by Trisha Telep
Taven had to go first. She’d have to reprogram the portal to send her back to the capital. It was what she had wanted since she’d arrived on this planet. She’d wanted to go home.
But now?
Taven lifted her chin with one finger. “I want you, Rexa.” He pulled her in close, holding her tight as if he would never let go. “Come with me.”
“Taven, I . . .”
He pulled away from her and stepped to the edge of the red light. “Come with me,” he said, as the light engulfed him and he disappeared.
Rexa cursed. She suddenly felt choked with an emotion she could hardly understand. She knew what she had to do. It was black and white.
She pressed her lips to the back of the control glove. Taven was right: political corruption would just roll merrily along while her brother got a slap on the wrist.
But it was the law.
She didn’t care.
The generator’s hum dropped a note and began to slow. She didn’t have much time. She had to make her choice.
The hawk cried, and she felt the tears streak down her face. There was no choice.
She stepped forward into the red light. It surrounded her and she let it sweep her away. She didn’t fight the vortex as it grew tighter and tighter.
She fell.
Strong arms caught her on the other side.
She blinked up into Taven’s shining eyes. He buried his face into her neck and held her like she was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.
“I didn’t think you’d follow,” he whispered against her skin. She looked out on a sunrise glowing over an endless forest teeming with birds and beasts, and clear running streams. “God, I’m glad you did.” He turned to her and looked at her with such awe. He kissed her with deep, fierce, true love.
She wound her fingers with his, and together they walked toward freedom.
Nuns and Huns
Charlene Teglia
One
The ship emerged from the colossal stresses of the wormhole with all klaxons blaring warnings. Captain Althea Eudora hit the override to silence them. If the ship’s structural integrity failed, crushing them all or perhaps peeling away and exposing them to hard vacuum for another variation on sudden violent death, she didn’t want that cursed noise to be the last sound she heard.
But the controls responded to her frantic hands, moving faster than her mind could, and the red warning indicators gradually shifted to green. Death by any method became a less pressing concern, to be replaced with the next: where were they? And when?
Her navigator, Su Carst, spun her chair in a circle as she took in star charts overlaying the real-time display of their current position. “Captain, confirming we emerged from the wormhole following the same trajectory as the exiles.”
“Excellent. Comm, can you pick up their ship’s beacon?”
Nia Thule frowned in concentration, long slender fingers tapping her console. “I have the signature, but it’s degraded. Enough to indicate a significant lapse in time between their emergence and ours.”
Althea nodded. They’d all known the risk they were taking. The trip through the wormhole was one way, and although they’d only been a month behind when they’d seized this ship and gone in pursuit, they’d been prepared for significant time dilation on the opposite end. “How much?”
“Over five centuries.”
“So much.” Althea slumped back in her seat, as much as the harness allowed. “They’ll have forgotten everything, their descendants.”
“Which might make our mission easier,” Nia suggested hesitantly.
It might, at that. The leaders of the warrior caste their government had rightly identified as a threat had been deported without warning, shot to the far side of a newly discovered wormhole while on a manufactured training exercise. Those men, deprived of everything they had a right to, and trained to solve problems with overwhelming force, would hardly be predisposed to listen to a scientific delegation from their home world.
But their descendants wouldn’t have to be reasoned with. And they would carry the same precious genetic material that had been so abruptly purged from their race, lest any future generations rise to threaten the order genetic manipulation had made possible. The very order that doomed them all, according to every projection Althea and her team had run from the sanctity of their cloistered institute based on Pangaea’s third moon. The very traits that guaranteed a vibrant and adaptive race were also disruptive.
Life, Althea mused, had such a tendency to be messy. Biology disapproved of political expediency. So strongly that if her team proved correct, the world they’d left behind no longer existed. The will to fight ensured the will to survive. Without the very traits that threatened the status quo, their civilization had unwittingly sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
She’d tried to get their leaders to listen to reason. At first. And then she’d realized the willful ignorance that met her team’s results was the only reason she remained at liberty. Before somebody suddenly started listening and recognized her team as the next threat to the ruling body, she’d plotted grand larceny, treason, and a host of civil infractions from small to great. And somehow, together, they’d done it. They’d hijacked the supply ship on its biannual run to their moon, and plunged headlong in pursuit of their hope for survival.
They’d made it this far fueled by desperation and determination. The same motivation would carry them through the next steps. “Triangulate that signal, and then scan the nearest inhabited world for our genetic markers.”
Three months later, Althea paused outside a door and tugged at her clothes, trying to ease the unfamiliar sensation of tight denim encasing her from hip to heel. The boots she wore were made of soft-tooled leather, and a plain white cotton T-shirt completed her ensemble. She was appropriately garbed for the occasion, she assured herself, even as she frowned at the sheerness of her shirt’s fabric and the restriction of motion imposed by her pants. The outfit was wholly impractical, and she failed to find any esthetic value in it, either. But she’d seen dozens of similarly dressed women enter the establishment before her, and several of them had engaged the attention of her target; the bar’s proprietor.
