by Stella Casey
He glided in and out, keeping the pace moderate, and immediately I felt my next orgasm rising. One of his many wonderful hands moved between us and began to lightly rub my clit, and I knew I wouldn’t last long.
Every nerve ending inside me was lit up, and now he was touching my clit as well as my breasts. The pleasure was too much and I thrashed, moaning, as I felt the pressure building and building.
Then, again, my climax hit me with a suddenness that shocked me. I screamed this time, but his lips were there to kiss me and swallow it.
As soon as he felt my convulsions, he started to pound into me harder and faster. Then he pressed his hips hard against me and groaned in abandon. He emptied himself inside me, and I convulsed again and then relaxed into a puddle, my bones turned to water.
Lii’thoou was muttering something I couldn’t understand in his own language. He was still inside me, and I loved the feel of his weight on me.
Finally, he pulled out, and I made a sad sound. But he wrapped his arms around me — my back to his chest, spooning — and I was comforted. Neither of us said anything, and in a minute I was asleep.
I woke in the darkness to feel Lii behind me, his hands all over my body, and already I was panting, even though I was barely awake. Two hands were on my breasts, one rubbing my clit, and another hand had two fingers inside me. Another hand was on my butt, squeezing, and the last one was spreading my legs so all the hands could reach where they wanted to.
“You’re so damn sexy,” he whispered, kissing and sucking at my neck.
I couldn’t speak. I was half asleep — and fully aroused.
The finger that was thrusting in and out of me sped up, and I focused on the sensation. “Come for me, Lyssa,” he whispered, pinching my nipples hard and speeding up on my clit.
With a gasp, I came. Hard. The second after I clenched around his finger, he removed it, and I felt something much bigger and harder sliding against my soaking wet folds from behind. I could feel his length between my thighs as the tip pushed at my entrance, and I whimpered.
“You took all of me before. And you’ll take all of me again,” he said softly, but his tone left no room for opposition. He pushed a little harder, and the resisting flesh split.
With a sharp intake of breath, I felt him slipping into me again, until I had taken all of him deep. I groaned as he spread me and filled me, not being as gentle this time. God, I felt so stretched.
With a harsh breath, he pulled out and thrust deep, his hips hitting my butt with a slapping sound. I was wide awake now as he took me harder.
I’d thought I wouldn’t like it like that. Harris had never been anything but gentle.
And yet…
And yet…
I loved it.
“Harder,” I said, and he slammed into me. I could feel him hitting the door to my womb. “Yes.”
I couldn’t believe this was me.
Couldn’t believe I was letting him do this to me.
Couldn’t believe how much I was loving it.
I ground my ass back into him as he continued to move inside me. This time it was slower, but the buildup was hotter, and soon I felt my orgasm rising inside me. I squirmed against his hard body as he increased his strokes.
And then I lost control, and was consumed by pure pleasure. A moment later, he spent himself within me, moaning my name.
“We should have a shower,” he said in my ear a few minutes later.
“Are you sure we can keep our hands off each other long enough to shower?”
“No,” he said, his voice rough. “But that’s the fun of it, isn’t it?”
I chuckled, and then gave a little shriek as he rose up from the sheets and scooped me into his arms.
“Lii, put me down,” I said, whacking the nearest arm.
“No,” he said. “You’re a dirty girl. And I’ve got to clean you up.”
Oh hell yes. There was nothing I wanted more.
12
Alyssa
I woke to the sound of birds chirping outside the window of my bedroom. I felt contented and happy inside. God, I hadn’t slept this well in ages.
Shifting, I realized that the toasty-warm pillow my head was resting on was rising and falling. My eyes flew open. I was wrapped in Lii’thoou’s six arms, my head snuggled into his chest.
Holy shit. I had sex with an alien.
I drew in a deep breath and let it out again.
Yes, I did. And it was amazing. I didn’t regret a second of it.
I closed my eyes again, enjoying the feel of my body pressed up against his. He was warm, and his chest was hard, in a very good way. I wanted to run my hands all over him, but that would wake him, and I’d opened my eyes once more so I could enjoy watching him while he slept.
Somehow, this moment felt so precious.
Last night was amazing. I had never felt like this before.
That thought jolted me a little bit. What about Harris? Hadn’t I felt like this about him?
I felt guilty at the thought, but the truth was that I hadn’t. I had never been so crazy attracted to Harris. I mean, I had enjoyed our lovemaking, but it had always felt sweet — like an extension of our love.
Never hot. Never desperate. Never like I couldn’t get enough of his body.
I bit my lip, gazing at Lii’thoou.
Even now, I could feel the desire in me. If he was awake, I would definitely be going for another round. I felt as though I would never be sated when it came to him. It was as though he had stirred a great hunger in me that I never even knew I had.
And then my thoughts turned to how he had saved me in the tiger enclosure, how he had been so good with Zoe, how much fun he was to be around. And how incredible he was in bed.
I closed my eyes again, savoring the feel of his body.
Damn. This was how I wanted to wake up every day.
