by Juno Wells
“Do people think the goddesses have something to do with all the women disappearing?” she asked.
“Yes. People have spent months now speculating on how we must have angered them to warrant them killing off our race.”
“But there haven’t been any revolts? Or skepticism surrounding them?”
“Not yet. It’ll come, if things get worse. That’s why some people are against humans coming, since it’s a decision made by the king rather than the goddesses. They think we should look to our women to find out how we angered them enough to make everyone disappear.”
“But there’s been no indication that the goddesses are still… here, since they stopped physically being on the planet?”
“No, there hasn’t.” He tightened his hold around her waist and she dropped it. She definitely didn’t have the answer for why all the women had gone—though bringing them back would mean no more human women would end up on Vaher. Maybe that should be her next mission, after challenging the absolute monarch on a trade decision.
She looked up at Aavik, who was gazing down at her with complete devotion.
If she was given the option to go back to Earth right now, would she even take it?
She stood on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to Aavik’s cheek, then took his hand and started dragging him around the temple.
It wasn’t leading him on, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. It was a slow adjustment for her. Letting her mind fall for the men her heart had already decided she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
The fact her body burned to be close to them, that it egged her on every time she touched them, should have made it easier. It just made her brain rebel though. It wasn’t her choice. Some arbitrary power had thought they were good together and decided for her.
Her knee jerk reaction was to fight against it.
If only her knees didn’t want to fall either side of their hips and let them have their way with her.
“So,” she lowered her voice, even though no one was nearby. “You want to go poking around and see if we can see anything odd?” She wanted to prove herself to Aavik after being embarrassed by the guards yesterday.
He shook his head. “First I want to make sure I can’t see anyone from the king’s inner circle here. I don’t anyone reporting back to him on what we’re doing here. And if there are, we need to look like we’ve just come for a nice day out.”
He pointed at the exhibit in front of him as if he was describing it intently, and then leaned close enough to brush his lips against her temple. “So if you want to play it up on the pretending you’re very into me, feel free.”
She flushed, guilty. “I’m not pretending when I hold your hand and kiss your cheek. It’s just… I don’t know. Weird for me.”
“I can wait forever,” he said.
“I don’t want you to have to wait forever.”
He cupped her cheek with his large rough hand and brushed his thumb back and forth. “Okay, forever might be a bit of an exaggeration. I’m not that patient.”
She shivered with anticipation, and he saw the look in her eyes.
“Focus,” he said, and she wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself. “Let’s go have a walk around.”
When they decided that there was no one from the king’s inner circle there, they went for a walk around the outside of the temple.
“I don’t know how they think they’re going to extract the tricanite without anyone noticing,” she said. “I mean, it’s one of the busiest places on the planet, right?”
“They’ll find an excuse to close the temple,” Aavik said. “Say that they’re doing repairs or something. It happens every now and then when the structure needs checking to make sure it isn’t going to fall down.”
“So there might not even be anything here yet.”
“If you said the Hystian have given an advance, then there’ll be things here. The Hystians will expect results and fast.”
“So we’re on a time limit?”
“Yeah. Though a time limit for what I have no idea. I don’t know what we do if this is really happening.”
Hannah had no idea either. She was trying to avoid thinking ahead that far. She was barely doing a competent job at spying. Politics definitely wasn’t her strong suit.
She walked hand in hand with Aavik around the perimeter of the temple. Aavik talked to her about the plants they saw on the ground, about the mountains in the distance, about the city that they could barely see over the horizon.
She knew he was just saying it to sell their cover in case anyone was watching, but she was still hooked on every word.
The shock of being on a new planet almost hadn’t hit her yet. It was all just so interesting, and listening to the deep, smooth voice of Aavik made it even better.
“Look,” Aavik said, cutting short his explanation of how the main city on Vaher had come into existence. “Over there. That gap in the rocks isn’t normally there.”
They tried to look casual as they walked toward it, but Aavik’s scan of the surrounding area wasn’t very subtle. His picking of a flower near the place he’d indicated and explanation of what it was while peering over at the tunnel that had been dug into the ground rather than looking at her wasn’t particularly subtle either.
They were both too excited to really care, though.
Aavik walked through the undergrowth, Hannah following closely behind. The tunnel entrance was cut straight into the ground, hidden in a cluster of rocks. With teleportation technology there was no reason anyone would need to go there unless they were looking forward.
Standing at the entrance, they looked around once more. There was no one there.
“Do you think we should go in?” she asked, having listened hard and not heard anything from the opening. “You don’t think there are censors or anything at the entrance? Or cameras? The technology on Vaher is so far advanced beyond that on Earth. I have no idea how it works.”
Aavik squeezed her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t see anything. We don’t have anything microscopic, from what I know.”
“So we can go in?”
“I should go in.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger.”
