by Calinda B
“I won’t believe it anyway,” she said, her voice low but unwavering.
Anger, fierce and scouring as the sandstorm, swept through him. She was like a lamb charging to the slaughter. He reached up to thread his fingers through her short hair, anchoring her head while he glared at her.
“Should I kill right before your eyes?” he rasped. “Would you believe then?”
She glared back but didn’t try to pull away. “My mind has been wiped again and again, but that emptiness isn’t innocence. I know you aren’t pure either, but I’ve seen how you watch over the girls and the ship. You’re doing everything in your power to save them.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “A cyborg mercenary accusing me of heroism?”
“I don’t know any heroes,” she said. “All I know is doing what I must. As you are.”
“And when my power isn’t enough to save them?” It hadn’t been when he’d watched the torture of his mother and first father broadcast to the entire planet. All his second father’s leadership and love hadn’t been enough to save them either. Where was his tranquility then?
“You’ll give more.”
The challenge of her certainty infuriated him. As if she could change the universe with her naïve belief. Better she learn the error of her ways early, as he had.
“You don’t think I’m bad?”
She shivered at the silky threat but kept her black gaze locked on him. “I’ve been bad too.” The confession stirred something dark in him, but she continued, “Does that mean we can’t wish for…more?”
“So you want more.” With his hand in her hair, he tilted her head back a degree, exposing her neck. “More of what? Cake? Kisses?”
She swallowed, and in her vulnerable position, he watched the pulse in her throat. “More of you.”
That revelation was more than he could take.
He brought his mouth down on hers with an unleashed ferocity that was half desperation to force her away. And half desire.
She clenched her hands on his arms with a strength that swore she knew exactly what she wanted and would take it—take him.
He deepened the kiss, suckling at her tongue, bringing her into his own mouth so that his breath backed up into his throat. He gasped and she took advantage of his hesitation to slant her mouth over his, their lips melding and not letting go.
When he tipped her backward onto the spongy mat of lichens, she resisted a moment. He tensed, but then realized she was only struggling out of her combat jacket. It flattened under her as they sprawled together in a tangle of legs.
He stripped out of his sand-robe, her hands shoving at the tough material hard enough to rip the cuff, and then his vest. Sparing a half second to praise the quick-release tabs on his boots, he kicked them off and found her fingers already wrestling with the fastener on his trousers. He tore off her utility belt and she bucked under him to let him peel off her pants. The sealant he’d patched her with in the med bay was still in place, smoky on her glistening dark skin. He kissed the point of her shoulder above the patch.
She turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide. “Your kisses taste like cake.”
“You taste like…” He trailed his mouth across the line of her collarbone exposed by her tank top, then up the column of her neck to her ear. “Sin,” he whispered against her damp skin.
She shivered, and he caught her mouth again, using the distraction to skim his hands up under her shirt to find the lower curves of her breasts.
She gasped and tilted her head back, breaking the kiss and giving him an excuse to slide the tank top up over her head.
He laid her back on the tangle of her combat jacket and the purple lichens and loomed over her, his eyes half lidded as he looked his fill.
Her dark skin and white shock of hair seemed more exotic to him than the alien moss and the defunct Hermitaj emblem glimmering on the rumpled fabric. Stripped of everything except her baseware shorts, the black of her irises swallowing the gold, everything that was fully feminine about her seemed suddenly unknowable.
“Why would you let me do this?” he asked hoarsely.
“I want to feel what I’ve been missing.”
“It’s not always sweetness,” he warned. “Sometimes it’s a fever that burns you all the way through.”
“I want it all.”
And that is how she fell.
Chapter 13
Looming over her, kneeling between her spread legs, even without his uniform or the sand-robes she’d first seen him in, he was imposing. His broad shoulders—the one blackened with the fractal tattoo—blocked the canyon behind him, as if he was a separate force of nature, and his chest…
He yanked off the thin baseware undershirt and she caught her breath.
The flowing lines of the tattoo vanished over his heart, as if the inker hadn’t been able to reach him there. She’d known he was strong, had felt the flex of muscle when she’d touched him even in passing. But to see the honed tautness of him stirred something primitive inside her, something encoded more deeply than any tech.
She might have feared Hermitaj had stolen her womanhood, but one glimpse of him sparked a surge of wetness between her legs and incinerated her qualms. She reached up and traced her finger over the ridges of his stomach to the shallow imprint of his navel. He sucked in a gasp, and she smiled.
“You’re playing with fire, innocent girl,” he growled.
“Is that why I’m burning up?” She let her hand drop from his belly to her own, tracing the same path she’d taken on him but then dipping lower to the band of her shorts.
Silver lightning flared in his eyes. “Don’t think you’ll quench that without me.” He lowered himself over her, his dark hair teasing her skin. “Where do you burn?”
“Everywhere,” she breathed. “Every place you touch me. Every place I want you to touch me.”
“Let me find each one.” He kissed her hard, his breath roaring into her and fanning the flames from the inside.
