Because the woman’s gaze flickered to the window and back.
She smiled a little woodenly as she surreptitiously shoved the kit into her pants pocket. “Thought I’d get some fresh air, but I think I’ll take a walk instead.”
The woman just stared at her, unsmiling.
Trying to shrug off her uneasiness, Lauren turned away and headed to the door. She felt the damned woman’s gaze, though, until she closed the door behind her. Wondering if the woman would run straight to Rama or if she even dared do such a thing—or how much he would believe or what he might make of it—Lauren went down the stairs and discovered Rama had taken a hunting party out and wasn’t expected till late afternoon.
Relieved, even though she was given a message by one of the servants that Rama expected her to entertain for him after supper, she left the great hall and went into the keep to search for samples to test.
It would’ve been a great deal easier if she only had to test surfaces and fibers, but, unfortunately, neither was likely to yield what they needed in this particular case. She did take a water sample from the well, though.
Spying the old maid/bitch heading toward the laundry after a while, she decided to return to the keep to see if she could get personal samples of other members of the king’s household by visiting their bedchambers.
She managed to get another micro-drone off with more samples near dusk and receive a micro-drone carrying a replacement for her broken player.
She was seized as she re-entered the room and swung around and slammed back against the wall hard enough it might have hurt if she hadn’t been cocooned by total shock.
The wall of naked flesh that pinned her was still hot and damp from the bath.
“What treachery are you about?” Rama growled.
Lauren struggled to focus on the danger she was in. He was six foot six if he was an inch, though, and broad shouldered and handsome, and vastly appealing to her to boot. Any woman from six foot Amazon to five foot pigmy and anything in between would, she thought, have a hard time not reacting to such a prime male animal. Her femininity swamped her, threatened to turn her brain to mush and her confidence and independence into simpering, whimpering female victim. “I didn’t …,” she stammered. “I wouldn’t—we wouldn’t. We mean you no harm. I swear it!”
He caught her face in one hand, framing her jaw with thumb and forefinger as he shoved his face threateningly closer and forced her to look him in the eyes. “I heard you speaking to another,” he growled. “A male. You think you’ve assessed our strengths and vulnerabilities already?”
Horror washed through her at the accusation. “No! I wasn’t sent for that reason! I’ve no notion of such things!” She studied his expression hopefully, but she didn’t see that he’d relaxed one iota. “I was just repor ….” She stumbled over that word, fearing he would hear nothing more than ‘report’ and react violently. “Letting my … uh … master know that I was safe and unhurt.”
His expression remained stern, accusing.
She licked her desert dry lips and tried again, this time taking the offensive. “Your people tried to shoot me down! I told them I was under attack! I just … needed to let them know that I was alright.”
Something flickered in his eyes and she realized he’d at least acknowledged that his people had broken the peace first. That acknowledgment made her aware as she hadn’t been moments before that his face was so close to hers that they shared every huffing breath of high emotion … with intoxicating effect.
It was at that highly charged, and most unfortunate, moment that she recalled her ‘master’ had pressured her to collect semen samples. She wondered later if it produced a chain reaction, a subtle shift in her perceptions, her reception of his aggressive stance, that triggered a response in him.
Or was it only an extension of his high emotion?
However it was, he shifted the focus of his aggression with a suddenness that snatched her breath away.
Abruptly, he was kissing her with much the same ferocity he’d displayed when he grabbed her, had closed the small space that separated them and conquered, laid waste to every functioning brain cell in her head. An avalanche of heat poured over her as she was filled with his essence.
His taste burst upon her the instant his mouth connected with hers in delightful adhesion and he swept his tongue into the exquisitely sensitive cavern in welcome subjugation. Even as she absorbed the taste of him, his breath delved deeper, filled her lungs with his presence, wove a web of desire around and through her.
Everything inside of her narrowed upon him with an intensity that obliterated the world beyond the two of them—actually, beyond him. She lost consciousness of herself, as well, became nothing more than a receptacle of him.
She’d set herself up for this, she thought with a vague sense of alarm as she struggled to relish every delightful sensation and find her moorings at the same time. She’d primed herself for him with admiration and empathy for the boy he’d been before she had ever set eyes upon him. And the moment she’d seen him in the flesh, desire had grown from that initial regard, a need to feel him.
It was Rama that broke the kiss and moved away from her abruptly.
It never occurred to her, even once, even after acknowledging the danger, to try to push him away.
He stared at her for several moments, hard, and then snatched the curtain away from the window and examined the view very carefully.
He’d stalked back to the bath and climbed into the pool before her sluggish brain interpreted his curious behavior as a search for her co-conspirator.
She rather thought distracting him would be preferable to trying to explain to him how she was talking to someone many miles away when he’d overheard.
He sent her a dark, brooding look when she followed him.
