Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Sarah

A fter rushing back from Earth to planet Halla to join my alien mates—Deacon and Jac—I stood frozen to the spot as I listened to a familiar voice say, “…day of Muraska, I unite Deacon Amroll-Bellket Ladrang to the Princess Silence Reticent Bateen. May you produce many heirs.”

I blinked as those words floated through my brain. Had I heard Wave—Allegiant’s biologist and part-time clergy—right? Did she just unite Deacon Ladrang and Silence Bateen? Did the man I love and had been united to myself already move on with the woman who’d betrayed him with his own father?

Seeing the pair together, accepting the words that were just spoken to unite them, it appeared so, and the knowledge wrecked me to the core. I couldn’t hold back the devastating sound that escaped me, which caused Wave to glance toward where I’d just stepped out from the copse of trees that formed a circle around them for the ceremony.

The alien historian inhaled a sharp breath at seeing me. “Sarah?”

The crowd turned to face me, and they gasped, too. Deacon’s whole crew was there, along with his father, Valor, in his ghost form, and his friends. And Silence, a stunningly beautiful alien, with silken hair and obsidian skin—who was once Valor’s paramour and was now Deacon’s mate.

No one moved for a beat. Deacon’s hazel eyes widened as he saw me. His long, trimmed gray hair blew in the breeze. By his shocked expression, I wasn’t sure if he was happy to see me or not. But the pink tinge of his tan skin shimmered in waves like when he orgasmed, and his furry tail swished side to side.

His muscular body met no resistance when he pushed past the crowd as he ran to me. “Sarah, you’re really here.”

I looked all the way up to his handsome face. Our two and a half foot height difference made it strange, but I had grown fond of most of the strange things that had come with being united to my Ladrian…who wasn’t mine any longer, it seemed. Despite my affection for him, after what I had heard Wave say, I was at a loss for words.

“Should I go?” I whispered around the lump formed in my throat.

“What?” Confusion married his handsome features. “Why would you go?”

Surely an alien as intelligent as Deacon wasn’t that obtuse. “I did just hear Wave perform the union ceremony with you and Silence, right?”

He reached a hand out to touch me. “Yes, but—"

“Then, I should go,” I said in a rush, then turned and ran before he could brush those warm fingers along my cheek and crumble the last of my pride. I didn’t want him to see me cry, and my eyes burned a warning. Tears were coming, whether I wanted them to or not.

But at eight feet tall with long, muscular legs, it didn’t take long before Deacon blocked my path to the front yard, forcing me to stop. “Where are you going, Consort?”

“I’m not your consort,” I croaked as I cried, while a ball of anger rose up inside of me that he’d move on so quickly after my departure. “I’m nothing to you—was I ever anything to you?”

“You are everything to me, Sarah!” he said, a pained look in his eyes as he gripped my shoulders in his big hands. “How can you even ask me that?”

I pointed wildly to the union party who were coming toward us. “Because you just united with Silence, aka the woman you were engaged to before we met!”

He closed his eyes and sighed, before opening them again. “This is nothing like what it looks to be, I swear to you.”

I shook my head wildly at his excuse, my heart barely beating in my chest. “I heard Wave, Deacon. You can’t lie to me!”

“He is not lying to you, Sarah,” Silence said in her melodic tones. Normally, her sweet voice was a comfort. But in the moment, it grated like mockery and I wanted to claw this other woman’s eyes out for making a move on my man.

Jealousy was a powerful thing, I realized, and I checked myself before I did something I’d regret. I’d never been the vindictive sort, and I wasn’t going to start now, no matter how much the urge struck.

On planet Orhon, Silence had been a princess and Deacon’s fiancé, before his life had turned to treason and danger. The first time I had seen Silence Bateen, as messed up as it was, I was relieved that she was pregnant with Deacon’s father’s children. Her beauty was beyond anything I personally had—dark, luminous onyx skin, amber brown eyes, and a round face so pretty, on Earth she would have had paparazzi stalking her. But instead of a life of luxury, Silence had to be sprung from the royal prison after her own father beheaded her lover—Deacon’s father, Valor—then had locked his daughter in a dank cell to wither away as punishment.

