“I am. I can follow commands. I can learn.”
He slapped the whip down hard on the back of her left thigh, and then again on the right. “Turn over,” he said. “Hold up your breasts for me to flog.”
Theryssa scrambled to comply. Her globes were so very tempting, splendid and lusciously available as she cradled them, offering them up between her lightly pressed fingers.
“Beg for it, Theryssa.”
“Please, Master. Flog my breasts.”
Azar delivered a measured stroke. Let’s see how easy it is for her to beg now that she’s felt the sting, he mused. “Again, Theryssa, beg for it again.”
Her face was twisted in dark lust. Her eyes were lit with desire. “Again,” she said after the briefest hesitation. “Please, Master. Flog my breasts again.”
Azar crisscrossed the pure skin a total of five times. Theryssa’s head was back, her hair hanging loose, her torso bent as a self-offering. She was the perfect picture of submission. He had to have her. As never before.
“Prepare yourself,” he ordered. “Legs spread.”
Theryssa positioned herself with exquisite grace, like a melting goddess, a butterfly unfurling its wings, revealing a precious colored center. In this case pink, like purest coral. And glistening drops of white. By the gods, even her pussy was perfect and beautiful. A work of art. If ever a woman could be plunder, it was she. And yet there was no price in the entire universe to redeem such a creature.
He descended on top of her, a single measured merging, flesh against flesh. This time they began with an embrace. Doing nothing more than listening to each other’s breathing, and feeling the tickle of one another’s sweat.
They licked each other, each dabbing lightly at the other’s skin. But still, they did not relinquish the bond, like two magnets, south to north, poles inseparable.
Azar just reveled in the feel of her, making his cock as large as he could, letting her accommodate, with all the seeming practice of a lifetime. Hand in glove, that was how to describe it. Hard muscle against soft curves. Male and female. A match, yes.
Logical, even inevitable, according to Nyssa and Theron. And good for him in so many ways. He was alive with her, and he knew that in her absence he would never feel joy again. But would it make her happy to be tied to a man like him? Did she not deserve more?
She did in fact, and he had to convince her of that. The sooner the better.
“Theryssa,” he said, trying not to sound too abrupt. “I realize this has been…pleasant between us. But I don’t want to hold you to any commitment…sexually or otherwise. I understand that you need to go.”
She wrinkled her brow, smiling oddly. “Why would you say that? No one’s satisfied me like you. I don’t want to be with another man. Ever.”
The finality of her answer startled him…and made him a little lightheaded.
“You should be with someone younger, more like you,” he said quickly. “I’m a pirate, I’m set in my ways, and that’s just for starters.”
“You’re not that old,” she laughed. “And I’m as set in my ways as they come, ask my folks.”
“I’m nearly your father’s age,” he reminded.
“You aren’t him, though. I don’t think of you like that.”
“How do you think of me? Outside of bed, I mean.”
She thought for a moment. “You’re intriguing, sexy as hell, smart, exasperating, stubborn. And did I mention sexy as hell?”
Azar laughed deeply. It felt good. Not to mention way overdue. “You’re not too shabby yourself.”
“For a youngster.”
“You’re plenty old enough, missy.”
“Old enough to know better?”
“I’m the wrong one to ask.”
She pursed her lips. He could tell she was thinking. He was getting pretty good at reading her like that. “Do you think the Narthians will really attack in as large a force as my father says? I’ll admit it’s a little scary.”
“I don’t know, Theryssa. Unfortunately, I can tell you your old man is seldom wrong about these things, though I would never tell him to his face.”
Theryssa’s pretty eyes were studying him. A lesser man would be terrified by that kind of probing. “Why wouldn’t you accept my Dad’s offer?” she wanted to know.
“You mean to take you as my mate?”
“No. To join your fleet to his.”
Azar frowned. “It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t seem complicated,” she insisted. “Either it’s the right thing to do or it isn’t. Are you holding back because of your objections to the Council’s genetics programs?”
“No, you are proof that things have changed. And I believe your mother and father when they say they want to work with me to improve the world. We can all learn from each other.”
“Well if it’s not that,” she persisted, “what is it?”
He was tempted to tell her something along the lines of “At your age it’s all black and white…” but he quickly dismissed it as an excuse to avoid the hard truth. “You’re right, Theryssa,” he dared to look into his deepest heart, “I’m only hesitating because I’m afraid.”
“You? What could you be afraid of?”
He heard the awe in her voice. It was flattering, if misguided. “I’m afraid of just about everything,” he said. “Beginning with myself.”
“You’re a good and noble man,” she said with all the confidence of youth.
“You don’t know that,” he said gently.
“Yes,” she replied, undeterred. “I do.”
He drew a breath as she squeezed her sex muscles around his cock, letting him know just how confident she was feeling about him.
“A woman trusted me once with her life,” he tried to put her off, “and I let her down.”
“You mean Solania,” she pressed. “Tell me, tell me what happened.”
“Why? You can’t change anything.”
