She didn’t know if he was still imprisoned in the bowels of the temple or not.
She didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
She hadn’t forgotten Nhewa’s little speech, she just wasn’t certain she could take it at face value. It might’ve been nothing more than a lie to torment both of them, to make Ulrich believe he would survive when he meant to kill him—to make her believe she was alone and completely at his mercy—or lack of it.
She didn’t know how much longer she was going to be alive, whether the bastard would succeed in sucking the life out of her or just get tired of toying with her and kill her outright.
Mostly, she was too exhausted to care.
When she had lucid moments, she was still afraid, but almost resigned.
She thought part of it was because she felt hopeless without Ulrich. Whether he was dead or alive, he couldn’t protect her anymore. She hadn’t realized just how completely she’d pinned her hopes of survival on him until the priests had ripped her away from him.
Or that she’d begun to look forward to his ‘promise’ with hope.
Until there wasn’t even a remote possibility of that future he’d planned for them.
She was surprised by how sad that made her on so many levels.
She supposed she’d developed a fondness for Ulrich because she was so dependent on him, because he took care of her and didn’t hurt her.
She’d thought he was handsome—awesomely built!—so exotic in his alien-ness that that circumstance alone was a turn on for her.
She didn’t suppose it should have been exciting, but it was.
Or maybe it was because everything about him seemed so very manly?
She hated that they’d scarred his back! It was such a beautiful back before they marred it.
Of course, there had been scars already.
She supposed, now, that that might be how he’d gotten those scars.
How very awful his life had been and he’d had such modest wants for his future—and he hadn’t even managed to get those.
It made her both angry and very sad to think about that.
This religious sect didn’t even belong on the planet from what she’d been able to figure out!
Of course, she supposed, since Earth had different races, there could be different races and even different species on the same world, but these creatures didn’t look like the aliens she’d seen in the towns they’d pass through.
She supposed it would be difficult, under the circumstances, to figure out who ‘belonged’ and who didn’t, but that was what it seemed like to her. These aliens had come to this world and taken over it with their stupid ‘religion’ and their demands and practices and the natives had been cowed—or killed.
They certainly hadn’t done them any favors that she could see, hadn’t allowed the inhabitants of the world to benefit from their superior knowledge.
She tried to dismiss it from her mind as pointless speculation, wasted energy and emotions, but despite her exhaustion from Nhewa’s demands, and her earnest attempts to erase Ulrich from her mind, he continued to visit her thoughts and dreams even as days turned into weeks and the weeks into a month.
And then one night, he was simply there.
* * * *
Over time, Brandi had gotten into the habit of simply pretending sleep when the priests came for her to take her to Nhewa. Not that it did any good to fake sleep. They still dragged her out of her bed and hauled her to Nhewa whenever he commanded her presence.
But both resistance and argument were futile and feigning sleep gave her the illusion of not buckling to them, even though she couldn’t fight. It allowed her to salve her pride at least a little.
Shock rippled through her, though, when she aroused one night a little over a month after she and Ulrich had been captured when the ‘priest’ climbed into her bed with her and covered her mouth. Still laboring under the belief that it was one of the priests—struggling with the shock/fear that Nhewa had grown bored with her and handed her off to the others—it took many moments for her brain to catch up to the fact that the man who’d covered her mouth was huge, heavy, and acting like none of the priests ever had.
“No talking,” he growled.
Brandi’s eyes popped open. “Ulrich!” she gasped, feeling a thrill of excitement and happiness rush through her.
Something flickered in his eyes—irritation, she thought, but she grabbed him, trying to hold him tightly to her, to hug him. She was so happy to see him, she struggled to elude his hand and kiss him.
Uttering an irritated huff, he replaced his hand with a gag and then hauled her out of the bed and across one meaty shoulder.
That move briefly paralyzed her solar plexus and she was mostly focused on trying to drag in a breath as he strode toward the open door of her cell, glanced out of the opening both ways and then almost seemed to melt into the dark shadows of the corridor.
Which was when Brandi noticed for the first time that the torches were out. There was a dim, flickering glow at the end of the bisecting corridor Ulrich headed toward, which gave off enough light to reveal two large, misshapen lumps on the floor.
That seemed to be covered with priest robes.
That realization sent a jolt through her.
Oh my god! They were really going to be up shit creak without a paddle when the priests discovered he’d whacked two of their number.
Actually, a half dozen, she amended as they traversed the temple and she saw crumpled lumps here and there—around corners, just inside of doorways.
The guards.
They’d died so swiftly and silently they hadn’t managed to alert anyone else.
The jog down the temple stairs across Ulrich’s hard shoulder nearly made her pass out.
When they got to the bottom, he plunked her down on a saddle, shook his finger in her face warningly, and then collected the guak’s reigns and led it almost silently through the village.
