Free Highest Bidder: 1 (Mercy) by Lexxie Couper Page A

her back. “I didn’t realize you were so religious.”
    Naya burst out laughing, her cheeks flooding with warmth. “Me either.” She giggled. “The monks would be impressed.”
    Dreylan smoothed his palms up her back, over her shoulders, to tangle his fingers in the tousled mess of her hair. “Oh, I’m sure they were impressed with you long before now.” He tugged her head down, brushing his mouth over her lips in a soft kiss that sent fresh jolts of hunger straight to Naya’s center. “But they can’t have you back, so they’re just going to have to deal with it.”
    He deepened the kiss and Naya willingly accepted it, opening her mouth to his seeking tongue, greeting it with her own. Contented bliss and smoldering desire threaded through her. She’d never felt so completely free, so utterly whole.
    A lifetime being prepared to lose the very essence of who she was had created in her a sense of detachment. Why become emotionally invested in herself when she would lose all she was with one simple act of sex? Yet here she lay, with the man of her dreams, no longer a virgin and still very much the same person she’d always been.
    She smiled into the kiss. Transformed or not, she knew her heart was no longer hers. Dreylan Tarq, the highest bidder, hadn’t bought it. He’d earned it. For that reason alone, she loved him.
    Pulling away from the kiss, she gazed down into his face. Gods. She loved him. A man she’d known for barely six hours. A man she’d dreamt of her whole life.
    She loved him. Utterly. Irreversibly.
    Which made what was to come all the harder.
    Snuggling against his chest, she closed her eyes, breathing in his scent, willing it to permeate her heart forever. The only connection she could take with her.
    She squeezed her eyes tighter, fighting the bitter tears threatening to sting her cheeks. Dreylan had been correct. They couldn’t put their desires ahead of the people of a whole planet. No matter that she had found her one true mate, no matter that she’d never be as happy again, she couldn’t destroy the one chance a desperate race had for survival. New Earth needed her. She had to go to Premier Pretorik Ipari. She had a duty to perform, a position to fulfill. The agreement between New Earth and the GU stipulated her planet would become a member of the union on consummation of her marriage to Ipari.
    She would go to Premier Ipari and pretend Dreylan had never touched her, never entered her. She would give herself over to the GU leader and do everything in her power to make him believe she was what he expected her to be—a virgin riephia .
    If letting him use her body—even if only once before he discovered her deception—saved New Earth, then that’s what had to be done.
    He would most likely kill her on discovery of the truth, but perhaps, if she was persuasive, he would listen to her pleas and not abandon her home planet to the brutal marauders already descending upon it.
    Perhaps, if she offered herself to him as a sexual slave, he would allow New Earth its needed place in the union.
    If she were lucky, however, if the gods truly watched over her and her people—as the monks oft asserted—Ipari would believe she’d become everything he wanted. A lifetime watching the monks temper and contain their emotions had taught her how to do the same. If the gods were on her side, Ipari would never know the woman he believed his perfect mate was actually someone else’s.
    She would do that for her people.
    He could take her body every night, deceived or not, but she would forever belong to Dreylan, her dream lover, her highest bidder.
    She pressed her palm to Dreylan’s heart, feeling its rapid beat slowly return to normal. “My soul is yours,” she said.
    “And mine yours,” he murmured back. “Forever.”
    “Forever,” she repeated on a whisper as two hot, fatalistic tears finally defied her will and slipped from her eyes, branding her cheeks with grim resignation.
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