Was he completely detached during all this? Was he sitting back and watching her gasp and moan and writhe, convulse with pleasure so intense she’d never believed such a thing possible?
Before she could work herself up into a rage of hurt and embarrassment, it dawned on her abruptly that he had been angry when he left. She had felt defensive about it. She’d felt inadequate, felt she’d failed to please her lover.
Because she had.
It wasn’t her fault, though. He had no physical form. He could enjoy it in his consciousness, or his psyche. Maybe he could even experience the things she felt and interpreted in her mind, but he had no body filled with nerve endings and nerve centers to feed those sensations directly into his mind.
That was why he kept presenting her with bodies he’d ‘borrowed’ for the occasion! It wasn’t just that he needed a physical form to impregnate her. He needed it to experience the completion of his passion as she did.
She examined that conclusion for a while, but she decided it wasn’t flawed.
Well, maybe a little flawed. She was assuming she knew his motivations, but she, damn it, didn’t have the ability to read his mind as he was so underhanded about reading hers!
It didn’t make it any easier to accept, she realized. She still felt used, abused, and completely inadequate as a woman.
It was unthinkable to use the body of another person for his own gratification. She could understand why he’d want to. She could even understand, she supposed, why he saw no harm in it, but it was wrong regardless.
Moreover, she couldn’t be a party to it, no matter how much she empathized with his plight. Ethics aside, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of fucking a complete stranger, one who might or might not be aware of the fact that his body was being used and who might or might not be agreeable to it.
Most of her early sexual experiences had been of that nature, what young people these days called hook-ups. She still wasn’t certain of what it was she’d been searching so desperately for—probably the love she’d never gotten, the acceptance she’d never felt—but it had always left her feeling worse about herself than she’d felt before. She was just fortunate she hadn’t paid the ultimate price for promiscuity and the stupidity of youth.
She braked at that thought, realizing she had in a very real sense, though not with her own life. Of course that hadn’t been her decision, not completely her decision anyway. She’d been pulled into the ‘game’ by her need to be accepted. She didn’t think any of the boys had deliberately hurt her. She’d never thought malice inspired it, but she’d lost all desire to participate when she’d discovered it hurt, and they had refused to stop.
Guilt at her part in it had kept her quiet more even than their fearful threats—which had scared her but wouldn’t have scared her enough to keep quiet about it if she hadn’t felt so guilty herself. And of course there’d been no hiding her injuries for very long and the infection had caused the scarring that had ended any possibility of ever having a family of her own before she’d even reached puberty. That was a pretty high price to pay for stupidity.
She surged up from the couch where she’d been sitting so long, as if by leaving the living room and seeking the sanctuary of her bedroom she could leave the memories behind, carefully stuff them back down into the dark recesses of her mind. She hadn’t thought about any of that for years and years. It was a sign of just how weakened her defenses were from everything that had happened since she’d fallen ‘down the rabbit hole’.
She couldn’t allow it! She was not going to allow it! The past belonged in the past and she meant to keep it there where it had no power to wound, no power to influence the life she had now. She’d put all that behind her when she’d made the decision that she was going to be somebody, that she was going to do something of importance with her life, something significant.
Maybe to most people what she did really didn’t make that much difference, wasn’t of any significance, but she knew that understanding the past was important to the future.
Anka’s comment about ‘yesterday’s trash’ piqued at her as she readied herself for bed. She would’ve thought he of all people would be able to appreciate her work, but it seemed nobody really did except the other people in related fields.
And anyway, he wasn’t human, was he? How could he be expected to understand that learning was what set humans apart from the other animals they shared the world with? Discovering knowledge that had been lost was just as important as discovering the previously undiscovered. Every little tidbit of information that was added carried the potential of changing the future for the better.
She hadn’t thought when she settled in her bed at last that she would be able to sleep for the emotional turmoil, but she discovered she was wrong. She’d worn herself out emotionally and Anka had drained her of the tension that had coiled inside of her before.
She was still debating with herself as she drifted off, though, as to how she would and should handle the situation when and if Anka appeared again.
Chapter Eight
Despite every attempt to focus completely on her job the following day, Gaby found her self-discipline left a lot to be desired. She managed to focus maybe half the time, but she emerged far too often to ‘feel’ about her for some indication that Anka was nearby, watching her.
He didn’t appear. She told herself she was glad. She thought she was for the first few days, but by the time a week had passed with no sign of him she was forced to reassess the lie she’d told herself. She wasn’t glad. She wasn’t unnerved because she still expected him to pop in on her when she least expected it.
She felt abandoned.
Disgusted with herself, she took herself to task. She hadn’t been abandoned, she told herself. He’d done her a favor and left. Her life could return to normal. In a little while, she’d hardly even remember the interlude. Maybe she’d even realize that the whole thing had been in her mind and it had never really happened at all.
With grim determination, she persevered in her determined happiness that Anka had, apparently, decided to take her at her word and look for a more likely candidate to bear his off-spring.
