The Mountain's Mate Read online

  The Mountain's Mate

  Salt Planet Giants Book One

  Sara Ivy Hill

  Copyright © 2022 by Sara Ivy Hill

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Cover design: Covers by Combs https://www.coversbycombs.com/

  Contents

  About This Book

  Content Guide

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Want to read more?

  About the Author

  About This Book

  He’ll move mountains for his mate…

  When Patrek, a giant Skarr, hires a human for a covert mission, he doesn’t expect a female to take the gig. Nor does he expect his long-dormant mating instinct to ignite for someone so tiny! When the heist goes awry and they’re forced to hide out together until the heat dies down, the close quarters reveal that, though they’re vastly mismatched in size, their hearts are a perfect fit.

  To escape with his freedom, Patrek must flee the city. But leaving her behind will break him. Can he convince her to take a mountainous monster as her mate?

  The Mountain’s Mate is a steamy, fated-mates alien romance with a huge helping of size-difference!

  A shorter version of this story was published in the Big Feels monster romance anthology. If you want to skip to the new material, it begins in Chapter 13.

  Content Guide

  The Mountain's Mate contains scenes, references, and tropes that may be unsettling to some readers. Please check the content guide before reading to ensure you have the best experience.

  If you have more specific questions about the content of this book, please email me at ! I’d be happy to elaborate further on any areas of concern.

  Happy reading!

  Sara

  DEPICTED IN SCENES

  Hunger, Killing, Violence

  REFERENCED

  Addiction, Animal Abuse/Neglect, Child Abuse/Neglect, Death of Spouse, Family Separation, Sex Work, Vampirism

  TROPES

  Alien Planet, Forbidden Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, On the Run, Rescue, Size-Difference, Touch Her & Die

  For the space sluts who get it:

  Bigger isn’t always better,

  but this time it definitely is.

  Chapter 1

  MAJA

  The line was too long at the butcher shop. When Maja finally had the small packet of meat in her hand, the last hint of reddish daylight had given way to the aquatic, wavering glow of Salaan’s two moons. By the twins, she wished she was already behind the thick, steel door of her apartment.

  She avoided the main streets, hurrying down the tight alleyways that zigzagged through the Salt District. The neighborhood wasn’t the usual haunt of most Nightborn, but you could never be too careful. Some of them still practiced the old ways and hunted for their meals.

  It was eerie, being out this late, without the protection of the sun. She hadn’t been since—she couldn’t remember. She quickened her steps until she was almost running, her breath coming in sharp animal pants.

  There were other humans still out, of course, but they were marked—if not by a collar with their employers’ name, then by the pockmarks and yellow eyes of a tzat addict. There were only a few like her, unbound humans who tried to be invisible as they hurried to reach the safety of their homes.

  Hurried as much as they dared, anyway. Too slow meant you were prey. But too fast also drew the wrong kind of attention.

  When she reached her squat, plain building, fear crashed and shattered in her chest like a swarm of glasswings. She found herself squeezing the meat so tightly that blood ran through her fingers and pattered onto the sidewalk, betraying her path. It wasn’t until the rolling door thundered shut behind her and the lock slid succinctly into place that she let out her breath and gave the poor butcher’s packet a break.

  She headed down the concrete stairs toward her basement apartment. The comforting noises of the building’s maintenance tunnels echoed up to greet her. Most people wouldn’t be grateful for such a lullaby, but Maja had spent enough time on the streets to appreciate every ordered hum and grind of the furnace and water pumps. The sounds meant warmth. They meant a roof over her head every night. They meant sleep that was truly restful because it wasn’t flavored with fear.

  “Give me that!” Xakov’s voice startled her, and she dropped the meat at the bottom of the stairs, inadvertently foiling his swipe to grab it from her hands. She swooped it up and skittered away from him until her back was pressed against the wall of the basement hallway.

  “It’s mine!” she said hotly, clutching the messy packet to her chest and eyeing the door he was blocking with his body. One more door, her door, and she’d be truly safe. He tilted his head in the creepy Nightborn way that made the back of her neck prickle.

  He sniffed the air. “How does a feedbag with no collar afford djumjum steaks, hmm?”

  “I don’t know—actually work to earn the credits?” Her blow landed. The gray-blue skin that marked him as half-human flushed deeper, and his withered wings flexed.

  He stalked toward her until she could feel his hot, coppery breath on her face. She squeezed her eyes shut against it. “Until you’re caught up on rent, every credit you spend comes out of my pocket. My patience is worn thin, Maja.” He spat her name like an insult, Mah-zhah, his tongue unable to form the sounds properly around his long, sharp canines.

  She ducked under his arm and dove for her apartment, slamming the door behind her and releasing the security bar across it with practiced speed. Xakov screeched outside and hammered his fist against the steel. But even his ring of keys wouldn’t open it now.

