Текст книги "Married to the alien cowboy"

Автор книги: Ursa Dox

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

22CHERRY

Fallon’s head was still very much intact when we re-emerged. He’d also eaten all his sausages and was eyeing the other plate with a slightly hilarious look of longing in his eyes. I started to push the other plate towards him when Silar slammed his hand down on the table, slid the plate back to me and said, “That’s my wife’s.”

“It was actually your portion, but you didn’t seem that interested in eating it,” I told Silar as I sat down in the chair across from Fallon. “Hi, Fallon. I feel like we didn’t get a proper introduction before. I’m Cherry.”

I stuck out my hand. Like an idiot.

What was it with me and constantly trying to shake these alien men’s hands?

Fallon stared at my hand like it was a puzzle to be solved. Then, he stuck out his hand exactly opposite mine, like a mirror image. We couldn’t exactly shake hands like that, so I bumped the back of my hand against his palm in a wonky high five and then retreated.

Now that my hand was no longer confusing him, his gaze returned to my face. And stayed there.

So did his dreamy grin.

I kind of got the impression that he was using my features as a sort of stand-in to imagine his own future wife. And I couldn’t even be mad about it. The guy just seemed so fucking excited.

He was so different from Silar. Fallon was chatty and smiley, sitting across from me like a friend while my husband stood beside the table, glowering down at us like some kind of Old-Earth gargoyle. A hot, grumpy, golden one.

Fallon’s colouring was different from Silar’s as well. He had a warm, deep, sunset-orange hue to his hide, and his long shimmery hair was a gorgeous gold-tinged white, the kind of colour that women spent hours frying their ends off to achieve. I’d even tried to get my strands that shade once myself as a teen, but I’d only ended up with hair even brighter orange than Fallon’s skin tone. Where Silar’s eyes were a deep blue with electric veins of aqua, Fallon’s were a rich dark brown, the branching bits a little lighter, like the colour of astronomically expensive Terratribe II maple syrup. Everything about him screamed warmth.

There was one thing he and my husband did have in common, though.

“So,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I see that you and Silar both subscribe to the Doctrine of Eternal Shirtlessness.”

Fallon’s smile vanished, a fiercely thoughtful look coming over his features. His pale blond brows furrowed over his eyes.

“The Doctrine of Eternal… That last part did not translate. I do not think I read about this in the book.” He leaned forward in earnest. “Please tell me if this is a belief system my future wife adheres to. I would like to honour it.”

“Oh. No, I…”

God. It was like kicking a puppy. Not that I’d ever had a puppy on Terratribe I. But I’d seen pictures. And I had to imagine that kicking one would feel the exact same as telling Fallon I was kind of fucking with him.

“You know what?” I said as gently as I could. “You’re already honouring it just fine. Since you’re all bare-chested and whatnot. Shirtlessness just means being without a shirt.”

He gave a relieved sigh. “Good.” He paused, then gave me an astounded look. “Does this mean my wife also will not wear a shirt?”

Good job Cherry.

“She will definitely wear a shirt. The no shirt thing only applies to, erm, males. Like that whole tail around the neck greeting you were so kind to explain to me before.”

He looked bashfully down at the table, like he was guilty for the lie.

Seriously. Puppy. Foot. Face.

To break the awkward silence that had descended, I cleared my throat and asked, “So! Fallon. Who is your wife? What’s her name?” I remembered Magnolia and Darcy receiving their husband name cards when I did, but I couldn’t remember who got whom.

Fallon’s smile instantly returned.

“Her name is Dar-chee.”

“You mean Darcy?”

“Ah! Is that how you say it? Yes. Darcy.” He rolled the sounds around his mouth experimentally, then grinned. “I love the sound of it.”

“Yes. Sounds a little less…Um… Starchy.”

“Tell me,” Fallon said, his eyes suddenly blazing white. “Have you met her? What is she like?”

“She’s…”

Darcy wasn’t actually who I would have pictured for him, to be honest. With her gentle nature and sweet optimism, I actually thought Magnolia might make a better match for a friendly guy like Fallon.

“She’s… a bit quiet,” I improvised, remembering Darcy’s downright frosty demeanour. “Reserved.”

