by Roxie Ray
The blonde. She had awoken in my arms mid-battle, stirring and nuzzling my chest with a fondness I had never yet, in all my twenty-two years, come to know. Long ago, I had discarded any notion of being touched by a female in that manner. Long ago, I had rid myself of any longing to feel the way she had made me felt.
Before she had regained consciousness, I had already wanted to fight for her. That was the entire point of the mission. It would not have mattered if she had been unappealing to me. She had needed to be rescued, and I had been the only man left to carry her to safety. But when she had rubbed her cheek against me so, wrapped her arms around my neck and clung to me with such full confidence in my strength…in that moment, I had wished that I had found her unappealing. I had wished that she had been too young to stir such desire in me, too old, or somehow less fair to gaze upon.
But of course, she was not. Instead, she had been so beautiful that it made my heart ache every time I caught a glimpse of the bruise across her eye, the scar that marred her cool, pale brow. I had not only wanted to fight for her as I carried her through the fray of battle.
I had wanted to kill for her. Destroy for her. If it had come to it, I would have gladly died for her there aboard the dreadnought. But even more, I had wanted to live for her, just to know that I had been the one to bear her safely home.
I toweled myself off with frustration knitting my brow. None of those feelings were unreasonable. I had asked no less of my men before we had set off on this quest across the stars. But when I had asked it of them, I had asked that their motivation be one of valor. Bravery. Righteousness and justice. It was right to save the innocent from the cruel. It was just, to do good in the face of such evil.
But when I had fought for her…
I tossed my towel across the bathroom and stormed to my bed with a grunt of annoyance curled on my lips.
I had not acted out of righteousness when she was in my arms. I had acted for her—and that, somehow, made all the difference in the world.
My cock was already half-hard against my thigh as I eased myself down onto my bed. I had hoped the heat of my shower would mingle with the heat she had drawn up in my chest when she gazed at me with her clear blue eyes, the color of north ocean ice. Instead, if anything, the sensation had only amplified.
I had wanted her. Yearned for her. Desired nothing more than to whisk her away from harm so that I could carry her here into my chambers instead, psychological trauma and medical evaluations be damned. As I lay back on my pillows, I could imagine all too clearly how beautiful her golden hair would have looked splayed out on the black linen on the bed next to me. Like tendrils of moonlight against a starless black sky.
When I had touched her knee, it had been only with concern for her wellbeing…or so I would have liked her to believe. But in reality, some small, awful part of me had hoped that she would ease into my touch. Pull me closer to her. Wrap her arms around my neck again, this time in gratefulness. Move to me, her lips slightly parted, her icy blue eyes locked on mine…
It was wrong and I knew it, but I could have done it. None could have stopped me. I was general aboard this ship, and she—she was my prize. If she had but given me the slightest indication that she was willing, I could have carried her off the cruiser exactly as I had carried her onto it. Leonix had been more than capable of manning the assault on the Rutharian ship on her own. I could have sent word to her through Gallix, let Ronan and Nion take the other females to the medical bay. And her, my blonde beauty…I could have stolen her away. Brought her back here, washed her, combed the tangles from her hair and kissed her eyelids so gently, she would have forgotten not just the bruise on her face, but every brutality the Rutharians had inflicted upon her along with it.
My hand was around the base of my cock before I even realized what I was doing. Now, it had swelled to its full hardness. The flare of my tip dripped with precum. My balls ached with need for release. But it wasn’t just release that I wanted—it was her. Wrong or not, she had awakened something inside me, something unlike anything else I had ever felt. On Lunaria, I had been blessed with many opportunities to share bed and body with Lunarian women—because of my family’s wealth and status, far more opportunities than most. But it had never seemed right, wanting for a female that I knew I could not bring myself to make my wife.
At least, not until now.
And I did not even know her name.
I stroked my cock to the memory of her instead. Her scent, beneath the blood and dirt of the filthy cage she had been locked away in, was soft and sweet, like fresh flowers on the first morning of the planting season. Her lips, flowers in their own right, a blossom begging to be kissed into bloom. Her hips…
I released a low growl. Her hips were delicious. Wide and inviting. Perfect, I knew, for bearing children—something I had never even entertained a desire for before. But as I stacked my fists on top of one another so I could better simulate how it might feel to have those hips straddling my own, her sex slick and wet with heat every time she plunged downward on my shaft, it was suddenly the only thing on my mind.
I wanted to breed her. To fill her with my seed, watch her belly swell as my child grew in her womb. Kloran had mentioned blushingly one night, that his own human wife’s breasts had swelled too once she was pregnant. Would this female’s as well? I had done my best to ignore them, but beneath her thin shift, they had been impossible not to notice. Full and firm, nipples hardened with the cold. Through the fabric, I had almost even been able to make out their color. Pale, pinkish. A color that I would have loved to darken with flicks of my tongue against her peaks—and maybe, even, with nips from my teeth.
