Billionaire Romance: MAXIMILIAN (An Alpha Bad Boy Contemporary Mystery Romance) (Mysterious Billionaires Book 3, Anthologies & Collections) (8 page)

The ruler of a planet could surely build a university of her own.

THE END

DESIRED BY THE ALIEN PRINCE

              "All dressed up and don't want to go."

              That was the way Danielle Dryden felt while studying herself in the full-length mirror in her suite at the resort.  She looked beautiful—at least, as beautiful as she felt capable of being—in her flowing pale yellow-gold gown and elegant gloves that matched the color of the clouds of Saturn and its rings that were at that moment shimmering outside her picture window.  She looked lovely with her brown hair all done up in shiny curls falling over her bare shoulders and just to the middle of her bare back.

She was dressed for a ball.  She had come all the way out from her parents' estate on Mars to the exclusive and opulent Titan II Resort, orbiting Saturn's largest moon, just for this event.  But, if the truth be told, her heart was just not in it.  Only her parents' insistence had brought her and her finery all the way out here.  Had it not been for them and the occasion of the ball, she would have been happy just to stay home.  Forever.

              She had not been in a party mood for weeks, not since the thing that happened with Braden.  She had been so sure about him, and so sure about the two of them.  Here, she had allowed herself to believe, was finally The One.  He had never lied to her, never misrepresented himself to her, never pretended to her.  Braden was for real.  His attentions and his intentions were both genuine.  This, she was sure, was going to work.  This, she was convinced, was going to be her life and her future.  Braden accepted her.  Braden was willing to make a life with the face that men always thought was pretty, and everything that went with it—the arms that other men found too stout, the hips that other men found too wide, the bottom that other men thought was too full, the legs that other men thought were too big and sturdy.  Braden saw that there was more of her to love and he loved it all.

              The trouble was that what he enjoyed
better
in bed was the slender blonde with the more graceful, lean curves.  The slender blonde had far less money and far less girth than Danielle.  And it thus became clear to Danielle that what Braden loved best about her was her pretty face, her sparkling wit, the vast holdings and resources of her family and the social, business, and political connections that they afforded.  Braden was an attentive, doting, passionate, and oh-so ambitious lover.  The greatest part of what he had felt for her, after all, was the private ambition.  Danielle examined herself in the mirror now, studied what Braden had
told
her that he accepted, and felt like the most naive creature in the universe for believing him.

              She had believed in him because, in truth, she
wanted
to believe in him.  She
needed
to believe in him.  She had convinced herself that in a space filled with billions of men, on Earth and on far-flung moons and asteroids, there had to be one—just
one
—whom she would actually want, and who would actually want her in return.  After all, in a galaxy full of millions of potentially life-supporting planets, there statistically
had
to be some that did contain life, and some that contained intelligent life, and some that even harbored life capable of space travel.  Reality had borne out the statistics and humanity was now in contact with dozens of such species.  If the odds had been on the side of extraterrestrial intelligence, they must surely also be on the side of Danielle Dryden finding the love that she most wanted.  Daniel had seized upon Braden as proof of the odds.

              And then Braden had gone and demonstrated the probability of a gorgeous, handsome, well-built man being attracted to gorgeous, slender women, proving to her the true order of the universe.

              "Well, Danielle sweetie," she told herself with a sigh, "the universe doesn't care what we believe, does it?  Or what we need to believe.  The universe is what it is and goes on that way regardless."

              There was no need to go on checking herself in the mirror.  She was put together as well as she was ever going to get, at least on the outside.  All she needed to do was get through the next few hours for her parents' sake, and it would all be over and she could go home to Mars and not have to think any more about socializing, or about the company of desirable men who really desired women to whom nature had given less than it had given Danielle Dryden.  Just one elegant, glittery, opulent party to get through, filled with VIPs and glitterati from across known space, and she would be done.

