Wed to the Alien Prince by C.V. Walter
Chapter 20
The dress Serogero pulled out was intended to be worn for at-homes among the members of the nobility. Light, flowy, and as casual as the aristocracy was allowed to be among any but their closest servants, it was a sea-foam green color that didn't work on most of the women who could have worn it.
"This should work," he told her and turned to the drawers that were hidden in the back corner. Technically, he could have moved the rack holding the clothes over them out of the way but it wasn't full and the ones he needed to get to were marked. "And your underthings are in here."
"My underthings?" Kaelin repeated. "And where did you get a dress in my size?"
"Isn't that what you call them?" Serogero asked. "And the dress came from the storage hold. Brinker pulled what you would need and got your measurements from Mintonar. Trina adjusted things so they'd fit you."
Kaelin looked stunned and reached out for the dress. "I can't wear this," she said. "It's too nice. We're just going down to the Medical Bay."
"Welcome to being a princess," Serogero said and kissed the top of her head. "You will have nice clothes, you will be required to wear them any time you step out of our quarters, and you will mostly not be able to pick them out."
"I can't pick my own clothes?" she asked. "But I didn't think you had a whole ton of servants. That should be something I can do."
"Well, that's mostly Brinker," Serogero explained. "You won't need help getting dressed but he's very excited about being able to dress you. He's even working with Trina to make sure we can have things adjusted as you need them."
"What does Trina have to do with any of this?" Kaelin asked. "Who's Trina? Why does she get more say in how I dress than I do?"
This was not the response Serogero had expected when he handed his mate a new wardrobe.
"I've been given to understand that she is a human seamstress and another friend of Molly's. Brinker speaks very highly of her."
"Oh," Kaelin said. "I think I've heard Molly talk about her. I didn't realize she was on board. Why is she altering my clothes? Or, I guess, your clothes to fit me?"
"These are for you," Serogero said. "Or, maybe I should say, these are not my clothes that have been altered to fit you. We have storage crates full of clothes that either don't fit or are not owned by anybody on this ship. Many of them were brought for children that do not yet exist. Brinker and some of the others conspired to bring a wardrobe for a princess that did not, yet, exist. Some of it took part of my personal storage allotment."
"What?" Kaelin looked up at him, the bewildered expression on her face made his heart beat harder in his chest.
"Since it was unlikely there would be anybody else on the ship allowed to wear these clothes, they were specifically put under my personal storage allotment and I brought other things to contribute to our voyage."
"I really don't understand," Kaelin said. "But I should probably ask more questions about how everything works so I can get an understanding of what we have, what we need, and maybe come up with options for how to get them?"
"Right now," Serogero said, tilting her face back to kiss her softly. "You need to get cleaned up and dressed. I promise, that is the most casual thing in this closet right now and we need to get down to the Medical Bay."
Kaelin nodded, her eyes closed just as she sighed. "Can we bring my clothes back, at least? I'd like to have something I can wear when I'm not 'on', so to speak."
"Of course we can," Serogero told her. "We'll do that as soon as we're finished talking to Mintonar."
She nodded and opened her eyes. The black part in the middle of her eyes contracted and expanded before her eyes settled on his face. She frowned at him and squinted slightly. "Can you back up just a little bit?"
"Is something wrong?" he asked and took a step back.
"I don't know," she said and squinted again. "But I think I'm going to take that shower quickly."
"Do you want to choose your underthings?" he asked when she turned.
"You grab them," she said. "Since I don't get much of a choice anyway. You know what's appropriate, right?"
Kaelin rushed out of the closet and he turned to the drawers. If Brinker had set them up the way he had for Serogero's things, it should be fairly easy to grab what he assumed Kaelin would need. They'd talked about everything since they'd met, including her difficulty shopping. He was hoping not having to do her own shopping would be something that would convince her to stay with him and his people but he might have misjudged.
She was standing in the middle of the bedroom, her hair still slightly damp, when he emerged with the dress and appropriate underthings. He watched her as she stared at an object he couldn't identify across the room then spun to stare and squint at something else.
"Are you well?" he asked.
"We told Mintonar that the bio-nanos weren't allowed to change anything, right? They're supposed to be diagnostic tools only, right?"
"And they can fuel themselves on dead and damaged cells," he reminded her. With a glance down at his comm band, he saw a message from Mintonar requesting their presence in the Medical Bay. He shifted the muscles in his fingers to find the monitors Mintonar had set up to alert him when Kaelin was in trouble.