It was that thought which grabbed hold of me beyond anything else: the imagining of her riding me, breasts bouncing over my face, nipples free for me to lick and suck at my will as my cock pressed into the velvet folds of her body, seeking her core. When I found it, I knew, it would be impossible not to fill her, soak her womb with my seed over and over again, until either I was too spent to go on or she was so perfectly bred that she would be mine forever. For good. Whichever came first.
My balls tensed at that forbidden temptation. Somehow, the sensation that it was wrong made it feel that much more right. I could not have her, I knew. I did not believe in marriage, in mating, in creating life, and more importantly, she did not yearn for me. The way she had flinched at my touch told me that much. I spent my seed over my knuckles and my stomach anyway. The hallucination I had conjured up of her in my mind’s eye was too vivid and my need was too great.
What in my heart I knew I could not have, my body wanted in a way that I had never wanted anything before in all my life. The result, of course, was several long, thick ropes of my seed shooting across my torso and a waterfall of it dripping down my fists.
I closed my eyes and sighed. Another shower would be necessary now. Perhaps that was for the best. I could wash my body clean of the evidence of my desire. Maybe I could wash my conscience clean of it too now that my balls were empty and that desire satiated—at least, for a time.
But as I rose from the bed and grabbed my towel, I knew that no amount of steam and water could change the reality of our situation.
This female would be trouble for me, if I allowed myself to continue to indulge in these fantasies. After all she had been through, she deserved better than to be imagined in such a way. I could not trust myself around her. Her face was too fair and her body made me weak. It was a problem—a problem with the potential to become an even larger issue if these thoughts continued. I was no Rutharian. I would never take what was not given to me willingly, with unbridled enthusiasm. But in my wanting of her, I had already wronged her in my mind. These feelings were new ones for me, but I had seen other men go down this path before.
Desire like this led to obsession. Listlessness. A longing that, if left unchecked, could easily spiral into something that could not be so easily satisfied with just sensual imaginings.
If I was to keep
my mind focused on my mission and my conscience clear, I could not continue to yearn for her in the way I had just done. I needed to stay away from the human female with the icy blue eyes and the golden hair. As much as possible, at least, until I had regained control of myself once more.
I knew it as well as I knew my own birthright: what had happened here in my bedroom in this moment of weakness could not happen again.
5
Sawyer
“Ouch!” I yelped. I pressed my fingertips to the space on my neck just behind my ear as the doctor—at least, that’s what I was pretty sure he was—withdrew the small implement he’d just jabbed into my skin. It looked like a staple gun, and it felt like, well, being stapled. “Was that really necessary?”
The doctor held up a long, pale orange finger with a sharp claw at its tip and took out something that looked like a remote control from his pocket. He held it up to me for a second, like he was inviting me to examine it, then pushed a button on it.
Immediately, my body jolted forward. I tucked my head between my knees and let out a whimper as I clapped a hand to my ears. The sound that filled my head was like putting a microphone right next to its speaker, the way the idiot principal my school sometimes did during assemblies when he was too busy checking out the busty third-grade teacher to pay attention to what he was doing with his hands.
“There,” a gentle, warm male voice said. “That’s better, I imagine. How do you feel now? Can you understand me?”
I narrowed my eyes and looked up as the ringing in my ears faded out. The doctor was smiling down at me, friendly despite the flash of his long, white fangs. Huh. Whatever he’d just done to me, somehow I could understand him now. It was a little weird, hearing one of these orange alien guys speaking English all of a sudden, but I wasn’t going to complain. Now that we were talking in the same language, I had just as many questions for him as he had for me.
“I’m…okay. A little dizzy, but…” I rubbed my head. “What did you just do to me? I can understand you now, but…how?”
“Translator chip.” The doctor tapped the place behind his own ear. “It automatically processes my language into one that you understand, and vice versa. My apologies if it hurt you. If the Rutharians were kind, they would have installed yours while you were still unconscious.”
“Rutharians?” I raised an eyebrow. “Those are the red demon guys, I take it.”
The doctor let out a little snort of laughter. “Not demons, no. They are another species of sentient beings within the galaxies. Not the most pleasant kind, either. Though, I suppose you have already discovered that much for yourself.” His smile faded into a look of concern. “I am Head Healer Adskow. I have been tasked with examining you to determine exactly how much of their brutality you have endured.”
“Um. Hi.” I struck out my hand for him to shake, which he looked at with such an expression of confusion that I ended up just dropping it back down onto my lap. “I’m Sawyer,” I finished lamely.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Sawyer.” Adskow picked up a clipboard-shaped thing off of the counter at his side and flipped through it with the tip of one claw, then made a note on it. Probably, he was writing down my name. “As you have come to us conscious, I am sure you have many questions.”
“You have no idea,” I assured him. But before I could launch into them, he held up a finger again.
“Please. First, allow me to scan you?” He exchanged the chart for something that looked like grocery store price-checker and held it up so I could see it. “It will not be invasive, I can assure you.”
“Uh…” I blinked at the gun, then nodded. “Non-invasive is good, I guess. What are you scanning for?”
“I need to assess your injuries, and, ah…determine if you were violated or not.” Adskow looked uncomfortable even saying the word violated. Probably not as uncomfortable as I was, though.