              She huffed a bit at her reflection.  Perhaps, after all, she was taking the wrong attitude about this whole thing.  Yes, she would have to get through a whole evening in a ballroom at one of the most posh and high-end guesthouses in the solar system.  And yes, she would have to spend the whole evening ignoring her broken heart and smiling and saying all the right things to the most prominent and famous people from dozens of planets.  But was it really so much to have to endure?  Was it really so bad that her parents had managed to cajole her into coming all this way for this occasion?  This evening was a rare thing, to be sure.  It wasn't every day that even a woman of Danielle's wealth and in Danielle's position was introduced to a prince.

              Yes, the ball was being given for a prince.  And not just any prince, but the prince of another planet.  And moreover, this was not just
any
other planet.  Sarma and its relationship with the planet Earth had become the talk of the galaxy.  Against all odds, against all the laws of biology and probability, Earth had made contact with an extraterrestrial species that so closely resembled humans that it was widely believed they shared a common ancestor.  It was practically all that one ever heard about in space these days—how scientists had speculated that unknown aliens visited Earth eons ago, captured early humans and whisked them back to their own planet, molded them into warriors, then disappeared for reasons equally unknown and leaving the descendants of their breeding subjects to their own devices.  Those descendants were the proud inhabitants of Sarma, distinguishable from Earth humans only by the hair that descended in a tapering, narrowing pattern from the scalp hairline to the bridge of the nose.  The Sarmians: civilized, with their own arts and technology and their own space travel capabilities, yet warriors at heart.

              Even Danielle, mourning what she had thought were the prospects of marriage to a desirable man, had taken notice of the Sarmians.  She had not actually met any of them yet. She knew only what was most generally known of them—that their planet had been through a time of devastating struggle over the throne of its aging king, and that the royal family had barely won out.  The elder prince, Dantar, had thus taken the throne.

It was probably only the badly broken infrastructure of Sarma, and the need for its people to regroup and recover from the wars, that had made their first contact with Earth a peaceful one.  Now terrestrial humankind, excited and fascinated to have found brothers across the stars, was keenly interested in staying friends.  So it was that when Dagin, the younger Prince of Sarma, decided to take some time traveling in human space, the government of Earth wasted no time throwing a party in his honor.  And so that was what Danielle Dryden was doing billions of kilometers from home:  preparing herself to meet the prince of another world.

              Danielle plucked her linker from the discreet pocket on her left glove and checked the opaque crystal for the time.  If the party were being given aboard one of the other habitats in the Saturnine system, she would have used the linker to call for a shuttle.  Given that her destination was on a lower level of Titan II itself, she had only to walk to the ball.  She made for the hatch of her suite and stepped out into the corridor of the resort that rotated so gently above Titan to simulate Earth's gravity.  The lights dimmed, the hatch shut itself behind her, and she was on her way.

Already the corridors of Titan II were filled with dignitaries dressed as elegantly as Danielle, all headed in the same direction, and she smiled politely at them as she passed.  Among the aliens present, she caught her first glimpse of some Sarmians.  There were a couple of them who she assumed actually
were
a couple, decked out in shiny golden outfits that hugged the contours of their athletic bodies and made them look as if they were wearing the gilded skins of dragons. 
Gracious,
she silently wondered to herself,
do they
all
look like that?
  She would know in a few minutes.  There would be a great many more of them where she was going.

_______________

              The ballroom was much as Danielle expected: dignitaries, politicians, diplomats, and celebrities everywhere; people seated amid tables filled with delicacies; servers circulating with drinks; a sprinkling of aliens across the scene; and more Sarmians wearing garments of that same scaly gold fabric.  She supposed she really ought to try talking with some of them.  The interest of meeting members of a new culture would be a welcome distraction and help to make the evening pass, if nothing else.  Then she caught site of the receiving line at one end of the room, and the long queue of people waiting their turn to be introduced to one figure standing at the end.  She looked closely at that figure.  It was a tall, dark-haired Sarmian, but he was not attired like the others present.  He was decked out as if to emphasize the similarity between his kind and terrestrials.  Suddenly Danielle was curious enough to want a better look.

