Baby, it's Cold in Space: Eight Science Fiction Romances

by Margo Bond Collins

  She let the tension drain out of her body. She returned to what was familiar, soaking up the physical sensations in her immediate experience. After a moment, she noticed that he was really warm, which reminder her that she was flushed herself. She squirmed slightly, mainly to turn her ankles so she could position the bottom of her feet against his bare skin. It was like putting her feet on heated pads. She let herself sink back into his sheltering hold even more. She could feel the tickling sensation of his chest hair on her back. Apparently, he was hairy pretty much all over. With her eyes closed, she could imagine being cuddled in bed with him on a cold night, curled up in his arms, his body a furry blanket.

  He licked and then lightly sucked the skin under her right ear, tasting her, and she gasped, jumping in surprise at the electric bolt it send down the center of her body. He pulled back while his grip tightened around her again.

  She surreptitiously bent her head down towards one of his arms crossing her chest that held her tight against him. She sniffed his skin. That rich, earthy, smell that only a male seemed to exude. A smell she was attracted to? She almost hummed herself.

  Why didn’t he answer her? She couldn’t be sure in the dark, but he seemed basically humanoid. She’d never met a humanoid species that didn’t speak.

  She patted his arm to indicate that she was no longer panicked. When she tugged on her wrists then, he slowly released her arms. She stayed calm, reclined cautiously against his chest, knowing he could take her down if she tried to flee. This was the moment to make an ally, not an enemy. And where would she go to get away from him, anyway? They were locked together in a cell. Plus, her body didn’t want to get away.

  His hands free now too, he began stroking her arms soothingly. See, she told herself, taking a deep breath of relief. If he’s trapped in here like she is, he probably isn’t bad.

  “I hope this means that you want to be friends, too,” she murmured.

  The tender nature of his touch reminded her of her family. They were a touchy feely tribe. Her parents always made her feel so precious, special with their constant hugging and affectionate touching. Her cellmate’s touch made her feel good too, even though he was a stranger. His touch was reassuring. Except for both of them being naked. And that made the nature of the touching feel more sensual than platonic. Apparently, their kidnappers liked to strip all prisoners of their clothes.

  The good news. She wasn’t alone in this situation anymore. It eased the ache of her sense of loss and isolation.

  This stranger seemed to have the effect on her of making her feel safe. And a few other feelings that she definitely didn’t associate with security. She frowned as she acknowledged that she was definitely, unequivocally responding sexually to her mystery cell mate’s touch and the evidence of his arousal. Like her body had processed his smell, his gentle caresses, his engorged penis, and decided—at the worst possible time—that this was the appropriate response for it to make in a life-or-death situation. She knew she wasn’t completely comfortable with the male’s arousal, and certainly not her own.

  “Please, please, don’t…” she whispered. She wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to him or to herself. An unintelligible rumble sounded in his chest. It sounded sorrowful and frustrated. Okaaay. He didn’t like to be told no.

  Her breath stuttered as he shifted and slid them both down together on the mat into a horizontal position. He turned her and pulled her face first into his chest, sliding his arms around her back and just holding her. Despite her anxiety, in the circle of his arms, she felt warm for the first time since she’d awoken. The guy blasted warmth like a heater. She couldn’t resist it. Between her mating flush and his heated flesh, her shivers were long gone. She snuggled into the heat of his body with a sigh. There was nothing snuggly about the way his erection pressed and throbbed against her stomach with persistent eagerness, though. Since he wasn’t pressing the issue into something more, she tried to ignore it.

  Why didn’t he speak?

  He tucked her head under his bearded chin and stroked her exposed back slowly, up and down. The heat of his big hand warmed her skin, heightening its sensitivity. Shivers from a source other than the cold skittered across her skin. She closed her eyes and pressed her still cold nose into the thick blanket of fur covering his broad chest. She shifted slightly to position her hips more comfortably and his cock slid easily against her. He groaned and repositioned her. Was he leaking? Her clitoris throbbed in answer to some ancient call against her better judgment. Her toes barely reached his legs mid-calf. She calculated that the guy had to be well over seven feet tall. About the same as her dad.