She halted at the door, pinned there by the unwelcoming look.
“I could … wash your hair and scrub your back if you like?” she offered placatingly.
His dark gaze skimmed down her length and returned to her face. “Unless you have a mind to learn what it is like to have your twat fisted around my cocks I would advise you to keep your distance.”
Lauren gaped at him for a long moment while that sank in—her mind conjuring a fantasy scenario of her accepting the challenge and climbing into the pool with him—and then she broke the lock of his gaze and beat a hasty retreat.
She was shaking by the time she reached her corner retreat. She sat on the mound of furs, not so much by choice as by necessity.
God! She wanted to feel her body fisting around his, she thought a little wildly!
Bad, bad idea!
Good in the sense that she could collect the semen for the research team, but otherwise very bad in too many ways to count.
First and foremost there was the probability that his girlfriend would slip a knife between her ribs.
Then there was the mean bastard that had threatened her if she got in the way of the arranged mating/joining.
And finally, maybe most important to her personally, she didn’t think she could be detached and clinical about it.
She knew she needed to be, but she just didn’t feel like she could carry it off.
* * * *
It took Rama longer to bring his body and mind under control than it should have once Lauren had left, and he was not pleased that it did.
He was inclined to think that was because the object of his desires was only a matter of a few quick strides away—and his bed very little further—but it was such thoughts that made dismissing that side of the encounter nearly impossible. So he very deliberately shifted his thoughts to the wench, Gil-liana, the maid he had sent to show Lauren around the keep.
It didn’t warm his interest in that direction, unfortunately.
He had tired of her before he had dismissed her from his bed.
Mostly because he found her possessive streak annoying.
The only reason he had not sent her away before was th
at he worked hard to keep peace in his household by not showing favoritism. He did not want to give the women ideas above their station or to inadvertently target anyone for the cruelty of the others by showing a complete lack of interest.
He was king and he could not mate based on his personal preferences. Any joining would be for an advantageous political alignment.
He dismissed that after a moment and turned his mind to bathing the grime from his hunt off and considering the nothing he had actually learned about the encounter with Lauren ….
Beyond the fact that the kiss they had shared had rattled him as he could not recall ever experiencing previously.
Nothing.
She had told him she was speaking to someone who was not there and he did not care because all he could think about as he had watched her lips move was his thirst to taste her—to feel any part of himself engulfed by her heat.
He frowned.
Muilt, the man he’d set to watch her, had brought a very strange report back to him. According to him, she had simply wandered about the keep scraping at things and placing a peculiar assortment of invisible objects in tiny vials.
He was no wiser to what it was that she was up to than Muilt, but it seemed to be another confirmation that whatever it was she was up to, establishing an alliance wasn’t it.
He just couldn’t figure out what it was that she was actually doing … beyond spying on them for her people.
He was convinced of that much.
The other … well, he could go quietly insane trying to figure it out, but unless she was trying to make them think that she was crazy, he was clueless.
He could do nothing, he realized, except continue to pick at the puzzle and hope that he solved it before it bit him in the ass.
There was a possibility, he knew, that everything was just as they had said and he was only being paranoid.
But his experiences had taught him to believe the worst and, as much as he desired Lauren, he could neither dismiss treachery completely and accept her explanation or dismiss her claims and convince himself she was bent on evil intent.
The worst of it was that he wanted to do just that—accept her at face value and simply enjoy her company as if she truly was nothing more or less than a gift by the strangers intended to forge a bond between her people and his.
Chapter Seven
Lauren had the presence of mind to check the player before she was called upon to entertain and discovered, to her relief, that it was in perfect working order unlike the other which had, no doubt, gotten banged up in the rough landing the pod had made. It was very disconcerting, therefore, to perform her lip sync routine flawlessly, only to have a far more profound, and negative, reaction from the crowd than she’d had the night before.
Even Rama looked stunned and thoroughly confused.
And that expression was reflected on every face in her audience.
Those who’d been too frozen to move, she realized. Fully a third had leapt to their feet and run the moment the music began to pound through the room, turning over benches and tripping over one another in their mad rush to vacate.
Struggling to submerge her uneasiness, Lauren bowed in the hopes that it might break the spell that held them.
Thankfully, it seemed to have the desired effect.
Rama beat the table top with his mug in appreciation and everyone else that remained in the great hall followed suit—still looking thoroughly confused and some downright terrified rather than pleased with her effort.
Lauren had made it all the way back to the king’s suite before it dawned on her that the music that accompanied the song—seeming to emerge from her with the voice—might have thrown them.
Mostly because she couldn’t think of anything about the song itself that could have had that effect.
She didn’t know why that hadn’t occurred to any of the damned planners! But now that it had occurred to her she felt like it should have been blatantly obvious that it was unfamiliar technology to the Uti and probably wouldn’t be received well.