They'd gone off earlier to tell him she was having a seizure. The only thing she'd complained about was a headache. They weren't doing anything but her heart rate was registering higher than it should be.
"Dammit," Kaelin said. "Something is off in the programming. I hope it was an oversight and not something he did deliberately."
Rage boiled up in Serogero and the possibility that Mintonar might have done something beyond what he'd said he would do with the bio-nanos. "Are you sure?" he asked.
"My eyes are doing something that's not right," she explained. "Like, focusing with perfect clarity and then fuzzing out to my usual not being able to see. If he'd programmed them to fix my eyes, it's not working. If he didn't and they're just doing that, something else is wrong. So, yes, I'm sure something is off and I want to know what and why."
His anger eased but his concern did not. "Get dressed," he said, handing her the clothes he'd pulled for her. He had his own in his hand. "I'll clean quickly and we'll go to the Medical Bay."
Kaelin nodded and he moved quickly to the shower. She would be finished before he was but he knew he could move fast enough to not leave her waiting too long. He hoped he'd made the right decisions regarding her underthings. While they'd discussed them, he hadn't paid much attention to their functions except where it was necessary to take them off. His people had similar things but the shapes they were supposed to create were different than what the human women seemed to prefer.
He took the fastest shower he'd ever managed in his life and only just allowed the dryer pad to work so his hair was still damp when he walked out into the room still pulling a shirt over his arms to secure across his chest. Shirt construction didn't seem to have as many variables between their species as he thought they might, though his people didn't have as many things to get caught on horns as the humans did.
The sight of Kaelin before him in the dress stopped him hard in his tracks. She was beautiful. The fabric seemed to foam about her, drawing attention to the slim line of her neck and the daintiness of her feet. The color almost made the skin on her arms glow, a trick most of the women of his acquaintance would have paid very good money for.
"What's wrong?" Kaelin asked, shaking him out of his stupor. "I look ridiculous, don't I? I'll find something else to wear when we get back."
"No," he said and the startled look on her face told him he was a bit more demanding than he'd meant to be. "No, you don't look ridiculous. You look beautiful and regal and more like a princess than any other woman I've met. If anything, I would commission a dozen gowns in this color and ask that all your at-home dresses be in this style. You need jewelry that's capable of complimenting your beauty the way this dress does."
She blushed and looked down. "I don't think-"
"Don't," he said, emotion building inside of him. "I know you have a wonderful brain but for this, please, just trust me when I say the only reason I would want you to take that dress off is to show just how much I appreciate the body it was covering."
Her mouth dropped open slightly and he couldn't help himself. He crossed to her and took her into his arms, crushing the fabric to pull her against him and kiss her. With a couple strokes of his hand, he could have escalated it, and he was tempted to when her arms wound around his neck and he could feel the tension drain out of her body.
"I love you," she whispered against his lips.
His only answer was to hold her tighter and kiss her harder. When he was able to pull back enough to respond, one look at her face had him pulling her close to kiss her breathless again. There wasn't enough time or adequate words to explain to her how he felt.
"We have to get to the Medical Bay," he told her. "Or I would spend the next several hours showing you just how much I love you in every way I possibly could."
"Yes we do," she said with a sigh. "And I hate that the first thing we have to do after spending some time out of quarantine is to go rushing back to Medical to deal with a problem caused by what we had to do to get me out of Medical."
"We knew this was a possibility," he said, running his hands up her arms.
"I can still hate it," she retorted.
"Yes, you can," he agreed. "And I don't blame you one bit that you want to but I'm hoping this means that there are more possible solutions than we first thought."
"I hope so," she said. "I don't know what they could be but I really do hope so. It would be a nice change from it being worse than we thought."
Serogero reluctantly stepped back and finished closing his shirt. "I'm certain it will be better than that."
Kaelin nodded and turned away, her eyes scanning the floor by the door, the frown on her face growing gradually deeper. "I don't have shoes," she said, her voice perplexed. "Why don't I have shoes?"
Prince Serogero thought back to what had happened when they'd gotten back to the room after the injunction from Mintonar that they introduce her to as many Orvax virii as they could. Had she been wearing shoes to the Medical Bay for the exam?
"Ship shoes," he said and turned towards the closet. "There should be ship shoes in here for you."
"But those won't go with the dress," she told him, following him into the closet. "And I still want to know where my shoes are."
The shoes he was looking for were right next to his, along with a wide array of others that had obviously been put aside for her. "Everybody wears ship shoes while they're on board," he told her, picking up the pair. "It's less a fashion statement and more a necessity. They'll go with the dress well enough."