Free Aedian: Alien Warrior: A Sci-Fi Alien Invasion Paranormal Romance by Ashley West

your people use is hardly favorable for you guys treating us like people. I mean, you call us ‘prizes’, so that definitely sets up the whole ‘you owning us’ thing.”
    Aedian tilted his head to the side as she spoke and then shrugged a shoulder. “I...guess.”
    She sighed. It was apparently too much to have that particular conversation just now. Well, progress was progress she supposed, and the apology was more than she had been expecting.
    “I would have thought you’d be glad to be rid of me,” she said, sipping her tea and looking at him.
    “The treaty-”
    She snorted, cutting him off. “You don’t care about the treaty. I could see that at the tournament. That was all about you needing to prove that you were strong, not because you wanted to be saddled with a human wife and locked into prolonging your race.”
    “I...what?” Aedian asked, frowning in confusion, and Roxy figured that his gift of tongues wasn’t cut out for catching up with her logic, so she sighed.
    “You weren’t any happier with me than I was with you,” she explained.
    “That’s true,” he allowed. “But...we are stuck with each other. Because of the treaty. I might not care about it, but I respect it. I have no other choice.”
    And that was true enough. They were both victims, though Roxanne thought she had perhaps gotten the shorter end of the stick, but then, Aedian probably felt the same way. She sighed and put her cup down, tugging on an errant curl that fell into her face from her sloppy bun.
    “Do you respect me?” she asked. “Because I’m not going back with you if you don’t.”
    He looked at her for a long moment, clearly thinking. Finally he inclined his head. “Yes. I think I do. You aren’t weak. Well...you’re a human, so you’re weak by nature, but you’re strong for your kind. You stand up for yourself and you don’t allow disrespect. That is a strength. I am sorry for what I did, but you reacted with strength.”
    “I slapped you.”
    He shrugged a shoulder. “Strength.”
    They were such a simple people, it seemed. Defending yourself was strength and rolling over and taking abuse was a weakness. Well, Roxanne had never been someone to let people walk all over her when she could help it, so she didn’t think they were going to have a problem there. She looked down at the floor for a moment, thinking, and when she looked back up, Aedian was on his feet, walking towards her with slow carefulness.
    She watched him warily, unable to forget what had happened the last time he’d been coming towards her. But this was a different thing entirely, and she let out a slow breath as he approached.
    Carefully, he reached up and touched her face, giving her ample time to step away or tell him to stop. She didn’t, though, smiling a bit when his calloused palm came to rest on her cheek. It was, perhaps, the most gentle he’d ever been with her, and she looked up and into his strange eyes, wondering what he was doing.
    “You challenge me,” he murmured. “You try to be my equal.”
    “I am your equal,” Roxy retorted. “I don’t care if you’re bigger and stronger than me, there’s nothing I can do to change that, and I am a human. That’s just the fact of the matter. But if we’re going to do this, and we don’t have a choice in it either way, then I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m less than you. Like I’m...some burden you got saddled with. You might feel like that, and I do too, to some extent, but we’re going to be equals in this because that’s how marriages work.”
    “Not on Calphas,” Aedian pointed out, and Roxanne surprised herself by laughing instead of getting angry.
    “You’re not on Calphas anymore, big boy.”
    Something like humor shone in those silvery eyes, and Aedian looked at her for a long moment before he was dipping his head down. “May I?”
    She gathered that he wanted to kiss her, and there was something about the way he asked that made her smile and