  Why did he just hold her?

  Not that she was complaining. Really. But the guy’s arousal was obvious and not going away. He probably recognized that she was also humanoid, despite the lightless room. He might also notice that she was getting aroused too because now she could smell her own body signaling its preparation for the mating act, could feel the dampness between her thighs that scented the room with her own perfume. Super embarrassing. Well, probably not as embarrassingly obvious as the guy’s situation, though he might not be embarrassed, since he was a guy. She recognized the telltale comingled musky scent from being in her parents’ bedroom after their time together. Even after twenty-one years together, they had a passion that was often an uncomfortable aspect of the whole family’s shared life, especially when they traveled jointly on the family ship.

  Time to focus on escaping.

  “I just want you to know that I’m pretty uncomfortable with this whole situation,” she told the guy, feeling uncharacteristically chatty considering he was a stranger. “I’ve never been in a scenario like this. Hell, I’ve never imagined being in a scenario like this, so I’m probably not going to do things the way one is supposed to do them.”

  No response. He just kept stroking her hair and back.

  Since he was naked and locked in this cell too, she assumed—accurately she hoped—that he was also a prisoner, being held captive against his will. Maybe they could join forces to escape. It never hurt to have the kind of physical muscle he had working to that end. Of course, he hadn’t escaped on his own yet. That thought caused her hopes for an escape partner to stutter. He was huge, powerful. And he hadn’t escaped. Maybe they’d been abducted near the same time and he hadn’t had a chance to fight his way out? He would likely think her a burden to him in a hand-to-hand battle. But he might be a hindrance to her in planning and execution too since he wasn’t talking. How’d anyone get the upper hand with someone this big? Maybe he was physically strong but not especially smart.

  She pushed gently back away from his chest and looked up. Not that she could see a thing. She had to get this escape plan going. They couldn’t just cuddle.

  “I’m Nadiah. What’s your name?” Her soft voice echoed like a whisper in the chamber.

  She sensed him tipping his head down towards her but he didn’t answer. He might not understand her. He shifted, tightening his arms momentarily. He seemed frustrated. Most aliens traveling the galaxy wore language implants. Hers was still intact and if he spoke any of the thousands of alien languages uploaded into the device, they could communicate. She reached up and touched his bearded chin, and slid her fingers cautiously to his lips.

  “Why won’t you speak, big guy?”

  His lips opened and her index finger slid unexpectedly into his mouth. He closed his lips over it and sucked her finger deeper into his mouth, holding it. Then she knew. Horror filled her mind as she yanked her finger out and tried to jerk away.

  “Oh my gods!”

  He had no tongue. Well…he had what was left of one. It appeared to have been cut off near the base. By the feel of it, the injury was fairly recent. She could even smell the telltale rusty scent of blood now.

  “Did they do this to you? Oh gods, oh gods.”

  She panicked momentarily, maybe whimpered in fear and sympathy. He hummed soothingly as he tucked her head back under his chin, an
d she let him pull her close again. He seemed to want to comfort her. It was silly, she needing the comfort when he was the one who was actually suffering? This situation was serious. She needed to get a grip. She took several deep breaths to center her mind. Pressed intimately against his hard body, she realized that at least one of his parts wasn’t hard anymore. It helped her let go of her remaining fear of the guy. At least forced sex—was it forced if you were hot for it?—wasn’t imminent on the agenda. She let his warmth surround her again, his gentle caresses soothe her. Her cellmate was so deliciously warm.

  “I’m sorry for your…um…tongue.”

  “Sshh…”

  “So, I think we need to plan how to get out of here.”

  At that moment, a subtle hissing sounded from high overhead and the arms around her stop moving. The guy most definitely growled and she was enclosed tightly in his arms again, as he locked himself around her.

  Once again, sleeping gas filled the air she was breathing. Then a sense of lethargy washed over her. She pressed her face into that strong chest and clung to her cellmate.

