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)
And I wasn’t afraid. I was thrown, but not frightened, not like I probably should be after what’d just happened, likely because of the smile on his face, which looked like pure unadulterated joy. Complete and absolute joy.
Wait. Fear was back because then there was a niggle, a reminder of what I’d have to do now that I was here.
Get vaccinated. Via sexual intercourse. Lose my virginity. Oh yeah, and do it within 3 days. It’s what they told us would prevent us from catching the woman-killing plague.
His lips were moving but I couldn’t hear sound. I stared. And blinked. And stared some more.
His warm and sensual voice suddenly cut in and interrupted my train of thought.
“Ollie’s waiting, Tanya. We’ve been anxious for your arrival and he’s gotten some things ready for you.”
I don’t know what I was about to say; my mouth did drop open as if I’d been about to speak, but then we shot up higher into the sky and instead of speaking, I squealed in surprise. I held tighter to the edge of the leather-like white bench seat. We had a panoramic view through the window in front of us and I saw the ground was moving farther and farther away. I was deathly afraid of heights. I’d never ever flown before. Well, not to my knowledge, anyway. I’d obviously flown here. But there were no window seats on that space craft; it was designed like a dormitory, and I hadn’t gotten a chance to get nervous about it because I didn’t know it was happening.
He immediately put his arm around me, and I clutched his soft shirt out of fearful reflex.
“You’re safe,” he assured, and hit a yellow icon on the screened ceiling.
The area around us brightened as the roof of the machine we were in seemed to peel back to reveal an all-glass (except for a control-type panel) domed roof.
I gasped as my eyes roved the 360-degree view and when they met his eyes, he smiled again, but then I heard the trilling of some chimes. He stretched to reach an oval-shaped device that was clipped to his waist and put it to his ear. It was curved like a computer mouse, black, shiny. I heard him say something but didn’t make it out because a simultaneous squeal came out of the speaker. I winced. My ears filled with a screech again. Yes, a phone.
The screeching halted.
“Ollie! I have her. She’s ours. Yes! Tanya’s ours!” He was filled with jubilation.
Ollie? Ours? What?
How did Zane Zenith know my name? I was frozen stiff. I think I was in shock.
My heart pounded hard. It took everything in me to make myself appear calm. I still had his shirt in my left hand, my right palm pressed against my sparkly chest. It felt oddly poetic that this dress I wore was a lot like the Jessica Rabbit one, only blue and glittery instead of red and glittery and this one ended just above my knee without an indecently high slit. It did, however, have a halter neck with a peekaboo diamond cut-out over the center of my cleavage.
I was soaring up into the pink sky in a blue sparkly dress, wearing very high silver sparkly heels. I was on another planet. This man wasn’t taking me home home, he was taking me to his home and to someone named Ollie so I could be “ours”?
The likely meaning behind that penetrated.
On the ship, they didn’t say anything about being in a relationship with more than one alien man. They made it sound like this planet had a very traditional family circle. Protective men. Alpha males. Nurturing. A polyamorous relationship didn’t jive with that. Did it?
I didn’t know all that much about those types of relationships, except for that one smoking-hot reverse harem romance Maeve from work picked for book club during our most recent meet-up. Maeve was a very sexual person. She’s the one who dressed me as Jessica Rabbit, telling me I had Kathleen Turner’s voice, too. She also talked about threesomes she’d been in, that time she dabbled with bondage and fetish clubs. She was constantly making me blush.
We hadn’t even had a chance to discuss that reverse harem book yet. I was at 83% on my e-reader and wouldn’t get that chance because my transfer wasn’t to another city like I’d been initially told. But, then again, the guys with the clipboards on the way here weren’t exactly beacons of truth. Maybe because of the female shortage we were going to be treated like broodmares.
We’d been dressed to impress before we’d been ushered out there. We’d had minimal prep about what life would be like on this planet. We’d been told that we had to have intercourse and exchange fluids within about seventy-two hours of arrival, “give or take”, otherwise we’d be at risk of contracting the virus that’d killed off most of the women here. We were assured we would have no problem finding someone to exchange those fluids with.