Billionaire Romance: MAXIMILIAN (An Alpha Bad Boy Contemporary Mystery Romance) (Mysterious Billionaires Book 3, Anthologies & Collections) (12 page)

              The ship moved smoothly, just meters above the ring, and at one point Dagin looked over at her and grinned, saying, "Watch this!"

Danielle kept her eyes fixed on the viewport and felt a fluttering in her stomach as the craft went into a long, shallow dive.  In the next moment, the ship was skimming the surface of the ring; not descending fully into it, just slipping along the uppermost part of the orbiting icy rime.  The viewports to the front and both sides were at once filled with a sparkling cascade of particles, a shower and spray of ice crystals that the ship kicked up as it passed.  Startled and delighted at the gorgeous display, Danielle let out a "Whoop!"  Then, embarrassed, she raised a hand to her mouth and tittered and giggled quietly as the ship went skimming along the ring and Dagin glanced over at her, enjoying her enjoyment—and anticipating the still greater enjoyment that he would soon give her.

              They made one full circuit of the rings of Saturn before Dagin returned his craft to its docking at the resort, where the spin of Titan II lent it a semblance of Earth's gravity once more and they no longer needed the boots.  Taking Danielle by the hand, he led her from the cockpit through a passage whose walls shimmered iridescently like mother-of-pearl to a chamber containing a large viewport through which they could see the rotating arc of the resort.  Presiding over the master cabin of the yacht, which was all done in gold and burgundy tones, was Dagin's large and sumptuously inviting-looking bed, whose sheets at the moment were shrink-wrapped to the mattress and frame.  Dagin called to the ship's systems, "Release bed."  At once, with a hissing and rustling sound, the sheets came loose from the rest of the bed and the headboard opened up and two large, thick, soft pillows rolled out.  The bed was thus ready for normal-gravity use.

              Danielle looked up at Dagin warmly, sincerely, and said, "I think I owe you an apology first."

              "For what?" Dagin asked.

              "For the way I spoke to you on the observation deck.  For throwing all the disappointment I've had from Braden and other men at you, as if you were responsible.  I shouldn't have done that to you.  I apologize."

              "That is done now, Danielle.  It is no more.  There is only now, and what I wish us to have together in this bed."  Danielle stood immobile, barely able to breathe, watching Dagin strip off his longcoat, boots, and everything else.  One piece at a time, his clothing came to rest on the floor or on the chair and divan-like cushions fastened to the walls, until the Prince of Sarma stood revealed in all his naked glory.  He was even more perfect than Danielle imagined.  Every muscle up and down his frame looked as if it had been selected from some celestial shop of bodies.  And at the juncture of his thighs, under a silky bush of dark pubic hair, hung something, that was a mighty vessel in its own right, long and thick and veined with a fleshy bottleneck of foreskin.  "This is the end of all your disappointments, Danielle," Dagin said.  "Take off your clothes and join me in the bed.  I wish to be inside you many times."

              The next moments passed in a glittering haze like their skimming of the Saturnian ring.  One moment Danielle was dressed.  The next, her gown and everything else she had been wearing lay draped upon one of the furnishings of the master cabin—and the naked Danielle herself strode dreamily to the bed where Dagin sat on his knees with an arm outstretched and the vessel between his legs aimed right at her, ready to be launched.

              Danielle, sitting with him on the bed, leaned back her head and let out a long breath at the feeling of his hands moving up and down the full, soft contours of her body.  His hands were so wonderfully smooth and hot that he had her in a state of rapture at his first touch.  He whispered to her, "Touch me.  Feel me.  All of me."  And Danielle did.  She set her hands free to explore the world of smooth, tight, hard muscle that was Dagin's body. 

With their mutual caressing came Dagin's kisses on her mouth, hot and wet and deep, his tongue probing between her lips, his lips sucking at hers as if to devour all the passion and desire right out of her.  More incredible than the sensations that her lips drank in were the feelings that greeted her hands.  So many times she had imagined touching every part of the perfect man and feeling what true perfection of body was.  But her imagination paled beside the reality of Dagin's warm, sinewy flesh.  She grasped his buttocks and squeezed, feeling them tighten and flex at the command of her eager fingers.  He kissed her harder, encouraging her to know more of his body.  He took one of her hands and guided it to the erect ship of his sex, and slurped into her mouth, "Touch my
zazansa. 
And the sac of my
briole.
  Feel of my sex and know what I shall do to you."