“She sounds very elegant,” Fallon said dreamily, and I let out a sigh that he seemed happy with my description of her.

“She’s taller for a human woman. With pink hair, green eyes, and freckles. She’s absolutely gorgeous,” I added, remembering Fallon’s earlier comment about her being half as beautiful as me. I gave him a conspiratorial wink. “Definitely prettier than me.”

Fallon looked like I’d just about blown his Zabrian mind. It was kind of fun seeing how absolutely banana-pants excited he was getting. So fun I almost missed Silar’s quiet, incredulous growl of, “Unlikely.”

A hot thrill caught low in my belly.

Silar thought it was unlikely that someone could be prettier than me? Seriously? I mean, I was alright. Could definitely qualify as a very solid “cute” when I made some effort. But he honestly thought, on a balance of probabilities, that I was prettier than… Everyone? Ever?

I mean the man hadn’t seen another female in the lord knew how long and there was certainly no accounting for taste, but…

I kind of fucking loved it.

“I think it is time you be leaving,” Silar said flatly to Fallon, his patience with this chat apparently running out. “Go check on your herd after everything that’s happened.”

“Sora is out there with them,” Fallon said. “And they already trampled the genka that broke through the fence and started the stampede. If there is any trouble, I will hear Sora’s barking.”

“She’s barking.”

Fallon and I both stopped to listen. Not a single bark to be heard.

“Are you quite well?” Fallon inquired, sounding genuinely concerned as Silar hauled him up and out of the chair. Kind of a bold question, considering Fallon was the one who’d almost ended up with a crushed windpipe today, not Silar.

In his usual fashion, Silar ignored the question, pushing the other man towards the door.

“I was not finished speaking to your wife!” Fallon whined as I stood up and hastened after them. “I was going to ask her more questions about Darcy!”

“It’s OK!” I said from behind Silar’s broad back as he marched Fallon towards the back door. I pulled my comms tablet from my pocket, the thing miraculously unscathed from my fall and frantic shuldu ride earlier. “Give me your information. You can call me on your-”

“No, you can’t,” Silar cut in.

“Hey! I’m allowed to talk to other people, you know!” I huffed at my husband.

“You can do whatever you want,” Silar acknowledged. “But he can’t.”

There didn’t seem to be any slowing or stopping Silar’s forward momentum. Suddenly exhausted by this entire day, I gave up on following them and let Silar shove Fallon all the way out of our house. Fallon gave me a harried-sounding shout of “Goodbye!” as Silar dragged him towards the shuldu stalls where they were soon out of sight.

23SILAR

“Icannot wait,” Fallon said from atop his shuldu on the road in front of my house, “to tell Zohro how beautiful the human females are.” A manic white gleam entered Fallon’s eyes. “He is going to eat his own hat.”

Speaking of hats…

I bent down to pick up a completely flattened, dusty, torn-up disc that had once been the hat Cherry was wearing earlier. This could have been her body…

My fingers contracted involuntarily, crushing the garment further.

“And to think,” Fallon went on, oblivious as he so often was, “that Cherry said Darcy is even prettier than she is!”

“She isn’t.”

Fallon ignored that.

“Do you know what freckles are?”

“No,” I grunted. “Stop asking me questions before I push you off your saddle.”

I needed him gone. Now. So I could be alone with Cherry and maybe do that hug thing again. Uninterrupted this time.

Sora had joined us, running circles around Fallon’s mount, clearly eager to begin herding the bracku back to their ranch.

“Alright. I will go now. But Silar, let me just say that-”

Before he could finish his sentence I had already re-entered the house and closed the door behind me.

Cherry was still in the kitchen, seated in the chair I’d made for her. Her eyes fell to my hand.

“Oh!” she said, jumping up. “Is that… Oh no. Is that your hat?”

“No. This is your hat. Or it was, anyway. I’m still wearing my hat.”

“No. I mean… It was yours from when you were a kid. Oh, no. Just look at it now.” Her eyes grew very wet and shiny, and I jolted, realizing more of her human teerz were about to spill out.

Teerz. Over a hat.

In a Zabrian, I would have considered such a show of emotion a horrific sign of weakness.

