Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
I gave my head a shake. “This is so cool.”
“What is?” Zane asked.
“All of it. Well, most of it.” My face burned. Of course not everything today had been awesome. Almost getting raped. Zane having to kill. The fact that girls were missing. “Without the bad stuff that happened today, the rest of it has been really fascinating.”
It was getting dimmer by the moment and no lights were on in the room. The sky’s lilac color was deepening to lavender with the edges of the deepest purple creeping into the pink from all sides. It was as if ink was being injected into the sky.
What a sight.
Stars. Millions, trillions of them. The moon looked so bright. Though it was nighttime, it wasn’t so dark it’d make it difficult to see out there. Dusk to night had taken several hours, and it still was only kind of dark out there.
I looked at him. He’d been watching the ceiling with me.
“What sorts of things were fascinating?” he asked.
“The sky is different from at home. Our sky is light blue. Sometimes more grey than blue. And everything here is so colorful. The animals and the food seem different. We only have one moon and it goes from day to night much quicker than it did here today. And your language, obviously, but a lot is the same, it seems. It took forty days to get here. Earth must be far away,” I said.
“It is. Very.”
“So, you know of us but most of us don’t know of you?”
“Apparently,” Zane replied.
“And we decided to help you populate the planet? That’s really awesome, except that we came without it being a choice. The government has kept contact with your planet secret from us. We slept most of the way here and didn’t even know it.”
“I know,” Zane told me. And then he opened his mouth to say something, but I kept talking, which wasn’t really like me. I think I just wanted to put him at ease. And maybe I was a bit tipsy from that brandy. And maybe something else. Mostly, I wanted to put him at ease.
“But, I’m almost kind of feeling like this is where I’m supposed to be. Isn’t that odd?”
Zane blinked in surprise.
“It’s so strange,” I babbled on. ”All the way here, I was deep in thought.”
“I watched, so I know.”
“You watched?” My chin was on his chest, holding my head up and my face was close to his. I should be shrinking away. Yet, it felt so incredibly natural.
“Yes.”
“Me? You watched me?”
“A bit. There were live video feeds. It’s how we were able to look and see which woman we might be interested in. Okay, so more than a bit. We watched a fair bit.”
I blinked in surprise. “And you were that interested in me?”
He gave a swift nod, his blue, blue eyes locked with mine. Even though the room was dim, his eye color was vivid.
“Why?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
His mouth split into a smile. “My son was interested, too. We both chose the same woman as our pick, which was rather fortuitous, don’t you think?”
I smirked. “I guess it could complicate things if he chose me and you chose someone else.”
He continued. “I was watching you, not aware he was watching over my shoulder for quite some time.”
“And he agreed with your… pick?”
“Our only one. If we couldn’t have you, we agreed to not collect another. Ollie got attached to you rather quickly.”
My eyes went wide. Or wider.
“I wasn’t happy about the set-up, Tanya. Between what I saw outside the gate with my competition and what I felt when the pheromones hit me inside the gate, I acted… as you saw. I did what was needed to win you. My competitive instincts kicked in. I’m sorry if it frightened you.”
He moistened his lips with his tongue. My eyes dropped to his mouth and watched as the words came out not matching the way his mouth moved.
“And then after frightening you with that, I fucking left you here to face a squadron of rogues who would have taken you and, every one of them, raped you.”
I chewed my lip.
“And here you are, mysteriously unattached, because your ear tells me it’s not so. And you’re looking at me like that, as if…” He shook his head instead of finishing his sentence.
I waited and when he still didn’t finish his sentence, I gave my head a questioning shake. He simply stared.
“As if what?” I finally asked.
His eyes were now on my mouth.
“As if you’d gladly marry me right now.”
I bit down on my lower lip.
Dimples. Zane showed his dimples.
My body felt all tingly. I was very aware of my erogenous zones. At once I could feel their nerve endings responding to the silken fabric that covered me. My breasts felt tingly. Between my legs was hot and slippery.