Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance by Juniper Leigh Page A

real marriage. Maybe it could just be one of those paper marriages, yes?”
    “Paper marriage?”
    “How some people just get married for the benefits?”
    “Praytell, what are the benefits of marriage?” I turned my head to glare at him and he was grinning. So I grinned back. We laughed quietly together, and I shook my head, trying to clear it. “They will want proof of consummation,” he went on. “That is a traditional part of our culture, and has been for hundreds of years.”
    “What kind of proof?”
    “For me, or in general?” I blinked, propping myself up on my hand to look at him.
    “Why would it be different for you than for everyone else?” Calder heaved a sigh and sat upright in the tent, bending his knees so that he could drape his arms over them. The Panyan liquor made him sway ever so slightly from side to side.
    “I am a prince.” He said it so plainly that I couldn’t help but laugh. His expression, however, indicated that he wasn’t joking.
    “Holy fuck, you’re serious,” I said in English. He furrowed his brow with a lack of understanding. “You are actually a prince?” I said in my formal Qeteshi.
    “I am the bastard son of our late leader, yes,” he confirmed. “Her formal marriage yielded no heirs, and I was the issue of her affair with one of her advisors, Orvald Fev’rosk.”
    “That is why everyone wanted you to lead them after she died,” I mused quietly, and he gave a nod of his head in response. “But you’re so old,” I asserted, without meaning to. It wasn’t that he was old, just older than you would think of when you thought of a newly ascended prince.
    To this, he laughed a huge, full-bodied laugh, and said, “Yes. I am old.” There was a glint in the fine blue of his eye, and he curled one corner of his mouth in a rougish grin. “But not so old that I could not do my husbandly duty.”
    It was my turn to laugh, because this was all so absurd. “So, you mean to tell me,” I said when my laughter began to die down, “that my only hope of getting out of this entire mess is if I marry you, and become a Qeteshi princess?”
    He gave a wry chuckle. “Basically, yes.”
    I leaned my forehead against his arm and gave a little groan. “I do not know what to do,” I said in Qeteshi. Then, in English, “I’m fucked.”
    “What is this word you keep using?” he asked, and then he tried out our curse on his unwieldy tongue. “Fuck.”
    I laughed again, clutching my sides with the force of it. It was so bizarre, to hear this proud Qeteshi man use a human curse word. “Fuck,” he said again, because he saw that it was making me laugh. “What is ‘fuck’?”
    “It is a swear word,” I explained, “a cuss word. It means...um…” I leaned my head gently to the side and looked at him in the dancing firelight. “It is a vulgar term for what two people do when they…”
    “Mate?”
    “Precisely.”
    “Ah.” He was grinning as he looked back at me, and I studied his features: the strong line of his jaw, the braids in his cloud-white hair, the sparkling blue of his eyes. He was handsome, even by human standards. Even including the horns protruding from his forehead, and the prominent tribal markings running up and down the left side of his body. I felt a little pulse between my thighs, and tried to recall the last time I had experienced this type of raw wanting. I gave a quick shake of my head. It must be the liquor.
    “You have told me so little of yourself,” he gently intoned, turning his gaze back toward the firelight at the mouth of the tent. “Tell me where you come from, my lady Lorelei.”
    He was changing the subject. I wanted to talk more about fuck.
    “Well,” I began, shifting to sit cross-legged at his side, “I was born aboard the Atria , and I grew up there. This is the most time I have ever spent on a planet in my entire life.” I proffered a thin-lipped smile then, and thought how royally I had messed this entire thing up. I’d