In her…

It was a sign of something precious to me. Purity. Goodness. A heart that seemed far too big to be housed in such a little human body.

“It’s just a hat,” I told her, casting a critical eye over the thing. It was thoroughly wrecked. There would be no fixing it. I tossed it into the fire. “Better it than you.”

She started forward with a small cry, as if she meant to pull it back out of the flames.

“Silar! What are you doing! That was your-”

“It is nothing, Cherry.” I told her firmly. “There’s only one thing currently in this house that matters to me. And it’s not a cursed hat.”

Blast. This was not helping. The teerz were coming anyway. Sliding over her soft cheeks like rolling beads of dew.

I tried another tactic.

“I will buy you a new one. Or maybe make one,” I amended, remembering just how empty my credits account was after my most recent purchase. I hadn’t anticipated how expensive it would be to get something transported here from the far-flung human world of Terratribe II. Surprisingly, they hadn’t had what I’d been after on Elora Station, so I’d had to order from further afield. But it was no great matter. The account would be topped up after the next round of cattle grading and purchase. I’d never had much of a reason to use my credits before Cherry.

It was deeply satisfying in a way I could not have anticipated to have someone to spend them on now.

But that did not seem to make her happy, either, because she made a big, gulping sound and pressed her palms to her eyes.

“Sorry,” she gasped wetly, as if she were the one who’d done something wrong. “It’s just… been a tough day.” She wiped her face then gave me a weak smile. “Come on. Let’s get your tail dealt with.”

“My tail?”

She jutted her chin towards the floor, where a puddle of blood was forming behind me.

“Oh. Don’t trouble yourself over that,” I told her.

But she just gave me a look. And I knew. Knew that I would not be able to refuse her.

I hadn’t been able to refuse her anything from the moment that I’d met her.

She led me into our bedroom and pulled out her pretty scarf.

“Not that.”

“We are not having this argument again,” she said firmly as she also retrieved her bottle of antiseptic lotion. “This is way worse than your sunburned ears.”

Without speaking, I opened the second drawer and indicated the small pile of clean, white strips.

“Hold on… are those actual bandages?” Cherry asked, her slim eyebrows crawling nearly all the way up to her hairline.

“Sort of. They’re still made from my old shirts. But they’re more… bandage-shaped now.”

“I told you we’d need bandages so you didn’t have to keep using your shirts. And your solution to that was to just cut up your shirts instead?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me for so long I was certain she was angry. But then she laughed, a bright, beautiful sound.

“Oh, my God. You are impossible. Go sit on the bed, you– Oh. Hold on. The back of your pants are covered in dust and blood.” With the bandages in her right hand and the lotion in her left, she gave me an imperious look and simply said, “Off.”

“Off… what?”

“Your pants. Take them off.”

Oh.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t taken them off in the same room as her before. I took them off before bed each night.

When she was facing the wall with her eyes closed.

My heart practically vibrated as I reached for my belt, undid it, and removed my pants. I folded them and put them aside then stood to face my wife.

She inhaled softly through her nose, her nostrils flaring. Her cheeks grew very dark, and her lips parted in a way that instantly made blood rush to my cock.

Her gaze fell there. Fused there. The feel of her eyes alone was enough to bring me to full hardness. The hushed proximity of her body to mine in the room, her scent in the air, the memory of her body pressing up against mine before Fallon had interrupted.

“Sorry,” I grunted, falling heavily onto the bed, lamenting the lack of control I held over my own body. I wanted her more than was natural, more than was good, more than she’d ever forgive me for. And it was so plain to see.

“You don’t need to say sorry.” She smiled, her face so soft in the late-day sunlight that I almost let myself believe her.

“But first,” she said, “let’s deal with that tail of yours before we deal with…” Her cheeks got even more red. “Other things...”

She put down the bandages and ointment, then retreated into the kitchen. I used that moment alone to take deep, ragged breaths, trying very hard (and failing) to will my cock into a more appropriate state. When it did not work, and I heard Cherry returning already, I chose at the last moment to cover my lap with the bed’s blanket. It did little to hide anything, as my cock was now tenting the fabric, but I figured that it was better than nothing.

