Ok, so they couldn’t watch her from inside the house … not that he’d had any intention of doing that to start with! He wasn’t a damned rooky! It was almost as damned insulting that Simon had suggested he didn’t have any more sense than that as his snide personal remarks!
He supposed after a while that what was really bugging him was that he had an uneasy feeling Simon might be right. He hadn’t thought too much about how scared she was that first night. He’d figured it was them that had scared her and a trip down to Atlanta for an air-breather without a tank strapped to their back was bound to be a scary proposition on top of the fright they’d already given her. The sub had scared her too, though, enough she’d bitten his head off when he tried to distract her. That didn’t actually augur well for a potential Atlantean—the fact that everything about being in the sea unnerved the hell out of her.
He’d dismissed it, figuring she wouldn’t have any reason to be afraid once she had the change, but then Simon had just had to bring up that shit about her hating mutants again. He didn’t believe she did. He hadn’t seen anything about the way she’d looked at them, spoke to them, or behaved around them to suggest such a thing. She’d said she didn’t have a problem with mutants, but was he right? Or was Simon right?
He was inclined to go with his gut. She hadn’t just let him kiss her. She’d responded, god damn it! Yeah, she’d lit him on fire, but he was damned if he believed he was the only one feeling that way.
So Simon was right about her not being on the market and he was a dumbass because he hadn’t considered that when he’d decided she would do nicely for him.
Granted, it would’ve been a different ballgame if she had been on the mart, maybe an entirely different game. Women who allowed their families to badger them or beg them into selling themselves on the bride market had a tendency to go for the highest bidder, but that wasn’t always the case, especially when a man had an opportunity to do a little wooing beforehand. That didn’t mean he, or one of them, couldn’t convince her, though, and all it would take was one. They had a deal. Ian and Joshua had already agreed they were in. He had an idea that Simon wasn’t going to hold out if she capitulated. He was just leery because that bitch Roxanne had burned him so badly.
Anna wasn’t like that, though. She wasn’t glamour, glitz, and fluff. She was a real woman—brains, beauty, a body to kill for, and sweet as candy, with just enough fire to keep a man on his toes.
Of course, Simon had been the recipient of most of that fire and it had been damned uncomfortable when he’d gotten a taste of it, but he figured, what the hell?
There was bound to be a little vinegar to go with the honey and if they’d seen her worst, and he figured they had, then he could deal with it.
It pissed him off big time that he thought he had it all figured out and that it was all but a done deal and Simon had thrown a wrench into it by pointing out that she might not be interested!
Joshua brought him out of his dark thoughts by punching him on the shoulder.
“What?” he growled.
“Are we going to do this or what?” Joshua demanded irritably.
Considering the direction of his thoughts, it wasn’t a great leap from there to where he wanted to be—in Anna’s bed—and he stared at her house speculatively through the front porthole. “We should wait until after dark,” he said finally. “He could have somebody watching her house and we’ve already shown ourselves one time today.”
“In that case, I guess I should take it down a little.”
“Yeah, just not so much that we don’t have a view of the house.”
Joshua headed to the food lockers when he’d settled the sub low in the water. “I stocked up since we were going to do a stakeout. You want something?”
“A beer would be nice.”
Joshua chuckled and tossed him a bottle of water. “Sandwich?”
“Sure … whatever. If you made them they all taste the same anyway.”
Joshua shot a bird at him and grabbed two sandwiches. “What did Simon say that pissed you off so much, anyway?”
Caleb grunted, unwrapping his sandwich to examine it. “Reminded me she wasn’t on the market,” he muttered, “among other things.”
“Shit!” Joshua said, nearly dropping his sandwich. “I hadn’t even thought about it! Damn! I guess we’re fucked … or not to be, as the case may be.”
“You’re taking it damned lightly!” Caleb snapped.
“Do I look like I’m taking it lightly?” Joshua demanded tightly. “What the hell am I supposed to say?”
Caleb shook his head.
Joshua frowned. “I guess that’s what comes of never seeing a woman that isn’t attached already or on the market. You get to thinking there’s only two kinds—taken and available.”
Caleb grunted. “She isn’t taken,” he said pointedly.
“No, but she didn’t volunteer to take any mutants on either.”
“Don’t you start that shit, too!”
“Ah … Simon reminded you that she didn’t seem too keen on mutants, huh?”
“Did she seem to you like she was … repulsed? Or she hated mutants?”
Joshua shrugged. “She seemed pretty fascinated with Simon’s ass … or maybe his back, but I’m thinking ass. I suppose she might’ve been staring at the fins, though. I didn’t see anything on her face that looked like revulsion, but I have to tell you I’ve got my own doubts she’ll go for it. I don’t think she hates mutants—not like her father does.
She just isn’t that kind of person, to my thinking, and I think she was all right with us once she discovered we weren’t going to hurt her, but that doesn’t mean she likes any of us. Or that she might feel more than like. If she’d put herself on the market, we’d at least know that she was willing to settle with mutants. As it is, all we do know for certain is that she doesn’t approve of the practice and it seems to me that that means she won’t be easy to convince to make the change.”
