Текст книги "Married to the alien cowboy"

Автор книги: Ursa Dox

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

20SILAR

Fallon jerked as my tail seized upon his throat.

I had not felt rage like this since… since…

Since I’d killed that man on Zabria.

Fallon’s white eyes bulged, his claws sinking deep into my tail. I barely felt it. His hound snapped feral jaws in defense of his master, circling Tarion, but I paid the creature little mind. If Tarion felt threatened, he could deliver a single, skull-smashing kick.

No. All my attention was focused upon Fallon. Fallon, whose stampeding herd had almost killed my wife.

Thoughts about how Fallon was the youngest and likely the best among us were torn asunder, mashed up by memories. Memories of hearing the stampede and racing across my property, calling Cherry’s name but not finding her. Memories of spine-sheering panic as I’d rounded the house on Tarion’s back and saw my wife, trapped and disoriented, while Fallon’s cattle hurtled towards her like a storm.

I almost hadn’t reached her in time. It had been far too cursedly close.

And I had to do something with the frenetic friction of that fear. I had to do something before it strangled me.

So I would strangle Fallon instead.

“Silar!”

Clear as a note of music, Cherry’s voice called to me. I held Fallon in place and cranked my head to the side, searching the house’s doorway but not seeing her. But when she called my name again, I found her. She was on the roof, standing atop the flat portion of it at the back of the house and staring over the angled part near the front.

Fallon burbled. My tail burned and bled as he clawed me.

“Silar!” my wife cried for a third time. “You let him go! This instant!”

My body obeyed her immediately. Clearly, it was more devoted to her than it was to me. My tail loosened around Fallon’s throat and then entirely slipped away. The other man coughed and gagged, shooting white-eyed looks my way that I ignored as I watched my wife disappear from the roof only to reappear on the ground at the side of the house a moment later.

“Get inside!” I ordered her, turning my wary attention back to the bracku. Luckily, they had calmed now. They milled aimlessly around the flat pasture Fallon and I had forced them into.

Cherry sucked in a breath, looking like she was going to refuse. But then she, too, looked at the bracku, her face paler than usual. Giving me one of her human head-motions that I’d learned meant that she was in agreement, she hurried into the kitchen and slammed the door.

“Is she alright? Your wife?”

That frantic croak of a voice belonged to Fallon.

“Don’t you even dare to speak of her,” I snapped, rounding on him. “She’s the only reason you’re still breathing, Fallon. Keep her name out of your filthy mouth.”

“I did not even say her name!” he cried. “I do not even know it! I did not even know that she was here!” Fallon rubbed viciously at his throat. “Why did you not tell me? You could have sent me a message on my data tab!”

“Why the blazes should I have told you?” I snarled over his hound’s incessant barking.

“Because then I would have known!” Fallon exploded. “When the stampede started, I knew, or I thought, that you would be the only one potentially affected. No one else has a property this near to mine. And I know that you can ride a shuldu and that you’d know what to do if you were outside! You would not be in any danger. But then-”

His voice broke off and he dragged desperate claws through his pale yellow hair, his tail gesturing to the well-trampled and now-empty road.

“But then, there she was! I saw her fall! I had no warning!” His chest heaved, his eyes flashing white then brown, white then brown, before finally settling into their usual warm umber.

“You have no idea the shock of that, Silar,” he added quietly, sounding sick. “To suddenly see a vulnerable little female in the path of my cattle. And knowing in the deepest parts of myself that I’d never reach her in time.”

“I know exactly what it’s like.”

I’d seen the same thing he had. I’d watched my wife in the road. About to die.

Because of him.

“I need to see her,” Fallon said, his eyes going moon-white. “I need to make sure she’s alright. And apologize and-”

“You need to get off my property before I change my mind and kill you.”

My tail was already itching to find its way to Fallon’s throat again.

He cast a pained look towards the house. But he knew better than to argue with me.

Unfortunately, my wife did not.

Once again, she called to me from the house, shouting that she was “making some food and why don’t you bring your friend inside?”

My friend. My friend.

