Chapter 1: Walking in on a Princess
The desk lamp buzzed, a persistent fly against the silence of the locked office. Jake McAllister’s head was pillowed on a stack of invoices, his breathing deep and even. A single beam from the dying light caught the dust motes hanging in the air above him. Outside, the absolute black of a Rocky Mountain night pressed against the windows.
He woke with a jolt, a crick in his neck and the taste of stale coffee on his tongue. “Damn it,” he muttered, pushing back from the desk. The digital clock on the wall read 2:17 AM. The resort was closed, had been for hours. Everyone should be gone.
He rubbed his eyes, standing and stretching until his spine gave a satisfying pop. He grabbed his worn fleece jacket, shrugged it on, and killed the desk lamp. The room plunged into a darkness so complete it felt solid. He knew the path to the door by muscle memory, his boots scuffing on the wooden floor.
It was the faint, ethereal glow through the large picture window that stopped him. Not the soft security lights along the path, but the brighter, whiter illumination from the hot spring area itself. Maria must have forgotten to hit the switch on her way out. Again. With a sigh, he grabbed his heavy flashlight from its charger and headed out the back door.
The cold was a slap in the face, clean and sharp, scented with pine and frozen earth. His breath plumed in the beam of his flashlight as he crunched along the gravel path toward the springs. The sound of the water, a constant, bubbling sigh, grew louder. He rounded the final curve of manicured pines, ready to flip the master switch on the small utility box.
He froze.
The steaming pool was lit from below, casting everything in an aqueous, blue-white light. And there, in the center of the roiling water, was a woman.
She was not just in the water; she seemed a part of it, the steam curling around her like eager spirits. Jake’s brain stuttered, trying to process the sheer physicality of her. She was tall, impossibly so, even submerged to her waist. Her skin was a deep, shimmering navy, like a lake under a midnight sky. Hair the color of a cosmic nebula—midnight blue bleeding into violet and dotted with tiny, twinkling points of light—cascaded over her shoulders and floated around her.
And her body… it defied every law of physics and anatomy Jake had ever known. Her back was to him, the curve of it elegant and strong, leading down to a waist so slender his hands could have spanned it. But from that waist erupted a panorama of hip and rear that was frankly astronomical. Each hip was a perfect, jutting shelf of flesh, wide enough to seem like a separate entity from her upper body. The spheres of her backside were immense, glistening with water and steam, and they quivered with a life of their own as she moved, the fat tight and unreal, bouncing with a hypnotic, liquid rhythm.
She raised an arm, and Jake saw the powerful, feathered edge of a wing. A fucking wing. It flexed, sending droplets sparkling into the light. She was humming, a low, resonant sound that vibrated in Jake’s chest. Her hands, long-fingered and elegant, slid over the impossible shelf of her hip, scrubbing at the skin with a palpable sense of enjoyment. The movement sent shockwaves of motion through the connected globes of her ass and thighs, a mesmerizing cascade of jiggling flesh.
Jake’s mind went blank white. He forgot the cold, the flashlight in his suddenly numb hand, the reason he’d come out here. He was a statue, rooted to the gravel, a witness to something that could not be.
She turned, just slightly, to reach for a carved soapstone bottle on the pool’s edge. The profile view was even more unbelievable. Her breasts were colossal, each one a heavy, perfect swell that rested on the water’s surface, their dark, peaked tips just breaking through. They sloshed gently with the water’s movement. And below, where her massive thighs met, there was a pronounced, puffy fullness even through the distortion of the water, a prominent cleft that emphasized the sheer voluptuousness of her form.
His boot finally scuffed on a loose stone.
The sound was tiny, but in the silent night, it was a gunshot. Her humming stopped. Her head, which had been tilted back in relaxation, snapped upright. She turned, slowly, with a grace that was entirely at odds with her staggering proportions.
Her eyes found his. They were large, luminous, and a shocking shade of magenta, and in them Jake saw not embarrassment, but a dawning, catastrophic horror. They widened. The regal face, beautiful and sharp-featured, paled from navy to a lighter, ashen hue.
A torrent of primal, magical energy slammed into Jake. It wasn’t a physical force, but a knowledge, an ancient protocol engraved into the very fabric of her being, now triggered and screaming for completion. It bypassed his eyes and went straight into his hindbrain. He understood, without knowing how he understood.
The first being to see an alicorn princess in her naked, true form… was hers.
“No,” she breathed, the word echoing with unnatural power in the small basin. “No!”
Jake stumbled back a step, the flashlight beam dancing wildly over the pines. “Whoa, hey, I’m sorry—I just came to turn off the lights, I didn’t—”
“Mortal,” she hissed, the word dripping with fury and a panic that matched his own. She made no move to cover herself. Her stature, even half-submerged, was one of terrifying authority. “What have you done?”
“Done? I haven’t done anything!” Jake’s own fear was morphing into a defensive anger. “This is private property! Who are you? What are you?”
