Page 23 of Married to the Alien Mountain Man (Cowboy Colony Mail-Order Brides #5)

23

JAYA

T he rain continued all night. And I heard it all night.

Because I didn’t sleep.

In the early, pre-dawn hours, the rain turned to hail. Icy pellets crashed into the Lavariya like nature was doing its utmost to bury us. My bed was hard and cold and, bizarrely, felt entirely foreign to me now. The place I’d slept for twenty-two years, first sharing with my aunty, and then on my own…

It didn’t feel like mine.

Lala could sense my agitation. She tried various methods of engaging me, distracting me, but none of them worked.

Exhausted, eyes burning, I gave up on remaining in the Lavariya. Oaken would likely be waking up about now.

It was time to tell him. Tell him about the call with Tasha.

Let him know that as soon as this storm cleared out, the warden would come.

And I would leave.

I shoved my feet into my boots, tugged on a jacket, then opened the Lavariya’s door.

“That is not advisable!” Lala said, her smooth robot-voice coming as close to panic as she was capable of. “The ship’s sensors indicate that the severe weather has not yet passed.”

I didn’t need sensors to tell me that. The wind flooded into the ship. Outside, ice balls bigger than Lala slammed down to the ground.

“Remain inside!” Lala chirped frantically. “Ice that large could cause significant damage to any number of places on your body that-”

“I’m just running to Oaken’s door!” I said, raising my voice as the wind screamed. It was barely ten metres away. “You stay here!”

Before I could hear if she replied, I dashed out into the storm. I held both my arms over my head, but by some miracle I didn’t get hit by a hailstone. I crashed against Oaken’s door, adrenaline pumping, heart pounding, and found it was unlocked. I rushed inside.

The kitchen was empty, but a second later Oaken was there, stepping out of his bedroom. The storm made everything darker than it should have been at this time of day. But the room suddenly glowed with the force of his eyes.

“Jaya,” he murmured.

“Oaken…” I wanted to run to him. I wanted to run from him. I wanted to hide on my ship until she took me away from here.

I wanted to stay.

“I have to talk to you,” I said, my heart in my throat. “About something serious.”

Oaken went rigid. His jaw tensed.

“My conviction,” he said.

“Wait…”

“I knew you would want to know soon. Were you thinking about this last night? Is this why you did not want me near you?”

“No! That’s… That’s not it at all…”

“I will tell you. If you want to know.”

This conversation was not going the direction I’d planned. But I couldn’t deny that a part of me – and not a small part – did want to know what had happened when he was a kid. Magnolia had dropped a few hints over lunch that first day together that made me think she knew the story. But she hadn’t mentioned any details.

I supposed because it wasn’t her story to tell.

But even more than my curiosity was a visceral need to protect Oaken. I never wanted him to do anything he didn’t want to.

Not with me. Not ever.

“Do you want to tell me, Oaken?”

But my fears appeared to be unfounded. His answer was an instant, emphatic, “Yes.” He closed the distance between us with two huge strides. “I want to tell you anything you want to know. I want to give you everything I have to give. All of me. Even the bad bits.”

“You have no bad bits,” I whispered.

His hand rose to cup my jaw.

“Like you,” he began, “I was taken in by a family member after my mother’s death. But my uncle was not good. Not like your Aunty Anjali.”

Dread sluiced like poison. I already knew this story would be a bad one. We’d barely even begun, and it was already painful.

Little Oaken. Five years old. Grieving and alone.

And not given to someone good.

He deserved someone good. He deserved an Aunty Anjali, swooping in like a superhero and carrying him away. The fact I’d received such a miracle when he hadn’t was an injustice so grave that my body went briefly nuclear with fury.

“My uncle was Garrek’s father. We lived all together in his house for a time. He was… difficult.”

“Difficult?”

Oaken grimaced. “He enjoyed control. Power. He would hold back food from me when he was angry. And take other things away. My warm clothing. My bed.”

