The Bride's Unexpected Change in Plans (2 page)

Ewin watched the smile slip from the human woman’s face. She nodded slowly and twisted a ring on her finger nervously. “O–Okay,” she said haltingly. “Thank you.”

She quickly returned to her seat, her trembling fingers still turning the ring over and over. When she noticed Ewin watching her, she forced a smile onto her face and tried to look relaxed. But as one hour rolled into two and then two into three without any word from anyone on what was happening, not only was Ewin’s patience running thin, but it was also obvious that Kimberley’s nervousness was getting worse.

“Go and find out what’s happening,” Ewin said to his fellow security guard.

“But we aren’t…um…supp—”

Ewin cut him off with a growled, “Now!”

The young man visibly paled as he nodded his understanding and left the room quickly. Kimberley gave Ewin a brief smile but went back to twisting the ring on her finger. Even from several feet away Ewin could see that the skin under her ring looked red and sore. Clearly the woman’s concern was overriding her pain sensors.

“He’ll find out why there’s a delay,” Ewin said, trying to act like this sort of thing happened all the time. Hell, for all he knew, it probably did. There was always a glitch or two in any plans, no matter how organized the people involved tried to be.

“Thank you.”

Kimberley gave him a tremulous smile and then dropped her head forward. He’d seen the telltale glisten in her eyes but hesitated on what to do. It was obvious the woman was upset, yet he was fairly certain cuddling someone else’s mubellabina wasn’t on the list of his guard duties. But when her shoulders shook slightly, he couldn’t refuse to offer comfort. To have come all this way to get married would have been very stressful. To have something delay the ceremony probably tripled her tension levels.

“Kimberley,” he said quietly as he sat beside her. “He’ll find out what’s going on and get it fixed. It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a shuddering, breathless voice. “I just…” She lifted her face and gave him another of those tremulous smiles. “I should have known my wedding day wouldn’t go as planned. It’s not like anything else in my life happened the way I wanted it to.”

He placed his hand high on her back, rubbing gently between her shoulder blades as the woman wiped at the few escaped tears and tried bravely to pull herself together. After a few moments she took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Thank you.”

“Any time,” he said, leaning back in the chair, but instead of taking his hand away like he should have, for some reason he continued to draw little circles on her spine. It wasn’t until she sighed softly that he realized what he was doing. He withdrew his hand quickly and got to his feet. He tried really hard to think of something neutral to say that would put them back on familiar ground. “I guess you’ve had a few busy days lately.”

“Yes,” Kimberley said with a soft laugh. “Packing up a crappy life and heading to the promise of something better is always hard work, or so I’m told.” She gave him a smile that suggested that this was her usual personality, not the nervous, distressed woman she’d been for the past few hours or the weepy one she’d been minutes ago.

“I’ve heard that life on Earth is hard.”

“It is for some. My life wasn’t all bad,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not like I was destitute or abused or anything like that. It’s just a really difficult place to build a happy life. I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a family somewhere as crowded and polluted as my hometown.”

“So you came to Descon to have children?” Ewin wanted to roll his eyes at his inane question. Of course she came to Descon to start a family. It was why the Desconian kings were encouraging human women to come live on the planet.

Kimberley must have realized the ridiculousness of his question because she simply nodded and asked a question of her own. “What about you? Do you have a family?”

Ewin smiled as he thought of his tredellabina. Dayved was the love of his life. “I have a husband,” he said, deliberately using the word they used on Earth. He’d heard that some humans had a dislike for same-sex marriages, although he seriously couldn’t understand why. “But we’ve never really discussed finding a mubella, a wife, together. Dayved is quite happy running our home his way. I don’t think he’d appreciate a woman trying to take over.”

Kimberley raised an eyebrow and gave him a quirky smile. “You never considered finding a woman who wasn’t interested in taking over the home duties?”

“Not really,” Ewin said even as he realized that wasn’t quite true. He would have loved to complete their triad, but it was obvious that Dayved was happy with things the way they were. Why risk ruining something so perfect?

“You never wanted to be a daddy?”

