Vorn seemed to have the same idea because one big hand came around to cup her pussy and Jodi felt him bracketing her tender clit again with his big fingers. He began to rub as he fucked into her, accelerating the pleasure that had been growing steadily inside her by leaps and bounds.
“Oh!” Jodi gasped. “Oh, Vorn, that feels so…so good!”
“Of course it does, baby,” he growled in her ear. “Feels good to be Claimed—to be fucked and opened and taken by the one who’s supposed to Claim you. Feels good to give yourself to the right male.”
“You’re the one,” Jodi moaned. “The right male for me, I mean. I…I know that now.”
“You’d better know it, baby,” he told her. “Because in just a minute, you’ll be mine forever. You okay with that?”
“Yes!” Jodi gasped. “Yes, Vorn, I’m…I’m okay with that. Do it—fuck me and make me yours!”
“I will. Now let me tell you what’s going to happen,” he rumbled. “As soon as you come, baby, I’m gonna come with you and flood your little pussy with my seed. Then I’m going to thrust deep inside you and fill you with my mating fist. After that, we’re going to be locked together for a while until I Claim you completely—understand?”
“I…I think so,” Jodi whispered. “But…but how long is a while?”
“As long as it takes to make you mine forever,” Vorn told her.
And then the fingers in her pussy, which had been rubbing in a slow but steady rhythm as he talked, began to pick up the pace. Jodi gasped as she felt her orgasm, which had been building, suddenly barreling down on her like a runaway train.
“Oh,” she gasped, bucking her hips against him. “Oh Vorn, think I’m going to…going to come!”
“That’s right, come for me, baby,” he growled, his grip on her hip tightening as he thrust deeper and deeper into her pussy. “Come while I fuck you—come while I Claim you.”
And then Jodi was coming, her orgasm crashing over her like a tidal wave. She felt herself tightening helplessly around the thick invader of his shaft and then gush after gush of hot wetness was spurting inside her.
Coming in me! Oh God, he’s coming inside me! she barely had time to think and then the thick ridge of Vorn’s mating fist was pressing hard against the mouth of her pussy.
Jodi had a split second to think that it was never going to fit and then, to her utter surprise, her body opened up and Vorn was sliding all the way inside her and Claiming her…making her his forever…
* * *
She didn’t know, later, how long it lasted. The Claiming was almost like a fever dream—the crowd of Varians humming and thrumming below them as Vorn thrust into her again and again and filled her with more and more of his seed as he whispered in her ear how much he loved her, how she was his now and he was never letting her go.
After a while, Jodi realized that his deep, growling voice was coming from inside her head.
“That’s right, little girl,” she heard him say, again inside her head. “That’s because we’re bonded now. And we’re never going to be apart.”
“Never?” Jodi asked, testing out their new bond herself as a surge of hope and love and desire rushed through her.
“Never,” he promised. “I love you, baby—I’m never letting you go.”
“Oh, Vorn—I love you too. I’m so sorry I was too much of an idiot to see it before.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” he murmured through their link. “We might have taken the long way to get to each other, but we wound up together in the end. That’s all that matters.”
Jodi was inclined to agree but then he was coming in her again, which somehow triggered another orgasm for her as well. She moaned helplessly as she felt him spurting deep inside her, his big hands cupping her breasts and his shaft buried to the hilt in her pussy.
She and Vorn belonged to each other now and they were never going to be apart again.
Forty-Seven
Back on the ship, Liosh watched as Melinda paced nervously. She was nibbling her right thumb nail in a way he knew by now meant she was extremely agitated.
“Please don’t worry, Talli,” he said gently. “If anyone can get your sister free, it’s Vorn. He loves her with his whole heart—he’ll kill or die to protect her if he has to.”
Melinda shot him a nervous glance.
“You mean he’ll, uh, go into Rage? Like…like you did?”
