Billionaire Romance: MAXIMILIAN (An Alpha Bad Boy Contemporary Mystery Romance) (Mysterious Billionaires Book 3, Anthologies & Collections) (6 page)

              Thus leaving the unconscious healer, who would now need healing herself, Gwen found on the carpet of the bedchamber a pair of slippers that she guessed were meant for her.  She put them on and made for the chamber portal.  It took her a few minutes of rifling through the contents of the healer’s pouch and looking anxiously back at the unmoving healer herself before she found an oblong, narrow piece of crystal that fit in a slot on the wall beside the portal.  She inserted it, fighting the unwelcome image of what Dantar wanted to insert and where, and the portal slid and hissed open. 
Yes!
she congratulated herself. 
Now, if this thing works the same way on all the doors in this place, I may get myself out of here yet.
  And with that hope, she crept out of the royal bedchamber and into the corridor beyond, letting the portal slide and hiss closed behind her.

              It was times like this that Gwen least appreciated her girth, for it did not lend itself to moving stealthily through the corridors and halls of what she took to be one of Sarma’s royal palaces.  She would have liked to be thinner, gliding behind pillars and fixtures and ducking around corners and behind potted plants and indoor shrubs to avoid detection by the guards that she found standing about at the entrances to various chambers.  She would have liked to be leaner, slipping past the attention of the other palace staff that she saw going about their business.  All it would take, she knew, was for some serving wench or fetching boy to find her slinking about or crouching in hiding, and the underling would call out an alarm that would cook Gwen’s plump little goose.  Somehow, though, she found her way to a flight of stairs in some rear part of the palace, perhaps a service stairway, where she hoped the guards’ and servants’ attention would be focused the least, and she made a break down to the lower levels of the palace for what she hoped would be a clean getaway.

              At the bottom of the stairs lay another portal like the one to the bedchamber from which she had escaped.  She took the crystal key and slipped it into the appropriate slot, letting out a grateful exhalation when the portal slid open for her.  “
Yes!
” she said in a whisper that was actually a muted shout, and stepped out onto the palace grounds.

It was still daylight out, but the Sarmian suns were on their approach to the horizon and their light was taking on the fading golden cast of the last hours of the day.   The palace, she found, rested atop a plateau surrounded by the same kind of terrain from which she had been abducted.  The grounds were not enclosed in walls but surrounded by rows of trees and hedges, perhaps because anyone approaching the place would have to climb the plateau and the palace likely had sentries looking for anyone doing exactly that.  This, if true, would complicate Gwen’s escape, for she would have to avoid being spotted sneaking out just as much as anyone sneaking in.  Her best bet, she reasoned, was just to run to the edge of the plateau as fast as her stout legs would carry her and find a way to climb down it.  She did not look forward to that, but neither did she look forward to possibly being the captive Queen of Sarma and the focal point of an interplanetary incident.  So off she went, keeping to the cover of trees and hedges, peering upward at the palace as she went, and otherwise keeping her head low.

              She was halfway across the grounds when a loud, sharp, reverberating sound split the air, coming from the stone and glass turrets behind her.  Gwen flinched at it, at both the suddenness and the volume going through her like a slung blade.  It was without question an alarm.  Someone in the palace had either found her missing from the bedchamber or spotted her skulking through the grounds.  It did not matter which; the Sarmians were on to her.  She bolted upright and broke into a full run for a row of hedges at the edge of the plateau.  She could only hope that the incline beyond those hedges was not too steep. Otherwise she might have to slide and roll down it to freedom, a prospect that promised more pain. She ran, puffing as she went.

              Gwen pushed her way between two hedges and peered down carefully, nervously, with the alarm still throbbing loudly behind her.  The side of the plateau was quite steep—but perhaps not so steep that she couldn’t crawl or clamber down it and out into the terrain beyond.  Her next problem would be finding someone in the surrounding kilometers of countryside who would help her without turning her over to the king—perhaps in the best case she might stumble onto some other human visitors to Sarma—and if that was impossible, what she would do about being out here by herself at night, exposed to cold temperatures and whatever native creatures might come out in the dark.  She tried to call up her outdoor survival training, wondering how much of it would be applicable in this environment, and clutched the healer’s bag all the more tightly as her only resource against whatever awaited her.  With a breath of resolve, she stepped out past the hedges and went into a crouch to climb down the plateau. 

