Authors: Milly Taiden
FIFTEEN
She closed her eyes and inhaled, taking in the moment. She was on another planet. The vacation she’d been denying herself had finally come and it was literally out of this galaxy. Not to mention she was with a man so hot, her skin sweat from just looking at him.
He slid from of his seat and helped her out. Wind ruffled the trees, whispering through the branches and gliding its cool fingers over her skin.
He pulled her into the seductive cage of his arms and brushed his lips over hers. Little fires broke out in her core, heating her from the inside. He glided his tongue over her lips. Tasting. Probing. She opened hers in a soft sigh and he plunged in, his tongue immediately caressing and curling over hers. She clung to him, her soft, curvaceous body pressed tightly to his muscular, harder one.
The kiss didn’t grow desperate, though she felt like she was. He kept it light, playful with a hint of ownership. A reminder of who was in control: him.
She opened her eyes the moment he drew away, taking in his stubbly beard, and licking her lips. She had a thing for men with stubble. On Karel, it looked like he’d just gotten out of bed and with his short hair tousled from the wind, she had no issues imagining him in bed with her--doing all the wonderful things he’d done before.
It felt a lifetime ago since then, but it had only been hours.
“I’ll set up our tent for the night,” he said and moved to the rear of the bike. He grabbed their duffel bags and headed toward two giant trees with long crooked branches that intertwined creating an X.
“That’s kind of up there,” she mentioned, making conversation. “Are your trees always so tall and gnarly?”
He laughed and took a bunch of thin sheets out of his bag. “Yes. Aurora is very old. It is common to find trees millions of years old.”
She stared at him in shock. She’d never heard of a tree being that old. She stopped asking questions and instead focused on watching him.
He laid a sheet on the flat grass and frowned. If they were sleeping on that, she was in for a rough night. But before her eyes, the sheet started to reshape, thickening and changing to look like a mattress.
Holy shit! They wouldn’t have to sleep on the ground and she wouldn’t have to make the acquaintance of otherworldly bugs. She definitely didn’t want any creepy crawlies getting friendly with her mouth, nose, or ears while she slept.
Karel grabbed another sheet and hooked it to a corner of the mattress. The sheet stood straight and twisted into a rope growing longer. While that one twined, he hooked another to the other corner and let it twist. After all four corners had an attachment, together they reached toward the branches.
The cords lengthened and wrapped around limbs, lifting the mattress two feet off the ground. She squatted to look under the mattress and noticed the bottom appeared to be sheet metal and the top plush like a normal mattress.
“This is insane!”
“What’s insane?” he asked, standing back to glance at the hammock bed. He placed another thin sheet on top and it extended over the mattress and thicken into a throw blanket. With a firm set of his lips, he turned to her. “It’s not the castle, but we’ll be able to sleep. I don’t want you on the ground.”
She curled her hands at her sides to keep from throwing herself at him. “You have been catering to me since I met you,” she said. “I could have slept on the ground, if necessary.”
He nodded, cupping her face and pinning her with his stare. “I know, but it is my honored duty to make sure you never have to.”
Her heart thumped twice as fast in her chest. “Life isn’t always comfortable. There are a lot of difficult situations we all face at one point or another. This would have been no different.”
“That’s true, but you’re important to me,” he reaffirmed. “It would be different if it felt like a job, but making you comfortable and happy makes me happy.”
“I wish more people like you existed.” She sighed, remembering the difficult times she’d had as a big girl with people, and even her family. “I’ve never been anyone’s priority.”
“You have gone through a lot,” he said, his eyes bright with that animal she knew lay beneath the surface. “I can’t make your past disappear, but I can tell you that it doesn’t define you. The woman you are is the woman you want to be.” He caressed her jaw. “Everything you went through made you stronger. Taught you to be the woman you are. It helped to decide how you would approach the world.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I wish more women like you existed, because then other men would appreciate getting to know someone who has endured a hateful society filled with negativity, but thrived as a person.”
“That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” she mumbled, her throat filled with emotion.
“It’s not meant to be nice. It’s the truth. This bed,” he said, pointing at the raised bed, “it’s a small luxury I can give you. I know you are unsure about me, about us. That’s okay. The fact you are giving me a chance tells me all I need to know.”
“What’s that?”
“That you are more than my mate,” he replied. “You’re the woman I’ve been waiting for. The one who won’t be easy all the time, but will make my life easier to bear.”
She licked her lips and cleared her throat. This was getting way too emotional for her. She really liked Karel. More than liked at this point. She wanted him in her bed, and to spend lots of time with him to see where things went.
“Do you have water?” she asked, in an attempt to take control of her body. Her hormones were in a frenzy.
He gave her a look that told her he knew she was trying to divert his attention, but he let her and reached into the open back of the bike for a jug. He pulled out a small plastic cup and filled it before handing it to her.
She drank the cool liquid in two quick gulps.
“Come on.” He grinned. “Let’s go to the beach and watch the suns set.”
He brought his bag with him.
They sat on the beach, quiet for a long while. “Is the water deep?”
“No. This area has long, shallow slats of beach. Why?” He glanced at her tank top and shorts. “Do you want to go in?”
Yes. She really did, but she was scared. This was a different environment. What if they had strange animals in the water? Her fear of drowning made itself known at that moment.
He must have read the indecision on her face because he got up and yanked his shirt over his head. Her attention stuck and stayed riveted on his contracting abs. He had such a gorgeous body. All toned and muscled without being overly bulky. Though her caramel skin looked chocolaty compared to his much paler one, he still made her mouth water. His pants came off next. Oh, my. He was naked. Very, very naked. And hard.