“But I need to hear,” she took his hand. “I love you, Azar.”
His lip trembled slightly as he prepared to relate the story, the whole story, including the deepest part of his rage…which had never been directed against Theron but against himself.
“Solania risked everything to be with me,” he explained. “She was a fem. I should only have married an obedient like the rest of my kind. I seduced her. The Council found out. They sent Theron to warn her off. She was…confused, alone. She took an air-car…there was an accident, no one will ever know exactly…”
“But that isn’t your fault,” she said quickly, echoing the words he’d heard so many times.
“It is my fault, though. No one knows this, Theryssa, but she tried to contact me. After Theron left. I told her…I told her I couldn’t ever talk to her or see her again. The Council had sent someone to talk to me, you see, at the same time Theron went to her.”
Theryssa’s eyes reflected his pain. “I’m so sorry, Azar?”
“Sorry for what? That I’m a monster? A coward?”
“You did what you had to,” she insisted. “You followed orders. You know, like we all do. The Council is all we have. It is what makes us human.”
“Damn the Council, Theryssa, and damn your Pollyanna mentality. For god’s sake, must you have an answer for everything?” He couldn’t believe he was getting impatient like this. It was almost like he wanted her to hate him. And he had been so anxious to hear what she felt about him, to see if she might like him.
To his surprise, she seemed unfazed by the outburst. “Well it wouldn’t be much fun if I couldn’t keep up with you, would it?” she quipped.
“I think we need to be realistic about what is going on here,” Azar thought aloud, succumbing once again to that veil of fatigue and grayness he’d been feeling in the months and days preceding her arrival.
“And what is that,” she asked skeptically, a distinct twinkle in her eye, “oh, all-seeing Master?”
“We’re making good sex,” he deliberately ignored
her good humor. “That’s all it is.”
“Really? Then why do I feel like there’s a hole in my heart whenever you’re gone from me, Azar? Why do I bleed to death, in my soul?”
Her words cut him to the quick.
“After a day? Theryssa that isn’t possible.”
What was wrong with him? His emotions were on a cascade? He needed safety, needed to be alone.
“How do you know what’s possible? Do you know what my heart feels like…and my soul?”
“No,” he admitted grudgingly, “I don’t.”
“And what about you? What do you feel?”
“Me?” Azar scowled. “I feel like hell. Confused, churned up. All twisted. Out there, with my men, I would have killed them all to save you. Damn it, Theryssa, I bonded with you. What else do you want me to say?”
There, it was out. The truth he’d been hiding from himself all along. Azar rolled off her, landing heavily on his back.
She leaned across, propping her head up with her elbow. “You mean a primale lifemate bond?”
“Yes,” he glared at the ceiling.
“Well, I guess that’s that.” She shrugged.
“That’s what?”
“We have to be mated.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he retorted. “I bonded…by mistake.”
“So you don’t want me? You wouldn’t care if I walked out and found the first guy to fuck? You would be cool with that?”
“Of course I wouldn’t. I would want to rip him to shreds.”
“Okay, suppose I find a nice man and settle down?”
Azar sighed, sounding more and more like a man playing a game of chess and discovering himself checkmated. “I would probably haunt you both until you had me arrested for harassment.”
“I’m in the same boat,” she told him. “I’m a primefemale, seventy five percent primale, remember? If you ever went near another woman, I would cut your balls off.”
“How charming. Sounds like the answer is for you to stay in the Guardians, choose the path of lifetime commitment, no mating.”
“No. I can’t live alone my whole life. I thought I could, but thanks to you, I know I need companionship.”
“So basically, I’ve sunk my own ship.”
“If you consider mating with me a fate worse than death.”
“Personally, I adore you,” Azar admitted, still eying the ceiling. “You have completely swept me off my feet. But I still don’t see how I can be the right man for you.”
“Isn’t that my decision?”
“I suppose, but I don’t want you throwing your life away.”
“Do you love me, Azar?”
Azar felt like a laser had been fired through his heart. “Love?”
“Yeah, you know,” she quipped, “that four letter word that rhymes with above.”
“Theryssa, you can’t ask me a question like that.”
“Why, does it scare you?”
“Look, let’s leave it that I don’t love you,” he said flatly, “and we’ll both be better off.”
“But you bonded,” she reminded him, mischievously fingering his cock. “We made sex, you bonded with me and now you have to love me. It’s your biology.”
“I don’t have to do anything, Theryssa. And if you keep on pressing me, I will not be responsible for my actions.”
“What will you do?” she asked, eager-eyed.
“I’ll chain up these busy little hands of yours, for one thing. And I’ll gag that impossible-to-argue-with mouth.”
“I’d be helpless, then.” She licked her lips. “And you could fuck me again.”
“Damn it, no.”
Theryssa was crawling on top of him, trying to mount his erection, which he could do not a damn thing about no matter how hard he tried.
“Why not, Master?”
“Because I said so.”
“I’m being disobedient, aren’t I? I need another flogging.”
“You need to go home, Theryssa, that’s what you need to do.”