The sound of the palace alarm carried over.  Gwen’s heart and breathing quickened at the thought that at any second guards would come pouring down over the side of the plateau after her.  Still, she kept moving, now sliding, then crawling, down and down and down, desperate to put as much distance between herself and the palace as she could, knowing that if she could just get herself all the way to the ground below, she could break into a run…but toward where?  She would still be out in the open, a lone target running out into the expanse beyond the plateau, easily spotted, easily surrounded.  Her face broke into a sweat and her breathing broke into panting. 
Damnit, Dantar, why me?  Of all the Earth women visiting your damn planet that you could have drafted for your queen, why did you have to pick an archaeologist with hips the size of her IQ?  Damn, damn, damn…

To her utter amazement, in a few minutes she was down the side of the plateau, her soft and elegant royal gown dirtied and torn from her journey, her hands dirty and her arms streaked with soil. But she still had a firm grasp on the healer’s bag and she was in the clear.  Puffing all the harder, she ran, not daring to look back.  She simply ran, her gasps filling her ears as much as the sound of the klaxon in the distance.  Before her stretched an alien world in which she was now alone.  Above her, the color of sky was just starting to deepen into darkness.  She thought that once she got a bit farther away, she could use the last light to search the healer’s bag for some sort of communication device with which to send out a distress call.  Of course, any such call might well be picked up by the palace guards, leading them to her all the more efficiently.

Gwen was in mid-thought and mid-stride when the ground shook under her feet.  She came to a stop, casting her eyes back and forth, eyeing the ground.  The soil beneath her was part sand and part dried and cracked mud, and all of it was trembling hard.  With the shaking of the ground came a low rumbling that turned louder until it drowned out the distant noise from the Palace.  Then Gwendolyn staggered and stumbled at a dreadful upheaval right in front of her.  The ground pushed itself upward and outward—no, something pushed
at
it, something large, perhaps twice the size of a man.  The shape rose up out of the dirt and unfolded legs from the sundered soil onto the ground.  It had a long body with a segmented exoskeleton, resembling a sand-colored lobster.  It had four massive, multi-jointed legs, two on either side, and from the front of the body, under the eyes, two long tentacles writhed, each one tipped with a scorpion-like stinger the size of a man’s fist. 

Gwen’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open, but she was too terrified even to scream at what she recognized from zoological surveys of Sarma as a shambleclaw, one of the planet’s native predators.  They lived underground and came up to hunt at dusk and through the night.  She knew there were dangerous things in the wilderness of Sarma and had opted to take her chances with them, but she had forgotten about the shambleclaws.  Now she had blundered right into the path of one.  The creature raised its stingers at her.  She was defenseless and could hope only for the end to be quick.

Paralyzed with terror, Gwendolyn closed her eyes and heard a slicing sound in the air, which she took to be one of the beast’s tendrils lunging at her.  But she pried her eyes open again at the sound of a high-pitched squeal that was not her own.  The creature reared up before her, glaring not at Gwendolyn but at something above and behind her.  She made herself turn halfway around to look, and only now did she notice the whine of an engine.  A landfloater had come swooping in from the rear.  A muscular Sarmian male manned the controls while standing up behind him, wielding a Sarmian power bow, was Dantar. 

Startled, Gwen reeled at the sight of him, almost falling over.  Dantar commanded his pilot, “Hold altitude steady and move in closer!”  The pilot maneuvered as commanded and the floater came nearer to the shambleclaw, which had a spear buried in its side and now flailed its tendrils at the craft.  Dantar aimed again and fired another spear.  This one struck home in the beast’s other side.  The animal shrieked and wailed, lashing out with both tendrils, reaching for its foe and wanting nothing more than to sink a massive stinger into Dantar’s flesh.  “Come about!” shouted Dantar, and the pilot steered the craft in an arc, keeping the shambleclaw’s attention on himself and the king—and diverting the predator from Gwen.

