At least, that’s what I thought.

Until she broke all those thoughts apart and ground my brain to a halt with what she said next.

“So, was this your parents’ ranch, then?”

She gazed up at me innocently as I felt my eyes blaze hotter white, my entire frame bristling with tension. My parents’ ranch?

“I mean, since you’ve been here since childhood,” she explained, her brow now puckering at my expression. “You said this was your hat from when you were a kid, right? Were you born here?”

She came here without knowing this is a penal colony.

And perhaps even worse than that…

She married me without knowing that I’ve killed a man.

How could she not know? How could she not have been told? Was this because she’d come here so early, before the others?

Would she still have married me if she knew?

Questions pounded through me while hers hung unanswered in the air.

I have to tell her.

And I would. I knew I would. Just…

Maybe not quite yet.

I would use my thirty days to show her how calm, controlled, and decent I could be. To prove just how hard I’d work to take care of her. I’d show her who I was, besides a convicted murderer who apparently wanted to do unnaturally perverse things to her backside, that is. If she could learn to like me, or at the very least respect me, before I told her why I was here, then maybe she would stay…

I did not say any of this to her, of course. I simply shoved her bag at her, told her to “take this into the house,” and immediately stalked stiffly away to inspect the property’s fences. I retreated into the monotonous safety of physical labour, telling myself it was because I was going to work hard for my wife.

I ignored the fact that work – even the hardest, most tail-breaking work – was just so much easier than the truth.

11CHERRY

My face felt hot and my stomach hollow as I stumbled towards the house, clutching my bag to my chest. He’s your husband, I told myself fiercely, he doesn’t have to be your friend.

We’d only just met. He didn’t need to spill his guts to me the way I found it so easy to do. I’d even told him it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if he told me to stop talking!

So why did I feel so fucking hurt now?

It wasn’t like he’d even done anything. I mean, not really.

All he did was walk away from me.

Last time I checked walking away from your nosy new wife isn’t a crime!

I blew out a loud breath between my lips, dropping my bag on the house’s back porch and blinking away a fresh, stupid batch of tears.

Maybe I’d touched a sore spot with my question. Maybe he didn’t like talking about his parents. He’d looked absolutely thunder-struck that I’d even asked. Was that some kind of Zabrian taboo I didn’t understand? Or something specific to Silar that I’d messed up by asking about?

At the very least, it seemed obvious his parents weren’t here. Based on his reaction, I thought it was probably safe to assume that they were dead. Just like mine. But if we had that in common, he certainly didn’t seem keen on commiserating about it with me.

I turned around, looking back the way I’d come, and found myself startled at how far away Silar already was. The man was damn fast with those long legs. It was hard not to feel like he was running away from me, despite the fact he was only walking, if at a rather relentless pace. He’d put his hat back on, and his electric turquoise hair swung between the taut muscles of his shoulders as he ploughed through a stretch of long grass towards a tall, wooden fence. The fence suddenly opened – a gate – before it slammed shut again, taking Silar out of view.

The porch wasn’t high enough off the ground for me to see what lay beyond the fence. But Silar’s house – our house, I supposed – did have a flat spot on the roof back here that seemed to function as a sort of tiny balcony that also jutted out to shade the porch. There was a ladder leading up to it. Leaving my bag behind, I clambered up.

This little roof/balcony was less than two metres squared, and I made sure to stand in the middle because there was no guardrail that would keep me from falling to the ground if I weren’t careful. From here, I could get a much better view of Silar’s property, and boy, was it extensive. I found myself entirely gob-smacked and more than a little impressed at the fact that this seemed to be a one-alien-show. I had no idea how he managed this massive amount of land with its gardens and its shuldu and its… whatever those were.

They were big and four-legged, and there looked to be at least fifty of them, if not more. They came in shades of rust-red, midnight blue, and yellow-ish beige, many of them with spots or speckles on their hide. The largest ones in the herd had impressive antlers, the width of which easily surpassed the span of both my arms outstretched. There were three other shuldu out there, too – one black, one white, and one a softly rosy pink that reminded me of the colour of Darcy’s hair.

Silar was on that pink one now, riding without a saddle, trotting around the fenced-in area with the established ease of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. The cattle-creatures were obviously used to him, as they continued munching the tough grass and lowing at occasional intervals while Silar made a perimeter of the pasture. There appeared to be another closed gate at the other end, which once opened would lead out into a vast tract of land whose flatness eventually gave way to more trees that appeared to go on until mountains thrust upwards out of the horizon.

Is all of this his?

So much space it made me a little dizzy. I plopped down onto my butt, not wanting to topple off the edge of the roof. I highly doubted snapping my spine on my first day here was going to speed up Silar’s uneasy acceptance of me.

Silent Silar.

Yup. Sounded about right. At least he wasn’t only that way with me, if he’d earned that nickname from the others around here.

Speaking of others…

I gingerly got to my feet again, scanning the landscape for any other signs of life, wondering how far away Darcy and Magnolia would live when they arrived and married their husbands. It was hard to tell from here, but I thought that I could just make out another structure – a little poky dot in the distance – that might have indicated another house or barn nearer the mountains. But I couldn’t be sure.

Looks like it’s just you and me, hubs, I thought as my gaze went once again to Silar. He’d gotten off the pink shuldu and appeared to be inspecting part of the fence, his impressive form folded at the waist as his hands and tail all worked in tandem to tighten some unseen fastener.

Well, if he could keep himself occupied with chores, then so could I. I wasn’t going to sit up here and mope all day. I’d told him I’d work hard, and I would. Winning Silar over so that he’d keep me here appeared more and more monumental a task every moment.

So I’d better get started.

I climbed back down the ladder and hopped onto the porch. Scooping up my bag, I headed inside the house.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expecting to find in my alien-cowboy’s bachelor pad, but I was relieved to see the place was extremely tidy. And not just tidy from clutter, but clean, too, the various wood and stone surfaces looking like they were wiped down with regularity.

The back door I’d come through had brought me into what was obviously a cooking area. A large sink stood beneath a sunny window and wood-doored cupboards crowded along the walls. A large stone opening stood on the other side, and when I saw some wood piled beside it, I realized it was a wood-burning oven. My heart sank, because I’d barely been a cook back home with processed protein blocks and modern appliances at my disposal. It certainly appeared that the set-up here was much more rustic than what I was used to.