Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Brutus, how is the wife? Last time we spoke you were on the verge of making your life pledge to a doe?” Gruff asks what seems to be a polite question.
Brutus grunts. The sound makes my belly clench low. Fuck. I have never been the sort of person to find more than one guy attractive at a time, but these aren’t guys, and I can’t help what all this chemistry is doing to my biology. I tell myself that it’s not really that I am attracted to any of them. I’m just reacting to a series of circumstances and events, and…
“Not a good topic of conversation,” another one of the brothers pipes up. “Wedding never happened.”
“And you, Trex?”
Neither of them have stories of romantic success to share. They make this clear in a series of rough guttural sounds that make full sentences obsolete. This planet clearly has a mate crisis, and I have landed smack in the middle of it. It’s not something I just intellectually understand. It is something I can feel coursing through me. I have become part of it.
“When I was a young buck, there was a mate for every male,” Piam sighs. “Then I had two sons, and so did everybody else. And now…”
“We’ve heard this,” Alix says. He seems like he is the youngest, and possibly the most hot-headed. Or maybe just the most desperate for a mate. Hard to say.
“The courtesans of the city are busy,” Piam says. “There are lines. Long lines every day outside the brothels. The courtesans are the richest in the land. We have nothing to sell that is of even close to the same value.”
Caprine society seems as though it is in a desperate state. I wonder why Gruff never speaks of it. He prefers to speak of simple, local things. A lot of my curiosities are being sated, but I do wonder how long I’ll be up here, stuck hiding from the horny bucks.
Turns out, not that much longer. The grasses are tickling my nose and irritating my sinuses. I let out a sneeze. That brings all the bucks to their feet, leaping off the benches on which they sat.
“There’s something in your loft, Gruff.”
“I know. Don’t worry. Nothing hostile. She’s more scared of you than, well… I don’t know if that’s true. Fear doesn’t seem to factor into many of her decisions. Jem. You can come down.”
I’m not sure if I want to come down. I’m not sure how I will react to them, or how they will react to me. I don’t trust myself around these creatures. I don’t believe I know how to act morally, or properly, or like anything other than one of the courtesans they were just talking about. I can feel that familiar wetness between my thighs.
“Jem,” Gruff says. “Come down.”
“I don’t want to come down.”
“Sorry,” he says. “She’s disobedient. And new. And”—he raises his voice to make sure I hear the threat—“about to be punished for disobedience.”
“Over your fucking dead body, buddy.”
This started off as a hiding place, now it’s more like a grassy siege. I’m not going down there. I don’t care what the threats are. I don’t care what the stakes are. I’m not going down there. Up here, I’m above them all. Down there I’m going to feel like one small girl surrounded by hulking, horned aliens. I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself. I don’t know if they will control themselves.
The stairs to the hayloft creak as Gruff comes up them. “What are you doing?” He growls the question softly at me as I peer out at him from an impromptu hay costume I have just made for myself.
“I don’t want to go down there,” I whisper back. “They’re scary.”
“You have nothing to fear from them. They are civilized.”
“They were just talking about prostitutes.”
“That does not apply to you.”
I find that less than reassuring. These males are desperate for females. They are open about it, and I can smell it on them. The musk is filling the room. It is infecting me. It is making me hot in ways I shouldn’t be hot.
“I can smell them,” I whisper.
His gaze becomes knowing. “I see.”
“She’s very sensitive to buck musk,” he explains, loudly.
“Oh my god, Gruff, shut up!” He won’t understand any of those Earthly anachronisms, but they leap to my tongue unbidden. I am so embarrassed. He’s making me sound like some kind of alien nympho.
“Come down and behave yourself,” he says. “Nobody will touch you. Even if you want them to.”
“I don’t want…”
“Stop it, Jem. There is no shame in being a lustful girl in season.”
“I’m not!”
“Then come down and stop lurking in the hay. We have guests. You need to be the hostess.”
“I’m not the hostess type, Gruff.”
“Come down off there. Now.”
I refuse again. He reaches out, grabs the back of my uniform and pulls me bodily out of the hayloft. I grip the edge of the overhang and refuse to move any further. It’s a precarious position, and one that clearly does not please him. He wanted to show me off, but if that’s what he wanted, he should have prepared me better. Or maybe he should just have listened in the first place when I said I didn’t want to meet them. Gruff has a way of getting what he wants, but that’s what makes us a good match — because I have a way of doing what I want anyway.