I swallowed hard. I didn’t know how long I’d been out for before I’d woken up in the Ruthy-whatever cells, or how long I’d been unconscious after that big red guy had come along and hit me. Sex slaves. The words hit me a little harder every time I remembered them. And now, with all this talk of violation, I was starting to feel dirtier than I ever had before in my life.
“Do you think they would have…” My mouth formed the word: raped. But I couldn’t quite get it out. Saying it, it felt like, would just make it even more real. “That they would have had time?”
Adskow didn’t answer this time, just gave me a grim look and pressed a button on his scanner. A glowing blue light burst from it and engulfed me completely for a moment. I flinched as it hit my eyes, but true to Adskow’s word, it didn’t hurt.
“Hmm.” He peered down at the screen on the back of the scanner, then his shoulders relaxed with relief. “No. It would seem not. You have several scrapes and bruises, including the one on your forehead, that seem to be approximately one week old.”
“Oh. I was in a car crash.” I raised my fingertips up to the sore spot near my hairline. I could remember the sticky warmth of blood dripping down from it after I’d wrecked. In the week that had passed since then, the cut had scabbed over. It was tender, but it didn’t hurt as bad as my eye did. “I think I passed out when it happened. When I woke up, I was in a jail cell and a big red guy came along and hit me…”
“The bruise on your eye is from barely five hours ago.” He cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable again. “There are some minor, ah, intimate signs suggesting that you were tested for breeding sometime between the crash and the point when you regained consciousness, but nothing implying that, ah…”
His words fell off, and I let them. For a doctor, he was obviously just about as skeeved out by this whole situation as I was. As creepy as the idea of being tested for breeding, of all things, was, that was a little reassuring, at least. Whoever these orange guys were, everything I learned about them told me that they were probably the good guys.
Still, I didn’t want to, but I had to ask.
“Is that why you guys rescued me?” I shuffled back a little on the examination table I was sitting on. “Because you want to…to breed me, too?”
Adskow’s face went pale. “Blood. No, Sawyer. Not at all. Or, well, not unless you wanted that, but given all that you’ve been through—”
“Yeah, no.” I shook my head as quickly as I could. The big guy who had carried me to safety had been handsome, sure—for an alien, anyway—but even just the word breed was starting to make my stomach churn. “Like, I’m grateful that you did rescue me and all, but—”
“Of course. You would not—”
“And you guys don’t seem like you’d—”
We both stopped, stared at each other for a moment, then shared an awkward laugh. Alien or human, apparently the ways we dealt with uncomfortable situations were kind of the same.
“My apologies, Sawyer,” he said. “I believe it is obvious that this is a strange conversation for both of us to have at the moment.” He arched a dark salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Admittedly, however, it could be far stranger. I understand that you humans are generally unaware of other sentient lifeforms within the galaxies, but you seem to be taking the knowledge…in stride.”
“I’m a kindergarten teacher. Or at least, I was, back on Earth.” I shrugged and forced another laugh as confusion passed over his face again. “Um. I taught school for young children, I mean. Some of the stories they’d tell me… You don’t get very far in a job like that without a little imagination, I guess.”
“Interesting.” Adskow made another note on the clipboard. “You enjoy caring for children?”
“Of course. They’re cute, right?”
Adskow sighed. “I imagine so, yes. On my own home planet, though—Lunaria—we have so few cubs that it is not often I am able to enjoy their presence. And of course, my place is here on the ship. A poor place for cubs, even if there were many to entertain.”
I leaned back and took him in for a second—his vibrant purple
eyes, his salt and pepper hair, the orange tint of his skin and his broad, flat nose, which reminded me of a lion’s. He shared a lot of features with the big guy who had rescued me, actually—though, I thought, he wasn’t maybe quite as handsome. Not that it mattered or anything, obviously. Despite the awkwardness, Adskow seemed a little more at ease around me than the other guy had. I’d take friendliness over handsomeness any day, especially since now that I was literally floating around in a ship in outer space, having a friend was a little more important than scoping out the local hunks at the moment.
“Lunaria, huh?” I kicked my legs gently over the edge of the exam table as I stared down at my lap and tried to fight back a blush. I shouldn’t have even still been thinking about my big, muscular, red-headed rescuer, now that I was considering it. He’d turned cold to me as soon as I flinched at his touch, after all, whereas Adskow had been nothing but pleasant and warm. “Are you all from the same planet, then? Why don’t you have many, uh…cubs?”
Adskow’s eyes went a little paler at my second question. The friendly smile that had been playing on his lips fell slightly, too. It was like I’d said something that had made him sad.
“We are all Lunarians on this ship, yes, except for you and the two other humans we recovered from the Rutharians.” He shrugged, and his voice suddenly shifted tone from conversational to clinical. “Lunarian females are born with less frequency than our males and can only bear two cubs each at most before they become infertile. As a result, our population dwindles with every generation. It is part of the reason that we are so eager to recover kidnapped human females from the Rutharians—your species is the only known to be able to reproduce with our kind.”
