Page 11 of Alien Orc's Prize

“Not that seat,” I told her. “That is the current queen’s place. She’s gone south to attend the funeral of a childhood friend. Otherwise, she would have been here to meet you.”

“Oh.” Her mouth quirked downwards. “I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry about her loss.”

“Sorry?” I asked, twisting to watch her as she walked behind my chair to the one across the table from my mother’s. It was as if someone had tethered my eyes to her. Her movements were dragging them all over the blasted place.

“Is that not what you say here? When someone dies?” she asked, halting beside the chair to my left.

“No.” She could prick her thumbs against her tusks to honour the death, but she didn’t have any tusks to begin with. The absence made her mouth look oddly empty and flat, but surprisingly, it wasn’t an unpleasant effect.

“Not that chair, either,” I said when she tried to pull it out from the table. “That’s where the next highest ranking malesits. Usually Padreth, when he can attend dinner and no royal relatives are visiting.”

She blew out a breath and planted her hands on her hips.

“Where, then?”

She was pointing out a rather obvious dilemma. Typically, her chair would have been right beside mine, both of them sharing the head of the table. But, much like everything else, I’d told my staff that such a thing was unnecessary. Before this moment, I never could have anticipated seeing myself dragging my new wife out from between my sisters. Before, I would have been grateful for Neena and Noona’s corralling of her so that I didn’t have to be near her any more than was necessary.

But, blast it all, I actually found myself wanting to be near her.

That still didn’t solve the problem that her chair was not here.

I could have gone and grabbed it myself. But I didn’t. Instead, I leaned back in my own seat, spread my leather-clad thighs, pointed down at my own lap, and, my eyes locked with hers so that I could see them widen, said, “Sit.”

CHAPTER 9

LUNA

The big, hulking, brooding lug who was my husband wanted me to sit. On his lap.

The same man who hadn’t even greeted me when he’d walked in the damn hall now wanted me to saunter over there and just plop my ass down on his knee? No, It’s a pleasure to meet you, my glowing bride!No, How was your journey?Not even a freaking hello! Just a monosyllabicsit.

Like you’d give a dog.

But I couldn’t afford to get pissed about this. I couldn’t afford to have pride. And, maybe this was a good sign. He at least wanted me to sit with him. And he was moving me into his bedchambers which was…

Good. Right? It had to be good. It meant he was acknowledging me in some way after not even attending our own wedding. Acknowledging that I was actually his wife. That this hadn’t all been some big, embarrassing mistake that meant I was going to get shipped off-planet any moment.

I’d always been an optimist. Much more so than my older sister Lyric. It was why I’d taken this opportunity in the first place while she’d gone on and on about how terrible an idea it was. Not that I’d had much of another choice, but still. I’d goneinto the Starlight Brides program with an open mind and a hell of a lot of hope.

I was here. So was my husband. He wanted me to sit with him and I was going to make the most of it.

“Of course,” I said, giving him a bright smile and gathering up my heavy golden skirts. I rounded the corner of the table and approached his chair. It was huge. Bigger than any other. Almost like a throne at the table. Shiny red-stained wood, intricately carved with symbols I couldn’t read, as well as images of weapons that were like smaller, less deadly versions of the ones Prince Gal wore at his belt.

He'd leaned back, but hadn’t actually pushed his chair away from the table. Which meant there was very little space to squeeze in and spin myself around in front of him. I felt the keen press of his dark eyes on the back of my bare neck as I attempted to get myself into position to perch on his knee.

Only, I wasn’t used to manoeuvring with skirts like this. In the tight space, I got twisted and tangled, and before I could do anything to stop it, I was tilting. My legs were clamped together in the tightly-wound burrito of my skirt. My arms windmilled wildly, one of them knocking over Prince Gal’s cup and sending his drink spewing so far across the table that Noona jumped up out of her seat to avoid getting splattered.

I was going down. Hard.

A rough, calloused hand – surprisingly warm and very strong – clamped around my upper arm and jerked me back. My legs were still too tangled up to properly right myself, which meant I couldn’t regain my balance and was still falling, just in a new direction.

It was only Prince Gal’s lap that kept me from tumbling heels over tits and smashing my skull open on the stone floor. I landed awkwardly on my front, lying across his legs with my ass up in the air like I was waiting for him to smack it.

“Steady, lass,” came the smoke-deep voice of Prince Gal from above me. “I said, ‘sit.’ Not ‘fling yourself at me like you’re trying to break your own ribs.’”

Ooh. The bastard. Obviously, I hadn’t thrown myself down on him like that on purpose. If anything, it was his fault for grabbing me and yanking me back onto him! Maybe he didn’t know his own strength in comparison to my much smaller human body. Even in that brief pressure of his hand on my arm, I could feel how incredibly strong he was. He probably could have popped my arm out of its socket as easily as pulling a little twig off of a tree.

“I didn’t… I wasn’t trying to… It’s these skirts!” I cried, slightly wheezy from the collision my lung-and-sternum area had just been subjected to against the orc’s rock-hard thighs. I was no longer convinced that landing on Prince Gal’s lap was any more comfortable than the floor would have been. At least the floor wouldn’t scold me about it.