Lori swallowed with an effort. The sound was deafening in her ears, distracting, vaguely embarrassing.
She found herself at war with the need of necessity, the want of desire, and fear of the unknown.
Not that she was a virgin or even close.
But she’d certainly never been with a man like this man.
It wasn’t one part that won out. It was all of it together.
She couldn’t find the courage to say, yes, I want this. Or the will to break the spell he’d woven over her by making it sound like a verbal transaction. Instead, she leaned closer to him, lifted her hands, and settled her palms against his chest, testing the surprisingly smooth and silky skin that covered his equally surprisingly hard pecs.
Somehow, she’d thought the tattoos would add a roughness to his skin or that she would find the coarseness of hair even though she hadn’t noticed he had any hair on his body at all.
She captured his scent as she leaned closer and the errant thought flickered through her mind that he was alien and she should have detected something in his scent to put her off, at least. Instead, it prompted images of the rescue from the food bin and the choking, the food he’d offered her since they’d been thrown together and the nights he’d protected her from the cold with the warmth of his body.
It comforted her, made her feel as if her decision wasn’t solely based on necessity and the will to survive—as if she wasn’t simply asking for or handing out a mercy fuck.
Her body responded to his nearness, his touch, his scent with the longing of a lover, warming, her channel growing moist and slick in welcome.
There was a tense moment of doubt when he grasped her hair and tugged her head back, but he banished it the moment he covered her mouth with his own, breeching the barrier of her lips and laying conquest to the ultra sensitive inner surfaces. He filled her at once with his intoxicating essence, far more potent than the light ‘taste’ she’d captured before with the sense of touch and smell.
Like a living thing, it reached right down inside of her, pouring fire through her blood vessels and nerve endings.
Disappointingly, he broke the kiss almost at once, steadied her and then whipped the gown off of her and tossed it aside.
Her skin instantly pebbled all over when kissed by the chill air in counter to the heat he’d generated inside her. He soothed the eruption and spread more warmth by running his shaking hands over her.
By the time he’d thoroughly examined her, she was more than ready to take it to the next level and impatient with him for the measured pace he kept—so completely at odds with the barely contained eagerness in the tremors that wracked him.
She decided to give him a hint in the right direction by slipping forward on his lap to capture his turgid flesh within her cleft.
His reaction was all she could’ve hoped for.
He instantly stopped stroking her and grasped her hips, bearing down on her and arching against her at the same time until she began to wonder if he thought she’d actually mounted him.
Either he wasn’t confused at all and tired of that stimulation fairly quickly, or he figured it out very quickly. He lifted her up and speared into the mouth of her sex with unerring, and pretty amazing, accuracy.
They deadlocked there for several unnerving moments—unnerving for her since she was so wet by that time she’d expected him to basically fall in.
Because she’d forgotten what a behemoth he had attached to his belly.
Before she had time to fully recall her first experience with him in the ‘lab’ and panic, he plowed past her resistant flesh, burrowing deeply enough she began to worry he was going to shove her womb into her chest cavity.
He paused, panting for breath, shuddering, holding her so tightly she felt bones crack, then he slipped his hands up to capture her face and kissed her deeply, generating so much heat she felt her kegels clap with excitement.
He tore his mouth from hers and looked at her wide eyed for a split second before uttering a deep-chested groan and launching into a sequence of short, deep strokes that set off her climax within moments. She gasped as the force of it hit her, and then uttered a groan of rapture as it peaked.
The sound, or the clutching of the muscles along her channel, seemed to set his crisis in motion. He lost all semblance of rhythm, lunged deeply in a succession of jolts and then went still when his body quit convulsing in climax—not even breathing for several moments.
He released his frantic grip on her after a handful of seconds and fell back limply against the hard platform, leaving Lori wondering if she should dismount or wait for round two.
Because her ex had always wanted to go two or three rounds.
Not that she needed it.
She’d just had the best climax in her life!
Well, she’d only ever actually climaxed when she was masturbating and she wasn’t particularly good at pleasing herself so maybe she hadn’t actually climaxed before?
Hard to say, but the other experiences certainly paled by comparison.
As she cooled from his distance, though, she began to feel non-essential—dismissed.
It was worse, somehow, more embarrassing that she was so full of semen that it started to drip as soon as she dismounted and wove a damned trail down her leg when she went to retrieve the gown he’d tossed and put it on.
She didn’t even debate about whether to return to the sleeping platform or not—which she regretted fairly quickly. She crouched on the floor and hugged herself tightly, struggling to sort through her emotions, telling herself she was being ridiculous.
He didn’t matter to her.
Why be upset if he behaved as if he felt the same?
Because she’d convinced herself somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind that he cared and that was why he’d treated her with respect and consideration.
