deeply committed self, only now there’s a peace and tranquility that wasn’t there before. I love every single thing about this man, and I plan to kick back and enjoy the happily ever after that we’ve earned through our blood, sweat and tears.
Epilogue
Juliet - Sixteen Months Later
Things have really simmered down in the Clade of Borak. Jill, Tonya and Elaine have all settled in quite nicely. They love the pristine wilderness surrounding our clade’s keep. Borak’s sons spoil them absolutely rotten. Right now they’re all rushing around putting the finishing touches on the party we’re throwing tonight.
Jill does an awfully lot of arguing with the one called Celdar with a long ‘a.’ He’s a little uptight and rigid in his thinking. Celdar is responsible for operating all the farming and food processing droids.
Elaine has taken a shine to the one who is next to the youngest. They all came from the same spawning, so there is only a few minutes difference between their ages, but those minutes are marked and remembered by the sons. I’m not entirely certain what Danel does. I see him with rolled up scrolls of old fashioned parchment, and he has lots of visitors in and out to a little office he occupies in the back of the common area.
I’ve taken Tonya under my wing. She’s overwhelmed and a little lost in this new environment. She lost her parents in the fall of Earth and never had much of an extended family. Tonya is withdrawn, and though I’m doing everything I can to draw her out of her shell, most days you’d never know she was in the room.
Penelope and I had a long talk about how guilty she feels about our disagreement that resulted in Borak getting scourged. She apologized for blaming me at first, and I apologized for being so harsh when we first met. I’m not the person I was before, and it’s pretty clear that I was so hardcore into the mission that I couldn’t see past tracking down those Sonarians. In any event, she’s got a huge crush on a young man from a nearby clade. He’s one of Kryos’ sons, who is single but raising a little human girl. Penelope goes to visit them all the time because she likes to make googly eyes at the father and play with the little one. They’re cute together, but I can’t remember the man’s name to save my life.
A pair of strong arms slips around my waist, and Borak’s masculine scent wraps around me even as his muscular chest rubs against my back. “It will not be long now, my queen. I believe our little spawn will break from their shells this very evening.”
I don’t take my eyes off the incubation chamber where two huge Draconian eggs are resting. The chamber has environmental controls. It maintained the humidity at a particular level that kept the shells from totally hardening until the final stage in the growth cycle. Watching these eggs get bigger has been my obsession over the last few months. Everyone close to us is saying they’re bigger than anything they’ve ever seen.
“I’ve seen them tremble. Is that a good sign?”
Borak’s deep voice turns tender. “It means they are moving around inside the shell. This usually happens right before they break out.”
“We are going to have two of the biggest, toughest boys in these mountains.”
“I believe you are correct, my queen. This does not bother you?”
“Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“As you might have noticed, I am much larger and more dense than most of my counterparts. I was very aware of how this inconvenienced everyone around from the very beginning. I was too large for my habitat and quickly outgrew the larger one they moved me to. It took more to feed me and clothe me, and even seating had to be reinforced to accommodate my bulk. Draconian young are normally placed in trainings pod in pairs or even groups of three. I was given my own learning pod. Because of my bulk, no one wished to squeeze in with me.”
I turn in his arms, bringing my hands up to caress his face. “You’re just the perfect size. I wouldn’t change anything about you. If our boys turn out to be exactly like their father, I would be thrilled.”
His eyes drop, and I think he’s going to tell me something else horrible about his childhood, but he doesn’t. Borak slips his hand into his nice crisp uniform top