She stared at his manly goods for way too long before lifting her vision to his face. A wicked twinkle flitted through his eyes and a sinful smile spread over his lips. “Come on. You’ll love it.”
Yeah, she bet she would. She also loved ice cream and cake but both were bad for her. Ah, what the hell. What was that saying? You only live once, or some shit like that. That was a good excuse.
She stripped, conscious of her naked state and the fact he stared at her like she was offering her body to him for a meal.
The sand felt ultra-fine and soft between her toes, molding around her feet. She wiggled her toes and lifted a foot off the sand. Her brow furrowed in confusion.
“It doesn’t stick?”
“What?” he asked, glancing at her foot, appearing confused as well.
She grinned and lowered it to the ground, grabbed a handful of sand, letting it run through her fingers, watching every single grain fall without leaving anything on her hands. “The sand. It’s not sticking to me.”
“It won’t. That’s not how it works. Sand here is not clingy. I am not sure of the properties of your earth sand, but the sand in Aurora will never stick to you.”
This planet got cooler by the second. She took his offered hand and walked to the edge of the water with him. He held her in his grasp with enough pressure to calm her nerves. He wouldn’t let her go.
SIXTEEN
Karel watched his mate dip a toe into the sea. Fear clung to her pores, but once he’d tighten his hold on her hand, she’d calmed. To his pleasure, her entire foot went into the water. “It’s warm!”
He laughed at the wonder in her voice. “It is.”
He’d heard about earth beaches. Temperatures were usually cold, and even at the warmest beaches, the water didn’t get to the heat levels they did in Aurora.
She stepped farther out, lifting a handful of the pink water. “It’s so clear,” she gushed. “I can see my feet.” She glanced up to meet his gaze. “How come it doesn’t look pink when I scoop only a little?”
“It only looks pink when you put a lot of it together. The amount of mineral in a large body of water makes it look pink.”
Time passed with her asking questions and him answering as best as he could. He sensed her fear the farther out they went.
“Why are you afraid of the water?”
Panic dashed through her eyes. She bit her lip and splayed her fingers through the now waist high water. “I almost drowned when I was a kid.”
His chest tightened and his lungs burned. He’d almost lost her before he’d found her. “What happened?”
“My grandmother loved visiting new places. She had a lot of money from my grandfather’s life insurance, so we traveled a lot. His company was managed by a board so all she did was collect a massive paycheck every month,” she said, curling her hand into a small scoop and lifting water to his chest. “We went to Costa Rica and had a great time. I was like nine or ten at the time,” she said, her voice growing far with her memory. “I was zip lining with some of her friends’ kids. They’d chosen to go over a river instead of just regular land because,” she snorted, “land was so boring.”
He curled his hands around her waist, holding her close while she spoke. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. The animal in him hurt from the amount of fear pouring from her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I want to.”
He nodded, bringing scoops of water to her shoulders, watching the drops slide down her chest, cling to her nipples before falling into the sea.
“My clip broke and I fell into the river,” she said, her voice low and shaky, as if she were reliving the moment. “I went down hard with a scream.” She gripped the sides of his arms, digging her nails into his flesh. With every word, her hands gripped tighter. “The water wasn’t clear like this. It was dark, muddy, and I couldn’t see anything. I panicked when I couldn’t get any air. Everything was so dark.” She visibly gulped. “I tried to push my way up, but I was dragged down. Probably by my own fear.” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “My lungs burned and I could feel my body giving in to what would kill it. I inhaled water. I don’t recall what happened after that.”
He hugged her. There was nothing else he could do to comfort her after such a harrowing tale. “Someone got you out.”
She nodded on his chest. “Yes. One of the tour guides jumped in after me, but it took him a minute to find me. All that time I was under felt like an eternity but it had been less than a minute.”
He held her in his arms, their heads turned to face the suns offering their last rays before darkness overtook and the twin moons bathed everything in soft light.
“Come on,” he said after a while. “Let’s rinse off by the mountain not far from here and get something to eat.”
He took her along a pathway he knew to a small waterfall with a shallow heated spring. The water came through the rocks, pooling around them, then returning into the mountain.
They stood under the water and he had to grit his teeth to keep himself from pressing her against the rocks and taking her, but he wasn’t going there. Not until she wanted him to. He knew she was still confused about him, and the last thing he wanted was to complicate it more with sex. That meant depriving himself, which pissed off his jaguar enough to need a run. Maybe once she was asleep.
“What are we eating?” she asked back at their camp.
“I choose packed meats and cheeses,” he replied, handing her a towel to dry off with. His cock ached as he stared at her wiggling while drying herself. It was going to be a long night.
* * *
He was drifting off to sleep, but Karel’s heart felt weighed by the sadness in his mate. He was right. He could see she’d suffered throughout her life in the softness of her brown eyes. The way she wouldn’t believe he genuinely wanted her forever still worried him. Why were earth women so skeptical of true desire. Gerri warned him humans didn’t believe in fated mates. Women needed to feel loved before they made a commitment.
He could only hope in the coming days, Liv learned to trust her emotions when it came to him. To them. His little mate might not realize it, but he’d go to the ends of any galaxy for her. He’d fight any creature in any world to keep her safe, and give himself to her without asking anything in return. Now it was just getting her to believe in him. That was his biggest hurdle.