7. Darcy
7
DARCY
“ I still cannot believe he was about to get his junk out right there in front of all of us,” Magnolia said, not even bothering to hold back her snort.
“I see you’re not feeling so sad anymore,” I said dryly from beside her on the bench in the shade of Fallon’s covered wagon. The wheels rolled beneath us, rhythmic hoofbeats ahead.
“Nope. Not sad,” Magnolia confirmed just a little too gleefully. “Seeing your man get all horny and discombobulated has cured me. Any time I’m feeling down from here on out, I’m just going to remember him with his hands on his belt asking if we were all going to stay to watch the next part.”
She barely got the last words out as she dissolved into peals of laughter that, apparently contagious, Cherry caught. Since Fallon lived beyond Silar’s ranch along the same road, we were all travelling back together, and the three of us girls could fit easily into the shady wagon.
“I’m so glad the trauma of my ridiculous wedding is your new happy place,” I told her, but I was only teasing.
Yeah, the wedding had kind of been a bit of a shitshow, what with us having to talk Fallon down off the ledge of “mating” me right there on the fucking floor. But I really was glad that Magnolia was smiling again. And if my husband had to act like a horny fucking dork in front of everyone to put that smile on her face, then my embarrassment over the whole ordeal was worth it.
“Hopefully I’ll get to laugh at you when Oaken does something equally dumb,” I said, elbowing her gently.
“And he will,” Cherry warned, wiping away tears of laughter from her blue eyes. “Between the cultural differences and the fact these guys haven’t seen a female of any variety since childhood… Yeah. There’s a lot of learning on both sides. But yay for teachable moments, right?”
“Fallon’s adorable, though,” Magnolia said. “He was so earnest! And when he realized how wrong he was about where the kiss would lead… I just about died when he was sadly but dutifully doing his belt back up, and being all ‘forgive me, wife,’ about it. What a cutie patootie.” She sighed. “It’s making me that much more excited to meet Oaken.”
“Even knowing that he’s probably a murderer?” I asked with a raised brow. Magnolia visibly swallowed, pursed her lips, then nodded.
“If he’s anything like Silar or Fallon, I think it’ll turn out alright. They both seem like really sincere guys in their own ways. And we’ve all done things we aren’t proud of.”
“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.