Taurin—still stark naked—blocked her view as he approached the bunk where she lay and dropped to a crouch. He reached to touch her face, lightly, with his fingertips. When he saw that she had met his gaze, he made an eating motion and quirked one dark eyebrow questioningly.
He was so handsome and it was such an endearing human gesture that she felt herself reacting to him with a flood of warmth, smiling faintly at him as she nodded thankfully. “Yes.”
Almost as if he could sense her chemical reaction, his expression hardened for a moment, something glittering in his eyes that created a fresh, harder wave of attraction to rush through her.
She might have thought it was pure imagination, but when he stood abruptly, his cock said hello.
Stunned, her gaze darted upward toward his face, but he had already turned away by that time.
Jurik hadn’t.
Across the width of the room—which, granted, wasn’t terribly wide—she could see he, too, had reacted. He was standing by the bunk staring at her, one leg in a leg of his trousers and his cock lifted like a pointer.
It took a supreme effort to drag her gaze away.
It was sort of like being confronted by a dog you knew to be vicious, feeling a need to keep an eye on him but knowing that meeting his gaze would be a challenge to him that would make him attack.
Shaken, she sat up, drew her legs up, and locked her arms around her knees.
She heard the movements that told her they were dressing, but she didn’t look toward them again—unnerved at the byplay and trying to understand it.
So she could dismiss it as non-threatening.
Pee hard?
At the same time?
She frowned at that thought, realizing abruptly that there was a … strange sort of connection between the two men. She’d noticed Jurik tended to do almost exactly the same things that Taurin did—unconsciously mimicking him, she thought, or maybe even consciously.
Taurin shouldn’t have reacted to anything she had done, though, and he’d had his back to Jurik anyway.
So they’d both sensed the warmth she was barely aware of herself or … there was an alien connection unlike anything she had any experience with.
She supposed they could be twins—but even that wouldn’t explain it to her mind—and frankly they didn’t look like they could’ve shared even one parent in common.
They were both dark skinned with inky black hair. They were even built very closely to the same size, height, musculature and weight, she thought. But their faces were entirely different. The overall shape of their faces, the chins, the lips and noses—even the shape and color of the eyes, and the eyebrows were either subtly different or very different.
She recalled abruptly that her great grandmother had talked about ‘mirror twins’, twins that were absolute opposites of one another.
Maybe?
Taurin broke into her thoughts by approaching the bunk again and holding out his hand.
She glanced at his palm and then up at his face.
Thankfully, he was fully dressed.
Jurik, just behind him, she saw with her peripheral vision, was also fully clothed.
She placed her hand palm down on Taurin’s after a long moment.
Her entire hand fit in his palm.
Her belly went weightless.
He closed his hand around hers as she began to look up again, redirecting her attention when he tugged at her arm. When she’d climbed off of the bunk, he released her hand and encircled her upper arm with his hand as he had every time before, leading her from the cabin.
When they reached the corridor outside, she saw that others were emerging from cabins up and down the corridor—all leading a woman as Taurin was, and all headed in the same direction.
They followed a labyrinth of corridors and arrived finally at a very large room reminiscent of the ‘freezer’ where they’d been taken the day before except not as cold and not as empty or dirty.
Everyone stopped except Taurin. He tugged her with him and moved to a door along one wall. Uneasiness was already beginning to creep through her when they rounded a short wall and she discovered it was a dormitory-like bath, or maybe prison-like would be closer? There were spouts sprouting from high up on the walls—two rows comprised of around fifteen per side.
He led her through and showed her there were facilities—thank god and halleluiah!—beyond.
Having shown her how everything was activated by hand motions, he led her out again.
“Bathroom!” Niki announced, and then nearly got run down by the stampede as two hundred desperate women tried to cram in at one time.
Taurin yanked her out of harm’s way and sandwiched her between him and the wall.
She had her nose planted somewhere in the region of his breast bone.
His cock wanted to shake hands.
To be completely fair, he didn’t grind it against her. He put as much distance between himself and her as he could and still protect her from the mob.
Thankfully, they desisted when they discovered only about a quarter of them could get in at the time and settled to complaining about having to wait and trying not to dance.
And still Taurin remained virtually plastered against her. Finally, she managed to lift her head to look up at him. Feeling the movement, he looked down and met her gaze.
A wall of heat blanketed her, snatching her breath.
After a moment, he seemed to release a pent up breath—as if he had been holding it—reached surreptitiously to adjust the erection that just refused to lay down and then pushed away from her and waded through the crowd of women that parted like the Red Sea before Moses.
Not that he disappeared. He was significantly taller than the tallest women among them—a full head taller. Head and shoulders taller than the average and below average.
The women began to emerge a few minutes later, soaked to the skin, still wet and shivering.
Spotting them, Taurin plowed through the women again, grabbed Niki, and took her in to show her the dryers.
She nodded at him, searched his face, but instead of meeting her gaze again, he turned away and left.