My fellow convicted murderer whom I’d nearly just killed in front of her.

Fallon, brainless fool that he was, was already ignoring my ire and directing his mount into a trot towards the house. I urged Tarion into a canter, quickly catching up with him.

“Wait,” I growled at him.

“She invited me!” Fallon reminded me defensively.

“Fallon, curse it all, wait.”

Something in my tone caught him up short right after he’d dismounted. He paused, stroking his mount’s black neck as I followed him down to the ground.

“What is it, Silar?” He eyed my bloodied tail with suspicion.

But I’d restrain myself. I’d been so afraid of Cherry finding out about my murderous past and now I’d almost gone ahead and killed Fallon in front of her. She wouldn’t have to wait for me to tell her the truth. I’d practically showed her.

I reined in my rage, the way I would a bucking shuldu, and held it tightly leashed.

“If you go in there… You cannot…”

“Cannot what?” Fallon pressed.

I bit out a sigh.

“She does not know, Fallon.”

“She does not know what?”

“She does not know.”

Fallon glowered at me, dragging his bloody fingers absentmindedly across his throat. Then, all at once, it hit him. I watched understanding, then horror, dawn on his face.

“She does not know? That you… That we…” His voice lowered to a hissing whisper. “She does not know about the convictions?”

“No. And you don’t need to whisper like that. She’ll never hear us through the door.”

Fallon’s head whipped towards the door then back to me in alarm.

“Her hearing isn’t good,” I explained.

“It isn’t?”

“I think it is a human thing.”

“Oh,” Fallon said, his white eyes bouncing back and forth between the door and me. “Oh… Oh my cursed cattle… Alright… So…”

“So,” I cut him off, “you will keep your mouth closed for once. It seems as though my wife wishes to greet you. Therefore, you will sit down, shut up, and take whatever generosity she chooses to bestow upon you because the Empire knows that I have none. And Fallon,” I added on a dangerous growl, “if you breathe one word about my murder conviction to her then I vow to you, that breath will be your last.”

21CHERRY

Silar and Fallon didn’t come in right away. They lingered outside by the door for a minute, and then they went around to side of the house and the hose to get their worn-out mounts some water after all the running the poor creatures had done. I watched through the kitchen’s back window as they eventually brought the two shuldu, one black and one rust-red, towards Silar’s stalls. They’d be able to rest and have a munchy little snack in there.

I used that time to collect myself, trying to keep all my splitting nerves together after today’s lovely little near-death experience. And then there had been the whole Silar trying to strangle Fallon with his tail thing…

The two men finally came into the house just as I was spooning some sort of smoked, mystery meat sausages out of the cast iron pan onto plates.

“Oh!” I said brightly, smothering my nervousness with false cheer. And honestly, it didn’t feel so false after a minute. Because Fallon was just about the friendliest Zabrian a human gal could ever hope to meet.

“Hello!” Fallon bounded into the room with all the energy of an overexcited pet. And then he stopped, his broad, fangy smile going slightly lopsided. His eyes took on a soft white glow as he stared at me. Self-consciously, I brushed a hand over my face and then smoothed my wind-whipped hair.

“Hello. Sorry. Um… Is everything alright?” I asked, unsure what to do about this decidedly dopey and sudden bout of staring.

“Oh. I was just… I was just thinking that…” The whiteness in Fallon’s eyes shone brighter. “I was just thinking that if my bride is half as pretty as you, then I am a luckier male than I’d ever dared to dream.”

“Oh. Wow. Alright. Thank you,” I said with a slight laugh. The guy was laying it on pretty thick, but strangely, it wasn’t creepy or weird. It just sounded… Nice. Genuine.

But before I could bask in the glow of the compliment Fallon had just given me, someone who looked more like an Old-Earth depiction of a demon than my husband stepped darkly into the room. He loomed behind Fallon, his face storm and shadow, his eyes white lightning. His golden hand clamped down like a vise on the burnt-orange hide of Fallon’s shoulder. He ground out a single word.

“Sit.”