She stood there, pleading with her perfect eyes for me to hear her out, but my agony was too great and I didn’t care what she had to say. “I hope you have many heirs,” I spat at them both and tried to worm my way around Deacon.

But he grabbed my arm to stop me, his grip gentle, but firm. “Just wait—”

“Let me go!”

Valor stepped in front of me. The similarity between father and son was striking, with the exception of Valor being older and a ghost. His translucent body couldn’t touch me, and I couldn’t touch him, but the weight of his presence was enough to stop me from struggling against Deacon’s hold.

“Sarah, please,” the older man implored, his gaze kind. “My son united with Silence at my request. I intend to raise our children here, on Halla, with her. But as a ghost, I am not permitted to legally unite with her, and a legal union is the only thing that will protect her from possession. Since you left to go back to live on Earth, Deacon’s union with you was legally nullified, due to abandonment. This left him free to unite again, and we seized an opportunity to keep Silence and my children safe. This is not a love match. It is a favor to me.”

The fight eased out of me as I considered what Valor had said. “Possession…that’s where a ghost controls you, right? I mean, that’s not great, but—”

“I am a Bateen ,” Silence uncharacteristically interrupted me. “The daughter of the ruler, Justice Bateen. That fact alone is enough for half the ghosts on Halla to want to murder me, and that is the best scenario I could hope for.”

I blinked, trying to figure it out. “I don’t understand. How is that the best scenario?”

“Because if they wanted to make me suffer first, they could possess my body and make me murder my children, before they murdered me.”

Horrified by the thought, I tried to wrap my mind around it all. “So, Valor, you unite Silence with the son who was engaged to her, and you say it’s not a love match?”

Valor nodded solemnly. “Yes. I asked Deacon to do so because I trust him.”

Wave folded her arms and in a grumpy tone the historian said, “It is true, Sarah. Prior to the ceremony, there had been extensive talk of how to get around the after-union pomp. I had to perform considerable research on how to maneuver around such a thing. It took nearly an entire hour to perform the research, and I cannot tell you the last time anything took me that long.”

I looked up to Deacon, searching his handsome face. “This wasn’t because you two had been engaged before?”

He shook his head, sadness gleaming in his eyes. “No, Consort. Not at all. While it is true I had loved Silence for many years—”

“You might want to skip that part of things,” I said, not wanting to hear about his love for another woman, even if it was in the past. “I don’t need to think about any of that, while I’m trying to sort this all out.”

He gave a short smile and finally released my arm. “Understood. This truly was only to protect Silence and my half brother and sister from the ghosts here on Halla. My heart is not with her. It is with you. And with Jac.”

My eyes burned for a better reason this time around, and my throat tightened with emotion. “Do you mean that?”

He slowly nodded and smiled. “With every part of me.”

“Does that mean we are united again?” I asked hopefully. “I don’t know how Ladrian law works with all of this stuff.”

Wave chimed in. “As you were united to Deacon first, you have a claim on him and anything he does, despite the annulment. Do you object to the union of Deacon and Silence?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “But what about protection for Silence?”

“We will figure that out,” Deacon said. “But it is you that I want.”

“Very well,” Wave said before I could respond to Deacon, and pressed the pendant on her uniform to record her words. “The union of Deacon Amroll-Bellket Ladrang and the Princess Silence Reticent Bateen is officially annulled.” She pressed it again, I assumed to turn it off. “Now you are free to unite with whomever you wish,” she said to Deacon, before glancing back at me. “However, your union is still dissolved, as you abandoned him.”

“I did not—”

“You did,” Deacon interjected before I could argue. But he didn’t seem upset to say it.