“That doesn’t mean she can’t be convinced,” Caleb said doggedly.
“That’s going to be hard to do from out here,” Joshua retorted wryly.
“That’s why I don’t plan on staying out here.”
Joshua stared at him. “Man you’ve got it bad! You’re going to risk suspension or worse?”
“I could use a little vacation time … maybe I’ll spend it with Anna.”
Joshua thought it over a moment and grinned. “I haven’t had a vacation in a while if it comes to that.”
Chapter Six
Anna began to feel the beginnings of deep depression as soon as the glow from Caleb’s kiss began to wear off. Shaking herself, she headed to her garden to check on her plants since she hadn’t been able to in several days. To her relief, the automatic drip feed hadn’t let her down. The plants were still hardy and had burgeoned with a bumper crop of the nutritious but horribly nasty produce.
Heading back into her kitchen, she grabbed a large bowl and went back into the garden to pick what seemed to be ripe. When she’d washed them, she remembered she’d been looking for a recipe that might make the food more palatable before she’d been whisked off to the magical land of mermen. Deciding there was no sense in completely giving up on the still unnamed vegetable she’d invented before she’d at least tried cooking it every way she could think of, she settled to looking for recipes again.
She didn’t actually have a lot of them in her book, though, that she thought were worth a try and when she saw she’d already tried most of the promising ones, she went to her media center and connected with the net to look up others.
She started with the fish, since Paul had pointed out that it had a faintly fishy taste—which it did—which led her to Atlantis since the territorial fish farms were now the biggest supplier of the fish distributed in the U.S. She hesitated. After a few moments indecision, instead of pursuing the recipes that had brought her to res
earch the net to start with, she veered off to see what sort of information was available. It wasn’t until the light came on in the living area that she realized she’d been sitting in front of her media center for hours.
The board of tourism and colonization had offered far more information than anything else she’d found, although she suspected, like most places, their main objective was to make the spot as enticing as possible. It had pretty much glossed over the customs she’d found so unsettling beyond comparing it to a nudist colony.
It was certainly that, she thought as she headed to the kitchen and began chopping up some of the ‘franken-veggies’! Not that it didn’t make perfect sense! As disturbing as she’d found it, she could see the reasoning behind it. It was a matter of practicality.
She supposed that was one of the main reasons why people tended to dismiss the territory as a wild, uncivilized, decadent place—because they didn’t have enough sense, or just didn’t care, that the custom had evolved out of purely practical considerations.
The marriage practices were another matter! After reading all about it, she was obliged to admit that that, too, had clearly evolved from necessity, and she still found it shocking—intriguing, but scandalous!
It just supported her case, though! If times weren’t so hard people wouldn’t feel compelled to help to support their families by placing themselves on the Atlantis marriage market for sale! It was sad, really, for everyone concerned. Sad to think the colonists were so desperate for families, for women, that they paid a fortune for them and sad to think the women’s families were so financially crippled that they had to offer up their daughters just to survive!
Her genetically engineered food would go a long way toward solving some of the worst problems, she knew … if she could ever get it right. The recipe she finally decided on was a complete disaster, though!
Shuddering after her first bite, she set her fork down and studied the casserole speculatively, wondering if the vegetable was that salty or if she’d just added too much salt. She really hadn’t noticed that the vegetable tasted salty when she’d tried it before, though.
Of course, she’d barely stuck her tongue to it.
Taking another out of the cooling unit, she sliced a piece off and popped it into her mouth. Almost the instant she sucked on it, her mouth filled with a salty, fishy taste and she dashed to the trash and spat it out.
Maybe she could soak it before she cooked it and remove some of the salt? She really hated to just chuck the lot and start over from scratch! It had so much potential! It thrived in seawater contaminated soil. The plants were hardy and prolific producers.
The meat was nutritious. It had everything but an appealing taste.
Deciding to mull over it a while, she raked out the casserole she’d cooked, cleaned the kitchen, and found something more edible to nibble on, heading back to her media center. Instead of looking up more possibilities for her veggies, though, she went back to researching Atlantis and eventually found an article written by a man who claimed to have traveled extensively through the territory and lived among the natives, whom he pointed out didn’t like to be called mutants by outsiders since they knew very well that land dwellers considered it a derogatory term. They might, and frequently did, refer to themselves as mutants, but outsiders shouldn’t unless they just wanted to piss them off—which he didn’t recommend since they tended to be twice as strong as a ‘normal’ human being and were accustomed to settling disputes physically if the mood struck them.
That was unsettling, but at least it explained why they always gave her evil looks when she used the word! Of course, it would’ve been more helpful to know this sort of thing before rather than after an encounter!
The territories, according to the author, were vastly more civilized now than they had been even a decade earlier, but it was still a bit more like the ‘wild west’ of the late 1800’s than ‘air-breathers’ were accustomed to—which was a derogatory term they used for land dwellers.