“Silar,” I said, my voice laced with wary warning. “I don’t want a repeat of whatever the hell you two were doing outside.”

“What do you mean?” Fallon inquired a little too quickly as Silar shoved him towards the chairs. Fallon was about to sit when Silar yanked him back.

“Not that one. That’s the one I made for Cherry,” Silar gritted out. “You sit on the old one.”

“It doesn’t matter which chair he sits in. I just…” I stopped, noticing for the very first time that the new chair Silar had built was decidedly smaller than the other one. It wasn’t built for a Zabrian butt.

It was built for mine.

“OK. The other chair works,” I finished lamely, even though Fallon was already sitting in it. “And I was talking about the whole tail around your neck thing.”

“Oh! Oh. That. Yes,” Fallon stammered. “Ha! That is simply… That is simply a Zabrian form of greeting!”

“Silar’s certainly never greeted me like that,” I said suspiciously.

“Well… Of course, it is a greeting between males!”

“Huh… So why didn’t the warden greet him like that on our wedding day?”

“Ha! Well. You see… The warden is… Silar… He… Are those sausages?”

I pushed a plate across the table to him. Before I could ask the big, brawny, orange Zabrian anything else, a strong hand closed around my arm and propelled me out of the kitchen and into the bedroom.

“Hey!” I said, trying to wiggle out of Silar’s stony hold. Which I should have known was an exercise in futility. But hey. They say exercise is good for you. So I did it anyway.

Silar slammed the door shut with his tail.

“I don’t know what is going on with you and Fallon,” I said, yanking hard at his grip. “But that doesn’t mean you can just shove me in here and-”

My words evaporated into a gurgling puff of air as Silar suddenly released me, only to crush me against his chest in the longest, most desperate hug I’d ever experienced.

“Si… Silar?” I said on a craggy exhale. It was hard to speak. The man was holding me like he was trying to pop my lungs like balloons.

And suddenly, all that work I’d done in the quiet kitchen to get my nerves under control and present a calm exterior was gone.

Poof. Just like that.

The tears came fast and furious, hot, salty rivers that doused Silar’s bare chest. When the moisture touched his skin, he jolted and shoved me away.

That only made me feel worse. I tried to hide my face and wipe my tears, but Silar caught my wrists in his hands and held them in the air, lowering his face to mine and scanning me with wild, white eyes.

“Is this blood?”

“What?”

“All this… this…” He let go of one wrist to cup my cheek, rubbing salty moisture beneath his thumb.

“It’s not blood,” I told him, sniffing miserably. “They’re tears.”

“Teeeeerz. That does not translate. Teerz.” He straightened, looking a little more composed now, his hard jaw set with determination. It was as if, now that he knew the word for the apparently-human phenomenon of tears, he could make a plan on how to tackle the problem.

And apparently that plan involved ripping the pillow off the bed. Then the blanket. Then over-turning the entire mattress.

“What are you doing, Silar?”

“I am looking for the book.”

“The… Oh. The human sex book?”

“Yes. The… What?” He cast me a mystified glance over a tense shoulder.

“Right. You haven’t gotten to those pages yet.” Welp. At least I was so embarrassed now that I’d stopped crying. “I put it in the drawer.”

He made a Silar sort of noise, halfway between a growl and a grunt, that I chose to interpret as grateful. He slammed open the drawer and started thumbing through the pages of the book before chucking it right back down, frustration clear on his face.

“What do the teerz mean, and how do I heal them?”

“Heal them?”

His tail lashed the floor, leaving a streak of dark blood on the boards.

“Yes. I brought you in here to check you for injuries. The teerz are the most obvious and must be dealt with first.”

“No, Silar. This isn’t an injury.”

His nostrils flared with strained breath. The man looked out of his mind. It was actually fucking adorable, in a break-your-heart-into-a-million-powdery-pieces kind of way.

“You have your white glowy eye thing,” I told him. “I guess this is the human version. We shed tears when we feel strong emotions. Or when we’re hurt.”

He let out a feral growl and crossed the room back to me.

“Then where are you hurt?”