Cherry came back in, pushing her chair in front of her while carrying my one and only bowl. She cast a glance at my covered lap and raised a brow, but said nothing about it as she settled herself into the seat. She placed the bowl down on the floor beside her little foot, then dipped one of the bandages into the water it was filled with.

“I’ll try to be gentle,” she murmured, grasping my tail and drawing it into her soft lap.

My breathing grew uneven. I was astoundingly affected by this sight. The sight of my wife’s small, soft hands taking a part of me onto her thighs so that she could wipe my blood away. It felt good, but I did not want it to feel good. Because goodness had been gone from my life for so long and now that it was here, that she was here, how could I possibly hope to keep it?

I wanted to ask her if she would stay. Perhaps I had not impressed her, but I hoped I had at least not disappointed her too much.

The question was right there. Stuck at the back of my throat.

Will you stay with me, Cherry?

But Cherry broke the silence before I could ask it.

“Fallon said something about a genka breaking through the fence and starting the stampede.”

She did not look at me as she spoke, concentrating on the torn flesh of my tail, cleaning it with a tenderness that ripped me open far more than Fallon’s claws ever could have.

“Yes. It’s a predator. Nasty one, too. They’re very good at finding weak points in the fences.”

She dipped her chin a little, then quietly asked, “Is that why you wouldn’t let me near the fences?”

I blinked. Had that not been clear to her? I supposed I had not really explained.

“Yes.”

She dipped her chin again, dabbing at an especially deep, bloody spot.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever really seen you angry. When you told me that I wasn’t allowed to help with the fences.”

“Angry?” I asked, taken aback. I’d never been angry with Cherry. Not once.

“Your gaze got so white,” she said, her eyes, blue as purest summer sunlight, flicking to mine before returning to her work. “It was the only time I could tell which emotion you were actually feeling. It was pretty clear.”

“That was not anger,” I insisted, shocked that she had thought so and internally berating myself for the clumsiness of my communication. “That was…”

I paused, my brain and tongue tangling against each other. It was not easy for me to speak of things like this. It had not been since the trial. But Cherry thought that I was angry with her and that was unacceptable to me.

“I saw someone die that way. When I was young.”

Cherry’s head snapped up, her hands stilling.

It had been four or five cycles after I’d arrived on this world and I had been just beginning to approach young manhood. Garrek, Oaken, and I were some of the first child-convicts to be brought to this province. Back then, we’d all had our own individually-assigned wardens, as we were too young to live alone and needed to be taught how to survive and earn a living here.

“Was it…” Cherry hesitated, worrying her pretty lower lip between her blunt teeth. The rest of her question came out as a whisper. “Was it one of your parents?”

“No,” I said gruffly. “It was my… the old warden. Warden Veran. He was getting ready to repair a fallen post that had left a gap in the fence.”

I hadn’t been far from him when it had happened. I still remembered the silent swipe of the genka’s paw through the gap, the sharp seize of its claws against Veran’s gut. I’d sprinted to him, my knife out of my boot before I’d even blinked, but the genka had already dragged him halfway to the trees by that point.

With his life pouring out of him, getting further from me every moment as the genka pulled him away, he coughed out a stream of hot blood, fixed his dimming white eyes on mine and told me, “Fix the fence, boy.”

I threw my knife anyway. It hit the genka square in the throat. But by then it was too late.

“And you saw it happen?”

Cherry’s lovely voice dragged me from the past and back into the present. And oh, what a present it was. With my wife’s perfect face turned up towards mine so expectantly and my tail safe in the caress of her caring hands.

I must have been lost in thought for some time. My flesh had already been thoroughly cleaned and layered with ointment. White bandages covered the end of my tail in neat stripes, tied off with wing-like bows.

“I did.”

“Oh, Silar.” A single drop of shimmering liquid, perfect and gem-like, spilled from her eye to her cheek. My heart strained in its cage of bones, and before I could stop myself, before I even knew what I was doing, I leaned forward, cupped her jaw, and pressed my mouth to the moisture.

Cherry gasped. I felt her heartbeat flutter like a trapped animal. Cursing myself for the foolishness of pressing my mouth to my wife’s skin in such a fashion, I made to draw back.

But Cherry threw her arms around my neck and held me there.

