Текст книги "Married to the alien cowboy"
Автор книги: Ursa Dox
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
31CHERRY
Warden Tenn’s prediction came true. The body was gone by morning. Silar and I stood hand-in-hand in dawn’s rosy light, staring down at the patch of blood-stained ground with its new, distinct drag-marks leading away towards the trees. We didn’t stay out there long. Silar wanted to get me back inside the fencing. Once there, he pulled out his data tab to make his call, alerting the warden to everything he already knew.
While Silar spoke to the warden, I wandered aimlessly around the back of the house, rubbing my hands up and down my arms in a shivering motion. My brain felt oddly thick and numb, and I decided to try to make myself useful and maybe find a little calm by throwing myself into my newfound love of gardening.
I turned towards the closest patch of soil with sprouts, suddenly starting when I noticed something I had never seen before.
It was a plant, I was fairly sure. A big one, too. It was about a metre tall, with a spindly brown body and branches stretching out from its core. The bottom of it – presumably the roots and some soil – was wrapped up in a plump fabric sack, allowing the thing to balance upright without yet being buried in the ground.
“Is this a tree?” I asked Silar, hearing him step up beside me. He shoved his data tab into the pocket of his trousers.
“Yes,” he answered. “I ordered it recently. The warden was dropping it off. That’s why he was here last night.
“Huh. I didn’t realize you were looking to add to the trees on the property. What kind of tree is it?”
It didn’t appear to match the native ones on this planet. It just seemed… different, somehow.
Silar’s silence stretched for longer than it should have. Feeling uneasy and suddenly filled with the need to protect the little tree, I hoisted it up, holding the bulging sack part against my chest.
Silar’s eyes settled on the tree. On me, holding it. His expression grew softly raw.
“It’s from Terratribe II,” he finally said. “It’s a cherry tree.”
I almost fucking dropped the thing. Gasping, I adjusted my hold, surprise jolting through me.
“A cherry tree?” I stammered, “from Terratribe II?” I wrenched my gaze from my husband and looked at the bare brown body of the tree with new eyes. “It must have cost a fortune!”
Silar gave a casual flick of his tail.
“Surprisingly, it would have cost more to order cherries,” he said calmly, as if he hadn’t just spent what I knew had to have been an astronomical amount of money on this thing. “So buying the tree seemed like the better investment. This way you might have cherries every cycle.”
“Oh… Oh my God,” I said, swallowing thickly and hugging the tree hard. “Thank you, Silar.”
“I said you might have cherries.” His mouth twisted. “It might not thrive here or bear fruit.”
“But maybe it will!” I said, about to sob at the fact that Silar had spent so much of his savings on something that he wasn’t even sure would bloom. Because of me. “If we work hard, and take care of it… Maybe it will blossom.”
A soft whiteness bled out from the aqua veins in his eyes.
“Maybe it will,” he agreed softly. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll start saving up again and buy you the cherries instead. Even if it takes another fifteen or twenty cycles, I promise that you’ll get to taste one.”
“This is more than enough,” I whispered, giving my tree another teary hug before setting it gingerly back down. “There are probably a million other things you could be spending your money on instead of saving it up to get expensive fruit shipped in!”
“There are,” he admitted. “But none of those things matter.” He took my hands in his, running his thumbs gently along the backs of my knuckles. “Every credit to my name,” he said gruffly, “every piece of this property, every store of my strength, every beat of my heart… It’s all for you, Cherry. Everything’s for you.”
I nodded wordlessly as Silar tugged me to his chest.
“Where will you put your tree?” he murmured against the top of my head.
“I don’t know,” I said with a tremulous sigh. A moment later, I pulled out of Silar’s hold, considering the question more thoroughly as I gazed at the property. But it felt too overwhelming, trying to figure it out from down here. Without speaking, I turned and headed for the ladder at the side of the house, pulling myself up onto the roof so that I could get a better sense of placement and scale.
Only my view was blocked by Silar’s broad body suddenly hauling itself up behind me. He planted himself firmly between the edge of the roof and me.
“You didn’t have to come all the way up here,” I chided, even though I was glad he’d followed. After everything that had happened, I just wanted him near me.
“You make me nervous when you come up here,” he grunted, looping his tail in a protective sling around my waist. “I told you last night. I cannot live if you are not alright.”