It took Brandi a little while to recover sufficiently from her rescue and beat back her terror of being caught to actually notice how quietly they were moving and to wonder at it. When she did, she examined the beast and discovered its hooves were tied up with some kind of fabric or leather to dull the sounds they would ordinarily have made and everything on the tack was also covered to muffle any sound.
Relief and pleasure filled her. Ulrich was so smart!
Not that she’d ever doubted for a moment that he was exactly what he’d claimed to be, but it was still reassuring to see him in action—well sort of. The results of his training, certainly.
When they’d cleared the village by a good margin, Ulrich mounted the beast and pulled her snuggly between his thighs.
“Try to hold on this time,” he growled a split second before he kicked the guak and set it to a run.
Annoyance flickered through Brandi, but she’d been prepared this time. She’d braced herself the moment he gathered the reigns and leapt up on the beast’s back.
She dragged her gag off. “You didn’t warn me you were going to change directions so abruptly last time,” she muttered in a whisper.
He grunted a comment.
It sounded sarcastic to her, but she decided to ignore it. Shifting around, she struggled to embrace him even though her arms weren’t long enough to make the circuit, snuggling her face against his chest thankfully. He was alive and they were free!
Probably not for long, but it felt good to be out of that place and better to know that Ulrich cared enough to take her with him when he escaped!
Of course, she knew that was probably mostly because he’d paid for her and considered that she belonged to him, but she wasn’t going to allow that to dull her pleasure in being rescued.
He tightened his hold on her. “I will not allow you to fall,” he said gruffly.
He thought she was holding on because she was afraid she was going to fall!
Brandi was torn between amusement, irritation, and relief that he’d completely
misunderstood why she’d embraced him.
Shaking her head, she turned her face to his chest and kissed the spot directly over his heart.
He stiffened.
In a number of places.
“We do not have time for that … now,” he muttered.
With absolute sincerity.
Brandi rolled her eyes. More irritated than amused at that point, she shifted around once more, putting her back to him.
He shifted the reigns to one hand and stroked her leg. “We may have time … later.”
Brandi popped his hand. “You are such a man!” she snapped. “I wasn’t offering to fuck! I was hugging you to thank you for rescuing me!”
His chest began to shake. “There will be a better way and more time to thank me later.”
Brandi ground her teeth. “Asshole,” she muttered.
Her pique didn’t last long. Ulrich was moving at a breakneck pace through the forest—in darkness. At some point weariness began to overcome both her fear of getting caught and her exhilaration at being free. She sank more and more heavily against Ulrich and finally dozed off.
Almost immediately, or so it seemed to her, Ulrich roused her by bringing the guak to a halt. She opened burning eyes to discover it was still dark—although the area was brightened considerably by a break in the trees that allowed the light of the moons and stars to reach them.
They’d paused beside a creek, she saw. Little more than a trickle of water ran through it.
The guak immediately began struggling to reach it.
Brandi felt her own throat close with need.
Ulrick slipped from the beast’s back, carrying her with him. She nearly sprawled out when he let go of her but managed to lock her knees. “We won’t be here long. Be quick.”
Brandi stared at him blankly for several moments before it dawned on her—because he dragged his dick out and took a piss—that he was talking about rushing to find whatever relief she could. Moving a little further from the stream, she relieved herself and then hurried back to the stream to drink as much water as she could trying to banish images of men and creatures standing over the stream uphill from her urinating in the water she was drinking.
It didn’t taste like urine, thankfully! It was icy cold and seemed amazingly fresh.
Thank god it was too dark to see anything that might be floating in the water!
By the time she made it back, Ulrich had stripped the ‘booties’ from the guak’s hooves.
“He will be more surefooted when we begin to climb,” Ulrich said, as if he’d read the question in her mind.
“Climb?” Brandi asked uneasily, vividly recalling their last attempt to get over the mountain.
“Until we reach the top.”
She rolled her eyes. “And then we’ll go down again?” she ventured dryly.
A slow grin spread across his lips that made Brandi’s heart go pity-patter. “No. We will follow the ridge.”
Brandi was so stunned by Ulrich’s good humor—by the fact that he’d smiled at her at all and by the effect it had had on her—that she was reduced to silence. In point of fact, complete feminine idiocy due entirely to Ulrich’s sex appeal so completely enveloped her that they were nearing the top of the mountain before she became sufficiently aware of her surroundings to realize the sun had broken over a distant ridge.
Feeling more than a little sheepish—although she didn’t think Ulrich could possibly have noticed her odd behavior—she looked around until she spied the edge of the woods below them and thought she could even discern the crevice where the small creak cut across the landscape.
How could she have lost so much time, she wondered? Had she fallen asleep?
Or was it just that not that much time had passed?
She knew there had been moons in the sky when they’d stopped to relieve themselves and drink, but then she realized with more than a touch of surprise that she didn’t actually know the movements of this world or its moons. The moon might well whip around the world many times in the course of a night. The days might be approximately the same as an Earth day—or half as much or twice as long.
She felt like she’d been on this world an eternity already, but when she fell to trying to calculate the time, she realized she couldn’t possibly have been there much more than a month.