“I’m not. Not really. My backside is going to be bruised. And my pride, I guess, for falling down at the worst possible moment out there. I… I’m so sorry, Silar.” I was about to start blubbering again. I pressed my lips together and ground my molars, willing myself not to cry.

But all that achieved was making sure that I cried silently. I stared at Silar while big, breathless tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Don’t say sorry,” Silar said, the words sounding like they were ripped from somewhere deep in his throat. “Not to me, Cherry. Never to me.”

His hands rose, like he wanted to cradle my face, to dab away my tears. But he let them fall with a miserable snap of his tail.

“You are not physically hurt. Then I have done something. Grabbed you too hard. Or… Or I should not have held you the way I did.”

“No. Not at all!” I said, sniffing hard and scrubbing my hands over my cheeks. “If anything, it’s the opposite. I really didn’t know how much I needed that hug.”

Silar’s aqua brows pinched together.

“What is a hug? That word does not translate, either.”

“You guys don’t have a word for hugging?”

“No. At least, I don’t believe so. I don’t know what it means.”

Huh. So they didn’t kiss, they didn’t hug…

“What do Zabrians do,” I asked, “to show affection?”

“I do not know.”

Something about the immediate and unguarded way he said it made me feel like I was going to start crying all over again. He didn’t think there was anything weird or wrong with what he’d just said.

Whether it was because his family didn’t give much affection to him, or because Zabrians just didn’t express themselves the same way humans did, I couldn’t be sure. But either way, his response took my heart in its hand and squeezed. Life on Terratribe I was never really easy, but mine had been blessed with more love than I knew what to do with. At least while Mama had been alive.

But Silar…

Silar had never experienced anything like that.

“A hug is… It’s like what we just did. When you held me. I mean… Do Zabrians not do that?” It had seemed instinctive enough for him.

“I do not know,” he said again. “I never saw my father do it.”

“And… Your mother? She never did it to you?” I waited, already flinching at Silar’s expected silence. I thought he’d shut down the way he had when I’d last asked about his parents.

But this time he didn’t.

“If she did, I don’t remember,” he said. “I do not know if it is a Zabrian custom or not. All I knew is that I wanted to hold you but I…” His throat worked, and his hands rose then fell, empty, once more. “I did not know if it was right.”

He didn’t know if hugging me, his wife, was right? Were these the kinds of questions my husband had been torturing himself with while I’d been pouting over feeling rejected by him?

Maybe it wasn’t that Silar didn’t have any feelings for me.

Maybe it was just that he didn’t have the first fucking clue what to do with those feelings.

Well. I could bloody well show him. Starting now.

“OK. Well. It is right, for the record. I love hugs. Always have. And you can hug me any time you damn well please,” I told him, closing the last little bit of space between us. I sighed and leaned against him, turning my tear-dampened cheek to his chest, and wrapped my arms around his back. “This is a hug.”

Silar’s body was taut as the skin of a drum. His heart slammed beneath my cheek, like it was trying to run right out of his chest and reach me. A shudder rolled through him, and suddenly his arms were around me again, thankfully with less of that bone-crunching desperation this time.

A little sob hiccupped up out of my throat as I buried my face against him, breathing in his unique scent of dust and sun and Silar. That fragrance grounded me. His warm skin soothed me. And when his hands began to roam along my back, I sighed into the sensation.

One of his hands came up to cradle the back of my head, stroking my hair in stiff, patting motions that became more fluid and natural every moment.

Mama used to brush my hair. No one else had touched it since she’d died. My scalp sang, my neck tingling, and I had to fight hard not to start crying all over again. Because I was sure that if I did, Silar would end the hug in a big panicky huff that he’d done something wrong.

But he hadn’t.

In fact, in that moment, I couldn’t think of anything more right. Being here, with him. Letting him hold me this way.

The moment had to end. Of course it did. But when it ended, it wasn’t because of anything Silar or I did or said.

It was because of Fallon.

“Hello?” his voice boomed from what sounded like directly outside the bedroom door. I nearly jumped out of my fucking skin, and Silar gave a low growl and tightened his hold on me in response.