My eyes popped open again.
Wait a minute. No, I didn’t. This was a one-time thing, just to get him out of my system. I didn’t want this every day. I was never doing this again.
I sat up, pushing his arms away.
“Lyssa?” he said, giving me a sleepy look. “What’s wrong?”
What was wrong? What was wrong? Me getting attached to an alien that was going to leave me like all the rest of the men in my life, that was what was wrong.
“It’s morning,” I said, knowing that I sounded brusque. “You have to go.”
“Morning?” he said, his head whipping to the window, where the sun was streaming in. “What time?”
“Oh, fuck,” I said, suddenly realizing how stupid we had been.
“I slept in,” he said, jumping out of bed, standing firm, and closing his eyes. All of a sudden, he was a tiger. I felt my eyes get big. Then he shifted again, and the guy from last night was back.
“What are you doing?” I said, flailing my hands around. “Stop that. Don’t shift again. We have to talk. Figure this out.”
He shifted once more, back to his true form. I couldn’t help but notice he was naked — and damn sexy.
With an effort, I yanked my eyes back into the polite zone and went to my dresser drawers, pulling out my usual work clothes.
“Alyssa, we’re in deep shit,” he said, sitting down on the bed again and putting one of his many blue hands to his forehead.
Those hands that had been everywhere on me last night.
I shook my head to clear it of the erotic images.
God damn it, I needed to focus, not think about what I wanted him to do to me… Shit. Seriously, Alyssa. Get your head in the game.
We were in trouble. I needed to figure out a solution to this problem. “I know, I know,” I said, grabbing my bra and doing it up in the back. “How do we get you back in?”
He shrugged, looking up at me. “I have no idea. The zoo is already open. They’ll have reported a missing tiger. I can’t go in as a human…”
“No. No way. There’ll be people everywhere. The place will be going bonkers,” I said, slith
ering into my underwear. “I have to get down there. I’ll figure something out.”
He stood up and came to me, putting a hand to my cheek and studying my face. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
I closed my eyes for a second, enjoying his touch. A moment later he was kissing me gently, his hardness pressing against me, making me wish I had time and that this wasn’t the last time we would be together.
And I really wished we hadn’t overslept and made a huge problem for both of us. I pulled away, getting into my pants and dragging my T-shirt over my head. Then I kissed him again.
“You have to stay here. Don’t open the door or anything. Where’s your cell phone?”
“I’m a tiger, Lyssa,” he said, an amused expression on his face. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
“Shit, seriously? Well, I don’t have a landline, so I’ll leave mine here and I’ll call you from one of the phones at the zoo. Or I’ll come here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea,” I said, honestly. “I’ll improvise. We just have to sneak you back in and say that you hadn’t escaped the zoo, only the enclosure. Or something like that.”
“Shouldn’t I come with you now, in human form?”
I shook my head. “Let me go in first and see what’s happening. Then we can figure out the best way to sneak you back in,” I said, heading for the door. “We have to be smart about this, and not mess up both our lives.”
He frowned. “Shit. I can’t believe I did this. It was completely irresponsible.”
I came back and hugged him, kissing him on the cheek. “It wasn’t just you. So we made a mess of things. Now we have to fix it. That’s all.”
I held his gaze. “I don’t regret even one moment of last night.”
A half-smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Me neither.”
“Good,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’ll get this sorted, and everything will be back to normal by tonight.”
“Call me.”
“I promise. I’ll call as soon as I get there and find out what’s going on.” I ignored how lonely the thought made me.
I didn’t want things to go back to normal.
But I didn’t have a choice. There was no future for me and Lii’thoou. How could there be? We were literally from different worlds. The two of us could never be.
No matter how much I wanted us to.
I dropped off Zoe at Callie’s house, fielding her questions as best I could.
“Alyssa, what the hell’s going on? Why are you late?”
I shoved Zoe’s bag into Callie’s free hand and tried to step out the door, but she grabbed my forearm.
“I slept in,” I muttered.
“You never sleep in. Never. Not even when you work twenty-two hours straight.” She was looking at me like I was an alien, ironically. And she was not going to buy sleeping in as an explanation.
“Well, I met someone. A friend.”
Her eyes got wide. “What sort of friend? The sort that sleeps over and keeps you up all night doing naughty things to…”
I held up my hand, and she stopped.
“Yes, that sort of friend. And now I’ve got to get to work, Cal. I’ll tell you everything some other time. I’m so late.”
“He must be special,” she said, studying me like she had never seen me before.
I tried to contain my smile, but I couldn’t. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’ve never looked like that. Not even with Harris.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, trying to wipe the smile off my face without success. “How do I look?”
“Head over heels in love, Lyssa.”
“Shut up. I do not.”
“Okay,” she said. “Say bye to your head-over-heels-in-love mama, Zo-Zo.”
“Bye-bye, Mama,” she said.
“Bye, baby. Bye, Callie,” I said.
“I will be getting details,” she called after me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, getting into my car and heading for work.
