His Virgin Mate. Grace Goodwin
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I loved my parents, too. But they were all gone now. Everything was gone but the big rambling house I couldn’t stand to be in. The yard was huge, the house a four-bedroom monster I didn’t want to keep. Being in that house, looking at the pictures on the walls, the furniture, the smells…
Being there felt like being in a shrine to my dead parents, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. So I sold it, put the money in a trust for my cousin’s new baby girl, rented a car and drove to Miami. Three days from Denver. I’d barely slept. Eaten even less.
I felt empty. Totally empty. Until now. Until that dream. And the tears just kept coming, like a silently leaking faucet. That man made me feel. He made me want. Hunger. Lust. That girl in the dream was so unlike me. She was full of hope and love, and had joy bubbling in her veins like fizzy candy under her tongue.
I wanted that. I wanted to feel like that.
“Miss Lopez? Can you hear me?”
I blinked at the warden, clearing the cobwebs from my thoughts. Those thoughts were for the past, the tangled, twisted, painful past that I was leaving behind. Today. Right now.
“Yes, I’m all right. That was fast.” It seemed like just a minute ago I settled into the chair in my drab hospital-style gown with the Interstellar Brides Program logo printed all over it.
“Yes, it was,” she replied. I heard the surprise in her tone and I frowned, felt dread settle in my stomach.
No guy had ever made me feel a tenth of what I’d felt in that dream. I’d never had the hots for a guy on Earth. Ever. I’d gone to the doctor about a year ago to find out if I had a hormonal imbalance or something, but she’d just smiled, looked at my bloodwork and told me everything was perfectly normal. She said there was nothing wrong with my body. I was healthy as could be.
She’d even suggested I visit a counselor of some kind. A therapist. Then she’d started asking me about my papa and uncles and I’d shut her up and gotten the hell out of there.
I didn’t have secrets like that in my past. Even if I had, and I had friends who had suffered abuse and rape, they weren’t like me. They worked through their past, found a way to be in relationships. They, at least, wanted to try.
Me? No. There was definitely something wrong with me. Hank had called me frigid when I pushed away his advances last year. Of course, he was handsy and smelled of garlic. Robert had said I was a prude, not interested in giving him a BJ after our second date, payment, he’d said, for taking me out to dinner. Twice.
I’d left him sitting in his car in front of my apartment with his dick in his lap. After seeing the bulging, veinous head, I had to wonder why any woman would want to put that in her mouth. Even now, I shuddered at the memory.
Every kiss I’d ever had, from the peck on my cheek from Will Travers in fifth grade to the first French kiss behind the bleachers in tenth, had left me feeling nothing but sloppy, cold and wet.
I didn’t fit in. Clearly, men didn’t find me appealing and my clit must be broken. I felt nothing when it came to men. I even wondered if I was gay. I’d spent a month after Robert and the cock incident looking at women, studying them, wondering if I might find myself attracted to their bodies. I’d asked a friend of a friend, Meg, who was a lesbian, how to tell if one was actually gay. She’d said if I didn’t want to dive in the bushes, then I probably wasn’t interested in women.
She kissed me once, because I asked her to. And I felt nothing. Nada.
Since the thought of putting my mouth on another woman, down there, held about as much appeal as putting my mouth on Robert’s cock in the parking lot, I figured I wasn’t a lesbian. Which kind of sucked. I didn’t care who I might fall in love with, I just wanted to fall. I wanted to feel desire. I had loved my parents, but that wasn’t the same. I loved my dog. I had friends I cared deeply about in high school. Cute memes of kittens and puppies and babies online made my heart lurch. So, my heart worked just fine.
Since I wasn’t into women, and no man I’d met made me hot, made me pant like I saw on TV, I finally gave up. I just buckled down and worked. I went to school and studied to be a chef because the only thing I was passionate about was food. The tastes, the textures, the surprises that could roll over my tongue when I combined spices or ingredients in unexpected ways. I’d spent the last three years in school, learning everything I could at the culinary institute downtown.
I excelled in class, but I felt like life was parading in front of me in a twisted and cruel taunt. As the monotony of caring for first one ill parent and then another wore me down, I discovered that going to class made me feel twice as lonely heading home at the end of the day as I did in the morning. The people in my classes were working in real kitchens, earning their place already while I had to squeeze every moment of study I could into my day.
Eventually, I had to stop going to class and take care of my father. We couldn’t afford a nurse, or a nursing home. And I couldn’t’ bear the thought of him wasting away in a place like that while I sautéed mushrooms and made cream sauces for wealthy tourists.
I took care of my father, and every day I thought more and more about the Interstellar Brides Program advertisements. They assured their matches were ninety-nine percent successful. Those were crazy numbers since the divorce rates I’d heard quoted for regular Earth marriages were around fifty percent.
Ninety-nine percent sounded really damn good. And if I didn’t have to go on any more dates with guys like Robert, and I was guaranteed a guy that was perfect for me, then I was all for it. What the hell? I had nothing to lose.
Even if that guy was an alien.
“Hmm.” Warden Egara paced beside me, her dark brown hair up in a bun and her total attention on the tablet in her hand. She didn’t look happy anymore. She looked worried.
Maybe I was really, really broken. Maybe their system didn’t work on girls like me, stupid, scared virgins who had no idea what to do with a man, let alone an alien.
Oddly, that thought dried the tears immediately. Pain and loneliness I could deal with. Hope hurt a hell of a lot more.
“It didn’t work, did it? You couldn’t find me a match.” I sighed, tried not to let the disappointment make my voice quiver. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” she wondered.
“That I’m broken, that there’s something definitely wrong with me when it comes to men.”
The warden offered me a sad little smile. Yeah, I was that pitiful. “Oh, no Alexis. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were worried. I should have spoken sooner. You have been matched.”
My heart skipped a beat and my eyes widened. “I have? Really?”
There was someone out there for me? Who was waiting for me right now?
“Really,” she repeated, now smiling fully.
“Who?” I knew I sounded breathy and excited, but I couldn’t help it. Today, the dream, was the first time I was hot for a guy. Ever. And I had no idea who he was, or where he was.
With a swipe of her finger over her controls tablet, the restraints retracted. I sat up, rubbed my wrists, although the hold hadn’t been too snug.
“All brides are matched to a planet first, then a mate. For you, and this is quite interesting, your genetic profile matched you to Everis.” Her shrewd gaze raked over me. “It seems you have met the special requirements that are very specific to that planet.”
“Oh? What kind of requirements?”
She tilted her head to study me. “Let me see your palm.”
I didn’t know which one, so I rolled my hands over, palms up so she could see both.
She frowned. “Strange.”
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