“I am Princess Luna,” she declared, as if that explained everything. The ache, the deep, throbbing need she had suppressed for centuries, was now a crescendo between her legs, pulsing in time with the newly forged bond. It was maddening. It demanded she seize him, claim him, relieve it. Her wings flared, sending a hot, mineral-scented gust across his face. “And you… you have invoked the Vinculum Aeternum. The Eternal Bond. By the old laws, you are now my betrothed.”
Jake stared. He heard the words. They were English. They made no sense. “Your what? Look, lady, I don’t know what cult you’re from or what movie you walked off of, but you need to get out of my hot spring. Now.”
Her regal composure cracked. “You think this a jest? A trick?” She surged forward through the water, the movement creating a wave that sloshed onto the deck. Her sheer scale, revealed as she rose higher, was overwhelming. “The law is absolute! It cannot be undone! The seeing has been seen!”
He saw it then, past the fury: a flicker of pure, unadulterated panic. She was just as trapped as he was. The reality of the situation, absurd and terrifying, began to crystallize. A being with wings and starlight hair, talking about ancient laws, was standing in his commercial hot spring in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. And according to her, he was now engaged to her.
His pragmatic, problem-solving instincts, honed by years of running a resort, kicked in. Arguing with magic laws wasn’t going to work. He had to de-escalate.
“Okay,” Jake said, forcing his voice into a calm he didn’t feel. He lowered the flashlight, pointing it at the ground. “Okay, Princess. Let’s… let’s just pump the brakes. You’re saying there’s a law. Fine. I’m not disputing it. But look around.” He gestured wildly at the mountains, the deck, the utility box. “This is Colorado. My world. That…” he pointed a finger at her, “is your world. Throwing an ‘eternal bond’ on me right now is gonna cause one hell of a scene in my world. You get that, right?”
Luna hesitated. The desperate ache within her pleaded for immediate resolution, but his words carried the cold water of reason. She had been so focused on the catastrophe of the bond’s triggering, she hadn’t considered the practicalities of the mortal realm.
“What do you propose?” she asked, her voice still trembling with suppressed need and outrage.
“I propose we don’t do anything rash. You don’t… announce me. I don’t call the cops or the men in white coats. We take a minute. You get dressed. We go inside, where it’s warm, and we talk about this like two… beings… who just had a really weird night. We figure out if there’s a way to… I don’t know, put a pin in it.”
“A ‘pin’ in an eternal decree?” she whispered, but the fury was fading, replaced by a dizzying whirl of confusion and that incessant, bonding pull.
“Just for tonight,” Jake pressed, seeing an opening. “A temporary delay. So we can both think without all this…” he waved a hand at her incredible form, “…distraction.”
The word ‘distraction’ hung in the steam. Luna’s luminous eyes searched his face, looking for treachery, for mockery. She saw only a stunned, tired man trying to prevent a disaster. The logic was sound. To reveal this now, here, would be chaos. And a small, secret part of her, the part that had been lonely for a millennium, was intrigued by this mortal who met her eyes instead of prostrating himself.
She gave a single, sharp nod. The motion made the stars in her hair swirl. “A temporary delay. Only. You will speak of this to no one.”
“Believe me,” Jake said, a hollow laugh escaping him, “I have no one to tell who would believe me. There are towels in the cedar box behind you.”
He turned his back, giving her a semblance of privacy, his heart hammering against his ribs. The gravel crunched as he heard her emerge from the water, a sound of displaced liquid on a scale he couldn’t comprehend. He heard the soft, heavy pat of water falling from immense curves, the whisper of fabric—where had she even gotten clothes?—and a slight, almost imperceptible sigh that seemed to carry a universe of frustration and reluctant relief.
“I am… covered,” her voice came from behind him. It was closer.
Jake turned. She stood on the deck, now wrapped in a surprisingly sexy purple bathrobe with golden puffy furred lining and cuffs that hugged her breasts for dear life, left the entire top half of her breasts and cleavage exposed, and failed to wrap around her impossible hips enough to cover her inner thighs or her giant puffy pussy, which seemed strangely more wet than the rest of her body despite having just dried off. It looked as though her pussy was being framed by royal curtains like an opera singer standing center stage, and the edges of her palm-sized areola stuck up over the fluffy edge of her robes furry lining, though she didn’t seem to care about either. She seemed to care little about hiding herself from him; she was resigned to him becoming her husband so hiding herself from him was pointless as far as she saw it. The robe did astonishingly little to conceal the monumental topography of her body. It clung to every dip and staggering curve. Her hair, still damp, smoked with captured starlight. She was even taller than he’d guessed, towering over him. Those magenta eyes held his, no longer just furious, but filled with a complex, wary calculation.
“Follow me,” he said, his voice rough. He led the way back up the path, the beam of his flashlight carving a shaky tunnel through the dark. He was intensely aware of her presence behind him, a warmth that cut through the mountain cold, the faint, sweet scent of night-blooming flowers and ozone. He had just postponed a magical marriage. He had a mythical creature in a sexy bathrobe following him to his office.
And as he fumbled for his keys, his hands shaking, one terrifying thought eclipsed all others: this was only the delay. The bond, whatever it was, still thrummed in the air between them, unanswered. The problem was not solved. It had just followed him home.