              She did as Dagin said—and as she so dearly wanted.  Danielle took hold of the pulsing, throbbing wonder between Dagin's legs and ran her fingers along it, feeling the hot surge of his shaft in her hands and the slick dribble of his pre-seed onto her skin.  Oh, was there any part of him that was not warm to the touch?  His pre-seed was like a heated nectar.  She savored the feeling of it on her, even as she slid her hand back to the root of his shaft to grasp the round, firm fruit of Sarma that lay behind it.  His sac, too, was warm, and she knew it was filled with a white sap of maleness that would soon flow deep into her.

              Dagin let his own hand slide purposefully from the ample roundness of Danielle's bottom to the treasure under the wreath of hair between her own thighs, and she sighed in mid-kiss with the feeling of his strong fingers exploring the slick, wet opening of her woman cave.  Taking her mouth from his, she began to kiss and lick and suck her way along the cord of his neck down to the plateau of his shoulder, while letting him take her sex with his fingers.  All the while she continued to fondle and caress his long, hot, thick hardness, making him grunt and groan with the desire for release.  "Mmmm," he uttered, sniffing at her hair.  "Your
gliarra
is so wet.  And I know my
zazansa
will find it tight when I put it inside you.  I will
shadaal
you so many times this night.  Over and over I will do it to you, Danielle... over and over..."

              Breathlessly, she poured out her response, "Yes, Dagin, yes..."  And at that moment, his fingers found the dearest prize that her treasure held.  His fingertips, slick with her juices, teased and flicked and stroked at the bud of a woman's most special joy.  And at the rising of this newest, greatest pleasure so far, she firmly but carefully squeezed the fleshy roundness of his man-prize.  Together, they pleasured one another, stroking and strumming and squeezing, Dagin's fingers growing ever wetter with the liquid expression of her delight that flowed onto them.  The elation that Danielle felt grew until she could no longer contain it.  She tore her lips from his shoulder and cried out,  "
YEEESSS!"
from the seismic shock of an orgasm that thundered through her flesh.  Danielle found herself panting in Dagin's arms, still holding his erection as he rained kisses upon her shoulder.  She felt herself grow limp from this moment of ultimate ecstasy, and he guided her down onto her back on the bed for what he was ready to do next.

              Dagin gently took his lengthy piece from her grasp, put her hands up on either side of her head on the sheets, and opened Danielle's thighs for access to the wet pink flower between them.  In a voice husky with a man's desire, he said, "Now I shall show you how a prince
shadaals
a woman that he desires."

              Submitting completely and joyously, Danielle let Dagin come down on top of her and nestle himself between her thighs, and with a skillful stroke he eased his tool inside her.  She moaned at his first penetration, the pleasure rising in her once again.  With his hardness sheathed in her wetness and reaching all the way to her womb, Danielle belonged to His Highness.  Dagin pumped inside her, grunting in what seemed a truly mad joy, "Ah...
ah,
yes!  Oh yes, I knew you had a tight
gliarra. 
I will not want to stop, now I am in you. 
Aaahhh,
it is good.  So tight... so good..."

Dagin's humping, the quick, deep, and urgent pistoning of his tool in and out of her, filled Danielle not only with his hard and throbbing flesh, but with a feeling that she had never known.  It was a feeling of not being merely taken, not merely entered and penetrated, but almost a feeling of reverence from the magnificent manhood humping away on top of her.  It almost seemed to her that Dagin's hot, hard, feverish intercourse was not only a thrusting of his meat into her depths, but a thrusting of his spirit, his being, into her own.  How could anything feel as indescribably wonderful as this mounting and pounding by the inhumanly handsome and beautiful prince of another world?  Dagin's
zazansa
moving hard and fast in and out of her, the wet and wondrous sliding of his sex inside her tight channel, made her feel as though his mighty and pulsing organ were a totem pole of passion being buried in the soil of her womanhood.

              And Danielle had faith that the thrusting, grunting prince driving that piston of pleasure in and out of her and slamming his crotch against her mound, would be as good as his word.  He would be on top of her and in and out of her for hours to come.  And speaking of coming...

              All at once, Dagin matched the ultimate moment that he gave her with one of his own.  He came up on the balls of his hands and drove his steely vessel into her harder and harder with every successive stroke, until the walls of the ship's cabin reverberated with the impacts of his pubis against hers and the sounds of her wailing and his shouting:  "
Uuuhhh... Uuuhhh... UUUHHH YES!"
  With one last piledriver blow of his piece into her depths, Dagin let go.  In his mind's ear, the gush of his seed into Danielle's womb was a sound to match his own voice.  It became a long cascade of thick, wet whiteness, shooting and pouring from his glans into her deepest reaches, until he had given her all that he had... for now.