  ***

  The high screeching sound of metal sliding and scraping against metal woke Nadiah out of a fuzzy dream. She must have fallen asleep? She struggled to open her eyes, remembering then the sleeping gas. A single white light cast itself across the cell, harshly silhouetting the toilet, sink and shower stall, turning the small space into dull gleaming greys and black gaping shadows, like a colorless two-tone image. She blinked against it all. She tried to sort out what had happened.

  She realized she was still held tight and safe, tucked inside what she was beginning to think of as her hairy giant’s arms. His penis was hard against her stomach again. As she shifted, he released her, lifted her and set her off of him. Somehow, she’d gone from lying next to him to lying on top of him. And her body was clambering for even more contact if the disappointment she felt at being set aside said anything. At least she was warm this time when she woke.

  She swallowed and tasted the same herbal acridity on the back of her throat she’d had waking up in the space cell earlier. Nadiah remembered the sound of something like the release of gases just before being knocked unconscious again. So they’d been drugged, again. She suspected their captors had used less on her this time, because her memory retained more clarity in this reawakening.

  Her cellmate stood abruptly so she started to stand too, but he gently pushed her back down and held her by her shoulders for a prolonged second. Okay. He wanted her to stay. She stayed. For now. When his hands lifted away, her shoulders rose imperceptibly to extend the contact. He moved off the mat, straight out across the room to where the light glared into the darkness. As he approached it, it quickly disappeared to the sound of more screeching metal. Was the source of the light and sound near the shelf where she’d scraped her hip earlier?

  Nadiah rubbed her eyes. It was a relief to know she wasn’t blind. She had to admit fearing just that possibility especially when she’d discovered her cellmate had his tongue cut out. In that brief exposure to light, she also confirmed how huge her companion was—standing tall with shoulders that had to be nearly three feet across—and a few details about the cell. It was smaller than she’d imagined, but higher too. The light didn’t shine bright enough to reach the ceiling. Her mind turned back to her cellmate and his size. She guessed he weighed more than twice what she did, maybe closer to three times her weight.

  In the relentless darkness again, alone, she curled up, tucking her knees under her chin and waited. Without her cellmate’s body heat, the chill of the room was already invading her bones again. She could hear him moving around on the other side of the chamber and then silence before he stepped back onto the mat. She sensed him placing something down at the end of the mat near the center of the room. Then he settled down behind her and pulled her up between his legs so that he surrounded her again, though they now faced the same direction. She couldn’t help but lean into his warmth. She sat cross-legged then, in his lap, letting her outer legs rest against the inside of his legs and waited, wondering what he was doing. Since he hadn’t hurt her or pushed himself on her, she decided to trust this male creature. She hoped her trust wasn’t impulsive or misplaced. She’d always operated on her instincts and they were rarely wrong. In this moment, her instincts told her he was a good guy. It was obvious who had the physical advantage between them, and he hadn’t taken it.

  He stretched forward around her and dragged something towards them across the mat. She heard packaging tear open and the smell of food tripped her appetite. Her stomach growled. Her cellmate chuckled as he caught up her hand and placed what felt like a warm wrapped food item in it. Man his hand was big. He guided her much smaller hand to her face. She brought the food to her nose and sniffed. It actually smelled safe to eat. She took a tentative bite and moaned in recognition as the flavor of a familiar intergalactic travel food favorite, the spicy tachatac, hit her taste buds. She ate it fast, taking the biggest bites she could, chewing fast. She didn’t realize how starved she’d been. Apparently their big, bad abductors were fast food junkies.

  She heard a popping noise. Her giant caretaker captured her other hand and placed a tubed drink into it all without spilling any. Could he see in the dark? Some species had the ability to detect heat signatures as a kind of visual sensory experience. She searched with her lips for the standard narrow tube for drinking and sucked up the sweet juice, swallowing the high-energy liquid down in large gulps.