Anna gaped at that, recalling all too well that Simon was in the habit of referring to her as an ‘air breather’. That ass! Of all the damned nerve to insult her and everybody else and then call her a bigot! Of course she hadn’t actually felt insulted because she hadn’t realized that was what he’d intended, but that was beside the point! No wonder he’d been so nasty to her! He just disliked land dwellers in general and went around with a damned chip on his shoulder! How unfair was that?
The anger didn’t last. It flared and died, leaving her tired and blue. She didn’t know why she’d spent most of her day trying to find out what she could about Atlantis.
It wasn’t as if it mattered. She was never going to go there again. From what she could see they disliked ‘air-breathers’ as heartily as land dwellers despised mutants. And she was her father’s daughter, as Simon had pointed out so nastily. They figured they had even more reason to dislike her.
Simon certainly did. She didn’t know why she cared about his opinion anyway!
If she’d had any damned sense she would’ve focused on trying to find another sponsor and someplace to live. She couldn’t just stay where she was and bury her head in the sand. She couldn’t pretend her father wasn’t a murderer or that working for him didn’t taint her and everything she did.
She didn’t understand why Simon couldn’t see that what her father had done went against everything she believed in and everything she was working for. She wanted to save people! She wanted to make their lives better!
Trying to push it from her mind, she checked her doors and windows to make sure everything was locked up and went to prepare herself for bed. She was exhausted.
If she hadn’t done anything more useful with her day anyway than reading about Atlantis, she thought glumly, she would’ve been better off trying to catch up on her sleep.
Settling at last, she stretched the kinks from her muscles and closed her eyes, beginning her sleep chant. She learned long ago that her mind was too often too active, no matter how tired she got, to allow her to sleep without help. The sleep chant helped, gave her something boring and repetitive to focus on until she could drop off.
Eventually, it worked and she dozed off. She woke to sheer terror as something heavy settled on top of her, pressing the breath from her lungs. A hand was clamped over her mouth. A mouth brushed her ear and then his heated breath on a whisper of sound.
“It’s Caleb.”
The chaos her mind had erupted into prevented instant recognition but even as he eased his hand from her mouth her heart stopped hammering with fear and took up a happier cadence. “What …?”
He clamped his hand over her mouth again. “We’re sweeping your house for bugs. Don’t talk.”
Bugs? She didn’t have bugs, damn it! Ok, so a few garden bugs, but why in the hell would they be sweeping up her bugs? And who was ‘we’? Certainly not Caleb!
The big lug was crushing her lungs!
He moved his hand again. She sucked in a breath to ask him what was going on, but he apparently decided on a more interesting way to keep her quiet. He planted his mouth firmly over hers. As disoriented as she already was, it took her mind a few heartbeats to shift gears, but the moment pleasure registered, she instantly forgot everything else. As if hours hadn’t passed since he’d kissed her, her body leapt almost instantaneously to the same level of drunken euphoria where they’d left off. She struggled to free her arms from the coverlet binding her and clutch him more tightly.
He broke the kiss, lifting his head to stare down at her questioningly, his breath puffing raggedly against her face and throat. The shifting of his weight gave her enough room to free her arms, though, and she caught his shoulders, trying to pull him back. He leaned toward her and then changed his mind, rolling away instead. Dismay and disappointment filled her until he grasped the coverlet and tossed it away. Cool air wafted over her and then he settled his chest against hers again and she felt the coo
lness of his skin, the dampness that told her he’d only just come from the water.
It flickered through her mind to wonder how he’d gotten in and why he’d climbed into her bed with her, but she dismissed it as soon as his lips met hers again in hungry assault. It sent a fresh thrill through her. She shifted closer to him, rolling her hips and curling one of her legs around his, sucking at his tongue greedily to absorb the taste of him more fully as he explored her mouth.
He caught her thigh, holding it as he shifted his hips between her legs. Her kegels clapped together in anticipation, her mind instantly leaping to the realization that that was what she needed, to feel him inside of her. Instead of entering her, though, he broke the kiss and stroked a hand over her, searching for a way beneath her nightie. Goosebumps broke out all over her, making her nipples rise to hard points when he found the hem and delved beneath it. The coast of his hand upwards to cup one breast created goosebumps on top of goosebumps, made her skin feel too tight and so exquisitely sensitive it was almost painful.
She couldn’t catch her breath! The struggle to do so produced only pants that made her dizzier. She clutched at him as he broke the kiss at last, half afraid he’d stop.
Instead, he pushed her gown up and covered the tip of one breast with the heat of his mouth. She gasped. Her eyeballs rolled back in her head. She thought she was going to pass out from the sensation pouring through her with every tug of his mouth on her.
She arched against him mindlessly, pressing her mound against him rhythmically in a silent demand, sinking her fingers into his hair when he moved to her other breast instead.
Now! Now! Now, she thought deliriously, struggling with the urge to voice her demand. She felt like weeping when he ceased to tease her breasts at last, but instead of giving her what she needed, he tugged her gown off and pressed his chest to hers, rubbing restlessly against her as he explored her throat with his mouth.
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