She needed to matter to him.
She wasn’t going to survive on her own.
Especially not if she was going to behave like the idiot, Debi—like a spoiled, petulant child.
She supposed, though, that it was probably too late to behave as if she was as indifferent as he was about the screwing.
She fell asleep debating whether to join him on the platform or not and was woken by the summons to the ‘exercise’ yard.
Chapter Seven
Jarek tried very hard not to think.
That should have been fairly easy, he thought with disgust, when he had not really been thinking before. He should have been able to simply lie back and relish the fading echoes of pleasure and the sense of release.
He should not be aware of anything else.
He should not feel a deepening sense of ‘wrong’.
But he did.
And his mind would not allow him any peace.
It began to pick, to turn things over to examine them as they had not been when they should have been, when he could have made a better decision.
There was nothing simple or uncomplicated about what he had done—in any sense of the word.
He could not afford a lover of any description and uphold his vow to make certain he did not give the bastards another slave—his off-spring—because he knew, suspected, that they had somehow manipulated his body so that he was entering his spawning time.
It was worse, not better, that he had taken Lo-ri.
Because he knew nothing about her or her people.
Other than the indisputable truth that she was not a warrior in the sense that their women were warriors and she would not be able to protect their off-spring if he managed to spawn on her.
He should not have yielded to his desire for her.
This was going to create more problems, not less.
If he succeeded she would be pregnant and more vulnerable even than she was now and there would be nothing he could do to protect her and the unborn.
* * * *
Lori barely acknowledged her friends as she dashed past them and made for the horrible shower. Without
taking the time to brace herself, she stepped under the spout and allowed the deluge of tepid water to flood over her, brushing her hands over herself vigorously in an effort to remove all evidence of recent activities.
The gown she didn’t have to concern herself about.
It wasn’t made of paper as she’d first thought. It was made with something similar to plastic and wouldn’t absorb the water so it wouldn’t remain damp and uncomfortable.
And it was streaked with bodily fluids, too, so it needed the water as much as she did.
The deluge effectively removed the scents if it failed to get rid her of all of the fluids or at least the sticky feel of them, effectively replacing Jarek’s scent on her skin with the disgusting smell of rotten eggs.
The smell was so strong, in point of fact, that it nearly took her breath.
She left the facilities almost at a run, as she’d entered, hoping to outrun the stench of the sulfur this time.
May and Jill waved their hands in front of their faces when she joined them.
“God! It’s worse today!” May commented.
“The absolute worst it’s been since we got here,” Jill agreed.
Lori plopped down between May and Jill. “It’ll dissipate pretty quickly,” she said nasally, talking through her nose since she was trying to hold her breath.
The comments caught her attention since she was trying to divert her mind away from Jarek anyway and she turned them over, curiously at first—puzzled, really. “You know … that’s weird,” she said finally, still frowning as she turned it over in her mind. “Why would the smell be stronger today?”
May shrugged. “Like any of us would know.”
Lori was about to say more when another thought abruptly occurred to her. “Do you think they listen to us, too?”
Jill’s brows lifted. She frowned thoughtfully. “Well, they would certainly have the capability, I would think,” she responded finally. “I suppose the question is would they think it worth their time?”
Elly joined them, dripping water and holding her nostrils pinched between a thumb and forefinger. “I can’t image them seeing us as any sort of threat. What’s the discussion?”
“The sulfur in the water,” Jill replied.
“Oh! That shit stinks. God! You’d think it would have subsided in this length of time. It seems stronger.”
Lori, Jill, and May stared at her and then shared a look as their minds synced up.
“Do you think …?” May asked a little breathlessly.
“But … what difference would it make to us?” Jill asked pointedly.
“What?” Elly demanded.
Lori shook her head. “I don’t know, but I think it could.”
“What?” Elly demanded.
Lori gave her a look and finally leaned closer. “Fresh water,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Elly gaped at her for several moments before her eyes rounded. “But ….”
“Yeah, but,” May said.
* * * *
Lori was so excited about her ‘discovery’ that she’d forgotten all about her discomfort with Jarek by the time she got back to the cell they shared.
It was unfortunate that he hadn’t because he pissed her off so thoroughly when he gave her the cold shoulder, acting like he was in the damned cell alone now that he’d fucked her, that she couldn’t bring herself to even try to speak to him.
It was just as well, she told herself, settling in the corner of the cell to consider what she thought she’d learned.
As excited as she was about what she thought she’d figured out, she didn’t actually know a damned thing.
She was guessing and she didn’t even know if it was a good guess or not—as in close to the truth.
Then, too, what could he do about it, saying she was right—meaning what was the point in sharing it with him and possibly giving away something with potential? What could any of them actually do with the information?
