I fixed my posture so the poor guy wasn’t stuck leaning back at such an awkward angle, mulling it over and getting nowhere. As Silar urged Tarion into a slow trot, steering us into a wide, dusty road, I gave up on trying to figure it out. Whatever his reasons, he’d married me. I was safe. At least for the next month.

And I sure as hell wasn’t about to look this gift shuldu in the mouth.

10SILAR

The ride back to the ranch seemed impossibly long, though the position of the sun told me I was making expected time on the journey. I spent most of the trip trying very hard not to touch my wife, because every time I did it felt as if I’d been hit with the lowest setting of a stunner. Not enough to knock me out, but enough to send every nerve bristling with hotly distracting sensation.

So I sat up straight and did not touch her, keeping my eyes on the road ahead and sweeping them side to side every now and then, watching for ardu serpents and other creatures that could cause us trouble. Luckily, larger predators like genka and ortu did not typically hunt out in the open. They were more trouble in the trees near the ranch, which was why keeping fences mended was one of my top priorities.

By the time we plodded up the last stretch of the road to the ranch, I knew my ears would be badly burned. Spring sunburns crept up easily. The sun wasn’t hot enough to feel it.

I didn’t feel it yet, but I would later. At least it was only our ears prone to burning. The rest of our hide was made of much stronger stuff. Unlike Cherry, who looked vulnerable and soft everywhere. Alarmingly so.

“Oh, wow! This is it?” she asked from the saddle in front of me, tilting my hat back on her head to get a better look.

“Yes.”

I looked at my property, bestowed upon me as part of my conviction by the Zabrian Empire, and wondered what she saw. I’d grown so used to the place, having been here so very long, that I found it difficult to observe my home with a stranger’s perspective.

Directly ahead, a lane branched off from the main road and led up to my lumber-walled house. It looked suddenly small. It had never seemed that way before. But before, it had only been me.

Beyond the house stood the shuldu stalls, the large winter barn, the grazing pastures, and the gardens, everything enclosed by fencing I meticulously maintained. Behind it all, the mountains glinted pinkish-gold on the horizon, their tops still dusted with snow. Between the mountains and the fencing of my property stood some woods with a creek, swelled higher now than it would be in summer due to winter’s melt.

I did not need to turn Tarion onto the lane to the house. He knew where to go. I relaxed my hold on the reins further. Normally, by this point in the journey home, I’d be feeling much more at ease, away from other people, alone with my animals and plants and thoughts.

But now, I was not alone. And instead of my usual feeling of serene solitude I instead prickled with something hot and harried, my throat and the crotch of my pants feeling uncomfortably tight.

“It’s lovely!” Cherry said as we rode up to the house. I felt an awkward relief at that. If she hated the place, I was not entirely sure what I’d be able to do about it. Of course, I could try to make whatever adjustments to the property she requested, but my time was severely limited.

But other than her room and her bed, which I still planned to build, perhaps I would not need to do much else. That was good. The cattle were high maintenance enough without adding my human wife’s wishes into the equation.

I could not deny that the relief I felt was not solely about less work to be done.

A part of it was because, in her pronouncement of liking the property, it felt that she was making a judgment upon me by proxy. I’ll marry someone else. Anyone else. Her earlier words, which she seemed to have forgotten, still clanged in my head like metal on metal.

But she liked the property. That was a start.

I quickly dismounted, needing to not be so very near her for a moment. It was not a long moment, though, because despite her awkward wiggling and rolling, she could not get down on her own. All she managed to achieve was getting onto her belly and lying sidelong on the saddle, the backs of her legs facing me, her rump directly at my eye level.

I could barely remember what Zabrian females looked like. I’d certainly been too young to look at their backsides like this with any sort of appreciation. I did not know if backsides were even meant to be looked at, to be coveted. Whether this was typical for a Zabrian male, or some terrible result of my excision from good society, I had no idea.

But whatever the reason, for better or worse, I could not rip my gaze from my wife’s rump.

It was pertly curved, taut and round as she strained awkwardly on her belly. My throat contracted, my claws flexing with impotent hunger when I realized just how perfectly my hands could mould themselves to that part of her. The lack of tail was so very odd, but in a way that felt distinctly perverse I realized I rather liked it. I liked the strangely naked view it gave of her, even while she was fully clothed.

“Sorry, Silar. I think I’m stuck,” she admitted, her voice muffled by Tarion’s belly. A dust-softened thud let me know my hat had fallen off her head to the ground. Cherry kicked her legs, making her backside bounce up and then down, her hips wiggling in a trapped movement of frustration, the sight of which made my belly and groin feel startlingly hot.

“Silar?”

I shook myself. She’d be stuck there all day if I didn’t do something.

The fact that I could have stared at her like that all day was beside the point.

I turned my gaze to the blank blue of the sky, grasping her hips firmly and yanking her down to the ground without looking at her.

“Thanks! Sorry about that. I swear, I’m not usually so useless. I’m a quick learner. I’ll get used to everything soon. I promise.”

There she went again with her promises. Why did she feel the need to promise me anything when I was already so wholly undeserving of her?

“Let me just grab your hat. Thank you for that, by the way!” she said, jogging to where the hat had fallen as Tarion ambled away in search of water. I’d have to go follow him, get the saddle and everything off him. But for the moment I found myself once again wholly occupied by the sight of my wife’s backside, this time as she bent down to retrieve my hat from the ground. My cock pulsed.

I think there is something wrong with me.

It was a thought I’d had countless times before. Not many men could kill someone as a child as I had and not think so at some point or another. But for once, the thought was not about that dark day back on Zabria. It was about my new obsession with Cherry’s rump.

I wanted to clasp her hips while she was bent over like that.

I wanted to rub my cock on it.

There is definitely something wrong with me.

Such a desire could not be natural.

But then again, I had very little idea what constituted natural between Zabrian males and females, let alone a Zabrian male and a human female. I wondered if two of our kind had ever even been bonded before. Even if they had, I doubted a good Zabrian male from the Empire would currently be imagining dragging his hard, pulsing cock across the roundness of his human’s flesh the way I was.

Something very, very wrong.

I was sullied and broken and if my wife only knew the thoughts filling my head now then she would run from me the first moment that she got.

Thirty days. I had thirty days to learn how to control myself. Thirty days to patch up this strange, new, broken need inside me before she found out just how terrible the man she’d married was.