Oh God. I was supposed to be on my best behaviour. I was supposed to be charming him. Winning him. I couldn’t afford to make a bad impression, and I was pretty sure the one I’d made wasn’t just bad, it was catastrophic. And now he was going to change his mind and send me away and I’d get my stupid self dumped in a frigid lake by the Magnus mafia.

I had to turn this around.

I tried to smile, but realized too-late my nose was still crushed up against the glass. Which meant I probably looked fucking insane. I snatched my head back, silently dying inside when I noticed the oily smudge-mark I’d left behind on the glass. Praying that my husband-to-be was not the most astute of men and that he hadn’t noticed it – or any of the other dumb shit I’d done so far – I smiled again and gave him a jaunty wave.

“Hi! I’m Cherry! I’m – Oh, fuck me. The window is closed.”

I kept my harried smile plastered on my face as I started hunting around for a way to open the window, babbling all the while.

“I wasn’t… Well, I was… But I didn’t really mean to. At least at first. I’m sorry about that. Anyway, I’m just trying to figure out how to open this window so I can talk to you. They told me your translator should be up to date. Although maybe it’s better if it isn’t because then you won’t know how much absolute fucking nonsense is coming out of my mouth right now.”

In a moment of frustrated panic, I placed my hands flat on the square of the window and pushed hard, but all that gave me was sore wrists. Silar still stood there staring at me from outside, close enough that I’d be able to reach out and touch him if it weren’t for the glass between us.

And close enough, it turned out, for him to reach over, pull at some unseen latch, and open that impossible window without taking a single step.

I hadn’t realized how much the dust on the window had been distorting my view of him. With the dirty glass gone and nothing but empty air between us, Silar came into even more shocking and vivid focus, the golds and the blues and the bright, crackling whites of his eyes searing into me.

He didn’t say a word.

Alright, I thought, nerves snaking through my belly, let’s try this again.

“Hi,” I said, lifting my chin and doing my darnedest to smile into the fearsome heat of that white gaze. “I’m Cherry. I’m… I’m here to be your bride.”

Absurdly, even though I knew it wasn’t a Zabrian custom, I lifted my hand to shake, thrusting it out the window at him.

It took him a while to even notice my hand. When he finally did so, he reached out and grasped it in a firm, calloused grip. I practically cried out with relief, thinking that the gesture had to be a good sign.

Except he didn’t stay like that for long. He wasn’t trying to shake or even hold my hand. He simply pushed my hand back inside the room so that it wouldn’t be in the way when he closed the window. Which he immediately did. The glass thwunked back into place with terrible, dusty finality.

And then Silar turned his finely-sculpted golden ass right around and walked away.

Well. That was that, then. I’d fucked things up so royally he was apparently done with me before we’d even said, “I do.” I whirled around just in time to see Warden Tenn stepping up onto the porch and heading towards the open door into the office.

“If he doesn’t want me-” I started to say.

The warden froze in the doorway and frowned at my words. “If he doesn’t… What?”

“Then I’ll marry someone else,” I continued without pausing to take a breath. “Anyone else. It doesn’t matter who.” I knew I sounded desperate, but I was. Humiliatingly, I could feel tears biting at the backs of my eyes. If Silar didn’t want me there had to be some other lonely alien cowboy in this colony who’d be willing to take in a Peeping Tina on-the-run like me. Right!?

The fact that Silar wouldn’t be that man, that he’d so summarily rejected me already and that it actually kind of stung, didn’t matter. I’d take anyone. And if whoever that was didn’t look like he was carved out of a precious metal, well, that would just be too bad for me now wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t have scared Silar off, my literally golden chance at salvation.

I stared at Warden Tenn miserably, willing myself not to cry and expecting with every throttling beat of my heart to hear the sound of rapid hooves carrying Silar far, far away.

But that wasn’t what I heard next. There were no frantic hoofbeats disappearing into the dusty distance.

No, the next sound I heard was the heavy thud of a very big alien wearing very big boots stepping up onto the wood planks of the porch outside…

And coming closer.

8SILAR

Icannot believe I tried to give her to Fallon.

There were few times I’d ever been truly grateful to the warden. This was one of them. He could have accepted my morning request. Right now, this very moment, Fallon could have been walking around the side of the building towards the door and the woman inside instead of me. I would never have known what I’d missed out on, what I’d lost, until I saw them together one day in the future and I was knocked just as senseless with wonder as I’d been a mere moment ago glimpsing her little face through the window.

What a face. An odd, pale, wide-eyed face, with rounded cheekbones and a soft pink mouth and eyes gone white ’round the edges. Whatever emotion she’d experienced, she’d felt it keenly. I knew my own eyes had been bright white in return.

I could not remember the last time my heart had pounded so hard. It was unlikely my eyes would return to their normal colour for the next two days at this rate. Maybe not even the next two cycles, the way things were going.

After opening the window, I’d nearly vaulted right through it just so that I could stand beside her, to be with her instead of being on the outside looking in. The only thing that had stopped me was the fact that the window was too small for me to fit, and getting stuck halfway through an opening on the warden’s wall, tail foolishly up in the air, was not an ideal way to begin a marriage ceremony.

So I’d closed it against the outside dust as quickly as I could and now I was nearly at the porch. Cherry’s human voice drifted out of the warden’s office, high and trilling, the words parsed by my inner ear translator.

“I’ll marry someone else,” she said, her words slicing through the air like a stunner’s beam and sealing me to the spot. “Anyone else. It doesn’t matter who.”

I mentally ran through our interaction, trying to figure out just where I’d already gone wrong. She’d seen me with my trousers off and had apparently decided that she would now marry someone else. I frowned down at my body, wondering what she’d expected. I did not know how I stacked up against most decent Zabrian males of status – I only had the other convicts and the warden to compare myself too – and I knew even less of what she’d prize in a human male. But if she wanted a human male, surely she could just go out and get one and would have no reason to seek a husband here.

So. Perhaps it was something else, then. Maybe, as the warden had said, I should have worn a shirt for the ceremony. Only, I’d read about human grooms and their specific wedding outfits and nothing I owned seemed anywhere near the descriptions. It had seemed better to come as I was – bare-chested as I’d been when I’d received the warden’s call – than to wear something that was not right. But maybe this had displeased her.

Or perhaps she had noticed my lack of covered wagon. Maybe she assumed I did not have one at all, therefore I was an unworthy male who could not provide for her. In all honesty, I was an unworthy male, and I still was not sure I could provide for her. Her bedroom was not even ready, after all. But I did have a blasted wagon, at least, and curse me to Zabria and back for not bringing it with me now!