Total pages in book: 159
Estimated words: 144433 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144433 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
That part has suddenly become more important than anything.
"It's dangerous," she protests, her eyes full of worry as she gazes up at me.
"It is, but it must be done. I cannot spend my life looking over my shoulder, wondering if today is the day I will be assassinated." It's not fair to her, either. I'm supposed to be a temporary husband who brings no danger to her, and if I stay, I am no longer temporary...and I am a problem to have around. It's best for both of us to get this done quickly, for better or for worse.
Maeve frowns, but then pulls her face from my grasp. She flings her arms around my waist and buries her face against my chest. "You'd better come back, Lord Hairball."
I want to tell her that I will. I want to tell her that I have lost my heart to her, and that it stays here on Risda. I want to tell her that even though I am not supposed to, I have fallen in love with my new wife. That I want more than anything to stay here on Risda with her, and I want ten thousand mornings where we wake up together in a lazy bed. That I want what Nassakth has, with his privacy, his wife and his cubs. I want the same happiness he has carved out for himself.
It would be unfair to say any of those things, however, so I simply stroke her hair and hold her until Salvotor arrives, and then it's time for me to leave with Kazex.
CHAPTER
ONE HUNDRED NINE
MAEVE
I don't know whose idea it was to stick me with Salvotor, but I wish nothing but pain and misery upon them.
It's been two days since Zhur left. Two days without a word. I expected as much, because he's careful not to leave any lines of communication open so they can be traced, but it still makes things tense. Has he contacted his brother? Is the parlay moving forward? Or has he been arrested and even now is sitting in a dungeon somewhere? Bad enough that I'm stuck with my racing thoughts.
Being stuck with Salvotor too is the cherry on top.
At first he wasn't too bad. Cheerful, kinda chatty, and he's got a strong frame if not the height. He's not mesakkah, but some other alien I haven't figured out yet. His skin is more gray than blue, and he doesn't have horns, yet he's definitely thickly built and seems like an ideal bodyguard, all right. But as more time passes, having Salvotor around is like being stuck with a very muscular toddler with the attention span of a gnat.
"Can I go hug the cows?" he asks me for the third time since breakfast.
"You've already hugged them once this morning." And the poor things had no idea why he was trying to put his arms around them. I think he scared a few of them. I pick up the dishes from the dining room table and head for the kitchen.
"They like hugs," he tells me, as if he's been around cattle all his life. "I'm sure of it."
And I'm sure he's driving me crazy. I scrape the plates over the compost processing unit and shake my head. "I need to stay in the house in case anyone comms. By now the bots have moved the cattle out into the pasture so they can graze. I'm not going out there just so you can hug them."
"No one's going to comm," Salvotor says, scraping his plate. "And I can go out to the pasture on my own if you want to stay. I don't mind. I'll give them extra hugs and tell the cows they're from you."
Not going to comm? I pause, looking over at him. "What do you mean?"
Salvotor blinks at me, then gestures with his arms, making a circle with them as if hugging a cow's neck. "See, when I hug them, I'll whisper, 'This is from Maeve' and then I'll kinda be more girly about it. I can stoop, too, because you're kinda short—"
"I meant about the comm!"
He frowns. "There's no need to yell, Maeve. They'll comm when they're done, and there's no way they'll be done yet."
"That's precisely my point. How do you know they're not done?"
Salvotor shrugs and reaches out to straighten one of the plates, nudging it closer to the sink. "Because they were going to go to a location far from here to throw the praxiians off, right? That's most likely another station. Which takes at least one day to get to, probably two. Then there's the comm to his brother, and then he's going to want to meet somewhere, which means the brother has to travel to meet him at the new station. They meet up, boom boom boom"—he punctuates each word with a karate chop into the air—"and either Zhur gets murdered and Lord Straik comes back without him, or he doesn't get murdered, and Lord Straik comes back with him."