Highlander's Need: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 4) Read online

  She and her archaeological team had been going through the Sarmian excavation. The desert around them was gorgeous. It reminded them of the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert of North America back on Earth, except the browns and tans and the ruddy and rusty colors were streaked with green and grey. Being surrounded by all that beauty had made them wish they were tourists instead of scientists. But they had gotten to work well enough, for each of them was well accustomed to interplanetary travel. More exciting than Sarma itself was the idea of who lived there and what first contact with them meant. Gwendolyn and her people were living the dream of not only every archaeologist on Earth, but every biologist, every biochemist, every political scientist and historian, every philosopher—practically the whole of humanity. They were on the cutting edge of the most exciting thing to happen in human history since the confirmation of extraterrestrial life itself.

  The Sarmians were not merely extraterrestrial—they were humanoid. They had human forms, human anatomy. Except for the trail of hair descending from the hairline of the scalp to the bridge of the nose, they could easily pass for human, at least physically. It was something that science had always deemed biologically impossible, but it turned out to be one of the times when the universe yanked the rug out from under science. The Sarmians had become Earth's great obsession and people from every discipline were all but foaming at the mouth to have a crack at studying the planet and those who lived there.

  And Gwendolyn Rush had snagged for herself the singular honor of leading an archaeological team to the desert wilderness of Sarma, into the ruins of an ancient Sarmian society, to dig for clues to why the Sarmians were so much like humans.

  What they were seeking was not just insights into how ancient and prehistoric Sarmians might have lived, but also confirmation of the only theory that could explain them, a theory so radical that it could have been easily dismissed if the very existence of the Sarmians were not such a radical thing. What the scientists of Earth hoped the planet Sarma might yield was any clue to the identity and nature of the aliens who, the theory held, had come to Earth eons ago and abducted prehistoric humans, taking them across the stars to guide and shape their evolution for some unknowable purpose. The Sarmians were one riddle whose answer might expose a greater one.

  And that was what brought Gwendolyn light years from Earth into the heat and dust and undeniable beauty of another planet, supervising other archaeologists and students in the digging and scraping and sorting and categorizing for later study of structures buried in the sand and the objects and artifacts that they contained. As much as Gwendolyn loved and cared about the work, it made her wish that she were a leaner and lighter woman. Gwen was pretty—an almost luminous beauty in fact—with a soft round face, bright blue eyes, and an incandescent smile. When she did not have her hair bound up in a scarf or rolled up under a hat, it fell in loose black curls about her shoulders. But it was in the mid section that she felt a bit ponderous when she went to work on a dig. Her hips, buttocks, and thighs had somewhat more of a spread than she would have liked. At times she would watch the female students who accompanied her on digs, note their hips and thighs that lacked the same spread, and think, A decade and a half ago, that was me.

  But then, a decade and a half ago Gwendolyn was not one of the youngest leaders of the field of xenoarchaeology, whose perseverance had contributed to humanity's greater understanding of the non-human species of the galaxy. A decade and a half ago she could only dream of leading the effort to understand the other human-like species in the galaxy, something that biology had predicted man would never see. Even if she was not what the most desirable men wanted to take to bed, there were compensations.

  Work on Sarma proceeded uneventfully until Gwen and the crew noticed a greying of what had been a perfect blue sky, and a low sound like a million heavy breaths exhaling coming in from the distance. They all looked up from their tools and their excavations and found something growing and looming into view on the horizon. It was a spreading vastness of ruddy brown emerging over the hills in the distance, and it could mean only one thing. Gwen cursed the luck. While modern Sarmian society was as advanced as Earth in many ways, they did not have a lot of the niceties of Earth, such as weather-tracking and severe weather dissipation systems. On Earth, massive sandstorms rising out of nowhere had ceased to be a problem long ago. Sarma, damn it all, still had them.

