Authors: Kate Pearce
Planet Mail
An Ellora’s Cave
Romantica
Publication
www.ellorascave.com
Planet Mail
ISBN # 1-4199-0666-6
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Planet Mail Copyright© 2006 Kate Pearce
Edited by Briana St. James.
Cover art by Syneca.
Electronic book Publication: July 2006
This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc
.®
1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.
Warning:
The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers.
The story
has been rated E–
roti
c by a minimum of three independent reviewers.
Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of
Romantica
™ reading entertainment: S (S-
ensuous
), E (E-
rotic
), and X (X-
treme
).
S-
e
nsuous
love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.
E-
rotic
love scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall word count. In addition, some E-rated titles might contain fantasy material that some readers find objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same sex encounters, forced seductions, and so forth. E-rated
titles are the most graphic titles we carry; it is common, for instance, for an author to use words such as “fucking”, “cock”, “pussy”, and such within their work of literature.
X-
treme
titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline
execution. Unlike E-rated titles, stories designated with the letter X tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.
Planet Mail
Kate Pearce
Prologue
Somewhere in deep space
Earth year 2406
Hammersford
Village, Planet Valhalla
“By Thor’s bones, how old is she?”
King Marcus Blood Axe stared in disbelief at the girl the village elders of
Hammersford
ushered into his tent.
One of the men stepped forward. “She is of age, Sire. She is eighteen.”
Marcus walked a slow circle around the woman. She wore nothing but a heavy gold chain around her neck. Her lips and nipples were rouged; black kohl edged her wide, scared eyes. He took her chin in his fingers and made her look at him.
“Do you want to have sex with me?”
She blinked and peered over Marcus’ shoulder at the group of men behind him. “I wish to help my village, Sire. I wish to bring favor to our region by bearing your child.” She sank to her knees and handed him an ancient gold goblet filled with thick crimson wine.
Marcus stared at her bowed head. Despite her beauty, his cock remained unimpressed. How was he supposed to bed her if he couldn’t even get hard? He’d grown weary of this endless game. At first, he’d enjoyed being offered the most beautiful of his people’s women but now, at thirty-five, he felt old, tired and jaded.
He turned and bowed to the anxious men behind him. He had no choice. Ritual demanded he play his part. The village was barely surviving on the edge of the Purple Desert. He had to give them hope. He drank deeply from the goblet of wine, wincing at the bitter aftertaste.
“I accept your gift and give you thanks for it. If this woman should bear my child, she and her village will be honored for all eternity.”
The ritual words sounded hollow on his tongue as the men bowed their way out of his tent. He gestured reluctantly to the woman who knelt at his feet.
“Please, get up.”
She stood, hands clasped together at her waist. Long brown hair curled to her hips and her head was adorned with a wreath of flowers. Marcus sat down and finished off the wine. He patted his knee. By Odin, he might as well get it over with. “Would you like to sit here?”
She nodded and came toward him, her breasts bounced as she walked. She balanced easily on his muscled thigh, one small, hot hand braced on his naked shoulder. He smoothed his hand down her back and she trembled like a frightened mare. Outside, the wind gathered speed, making the leather and silk hangings of the tent shudder and shake like a live animal.
“What is your name?”
“It is Lillian, Sire.”
A beautiful name for a beautiful girl.
Despite her age, he found it difficult to think of her as a woman. He understood why the village offered him their most prized possessions, their desire to enjoy the king’s favor was reasonable. As rulers of the planet, his family held the ancient right to mate with any offered female and marry them if they proved fertile. Some of his ancestors had many wives. In more recent times, as fertile women proved elusive, they had difficulty in finding even one.
Lillian stared over his shoulder, her face a bland mask. He’d never really thought about how the women who were chosen to be bedded by the king felt about it. In his younger days he’d been too busy enjoying them to care.
Marcus licked his lips as his vision wavered. Lillian watched him through lowered eyelashes. A surge of heat settled in his belly and spread to his loins. Had the elders added an aphrodisiac to the cup? Did they believe the rumors that their king was impotent?
His cock hardened against her thigh. He barely resisted the impulse to rub himself against her. He slid his fingers into her hair.
“What was in the wine?”
“Only herbs to heighten your enjoyment, Sire, nothing more.” He stared at her trembling mouth, wondered how his cock would feel as he thrust inside it. After a deep shuddering breath, which did nothing to calm the racing of his heart, he lifted her off his lap and set her away from him.
“Go, little one, I don’t want to hurt you.”
She fell to her knees and pressed her face to his thigh. “Please take
me,
I can’t stand the shame if you leave me untouched. I’d rather face your anger if I fail to give you a child.”