She moaned in disappointment when he lifted his head, but then he nipped at her throat. When she turned her head to give him better access, he licked the little ache.
“Sugar-frosted sin,” he murmured.
He kissed a tangle of sensation down her neck and over her collarbones. He paused between her breasts and she heaved up against him, trying to force his hand.
“So small,” he said. “So perfect for one lick, one bite.”
Her breath caught and shattered in her throat as he fastened his mouth over her breast. He drew the nipple up with soft, relentless suction, and her hips jerked at the yearning he seemed to conjure from her core. He flattened one palm over her belly, holding her fast to the earth.
“Another bite,” he whispered. The cool air of his breath over her wet skin made her shiver, but when he bit down, she cried out and arched into his kiss.
He snaked one hand under the small of her back and lifted her to his ruthless mouth as he punished her other breast with the same intense sensation.
She caught her breath on a sob as the pull of his mouth intensified the ache between her legs. She writhed against him and his knees forced her thighs further apart but didn’t touch that pulsing want at the apex. Oh, he knew, he knew what he was doing to her.
How could she fight back when she knew so little? She could only reflect like the water in the pool, sending every ripple of feeling back to him with her own hands and mouth.
She scraped her fingernails down his back and he shuddered, like a ship threading a dangerous tangle in the sheerways. So she did it again.
He groaned, and the vibration on her distended nipple made her squirm. She ran her hands down to the powerful flex of his ass and squeezed.
That brought him achingly close to the crux of her body with its throbbing heat. But still too far away. She’d have to take matters into her own hands.
She rolled down the waistband of his shorts, but unable to see what she was doing, got caught up on something. He groaned some
incomprehensible oath and heaved back, breaking her hold.
And ripping her shorts off. The tough material held for a heartbeat and then gave up in the face of superior firepower.
He threw the scrap of material aside, and her gaze caught on what his shorts had caught on.
While the entertainment vids she’d watched had seemed more confusing than useful, at least she was prepared for… No, she wasn’t prepared. She’d understood the concept, but in practice, he was more—much more—than she had imagined.
With an admonishing look at her, he peeled his shorts down over his jutting cock. Well, no wonder she’d had trouble. His engorged flesh thrust at her with wicked intent.
She licked her lips in sudden nervousness, and it jerked up another degree.
She raised her gaze to his half-lidded eyes.
“Touch it,” he murmured. “Stroke me so I believe you want it.”
Her heartbeat doubled, then tripled as she reached out and wrapped her fingers around his shaft. It throbbed at her touch, and the blunt head wept out a single tear.
“Do you want it?”
She nodded, her mouth dry but other parts of her so, so wet. Bending her knees up, she showed him, and his eyes blazed.
“By every thread of the sheerways, innocent girl, you could break me.”
“No.” She croaked out the word. “I want you, all of you, here.”
He licked his thumb and touched it to the most wanting part of her. As gentle as he was, she cried out and tried to clench her legs closed, but he wedged his body between her knees.
“Let it come,” he soothed. “Let me see you when you come.”
Helpless against his touch, she let her thighs fall open as she fell apart, her body rocking to his caresses. She all but curled around him as he moved closer.
His cock nudged into her wetness, timing his advance with the needy contractions of her inner muscles. He groaned as he buried himself inside her, and she convulsed around him.
She might have screamed, she wasn’t sure since all of her focus was inward, all her peripherals shut down, refining to just the feel of his body linked with her, all the heat and friction and a terrifying sensation of freefall, like a sheership piercing atmo and caught in endless loop of entry and escape. Was this an orgasm? She was going to explode—
She spasmed again, going beyond mere explosion to supernova, just as he exploded in a gush of hot semen and a shuddering cry.
He clasped her tight to his chest—not that she needed to breathe, possibly ever again—his cheek pressed to her temple and his gusting breath rifling through her hair. Slowly, he collapsed beside her, rolling to one side and pulling her with, so they lay still joined, legs entangled, his tattooed bicep cushioning her head, hers looped over the heaving cage of his ribs.
Even more slowly, their breathing eased as their skin cooled. She felt like a crashed meteorite; she’d survived the fiery burn and now she burrowed into him, no longer wandering some dark and lonely path through the cosmos, but home.
She wished the storm overhead would rage forever, so they didn’t ever have to leave.
His arm under her head curled, bringing her forehead within reach of his lips for a gentle kiss.
She returned the favor with a kiss on his bicep where the black lines unfurled into nothingness. “What is your tattoo?” she asked.
“A silver fern,” he said, his voice little more than a murmur. “Most youth on my world were inked, but I wasn’t able to finish mine.”
She wondered why he hadn’t completed it in the time since then. The pattern would have been obvious, the tapering edges looping back on themselves, ever onward, a quiet paean to worlds without end.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “I hear you thinking.”
“You can’t hear thinking.”
“With you, it sounds like gears.”
Since he might have been right, she did as he ordered and closed her eyes. The sweet scent of pixberry and the musk of their sex mingled with the green tang of the lichens. “So that was sex,” she said. “It didn’t look like that in the vids. Do you think that’s because of our exposure to the l’auraly?”