She shook that off. It could be something to work with and that was hope—the first taste of it that she’d had since she was captured—and hope beat the hell out of hopeless.
She just wished she’d paid more attention to chemistry when she was in school.
It seemed completely logical to conclude that there wouldn’t be more gas in the water as time went on, though. Surely it would be a specific, measurable amount? Because it was something in the water not part of the water, not a chemical change.
But she supposed that it could be like on the bottom of the water, heavier, and then when the water got low it would escape? And that might make it smell stronger because it wasn’t diluted by the water?
The water pressure seemed the same.
Actually, she realized with a touch of excitement, a little harder than it was and that could also point to a recent refill.
She needed something to mark with, she decided. There was going to be no way to figure this thing out without more information and, sadly, that seemed to point to time spent ‘observing’.
It was a short search. There wasn’t a damned thing in the cell—besides her and the asshole that had decided to pretend she was invisible.
She knew the bastard had gotten off! He needn’t act like he’d put out and gotten cheated out of his cookie!
Shaking the thought, she moved to the wall again and tried marking it with her finger nail. Five minutes of rubbing was enough to convince her she wasn’t making any marks there. She sat down and tried the floor and finally crawled over to the sleeping platform and tried that surface.
Success!
She sat back when she’d made the mark, staring at it, thinking, but she was certain today the smell had been the strongest. As much as she hated the ‘shower’ she always used it when she got the chance, fearful that it was a ‘luxury’ that she might lose access to at any time.
There’d been at least five sleep periods since that first, nasty, encounter and the stench had been pretty damned noticeable then.
She didn’t recall that she’d noticed it when the water had been put into a trough for all of them to drink, but then again the circumstances had been so horrific she wasn’t sure she would’ve noticed if it had been a septic tank. She’d been stomped and kicked and shoved so many times by the time she reached the water that she was punch drunk.
And, saying there was no odor, she couldn’t just accept that there wasn’t an odor of sulfur because it was from a different water source, but it was possible.
Of course, it was also possible that the sulfur had evaporated from the water because it was left out.
They’d had city water where she’d grown up and she hadn’t had to deal with sulfur water, but she’d had a friend who did and she knew the sulfur dissipated when the water was boiled or even just left out for a period of time. In fact, she’d seen the water works in town and, as far as she could see, they just percolated the water to get rid of the sulfur smell.
Trapped in a tank on the ship, the smell would almost certainly be trapped, too, but it wasn’t exactly trapped. It was being circulated through the sanitation system and it took an infusion of air and pumps to do that so it seemed like that must account for the levels being higher when it was first filled and lower after it had been circulated.
Of course, she supposed it could be a closed system and the water was treated and recycled, but it was definitely sulfur.
Not methane.
She was just going to have to pay close attention and mark down each day until she could tell how long between the peak of the stench and the lowest point.
And then maybe that would tell her whether the ship was on a planet and getting a constant flow of fresh water or in space, but stopping to replenish.
She discovered Jarek was leaning over the edge of the platform staring at her when she reached that conclusion.
“What do?”
She blinked at him, searching her mind for an answer. “Counting,” she finally said evasively.
H
e frowned. “Count why?”
She studied him. “Days in captivity,” she said tightly.
Something flickered in his eyes that told her he knew she was up to something, but instead of trying to pry more information out of her he extended his hand with a piece of the bread.
Surprised that it had been delivered and she’d been too focused to even notice, she took it. Instead of immediately eating, though, she held the bread in the dim light to study it.
It wasn’t particularly good.
Or really nasty.
She thought she would have noticed if there’d been anything like mold.
So it was either fresh or they had something that worked way better than humans did to preserve bread.
As with the water, it suggested the possibility that the ship had actually landed somewhere and was bringing in new supplies as needed to feed their captives.
She tried not to get too excited about it, but the fact was that as long as they were in space there was absolutely no hope of escaping. If they were on a planet, the chances might be slim to none, but there was still a sliver of a chance because there was a place to go.
Of course, the planet might be completely uninhabitable. It might mean sure death to escape, but it seemed to her that that was what she was facing if she didn’t.
Or worse.
Because, if the bastards succeeded in breeding her, she was going to have a baby to worry about and she’d either have to risk its life and hers to leave, or stay.
It was actually terrifying to think about trying to escape, but she was determined not to dwell on that. If she did, she’d be too scared to try to help herself and she knew she was facing disaster if she didn’t.
Because the cavalry wasn’t coming and she wasn’t part of the alien catch and release program anymore.
She’d only managed to collect data for roughly another week, though, when the grays came for her again.
Alien Enslaved IV: Spoils of War Page 6