Liosh felt his heart fist in his chest. Gods, how he wished she hadn’t seen him in that state! He’d seen the mangled remains of the man he had killed when the Rage had come upon him and he could only imagine what he must have done in order to rip the other male apart so thoroughly.
And Melinda had seen it all. No wonder she was looking askance at him now and hadn’t offered to sit with him or asked to cuddle, as she usually did when they were together.
“He may if she is threatened,” he said carefully. “But he will never hurt Jodi, even if he does go into Rage. He’ll be trying to save her—to protect her, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Melinda whispered and nibbled her thumb nail some more.
Liosh’s heart fisted in his chest at the fear and uncertainty in her eyes.
“Did you think I would hurt you?” he asked softly. “When I went into Rage because I saw you being attacked?”
“No, not…not exactly,” she said, darting another nervous glance at him. “It was just so…gory. So bloody. You’ve always been so gentle with me. I didn’t…didn’t know you could…could do that to somebody.”
“Not just somebody—the male who attacked you, Talli,” he reminded her. “And I’m sorry you had to see it,” he added. “I know it was…awful.” He shook his head. “The Rage came on me so suddenly and I…I’ve never had it happen to me before. I had no notion how to control it—I was running on pure instinct.”
“So you’ve never…never gone into Rage before?” she asked, her blue eyes wide.
Liosh shook his head.
“I’ve never had a reason—never loved a female before like I love you,” he assured her gently.
“Really? Oh, Liosh!”
At last she came to him, letting herself be enfolded in his arms.
“Your response actually makes more sense than mine,” she told him when she was seated on his knee with Liosh’s broad hand splayed comfortably between her shoulder blades.
“What do you mean, Talli?” he asked gently. “What was wrong with your response?”
“Well, I tried to get away at first…” Melinda put a hand to her throat and went silent—went inside herself so that Liosh was afraid she was reliving the attack.
“Yes?” he asked gently, trying to bring her back.
“I…when I couldn’t get away, I just…went limp.” Melli hung her head in shame. “I wanted to fight him…wanted to scream and kick and punch. But it was like my body wouldn’t do anything. And then I didn’t even feel like I was in my body anymore. I felt like I was floating and looking down at myself. I didn’t do anything to try and stop him!”
“Talli, please—don’t be so hard on yourself,” Liosh murmured, rubbing her back. “You can’t control what response your body has to an attack. My guess is that you were so horribly surprised at seeing that bastard again, you went into a kind of shock.”
“Maybe,” Melinda whispered. “But I still should have tried to fight him—I should have tried to do something.”
“Sweetheart, you couldn’t help the way your body reacted to his attack on you any more than I could help the way mine did,” Liosh assured her. He drew her close to his chest and stroked her long blonde hair. “Nothing that happened was your fault—it was all that bastard, Jason Sykes.”
“Not all,” Melli said, surprising him. “I mean, he didn’t come up with the idea to go after me all on his own.”
Rapidly, she told what she’d learned about how Amanda Brannigan had been behind both attacks—both the recent one and the one back in high school.
As he listened, Liosh
felt himself growing cold. This was an offense worthy of the same savage death he had meted out to Jason Sykes, but Amanda was a female and so he couldn’t kill her.
“I must think about this,” he said at last, when Melli was finished. “She deserves death for what she did to you but I cannot kill a female—it is against everything that is in me.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean for you to kill her!” Melli’s eyes went wide with horror. “Please, Liosh—don’t do that! Don’t go into Rage again and…and…” But she couldn’t seem to finish.
Liosh felt his heart fist in his chest. She might have been brave enough to come to him, but there was no denying that Melli was always going to be a little different around him now, after seeing the Rage incident. There was a new wariness in her interactions with him that hadn’t been there before. A new fear that she’d never had before she saw him go feral and rip her attacker to shreds with his fangs.
“Forgive me if I frightened you,” he said, his voice hoarse with regret. “I just don’t believe that such a female should go unpunished. Though how her punishment is to be achieved, I confess, I don’t know.”