  “If you don’t pay up by the end of Manna-moon, you’re out!” he called through the door. When she didn’t answer, he added, “I know you have someone staying with you. I hear you talking through the pipes. If I catch you, I don’t have to wait until you skip rent again. I can turn you out now.”

  “I talk to myself!” she shot back. She was pleased when her voice didn’t betray the crushing level of terror she felt at the thought of being on the streets again. She couldn’t let it happen.

  Then there was only silence outside the door, silence and the hum and grind of the building’s guts. In the corner, Carra rustled in her box, and Maja pressed a finger to her lips, cautioning her not to make a sound. Xakov was still out there in the hall, even if he was pretending to be gone.

  Finally, the faint tem-tem-tem of footsteps sounded from the stairwell, and she let herself relax. “You can come out now,” she whispered.

  Carra unfolded her two long, scaly legs and stood up, surpassing Maja’s height when she stretched her slender neck up into the air. She nuzzled her hooked bill into Maja’s hair and preened her like a chick.

  Maja took the opportunity to check how the gharial’s wing was healing, walking her fingers down the coracoid bone, testing it with gentle pressure. Carra flinched, but only the briefest shudder. The bone felt solid. Now it was just a matter of rebuilding the muscle, the veterinarian had said.

  Hence the meat. It was a splurge Maja couldn’t afford, but it wasn’t like she had enough credits to pay rent before the stop at the butcher shop, anyway.

  “Do your stretches while I make dinner,” she urged the bird in a low voice, her eyes darting reflexively to the door.

  Carra protested with a few lopsided flaps and then obeyed. Gharials were quite intelligent, far more so than the dockworkers who shot them with salt pellets to keep them off the catch would admit. During one of her delivery runs, Maja had found the injured bird crumpled beneath a pier after such an attack and smuggled her to the veterinarian in a spare carra-root sack.

  That’s where last month’s rent credits had gone. And this month’s, too.

  She probably should have killed Carra and eaten her, Maja reflected as she unwrapped the modest strips of meat and began slicing them into even thinner pieces. That’s what her mother would have said. Feed yourself first.

  But as she watched the gharial carefully exercise her injured wing, performing the strengthening sequence the vet had outlined with faultless execution, she didn’t regret it. Any of it.

  Carra deserved to fly again. To feel the tips of her white wings brush the brine as she searched for her sustenance beneath the waves. To find a strong mate, hatch chicks on the hazardous rocky island where the gharial colony nested, out of reach of predators. Safe. Free.

  Maja blinked, her vision going fuzzy as stinging tears suddenly invaded her eyes without the excuse of onions. She scrubbed them away with her sleeve and scooped the steak slices into a bowl. She dropped it in front of the Carra. The gharial dipped her beak into the bowl and plucked out a strip of meat. But instead of gulping it down, she dangled it over Maja’s head, a coo in her gullet.

  Maja laughed silently, pressing her lips together. “I am not eating raw djumjum. It’s for you.”

  Carra froze a moment, one fathomle
ss black eye regarding Maja with disapproval, before tilting her head back to swallow it. She tried again with the second piece, like Maja was a recalcitrant hatchling, but gave up by the third, gobbling down her meal with satisfied, throaty chirps.

  Maja helped herself to a ration bar, curling up on the bed—the only furniture in the one-room apartment—to nibble it and think.

  She still had to figure out how to come up with two months’ rent in two days. Her usual daytime delivery jobs weren’t going to cut it. Unless she wanted to rent out her womb for the next year, she’d have to work nights, too.

  She pulled out her datacom and slid her fingers over the dark screen to wake it. The Graygig app stared back at her. She opened it and weeded out all the postings tagged with feeding or breeding. She would not give any more of herself to sustain the Nightborn.

  She was left with few options, none of them legal: transporting “sensitive” goods in dicey neighborhoods, nude dancing at unregistered clubs, some vague ones that were probably peddling tzat. The delivery gigs paid the worst, but she knew the streets and could potentially line up several jobs along the same route.

  She added it up in her head. Even if she worked day and night, it might not be enough. She’d have to compromise her standards no matter what.

  Tzat-peddling it was, as sick as that made her feel. It was only a few days, though, not forever.

  As her finger hovered over the “accept” button, a new gig alert buzzed, lighting up the screen. She checked it. The pay was exorbitant—enough to cover three months’ rent, not just two. Hazard bonus, the listing said. No nudity. The only stipulation was body size.

  Her size.

  She ignored the implications. Or rather, she was resigned to them. She could endure almost anything for one night if it meant that she and Carra kept a roof over their heads, right?

  Gig accepted.

  Chapter 2

  PATREKILGAR

  The sweet scent curled under the door before he even opened it. Female.

  He almost didn’t answer her knock. But it was late enough that he feared for her safety, so he opened the door to give her directions. She was lost, obviously. No female in her right mind would be wandering the Warehouse District at this time of night.

  “I am a Skarr,” Patrek warned through the door panels before he rolled it up. He knew the stories the Nightborn told about his kind, ugly ones woven with half-truths and outright lies. He didn’t want her to panic when she saw him and run off the end of a pier or anything. He wasn’t good at swimming.