              The two of them panted together as Dagin pulled a still half-erect piece from inside her and they curled up together on the bed.  They melted into kisses long, wet, and lingering, their warm breath mixing post-coitally.  Somewhere in the midst of it, Dagin's fingers found their way back between Danielle's thighs, and she rejoiced in submitting to him.  "That was not even the beginning," he groaned.  "I will be in you many times, Danielle.  Many times, here on my ship and back in your suite.  I will
shadaal
you more than you have ever dreamed any man could.  I have not even begun."

              "Please, yes," was all she could say, giving herself in to another long kiss.

              Danielle stayed aboard the prince's ship as he said, the ball in his honor now all but forgotten in this mutual celebration of desire.  She submitted to his demand for more and ever more of her
gliarra
and worshipped his body and his
zazansa,
and lay with him in her suite for still more, as he had said.  In the days to come, the interstellar newsfeed would be abuzz with the story of the Prince of Sarma taking a human heiress of Mars with him from Titan II and exploring the known galaxy with her.  But the stories would not tell even half of the real exploration that took place in the prince's bed.

THE END

NORAH AND THE ALIEN LORD

              Norah Slattery, strapped into her seat in the passenger cabin of the envoy ship from Earth, used her linker, which rested in front of her on the table mounted to the cabin wall, to bring up a hologram of what lay out the front viewport of the ship.  The hologram gave her the nearest thing to a first-hand look at the planet Sarma.

              It was an inviting-looking planet, she thought, even considering its recent history.  It looked much like the Earth, a blue and green planet with bands and filigrees of white clouds.  Sarma's continents had more hues of tan and rust than those of Earth, bespeaking a planet with larger desert and mountainous regions.  But even these were as diverse as the corresponding regions that Norah knew back home.  Sarma, she knew from the
Interstellar Geographic
reports, was filled with places that reminded her of the North American Southwest, the Badlands, and the Petrified Forest as well as the great Sahara.  Once everything was sorted out politically and diplomatically with Sarma, which Earth had so recently contacted, there would no doubt be increasing tourist traffic to this planet. For now, most humans coming to Sarma were diplomats, government officials, and researchers like Norah.

              Norah appreciated the government back home sending her to Sarma in a private envoy ship, owing to the importance of what she was coming to do here.  For the length of her trip, everything had been as comfortable as it could be in zero gravity, and the pilot and copilot had not intruded on her as she went over her project notes and made her plans for further study.  She only wished they had assigned her a ship with artificial gravity, but such vessels were few in number even for government use.  Artificial gravity was the rarest and most luxurious technology in demand just now, though it was expected to become standard in space vessels eventually.  For this trip it was the usual deal of being strapped into her seat for most of it, or plodding around on the decks in magnetic boots as the only alternative to floating.  Norah never much cared for floating, as nature had seen fit to give her a full and roundish figure and she always felt ungainly and self-conscious in freefall.  She also had to pin back the brown hair that normally settled over her shoulders, lest it drift annoyingly into her face. 
One of these days,
she often promised herself,
I swear I'm just going to have these extra pounds lasered away so I'll be more comfortable when I have to leave Earth.
  She had just never gotten around to it.

              Regardless of all that, she would surely be more comfortable when she got where she was going;  for on this, her first visit to Sarma, Norah was to be the guest of a lord.

              She tapped on her linker to dismiss the hologram of the planet, then tapped on the opaque crystal square again to bring up another hologram, this one the image of Lord Vashar.  Truth be told, he did not strike her as a terribly lordly-looking person, in spite of his gold-leaf-patterned burgundy suit.  It was not only because of the inverted triangle of hair down his forehead from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, which only marked him as Sarmian.  It was because when Norah thought of a lord, her mind always gave her a somewhat archaic picture of an elder gentleman, perhaps mustachioed or bearded, with a paunchy belly, presiding over a lot of underlings.  Lord Vashar was a complete contradiction of the image.  She guessed his age at perhaps a couple of Earth years over thirty-five, certainly not yet forty—comparable to her own age.  And Lord, but this lord was something handsome.  With slightly tousled, dark brown hair and dark brown eyes to match, his features were like those of a leading man in a holovid.  He had what Norah liked to call a bedroom face.  Moreover, she could tell that the figure under that ornate suit must surely be a bedroom body.  No doubt Vashar spent plenty of time out of his lordly vestments and between the sheets with the lucky ladies of Sarma.

