Tamed By The Alien Barbarian by Celeste King
Candi
An alarm went off. I knew immediately what had gone wrong and dreaded what it might mean.
“Jaxil,” I called out, “did you burn the eggs again?”
I cocked my head, listening for a reply. I heard vague mumbling and swearing coming from the direction of the kitchen.
“Durine?” I called out next, “did Daddy burn the eggs again?”
On cue, our daughter came into the master bedroom to relay the information. Only three-years-old, but already half my size thanks to her Sanax blood, Durine had Jaxil’s face and my thin frame. She nodded as she came in sucking on a treat.
“How bad?” I asked my daughter. Durine showed me the flavor of the treat her father had given her. Martian Cherry. The little girl’s favorite. “So, breakfast is delayed?” I shouted to the kitchen.
“What do I even bother bribing her for?” Jaxil called back.
I laughed softly. Then I glanced down at Hayden. Jaxil’s and my little boy, born only a few months ago. He’d fallen asleep while nursing. Hayden looked almost a hundred percent human. But there were already tell-tale, dragon-like Sanax features creeping into his face. I could already tell how handsome he would be.
I only prayed I could make sure he grew up to be a better cook than his father.
The boy stirred as I carefully took him from my breast and held onto him as I covered myself up. Then I told Durine, her face covered in red smears from her treat, that we all should go see how bad the damage was.
“It’s not my fault,” Jaxil said as we entered the kitchen. He was bare-chested and looking sexy, despite the remains of the egg-bonfire in front of him. His wings were slightly open and he was pulsing them to make a little bit of air flow to help dissipate the smoke hanging over everything. “There’s something wrong with the stove. I’ve called our people a dozen times to fix it.”
“I know,” I told him, gently going over to him and kissing him on the shoulder. “And I cancel the appointment every time because the only problem with our stove is the way you use it.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You seem to think the range only has two options: off and wildfire. Cooking is a subtler art than that.”
“We have more than enough money for neither one of us to ever cook, my dear. Why do you insist on this?”
“Because I want our kids to know how to care for themselves, even if they’re always going to be provided for.”
“That’s such a human idea,” he mumbled.
“And it’s very Sanax of you to accommodate my request with such magnanimity.”
“Huh?” he asked. Then, he looked at me for the first time since I’d come in. He glanced at our baby on my shoulder. His face changed. Gone was the moping look. It was replaced by a beaming smile. He took Hayden from me.
“Be careful, he just ate,” I told my husband. Jaxil kissed me on the cheek, then began cooing at our boy.
“Mommy?” Durine asked, “are we not going to be able to have any breakfast because Daddy ruined it?”
“Hey…” Jaxil warned.
“We’ll go out. Again. But tomorrow this family is going to learn how to fry an egg or else.”
“In my defense, I was getting the hang of it before we left Earth and moved to Mars,” Jaxil said, bouncing Hayden in his arms. “It’s the whole gravity-shift that’s thrown me off.”
“Sure,” I said.
Fortunately, all Jaxil had to do to start the coffee in the morning was push a few buttons on a machine. I grabbed myself a cup and sat at the kitchen table. Jaxil held onto Hayden while coercing Durine into helping him clean up the blackened pan of charred eggs.
I let my mind wander. It was still hard to believe this was our life. Things seemed to happen so quickly after the wedding, there’d hardly been a chance to breathe.
I’d become pregnant with Durine on our wedding night. So my body was trying to share its resources with a half-alien baby growing inside me while Jaxil and I hammered out all the details of merging our companies. My belly expanded at the same time as our operations. We’d become the first group to secure mining rights on Titan.
But we’d barely been able to celebrate that before Durine arrived and our lives were changed again. Thankfully, Xxuric and Heather had already become parents by the time Durine arrived. They were full of helpful hints. And Xxuric was able to talk Jaxil through what it meant to be a father in a human-Sanax marriage. Not that there weren’t still moments where I wanted to grab my husband by the horns and hurl him into space, he seemed so dim-witted.
We got through those challenges, however. Then there was the surprise of just how quickly a Sanax child grows. I could swear little Durine’s closet was a timeline of clothes that had only been worn once.
Just as soon as we all seemed to be getting comfortable with one another, Jaxil and I were blessed to learn we were pregnant again. I knew it was a Sanax boy from first kick. I was just glad the little guy wouldn’t develop horns until after his third birthday.
When Hayden came into the world, I suggested to Jaxil that we relocate to Mars. It would be good for both our family and our business. Mars had quickly become the center of our operations. It was also our quickest link to the Titan operation.
Meanwhile, Mars being outside the reach of some of the worst impulses of human and Sanax thought had made it a center of arts and culture. The planet’s wealth and perfectly terraformed environment had attracted talent from around the galaxy. Now, it had some of the best schools anywhere in the Milky Way.
So, a few weeks before the Great Egg Burning Incident, we’d packed up everything and headed to Mars. I’d made one stipulation. For the first month in our new home, there would be no servants. I had become too comfortable with that sort of lifestyle and Jaxil had never known any other kind.
My kids would have to know life wasn’t always so easy.
Christ. Was it really me that was once a stripper, hustling for every dollar I could fit into my g-string? I thought to myself as I sipped my coffee in my Martian mansion while my alien husband and mixed children stood at the sink. Hard to believe I was ever that girl. It would probably be even harder for that girl to imagine she could ever end up being me.
Yet there I was. Funny the twists and turns and unexpected happiness that the universe can throw at you. No matter how deep you think you’ve mined into life’s mysteries, there’s always some new lode of riches to be discovered.
There was a tap on my arm and I realized I’d drifted off into reveries. Durine was standing next to me.
“Yes, dear?”
“Can we go to Ziggots?” my daughter asked.
I looked past her at my husband. Ziggots was his favorite breakfast place on Mars. I always suspected the place intrigued him for more than its menu. It was run by Andrenian twin sisters. And since every Andrenian female was already a kind of conjoined twin, it meant that the proprietors of this particular establishment were really a four-some.
“I think we can go,” I told Durine. “But Daddy’s been very bad this morning. Do you think that we should let him come us?”
Durine considered, then nodded and whispered a ‘yes’ in my ear.
“All right. Everyone get ready.”
Durine went running to her room. Jaxil passed Hayden off to me as he went to get a shirt on. He leaned over and kissed me softly on the forehead. I grabbed his arm.
“If you stare too long at those twins, Mister,” I said with a roguish smile, “then you’ll be the one getting spanked, tonight.”
“Intriguing…” he said, and was gone.
I held Hayden close. Yes, life was full of layers to be bored into with all the passion you could muster. We – Jaxil, me and our children – would keep digging, that much was certain. Who knew what treasures awaited us?
The End. BUT to read about a day in the life of Jaxil and Candi, sign up to the newsletter here: https://www.subscribepage.com/celesteking