And then she crawled into my lap.

She settled her slight body there, the hot meeting of her thighs pressing against me. Cock to cunt.

My eyes grew so white that they began to feel scorched inside their sockets. My lips were still hovering at Cherry’s cheek, wanting so badly to roam over her, but not quite bold enough to do so.

Until she gave a soft moan that was a fiery squeeze to my cock and then turned her face so that her mouth brushed mine.

And not just her mouth.

Her tongue.

My whole body spasmed with the erotic shock of it. The wet slide of her tongue against the parting seam of my lips.

“Is that… Is that alright?” she whispered against my damp mouth.

As I was suddenly even more incapable of speech than usual, I did not answer her with words but instead with the reciprocal dart of my own tongue. She stiffened, and then it was as if she melted, her mouth opening in a sigh against mine.

Any thoughts I’d had of restraint, of control, of keeping my foulest urges away from my wife disappeared like a candle snuffed out in the dark. My hands shot to her waist, palming the gorgeous flare of her hips as my tongue surged into her mouth.

But Cherry didn’t pull back and she didn’t pull away. Instead, she arched her spine, pressing herself even harder against me, as if trying to fuse our fronts together. I grimly congratulated myself on the fact that I did not immediately empty my sack through my cock this time. Though I was very, very close.

The inside of my wife’s mouth was sweeter than anything I could ever remember tasting. Sweeter than any of the fruit I grew on the ranch, sweeter than any delicacy I could recall having eaten in childhood on Zabria. Maybe even sweeter than cherries, though I would not know for sure for some cycles yet.

I slicked my tongue against hers like a starving man. And maybe that’s what I was.

I’d been so empty for so long. Waiting for something without knowing what.

And now she was here.

Cherry dragged her mouth from mine, pressing hot kisses against my cheekbone, my jaw, the side of my neck. There was no reason such a thing should have felt so exquisite. My cock leaped between the crush of our bodies, and Cherry rocked her hips, digging her fingers into my hair.

“You have no idea,” she murmured huskily, “how much I’ve wanted to kiss you again.”

“It is probably good,” I panted hoarsely, “that you have no idea the things I’ve wanted to do to you.”

She grew still.

Oh, well done, Silar. Now you’ve done it.

“What things?” she breathed.

I did not answer, arousal and shame beating through me in equal, toxic measure.

Cherry drew back, her fingers still fluttering through my hair, making my scalp and ears twitch with sensation. She met my gaze steadily. The darkest parts of her eyes were very large, very black. Her skin was flushed, her lips red and swollen, her hair a mussed cascade.

Her beauty was like a blow. It struck me, pained me, made me feel like I was grieving though for what I could not say.

“What things?” she prodded. Brave little Cherry. She did not seem afraid.

She also did not know what she was asking.

“Please, Silar.”

Her eyes were so big. So lovely. I felt like I could fall right into them.

“Please.”

“From the moment I helped you down out of the saddle that first day, I have wanted to rub my hard cock all over your backside.”

Her mouth fell open, her eyes widening, and I knew that I should stop. Stop, and preserve whatever respect my wife still had for me.

But now that I’d started, I could not stop. The words flowed out of me like blood from a wound.

“And not just your backside,” I groaned. “I have dreamed about rubbing myself on your belly, your breasts. Tortured myself with thoughts of what you might look like, smell like, taste like between your legs. I want to suck on your nipples. Put every part of myself inside you that I can. Fingers, tail, cock, tongue. Spill myself into your cunt and even, perversely, outside of your cunt. See what you’d look like dripping with it, absolutely coated in it.”

Cherry drew a shuddering inhale.

“Sorry,” I gritted out. I’d said too much. Gone too far. My fingers tightened on her hips involuntarily, my body already preparing for her flight. “I swear to you that I can control every one of my unnatural urges.”

She cocked her head, her brows puckering.

“Did you just say, ‘unnatural urges?’”

“Yes.” What the blazes else would you call them?

Cherry watched me for a moment, her expression smoothing, then stretching into a grin.

“Oh, my sweet summer Silar,” she sighed.

I frowned. “I was born in winter.”

She chuckled, which confused me, considering I’d just revealed to her how foul the man she married was.