  As the airborne tsunami of sand came rushing in, Gwen ordered everyone to cover up their work, throw on scarves and goggles, and take cover themselves. She had just gotten her tools into an electric wheelbarrow along with some pottery whose markings and symbols she wanted to study and covered her eyes and her face when everything around her disappeared into flying sand. She pulled her electrolocator out of her pocket and turned it on, meaning to use it to find her way around by detecting masses and other moving bodies in the low visibility of the sandstorm. The screen on the device showed the shapes of structures and devices around her and the moving forms of the rest of her party. It also detected two other moving bodies coming up behind her, which she took to be simply two other members of her team looking for shelter.

  And it was then—ah-ha, then!—when that damn pain in her head started. She wondered now if she might have accidentally backed into something, but no, she remembered that the electrolocator showed nothing in the flying sand behind her but those two moving bodies. Her next assumption was that one of them had run into her. What sense did that make, one of them running into the back of her head? Which led to her next hypothesis: she had been struck on the back of the head, deliberately hit. And that was when the sandstorm and everything else disappeared into blackness in her memory.

  Now, opening her eyes and wincing from that nagging throb in her skull, Gwen started to become aware of other things. There was something unfamiliar under her, soft and cushiony and satiny. And whatever she had on, it wasn't the durable fatigues that she had been wearing on the dig. It was soft too, luxurious and flowing. Getting her vision back into focus, Gwen saw that she was in a circular room with windows from floor to ceiling on every side. Outside and stretching out all around was a panorama of the Sarmian countryside in which she had been digging, with whirling and billowing clouds of sandstorm whipping through it, thinning here and thickening there. Inside the room, everything was red and gold and magenta. It was all silky, satiny fabrics, drapes and blankets and carpets, divans and cushions and Ottomans, and a very large bed on which she was resting. And Gwen was dressed not for an archaeological dig, but in a flowing gown that suggested activities of a totally different sort.

  After a moment of utter bewilderment taking this all in, Gwen sat up on the bed and blurted out her confusion: "What in the name of hell am I doing here?"

  Her voice bounced off the walls and windows of her surroundings, and only silence greeted her outburst. She half expected she had no answer forthcoming and would have to get up and start looking for one. That was when a portal at the far end of the chamber hissed and slid open, and he came striding in.

  He was a Sarmian, no question about that. But in Gwen's unscientific opinion he was the most jaw-dropping specimen of manhood ever to appear before her wondering eyes. He was tall, like a pillar on a monument to masculinity. He wore nothing but loose-fitting silken leggings and thin, solid-gold armbands on a body built to be naked. It seemed to her that nature had taken on the role of a sculptor and hewn the most perfect body humanly imaginable from solid marble, then rendered it into flesh. The face was as chiseled as the rest of him, with a handsomeness that appeared to command without words, Submit to desire. Short brown hair crowned his head. Eyes the color of the desert sands blazed hotly at her. In his expression was no violence, no threat, but the unspoken understanding that he was accustomed to being obeyed. But even in this tone, the words that he poured out in a low voice like a desert wind were surprisingly gentle: "Gwendolyn, you are awake. It is good. I have been most anxious to know you. I bid you welcome."

  Gwendoly
n squinted at the awesomely sexy stranger addressing her by her first name. "You've got me at a disadvantage, whoever you are. And by the way, who are you? And what am I doing here, and where are my clothes and what am I doing wearing this?"

  The tower of sex before her said, "There is nothing to fear. My people brought you here, out of the storm, at my command. This, of course, is one of our royal bedchambers. And I am Dantar of Sarma, your liege and king and future husband." This he said with a smile devoid of irony. Gwendolyn blinked at him. He actually meant it.

  She leaned forward to shake a demanding finger in the air at him, and her sudden motion sent a hot spike of pain into the back of her skull and made her wince and grow dizzy. But even through this she held fast to her shock and indignation, enough to challenge his patently ridiculous claim. "What the hell do you mean, future husband?" Grimacing, she fell back on the bed a bit and watched him through a squint. His expression was her next surprise.

  This Dantar actually wore a look of gentle concern. "Are you injured, my bride? Did they hurt you?"