“Just not that way.” Melinda shivered and got up to begin pacing again. “I wish I could just never see her again. I wish she wasn’t in my Sociology class!”
“She ought to be exposed for what she has done,” Liosh growled. “Setting an innocent female up to be attacked twice. What motivates someone like that?”
“I don’t know.” Melinda looked down at her feet. “She said that I ‘got on her nerves’ in high school because I was so ‘sweet and innocent.’”
“And so she decided to despoil that innocence.” Liosh shook his head. He would have to give this some thought. But for now, his first concern was healing Melinda, not punishing the female who had initiated the attacks on her.
It was clear that was going to take some time, though. All the time and effort he’d spent earning her trust didn’t matter now, because he was going to have to earn it again. And as for how close they had been to bonding…
We’re going to have to go back to the beginning there, too, Liosh told himself. He was certain that having that bastard Jason attack her all over again, as well as seeing Liosh himself go into Rage, would probably bring back her problem with penetration full force. Melinda might not want him anywhere near her—at least sexually—for a while, which was completely understandable. She would need some distance—some time to get over what had happened to her and what had almost happened again.
More than anything else, she would need his patience.
Liosh was well aware by now, after watching the human entertainment programs, how impatient most human males were when it came to meeting their own sexual desires. They often professed to be “willing to wait” but they actually seemed to have the attention span and tolerance for getting their own way that a young child had when waiting for a favorite toy. They pushed females into giving what they weren’t willing or ready to give yet—pushed them to open their bodies sexually just to satiate their own selfish desires.
I won’t do that to Melinda, Liosh promised himself. I don’t care if I have to wait weeks…months…or even years, I won’t push her to do anything she isn’t ready for. She will have plenty of time to heal.
That he promised and swore before the Goddess.
Just as he was finishing his silent vow, there was a knocking on the shuttle’s door.
“Oh!” Melinda jumped and put a hand to her heart, her blue eyes wide with fright. “Oh, Liosh—who could it be? Do you think the Varians have discovered I’m gone?”
“It doesn’t matter if they have, they’re not taking you back, Talli,” Liosh growled. Drawing his blaster, he went to the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s just us—let us in, Brother,” came Vorn’s deep voice from the other side of the metal panel.
Liosh felt the knot in his gut loosen. So his friend had been successful. He could tell already by the lighthearted sound of Vorn’s voice that he had gotten Jodi away and both of them were unharmed.
He threw open the shuttle door and the two of them tumbled in, bright-eyed and with flushed cheeks. They looked like they’d been exerting themselves in some way and the scent of recent sex hung about them in a cloud of pheromones. Also, Vorn was shirtless—which made sense once Liosh saw that the only thing Jodi was wearing was his crimson red uniform shirt.
“Jodi! I thought I’d never see you again!” Melinda rushed forward to enfold her older sister in a hug.
Jodi hugged her back, laughing.
“Well, here I am! And now we can all go back home to Earth. Or maybe to the Mother Ship—I think I’d like to take a little breather and maybe see Mom.”
“I want to see her too,” Melinda exclaimed.
“The Mother Ship it is, then,” Vorn said heartily. “I’ll lay in a course.”
“Wait!” Melinda exclaimed. “How did you get Jodi free? How did you rescue her from those awful Varians?”
“Well…” Jodi and Vorn exchanged a knowing look and Jodi’s cheeks got red. “Vorn and I were able to, er, generate enough energy to make the Varians happy,” she said carefully. “I mean, so they could fertilize their eggs, you know.”
Liosh thought dryly that he was sure those weren’t the only eggs which had been recently fertilized, but he was too much of a gentleman to say so. And Melinda was so innocent, she still looked at bit confused. After a moment, though, what her sister was saying seemed to dawn on her.
“Oh!” She put a hand to her mouth. “You mean you and Vorn…”
“I Claimed my bride,” Vorn said firmly.