More power to him, she told herself at least ten times a day. She doubted it would work, whatever he seemed to think. Obviously, he could use people as his little hand puppets, but he certainly wasn’t a god and that meant he couldn’t do a thing about DNA. If he wanted to think he could take a human man and use his body to fuck a human woman and produce something that was his, he had a right to his delusions, she supposed, but she wasn’t buying it.
At least with some other candidate, he could delude himself. He would have found out soon enough that it wasn’t going to do him any good at all to fuck her. He could bring in a half dozen likely studs, and this filly wasn’t going to balloon out with fruitfulness.
Anka had spent way too much time with ‘primitive’ minds. She was inclined to think they had convinced him he was a god rather than the other way around. It actually seemed likely the more she thought about it. Obviously, he had abilities that human beings didn’t—just like they had abilities he didn’t have. To primitive minds, those abilities would naturally have seemed like magic, would have seemed miraculous, even though they really weren’t.
Those suppositions seemed to be borne up by the data she eventually collected from the remains.
Anka, or at least the body he’d once occupied, had been poisoned. The toxicology tests she ran were inconclusive. There was too much deterioration of the tissue and whatever the natives had used to preserve the body had further compromised the tests available to her, but there was no disputing the fact that his body had simply shut down. Every organ had just stopped.
There was the possibility that he’d contracted some disease, but there really didn’t seem to be damage from disease, which left only two conclusions and only one of those conclusions made any sense to her.
Either Anka had deliberately sabotaged the body he’d inhabite
d and shut it down, somehow, himself. Or he’d been poisoned and it had killed the body so fast and damaged it so thoroughly that he hadn’t been able to stop it from shutting down.
She wasn’t entirely prepared for how her findings affected her. As difficult as she’d found it to perform any of the tests on the remains, as hard a time as she’d had trying to separate her personal feelings from her professional objectivity in this particular case, she thought she’d done tolerably well.
The discovery that he’d been murdered demolished the wall she’d so carefully erected, though. The sense of loss and anger was so profound it took all she could do to even pretend for appearances that she found it ‘interesting’ instead of devastating, that she was pleased about her discoveries, not crushed.
After all he’d done for them, she thought angrily, the ungrateful bastards had stabbed him in the back! They hadn’t even had the balls to confront him over whatever it was that he’d done, or they’d thought he had done! The sneaky, underhanded, backstabbing cowards!
It occurred to her that maybe he had done something horrendous, but she dismissed it as quickly as the thought came to mind. He had his faults, but he wasn’t mean spirited. He wasn’t callous. Even though he was certainly guilty of a superiority complex, and he did take shameful advantage of his ability to control people and manipulate them like puppets, he didn’t actually harm them.
He hadn’t that she’d seen, anyway, and she felt like she’d seen the ‘real’ him. She felt like she would have sensed ‘evil’ in him.
She’d thoroughly pissed him off several times and he hadn’t lost his temper and done anything ‘wrath of god’ like to her!
Of course, there were all sorts of awful things attributed to the gods of mythology, but then she knew people! They were always looking for someone to blame for their own shortcomings. Maybe the old gods had been alien beings like him. Maybe they’d done some of the terrible things blamed on them, and maybe not. Whether they had or not, she didn’t believe for a moment that Anka had a vicious bone in his body, metaphorically speaking, of course.
He was sweet, even if he was annoying as hell.
He’d been sweet to her, anyway, and a generous lover. She wasn’t going to regret that or forget it. Those were memories worth holding on to, even if they were bittersweet.
She didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry when the South American authorities exerted their right to the artifacts, packed them up, and returned home with them to conduct their own studies, eventually to settle them in their own museum. She was both, she supposed. As possessive as she felt about the body, she knew she didn’t have a right to it. He wasn’t hers even if she did feel like he was.
It was cathartic she finally decided. She needed the closure. Anka was gone and now, finally, the last physical remains were gone, too. She could lay everything to rest and move on with her life.
Pathetic and pointless as it was.
Three weeks had passed, the longest, most miserable three weeks of her entire life, when there was a knock on her door one evening just as she climbed out of her shower. Her heart leapt instantly and crashed just as fast.
It wouldn’t be Anka, she realized belatedly. He wouldn’t have knocked.
Feeling abruptly annoyed when the imperious knock sounded again, Gaby grabbed her robe and shrugged into it, tying it at her waist as she reluctantly went to answer the summons at her door.
The man standing at her door was a complete stranger, a handsome stranger, she noted in a detached sort of way, but she’d never seen him before. He looked Germanic, she decided. Easily six foot, broad shouldered, heavily muscled—she supposed he would have been most any woman’s dream—except hers. His eyes were a pale gray-blue, not a vivid almost emerald green. His blond hair was cropped close to his head. It wasn’t halfway down his back and black as sin. His skin was tanned, but he wasn’t swarthy.
His smile was nice.
“Hello, Moonflower,” he said huskily, his deep voice laced with an accent she couldn’t quite put her finger on—guttural, though, not musical as Anka’s voice was.