Something throbbed mightily in my brain. For the first time in my life, I understood anger that could keep me from thinking, from breathing, from seeing straight. Oaken was a hot green blur before me.

“But whatever he did to me, he did tenfold to Garrek. Garrek always took the brunt of his anger. He was beaten. Often and badly. He still bears the scars to this day.”

I’d only met Garrek a few times in passing. We hadn’t really ever talked. I’d never noticed any scars on him. But he always wore that lacy vest…

“The day my uncle first tried to beat me was the day he died. Garrek…” Oaken’s voice suddenly warmed with affection. “You speak so highly of your aunt. To you, she is a hero. That was Garrek to me. Bigger, stronger, older. He could not bear to see me hurt. I was sickly. My lungs were nearly as bad as my mother’s had been. I would not have withstood what Garrek had for all those cycles of his youth. And I think maybe he knew it. He pulled my uncle away, and he hit him, and in the course of the struggle, my uncle hit his head and died.”

I breathed like a saw was going in and out of me.

The next time I encountered Garrek, I was going to march right up to him and shake his fucking hand.

“I didn’t know about your lungs,” I said.

There were so many things I didn’t know.

“They are much better now,” Oaken said. “Something about the environment here is better for them. For me. As horrific as my uncle’s actions, and the ensuing trial, were, they were necessary for me to get to this place.”

His white eyes shone with the force of a sun. I could barely stand to look. But I did look. Because he was so fucking beautiful.

“They were necessary,” he said, caressing my jaw, “because they brought me to you.”

I’d come here planning to tell him that I was leaving soon.

But now, all I wanted to do was hold him. To let him know, with my body if I couldn’t do it with my voice, that I was his if he wanted.

His to keep.

My hands shook as they rose to his face. He gave a soft groan when I tugged him down to me. His mouth sought mine at once, hot, hungry. Desire snapped, then blazed through me like lightning.

I kissed Oaken fervently, frantically. As I did so, I gently pushed him until the backs of his knees hit the chair. I pushed him again, and he fell into its seat.

He didn’t really fall. He was so solid, so strong, that he wouldn’t have moved a millimetre in response to my touch if he hadn’t wanted to.

But he did want to. When I pushed against him, he yielded.

I stood between his splayed thighs, not saying a word, as I stripped. Oaken’s throat worked. Beneath his trousers, his cock swelled.

Now naked, I let my fingers fall to that place. I worked his belt apart, and he sat back and let me.

I didn’t wait for foreplay. I didn’t give Oaken a chance to touch me. I needed him now. Badly. Even if it hurt. I straddled his hips and took him in my hands, guiding his tip to my entrance.

His breath hissed between his fangs as I lowered myself, rocking as I went, taking him as far as I could. I was so wet already. And that helped.

But it was still tight, hard, difficult.

And perfect.

I breathed through the stretching ache. Chasing pain was pleasure, pleasure I desperately wanted to latch onto. I moaned, grinding hard, and Oaken let out a guttural sound.

“Jaya,” he rasped. He palmed my hips, fingers digging into my ass as he helped hold me up. “You’re so blasted beautiful.”

A raw, tearless sob tore from me.

Beautiful.

He’d said that to me once before. When he was pretending to flirt with me. Using me as practice.

I didn’t think he was just pretending now. He responded to every arch of my back, every squeeze of my pussy, every lurch of my hips, like it was a revelation to him. His cock throbbed and jerked inside. His cock tail flickered and writhed over my clit. His breathing was hard and fast and punctuated by hoarse groans and growls.

His searing white eyes never left me.

“Jaya.” My name was a moan in his mouth. “Jaya, I-”

“I know,” I whimpered in response. “I know. I’m coming too.”

Oaken fell over the edge a split second before I did. His face went slack with pleasure, his hips driving helplessly up, shoving himself deeper as he sank into his release. I watched him come undone beneath me, and I came so hard it almost felt like cramping.

Even my body didn’t want to let him go.

