His Virgin Princess. Grace Goodwin
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life. Another planet. A life I’d traveled across the universe to leave behind. And damned if I’d let some stubborn Everian Hunter keep me from my happily ever after. Maybe I had a touch of a princess in me after all.
I could track almost anything. A skill I’d learned from my dad. But since arriving on Everis, I’d also discovered that it was an ability of an Everian, that tracking was inherent to those from this planet. I had the mark on my hand, as my father had. According to Warden Egara, back at the Interstellar Bride Processing Center on Earth, the mark proved we were descendants of aliens, Everians, to be exact. I had Hunter DNA in my blood. In my soul, more like. Understanding why I’d never been content to sit inside a classroom, why I’d dropped out of college and returned to the outdoors, had been a relief. My Earth friends hadn’t understood the restlessness inside me. It was always there. Urging me to go. To seek. To hunt. Something. Anything.
Coming here had seemed like a dream come true, like coming home.
Until my mate decided not to show up at the Touchstone and claim me. He set the mark on my hand – and my body – on fire, and never showed. Big jerk. Then I find out he’d been captured or kidnapped or something and he told me to stay away, not to risk myself, to find someone else. Like I’d want another man to touch me when I knew that man wasn’t ‘The One’. I’d saved myself for someone special, waiting for sex to mean more than a quick screw in the back of some good-old-boy’s truck, and my mate was not going to steal that from me.
No. I could track a mountain lion across a river and over a mountain. I could follow alligators through a swamp. I could find one stubborn, pain-in-the-ass mate. And I was close. There was no way he’d be able to keep me out of his head now. For two days, I’d been walking in this general direction, following something I couldn’t explain, even to myself. It wasn’t visible, tangible. There were no breadcrumbs to follow.
It was instinct. The deepest part of me demanding I put one foot in front of the other in this direction. I wondered if this was what a homing pigeon felt like, flying, always flying in one direction with no idea why. And maybe no one to welcome it home at the end of its long, painful journey.
I wiped the track of tears from my right cheek and curled into a ball on the ground. My back to the rocks, I was protected from the wind, and the thermal wraps let me get warm enough to sleep. At least as much as the stabbing pain in my wrecked ankle would allow. It was dawn, and I’d been walking all night. Now, I needed a few hours to recover, to rest my old injury, let the swelling go down.
I stared up into the strange Everian sky where two moons hung low on the horizon. The small, silver moon was called Incar, and was the most famous prison in the entire Coalition, from what I’d been told. The larger, pale green moon was called Seladon, and was green because it was covered with life, the entire moon a farm for Everis and its sister planet in this system, Everis 8. I was on Everis 7 now, technically the home world. The Everians referred to the other planet as Eight and had colonized it several hundred years ago. The information I’d read said over a billion people lived on Eight now, and I wondered if humans would ever colonize Mars. I tried to imagine that many people living there, looking back at Earth and never even visiting the world they came from.
The idea made me sad. But I was sad a lot these days. Frustrated. Angry.
Waiting for Gage to come for me had left me with a lot of free time to read, but lying there as the final twinkling stars faded, I was glad. It made this place feel less foreign, more like home. And I hoped, when I found my mate, I wouldn’t still think volunteering to be an Interstellar Bride had been the biggest mistake of my life.
I was close. I could feel him now, even when I was awake. His energy called to something primal inside me, and I knew I’d die before I’d walk away. I had no logic for this, so I’d given up trying to rationalize what I was doing out here, miles and miles from the nearest city, alone, freezing, wandering around a series of mountains and caves looking for a man who might not exist.
“Shut up, Dani.” I yanked on the covers and pulled them up over my head, shutting my eyes as the darkness closed in around me. “Just shut up and find him.”
There was a difference between tracking him and dream sharing. One I could sense his location and be pulled toward it, but that was all I had to rely on. A pull. Until now when I was close enough once again to be with him in our dreams. He was mine, whether he liked it or not, which meant he had to let me inside his head. He didn’t have a choice.
I was done playing little Miss Nice Girl. I had no idea who he was or what his role was on this world. Criminal or saint. Scarred and ugly, or an Adonis. And I didn’t care. He was mine.
I closed my eyes and willed my body to shut down, and my mind to find his…
Gage…Dreaming
She invaded my mind like a master, first blurring the edges of my pain with warmth and seductive promises, then luring me from reality to a beautiful land I could never have imagined on my own.
“Danielle.” I whispered her name, standing strong and whole behind her. She was dressed oddly, in dark brown pants and a forest green jacket. The boots on her feet were for trekking over rough terrain, but her golden hair was down, the yellowish sun of her world transforming the strands into an ethereal halo. She turned to me and held out her hand, her blue eyes warm and hypnotic.
“Gage. Come to me. See how beautiful my home is.” I had to reach out. Our hands touched and she pulled me to stand beside her overlooking a stunning mountain vista, the sparkling blue and white of a raging river far below us. The Hunter within me drew the fresh scent of forest and female into my body like I was starving for it. I was.
“You shouldn’t be here, Dani.”
“Where is that?” she asked, her smile wicked and alluring and everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. She was perfect, my mate. Full of sass and life and fire. Everything the ladies at the capital were not.
“In my head, mate. Being near. It’s too dangerous. Someone wants me dead, and I don’t want any danger to come to you.” I stepped closer, lifted my thumb to her lower lip so I could trace the softness. I knew it wasn’t real. Didn’t care. “Dream sharing is all we will ever have.”
“I disagree, but now is not the time to argue. It is time to do as I wish.” Her gaze raked down my body. Lower. Lower, still. In this dream, I was back to full health, my body strong. Aroused.
“And you shouldn’t have any clothes on.” The moment the words left her luscious, pink lips, I was naked and realized my mistake. She wasn’t in my head, I was in hers, and I was too weak to turn away from what she offered. Respite. After two days of torture and pain locked in that dark cave cell, I wasn’t ready to go back. Nothing but death waited for me there. And what I wanted right now was Dani. My Marked Mate.
Her lips traced a heated path from my chest to my abdomen. Lower, until she wrapped her hands around my hard cock and smiled up at me. I noticed a white, fluffy pillow on the ground under her knees and she grinned up at me. “It’s my dream, hot stuff.”
“I don’t believe so.” I traced her cheek with my fingertips. “This is definitely my dream, not yours.”
“Then tell me what you want, Gage.”
Not Lord Gage, or Lord of the Seven, or even my lord. Just Gage. The man. “I want what’s rightfully mine.”
She licked her lips and pressed her thumb to the tip of my weeping cock as her other hand cupped my sensitive balls. “And what is that?”
I hissed out a breath at the exquisite feel.
“Your mouth, Dani. The first of the three sacred virginities to be claimed by your mate.”
“And are you, Gage?” She looked up at me through her pale lashes. She looked demure, but her position in front of my raging cock made me think her a vixen. “Are you my mate? Are you really mine?”
I’d