farmer.”
I blinked at her. “You’re about as far away from a farm as you can get.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I know. There was a mix-up and I was sent here to Quill, and his actual intended mate, Evelyn, was sent to the farmer. It was in the cold months and one of the infamous Draax storms had started so we were isolated in the castle for a month.”
“So, obviously you’re one of the women with the gene variant,” I said.
“Yes.” She drank some more juice before resting one hand on her belly. “I didn’t like Quill at first, I thought he was arrogant and rude, but…”
A soft smile crossed her face and I said, “But?”
“I realized I was wrong. Anyway, long story short, Quill and I fell in love and we discovered the gene variant existed when I became pregnant with Jovie. We performed the mating ceremony shortly after that and now this former nobody is the queen of the western province. Trust me, no one is more weirded out by the fact that I’m a queen than me.”
“What happened to the other woman?”
Sabrina grinned at me. “Luckily, Evie fell in love with the farmer and his best friend. When the storm ended and Quill took me to the farm to tell the farmer that I would not be his nanny, we discovered that Evelyn was perfectly happy to stay with her new loves. It’s a friggin’ miracle really. What are the odds that one – they’d give us the wrong identification chips and two – we’d both fall in love with the Draax we weren’t supposed to be with?”
“So, Evelyn is in love with two Draax guys?” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. Bran and Court. Bran has a daughter named Bella whose mother left her to return to Earth, but Bella thinks of Evie as her mother. And Evie and Court just had a baby boy.”
“So, they’re just one big happy family,” I said. “I knew that Draax liked to have threesomes with chicks, but I didn’t realize it extended beyond the banging.”
I winced at my coarseness. “Uh, I mean… sorry. That was a rude way to say it.”
Sabrina laughed again. “Maybe, but accurate. It is a little unusual for two Draax to mate with one woman, but Bran and Court always knew they wanted to share a woman and Evie is perfectly happy with both of them.”
I spilled some orechoke down the front of Galan’s shirt and muttered a curse before giving Sabrina an apologetic look.
“As cute as you look in oversized Draax shirts, where are your clothes?” Sabrina asked.
“Sigan burned them while I was in the shower,” I said. “And I didn’t have any other ones in my backpack.”
She laughed. “Sigan means well but he has a hard time understanding females.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “But to be fair, my clothes did smell pretty terrible.”
“Yes, I saw you when you first arrived and were still unconscious. You’re actually pretty lucky that you stole some juice from one of Quill’s ships. Sigan said the faulty translator in your head probably would have killed you in another day or two.”
“Oh, I didn’t steal the juice,” I said.
“Right. Cheryl stole it.”
I jerked in surprise and Sabrina grinned at me. “My husband was amused by your cleverness.”
She drank some more juice and I ate a piece of the citrus like fruit called jeanda. I glanced at Adrix and lowered my voice, “Thank you so much for what you did the other day. That was really nice of you.”
“Truthfully, I did it for Galan,” Sabrina said. “He’s an amazing guy and while he is my husband’s best friend, if Quill had found out you escaped, it wouldn’t have gone well for Galan.”
“If you hadn’t said anything, I would have told the king that it was my fault, not Galan’s. I wouldn’t have let him get in trouble. I swear.”
When she didn’t reply, I said, “Is Galan okay? I haven’t seen him for a few days, and I’m worried about him.”
Worried was an understatement. While I was fairly certain he wasn’t around because he was pissed at me, there’d been a large part of me that worried he’d gotten in trouble for what happened.
“He’s fine,” Sabrina said. “Busy.”
“Is he?”
She paused. “No, at least no busier than usual. But he asked Adrix to keep an eye on you for now. He’s upset with you, but he’s also upset with himself for being so careless in leaving your door unlocked. If you had escaped or if