The signal they’d followed after exiting the wormhole had led them to a small, blue-green world, third in its system from a golden G-type sun. Weeks spent researching Earth’s records confirmed that their warriors had wreaked havoc as the army of invaders known as Huns, a people who suddenly appeared with their own language and no prior known history. The line of descent from the man called Attila to the man known as Caleb Bronson was unmistakably Pangaean, according to the ship’s scanners.
It had taken time to locate the men they sought, and even more time to learn the dominant language, copy local styles and attain enough working knowledge of the world to enter it undetected by the current technology.
But at some point, it would be time to declare an end to research and act. Althea hoped she’d struck the right balance between preparation and procrastination. And she really hoped the dubious custom of mechanical bull-riding would prove an effective way to attract Caleb’s interest.
The full impact of the bar’s sights, sounds and smells hit her as she crossed the threshold. She paused to adjust for a moment as the door closed behind her. After years on a moon base followed by months aboard a ship breathing canned air, the sudden plunge into so much life was staggering. Raucous music and dozens of simultaneous conversations at all volume levels were distractions she forced herself to filter out. She scanned faces and body types until her eyes came to rest on the match she sought.
His tall broad-shouldered form looked more impressive in the flesh than it had via a computerized image. His green eyes glittered with clear intelligence beneath the camouflage of hooded lids that made him appear disinterested while he took in every detail around him. Sensual lips softened the severity of his sharp cheekbones and stubborn chin. The well-defined musculature his every movement revealed showed h
e’d honed the physical gifts he’d been born with.
Caleb stood out amid the terrestrial males like a wolf among sheep. Althea wondered if they were aware of that on some level, because the bubble of personal space around his body was larger than that surrounding his counterparts. The man inspired a sense of caution in her, too. He had bred true to type. He was strong, dangerous, unpredictable. Exactly what she needed.
“Got another taker,” Boyd Maxwell jerked his head to indicate the direction. Caleb finished pouring beers, and sent four of them sliding down the bar, where they stopped at the precise spots he intended – in rapid progression like targeted missiles of malted barley – and turned his attention to the slender redhead mounting the bar’s mechanical bull.
She was worth a look even without the high-heeled cowboy boots and skintight jeans that made the most of her legs and emphasized the heart-shaped swell of her backside. The blunt cut of her straight copper-hued hair made a flattering frame for her delicate features and porcelain skin, and the fabric of her T-shirt clung in a way that hinted at rather than displayed the curves beneath.
A sign overhead invited interested parties to “Take the Challenge”. Anybody who could stay on through Caleb’s programmed course of bucking got a free pitcher of beer. Which wasn’t usually the incentive for women to climb aboard. No, most of them were vying for masculine attention. Often, for reasons he didn’t analyze, his.
The redhead seemed to sense his gaze, or maybe she’d been subtly watching him, because she raised her head to let her gray eyes meet his across the crowded, smoky bar. She studied him in solemn silence for a long moment. And then her lips tilted in a smile. She dropped him a wink as if to say, Go ahead. I can take it.
Her choice. Caleb pressed the button that launched the bull into action, and the noise around him shifted from general uproar to shouts of encouragement, catcalls, and carnal invitations. When she fell off, she’d have no shortage of partners ready to soothe any bruises she had gained.
The redhead wrapped herself around the bull and clung like a burr, if burrs were long, lithe, coordinated, and had nipples that thrust up enticingly against a tantalizing layer of white cotton. Her spine arched and relaxed as she moved with the mechanical beast, seemingly anticipating each shift in direction and reacting effortlessly. The shifts became more abrupt, the bucks harder, steeper, grouped unpredictably. She held firm. Her hair fanned out around her shoulders as the bull went into a furious head-down extended spin that usually unseated anybody who could stay on that long.
The stranger showed no signs of coming off. Instead, she leaned back with arms extended above her head to maximize the centrifugal force, like some cross between a ballet dancer and a daredevil, staying connected to the machine between her legs with the pressure exerted by her thighs and absolutely perfect balance.
The beast at last plunged to a halt. The stranger rose up gracefully and swung a leg over, dropped to stand beside the defeated bull, face flushed, eyes sparkling, a picture of lush sensuality, gleeful triumph and something else he couldn’t define.
Caleb motioned her to him. “You win,” he stated, already pulling the tap to fill her pitcher. He slid it across to her, his hand brushing hers as she accepted it. That small contact sent a frisson up his spine and made his groin tighten.
“Only if you share it with me,” she responded, still grinning like a kid who’d gotten away with something. If she’d given him a sultry come-hither invitation, he could have resisted. But the impish glee resonated with him. And hell, if she could ride a bull like that, he knew what she could do with, for, and to him.
“Deal.” Caleb tossed his bar towel to Boyd to indicate he was going off-duty, and grabbed two frosted glasses. Then he led the way to a table in the corner, for relative levels of quiet. But her unexpected victory had dropped the normal level of volume in the place to a dull roar, low enough to allow her to say whatever she wanted to him.