“It’s not like I’m going to fall off!”
“Not with my tail around you, you won’t.”
I chuckled and shook my head.
“Can you at least move out of the way? I was trying to decide where to put my present.”
Silar seemed to consider this and then finally stepped aside and around me. He moved in behind me, his tail still wrapped around my waist, his hands firm on my hips. My insides tightened with a trilling sort of joy when he lowered his chin to rest on the top of my head.
In the early morning quiet, we surveyed our home together.
“I think over there,” I finally said, breaking the comforting hush. “There’s a nice spot between the other fruit trees and that one patch of garden.”
Silar gave a rumble of agreement.
We lapsed back into silence as the sun rose higher and higher, sending its warm light down. Suddenly, Silar spoke again, this time on an entirely new subject.
“Will you tell the others?”
“Tell the others… Tell the other men, like Fallon, about your murder conviction?” I asked in confusion.
“No. They already know. We are all convicts.” He paused, his hands sliding in a distracting motion from my hips to my waist and back down again. “Will you tell the other human brides of our convict status before they arrive?”
“Oh… I haven’t had a chance to even think about that, yet.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, mulling it over. “On the one hand, they really should know what they’re getting into. So that they can make an informed decision. But on the other…”
“What?”
“On the other, they also deserve a chance to meet their grooms without too much bias. To get the chance to know them, even love them, the way I did with you.”
I didn’t even want to think about what would have happened if I’d learned about Silar’s past and decided not to marry him after all. I wouldn’t have gotten to fall in love with the best man I’d ever known.
“It’s all a bit of a moot point,” I eventually said. “I don’t have a way to contact them before their arrival, anyway. My comms tablet signal can only reach to other devices on this planet. If I want to contact someone off-world, I’d have to use the warden’s signal tower. And if he’s trying to conceal the criminal history of the men here, I doubt he’d let me do it.”
“I do not believe he is trying to conceal it,” Silar said thoughtfully. “He did not organize this program. The Empire did. He is only helping to facilitate it and has never once indicated that our brides would be in ignorance of our histories. I do not believe he even knows about this miscommunication.”
“Huh…” I absorbed Silar’s words, weighing them inside my head. Maybe he was correct. It had never seemed like the warden had purposely hidden anything from me in the short conversations I’d had with him. Maybe his one chat with Tasha had been the same way. He’d assumed she’d known, and so it had never really come up. “Actually… I think you may be right. I guess it’s the Empire concealing the details.”
I thought about the way the Empire was treating us, the human brides who apparently didn’t deserve to know who they were marrying, and the way they’d treated Silar, convicting him and sending him here at such a painfully young age.
“You know,” I said tartly, “that Empire of yours does a lot of stupid shit.”
“They sent me here,” Silar said without malice, his lips drifting down to brush my ear. “And they sent me you.” His fingers tightened on my waist, his cock thickening against my back. “I think I could forgive anything,” he added huskily, “so long as I have you.”
“Well, I can’t! I’m still mad at them,” I said. But there was no bite to my words. Silar was slowly grinding his erection against me, bending his knees until his hard shaft jutted against the curve of my ass. “But,” I said throatily, “I will concede that I am very, very happy they brought me here. Even if it was kind of under slightly false pretenses.”
Silar made a pleased sound at my words, then made an even more pleased sound when his hands rose to cup my breasts. I gasped, feeling my nipples instantly harden beneath his claiming touch. Need rose instantly, and I arched and pushed my ass against Silar’s arousal.
“Cherry,” he panted, his voice lust-thickened as he rubbed himself on me. I moaned in response, turning myself in his hold so that I could kiss him. His mouth met mine with hot urgency. It was like he was pouring every moment of doubt and desire he’d had since my arrival into my body.
Silar’s feet began to move, and I let him lead me, still sliding my tongue with blind abandon through his mouth. I gasped when I suddenly felt myself tipping backwards. My back hit the angled part of the roof and my eyes snapped open. Silar stood above me, blotting out the sun, snapping his belt open and shoving down his trousers. Wiggling against the warm roof at my back, I did the same thing, pushing my leggings down with a trembling franticness I barely recognized in myself.