  "I am not your bride," she winced back at him. "And someone came up behind me in the sandstorm and clocked me over the head with something. Is that your idea of courtship?"

  Dantar's expression now turned to wrath. "I instructed the guards who brought you here that you were not to be injured. This infliction of pain upon the person of their queen shall be summarily punished. I'll have them chained in the chamber of hot stones for this."

  Rubbing her head and carefully studying this man she now understood to be her captor, Gwen said, "Do whatever you want with your guards, but I'm nobody's queen. I'm a citizen of Earth and you're going to let me out of here or risk an interplanetary incident."

  But this Dantar person was adamant. "I have selected you as my royal consort and chosen you to be my bride. As such you shall be Queen of Sarma with all of the duties, powers, and privileges of your title, and as such you shall be my lady wife."

  Gwen now no longer cared about the pain. She was hearing no more of this madness, and rose to her knees on the bed to underscore it. Raising her finger to him once again, she said, "Listen, Dantar, or whatever you call yourself. I am Dr. Gwendolyn Rush of the planet Earth. I am an archaeologist doing a survey of this planet. I appreciate your help with the sandstorm, but I have unfinished work waiting for me out there and I'll thank you to let me get back to it. So show me where my clothes are and I'll be on my way, understand?"

  Dantar folded his arms, calmly and confidently, and replied, "'Tis you who do not understand, my bride. Your duties are no longer what they were. Your duties as Queen of Sarma now do supersede them. This is to be the night of our prenuptial consummation. Our royal wedding will follow directly, and our nights of First Coupling as King and Queen." He stepped forward, moving his hands to the waist of his leggings. In his gesture and his look, his intentions were crystal clear. Gwen watched him disbelievingly. He was giving her an actual copulatory gaze, not the look of an assailant or a rapist, but the look of an expectant and ardent lover. This was getting madder by the minute.

  Gwen thrust out her palm toward him in a gesture that she hoped would translate from Earth to Sarma as meaning Stop right there, Mister! "Are you insane?" she cried. "Do you actually think I'm going to let you have sex with me right now, and I'm going to marry you, just like that?"

  Dantar halted in his tracks, his hands frozen in the gesture of stripping off his leggings. His bush of pubic hair was already exposed and he looked eager to show her what hung and pulsed beneath it, when her demand for him to stop left him bewildered. In a curious voice he answered, "Yes, my bride. This, our first intercourse, will let our bodies know one another, to prepare for our marriage. What do you not understand?"

  She shook her head, wondering, What do I not understand? Where do I even start? And aloud, she asked, "How about the simple question, 'Why me?' "

  As if perplexed by her ignorance, Dantar answered, "Because I am newly ascended to the throne and I am thus in need of a queen."

  Whatever rejoinder she might have made to this caught in Gwen's throat. She looked off for a moment and considered the current political realities of the planet Sarma, to which she might have failed to give due attention because of her focused interest in its past. "Newly ascended to the throne... Wait, that would make you the son of—"

  "King Dealon," the young monarch said, straightening up at the mention of his honored father's name. "Well may he rest."

  "That's right," said Gwen. "King Dealon died. So of course his son takes the throne. But that still doesn't explain what you want with me. There have got to be a million Sarmian women out there who'd climb over each other and put their heels on each other's throats to be in bed with you. What do you want with an Earth woman? Especially one who's not that young any more and has..." And she looked down and gestured at her sides, recalling suddenly that her well-rounded figure was now draped in luxurious, shiny fabric. She was about to say, ...has as much hips and butt as brains. But it came out, "...has as much going on downstairs as upstairs."

  Dantar frowned, uncomprehending. "I know not whereof you speak. I do know that many women of your planet now walk mine. Never have we known the like of the people of planet Earth, you who look like us yet are not like us. In truth, a marriage such as ours would be unlike any other in the history of Sarma. It is fitting for a king to be the first to know what no other Sarmian man has known."