Ok, so she could see it. It was something they were used to. It was hard to view everything through the eyes of a stranger, with complete objectivity. She supposed they’d just been too harried with trying to make preparations for it to occur to anyone.
Or maybe it had and they just couldn’t figure out a way around it?
Wondering if she should risk getting caught to contact central command for advice, she moved to the pallet instead and settled on it, covering her face with her hands.
She’d known she was taking on a task that would be very risky and could cost her her life, but it had seemed far less shaky ground while she’d been safely tucked away in the colony. Now it seemed there was danger at every turn and that she was getting less competent at handling it than ‘learning the ropes’ as she progressed.
They must think she’d performed some kind of witchcraft, she thought in sudden horror.
She knew they believed in magic—just as humans had in the dark ages and well beyond that when they encountered anything they didn’t understand that didn’t seem possible.
The question was, did that put her in more danger than she’d been in before?
Or less?
Should she abandon all and run for her life?
She’d probably have to run because they hadn’t come up with a way, yet, to retrieve her and certainly not something that could take her away fast enough to avoid the consequences of her latest screw up.
Would they be afraid of her and want to kill her because of their fear?
Or, supposing they believed she’d performed magic, would they be too fearful to challenge her?
Most importantly, how would Rama feel about it?
She watched him uneasily when he came in some time later and settled in a chair near the hearth, studying her. After a few minutes he lifted a hand and crooked one finger at her in a summoning motion.
Lauren was more unnerved, not less, but she saw no hope for it. She got up and crossed the room to stand before him.
“What was that thing that you did in the great hall?”
Lauren chewed her lip. “It’s a music player.”
He frowned, his gaze flickering over her. “A musical instrument?”
She took the tiny player out and showed it to him. “No. Not an instrument. It … uh … records the sound of instruments being played and plays it back.”
She held it out to him, but he apparently had no interest in examining it.
“And … when you spoke earlier to your master? You used this thing?”
She pushed her hair behind her ear and showed him where the device had been implanted. “That was a com unit—communications. It’s embedded here so that I can quickly access it and it can’t be lost or broken—well, unless I get broken. In which case I wouldn’t actually need it anyway.”
“This is … tools that your people have made?”
Lauren felt like he was a prize pupil! He had an amazing understanding! Her admiration for him leapt upward several more notches and really she could hardly admire him more than she did already. “Yes.”
“Not magic?”
Lauren almost laughed scoffingly, but she caught herself. “No. People figured out how to make them work and other people built them. They’re just … tools. More complex than some of yours but still just things made by our people.”
To her surprise, amusement flickered in his eyes. “So you cannot turn me into a hoppity?”
Lauren blinked at him. “I’m not certain of what a hoppity is, but no. And I wouldn’t even if I could. You’re as close to perfection as makes little difference. I can’t imagine anything that I might do to improve upon that.”
She was charmed when he blushed and looked uncomfortable and then uncomfortable herself because she’d only intended to tease—not give herself away.
His eyes narrowed, his amusement vanishing as abruptly as it had surfaced. “But … your master is more perfect?”
She stared at him blankly for several moments before her mind made the connection between who she really was and who he thought she was. “Oh,”’ she said airily as she moved away from him, “of course! He’s practically a god.”
“You do not seem to admire him a great deal,” he said dryly, drawing her unnerved gaze—which is when she discovered that he was undressing. Her mind went perfectly blank—as if it had short circuited.
“I … uh …. What makes you say that?” she hedged, realizing he was far more perceptive than she’d given him credit for.
He gave her a look, but instead of responding he headed toward his bed and finished undressing. “I have need of a thorough rub down. The beast we took down today very nearly took me down, as well.”
That comment drew a startled look from her. Her mind leapt at once from speculation over his motives in asking for a massage to the offhand statement that he’d nearly been killed in the hunt.
She didn’t know whether to believe him or not, or if it was an exaggeration.
She saw when he’d lain down, though, that he had a number of scrapes, scratches, and bruises along his arms and sides and consternation filled her.
They’d been taught hunting skills when they’d been preparing for colonization and they had had to implement those skills when they’d first arrived. The colony had already been completed insofar as the building was concerned and there was some food that had been sent ahead to stock, but they’d had to ‘hit the ground running’ even so. They’d arrived barely in time to get the planting done to produce a crop for their first year and they’d had to get the protein production going. To be safe and avoid any chance of failure of the colony due to starvation, they’d had to immediately begin hunting and gathering.
But she hadn’t taken part in any hunts for any of the larger animals indigenous to the world of the Uti.
She did know, of course, that it could be dangerous—any wild thing was extremely dangerous when cornered, when they believed they were facing death, and the larger the beast the more damage he could do—up to and including killing the hunter and escaping.
The Nine Realms of the Uti I: Warrior Prince Page 6