“It’s a human phrase. ‘My sweet summer child.’ It just means somebody is innocent.”

“You think… You think that I am innocent?” I asked, unable to keep the bitter scoff out of my voice. Because there were myriad words to describe me, but innocent was not one of them. Not since my trial, anyway.

But Cherry just jerked her head up and down, undeterred.

“Yup,” she said. “Everything you just said is pretty normal. Those are all basic facets of desire. In fact, as far as humans are concerned, that’s actually pretty tame.” Her grin widened. “You should see some of the sick shit we get up to.”

“Tame,” I echoed, stunned. “Basic.”

“Is it not like that for Zabrians?”

“I do not know.”

“You’ve never been with anyone else, right?”

“No.”

“And have you… Have you had, like, sexual health education? Or anything like that? To learn what sort of things are normal and healthy?”

My stomach twisted at the thought of telling her that I’d left the academy far too early to encounter curriculum like that. Instead, I feebly offered, “I have seen shuldu and bracku mating.”

“Alright,” she whispered. She placed a tender kiss upon my mouth, disentangling her fingers from my hair. Her hands fell to the hem of her shirt.

And then she pulled it off.

I froze, watching my wife make quick work of the rest of her clothing, until she was on her knees between my splayed thighs, utterly and entirely naked.

My gaze dragged over her. Consumed her so completely I was almost surprised it did not leave teeth marks behind. Her breasts were just as luscious as I’d remembered, their sensitive tips rounded like little pebbles. Her chest and belly surged with heaving breath, drawing my eyes downwards to a surprising and fiercely erotic patch of dark hair between her legs.

“Silar,” my wife whispered, “I give you full permission and consent to do anything and everything that you just mentioned to me. And if you want to do anything beyond that, we can talk about that, too. But,” her voice grew firmer, “we have to be able to talk about it. I need you to try to tell me what you’re feeling. At least sometimes. I’ve been going crazy these past two weeks thinking that you didn’t want me. Or maybe that you did want me. But just… not enough.”

“I thought you’d leave,” I rasped. “If I told you what I wanted from you. I thought… I thought you’d hate me and you’d run.”

She moved her head side to side, making her hair sway hypnotically.

“I’m not running, Silar. Not anymore.”

She shimmied and shuffled so that she was no longer kneeling but sitting atop the blanket. Her cheeks colouring, she daintily parted her thighs, then spread them wide, slinging her legs over my hips. She leaned back upon her elbows, half lying and entirely splayed to me.

“Maybe I should tell you the things I want to do to you, now,” she said huskily.

My cock throbbed, my breath crashing like I’d just sprinted to her.

“I want your mouth everywhere,” she purred. “Including here.” She drew her delicate fingers down through the dark hair between her legs, spreading herself, revealing the pink and glistening seam of her sex. The skin there was so beautiful. Smooth and slick, an opening surrounded by sweetly ruffled flesh and crowned with a mysterious nub that seemed small and unassuming enough, but that some deep instinct told me would be very important.

“I want to lick all the way up the shaft of your cock. Then take you in my mouth and suck you.”

I jolted, the cock in question nearly erupting at the image she’d just put in my head. In all my deepest and darkest moments of perversion, I had not come up with such a thing.

Cherry was even more perversely imaginative than I was.

I am the luckiest male alive.

“Then I want to get on top of you, sink down on the cock I just sucked, and ride you like a shuldu.”

I must be dreaming. I must be dead.

There was no way life could be this good after so long.

I reached forward with a jittering hand, just to make sure that she was still real. Still here with me. My fingers bumped hers, hair tickling my skin.

“Oh,” Cherry said in a murmuring moan. Her hand moved out of my way, sliding up to my wrist to pull me closer. Being mindful of my claws, I rubbed the tips of my fingers around in the wettest part of her, my entire body spasming when the flesh gave way, soft and open. When my thumb bumped that swollen little place near the top, Cherry cried out, her back arching so hard that her breasts jumped and shook with the motion.

My heart slammed. My body felt like it was floating and being crushed at the very same time. My breathing came fast and feral and without another word, without the ability to wait even one more moment, I groaned, gripped Cherry’s hips and dove face-first between her legs.