“I…” I stared up at Deacon, trying to find the right words to make him understand why I’d left him, and Jac, behind. “I just…I saw Jac in danger because of me, and I panicked and couldn’t stay, but when I got to Earth—”

Deacon lifted his hand to stop me from speaking. “You do not need to explain your reasons to me. All that matters is that now you are back, and we can be united once more.”

I glanced around at the audience we had, before meeting Deacon’s gaze again. “Can we go somewhere private to talk about that?”

“Of course.” He turned to everyone else. “Please excuse us.”

He opened the heavy backyard gate for me, and I followed him to the front of his father’s property.

The blue wildflowers bloomed brightly beneath our feet. Valor’s home on Halla was a quaint cottage compared to Deacon’s mother’s luxury glass home that could have doubled as a hotel. I had not seen anything that ostentatious on Halla, and I doubted anything like it existed on this micro-planet.

We walked in silence, every footstep a heavy reminder of what I had done. I had left him behind, yes, but in the state of mind I’d been in, I had to. Even now, I still didn’t know how to process anything that had happened during the fight with the conduits, and I wasn’t sure how I would deal with anything going forward, either. The battle had been bloody and brutal, and I had almost died. But I couldn’t not be with Deacon and Jac. The whole situation left me with knots in my stomach and fear in my heart.

Deacon’s ship, Allegiant , sat just beyond the front yard. A sleek exterior with frosted gray metal and many windows, his ship was more comparable to his mother’s home. High-end, polished. The door opened with a whoosh, and we walked through the brightly illuminated halls to his quarters. Deacon’s room was just as clean and crisp as the rest of the ship, but larger than most of the other rooms on board.

The moment the door shut behind us, I grabbed his uniform and pulled him down to me for a kiss. It was a cautious thing—just a peck, really—but I needed that contact with him. His warmth filled me from my lips down the rest of my body like a wildfire.

I sighed, releasing his lips from mine but I didn’t move away from him, or release his uniform. “Mm, thank you for that.”

He smiled down at me. “As I said, Sarah, anything you want.”

I exhaled a breath. “I want to talk, actually. But I needed a kiss to calm my nerves.”

He carefully backed me up against the wall, a wicked gleam in his hazel eyes. “Then perhaps I should make you nervous, so you need more kisses.”

I couldn’t contain my soft laughter, because that said a lot for an alien race who didn’t normally indulge in that sort of intimacy. “Oh, you’re bad, aren’t you?”

He shrugged and wound a strand of my long, dark hair around one of his fingers. “Seeing you again has made me mischievous. I have missed you.”

Hearing him say that warmed my heart. “I’ve missed you, too, but I really do need to speak to you before you start distracting me with other things. Okay?”

He sighed in disappointment and dropped his hand back down to his side. “Very well, then. As you wish.” He walked away and sat on his bed. “Speak, so that we may get to the other things faster.”

Gathering my thoughts, I began to pace. “There are so many things I need to know and do and learn about Ladrians and the cultures and the beliefs and—”

“This seems like it will be a very long conversation then,” he said, interrupting me in that formal, classed tone of his. “Perhaps some refreshments?”

“Soon, yes, but Jac…where is he?” I asked of the man who’d originally abducted me, and had become a companion to both myself and Deacon. “I would have thought he would be back from dropping me off on Earth by now.”

“He had returned before you, but, well…” Deacon frowned and hesitated a few second before continuing. “I gave him a new assignment, and I do not know if you will be unhappy about it.”

My body tensed for bad news and I stopped pacing as the unthinkable jumped into my head. “Did you send him off to unite with someone else?”

“No, I—”

“Then I’m not going to be unhappy about it,” I said in a rush of relief.

He took a breath and huffed it out. “I sent him to see your father, Volatile.” When I stared at him in confusion, he went on. “When we found ourselves in need of a conduit prior to your forcible relocation—”

“You mean before you two kidnapped me from Earth?” I asked in a wry tone, then waved a hand in the air between us. “Yeah, go on.”