In spite of that, it seemed everything inside of her budded with warmth, surged toward him in glad welcome. “Anka?” she asked, doubt threading her voice.
He swept her up into his arms and somehow they were inside, bumping the door closed behind them as he carried her against it. His mouth was heated, feverish, possessive, demanding as it closed over hers. Lava poured through her veins, pooled in her belly. Turmoil twisted inside of her, though, in spite of the fire that erupted at his touch, the dizziness of desire that began to bake her brain. There was a subtle but distinct difference in the feel of his mouth and tongue on hers, a less subtle more pronounced difference in his taste and scent. He was big and strong and muscular, and yet his body felt alien to her, not dearly familiar.
Resolutely, she closed her mind to the doubts. It was Anka. She knew it with every fiber of her being. She wasn’t going to think about anything else.
He lifted her against the door, supporting her with his knee and his lower body as he untied the robe and shoved it from her shoulders. Burying his face against the side of her neck, he breathed deeply. “You smell just as I’d imagined,” he murmured huskily, “except far better, Moonflower, sweeter than any nectar of any flower in the realm of man.”
He sought her lips again after no more than a moment’s exploration, traced the curves of her body with his hands as she lifted her arms to his shoulders to help support herself and keep her balance. She heard the slide of a zipper, the click of a snap being flicked open. Impatience swarmed over and through her like the sting of ants as he cupped her buttocks, guided her legs around his waist.
She gasped, tearing her lips from his and uttering a groan of pleasure as she felt the probe of his cock, felt the head sink into her opening. He arched against her once he’d breached her, his thrust aided by the dampness of want that had gathered along her passage. Tightening her arms around him, she bit down lightly on his shoulder as he sank deeply inside of her, filling her with a delicious, nearly unbearable fullness.
He groaned as her body quaked around him, fisted tightly as if to hold him captive. Shifting her for better leverage, he launched a furious, pounding rhythm that spoke of desperate need and evoked an echo of it within her. Heaving together, moaning and shuddering, they rode the tidal wave of sensation upward together, found bliss together within moments. Breathless and weak in the aftermath, Gaby clung to him with an effort, dazed, her mind drifting with the surging, slowly dissipating currents of ecstasy.
He hoisted her against his chest when he’d finally caught his breath. Turning, he carried her into her bedroom still wrapped around him like a limpet and fell across the bed with her. Gathering himself with an effort, he rolled away from her and tried to shuck his clothes and shoes without leaving the bed. Gaby chuckled affectionately and helped him struggle out of the tangle of clothes. She’d lost her robe somewhere between the front door and the bedroom.
It saved her the trouble of discarding it.
He pulled her against his length the moment he’d removed the last of his clothes and pitched them. “I will have to make that up to you,” he murmured with lazy amusement.
“What?” Gaby murmured, inspecting his chest with her lips.
“The rough tumble,” he responded with a chuckle, stroking his hands over her hair and back appreciatively. “I love fucking you, woman! It felt good plowing my flesh into you, spilling my seed at your womb! I had all but forgotten how good a body can feel, the pleasure it is capable of.”
The comment caused her a pang—several actually. It had been good, she reminded herself, and nothing that rough and animalistic could be termed ‘love-making’. There was no sense in feeling hurt over his choice of words, and none in being distressed that it wasn’t ‘really’ him, or his seed.
“I love fucking you, too,” she responded, resolutely curling her lips into a smile as she lifted her head to look at him, bracing
herself to look at the face that wasn’t his face.
He chuckled, rolling with her until she was beneath him. “This body pleases you,” he said with satisfaction. “I should have realized before that you would find a fair one such as yourself more to your taste.”
Gaby felt her smile slip a notch. She didn’t want to feel unappreciative and she certainly didn’t want to show it. He was happy. He’d felt the things denied him before. It was selfish and stupid to wish for something she couldn’t have and deny him the pleasure he had every right to want for himself. “I liked the way you looked before,” she said, “but this is very nice, too.”
He almost seemed to shrug. “That one would cost me more to utilize than I wish to expend. I do not know that I could revitalize it if I tried. I would almost certainly be too weak to get my seed upon you, perhaps too weak even to sustain myself. This works well enough. I am satisfied with the performance of this body.”
Too weak to sustain himself, Gaby thought, feeling a shaft of fear spear through her? He had existed hundreds of years--thousands! It was almost inconceivable that he wasn’t immortal. Even though she knew he wasn’t really a god, she realized she had accepted that he was close.
It boggled her mind that he could speak so offhand about ceasing to exist, but then she supposed it wasn’t something he need fear like humanity. He had had far more time to grow used to non-existence than mortals did.
Another thought occurred to her on the heels of that.
Did he sense his end? Was that the driving force behind his need to procreate?
She found that it was too painful even to consider.
Resolutely closing her mind to it, firmly tamping the certainty that she would disappoint him if he thought to breed a child on her, she focused on trying to give him what she could—pleasure. At least she could give him that, she told herself, if she couldn’t give him anything else.
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