urge that she now had to chew back and resist.
She had lived with very submissive women all of her life, namely her mother and her aunt, who were almost pre-twentieth century with the way they had served their husbands. It seemed like all they wanted to do was cook and clean and look adoringly at their husbands whenever they came home from work. On her father and uncle’s side, it seemed like their wives’ constant affection had made them function better, work harder, and be happier.
She hadn’t considered what made her mother or aunt tick before. She had simply thought of them as strange, and she had never had any inclination to learn anything from them or to spend any substantial time around them.
Ellie had always thought of her career, of the garage, of her work. Besides general merrymaking with her cousins and her brother between the working hours, she was perfectly content with her lot. She had a gift—and her father and uncle let her use it as much as she wanted to. She had inherited the family fascination with problem-solving and puzzle work. She liked to make broken things work again. She liked to create new things or modify existing things to make them work better. It was her only hobby, her only care.
And she certainly didn’t care about those things any less now. It was just that this new obsession with Graham’s well-being that she was having so much trouble snapping out of was an alien feeling to her.
She told herself that the voice in her head would become softer, the urges to become wifely to Graham would become weaker, and that she would feel like her normal self in time. And eventually, if she had any luck at all, Graham would put aside any of his own expectations and just deal with her as she was.
Because even though she was determined not to give in to this new inclination to be submissive, one thing she knew she couldn’t fight was Graham. She didn’t exactly like him, but she couldn’t deny the fact that Graham wasn’t something escapable. Even if he allowed her to just walk away from him, she didn’t think she could. She felt an almost magnetic attraction to him. She was certain that she would be miserable without him. He was, for better or worse, her mate.
The problem was that she didn’t want to be miserable with him either. She had to make him realize that as much as she might be his mate, he was also hers. If she couldn’t be happy, then neither would he.
At least he was peaceful enough when he was sleeping. She felt possessive of his good looks, as if she had ownership of everything she saw before her, even the scruff on his chin. She stared, looking over his body, perusing everything else that she could consider hers as well.
She looked at his hands, and then she squinted. Slowly, not wanting to wake him, she put her hands around his wrist and lifted his arm so she could examine one hand more closely. Then, very gently, she put one of her hands up against it, just in case she was counting incorrectly.
He had six fingers on each of his hands! She wondered how she hadn’t noticed before, when she was looking for alien attributes when he had been a prisoner in Jazeel’s dungeon. She hadn’t thought to look at something like his hands. She was almost jealous—since the advent of the keyboard, it had seemed to her like five fingers weren’t enough. Graham’s hand seemed more perfect than hers because of this, not to mention far larger. As she compared her hands with his, she quickly noticed that even his smallest digit was the width of her thumb.
She gasped in surprise when the fingers suddenly closed around her own. Graham, having captured her hand, brought it to his lips, kissed her knuckle, and then stroked the hand with his thumb without ever opening his eyes. “Are you playing with me, wife?” he asked with a grumble.
She remembered him calling her ‘wife’ once before, when she was disobeying him, but hearing him call her that in good humor sounded strange to her ears, and she blushed, not that he had opened his eyes to notice. “When did you get dressed?”
“About seven hours ago, after you fell asleep. I wanted to make sure I took my turn at watch. I relieved Thorton so he could get some shut-eye until Braum woke up and was able to relieve me.”
The name he spoke was unfamiliar. “Do I know Braum?”
Still playing with her fingers, his voice sounded like a low, rumbly yawn as he replied easily, “My team has Fie—he’s the largest. He fulfills many purposes since he’s a skilled researcher and a doctor. Then there is Thorton, he’s the smartass who won’t shut up. He’s also my first cousin, and the only reason I keep him around is because he’s a very competent engineer.” He grinned, like he thought he was being funny. “There’s Jio. You haven’t talked to him, either, because he doesn’t speak Human. He just joined the service this last year, and is the youngest. Last, there is Braum. You haven’t talked to him either, because he also doesn’t speak Human. Not because he doesn’t know it—he was on the same mission where Thorton, Fie, and I learned it. He tried to make a point not to learn it, though, because he doesn’t like humans. That being said, I think he understands more than he lets on.”
She bit her lip, a little annoyed that her mate knew a language that she didn’t, although she obviously couldn’t blame him for it. “Why don’t you guys just speak in shal’ta?” she asked him. “Why’d Swarii develop their own language in the first place?”
“Speaking shal’ta is not done that often on Swaraan, and it is actually considered rude by some people,” he replied simply. “There is even a joke that if you don’t bother moving your mouth to speak, then you must be speaking to an enemy. Shal’ta is actually a very common language. Any species that developed on a water planet is sure to use a similar form of telepathy. The Frians, for example, evolved from an aquatic species that had no use of a spoken language.”
“Did you evolve from a water creature?” she asked, surprised. “That’s why you speak shal’ta?”
“We use telepathy for other reasons. The Libii, our ancestors, colonized the planet of Swaraan tens of thousands of years ago. The population of Libii and the native inhabitants of Swaraan have merged completely into the perfect specimen you see before you,” he said with a grunt of amusement, gesturing to his own person with his free hand.
“The inhabitants of Swaraan were very physically developed, while the Libii were very mentally developed and thus had their own version of telepathy already. The Libii blended the species purposefully to take advantage of both of their strengths.”
She grumbled and flopped down on the bed. “I’m too tired for a history lesson,” she grumped.
“You asked,” he reproached, and then brought his arm around to snuggle her against him. “How are you still tired after sleeping so many hours?”
“I only slept seven hours,” she reminded with a yawn. “And yesterday was not exactly a light load.”
“Your big human friend only sleeps a few hours,” he said, jerking his thumb back. He was trying to remember how much he’d noticed humans sleeping in the past. He was quite sure that they only slept four or five hours, and were happy to get it. But that might have been because they weren’t allotted any more time for sleep than that…
“Yeah. Peyton’s like my brother. He’s a machine. As lon
g as there’s food around, he’s sound as a pound,” she replied, then thoughtfully added, “There’s food on this ship, right?”
“Is my mate hungry?” Graham asked teasingly, reaching under the covers and stroking his big, callused hand over her belly.
“How is your hand always so warm? It’s freezing out there.”
“It’s well above freezing temperatures,” he assured her. He raised one eyebrow and opened his eye slightly to look at her. “Oh. You were exaggerating. I forgot how humans love doing that. You’re a poetic species,” he said, and she saw him grin teasingly. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you warm.” He suddenly arched and pulled the covers down his body and then snuggled under them with her, wrapping his giant body around hers. He rolled over so that she was completely under him. He was fully awake now, and apparently feeling very playful, because he loudly kissed several places on her face.
“You’re a goofball,” she snorted, rolling over to avoid any more tickling kisses. He kissed across her shoulders but, when he finished, he soon began to run a finger down a welt across her bottom that was particularly sensitive. “Owww…” she whined.
“I know that hurts,” Graham cooed, pulling the blankets over his head and then, much to her surprise, she felt a kiss across one of her welts, and then his tongue licked across another welt. She stifled a moan. “Poor baby,” he told her. “You still have a few bruises down here.”
“Probably from your swats yesterday,” she pouted.
He snorted cynically at his. “I was in the throne room yesterday, watching,” he reminded her. She felt him begin to pry apart her bottom cheeks, and her face heated. She tried to crawl out of his grasp, but his strong hands held tightly on. “Where’d this bruise come from?” he asked, touching a sore spot just above her now fully exposed bottom hole.
She winced and knew he was touching the place that had been hurt the most when she had her butt plug in yesterday. “I don’t know, don’t touch it!” she snapped.
His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Page 14