Which turned out to be, “This is delicious.”
Two
She tasted the froth at the top of her glass as if sampling some unknown delicacy, then tilted her head back. The icy cold beverage filled her mouth before she took a leisurely swallow, eyes closing in appreciation. She set the glass back down carefully, as if she were used to handling delicate crystal and drinking something that cost significantly more than beer.
“It’s my own recipe,” Caleb stated, wondering where she was going with this.
“You’re a genius,” she assured him with apparent sincerity. She raised the glass for another long drink.
That wasn’t the line he usually got.
“No, really,” she stated, as if sensing his skepticism. “A wonderful balance of flavors, bitter and yet sweet. And the mechanical bull, that was your program, yes? Excellent tactics.”
His lack of response made her brows draw together. “I offend you?”
“Most women say something like,‘My place or yours.’”
She tilted her head to one side, considering. “It will have to be yours. Mine is . . . complicated.”
A mixture of amusement and arousal stirred inside him, along with a curious reluctance to let the conversation come to its natural end. When was the last time he’d found it so stimulating to talk to a woman? “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself first?”
“Is that a required part of the ritual?”
“Usually.”
“I am Althea. You are Caleb.” She beamed at him, and the suddenness of it gave him a curious shock. “We are now introduced. May we proceed to your place?”
“Slow down and back up to ‘complicated’. Is sleeping with you going to get me shot?”
“Oh, no. I pose no danger to you at all.”
Caleb wondered why he wasn’t reassured. A complicated, sexy, obviously intelligent woman could pose all kinds of dangers to his peaceful existence. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
To his surprise, the offhand remark made her features still and her eyes widen, almost as if she were frightened. Then her face smoothed into calm. “No, but I thought I spoke your language well?”
“You do.” Just, oddly. But he kept that observation to himself.
“We don’t have to talk.” She leaned forward and touched the corner of his mouth with the tip of one finger. “I am sure you can think of other things we could do.”
Caleb gave in to temptation and nipped at the finger, lightly grazing the pad with the edge of his teeth. “Many things.”
Her eyes darkened. “I would like to try them all.”
Ending up at his place seemed inevitable. So did the slide of his hands through the silk of her hair, the urgent meshing of tongues and mouths, the soft sounds Althea made as he backed her up against the wall and kicked the door closed behind them. She kissed him with a mix of wild abandon and hesitation, as if she weren’t sure what to do first. Or maybe she simply wasn’t sure. The thought made him halt and drag his lips from hers.
“You want this?” Caleb rasped out the question in a voice roughened by desire.
Her eyes held his. “Oh, yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I rode a mechanical bull for you. Yes, I am sure.”
Her exasperation made him grin. So did her confession. “So you did do that to get my attention?”
Althea gave him that impish grin that did things to his insides. “It worked.”
“It did.” Caleb gave up talking for more direct communication now that his conscience was clear. They were both consenting adults, she wanted him, and he sure as hell wanted her.
Her T-shirt became a barrier he lost patience with, so he pulled it up over her head, exposing a satiny expanse of bare skin all the way down to the hip bones that showed above the low waist of her jeans. He made a sound of satisfaction at the sight and then proceeded to taste her from the line of her jaw to the hollows of her collarbones, the slant of her breasts, the valley between, the pebbled nipples that tightened as he curled his tongue around them, before mo
ving down to the soft skin below her navel. His hands gripped the rounded swell of her buttocks, drawing a low gasp from her.
Caleb paused to look up at her. Her passion-darkened eyes stared down at him, lips swollen from kissing, breath coming in soft pants. She looked wild, wanton. Wanting. With a low growl, he pulled her down to the floor and rolled onto his back with her plastered to his chest, belly to belly, thigh to thigh, far too many layers separating the lower halves of their bodies. Before he could get her pants off, her boots would have to go.
“Boots off. Now.”
She struggled to comply, but the tight leather proved difficult. Caleb recognized the problem and sat up. He turned her around and kept her in his lap, her backside snug against his groin. From his new position he could grasp her boots while she pulled her feet free, one at a time. He tossed the boots aside, not caring where they fell or what they hit.
“Pants next,” Caleb murmured, hands already working on her snap and zipper. “You okay with the floor, or should I leave these on you long enough to make our way to the bed?”
She gave him a confused look. “What?”
“My thoughts exactly.” He hooked his fingers into her belt loops and tugged the open jeans down, then off. He paused to note the lack of panties to match her lack of bra. She hadn’t worn socks, either. He put the oddity aside and decided to focus on being grateful that her choice sped up the undressing process while he stripped away the remains of his own clothes, pausing only to snag a foil square from his pocket.
Small, slender fingers plucked it from him and tossed it aside. “Not necessary.”
She was on the Pill, then. Or maybe she took shots. Whatever, the opportunity to ride this intoxicating redhead bareback had him hard as granite. He had presence of mind enough to be a gentleman and take the floor while his body provided a mattress for hers, instead of crushing her into the carpet.
