He was discomfited by the fact that he had been so focused on his physical attraction to her that he had previously overlooked the importance of her as an asset.

But that hardly mattered when no one could be aware of it beyond him and he had realized it quickly enough to consider how best to handle his prize from what might possibly turn out to be the most important raid of his entire reign as Prince!

Chapter Five

The landing was far more horrific than the take off! Even without the porthole, she knew the moment they hit the atmosphere. The ship was buffeted by scary winds as soon as it dropped low enough and this was no gentler near the ground!

She thought they’d crashed when they landed with a scream of metal against metal and rock and a jolt hard enough to make her bite her tongue.

The barbarian Prince’s swift entrance seemed to support her worst fears and Noelle immediately threw off her safety harness with shaking hands and charged toward the door on rubbery legs.

He caught her and held her. “You cannot escape now!” he growled.

Noelle gaped at him. “We could if you’d move your ass!” she snapped. “It hasn’t exploded yet!”

It was his turn to gape at her in disbelief. He looked torn between outrage and amusement.

Thankfully, the amusement seemed to win out.

“We have not crashed, you impudent little guztier! We have landed on my world!”

Noelle wasn’t certain she believed him. There seemed to be an awful lot of screaming, cursing, and scrambling on the part of the other passengers to get out of the death trap—get off the ship.

“Ok! Fine! You win! Can we discuss this a hundred yards or so from the ship?”

He shook his head, but he released her. Noelle took the opportunity to follow the last of the other passengers as fast as she could. She would’ve outstripped them except that they were blocking her path and wouldn’t let her get around them!

And the moment she reached the exit a gale force blast of frigid air slammed into her.

Of course even getting to the door had felt like crawling through a wind tunnel, but she’d had a lot of very large people in front of her to break the force of the wind. With everyone else now galloping down the gangplank toward a herd of …. Monsters milling about in a pen … she had an unrestricted view and the wind had no impediments to scouring the skin off her face, neck, and arms.

A heavy fur was tossed over her, momentarily blocking her view, and she nearly slipped and rolled down the gangplank. Fortunately, the same thoughtful person who’d dropped the blinding blanket over her, grabbed her as she pitched forward. This time, instead of tossing her across one shoulder, the barbarian Prince rolled her up in the fur and tucked her under one arm as if he was carrying a roll of carpet.

She had mixed feelings about the situation. The fur instantly blocked the bulk of the icy wind tearing at her, protecting her both from the cold and the sense of being sandblasted. It smelled a lot like the animal it had come off of, however.

Not that she knew what sort of animal had given its all to keep her temporarily warm! But it certainly had a gamey smell to it that tainted the air and made it hard to get plain fresh air.

And being wrapped in it—or possibly because of the arm cinched around her middle—she had to struggle to breathe.

The first she knew that she was going to get up close and personal with the giant monster-beasts was when she was lifted up and then plunked down on something that was warm beneath her ass—and moving. Fortunately, since the fur she was wrapped in produced a straight-jacket effect, the Prince never completely released her as he joined her on the back of the beast.

She relaxed fractionally when she felt the bracket his arms and chest formed around her, losing her fear that she was going to hit the hard ground any moment. The skin began to loosen almost immediately when she’d settled and Noelle wiggled until she could free her arms and hands and push the piece over her head and face far enough back to get a look at her surroundings.

Most of the females appeared to be rolled in a similar hide—and hogtied and strapped across the rumps of the beasts!

Noelle’s shock at that discovery gave way to a sense of gratitude.

Unable to stand much total freedom from the fur, she coiled it tightly around herself again and covered her head and face, leaving only a sliver of an opening to view her surroundings. Through that small crack, she turned to look at the Prince. “Why … uh?”

Amusement, she thought, glittered in his eyes, narrowed against the gusting wind. He shrugged. “They fought.”

Well, that was stupid! She didn’t voice the thought, though, particularly when she didn’t honestly know if it was a stupid move or not. It did seem to her that they would have been better off to make a pretense of cooperation to lull their captors into letting their guard down, but one never knew how such a thing would turn out.

With modern era crime on Earth, it usually turned out that the longer one was able to stay alive the better chance one had of staying that way—it increased the chances of escape or rescue—but it didn’t always end well. At least as often as not, it seemed to her, if a fierce effort to escape the captor immediately was unsuccessful and the perpetrator managed to carry their victims off to a quiet place, murder, not release came after the perp had satisfied whatever desires had prompted him to commit the crime in the first place.

She supposed, though, that her current circumstances couldn’t be compared too closely to that sort of situation, and not merely because she wasn’t dealing with humans—because she didn’t think they were that different from humans when all was said and done. These people were aliens and that meant an unknown mindset, culture, and belief system, but she thought there would very likely be certain constants, that they could be counted on to feel, and exhibit, many of the same traits/emotions believed to be purely human.

Because they had discovered that the traits were purely animal—not human—and that many so called ‘lower’ animals on Earth also exhibited greed, desire, generosity, etc.

Given that, she didn’t think it was too much of a stretch to expect similar behavior, regardless of the vast differences between them.

However, this primitive society didn’t seem to have laws prohibiting this kind of behavior, and that was the main motivation for criminals to kill—the possibility of getting caught and punished. By killing their victims, they had this twisted type of logic that made it seem they were less likely to get caught and convicted—no witness, no conviction. And sometimes they were right. More often, they were dead wrong and ended up paying a life for a life.

The important thing to her health, though, was that these people weren’t concerned about retaliation and therefore had no motive to dispose of their captives.

That being the case, she thought it might not be pleasant to be a captive of these people and probably wouldn’t be, but she didn’t think they would try to kill her and short of that, she was determined to endure until she could find a way out!

Of course, she couldn’t rule out the possibility of sacrifice, but it seemed a long way to go to get sacrifices!

Which still didn’t rule it out, but given what she knew of the situation, it seemed more likely that the men had captured women for the usual purpose.

Well, one of them. They didn’t seem like the type to particularly care whether they had a woman around to keep house!

“You like that these barbarian neetars have taken you?”

Noelle felt the Prince stiffen at the comment or she wouldn’t have realized the observation was directed at her. Slowly, she twisted her head until she could see the speaker who, unlike the majority of the women, was settled before the warrior on the beast next to theirs as the Prince was holding her.