I slumped forward, letting my chin come to rest against his shoulder. We breathed together for a long time, our fronts sealed together. When my gaze finally focused, it landed on something on the kitchen table. It was a long, tapered set of needles, yarn, and…

A pair of socks.

“What’s that?” I asked, gently prying my breasts away from where they’d been crushed to Oaken’s chest. I put my full weight on to my legs, and, gasping at the sweetly bruised sensation inside me, pulled myself out of Oaken’s lap. He inhaled sharply when his cock slipped out. He set to work tucking himself back into his trousers, then stood, looking more than a little unsteady on his feet.

“That is something I’ve been working on when I’ve had the time. I’d hoped to have made more than just these, but I forgot how long knitting socks takes.”

“You’re knitting some new socks?” I asked. I collected my clothes from the floor, quickly pulling them back on. “They look pretty small.”

“Too small for me,” he agreed. “But they’re for you.”

Someone tell me why that felt like a fucking gut punch?

“Oaken…”

“I worry,” he said, stepping in close behind me. So close that I felt the heat of his chest through the shirt on my back. “I worry that… That you might get blisters one day, out on some other world without me. And I won’t be there to carry you home when you do.”

Ten fucking years and I hadn’t cried once.

Until now.

“I can’t,” I gasped. “You shouldn’t… You should give these to your next wife.”

A sigh behind me. Then the saddest, quietest laugh I’d ever heard.

“There isn’t going to be a ‘next wife,’ Jaya.”

“What?!” I whirled around. “What do you mean?”

A wife was what he’d always wanted.

How had I fucked this up so royally?

“You will find someone incredible, Oaken. They aren’t all like me!”

His face was calm. Composed. But his eyes were alight with something intense and unnameable.

“But that is precisely the problem.” He smiled, but it was weak, wan, like it fucking hurt to do it. “They aren’t you.”

My emotions spilled into one another. A heady cocktail of grief, guilt, confusion, and…

Hope.

“What are you saying?” The words rushed from me “Oaken, what are you-”

I was cut off by an especially loud smack of ice against the window. I stifled a yelp and jumped when I realized it wasn’t a hailstone at all, but Lala. She rammed her body against the window again, making the glass rattle.

I sped to the window and yanked it open. Instantly, she was crawling inside.

“What are you doing at the window?” I asked as she moved down the wall to the floor.

“I am not at the window. I am in the kitchen!”

Sassiness isn’t part of your programming, my ass…

“And I had to come that way!” she went on. “I can open the door on the Lavariya . But I cannot, apparently, open one as ancient in design as Oaken’s!”

I scooped her up off the floor.

“What’s going on?” I asked. Now that the window was open, I could hear how quiet things had gotten outside. That was something. At least the storm seemed to have passed.

“The Lavariya’s weather sensors are picking up tornado activity,” Lala blurted. “A funnel cloud is forming less than ten kilometres from here.”

At once, Oaken was moving. His hands descended heavily onto my shoulders. “Get into the cellar,” he ordered me, already steering me towards the door that led down the stairs.

“But my ship!” I gasped, fighting his grasp.

He swore under his breath, then let me go.

“Get in it now,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “If you go now, you can beat the weather. You and Lala and the ship will all be safe.”

“And you!” I cried. “You’re coming with me! We’ll fly clear of the storm, and then come back when it’s safe.”

“I can’t! I have to stay and let the bracku and shuldu loose.”

“Let them loose?”

“Their instincts will help guide them,” he quickly explained. “They can get low somewhere and wait it out. But I have to open the gates for them first. And then I have to go get Nali.”

He left me no time to reply, no time to argue. Swiftly, he wrapped his arms around me, pressing my face into his chest. His breathing was harsh against my hair.

His arms were so fucking tender.

He was holding me like it would be the last time.

Before I even had a chance to hug him back, to do anything that might extend the moment with him, he let me go.

“Get in your ship, Jaya! Lala, look after her!”

Then he wrenched open the door and took off at a run.

