by Lyssa Hart
That last comment completely knocked the wind out of Brahma’s sails. He almost seemed to wither before Alexis’ eyes. “Right, boss. It was stupid.”
“And dangerous. Now move out.”
She really felt like he was being too hard on poor Brahma, but she didn’t argue.
She didn’t want to get Alexis killed either.
And she also didn’t want to make the rest of the trip across Hawk’s shoulder.
She surged up and took off to catch up to Puma and Cham-Two while he finished his ‘discussion’ with Brahma.
She didn’t actually catch up. She couldn’t maintain the pace they were keeping. At first, she jogged each time she fell behind, but pretty quickly she was just too damned tired to try or care a hell of a lot if they walked off and left her.
It was nearing daylight—she thought.
It had been so dark in the train tunnel and then the sewer line they’d followed after that that it had seemed really bright when they’d climbed out to a sky full of stars—a sight she wasn’t actually familiar with having grown up under the city dome where the lights of the city obscured any view of the outside world.
But she thought the horizon to her left looked a little lighter as they walked.
She sped up a little when she realized the guys behind her had nearly caught up.
She didn’t feel up to sparring with Hawk.
And she felt uncomfortable about the lecture Hawk had given her and Brahma when he’d caught them necking.
Like she’d done something wrong.
Well, she supposed, from a survival standpoint, it had certainly been wrong, but morally?
She didn’t see that it was, but she couldn’t shake the sense of guilt Hawk had dropped on her.
She finally realized that it was the fact that she felt diminished in Hawk’s eyes. It wasn’t guilt, because it wasn’t wrong. She didn’t belong to anybody and poor Brahma certainly didn’t. There was no reason to feel guilty when she hadn’t given her word or her heart in commitment.
It mattered to her how they thought of her, though, she realized—especially Hawk.
And she couldn’t shake the misery that caused her no matter how hard she tried.
She was grateful, though, when they at last spied the vehicle Hawk had mentioned.
Not that she saw it until she was practically on top of it and Cham-Two and Puma, in the lead, had already started loading it with their gear and snatching the bits and pieces of brush/camo off of it.
She stopped then and waited until everyone had loaded it and she was given a spot—in the rear wedged between Brahma and Puma tightly enough that it was obvious that she was just extra baggage.
Brahma lifted his massive arm after a moment and settled it along the back of the seat. When she didn’t object, he curled it around her and tucked her closer.
She allowed her head to drop to his chest wearily.
“Sorry, baby,” he said gruffly after a few minutes. “That was a really stupid thing for me to do. Nobody blames you.”
Alexis sighed. “That’s where you’re wrong. Nobody blames you. Everybody blames me.”
He gave her a comforting squeeze. “It was my fault,” he said. “And I’ll kick anybody’s ass that says different.”
She uttered an amused snort, but she let it drop. She was too exhausted at the moment to care and it was surprisingly comfortable cuddling next to Brahma.
* * * *
Despite the fact that she dozed off and on throughout the day, only waking when Brahma shook her awake to take care of her personal needs and eat, she had no trouble bedding down when they finally stopped for the night.
She had trouble staying awake, in fact, for the evening meal.
When she’d eaten, she found the sleeping bag and crawled into it. Hawk roused her when he joined her later—she suspected very deliberately—but she rolled away from him and went back to sleep without difficulty.
Just about the time she had the guys convinced she must be dying of something, she woke feeling rested—finally.
She still felt a little sluggish, but she thought that was because she’d slept so much.
On the other hand, she’d slept because of the exhaustion from running for her life for the first twenty hours she was with the squad.
What she didn’t get was how they managed not to be exhausted.
Well, she’d heard they needed very little sleep/rest to function. She supposed she just hadn’t believed it, certainly not when they’d spent hours fighting and running.
If she hadn’t been in survival mode, she didn’t think she could’ve managed what she had.
She was awake enough to notice her surroundings on the second day outside the dome, though, and to appreciate the views.
She’d been told the entire world was desolate beyond the domes of the cities.
She’d believed it.
It gave her hope that there was a place where she could go to live that she would be able to be relatively comfortable and safe.
She didn’t bother to ask where they were taking her. She doubted Hawk would tell her and if he didn’t want her to know the rest of the squad wasn’t going to tell her.
She had a feeling, though, that she was shortly to find herself dumped.
She wasn’t ‘in danger’ anymore—she didn’t think the company was going to send anybody to hunt her outside the city. They would assume if she’d gone out she was probably dead or as good as dead.
She thought it was pretty obvious Hawk disliked her—not just didn’t like, but actively disliked. She wasn’t sure of why, but she thought it was mostly because he just didn’t trust her because she’d worked for the company.
And probably also because she was the one they sent regularly to stab them with needles.
It seemed grossly unfair, but she was sure hate had been born of a lot less provocation than that.
Granted, she’d been equally convinced, at first, that they found her nearly irresistible—but Hawk had managed to resist.