“Is everything alright in there?” Fallon called through the door, oblivious to the rigid set of Silar’s torso, the furious white burn of his eyes. “Silar, if you are examining your wife for injuries, I should like to know the results!”

“I bet you would,” Silar hissed, glaring at the door.

“Of course I would!” Fallon continued, innocent and undaunted. “You know that I was worried! Cherry,” he said then, apparently switching tactics. “I apologize for what happened. I take full responsibility. I did not even know you were here yet and-”

“Fallon.” Silar’s voice dripped with venomous warning. “We talked about this. Sit down. Shut up.”

“Did you talk about this before or after you wrapped your tail around his throat?” I said, the words muffled against the muscled expanse of his chest. Silar’s hand was still protectively cupping the back of my head and it seemed like he wasn’t planning to let me go anywhere. “And don’t think for a second I believe that ‘It’s a Zabrian greeting!’ bullshit Fallon came up with.”

A tremor went through Silar’s arms. He remained silent so long I thought he wouldn’t answer before he suddenly whispered in a strained voice.

“He could have killed you.”

“His cattle could have,” I corrected him primly. “Pretty sure Fallon didn’t specifically send them on the war path just so they could trample me. Wait…” I paused, my heart swelling up into my throat. “Are you telling me that you almost strangled another man because… because he indirectly almost harmed me?”

“Yes.”

Holy shit.

That… should not have been so hot to me. Especially when the person in question was someone as sweet as Fallon seemed to be.

A sigh worked its way through Silar’s body and he finally let me go.

“I wanted to tell you before,” he said, his vision pulsing white. “I would have told you before the end of the thirty days. I swear it.” His voice went hoarse but his gaze held mine. “Cherry. I am not a good man.”

I snorted at that melodramatic statement.

“Pretty much everything I’ve observed you doing for the past two weeks is in direct contradiction with that statement.”

Silar gaped at me in silence.

“Look. Was it a good idea to nearly choke the living daylights out of what I assume must be our closest neighbour? No. But it was a crazy day. Emotions were running high. You almost watched me die.”

Yeah, still processing that.

“I’ve seen grown men beat the shit out of each other on the factory floor because of less life-or-death situations like love triangles and cheating. But another man inadvertently almost causing the death of someone you lo-” Shit. “-live with,” I amended with a hot flush. “Yeah. I mean. I get why you did it.”

I also kind of liked it. Way too fucking much.

But Silar probably didn’t need to know that.

I gave him a firm pat on his chest, his skin still damp from my drying tears.

“How about we just don’t do any more attempted murder. Deal?”

Silar didn’t say a word. He also didn’t move. Or blink.

“Deal?” I asked again, narrowing my eyes at him. The dude looked like he was going to stroke out on me or something. I wasn’t even sure that he was breathing.

“Silar-”

“That’s it?”

I pursed my lips, my brows coming lower over my eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“I tell you that… That I nearly murdered a man in front of you… And you’re not…” He angled his head back slightly, regarding me intently down his nose, as if he needed a little more distance to see me properly. “You are not angry?” His voice cracked. “Or… Or frightened?”

Ah. Shit. He was definitely picking up on my horny glee over this whole thing. Not that I was actually horny or gleeful for Fallon to get hurt. Just over the fact that my stoic, impossible-to-read husband actually cared enough about me that he would cut a bitch to protect me or avenge me. But clearly, I needed to tone it down. Silar was looking at me like I was, well, an alien.

Probably good he doesn’t know about that whole breaking a man’s nose with my cast iron pan situation…

“I’m not angry,” I told him sternly. “I’m… disappointed.”

Like hell I was.

But I guess Silar believed me. My words made that massive wall of a man flinch as if I’d gone ahead and punched him in the gut. Or, you know, did something as innocuous and gentle as put my hands on the man’s shoulder. You could never quite tell with him.

“Come on,” I said, giving him a smile. “Let’s go. I think Fallon’s head will explode if we don’t reappear soon.”