By the time all of them had used the facilities, took a brief turn in the showers and under the dryers and then left, the men were settled at the various tables around the room, eating. They looked up—all of them—searching for the woman they had chosen and then summoning her with a gesture.
She was fairly certain every single one of them would have pretended they had no clue they were being summoned except for two fairly important factors.
There was food if they went.
And there were males who had ended up without a female if they didn’t.
And those males were looking at the females as if they could eat them.
Jurik came to collect her and said something to the ‘unattached’ males. They redirected their attention to their food.
They didn’t seem angry and that made her wonder what he’d said.
Her first clue came when they’d all finished eating.
Those unattached males got up when they had finished and began to approach, in pairs, those who had females with them. At first, she didn’t really think anything about it when the men began to approach Taurin. She’d already determined that he must be their leader, but then she noticed that they were also approaching the others and an uneasy idea began to form in her mind.
She dismissed it, deciding that captivity around so many high testosterone males was making her crazy, making her own hormones run amuck.
Both Taurin and Jurik had reacted, basically, like any healthy, red blooded human male around her.
Understandably. She was next door to naked in the first place and the human male was very visual. In the second, she hadn’t seen another female—at least not one that looked like one—since she’d been taken.
But neither of them had done anything at all, beyond that reaction, to make her think they had sexual designs on her.
; And if they didn’t, she couldn’t think of any reason why the others would.
So … it couldn’t be about sharing the ‘spoils’—could it?
She wasn’t as convinced as she wanted to be and, apparently, she wasn’t the only one that suspected much the same thing and wasn’t reassured.
Although, actually, she had no idea whether the other women had been assaulted or not.
She hadn’t seen any indication that any of them were suffering from a sexual assault.
Truthfully, she hadn’t seen anything that made her think the women had had sex, willingly, either.
But, then again, they were a large group.
When the guys had finished whatever it was under discussion, they had moved the tables and chairs to the walls, leaving the center of the room bare. The women all stood around uncertainly for several moments and finally began to move to the chairs to sit in tight, frightened little groups and talk.
Niki watched them for a bit and then began to move from group to group, listening to the chatter, joining them briefly and then moving on. She’d only made half a circuit when she saw the men had returned from the facilities and took up positions in the center—where they began to go through a series of moves that sent Niki into zen meditation again.
She came to when they stopped. Mildly embarrassed, she looked around in confusion and finally moved to a place to sit and recover.
Then she discovered someone had brought weapons in—huge, lethal looking weapons.
Not right away, unfortunately.
She saw that the men had gathered in several large knots and when they separated, each was wearing a helmet, carrying a shield on one arm and a weapon in the other.
The moment the first two clashed with a near deafening ring of metal, all two hundred women shrieked, leapt to their feet, and gaped in frozen terror.
It seemed doubtful the warriors even noticed, because the first two faced off by mere seconds and all of the others began hammering at one another until there was such a deafening racket no one could hear a damned thing.
Not that any of the women waited around to reach that point.
They commenced to running in circles and slamming into one another mindlessly in an effort to find a hole to crawl in. The first to the exit nearly got trampled by the women that discovered someone had found an escape route. They plugged the doorway with bodies repeatedly as they fought one another to get out and finally gained the corridor and ran up and down maze of corridors until they’d so thoroughly exhausted themselves that they were too tired to be mindlessly frightened any more.
For herself, Niki thought she was more in a state of shock than terror and swept along willy-nilly by the tide of human bulldozers, in first one direction and then another. She thought she would have had trouble finding her way back to the cabin where she’d slept if she hadn’t gotten embroiled in a mad mob situation. As it was, she had no clue at all. And she was, frankly, too shaken even to consider wandering around in search of the quarters, even though she desperately wanted to lock herself away somewhere.
Finally, since nobody could find the way back to the massacre room either—or wanted to—they sat down in the corridor, shivering like terrified rabbits.
Eventually, the sound of hammering metal against metal petered out and then stopped.
Wondering a little wildly if that meant no one was still alive, Niki lifted her head and glanced in both directions along the corridor where she’d taken refuge.
She saw nothing at first, heard only silence for a time, and then the tramping of feet on the metal decking.
The giant aliens appeared, glancing from one white faced woman to the next until they identified the one they’d chosen. Then they would haul them to their feet and head back down the corridor.
Taurin and Jurik looked far from pleased when they found her.
She surged to her feet before either of them could grab her and haul her up.
Both of them tensed.
Realizing they suspected she was about to bolt, and fully intended to chase her down if she did, Niki felt her knees turn to water. They buckled just as Jurik reached for her and he caught her arm, yanked her toward him, and then tossed her across one broad shoulder and popped her ass soundly enough to bring her out of shock.
Sort of.
She jackknifed upward and smacked him on the back so hard she felt like she’d broken every tiny bone in her hand.
Like a mindless idiot.
He halted, but it was brief and, thankfully, he didn’t decide to take her apart.
