Free Harvest Moons by Melisse Aires

Harvest Moons
     
    Melisse
Aires
     
     
    Copyright: 
Melisse Aires 2013
    This
short scifi romance contains adult scenes.
     
     
    BLURB
     
    With the death of her no-account husband,
Polly is the sole owner of a farm steading on the planet Celstar. She is
determined to hold the steading and make a life for herself and two Synth
children in her care. Her nearest neighbor, widower  Fallon Verdad, is the big
landowner in the territory and also her local Councilman. Like most of the
other settlers, Fallon is a Shimmer, a horse shifter, while Polly is
human—well, mostly human. Their attraction to each other is electric and hard
to deny. An affair would lead to scandal in this conservative community.
Scandal is the last thing Polly needs.
    Sci-fi space western romance, futuristic,
short story.
    ~**~
     
     
     
    Her husband was dead and she was glad for
it. With this one last ugly chore Polly would be done with Hoggart Avila forever
and someday the memories of their short, ugly marriage would fade. Owning the Steading
would certainly help with forgetting the unpleasant way she got it. More
stability than she’d sure ever had, and she meant to keep it. She was legal
wife by law of the Terran Confederacy. Somehow, she was an upstanding, vote
carrying citizen of Celstar Mid-Territory.
    It was more than she’d ever hoped to have
in life.
    Polly paused in her labor, stopped and
rubbed her aching back. Dragging the body far from the Steading was dangerous
but necessary. Her laser was in her apron pocket, and high day was the rare
time to see a volve or a pack of woolers. Woolers, with their deadly horns and
short tempers, headed for the river banks during the heat of the day to nap and
volves came out after sunset. No extra credits to spend for the precious fuel
in the flitter to carry the body, since the solar array on it had busted. After
harvest she’d get in fixed. Meanwhile, she couldn’t allow this rotting hulk to
corrupt their water supply. He’d caused her enough misery.  The Steading only
had the one well and no credit to drill another.  
    She gripped the coarse cloth of the bag
she’d sewed him into and pulled him over the rocky ground, uphill, almost to
the hole. Sweat trickled so her shirtwaist was wet with it. And immediately after
this chore, she’d be in the fields until dark. Harvest. Of course Hoggart would
die at the time of year he was needed most.
    Sweat removed toxins. By the end of the
week she would be toxin free.
    The woven sack ripped as she pulled the heavy
body over the rocky ridge at the top of the hill, exposing Hoggart’s waxy
countenance, blood dried in his hair from the fatal wound. Polly had not done
him the final courtesy of cleaning him up. She’d sewed him in the bag, and dug his
hole on the far side of the hill so she wouldn’t have to see the grave marker
everyday. Shortly she would be done with the wretched man forever.
    Hoofbeats thundered behind her and she twisted
around to see one of the Shimmers in horse shape trotting down the far hill across
the vale that separated her land from her nearest neighbor. Shimmers. That was
how Hoggart got a cheap Class  Three land Package on what was clearly Class Two
land. The Mid-Territory on Celstar allowed Shimmer settlers and most Steadings
has been purchased by Equine Shimmers. In town they looked like anyone else,
collars and cuffs, city coats, proper dresses down to their boots. But across
the fields she sometimes saw a wild horse running free on the open grasslands,
mane flowing in the wind. It was a pretty enough sight, and the Shimmers kept
to themselves in their clan Steadings, so she never reckoned them to be a
problem.
    Until now. What if this one thought
Hoggart’s death might not be accidental? Her heart, already pumping hard from
the work of dragging the body, sped up so she felt the need to breath heavy.
    The horse coming toward her was
beautiful, large with feathers on strong legs, a dark brown, nearly black, with
a sheen in