Read Online Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance by Juniper Leigh - Free Book Online

but it was not quite beautiful yet: it was still too raw. The wood wanted polishing, and the entire place needed something of a feminine touch. Some color, perhaps, some texture.
    The smell of roasting meat began to fill the air, and I breathed in deeply through my nose. My stomach began to rumble, and I realized I couldn’t recall when I last had eaten. Calder removed the meat from the fire, slapped it down onto the wooden tabletop, and cut the creature in half after primly relieving it of its head. He put one half on a plate and handed it to me, along with an empty bowl. The ceramics were beautiful, intricately designed and expertly crafted, cast in deep purple clay and fired into a gradient of blue and red.
    “What am I to do with the empty bowl?” I asked, perplexed.
    “Spit the bones into it,” he said, and sat down on one of the stools even as he began to worry the meat off the bone.
    I blinked, and tore a leg off, chewing at it absently and pretending that it was chicken. But it did not taste like chicken. In fact, it didn’t taste like any meat I’d ever had before. It was sweet and moist; it was delicious, if a little strange.
    “What is it?” I inquired, and he said a word I did not recognize. I gave a slight shrug of my shoulders, and figured that it didn’t altogether matter what it was, as long as it wouldn’t kill me. And in that moment, I was hungry enough to eat it regardless.
    I tried to talk to him as we ate, but my head ached, and he seemed suddenly cagey with me.
    “So, Calder,” I began, like we were on a blind date, “what do you do?”
    “This,” he said absently, his face a blank slate, utterly unreadable. “I hunt during the day. I kill and eat what I hunt. I carve furniture and collect fruits and vegetables. At night, I eat and I sleep. And that is my life.”
    “Surely there must be more to it than that,” I pressed. “You didn’t always live on the outskirts of town, did you?”
    “No.”
    “So, what brought you out here originally?”
    “Our leader died, and I lost my gods,” he said plainly, rising to his feet and coming over to the bed to snatch away my bowl of bones. “I left my people, and now I live here alone. May I answer any more of your questions?”
    I shook my head, and scooted down low in the bed, tugging the blankets up to my chin. Calder disappeared out briefly into the Winternight, and returned again, the bowls empty. He set the bowls aside, and came to linger strangely by the side of the bed.
    “We will sleep now,” he said.
    “All right.”
    “And I must sleep in the bed with you,” he went on. “There is nowhere else, and the night freezes.”
    “Fine,” I consented. As though I should have any say in whether or not Calder Fev’rosk slept in his own bed.
    “Very good, then,” he grumbled, and climbed between the blankets. He was a huge and hulking creature, and even though I could tell that he was clinging to his side of the bed, our bodies touched beneath the furs. He still wore his drawstring linen pants, but a thin piece of fabric is all that separated our flesh.
    He shifted strangely on the down mattress next to me, trying to do his best to get comfortable and not touch me. I tried to show him the same courtesy, but the bed was constricting, and the result was that we both were stiff and irritable and would not sleep a wink if made to remain in the positions we were in.
    “Calder,” I said at length. “Calder, this is silly.”
    “What is?” he asked, resting stiffly on his side.
    “You can touch me,” I said. “It’s all right.”
    “I’d just as soon not,” he grumbled.
    I sat up next to him, letting a pocket of cool air between the blankets. He hissed his protest. “Am I really so awful as all that?”
    “I’ve no interest in reassuring you that I do not find you repugnant, so please, can we just sleep?” He didn’t even bother to turn over and look at me. The nerve of this guy.
    “Fine,” I spat, and laid down again.