Callie was wrong, though. I wasn’t in love with Lii. A little sex-crazed, maybe. Okay, sex-crazed for sure.
But not in love.
That would be stupid.
When I got to the zoo, people were swarming the place. It was nuts. I went to find the director to see how I could help.
“Alyssa. Good, you’re here,” the director said as I entered her office. There was an odd note to her voice that I couldn’t interpret.
“What can I do to help?” I said. “They told me a tiger escaped?”
“There’s no sign of how it got out. There’s no trace of it. Not one whisker, Alyssa. It’s the strangest thing.”
“That’s so weird,” I said, feeling nervous.
“It is,” the director said. “But that’s not why I’m glad you’re here. There’s something else I needed to discuss with you.”
“Uh, what’s that?” I said, my heartbeat ticking up a notch.
“Because there’s no sign at all of the tiger escaping, we’ve been going through all the security footage.”
“You think someone stole it,” I said, dropping into one of the chairs that sat facing the Director’s desk.
“That’s correct,” she said. “At first we thought that you took it.”
“But that’s crazy. I would never…” I protested.
She held up her hand, and I stopped. “I know. We don’t think that anymore.”
“You don’t?” I said, confused.
“Have a look at this,” she said, turning her computer monitor to face me and clicking something with the mouse. “Berani,” I heard my voice saying, and the camera caught Lii’thoou’s human form.
“Sort of,” said the Lii’thoou on the camera.
I watched myself respond. “Yeah, I bet. Where’d you get the shorts?”
“I keep clothes hidden in the enclosure for when I change into human form. Will you let me explain?”
“Come into this examination room,” the me on the camera said.
The director stopped the playback as we disappeared through the door. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, Alyssa?” she said.
No. I did not.
I did not want to tell anyone anything. After what had happened last night, I suddenly knew that I would protect Lii’thoou in any way possible.
This was awful and the last thing that I wanted to happen. Why hadn’t I thought about the security cameras? Uh, because you were meeting an alien, I reminded myself.
I jumped to my feet abruptly and bolted out the door. The director was yelling after me, but I ignored her, running out of the building and heading for the least-used entrance to the zoo.
If I could get out of here, I could lose myself on the city streets. Then I would get back to Lii’thoou, and give him my car so he could escape. As long as he was in human form, he would be fine. They couldn’t prove he was an alien.
Well, unless they took a blood sample, I thought, remembering his purply-blue blood. After I had looked at it under a microscope — and been disappointed that it wasn’t that different from human blood — I had gotten rid of the blood, and had washed all the equipment I had used and then thrown it out.
Now I wondered if someone had found any trace of it. Or if someone had taken my police report about the dog-man seriously.
And the security footage. Damn, I had seriously fucked this up.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I saw the back entrance that hardly anyone used and put on a burst of speed. As I cleared the turnstile, I ran straight into a wall of black.
Men in black, to be clear.
They wore black suits, and sunglasses with earpieces in their left ears. Their shoes were so polished that I was sure if I tried, I could see my face in them. Every single one of their faces was impassive, as if they weren’t even human, but some sort of androids.
I knew that wasn’t true, but there was something so frightening about the lack of emotion on their faces �
�� as if they could kill someone and barely even notice. They reminded me of the sort of characters you would see in an alien invasion movie. As though they had just stepped out of Area 51.
I spun around to run back the way I had come, and was faced with two more agents holding guns on me. “Excuse me, Mrs. Duncan,” a man said behind me.
I took my eyes off the agents holding guns to look back at him. “We need to ask you a few questions. Please come with us.”
13
Lii’thoou
After Alyssa left for work, I flopped back on her bed a big, goofy grin on my face. The morning sun was pouring in on me, like a benediction.
Last night had been the best night of my life. I was seriously crazy about this woman. When I was with her, I felt like I was finally home.
She accepted me so completely, so unconditionally. She loved my true form in a way that I felt no one ever had. And she was so smart. And sexy. And…
What was I thinking?
The smile on my face faded.
I couldn’t be crazy about her. I was about to be free. To finish my sentence, and be able to go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted.
Getting involved with her was a big mistake. She was a human. A primitive species on a planet I was never supposed to come to. This was all wrong on so many levels.
I closed my eyes, remembering how we had connected last night. How incredible the sex had been. But beyond that, how I had been able to be myself. Just me. Without all the labels I had carried with me my whole life.
I sighed, knowing that it couldn’t continue. And since I couldn’t seem to keep my tiger paws off of her, I would have to leave the zoo.
I had some alternatives. I wouldn’t have to leave Earth. Not just yet. But I would have to get away from Alyssa. She was addicting, and I had a feeling that if I got much more of her, I wouldn’t be able to let her go.
And then, when trouble came … I couldn’t bear it if I lost her. Especially if I couldn’t protect her. The thought made me sick to my stomach.
Damn it.
The thought of giving her up, even with only the little bit of time that I had spent with her, made me feel so empty that I punched the pillow. But I was nothing but trouble. I would only bring problems to her and that sweet little girl.
No. I had to get out of here.