He winced at my wording, but continued. “Jac and I had discussed visiting Volatile to find out where his other children are, to see if any of the others might be a conduit, like you.”

“Oh, right.” I nodded, remembering when Deacon and Jac had originally told me of this plan. Thank god my sisters Elizabeth and Jenny didn’t fall into that category, despite being Volatile’s daughters, as well. As far as I knew, neither one of them could see or communicate with ghosts like I could.

I placed my hands on my hips and narrowed my gaze on Deacon. “So not only were you replacing me with Silence , but you were also replacing me as a conduit with some of Volatile’s offspring?”

He arched a brow. “Please understand, Sarah. You could never be replaced in our hearts, but you were the one who left us, which meant we still needed a capable conduit to handle the ghost situation here on Halla.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” I said, calming down. “So, Jac’s with my biological father now?”

“He should be on Volatile’s island by now, yes.”

“Volatile has an island?” I asked, fascinated by the thought.

Deacon nodded. “After the war, your father relocated to an island on the Diamond Sea of Orhon, far from the land. Rumor has it, he wanted nothing more to do with politics. His wish is to live out his years on his island and away from everyone but his servants.”

“I understand the urge,” I murmured. “Can you call Jac back here to Halla?”

“I can try, but if he has already made contact with Volatile, he cannot leave so soon.” Deacon stood and walked to the enormous monitor on the wall. “ Allegiant , call Sovereign, captain’s quarters,” he said, to touch base with Jac’s ship.

“Calling Sovereign ,” Allegiant’s smooth voice responded.

I stopped beside Deacon. “Why wouldn’t Jac be able to leave right after contacting Volatile?”

He glanced down at me and explained. “One of the many things for you to learn about Ladrians. When you are with an elder royal, you do things on their terms.”

After a moment, the monitor screen was filled with a view of Jac’s empty quarters.

Deacon said, “ Allegiant , the infirmary.”

The monitor flashed to Sovereign’s infirmary. The female alien doctor, Ode Hrimp, smiled up at the screen. She had long blue hair and her skin tone was as dark as Silence’s, but her sheen was different. All living Ladrians had a sheen, as though their skin was covered in a pearly coating. Not wet looking, but iridescent. Ode’s sheen shimmered indigo in the light.

“Oh hey, Deacon—Sarah?” Her eyes widened at seeing me there, too. “You’re back?”

I grinned at the woman who’d saved my life after the battle with the corrupt conduits who’d had every intention of murdering me because of the powers I possessed. “I am.”

“Jac will be thrilled to see you. He’s been so mopey since he took you back to Earth.”

I laughed. “I’m glad to hear it. I’ve missed him, too.”

Deacon said, “Ode, has he made contact with Volatile?”

“Yes, they are greeting now.”

“As soon as he is able to, please have him contact me,” Deacon said. “We have much to discuss.”

“Clearly,” the doctor said, glancing from Deacon to me. “I’ll let him know.”

“Thank you, Ode. Allegiant , out.”

The monitor was blackened once more.

Deacon turned to face me. “I understand why you would want to see Jac so soon after your return, but you appear to have more than that on your mind.”

Butterflies flipped in my stomach. “I do. Wave said she would unite you and I again, and I am not sure—”

He held up a hand to stop me. “Whenever you want me, whenever you are ready, I will be your companion once more.”

A half grin curved my lips. “Is that what it’s called for male Ladrians? You are companion to my consort?”

He tipped his head to the side, causing his long gray hair to slid over his shoulder. “We did not discuss this before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Men are companions and women are consorts,” he explained. “Anyone who does not fit into those categories may choose their own titles.”

“Huh.” I considered that for a moment before broaching my idea. “Well, I’m not sure if Ladrian law allows plural unions, but what would you think of Jac being legally in our union? That way he can’t be possessed, either, and—”

Deacon cut me off with a kiss, giving me his answer with that seductive physical assault. His tongue had a map of peculiar nodes on it—larger than taste buds—and they gave his kisses a unique property I enjoyed. Feeling his tongue in my mouth made me think of it going other places, and before I knew it, he had picked me up and wrapped my legs around his waist.