  She groaned and finished the tachatac within minutes, licking her fingers clean. She could easily eat another one. She slurped up her drink and making a guess at the location of what she imagined was a tray, leaned forward and set the empty tube down. She leaned back against her cell mate’s warm chest and took a deep breath. Clean, fed, relatively warm. Things were not as bad as they could be. She was even becoming accustomed to the pitch black and being naked. Really. Already, her brain was buzzing with ideas about how to paint the dark as something more than the color black. As an artist, she worked with color and light. As a performing dancer, she worked with movement, which normally has to be seen to be experienced. But a world existed in the dark too, much of it smell and sound and texture. She thought she could decipher a surprising amount of information just from sound alone. If she got out of this alive, she’d work to hone her other sensory skills. Was there some way to represent sound, texture, and taste in her paintings which had always depended solely on visual imagery?

  She listened to her fellow captive eat at a slower pace above her head. He chewed and swallowed methodically. He didn’t eat delicately, nor did he eat noisily, which was surprising since he was missing most of his tongue. He just ate. The sense of normal that came with the realization made her think that he was not afraid, that maybe he wasn’t too concerned about being locked up. Maybe he was simple-minded? How she wished she could read minds like her father.

  When her cellmate finished eating, he got up—and based on the sounds echoing in their chamber—returned the tray to the shelf across the way. She felt the chill of his absence immediately. She could hear him stopping at the sink. Then the chemical shower switched on. She chewed her lip while he showered. The man seemed to have a near constant hard-on and he was cleaning up before returning to her. They’d eaten. They’d slept—well, she had anyway—and, after immediate safety, the only other concern males had was sex, according to her father. Which is why she was never allowed to be alone with one. The idea of sex didn’t sound so bad to her. Considering that all she kept thinking about, besides escaping, was sex. Curse her mating cycle. If the guy wasn’t too bright though…she wasn’t sure she wanted to mate with someone of unequal intelligence. She’d imagined having sex with someone unattached but still fairly smart. Remembering the hardness of her companion’s penis, though, caused her own sex parts to ache in anticipation.

  The biggest problem was not her human side, but her Kadisian side. Females from Kadis were susceptible to powerful
mating cycles in early adulthood. She’d been going half out of her mind, thinking about sex nearly continuously for the equivalent of six earth months. It was stifling her art, her work. And now she was trapped—naked—with a male humanoid who seemed to be attracted to her, and in all honesty, she was attracted to him in return. She should be thinking about escaping, about how to get away from their captivity. Philosophical contemplation without the ability to move or paint was driving her mind in unproductive circles. Sexual chemistry should not override her focus, her intentions.

  She wished she could see her cellmate’s face, and that he could speak to her. What color were his eyes? What did his voice sound like, before...the whole tongue severing.

  She wished she knew his name. But none of that was going to happen while they were locked in this cell. Surely, she’d met others of his species or planet before on one of the many slave recovery ventures she’d experienced with her parents? She tried to remember any races with lots of body hair. He wasn’t furry like their cat or dog—both animals imported from earth, so she was fairly certain he was more humanoid than not.

  There were the Dugarans, a species of giant warriors from Dugar, but they rarely, if ever, left their planet. Known to be fierce and extremely private, their relations with the Q’Tran Alliance were testy and tenuous. Even in all the years of rescuing slaves, her family had never encountered Dugarans in person. Only a fool would attempt to enslave them and they simply didn’t travel off their home planet, which was reportedly cold and icy, covered by huge seas of more frozen icebergs than water. It might account for the heat coming off her cellmate. Surely anyone living in such a cold climate would need to produce a lot of heat, and would probably have evolved with more protective hair.

  What if her cellmate’s attraction to her was only a simple reaction to her mating cycle? Some species reacted to other species revved pheromones. Actually, that would be okay, if they managed to escape together and he was willing to do something about her sexual needs. She sought a single sexual encounter with someone she planned never see again anyway, so would it matter if it turned out to be this guy rather than someone she met on Jagron? If the guy was intelligent, which he would be if he were Dugaran. He had been so gentle with her though, while Dugarans were reportedly brutish and violent. She tried to imagine him as a quiet but gentle giant. Like a big friendly oaf. A friend with a kind heart and spirit like her aunt, Kugen’s wife.