The shambleclaw spun around to follow the floater, closing a little more of the distance between itself and the craft, giving Dantar a new opening—but also giving one to itself.  It pressed its sudden opportunity and swung a tentacle forward, out, and around—and just the tip of the skin-searing stinger ripped the surface of the king’s bare shoulder.  Dantar threw back his head and winced in sudden agony, and Gwen finally let out the scream she could not find a moment before.  The pilot, unbidden, pulled the floater back out of range of the tendrils even as Dantar, staggering from the pain and from what must surely have been a partial dose of the creature’s venom, steadied his shaking arms enough to aim the power bow one more time.  The spear flew free and sank itself into the spot exactly between the shambleclaw’s head and thorax, burying itself deeply in a soft spot between the plates of its body armor.  The shambleclaw emitted a sickening noise like a scream cut off by something wet inside of it.  It reared back, flailing and thrashing its tentacles wildly in the air, and finally fell over, becoming a twitching mass of legs and tentacles that would not rise again.

At once the pilot landed the floater and Dantar sank into the passenger’s seat, grasping at the open wound on his shoulder.  It was a thing of inflamed, exposed layers of inner flesh, surrounded by a noisome purple-redness of skin.  Without hesitation, Gwen rushed to the landed craft, holding up the healer’s bag to the pilot.  “Here!” she cried.  “I took this from where I was.  Please help him!”

The pilot took the pouch from Gwen and treated the wound with a frothy substance and a skin-like sealant.  Dantar locked eyes on Gwen.  His gaze was even blearier than hers had been when she awoke in the royal bedchamber.  “You should not have run,” he groaned.

As the king shut his eyes and slipped off into a stupor Gwen watched him, the pain on her face mirroring the pain he must surely have felt before he blacked out.  Feelings churned up inside her, more feelings than she could name.  She had only wanted to get away.  She did not want this.

              Gwen was so fixated on Dantar and his fate that the import of what she was doing did not register with her when she willingly climbed into the floater with the pilot and the half-conscious Dantar.  She only marveled at the way he passed into and out of lucidity with a strength that would be the pride of any warrior.  She only half heard the pilot explain that the shambleclaws could not pass through the solid rock strata of the plateau, which was why the king had ordered this palace built atop it.  She listened to Dantar as he ordered the pilot, with unwavering command in spite of his condition, that he was to be taken to the same bedchamber from which his consort had fled and that he was to be treated and spend the night there. 

After all that had occurred—her refusal to accept his suit, her escape attempt, his taking a shambleclaw’s stinger for her—he actually still wanted to share a bed with her, and actually trusted her to remain by his side and make no reprisal against his attempt to coerce her submission.  What kind of man was this, after all?

Back in the Royal bedchamber, the healer treated Dantar in Gwendolyn’s presence as if Gwen had done nothing against her, as if her bashing the healer in the head to make her escape had never happened.  If anything, she was still deferential to Gwendolyn as her future queen.  Without so much as a word of acknowledgement of anything that Gwen had done, the healer excused herself after further ministering to Dantar’s wound, putting a fresh protein strip on it, and feeding him some sort of antivenin that would see him through the night and ensure a full recovery. 

Gwen noticed guards posted outside the portal before it slid shut with the healer on the other side of it.  The intended of the king would be going nowhere tonight.  She would stay in this chamber with him as he lay sleeping off the venom of the shambleclaw in the bed where he had meant to spend this night mounting her and binding them as one.  And so Gwen watched him sleep, and marveled all the more at her temptation to climb between the covers with him and just lie at his side.  She opted to sleep on one of the divans instead, and chose one that faced the bed.  She sat up, watching him by starlight in the darkened bedchamber, watching the plates of his pecs rise and fall with his sleeping breaths, and played over and over in her mind the memory of him coming to her rescue.  She had rejected him.  She had all but hated him.  And he had saved her.