I anchored my arms around his neck and held on, pressing our bodies together. Even though I had not been gone for long, I had forgotten how much hotter his body ran versus humans. Kissing him warmed me up in more ways than one. Our connection was too strong to hold back much longer.

But I managed to pry my lips from his and breathlessly asked, “So, is that a yes? Jac can join us?”

“Moons above, Consort, yes!” he replied enthusiastically.

Deacon walked us back to his fur-covered bed and laid me down, the hunger in his eyes lighting my body on fire. He tossed his tan uniform behind himself, quickly shedding his clothes while I tugged away my wrap dress until it was on the floor, too.

Deacon’s naked body was something to behold—it was like his muscles had their own muscles. Ladrians were meatier than their human counterparts—a twenty-pack, instead of an eight pack, and so on—and I imagined that was why they were so much warmer than us. Whatever the reason, I needed his heat inside of me.

I glanced lower and bit my bottom lip. His cock was in line with the rest of him—larger, thicker, more veins, and hard and ready to fuck. Desire pooled at my core.

He climbed onto the fur with me, skimming his mouth up my legs. My body trembled for him. He held my thighs wide open and stared at my wet pussy before yanking my legs to him, slipping his arms beneath my hips and lifting me up from the bed. He laid down with my pelvis elevated on his enormous hot hands and buried his face against my pussy.

I gasped, and he moaned against me as he tasted me there. “I have missed you, Consort.”

I slid my fingers through his hair and purred in a sultry tone, “I’ve missed you, too, companion.”

He growled and his tongue slid into me, making me suck in a sharp breath and arch my back. Between the nodes on his tongue and their texture, the length, and their pure desire, Ladrian men, in my limited experience, were far better equipped for a woman’s pleasure. He reached my G-spot with his long tongue, making me twitch and jerk, but held me in place against his face. I was helpless to his whims as he stroked inside me. My fists balled against the soft fur he used as a bedspread.

Pleasure built in my core, before it rushed out of my mouth in a gasping shout. “Oh my god. Don’t stop!”

He didn’t. He devoured me and every drop of sweetness there, like my body gave him life. His tongue stroked my depths, making me dig my heels into his back. He didn’t seem to notice, growling for more. When my orgasm hit, I was unable to control myself and screamed as my body convulsed with waves of pleasure. When it was over, he licked up my body, biting and sucking in various places as Ladrians tended to do, until finally, he was on top of me.

Our height difference meant he leaned onto his hands over my shoulders and arched his back to push into me. But before he did, Deacon glanced down at me and met my gaze, his own eyes dark and filled with lust as he said, “Consort, I need—”

“Oh my god, Deacon, fuck me already!” I demanded impatiently.

Without another word, he thrust into my throbbing pussy. I clawed at his chest and abdomen as I arched my back and screamed again. His very large cock had entered me by only a couple of inches—he was so careful with me, since humans weren’t equipped to take the length of his shaft easily—but I had forgotten just how much of a stretch it was.

I gripped his shoulders and panted for breath.

Deacon paused. “Are you okay—”

“Don’t stop,” I moaned, needing this, and him, more than ever.

Only then did he seemed to get comfortable. Still careful not to split me in two with his size, every thrust was wilder than the one before. I licked up his chest to his throat, as he groaned.

More, all I want is more! I wrapped my legs around the back of his thighs and gripped his ass in my hands, trying to take him deeper. He worked my body with his, fighting to keep me from pulling him in too far. Grabbing my wrists, he held them onto the bed, taking control as he fucked me as I came all over his cock, long and hard.

I was rabid, biting at him, jerking uncontrollably, until finally, he came, too, with a hoarse shout and a shudder of his big body above mine.