“What vids were you watching? Wait, don’t answer that. Yes, that was sex. No, it doesn’t look like that in the vids. The lighting in vids is much better.” His fingers traced a pattern she couldn’t identify over her bare shoulder. “The l’auraly effect. I don’t know. Most people will never experience qva’avaq-enhanced sex. I suppose you could ask the captain.”
She huffed out a laugh.
He squeezed her. “But I think what we felt was just what we wanted.”
“I felt…” She consulted her data for words but found nothing that fit. “I felt everything.”
His arm tightened around her. “Innocent girl, you shouldn’t reveal so much.”
“Not even to you? After that?”
He hesitated long enough that she thought he too must be looking for words.
“Only to me,” he said at last. “And just for tonight.”
“Is it night?”
“Somewhere it is. And it is for us.”
His hard-muscled shoulder made a surprisingly fine pillow. She nuzzled the crook of his neck. “It is always night in the sheerways.”
She meant to tease him until his flesh rose again like its own hot sun, but his hand stroking through her hair was so mesmerizing that she must have fallen asleep.
When she opened her eyes again, he was kneeling over her. The lume stick had faded somewhat, and his eyes were pooled in shadow. He was fully dressed in his dark uniform and he held something long and sharp in one hand.
A surge of alarm went through her, and she shoved herself upright, uncertain why she was so disturbed. Maybe just because she hadn’t woken with someone else since the day she roused from her first implant surgery and the technicians had explained her fate. She and her fellow commandoes had been programmed to rise and rest in waves, and they didn’t sit around watching each other sleep.
He rocked back on his haunches.
Her skin was cold, and she wrapped her arms around her nakedness. “What are you doing?” Her voice sounded rough, almost out of tune, in her ears.
“The runabout is charged.” He sheathed the nano knife at his belt and picked up the arc spanner that had been in the sand at her side. “I knocked out the worst of the dents, so we won’t look too disreputable when we pull into Rampakh.”
Why did he care what they looked like? And really, the arc spanner was too delicate for the job. She shook her head which seemed strangely fuzzy. From the vids, she’d gathered that sex left its practitioners untouched. Well, physically very touched, but essentially unmarked or at least indifferent. But something in her struck her as…odd.
She remembered what Benedetta had said about love, wishing it upon her.
Sex and love were often linked; she knew that much. But love was deeper, somehow. Although her enhancements meant she was immune to most infections, including conception, had she caught something else from joining with him? Was that even possible? Such non-essential concerns were not included in her onboard data.
His gaze was too fixed for her liking. She twisted her body away from him and reached for her discarded tank top. When she yanked it on, the tough fabric scraped over her tender nipples and she shivered at the reminder.
“Are you cold?”
He was still watching her? The chill in her skin sank toward her bones as she glanced warily over her shoulder at him. “Why didn’t you ask for my assistance?”
“I didn’t need it.” He smiled at her, but the lightness was confined to the upward curve of his lips and left his eyes a cold silver. “Besides, you looked so sweet, asleep by the pool like a little nymph.”
That didn’t sound sweet; it sounded…vulnerable. Innocent girl, he had called her, several times now.
And it hadn’t sounded like an endearment.
“Can a desert have nymphs?”
“Rare,” he admitted.
“And all the more precious for it.”
She patted around her for her shorts. They wouldn’t have gotten far on their own.
Behind her, he cleared his throat. “Your underthings were torn. Collateral damage.”
She swiveled again to stare at him. “Where are they?”
“I tossed them. I had to get rid of the cake too, since we kicked up some sand.”
Unwilling to hear any more, she grabbed her leggings and wiggled into the snug fabric without standing up. She didn’t want to expose any more of herself to him than she already had.
Her combat wear was engineered to repel dirt, but there were just enough grains of sand in her pants to grate on her. She scrambled into her combat jacket—which smelled of crushed lichens and Eril—and shoved her boots on her feet.
But when she stood, her knees wobbled.
Eril was already up, his hand under her elbow. “Steady there.”
Her head spun. “What…”
“You just got up too fast.”
She was a Hermitaj-created cyborg; she couldn’t get up too fast. “Something is wrong,” she said.
He scowled. “It’s been awhile since I had sex. But I don’t think it was that bad.”
An instinctive reassurance jumped to her lips, but then she turned a suspicious gaze on him. “You know it wasn’t. And you don’t have an ego about your sexual proficiency.”
His scowl remained in place, but the silver in his eyes glinted back at her. He took a step away from her, his hand falling to his side. “How would you know?”
“I’ve seen the way you pretend to be less than you are. You let Jorr belittle you with the nanotech knife, but you move like a warrior. You deferred to Fariz with the drone even though you knew instantly what was wrong with the runabout. The twins tease you as if they believe you aren’t dangerous.”
He stiffened. “And what do you think I am?”
She shrugged, testing her muscles which now seemed to be responding as normal. “I don’t know.”
“Then why did you trust me with your body?”