I followed him, pausing only for a second to stomp my feet into my boots. The door swung ominously on its hinges as I hurried through it. Lala was hunkering down against my palm, like she was trying to burrow right into it. Hastily, I put her into my pocket where she might feel more secure.

Then, I looked up.

I’d been to a lot of worlds. Seen a lot of things.

But I’d never seen a sky this colour before. Grey-tinged green, with clouds that roiled so thick and fast it was like looking into a toxic cauldron. The temperature suddenly shifted, dropping degrees so fast that goosebumps broke out along my arms. The hairs on my neck rose.

The ship. I was supposed to go to my ship…

But my gaze was seeking out Oaken instead. I found him already great distance away, at the shuldu stalls. Three of the shuldu raced away, released from their enclosure. A fourth, a female the colour of tea leaves named Fiora, he mounted, taking off like thunder towards the bracku pasture gates.

Beyond him, the sky started to pour out of itself. A spout of pure darkness spiralled downwards.

Funnel cloud.

But this was rapidly becoming more than a fucking funnel cloud. The whole world seemed whipped into a frenzy, like the very air around me was trying to shove the forming tornado back up.

But it couldn’t.

I shouted Oaken’s name, but heard no sound.

The Lavariya was there. Right fucking there. I could still make it.

I could still run.

But Oaken was here .

And I knew what my choice would be.

My home was the most important thing to me.

But my home wasn’t a ship anymore.

My home was a person.

And that person was Oaken.

I started sprinting…

Not for the Lavariya.

But for Nali’s enclosure.

When I got there, I found her huddled and terrified against one of the boulders Oaken had brought in for her.

“I’ve got you!” I screamed. But if the words ever left my mouth, they never reached my ears.

The storm swallowed them.

For a horrible second, I thought she might try to bolt. Her blue eyes rolled with panic. But once I wrenched open the gate, she came right to me. I collapsed to my knees, allowing myself one tiny second to sag with relief as I gathered her up into my arms.

The sturdy fencing around her enclosure trembled, the planks looking wobbly as loose baby teeth. It was a testament to how strong the wind had gotten, because that fencing was very well-made.

Oaken had built it, after all.

But if any of those planks or posts got yanked out of the ground into the air while we were still here…

Yeah. Time to go.

I staggered upon standing up, the air buffeting me so hard that, for a sickening moment, I thought I’d become so disoriented that I wouldn’t be able to find the house again. The ground seemed to seesaw beneath my boots as I stumbled out of Nali’s enclosure. My hair snapped against my face, the ends needle-sharp on my skin.

Blinking against the flying dust and debris, I saw it.

The tornado.

It moved like a living thing, like it possessed its own malevolent will. A violent, opaque, writhing spiral that dragged itself over the land.

Horror, unlike anything I’d ever known, numbed me.

The force of that thing…

It seemed unstoppable.

Destruction inevitable.

But I had Nali in my arms. Lala in my pocket.

And a man out there I loved.

My muscles shrieking in protest, I trudged unsteadily – almost drunkenly – into the wall of the wind. But after only a few steps, dismay nearly drove me to my knees.

I couldn’t see the house.

There was too much dust, dirt, grass, and other shit that should have stayed on the ground darkening the air. Nali bucked and wriggled. Her mouth opened in wild panic, but no cry came out.

I clutched her close, twisting this way and that, fighting panic, fighting nausea, fighting to stay on my feet.

I felt as if I’d been dropped right into the centre of the storm. The belly of the beast. Abyss.

There was nothing here! Nothing to lead me forward, nothing to guide me.

Nothing but wind and terror and dust and darkness. Nothing but…

White light.

Getting closer every second.

So fast that I knew he was running with everything he had.

In mere seconds, Oaken had me.

Just like he had that very first night, he dragged me up into his arms, holding me safe against his chest. He barely even slowed his pace to grab me, continuing relentlessly against the storm.

Bringing us home.

I held tightly to Nali with one arm, and clung to Oaken with the other.

I tried to tell him that I loved him.

But the wind stole the words away.