“You would miss me,” she predicted.
“That’s something we can certainly find out, isn’t it…by going to different sides of the galaxy?”
“Nah, I’d rather just fuck.”
Azar resisted in vain as she managed to slide his cock across her slit and between her gaping lips. His willpower pathetically low, he did little more than groan as she sheathed him completely inside her warm, tight opening.
“There, isn’t that better?”
“No,” he grumbled, “it’s messy and complicated. And it’s creating problems we will just have to resolve later.”
“We can resolve them by making more sex.”
“Theryssa, you are impossible,” he declared.
“And you love that about me.”
He had a lump in his throat. “Yes,” he admitted softly, “I suppose I do.”
“And you love everything else about me, too,” she beamed.
“First and foremost your modesty.” He rolled his eyes.
Theryssa slapped his chest, playfully.
Azar arched a brow. “I’ll take care of the discipline, thank you very much.”
“Aha,” she proclaimed victory, “so you admit we have a relationship.”
“I meant for this one-time encounter.”
“Which began a half hour after we met and shows no sign of letting up any time in the next millennium…”
“I’m a quick seducer.” He shrugged.
“And you have finally met your match.”
“You wouldn’t last a week,” he predicted.
“Try me.”
“There you go again, trying to make this permanent.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Nothing is permanent, but the stars,” he said stubbornly. “And even those will burn out eventually.
“You think too much,” she teased. “Tell me how this feels, not how it calculates.”
“I won’t speak to how it feels.” Azar shifted, settling his cock an inch or so deeper. “As for you, you feel like…heaven.”
“And you feel like a man with some unfinished business.”
Azar smiled in spite of himself. As if one single orgasm would actually do it. Each one so far had only begged another—bigger, better and more spectacular.
Was Theryssa an addiction? Maybe, but she was the kind of habit a man was goddamn lucky to find. She was a one of a kind addiction, in a world of sleazy habits and mindless routines.
Would they make it a week together? Who knew the answer to that one? He was a pirate. He had today. And nothing more. He followed his heart and his head and right now they were telling him something.
More to the point they were showing it. And its name was happiness, in the most unlikely form of a young Guardian, the daughter of his brother turned enemy and quite possibly soon to be a brother again.
Who could argue with how alive he felt inside her, and beside her. Talking to her, making sex with her. Looking at her. Hell, just being in the same room with her, in the same ship, even, was enough to awaken him from an age-old slumber.
“Just promise me one thing,” he said, grasping hold of her in preparation for riding her rapid-fire on his lap.
“Anything,” she vowed.
“You won’t run circles around me constantly, even though we both know you can.”
“Absolutely not,” she did her best to keep a straight face. “Master.”
“I know I will live to regret this,” he shook his head.
“I know,” she bent to kiss his forehead. “I love you, too, you stubborn pirate.”
The talking done, they returned to what had first brought them together, and what would always serve as their touchstone. Call it the forge of their bond, the source of their incendiary heat, the cauldron of their molten energy.
Sex, to use the technical word.
Whatever you called it, though, there was no denying they would never get enough of it. Not if they
lived to be a thousand and crossed the galaxy a dozen times over.
They came together this time, their cries intertwining, their precious fluids flowing together, their fingers interlaced, their bodies moving in time, finding just the right motions to seal the gaps, to close the empty spaces. Her breast in his mouth, his cock in her pussy, their pelvises conjoined, and their flesh superheated.
Two persons. One destiny.
“That was good, lover,” she whispered when she’d finally worn him out. “But I hope you have some energy left for fighting the Narthians.”
“The Narthians are nothing,” he grumbled, still holding her in his arms, loath to let go, now or ever, “compared to you.”
“Thank you,” she giggled. “I think.”
“Seriously,” he stroked her cheek, “thank you.”
“For what?”
“For giving me my life back?”
“You’re welcome. But you’ve had a life all along. The gods know you’ve been giving my father a run for his money all these years with this pirate rust bucket of yours.”
He smacked her bottom playfully. “This rust bucket is older than you and deserves respect. As for my life, it was gray until you came along. Now there’s color again.”
“Well, I do seem to make you see red often enough.”
He kissed her face—once, twice, a dozen times for good measure.
“What’s that for?”
“Insurance. Against the next time I piss you off.”
“Don’t worry,” she stroked his limp cock. “I have lots of ways to find revenge…Master.”
“I’m not sure I like that look in your eyes.”
“Is the big pirate scared of the little female?” she cooed.
“Damn straight I am.”
She laughed. “You just better hope I don’t figure out how to chain you up one of these days for a little payback.”
“Actually,” he grinned, “I’m kinda curious to see you in action…with a whip.”
“Name the time and place,” she said.
“Later. After a nap.”
“Perfect time to chain you up.”
“What you don’t trust me to surrender willingly?”
“Not on your life.”
“Smart girl. Very smart girl.” He kissed her again. This time she kissed back.
“You can forget your nap idea,” she murmured.
Azar's Prize Page 18