“You did?” Melinda looked at Jodi. “So Vorn and you…”
“We’re bonded now.” Jodi grinned at her. “And it’s amazing. If I need to talk to Vorn, I can just think at him and he can hear me! And we each know exactly how the other feels and we’re just so in tune with each other.” She shook her head in awe. “I just never knew I could be this close to anyone. And to think I felt like I had to stay with James just because he pretended to love me. He was completely wrong for me—I see that now.”
“Yeah, bonding with the right male can bring a lot of things to light,” Vorn rumbled. He put an arm around Jodi and pulled her close. “Gods, little girl, I’m so fucking glad you’re finally mine! Never gonna let you go again.”
“Well you’ll have to if you’re going to plot a course for us to get back home,” she pointed out, grinning up at him. “But give me a kiss first and promise not to take too long.”
“Of course not—can’t stand to be away from you,” Vorn told her. He bent her over his arm and kissed her so passionately that Liosh cleared his throat in embarrassment and Melinda’s cheeks went pink and she looked away.
“Hey guys,” she said at last, with a forced little laugh. “Get a room, all right?”
“Oh, we fully intend to,” Jodi said, as they finally came up for air. “We’re not nearly done bonding yet.” She looked at Vorn. “How fast can you get us to the Mother Ship?”
He frowned. “Well, I would call and ask them to fold space for us but that’s not safe for a female who might be pregnant.”
“Oh…” Jodi’s cheeks got pink and she put a hand to her mouth to stifle a naughty little giggle. “I guess we’d better not then, huh?”
“There are several stable worm holes we can take instead,” Liosh volunteered. “It shouldn’t take long to get back.”
“Oh, good.” Jodi smiled. “I can’t wait.”
“I can’t either,” Vorn rumbled. “Come on, baby—come sit with me while I plot the course.”
“Okay.”
And the two of them went off together, leaving Liosh and Melinda to stare at each other uncertainly.
Forty-Eight
“What’s wrong, doll? You seem down.” Kat, who was actually her mom’s friend, but who was turning out to be a great source of information about the Mother Ship, gave Jodi a worried look. “You ought to be feeling great,” she added.
“I mean, you’re just bonded, right?”
“Oh, I’m extremely happy,” Jodi told her. “Like crazy-happy. It’s ridiculous.”
They had only been aboard the Mother Ship for a little while but she had spent most of that time with Vorn in bed and she was just now getting out to explore a little. Kat had dropped by to “welcome her to the neighborhood” as she put it and she was so easy to talk to, Jodi somehow found herself confiding in her.
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” she told Kat. “It’s my little sister, Melli.”
“Oh, I was going to visit her next,” Kat remarked. “Your mom asked me to welcome you both. But what’s wrong with her?”
“Well, she just doesn’t seem happy,” Jodi said. “Part of that is the fact that she and Liosh haven’t bonded yet, I think. But she’s also thinking of dropping all her classes at USF even though she’s getting straight As.”
“Really?” Kat frowned. “She doesn’t want to at least finish out the semester before she takes a break?”
“No, and I think I know why,” Jodi said grimly. “It’s all because of one person—this one girl in her Sociology class that Melli’s always seeing around campus. She…” She bit her lip—how much should she tell Kat?
After all, their mom still didn’t know that Melli had been attacked in high school, though she did know about the more recent rape-attempt where Liosh had killed Jason Sykes, the attacker.
“You look like you have a secret you need to get off your chest, doll,” Kat said, eyeing her sharply. “Whatever it is, I’m a vault.”
“Well…it’s just that our mom doesn’t know about it,” Jodi said. “And that’s the way Melli wants to keep it.”
“I can keep things to myself,” Kat assured her. “If you want to talk.”
Jodi found that she did—very much. She explained to Kat about how Melli had been attacked after her Junior Prom by the same guy who had tried to rape her again recently.
“Of course Liosh stopped him—in the most lethal way possible,” Jodi said dryly. “But it turned out that there was someone behind both attacks.”
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