Brahma not so much, but the others seemed to have managed to hang on to their self-control without too much problem.
Despite the fact that she was the only woman around.
After a couple of days more, they stopped, painted something on the sides of the vehicles and then got back in and kept going. Towards evening, people appeared amongst the trees that dotted the hillsides.
They stopped the truck and got out.
One of the people approached, gave every impression that he knew Hawk if he didn’t especially like him and then Hawk got back in and they kept going until they reached a … well a village of sorts. She didn’t realize, at first, that they had. It wasn’t until she was allowed to get out and stretch that she saw that the dwellings were built to blend cunningly well with their surroundings.
There were children!
Her heart leapt when she saw them scampering about, playing with the wild abandon only a child could.
The children of the cities didn’t, of course. They were regulated by the government, but she had a few dim memories of such things from her early childhood—before the disasters, she supposed.
Nobody told her what she could do or not do, so she found a comfortable spot beneath a tree to watch the children while Hawk and Cham-Two and a man from the village disappeared into a large dwelling.
Puma and Brahma both cast glances her way. She noticed it peripherally, but she didn’t acknowledge them and they kept their distance.
It seemed unlikely that there would be technology here or anybody capable of understanding how to access the drive they’d taken that supposedly held the evidence they wanted, but she’d overheard enough to understand that was at least part of the reason they’d headed directly to this place.
A rebel encampment, if she wasn’t mistaken.
She’d heard there were rebels. She wasn’t sure she’d believed it.
She also wasn’t sure she wanted to become a part of it, but she didn’t think she had
a lot of options.
Puma and Brahma made a campfire not far from where she’d set up her vigil as the evening started to close in and got out the makings of a meal. It actually didn’t smell half bad, but then they were heating not cooking and she was hungry. When they summoned her, she went readily and settled with them to eat.
Hawk came out in a little bit, took two plates and left with them.
They got the sleeping bags out after they’d eaten and cleaned up and packed their supplies again, rolling them out around the perimeter of the campfire.
Nobody offered Alexis a spot in their sleeping bag so she took the one she’d been sharing with Hawk and climbed in.
He didn’t join her.
When she woke the following morning, she saw he was sitting beside the campfire, stoking it to bring it to life and heat another meal.
She debated whether to join him or not and finally got up and wandered off to find privacy. She discovered the local water source in the search and headed down to the stream to try to freshen up a little when she’d relieved herself.
The water was cold—great drinking water, but not appealing for a bath. She didn’t think she would’ve wanted to go in in the heat of the summer.
She discovered, though, that someone had rigged up a shower of sorts.
Maybe a community bath house?
It looked like a good bit of effort had gone in to it. There was a wheel sort of thing that the water turned that scooped up water onto a higher wheel and from there into a series of pipes and a barrel. From the barrel the water could be released in gushes from an overhead sluice.
Shrugging once she’d looked around and seen she had the area to herself, she went in and gave the twine a yank.
The water was cold—still—but warmed slightly by the air, she supposed. It wasn’t like ice, anyway. She ‘brushed’ her teeth with her finger and scrubbed her face and hands and arms with her hands and the water since she didn’t see any soap. The brisk rubbing made her feel a little cleaner.
She hadn’t managed it without getting her clothes wet, unfortunately, but there were still some dry patches. She took the shirt off and rung out as much water as she could and then put it back on and took the pants off to ring them out.
Hawk was standing at the entrance to the shower stall when she turned around to find a prop to put the pants back on.
She gaped at him, stunned.
He shook his head. His lips tightened, and he strode towards her.
Chapter Ten
Grabbing her shoulders, he brought her against his length in a motion just shy of violence.
“What …?” She didn’t get the chance to finish the question.
“Shut up,” Hawk growled even as his lips met hers, as he captured her mouth beneath his in a kiss that was scalding, pitching her from ground zero to near orbit in a matter of seconds.
Alexis seesawed for a handful of seconds between complete surrender and flight, but she knew even as she sank beneath the monsoon of sensations he created inside her that there had never been any actual chance that she would run—away. Toward him, maybe …. Definitely, if he had shown even half an inclination to welcome her.
She didn’t have to in order to anchor herself, but she had to clutch at him to keep from floating away or crashing to Earth like a meteor. Her entire body seemed to lose substance with the first touch of his lips.
She sucked in his essence with the heated exhalation of his breath, absorbed the taste of him, thrilled at the texture of his tongue as he stroked it possessively along hers.
She was next door to mindless in two seconds flat, had no idea she was standing with one leg in and one out of her pants, clutching the waistband in one hand and Hawk with the other.
Until he removed her grip and she felt her pants hit her ankle.
He skimmed his hands beneath her shirt next and broke the kiss long enough to tug it off of her head.
She shivered.
She wasn’t certain if it was the cool air touching her heated skin or just the delight searing her nerve endings when she felt the stroke of his hands on her bare skin.
It made her nipples stand erect.