  He waited a beat so she could steel herself and heaved the door up with one hand. The tiny human who stared up at him with wide, dark eyes barely reached his hip. The full bouquet of her scent reached him a moment later. She smelled of fear, as he expected, but it was sour and stale. Hours old.

  She wasn’t afraid of him. Perhaps she should be, in this neighborhood after dark.

  “What do you need, female?” he grunted, eager to provide it so her presence wouldn’t delay his plans. It was going to be a long night.

  Her hand brushed over her brown head fur, and she blinked rapidly. It made her eyes look like the elytra of glasswing beetles, flickering before they took flight. “How did you know that I’m…?”

  He took in the rest of her appearance. Her plain jumpsuit was worn and ill-fitting, like it belonged to someone else, someone male, and she wore no jewelry or paint to mark her as female. Flecks in a shade or two darker than her skin dotted her nose and cheeks like the first raindrops on dry stone. Was her kind born with those marks, or were they scars that indicated some kind of life experience? He suddenly wished he’d read more about humans in his studies.

  “Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” she insisted, before he could answer that her smell gave her away, not her appearance. “I’m here for the job.”

  Patrek rubbed his tusks, at a loss for words. She was his hired burglar? “No. Too dangerous.”

  “I accept the hazard pay with gratitude,” she said sourly, leaning to look past him into the warehouse he’d called home for the past few months. “Is this some kind of kinky thing? You know it won’t fit, so don’t even try it.”

  Now her eyes were on the thick length in his trousers, and the feel of her gaze made him shudder. He couldn’t help that his cock’s girth was the same as her torso, nor that it never flagged in size. He was simply made that way, although he wished he weren’t.

  Skarr mating organs were the subject of the worst stories about their species: That their shafts were spiked. That they oozed poison when aroused. That they had fucked their females into extinction. That they hungered to ruin other females in the same way.

  None of those stories were true, but he understood that bringing these topics to her attention, even to refute them, would only reinforce their veracity in her mind. He sensed the tension stringing her bones together, the buzz of her pulse rising, and without thinking he cooed to her in the way he might to a skittish Skarr female. It came out rusty from disuse, scraping out of his chest like the dry dregs from yesterday’s beer mug.

  But it worked.

  Her pupils widened as her heartbeat slowed, syrupy, and her sweet smell grew even sweeter. She relaxed in tiny movements, her shoulders dropping slightly, her tiny fingers uncurling from their fists. After a few seconds, when he was satisfied that she’d been sufficiently calmed, he let the noise fade.

  “I’ll call you a transport. What district do you live in?”

  She shook herself like she was coming out of a trance. “I don’t need a transport,” she snapped, her voice rising.

  His gaze flicked down the quiet street. It looked empty, but he knew that ears were listening. “Come inside before someone sends the Authority. You will be safe while you wait.”

  She froze at the mention of the Authority, and he felt her pulse flap like an injured bird as she gave him a stiff nod and followed him inside. He closed the door gently so as not to alarm her further and then moved to locate his datacom amid the clutter of his workbench.

  “Tell me the catch, because so far the main hazard of this gig seems to be wasting my time.” She crossed her arms and gave him a scathing look, although he noticed her gaze didn’t dip below his belt. She was a brave little thing, but not that brave.

  “Hush, female. I’m trying to help you,” he muttered absentmindedly, returning his attention to his own mess. He swept aside a stack of schematics to reveal his missing datacom. “What did you say your district was?”

  “I didn’t say. I don’t need transport. I need credits.” Her voice shredded into something ragged, and when he raised his head to look at her, her square, white teeth were bared as she glared up at him. He had spent enough time around feral creatures to recognize her desperation for what it was—a bid for survival. Her desire for credits wasn’t greed or even a practical consideration. This was life or death for her.

  Her fingertips brushed her chest and then remained there, toying nervously with one of the buttons on her jumpsuit. “I’m Maja. I should have said that.”

  “Patrek,” he grunted. He entered the code in his cashbox. “How much do you need?”

  She named a figure so high his teeth clacked together.

  He peeled off some credits from his roll and handed them to her. “I don’t have it. I’m sorry. I hope this will at least put food in your belly.”

  “You do have it,” she insisted, motioning to the rest of the roll.

  His gut tightened. Every instinct in his body was to give it to her. That coo had affected him as much as it had her, awakening something in him that he hadn’t known was still there, it’d been hibernating so long—the need to indulge and protect a female, earn her trust and prove his worthiness to be a mate.

  He almost laughed. This was no Skarr female ranging her vast territory, in need of gentling. This was a soft little human, an invasive species that, with the protection of the Nightborn, had multiplied so quickly they’d overrun the planet in the three short centuries since their ships crashed on Salaan. Human hyperfertility and general avarice were directly responsible for reducing the Skarr lands to a sanctuary so small that their females could no longer thrive.