Of course, she’d lost all track of time after Nhewa had claimed her. She’d been sure a month, at least, had passed while she’d been held prisoner, but she couldn’t even be sure about that. She was sure that she had traveled with Ulrich enough days to amount to a couple of week’s worth of time back home. So if she was right about the time she’d been in the temple—just under two months.
Of course, her life had radically changed in a matter of seconds. From the moment she was stolen from her bed it was like a ricocheting bullet. She’d been traveling in a straight line on a course she was happy to leave pretty much in the realm of ‘unknown destination’ and then been thrown off on a completely different tangent by alien interference.
That thought brought her full circle.
Ulrich had smiled at her and it had been like getting hit with a concussion bomb! It had so completely thrown her for a loop that it had suspended time in her mind.
She struggled to resist the awakening, tried hard to dismiss the blossoming awareness of feelings she hadn’t even realized were growing inside of her. Like an exotic seed had taken root and began an insidious invasion of her psyche—so quietly and cunningly that she was completely entangled before she’d even known it was a threat.
She didn’t truly feel anything for Ulrich, she told herself, beyond gratitude that he’d freed her, at least briefly, from Nhewa.
At the same time, she was struggling with the dismay that his determination to take her with him might get him killed.
They’d nearly killed him, she was sure, when they’d whipped him before.
She felt guilt about that—and about the possibility that he might be whipped again, or worse, for freeing her.
She found him physically attractive.
But what did she really know about him beyond the fact that he was strong and brave, smart, surprisingly gentle, thoughtful, and kind considering what his life had been like—and that he’d not only survived what seemed to her nearly impossible odds, but he’d bought his freedom—and hers.
Ok, so she knew a lot more about him than she’d realized.
She didn’t really know much about his past.
She didn’t understand what he’d meant when he’d said he hadn’t been born at all.
But she did know that he was amazing in so many ways that it wasn’t totally insane that she was beginning to think she was falling in love with him.
Or maybe already had.
Of course, he wasn’t human, but one couldn’t have everything!
They continued at a more or less breakneck pace throughout most of the day, stopping briefly every few hours to rest, and feed and water the beast—and themselves and then almost immediately heading out again.
Brandi tried not to spend too much time dwelling on the reason for the haste, but she was only partly successful despite the exhaustion than began to invade her to such a degree that she was hardly aware of anything else.
Toward sunset, a small cabin perched near the edge of the ridge, came into view. Made of the same stone as the mountain, it blended so well with the surroundings that Brandi didn’t, in point of fact, notice it at first.
She was unnerved when she did, wondering who lived there and if they would present a problem, then surprised when Ulrich headed directly toward the small structure. He slid out of the saddle when they reached the wide porch that ran across the front, tied the beast’s reins and then helped her down.
Curious and confused, Brandi stumbled a little on the steps that led up to the porch, partly because she was so stiff from the ride and partly because she was so busy looking around that she wasn’t minding her steps.
It was just as well she ma
naged to work some of the stiffness out of her muscles on the short walk from the beast to the porch. They’d barely cleared the doorway when Ulrich grasped her and lifted her to pin her against the wall behind her.
“Now! You were going to thank me for rescuing you from the temple,” he growled.
Brandi gaped at him, struggling with the urge to burst out laughing. “My god! That was two days ago. And I thought Earth men had one track minds!”
Chapter Ten
Briefly, he looked disconcerted. It was gone in a flash, but not fast enough to prevent Brandi from regretting the impulse.
He didn’t know her well enough to realize she was teasing—or to be certain of it, anyway.
When he covered her mouth in a bruising kiss, she absorbed the shock of his angry aggression apologetically and curled her arms around his shoulders and head, kissing him back. That one act changed the entire tenor of his kiss. He gentled his touch and gave her passion laced desire rather than passion borne as much of anger as physical need.
It sent an answering rush of desire through Brandi, creating flash fire. She was suddenly hot all over, steaming.
She hadn’t touched him before. She’d remained completely submissive.
Spawned by her desire to make amends, at first, she stroked her hands over every inch of his body that she could reach, discovering that the more she stroked him, filling her senses with him, the more excited she became, the more desperate for penetration.
It inspired him to drag his dick from his pants immediately and begin trying to pry her down over the thick rod of flesh. With burgeoning impatience, she hooked her heels under his ass and struggled to help. Despite the moisture that flooded her channel, however, all either of them seemed to achieve was to stretch the skin from her knees to her groin and stuff the lips of her sex into her channel.
They both realized they weren’t making much headway at approximately the same time.
Gripping her tightly, Ulrich turned to survey the room and finally carried her the few steps from the wall to a long padded seat that was neither bed nor couch but sufficed for their needs. Carrying her down onto it, he used the leverage of superior height and weight to wedge the head of his cock inside her and pumped his hips until he’d driven as deeply as he could go.
Alien Slavers II: Breaking Brandi Page 10