They tried to drill holes in his chest with each breath they took that brought them together.
It captured his attention.
He cupped her breasts one at the time, massaged them, pinched the pulsating tips and finally broke the kiss to investigate.
That was when he discovered he had a strategic disadvantage in the situation.
He couldn’t reach the breasts and he had neither a wall or flat floor to brace her on.
Lifting her straight up, he latched onto a breast and began trying to suck her brains through it.
Alexis coiled her legs around his waist to help support the lower half of her body to keep her ass from pulling her in half. He obliging formed a shelf beneath her with one hand to help support her and moved to the other breast.
She coiled her arms around his neck and shoulders to give him better access and a free hand to do other interesting things.
He took immediate advantage, stroking the free hand over her back and buttocks and finally searching her cleft to find her clit.
He couldn’t find it because it was bumping his belly.
He seemed to realize that fairly quickly, thankfully.
Letting go of her nipple abruptly, he glanced around for a more advantageous position to work from and left the shower area for the bank of the stream. Splaying her on the incline—on a bed of moss, she hoped—he sprawled over her and began gnawing on one breast while he worked on tearing is trousers off or at least shoving them down his hips far enough to unleash ‘the beast’.
The anaconda slapped her belly hard enough to knock the air out of her lungs when he finally managed to free it. While she lay gasping for breath, he grabbed the beast by the throat and tried to shove the head into her bellybutton and then her ass and finally rang the right doorbell while Alexis grunted out directions. “No! Down! Not that far! Up. Down ….”
He covered her mouth and rammed his tongue halfway down her throat.
While she was trying to fight him off, he commenced to battering at the mouth of her sex and finally just pushed, giving her a knee lift she didn’t need. She shoved at him and, when that didn’t work, reached between them to part the lips of her sex to keep him from shoving them up her hooha.
It worked like a charm. He hit the oozing walls of the throat and slid—well sort of skidded, like skipping a stone across a pond, bumping along in a way that drove alternating whinnies of praise and complaint from her throat until he hit bottom.
He reconnected with her mouth and pumped her lungs like a bellows with his huffing breaths. Thankfully, it only took a moment to gather himself and start pumping her hooha instead and he lifted his head to catch his breath.
That lit her up. Five strokes and she was huffing and puffing her way toward the peak. Five more and she got to the top of the mountain.
Three more and he leapt off.
Fortunately for her happy outcome, his climax set her off and … fireworks, rockets, orbit and then … Mars.
She felt like a deflated balloon when the convulsions stopped trying to shake her teeth out of her head—limp and empty/melted. She couldn’t even maintain her grip on him. She just collapsed weakly and struggled to breathe.
He rolled off, dragging the limp thing with him and dripping/smearing cum all over her thigh.
There was a wakeup call!
She jolted, but in a second relaxed.
Chances were nil, she was sure, that he was actually carrying bullets.
They wouldn’t want their super soldiers distracted from killing by their cocks.
Would they?
Start a breeding program?
That was just way out there, she decided. Breeding would be too random even if they liked the idea.
“Baby?”
“Wa ..?”
“I wouldn’t mind going another round, but
if you don’t get up and wash, the rest of those bastards will be down here and you won’t get any sleep tonight.”
That galvanized her. She jackknifed upright and looked around.
“You need to wash off. You can’t go back wreaking of sex.”
“Oh fuck!” She bounded up and headed for the shower unsteadily. She was thoroughly awake by the time she’d splashed cold water all over her hooha. Then she found her damp pants wadded in the dirt on the ground, beat the dirt off and put them on. The top was near the pants and almost as dirty.
All in all, she thought trying to finger comb the snarls from her hair, they were never going to guess she’d been fucking Hawk down by the river.
They might think he’d beat her up and dragged her all over creation, but sex? Nah.
They started sniffing almost the moment she came in sight of their camp area.
She knew damn well they couldn’t possibly smell sex on her when she couldn’t smell it on herself, though.
They were just trying to be annoying.
They all sat up, though, and divided speculative looks between her and Hawk.
She pretended she didn’t notice and kept walking until she reached the sleeping bag.
Hawk settled next to her and zipped it up.
Thankfully.
She was shivering from the night chill and the damp clothing.
Hawk turned onto his side and pulled her back against his length, warming her. When she finally stopped shivering, she dozed off.
* * * *
She didn’t know how to act or what to do with herself when she got up the next morning. In the light of day, she was obliged to think she definitely looked like Hawk had dragged her around by her hair the night before—or maybe her heels. She desperately wanted a bath, a real one with soap and clean clothes, but she was afraid if she went down to the creek they’d be gone by the time she got back.
If they were going to dump her now, she at least wanted the chance for a good bye.
She couldn’t bring herself to ask what the plan was, though.
“Did you …. Did y’all managed to find what you needed on that drive?” she asked finally, unable to bear the silence hanging over her any longer.
“Yes.”
She nodded, wondering if it had been good news or bad, struggling with the urge to ask.