              Norah, however, was a most fortunate engineer of the planet Earth, who had been sent to Sarma for the unveiling of the discovery in Lord Vashar's possession, which even now lay locked away on his estate.  It was one of a series of such discoveries that had almost perfectly coincided with first contact between Earth and Sarma.  The news of these discoveries had sent shockwaves through the political and scientific communities of known space.  It was as momentous as the meeting of the genetically related peoples of Earth and Sarma themselves, for it would almost certainly change the entire understanding of galactic history and the place of all sentient beings in the universe.  The eyes of civilization across space would be on Sarma when the presentation was made, and Norah Slattery would be there when it happened.

              To engage motion and sound she tapped on the display of Vashar standing in his elegantly furnished study, and the recording began to play.  She had watched it several times, but the subject—and the presenter—were just so fascinating, she thought she would never tire of them.

              In the recording, Vashar stood looking every bit the gentleman before a large curtain several heads taller than he and perhaps three times as wide.  Sounding just the way he looked (his accent reminded Norah a bit of Earth's British) he went into a talk.

"Brothers and sisters of Sarma and other gentlebeings," he began. “As you know, we are living in an unprecedented time in the galaxy.  We had believed that the discovery of a shared ancestry between the people of Sarma and the people of the planet Earth was as remarkable and extraordinary a thing as this generation would ever know.  We should have been contented to know that it was the most extraordinary thing to occur in this century and that we all lived to see it.  But even in a time of wonders, it seems, there is yet more wonder to be known."

              Norah listened raptly as the gentleman of Sarma went on, his voice mesmerizing her as much as his appearance did.  "With the discovery of our kinship with the human race of Earth came many speculations in the communities of science, not only on our own two planets but every other planet in known space.  How could identical genetic markers appear in species from two different planets separated by thousands of light years?  How did specimens of terrestrial life find their way to Sarma?  Is it indeed that Sarma became the cradle of life from Earth, or did life from Sarma in fact make its way to that planet?  And what agency accounts for this shared heritage?  Who or what could have thus intervened in the natural histories of these respective planets? 

              "The leading conjecture holds that aliens, ancient and powerful in the extreme, unknown and perhaps unknowable, visited one planet in its prehistory and delivered life from there to the other.  Our most ancient mytho-history on Sarma tells us of ancient gods whom we call the Shapers, whom our most distant ancestors served.  According to the tales of the dawn of our existence, 'twas truly the Shapers who made us the warriors we have always been; who bred us to battle in their own wars—until, for reasons and by means unknown, they disappeared, leaving us to our own devices.  We have had no evidence of the reality of the Shapers save for texts, etchings, tapestries, and paintings that we have held for thousands of years—until now."

              "Artifacts have been discovered in the galaxy—objects created by technologies foreign to any known civilization.  When the first was discovered on planet Sigma Cephei, unearthed by archaeologists thereon, it activated with an energy of unknown source—and on three other planets across space, similar energy signatures suddenly appeared, leading scientists to three similar artifacts, leading to the conclusion that the objects are of the same origin and are somehow linked across spacetime.  One such object was found here on Sarma itself, and another upon the very planet Earth.  It might have been found here far sooner than it was, but as you know, we of Sarma have until recently been too embroiled in our planetary conflicts to discover the unknown.  You, the members of scientific disciplines from across known space, have been invited to my estate here on Sarma, on my property where the Sarmian segment was found, to witness the assembly of the parts of the single artifact to which these discoveries collectively belong.  It is hoped that we shall then learn the function of the artifact—and perhaps know secrets of life on Sarma, on Earth, and even the galaxy, which no other generation before us has ever learned.  And now, I present to you... the Sarmian segment."

              Norah smiled, containing her excitement.  She watched as Vashar drew away the curtain and exposed the find.  There, standing upright on a broad platform behind him, was an arc of metal resembling bronze, carved and etched with patterns that suggested circuitry.  Parts of it shimmered with an inner glow, and other parts appeared encrusted with gleaming jewels.  It was a thing as beautiful as it was mysterious.  Had it been a vertical column it would have stood as tall as Vashar himself.  Its shape suggested that it was one quarter of a circle.  Either end of it had nooks and niches where another part would fit.  When the three remaining parts were delivered to Sarma and the whole thing was assembled, it would be a large ring, twice as high as a man was tall.  What was it for?