Feeling almost faint with relief, her ass still stinging from the blow, Niki wilted over his shoulder, hoping he’d think she’d passed out.
It was Taurin who grasped her, set her on her feet and shook his finger in her face.
She gaped at him while he lectured her.
She knew it was a lecture even though she didn’t have a clue of what he was saying.
He looked at her after a moment as if he was torn by conflicting desires and finally merely took her arm and led her to a chair.
“I think they might have been practicing,” Beth said from the table next to hers.
Surprise flickered through Niki—not because of Beth’s assessment, but to find her next to her.
“You think?” Jenna said sarcastically from the table on the other side.
It was when Niki whipped her head to look in the other direction that she realized there were two other males sitting at the same table where she was sitting.
Staring at her.
Her body, stupid, stupid thing, reacted with a surge of warmth that she couldn’t stop to save her life. She could feel the muscles along her channel fluttering, her panties growing damp.
The shift in the expression on their faces was so instantaneous that she was abruptly no longer in any doubt that they could sense, and would react to, her chemical changes.
Oh my god, she thought unhappily, sending a wide eyed glance of uneasiness at Taurin and then Jurik.
Chapter Six
Thankfully, the two new guys glanced at Taurin and Jurik when she did.
“She looks worried,” Kagan observed, his lips curling faintly at the corner.
“Likely, she would have reason to … if it came to a mating,” Taurin drawled coolly. “I would not yield my place to plant my seed, you may be sure—even if I concede your right to follow.”
Kagan frowned. “She is as drawn to us as we are to her. Surely there is … compatibility.”
“Yes,” Jurik agreed. “There is no doubt in our mind that she is … suitable in that sense.”
“But you believe that Muck’s offer is a two sided sword?” Goran, Kagan’s duo, asked.
“I trust nothing that Muck says,” Taurin said vehemently. “At this point, only a fool would and I do not believe there is one among us that has no more sense than that.”
Kagan released a pent up breath. “It is a double edged sword regardless.”
“Yes,” Taurin agreed. “It is hard to grasp that Muck is clever enough to realize that—about us—when he is so amazingly blind because of his love for himself. I am thinking, though, that he simply has a sense that allows him, always, to find the thing, the tool, most useful for manipulation.”
Kagan frowned thoughtfully. “No man is invincible—no matter how many toys he may have.”
“We have not found his weakness yet,” Jurik said pointedly.
“I think we have,” Kagan murmured. “I truly do.”
He glanced at the others when they sent a sharp look at him and then looked very pointedly at Nicole.
Unable to ignore the fact that all four of the aliens were studying her, Nicole glanced around at them. One of the strangers caught her gaze, touching his chest. “I am Kagan.” He pointed to the man beside him. “He is my duo, Goran.”
Nicole glanced from one to the other and then looked at Taurin questioningly. He met her gaze. “You know what he is saying to you.”
Swallowing with a
n effort, sensing Taurin expected her to respond, she repeated the names and introduced herself. “I’m Niki.”
Taurin caught the subtle difference immediately, cocking his head at her in a way that seemed questioning and accusing at the same time. “Ni-ki?”
Niki bit her lip, wondering why she’d given them the nickname she only allowed her close friends to use.
Perhaps because she was sitting between Beth and Jenna?
She didn’t know, but she thought she’d just gotten herself in trouble … again. She looked away. “Nicole.”
Taurin touched her cheek, applied just enough pressure to make her look at him. “Ni-ki? Ni-cole?”
She chewed her lip. “It’s the same name,” she said a little defensively.
“Oh girl! You have screwed up now,” Jenna murmured.
Niki felt her face redden. When Taurin released her, she sent Jenna a glare. “Are you trying to get me killed?” she growled.
Jenna looked startled, sent a quick look at the men seated with Nicole and paled. “I was just joking, Niki.”
“Which would be bad enough if there was no language barrier and I could explain. He looks like he thinks I lied to him, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind of man that takes that well.”
“I don’t see why he’d be upset about it,” Beth said placatingly. “Anyway, they haven’t hurt us so far.”
Nicole turned to glare at her. “Wow! A whole 24 hours, maybe, and nothing yet?” she said sarcastically.
Beth reddened, but looked at Taurin. “Nicole and Niki are the same thing Honest to god!”
Taurin slid a look at her and then Niki and Beth shuddered. “Ok, so you’re right. They are scary, but ….”
“Don’t try to help me,” Niki muttered. “I can dig my own grave, thank you.”
“Ok. Sorry.”
“They are like little birds,” Kagan said, amused.
“They did not seem merry to me,” Goran said pointedly.
Kagan grinned. “No,” he murmured, meeting Taurin’s gaze with one that was vaguely taunting.
Not so vaguely that Taurin missed it and he was certain he was not supposed to.
It took an effort to dismiss his pique, but then he could not expect to convince the delizo that the women meant nothing to them if he instantly leapt from his chair and tried to beat Kagan to death. “Tomorrow,” he promised.
Alien Warriors: Invasion Page 5