              Except for the hair tapering down his forehead, nothing about him suggested that he was from anywhere but Earth, and that he was indeed an Earth human of the highest standing.  He was dressed in a white shirt with black triangular neckwear, and a black leather longcoat with the lower back cut into tails.  His shiny trousers were black, his leather boots black as well.  The cut and fit of his outfit suggested that his garments were tailored to the muscles of a figure out of Earth's most heroic legends.  The arresting handsomeness of his face, leaving out the forehead hair of his species, was the handsomeness of a young nobleman out of bedtime stories of centuries gone by.  This prince of another world in the guise of a prince of Earth could be none but Dagin.  Danielle watched him courteously kiss the hand of some redhead heiress in a slinky, glittery blue gown and rolled her eyes at how slender and shapely she was.  Danielle had no doubt that this Dagin would have such women orbiting him like the moons of Jupiter tonight, and one of them would surely awake in his bed after a night of interstellar sex. 
Well, good for the lucky, skinny girl,
she thought. 
I'll just make my introductions and my small talk and leave him to her.

              As if on cue, Danielle had someone on one arm and someone else on the other.  Mildly surprised, she glanced from side to side into the smiling faces of her parents.  Sylvia Dryden was a brown-haired beauty of a certain age, who would have been as thoroughly filled out as Danielle herself, if not more so, if she had submitted to the whims of nature.  Instead, Sylvia had submitted to the bodily reconstruction procedures easily obtainable by the wealthy and frequently used by the less well off, and banished the fat from her body to have herself made a stately, swan-like society matron.  Many times she had urged, cajoled, even pleaded with Danielle to have the procedures herself, but Danielle had held fast to what her mother called "romantic" notions of the man of her dreams loving her in her natural form, just as she was.  After the experience of Braden, Danielle had grown to see just how "romantic" her ideas really were, yet she still clung stubbornly to the idea of finding the love she wanted in the body in which she had been born. 

              Thomas Dryden, her father, had also refused to accept the hand that his genes had dealt him. His age was disclosed only by the general roundness of his face, not by the full thickness and darkness of his hair, not by the perfectly subtle lines of his features, and not by the flatness of his midsection.  The physical effects of age had become very much a choice, not the destiny it had been in the past, a destiny that people largely rejected regardless of their walk of life.

              "Danielle, darling, you're finally here!  We're so glad you came out for this.  You look wonderful!" Her mother beamed at her, giving Danielle's stout arm a squeeze.

              "Thank you, Mom," Danielle replied with her politest smile, mentally continuing the conversation that always went on between her and her mother whether openly or between the lines with, ...
even if I won't go under the adipose lasers
.

              Her father gathered Danielle into a warm embrace and said, "Everyone's here, sweetheart.  The president, the ambassador—we've just been waiting for you to arrive.  We're all going to be introduced to the prince.  Come on..."

              And with his daughter on his arm and his wife at their side, Thomas Dryden escorted his family to the receiving line.  At the end of the line, Danielle maintained her party smile and waved cordially at people she recognized while scoping out the ballroom for a table to which she could retire once this formality was over, and the delicacies she would round up onto her plate once she could finally sit down.  Rituals of this sort had been going on since the days when Earth people took their ships to the seas and used the stars to navigate.  They were still going on now that they were sailing their ships between the stars themselves.  She could only imagine that they were as tiresome then as they were now.  She thought it might be best if she were to concentrate on the reason for all this folderol and trained her eyes on the end of the line where Prince Dagin, looking as Earthly and civilized as he could despite belonging to a ruling family of alien warriors, was still engaged in the shaking and kissing of sundry hands. 
Are you as bored as I am, Your Highness?
she wondered.