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“Plus – and I didn’t get a chance to tell you this before – but the Zabrian Empire can eat a bag of fucking dicks as far as I’m concerned,” Cherry interjected tartly. “They’ll convict for murder even when it’s self-defence. Silar was protecting his mother from an intruder. His father turned him in and he was found guilty. But since he was so young when it happened, they couldn’t send him to the mines. So they sent him here, along with Fallon, Oaken, Zohro, and Garrek. They were the first generation of young boys brought to this colony.”
“Who’s Garrek?” Magnolia asked.
“I haven’t met him yet,” Cherry said. “He’s another one of the convicts. I don’t know a lot about him, but Silar seems to respect him. Apparently, he’s got a new convict-ward that’s causing him all sorts of trouble.”
“Convict-ward?” I said.
Cherry nodded. “A convict-ward is a new young convict from Zabria. Now that Silar and the other guys are grown, they don’t need to have a bunch of individual wardens to supervise youngsters they ship out here. They just pair the boys up with an established rancher.”
She gave a weird half-smile, half-frown.
“I guess that the Empire was starting to worry that, since the guys are all adults now, they were going to start going crazy or killing each other or burn everything out here to the ground. That’s why they’ve set up this bride program. To placate the men and provide them with a sort of softening, stabilizing influence. But they’d never send their decent Zabrian women out here. Hence, settling for humans.” She rolled her eyes.
“It must be so hard,” Magnolia said, “for a little boy to come out here all alone like that. And hard for the one who’s suddenly looking after him, too. It’s not like these guys are trained therapists or something. How are they supposed to deal with the issues of a traumatized child who just killed someone and then got ripped away from their family? Their home?”
“Seriously. These men can barely wrap their big heads around their own issues, let alone someone else’s,” Cherry acknowledged. “There was a solid two-week period where I thought Silar hated me. Meanwhile it turns out he loved me the whole time, he was just so emotionally constipated that he couldn’t deal with it and he essentially ran away from me every chance he got.”
“Aw. That’s kind of cute,” Magnolia said, her cheeks dimpling.
“Cute now. Confusing and slightly terrifying at the time,” Cherry said with a small laugh. “But you won’t have that problem, Darcy. Fallon has been goo-goo over you since before you even arrived. Your only problem is going to be getting him to stop talking about how much he adores you.”
Fuck. Well, didn’t that just make me feel like this planet’s biggest asshole? And considering the majority of people here were literally convicted murderers, that was saying something. I had hoped that Fallon wasn’t that excited about the marriage, and it turned out to be the exact opposite. More than opposite. That big alien was like excited on steroids.
But he wouldn’t hurt me. He’d told me that, and I believed him. And when he’d understood that there wasn’t going to be any hanky panky happening when he’d thought, he hadn’t reacted angrily like I’d expected. Like Massimo had. He was the one who’d apologized to me. Forgive me, Darcy.
Yeah. There was a good chance I’d married a very nice, decent, dopey sort of ex-murderer alien who was apparently already halfway in love with me.
Things were going better than I ever could have hoped.
And they were already going so, so wrong.
8
FALLON
The chatter and laughter from the human females had ceased, and a glance back from my place on the driving bench of the wagon told me that Cherry and Magnolia had both fallen asleep, their heads leaning against each other. Darcy’s eyes were closed, too, her head tipped back, her slender white throat exposed. But something told me she was not actually sleeping.
I wanted to say something to her, but did not want to disturb her rest, so instead I turned my attention to Silar, who rode his mount Tarion beside me.
“So, Silar,” I called over to him. “Are you going to tell me what the bucket was for? At the wedding?”
He took so long to answer that I assumed, in typical Silar fashion, he’d decided to ignore me. But eventually his deep voice cracked out of his throat.
“How about you just focus on holding the reins,” he said. “I don’t want that wagon tipping with my wife inside it.”
“I can hold the reins and hold a conversation at the same time,” I scoffed. “Not to mention the fact that my own wife is in the wagon, too, and her lovely friend Magnolia.”
Silar grunted in such a way that let me know he was really only worried about Cherry. It would have bothered me, but the fact that he’d even been capable of loving Cherry at all had already been a complete and total shock. He had eyes for her and her only, and expecting him to extend his puny stores of affection to anyone else beyond his wife was simply asking too much.
He didn’t growl or grunt or make any other noises for a long while. I was just about to come up with some other topic of conversation to pass the time when he suddenly said, “The bucket was for water.”
“Water?” I said, making sure my two shuldu Kolt and Reesha were still calm and plodding forward before I turned in my seat to look at him.
“After Cherry did the kiss to me,” he said, his eyes on the road ahead, “I walked right out of the warden’s station, filled a bucket with water, and dumped it over my head.”
“Did it help?” I inquired.
“Not really.”