“I’ll be more danger stood here at the entrance to a tunnel on my own.”
He dithered. “I’m not doing this now,” he decided, taking her hand and teleporting them back to the palace before she had time to argue. “I’ll go back with Veiko and Wraxic tomorrow. I won’t take you in there.”
Hannah pulled her hand free, scowling at him. “You’re kidding? There wasn’t anyone down there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I wanted to see it. I was the one who found about all this in the first place.”
Her first real opportunity to actually make a difference and she was being robbed of it so that the men could go and investigate. Of course.
“It’s dangerous.”
“I don’t care!”
Aavik took a step forward, and his face was menacing, as if to make up for the vulnerability in his words. “I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you.”
She swallowed thickly. Words died on her tongue.
But I have to do this. I have to mean something. I can’t be as irrelevant here as I was on Earth.
She didn’t protest when Aavik wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her flush against him. Her lips parted and her heart pounded. Her skin was flush.
Her brain wasn’t issuing its normal protests.
Aavik had finally given into his urges, and she was powerless to resist them.
He kissed her softly at first. Almost timidly. It was the first time they’d kissed, and he seemed scared that it would throw her back to reality and she would pull away.
Guilt thudded through her once more and she deepened the kiss, wrapping her arms around his neck and brushing her nose against his.
Des
ire was overwhelming and she gasped when he lifted her easily and carried her to the bed. She finally gave into her urges to run her hand down his bare chest, to dig her fingertips into the hard muscle there.
The little concessions of holding his hand and kissing his cheek were one thing, but actually kissing him made her body sing. She finally felt exactly what they had been talking about. Every part of her ached to be close to him. She felt complete—well, almost, she needed Veiko and Wraxic here to be properly complete—and like she didn’t need to worry about anything else in the world right then because her mate was there.
It all felt so unequivocally right that in the moment she couldn’t understand why she’d been fighting it.
Aavik lay her on the bed and she undid the button and zip on her jeans, letting him pull them off by the ankle. She was really relieved he hadn’t ripped them, because she only had two pairs with her.
She pulled off her top and left her in bra and panties.
Aavik climbed on top of her, laying between her legs. His hard cock was pressing into her sex from behind his pants and she rolled her hips, biting her lip. He was big.
He pulled at the center of her bra. “I don’t like this,” he said.
She deftly reached behind her and undid the contraption with her first attempt. He pulled it from her eagerly and buried his face in her chest. She gasped when he took one nipple in his mouth and sucked softly.
“Fuck,” she muttered, lacing a hand through his hair and anchoring him to her chest. His other hand rolled her other nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
She wriggled. She’d never felt this good, and he’d barely touched her yet.
Maybe the goddesses knew what they were doing after all. This was bliss.
The fact it was so good made her impatient. She didn’t want to lay back and enjoy her attentions, she wanted to know how much better it was going to be when he was inside her—she had to know whether it could even feel better than this.
She started pushing his pants down with her feet, but they were caught on his hard on and she growled in frustration.
“I don’t like these,” she said, giving his pants a final tug with her toe through his belt loop.
He grinned and took them off for her.
He didn’t wear boxers underneath.
He was suddenly completely naked in front of her.
“Oh, fuck,” she said, feeling tingly just at the sight of his thick shaft. She pushed him over so he was laying on his back and wrapped a hand around his cock. It only just fit.
She kissed his chest, planning to kiss down his body and see how much of him she could fit in her mouth, but he stopped her by cupping her face with both hands. He gave a swift shake of the head, and he looked pained.
She half expected him to tell her she had to stop, that she’d done something horribly wrong, but he ground out, “I have to fuck you right now.”
She kept him on his back with two firm hands on his chest and straddled him. She was a little bit nervous about his size and wanted control. He let her take it without protest. His head rested on a pillow and he looked at her with dark eyes. A small hiss escaped his lips when she took his shaft in hand and began lowering herself onto him.
There was no sting of pain, only explosive pleasure as she took more and more of him. Her breath was short when she’d taken him all, and then she started to bounce slowly. It was agonizingly slow and perfect all at once. She could feel every ridge on his thick shaft, every pulse of his cock as he struggled not to push her into the bed and fuck her silly.
She played on it, going slower and slower. Running her nails down his chest and pinching her own nipples.
But Aavik never snapped. He fisted his hands so hard in the bed sheets that they ripped, he bit his bottom lip so hard Hannah thought he was going to draw blood.
He wasn’t going to do anything she might not like, no matter how tortured he was.
The jolt was electricity from that realization was almost enough to push her over the edge.
“I want you to lose control with me,” she murmured.
He moved so quickly she gasped, flipping them over in a fluid motion that never broke contact. She was pushed back into the bed and Aavik loomed over her, breathing heavily.
She kissed him, arms around his neck, as he fucked her with deep, slow strokes. He sped up, faster and faster until she was moaning so much that she couldn’t kiss him anymore.