  And the madness was back. Gwen shook her head again at what she took to be his meaning. "Let me understand this. You want to marry me and make me your Queen to be the first Sarmian man to have interplanetary nookie?"

  The young King narrowed his eyes, still not grasping the meaning, and still wanting to grasp what lay under her royal bed gown. "We have no such word. What is this 'nookie'?"

  Gwen glared at him. "It's what you seem to think I'm going to give you when you drop those trousers, Mister. And you can guess again."

  Dantar actually took a step back, looking as stung as if he had been hit in the face with hot sand. "Is it that you are...refusing first intercourse with me, I who have chosen you as my bride and queen? Is it that you refuse to accept my zazansa inside you in our royal bed? Do you truly not desire me?"

  The context of his question answered for her the question of what his zazansa was without Gwen having to ask. She could only imagine that the erect zazansa throbbing under those silken leggings was as mighty and meaty as the rest of him, and that the seed flowing from it could easily have irrigated the desert from which he'd had her abducted. In a measured tone, Gwen answered, "Listen, I don't know how this is done when you're a King of Sarma. Maybe this is a place where a king just picks out any woman he wants, has her wrapped up and delivered to his bedroom, pins her to the bed and dubs her with his Royal sceptre all night, and voila, she's a queen. But I'm telling you, I'm from Earth and that's not how we do things."

  Now the two of them studied each other in silence. To Gwendolyn it seemed that Dantar might sway and topple over at any second. She could tell that he was wholly unprepared for what she was saying. The possibility of her not wanting him did not even exist for him. She almost pitied him. Almost.

  "Dantar," she ventured to ask, "what do you even know about me?"

  "You are from the planet Earth," he replied. "A planet of beings so similar to us that it is even possible for us to breed, or so it is said. You and I would be the parents of a magnificent new dynasty, the most unique in all of Sarma's history."

  "That's not what I asked. What do you know about me? What is it that made you want Dr. Gwendolyn Rush for your queen?"

  Dantar fixed her with a steady gaze and spoke with absolute conviction. "As a human of Earth, you are capable of being as strong and fierce as any Sarmian. But your basic character is gentler than ours. To us, you of Earth are a softer culture, more concerned with refinement. All Sarmians are warriors, even our females. Had I chosen a Sarmian female as my bride, I could have had any of the most beauteous women my pla
net has to offer. But in such a woman I would have had to contend with a warrior spirit to match my own. I have come to know that I do not desire a mate of my own temperament. I desire a marriage with someone...different, someone unlike any other I have ever known or ever could have known. That is what all humans represent to us: the knowledge and intimacy of the different."

  Gwen's eyebrows arched a bit to hear him speak that way. He was beginning to show a level of insight that took her by surprise. She felt fascination starting to overtake her defensiveness, intrigue creeping up in the midst of her hostility. What would he say next?

  The young king went on. "Do you think that I selected you at random? Every human visiting Sarma was required to submit personal information to our computers for identification and background. I commanded my Information Guard to collate data on the most learned females visiting Sarma. Not only the most beautiful, but the most intelligent, the most enlightened, the most accomplished. I sought artists, philosophers, educators, scientists. When I came to you, I found a woman who had walked in Earth's most esteemed halls of learning and been a peer of the finest minds; someone who had distinguished herself in the pursuit of learning; someone quick of intellect and curious and fascinated with everything there is in the universe that is not like herself. Such a woman, I reasoned, could bring me not merely beauty and pleasure in my bed, but satisfaction for my own mind. As a king I shall be bound to my world and my throne. I desired a mate who could truly bring the universe to me. You are all these things, Gwendolyn. It is for these reasons I must have you. And have you, I shall."

  The reasoning and emotions behind Dantar's suit almost made Gwendolyn's head spin. In his haughty, entitled, royal way, he had made something like a compelling case for himself. On some level Gwen realized she should feel deeply honored. But on another level she was still offended at his presumption and angry to have been abducted right from her own work site. No matter that he was King, the embassies and other authorities of their respective planets were going to hear about this—after she was finished giving him an earful directly.