              Vashar echoed the question.  "Is this object truly the work of the Shapers?  If so, it is the only such work ever known to have been discovered.  What is its purpose?  What is its true power?  If it is the work of minds completely alien to our own, is its purpose even knowable to us?  When we gather here on my estate, we shall endeavor to seek the answers together."

              At this point the gentleman of Sarma looked directly into the lens of the recording device and sounded as if he were addressing Norah personally.  He finished, "I await your coming."

With that, the recording reached its end and vanished from the space above Norah's linker, leaving her with a distinct tingle in her chest and in other, more intimate regions.

              Sarma was still perhaps an hour and a half away, giving Norah plenty of time to dwell on the welcoming message of the hologram—and the equally inviting appearance of the Sarmian lord who created it.  Sarma was a monarchy ruled by a king or queen, and like all such monarchies it had a hierarchy below the throne.  At the lower end lay the leaders of the planet's thousands of individual tribes, who petitioned the needs of their tribes to the lords.  It was the lords who drafted petitions to be presented to the throne, to be dismissed or enacted into laws as the ruler saw fit.  Vashar, then, stood at the midpoint of the hierarchy.  But the lords had other functions.  They also presided over all of the planet's seats of higher learning.  All the greatest and most important knowledge on the planet was collected and disseminated under their watch.  A Lord of Sarma represented political power and education rolled into one package.

              And in her capacity as a university research engineer with government connections, Norah had been selected out of a very large pool of very eager candidates to be present to witness and record what happened when all the pieces of the possible Shaper artifact were brought together and, it was assumed, the artifact was fully activated.

              On Earth, Sarma, and every other civilized planet, the assembly of the Shaper artifact was greeted with as much anxiety and trepidation as excitement.  No one could be sure what such an alien thing would do.  Was it an elaborate bomb or booby trap?  The possibility that it was a weapon had not been ruled out, given that the Shapers were thought to have bred the Sarmians as warriors.  Perhaps it was a transport device, such as an artificial wormhole or spacetime conduit.  It could be a signal device, designed to activate countless other hidden devices for whatever unguessable purposes.  Or its function could be something completely unanticipated—perhaps wonderful, perhaps dire for all life.  No one knew.  In universities and seats of government across the known galaxy, the device was a subject of an inferno of debate.  Many were the voices that cried out for keeping the pieces separate, of not turning the thing on at all.  But curiosity, the need to know and understand, had finally won out—and Sarma, the last planet of the four where the pieces were found, was chosen as the site of the assembly.  And it was this fateful moment that Norah Slattery would be there to see.

________________

              Arriving on Sarma, Norah was impressed with the courtesy shown her as a functionary of the government of Earth.  The chauffeured vehicle that awaited her at the spaceport nearest her destination was not a common floater.  It was a larger, more ornate-looking craft that reminded her somewhat of the chariot magically transformed from a pumpkin in an old Earth fairytale.  The pilot of the floater removed her baggage from the ship and carried it to the fairytale craft.  Norah did her best to look like a slender, graceful girl in a ball gown and glass slippers as she climbed inside and the floater went whizzing away over the ground.  This, she guessed, must be one of Lord Vashar's official vehicles, which had surely transported nobles from other districts of the planet to meetings with Vashar.  She was being treated as a Sarmian VIP, a gesture that she hoped was a good sign for the rest of her visit.

              The craft glided along the avenues of what Norah took to be one of Sarma's larger cities.  She noted the lack of tall buildings in her surroundings.  The Sarmians had a noticeably different architectural sense than on Earth.  Where Earth cities were planned to grow upwards, Sarmian city planners seemed to favor an outward, lateral spread like the suburbs of Earth's 20th and 21st centuries.  Norah guessed that none of the buildings she saw was any more than seven or eight stories in height, and their general style reminded her of pictures of southwestern pueblos that she had seen in old photo books.  What most captivated her was the people, especially the men.  Only the elders of Sarma had round, stout, soft bodies.  Anyone under about the age of fifty-five Earth years was a lean, hard specimen.  Moreover, the Sarmians seemed to have bypassed completely the body shame of Earth's history.  Norah was bemused at how relatively little anyone, the men in particular, wore while out on the streets.  Well, she figured, anyone built like these people had no reason at all to be ashamed; though it struck Norah that she might feel rather out of place here as a woman in her thirties with a body type like that of a Sarmian woman in her sixties.  What would the Sarmians think of her?  Would they treat her as the age she was, or as an elder?