She brought one hand to his horns and managed through the whimpers to ask, “Can I touch them?”
“You can do whatever you want to me.”
She held her horn, using it to anchor herself as he thrust powerfully into her. He groaned at this, though she didn’t think the horn had any feeling in.
It did feel powerful though, holding both horns as he brought her closer and closer to the edge, pounding the exact spot she needed again and again.
It was so distinctly alien that it was a turn on.
His hand came to her hip and moved her just slightly down the bed, and the pleasure exploded immediately. He brought her to orgasm in just two swift strokes to this new place he’d found inside her.
He buried his face in her neck as he came, horn brushing against the side of her head. “Fuck,” he said.
She almost wished she couldn’t understand Vaherian. To hear him curse in satisfaction in his native language would have been a turn on.
He collapsed against her, keeping most of his weight off her but allowing their bodies to touch everywhere. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and held him tight, closing her eyes because now the spell had broken and intrusive thoughts threatened to ruin her afterglow.
The most important being doesn’t look like they have condoms on Vaher.
They lay for a few minutes before she couldn’t take it any longer and pushed him away. He looked at her face closely, and she was surprised when her smile was genuine. “I just need to use the bathroom,” she said.
He rolled off and let her up. She walked to the bathroom with his sticky seed running down her leg and chewed on her bottom lip. Sitting on the toilet and cleaning herself up, she fought back tears.
It had been so perfect, she had never felt that good, but her brain just wouldn’t let it last.
She ghosted a hand over her stomach.
So maybe she was pregnant now.
Another choice taken from her.
19 WRAXIC
When Veiko and Wraxic returned to the room after the king’s outing to the city, Wraxic knew something had happened.
Aavik and Hannah sat at opposite ends of the couch. Her nose was buried in a book and he was sat with his head back and eyes closed.
The smell of sex hung in the air.
Jealousy ripped through him before he could stop it, but it was quickly replaced by a soothing balm of hope. Did that mean she’d accepted it? Accepted them as her mates?
Of course Veiko got straight to bursting his bubble. “So, I’m guessing you went investigating. What did you find? Nothing?”
“Not nothing,” Aavik said, shifting close to Hannah. “We found a tunnel beneath the temple.”
“What was in it?” Veiko asked.
Wraxic felt himself shutting down with every word they spoke. He didn’t want to hear any of this. He didn’t know why they were even indulging the possibility that the king was doing something untoward. They’d devoted their lives to him.
“We didn’t go in,” Aavik said. “I didn’t want to risk taking Hannah down there when it could be dangerous.”
Veiko nodded. “Good idea. We’ll go and look now.”
“You can’t go without me,” she protested.
“Yes we can,” Veiko responded, folding his arms. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to risk you getting hurt.”
Wraxic was surprised by Veiko’s candidness.
Hannah apparently was too. She raised her eyebrows.
Veiko rolled his eyes. “Don’t look so shocked.”
“
Really, though,” Aavik said. “You should stay here. We won’t be long.”
The two men turned to look at Wraxic, who had taken a step backward to physically extract himself from the conversation. “What?” he asked.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Veiko asked.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“I take it you’re coming with us?”
Wraxic shrugged his shoulders.
“Will you stop acting like a child,” Veiko said.
Wraxic snarled. He might be younger than his two teammates, but he was hardly a child. “Having loyalty doesn’t make me immature.”
“Ignoring evidence in front of you is stupidity not loyalty,” Aavik responded.
“Someone should stay with Hannah,” Wraxic said. “Some guards tried to walk her to who knows where yesterday. It’s a bad idea to leave her on her own.” He might not believe that there was anything sinister in the guard’s actions yesterday, but Aavik certainly did. He could play up to that.
Aavik wavered, just like Wraxic knew he would. “You’re right.”
Hannah scowled. “No he isn’t. Wraxic is the one who needs to see this most. He’s in complete denial.”
For the first time, Wraxic felt angry at his mate. “I’m not in denial.”
“Take him with you,” she said, folding her arms. “He needs to see whatever is in that tunnel.”
“He’s right about the guards though,” Veiko admitted.
“I can contact you with my AI if anything goes wrong, can’t I?”
“That’s not good enough.”
“And you can teleport back here straight away.”
“You can instruct your AI to send your location to us every now and then, to make sure we know where you are,” Aavik suggested. “It’s not perfect, but it should keep you safe.”
“I’ll stay,” Wraxic said. “Just tell me afterward that you’ve found nothing, and that’ll be fine.”
“You’re coming with us,” Veiko instructed.
He couldn’t ignore a direct order from a superior.
He stepped forward and realized only when he saw her shrink away from him that he was scowling at Hannah.
“Let’s go,” Aavik hissed, and snatched his arm.