“Not really,” Ewin answered again. It was another lie, but it did start him wondering how long he’d been feeling this way. Until this very moment he hadn’t really considered how much he would like to have a family with Dayved. Perhaps it was Eric, Loukie, and Cindy’s precocious little daughter and newborn son that made him feel this way. Or maybe even his boss’s young son, Trent. Jerrod always seemed to be a foot taller when he had his son in his arms. He was so very proud of his family, and the fact that his and Kaydin’s mubella, Serena, was pregnant with their second child just made the man in charge of the royal guards seem even more incredible.

And if his friends ever heard him thinking mushy stuff like that, he’d probably never hear the end of it.

The conversation faltered as each of them fell into their own thoughts. A few minutes later the young security guard returned. He didn’t look buoyed by the news he had to impart. Rather than let the kid blurt out whatever he had to say, Ewin tilted his head and indicated for the young man to follow him to the far corner of the room before speaking.

The young man’s eyes darted to Kimberley before he turned his back on her and said in a lowered voice, “There was a problem with the couple Kimberley was to marry.”
Was?
This sure didn’t sound like the sort of news a woman who’d packed up her life on Earth and traveled three days to get here would want to hear.

“Explain,” he growled in a voice that had the young man quaking in his military-style boots, again.

“About an hour before the mubellabina claiming ceremony was to start, the mubella, Juna, collapsed. She has been in the hospital having tests ever since.”

“Is she okay? Did they find out what happened?”

The young man nodded and then glanced over his shoulder at Kimberley. “They discovered that Juna is pregnant.”

A pregnancy was always happy news, so he didn’t understand why they wouldn’t have come to claim their mubellabina and share the news with her. Ewin smiled and made a rolling motion with his hand for the man to continue. The young man winced.

“Apparently their whole reason for inviting Kimberley into their lives was to start a family. Now that they’ve…um…managed on their own they’re…um…”—he glanced over his shoulder again at Kimberley—“no longer interested in claiming her.”

Rage the likes of nothing he’d ever known swept through Ewin. To have put Kimberley through months of tests, unfathomable rules, and endless bureaucracy to become eligible to be their mubellabina, and then reject her without even meeting the woman was beyond cruel.

As he understood the new mail-order-bride rules, Kimberley would have been corresponding with the two Desconians for nearly a full Earth year before she’d come here to marry them.

“You’re dismissed,” he said to the young security guard. The man glanced at his timepiece and began to shake his head in confusion, but then he looked at the anger on Ewin’s face and literally ran out the door.

“Is everything okay?” Kimberley asked as she stood. The tone in her voice suggested she already knew something had gone really wrong. Ewin tried to tamp down his anger and focus on the woman who needed to know what had happened.

“I’m sorry, Kimberley,” he said, wondering how the hell to break the news. “It seems that your claiming ceremony has been canceled.”

“Canceled?” she asked, sounding worried. “Are Juna and Hollank all right? Did something happen?”

Ewin nodded. “Juna just found out that she’s pregnant.”

Kimberley smiled happily. “That’s wonderful.” Her voice was filled with genuine enthusiasm. “Juna and Hollank have wanted to have a family for a very long time.” She smiled, hugging herself as she absorbed Juna and Hollank’s happy news. But then she gave Ewin another of those worried, crooked smiles. “Is Juna all right?”

“As far as I know,” Ewin said, wanting to pull Kimberley into his arms and hold her close as the news sank in. It wasn’t fair that anyone should have to go through something like this alone and so far from home.

“Then why did they delay the mubellabina claiming ceremony?”

Anger churned in his gut again as he looked at the pleased, but confused, expression on the woman’s face. Kimberley was truly happy for the couple. She was beautiful in a very natural way on the outside, and he suspected that she had the insides to match. She didn’t deserve to be treated like this by people who’d claimed to love her.

“I’m sorry, Kimberley. They didn’t delay the ceremony. They canceled it.”

“‘Canceled’ as in we’re not getting married, ever?”

“I’m sorry, Kimberley,” he said again, unable to find anything to say that might help the situation. What the hell did anyone say to a bride very literally dumped on her wedding day?