Marcus ripped open his loincloth and wrapped his fist around his cock. He squeezed hard, trying to restrain the raging desire to fuck her hard and fast. “What are you saying? Do you think I am a monster?”
“Everyone knows that you kill any woman who doesn’t conceive your child.” Lillian was crying so hard now that it was difficult for Marcus to make out her words. His gaze fell to her breasts which quivered with the force of her sobs. He sat back in his chair and pushed her away with his foot.
“I’m no monster. Leave me in peace.” He desperately needed to attend to his cock before he came like an inexperienced boy.
Lillian got up and stood over him. Her tears had miraculously ceased. Her face was set. She placed her hands on the arms of his chair. The scent of her desperation and fear surrounded him.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Marcus’ head fell back as she scrambled onto his lap, trapping him in the chair. She knelt over him and grabbed his cock. He could do nothing but groan as his body lost touch with reality and felt only the burning need to fornicate like a wild animal. He started to come as soon as she tried to lower herself down on him. His last thought as he lost consciousness was rage at being outwitted by a frightened woman and deep relief that he’d finally been allowed to spend his seed.
Chapter One
One week later
“System overload. We are about to crash-land on this planet. Please take evasive action.”
Jerked out of her stasis sleep, Douglass Fraser stumbled toward the pilot seat. This was supposed to be the easy part of her journey. She’d delivered her last scheduled package, used the last of her fuel and was meant to be on a free-trajectory return to Earth.
The soothing female tones of her ship’s emergency alarms failed to dampen her fear as the ship hurtled toward a range of hills on the unknown planet below. Manually landing a damaged spacecraft was not something she did every day.
“Where the hell did that come from?” she yelled, not expecting a response but too overwrought to care that she was talking to a computer guidance system. “It shouldn’t even be there!” Although the big purple planet wasn’t on her charts, its gravitational attraction was affecting her trajectory and had pulled her out of the slingshot effect that should have taken her home. She grabbed the controls and reset them to manual. Despite her best efforts to remain horizontal, the ship dipped sharply to the right. Because the ship had no fuel left to burn the main engines, she couldn’t pull away. She only had the ability to make slight course corrections to minimize the effects of landing. The wing grated on a sheer rock face and slowed her speed, sending the ship down at a less steep angle.
Douglass buckled herself into her seat harness and allowed the ship’s emergency systems to cocoon her in some kind of foam. It started to harden around her as the craft rapidly dropped altitude.
“Ten, nine, eight,
seven
…”
She shut her eyes as the ship’s auto-defense screens activated and shut off her view of the purple planet’s surface.
Dammit
, she was only twenty-eight, way too young to die. And she had people who depended on her. She pictured her five-year-old son Danny smiling up at her, his face covered in chocolate, his sticky fingers clasped in hers. She
had
to get home. As the ship hit the planet surface with a screech and grind of tearing metal, she made herself a promise. If she survived, she was going to take a year off from the United Planetary Parcel Service and spend it lying naked on a beach.
When Douglass opened her eyes, she smelled smoke and charred circuits. She struggled to release herself from the crusty foam confines of the chair. By the time she clawed open the last restraint, flames licked at her boots. With all her energy, she crawled toward the hatch. Agony jabbed and seared her side. Had she broken anything vital during the impact? She fought the pain and managed to force the door open. Better to get out and suffocate than be burned alive.
She gulped in fresh air as she fell onto the soft purple sand. At least the planet had breathable air and an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. Behind her, flames licked voraciously at the new source of oxygen. Heat blasted the back of her neck. She tried to stand,
then
clutched her side as the pain started up again.
She kept crawling, the sand warm and gritty against her palms. Sweat poured down inside her brown jumpsuit. Ahead of her lay an ocean of swirling purple. She shaded her eyes and blinked as some of the dots melded together and became larger. A rescue party or trouble?
At this point she didn’t care. There was nowhere to hide. She was injured and likely to die out here. The Space Academy had always stressed that staying alive was preferable to being heroic. Douglass struggled to her feet as the figures approached.
The largest of them broke away from the rest and brought his mount to within twenty feet of Douglass. She wasn’t quite sure what it was the guy was riding, something between a chicken and a dragon. She stifled an inappropriate desire to laugh. This wasn’t the time to insult her hosts by ridiculing their forms of transportation.
The man who dismounted looked enormous to her. He was cloaked, apart from his eyes, his face hidden behind a swath of fabric. Douglass stepped back as he came toward her. Damn he was big. Okay, she was only five foot four, but this guy towered over her. She reckoned he must be at least six foot five.