Swept Off Her Feet Read Online Free Page B

flowering pava .
    Tears flooded his eyes as his nostrils flared; he drank in her heady, life-affirming scent. It had been more than twenty years since he had smelled the intoxicating aroma of a fem’s flowering pava .
    Eyes locked on her writhing form, he lowered his hands to his jeans-covered cherzda and palmed his demanding bulge. Leaning closer to the door, trying not to miss a moment, he felt his terat constricting, felt the tingling as they roared to life and softened. He barely managed to bite back a groan as he witnessed her solitary dance.
    His own tears fell as he watched her slump down in utter despair after the last tremor of ecstasy faded away. He felt so connected to her, could almost read her thoughts.
    He hurt for her.
    Carefully, quietly, he eased away from the door. By Deth ’s gate! She would never again have occasion to suffer through her pava , alone and lonely.
    His plan to deliver her to her father changed in that moment.

    * * * * *
    Nnora rose at last from her crouched position, biting back a harsh moan as intimate muscles twanged and pulled. She bent over to retrieve the hair dryer, moving like a tired, old woman. She sighed worriedly as she turned the appliance off, wrapping the cord around the squat round barrel before storing it away. The pleasurable relief had not lasted nearly long enough.
    Only twenty days into this second, yearlong pava , already she’d reached the level of constant arousal it had taken five months to arrive at during her first cycle. How was she to survive this constant agony of desire without losing her mind?
    “Thank goodness,” she murmured, reaching for the moisturizing lotion, “my biological father never stopped searching for me. If only there were more males like my father… Now, Dad is a major hunk!”
    With a fond smile, she recalled her shocked disbelief when a gorgeous, seven-and-a-half-foot tall man had knocked on her foster parents’ door, asking after the child they had taken in almost twenty years before.
    On him, her height and brilliantly-colored eyes looked damn good. The king, her father, looked entirely too young to have sired her, but there was no denying their relationship once he had shown her the birthmark he bore upon his left flank—the same blood red, three-pronged flower that graced her rounded thigh. The mark, passed down through the royal family, was the mark of a ruler, or a potential ruler. Rb’qarmshi custom, her father had said, allowed only one who bore it to rule.
    No matter how glad she had been to see him, her father had returned to Mars with his hopes of reuniting her with his new family unrealized. She’d refused to leave with him. After prolonged and escalating arguments, he had finally accepted her rejection, if not with good grace, then with diplomatic patience.
    On his second visit, the Chyya sweetened the pot by introducing her to her three half-blood siblings and to their mother, the woman he had married once his grieving period for his lost queen was done.
    At first, intimidated by the new queen-consort’s height—she stood almost eight feet tall—Nnora had been reluctant to approach her, but the queen had proven to be a sweetie. Once past Nnora’s initial wariness, Nnora and the queen had taken to each other, both thankful the other was willing to be friendly.
    For Nnora’s part, she was glad her stepmother was willing to share her knowledge of Rb’qarmshi biology. It was from Queen Rinalli that Nnora learned she had at least two more cycles—six Earth years—to endure before the eldest of the young Rb’qarmshi males would reach sexual maturity.
    The queen had informed a despairing Nnora of the current dearth of eligible males. She blamed the shortage on the stupidity of males in general—and the long, violent rebellion that had caused Nnora’s father to send her and her mother away to safety specifically. Raging over fifty years, the fraternal war had cost the colony greatly in the lives of its viable males.