Her gaze darted to his but then bounced away as her eyes became glassy. “I…I should go. I—” She patted the sides of her pants as if she was looking for something. She winced as if suddenly realizing that whatever she sought was no longer there. “I…um…”

“Kimberley,” he started to say, but she shook her head, cutting off his words. Her gaze bounced around the room as if she could somehow find the solution she sought written on the walls.

“I should…I should go.”

“Kimberley,” he said, this time giving in to his instinct and pulling the woman into his embrace. He held her close as she stood stiffly in his arms. “Honey, the next transport back to Earth doesn’t leave for another six days.”

“Then I…um…should get a h–hotel r–room or…or…or something.”

That might have worked on Earth, but Descon had no need for intergalactic tourism, so hotels were few and far between. It also didn’t help that she was human. The laws were very clear on protecting women, especially human women on Descon, but that occasionally meant that they didn’t have the same freedoms. After their horrendous lives on Earth, most human women were relieved to be protected and cherished, but there had been a few in the early days who’d been irritated by the restrictions. As a mail-order bride, Kimberley would have been made well aware of the laws on this planet, so it was obvious that in her distress she simply wasn’t thinking clearly.

He held her closer as she began to shiver in reaction.

“Oh, god, I’m so sorry,” she said shakily as she tried to pull from his embrace.

“Don’t be,” Ewin said very seriously, “you’ve been treated abysmally.” He pulled her closer as she started to cry, rocking slightly side to side as her disappointment overwhelmed her. She eventually clung to him, her entire body shaking with her distress. As the worst of her crying jag passed and she quieted, he lifted her in his arms and settled on a chair at the opposite end of the room where she’d waited hours for a husband and a wife who had apparently never really wanted her. “I feel like I should apologize on behalf of every person on the planet,” he said in a low, soothing tone. “I promise you that not all Desconians are so horrible.”

“I’m happy for them,” she said, confirming his theory on the size of her heart. “They are nice people.” She lay against his chest, obviously exhausted from the stress of the day, and laughed tiredly. “Their timing sucks—I could have done with that news before I left my planet—but I am happy for them.”

The door opened quietly, and for a moment Ewin wanted to rage at whoever entered, but when he glanced up, he found Cindy Richards and her mubella, Loukie, wearing sympathetic smiles.

Ewin glanced at the woman in his arms, ready to introduce her to his friends, but at the last moment realized she was asleep. Considering the sort of day she’d had, it was probably really good for her to get some rest.

“Is she okay?” Loukie asked, looking ready to summon the doctor.

“Just sleeping,” Ewin said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Where else would we be?” Cindy asked with a gentle smile. “Although we would have been here sooner if we’d been told earlier. I can’t believe they let her wait for so long without saying anything.”

“Neither can I,” Ewin said, trying to keep his voice low and quiet even though anger burned through him again at Kimberley’s treatment. Not only had her promised tredella and mubella let her down, but the system hadn’t been set up to cope with the fallout when they did. “The next transport back to Earth isn’t for several days. She’ll need somewhere to stay until then.”

Cindy looked ready to offer the woman guest lodgings at the palace, but Loukie smiled that smile he knew meant she was planning something and asked, “What about your place? You’ve got a spare bed.”

It wasn’t anything Ewin hadn’t thought of himself, but having a human houseguest wasn’t really something he and Dayved were prepared for. For one, the spare beds were set up in their room. It was for times when they and their friends wanted to indulge their voyeuristic tendencies. From what Ewin understood, human women took a bit of time just getting used to the “walking around naked” part even when they were married to those they shared a home with. At the very least it would mean he and Dayved would have to curb their natural and uninhibited sex life, at least while Kimberley was there.

There was a part of him that wanted to walk away from a mess that wasn’t of his making, but a far larger part wanted to help the woman. He was fairly certain that she was asleep, but he didn’t want her to wake up and hear herself being rejected by someone else today.

“Sure,” he said, hoping that Dayved would understand. It was only six days, after all. “Kimberley, honey, I need you to wake up for a moment.”