Silar gripped his shaft, squeezing as he cast his gaze appreciatively down my body. His tail loosened from its place around my waist, the tip of it dipping between my legs until I squirmed. It slid back and forth over my clit, then gently probed inside, flicking and swirling while Silar jerked his needy cock. His white eyes never left me, roving greedily between my flushed face, my naked legs, and the place that his tail disappeared inside me.
Just as my insides fluttered, a tell-tale indication of climax, he slipped his tail out of my wet core. I whimpered in complaint, only to be swiftly stuffed with his cock. He bracketed the sides of my head with his forearms, supporting the fronts of his legs against the angled rooftop while he took up a possessive, thrusting rhythm.
“I… I’m going to…”
Silar palmed the side of my throat, holding my jaw with his fingertips, forcing my gaze up to his.
“Say it,” he hissed, almost savagely, his hips moving with feral, lawless need.
“I’m going to come,” I whimpered, feeling myself constrict on him already.
“Not that,” he groaned, his eyes rolling back in his head, his hips surging forwards. “I mean… Yes, that… But also…” He forced his eyes back open, linking them drunkenly with mine. “Say you’ll stay with me.”
“I… I…”
Had I not said that yet? I’d told him I loved him. I’d told him that I would always be his wife. That it was him and me, forever.
But maybe my sweet Silar just needed to hear it in those exact words. And if I’d already said it once, maybe he just needed to hear it again.
I’d say it as many times as he wanted.
I threw my arms around his neck, lifting my feet and wrapping my legs around his waist. The angle instantly changed, sending his surging cock even deeper.
“I’m staying, Silar,” I whispered between the frantic meeting of our hips. “I love you. And I am staying with you.”
My orgasm crashed down on me with the force of a falling planet. My head tipped back against the warm, angled surface of the roof. A cry tore roughly from my throat when I felt the responsive swell of Silar’s cock. In his rising pleasure, his cock tail snapped and writhed between our bodies, fanning my clit into a frenzy.
“You’ll stay with me,” Silar repeated groaningly. He punctuated every word with a shuddering stab of his spewing shaft. “Stay. With. Me.”
“I will,” I sobbed as my whole body accepted him, claimed him, took him in as my own. Silar rose up slightly, planting his hands on the roof beside my head instead of his elbows. Staring down at me, raw and hungry, he thrust into me for the final, ecstatic time.
“Good,” he growled, going still and spilling the last of his lust into me. “Because at this point, Cherry, even if you wanted to…”
“What?”
“I don’t think that I could let you leave.”
His words touched a nerve somewhere deep in my psyche. The possessive edge in his voice making a second climax rise up and spin out inside me. My body spasmed, my throat so hoarse I couldn’t make a sound as I came apart on my husband’s cock once more.
For a long time after it was done, we stayed there on the roof. Tangled up in each other and letting the sunlight drape down around us.
Eventually, when we were ready, we went back down the ladder. We ate breakfast together at the table Silar built. We cleaned up the bloodstains both inside and outside our home. Silar inspected the fences while I tended to the garden.
And then, together, we planted the cherry tree.
Thank you so much for reading Cherry and Silar’s story. In all honesty, Married to the Alien Cowboy wasn’t even supposed to be on my 2024 publication schedule. But Cherry and Silar and this weird cowboy colony world was so vivid in my head that I couldn’t wait to write it any longer! I am so excited to continue with this series and bring you the stories of all our cowboys, including the warden. Book two is slotted to be Fallon and Darcy’s story. If you want to know the MOMENT that book goes up for pre-order and keep up to date with all my book news, be sure to sign up at www.ursadaxwriting.com/contact for my newsletter.
Want a FREE bonus Cherry and Silar story? Sign up for my newsletter at the link above!
If you want to read some of the other books in my Elora Station universe, including the story of Sophie at the coffee shop and Cherry’s friend Maggie and her alien orc, check out my Elora Station novellas!
HOLIDAY ROMANCES OF ELORA STATION
Chimera for Christmas (Sophie and X)
Alien Orc for Christmas (Maggie and Archie)
Other Ursa Dax Books
Fated Mates of the Sea Sand Warlords
Alien Tyrant
Alien Enemy
Alien Orphan
Alien Reject
Alien Exile
Alien Hunter
Alien Victor
Alien Shield
Alien Keeper
Alien Claw
Alien Heart
Alien Mask
Alien Storm
Alien Hope
Brides of the Stone Sky Gods
Alien God
Berserker God
