Her grandmother had crudely, but probably more accurately, described it as hot pants—hormonal Armageddon.
Monica found hers—hormonal Armageddon—only a few weeks after settling into her ‘new life’.
She hadn’t even realized that there was a reason they were following the little stream, other than the obvious one—that it was their water source and they didn’t want to wander far from it.
So it was a completely wonderful surprise to her when they climbed a rise perhaps two weeks in to their journey and saw an enormous lake sprawled before them.
She inhaled a sharp gasp of pleasure that instantly caught the attention of both men.
“It must have been beautiful … before,” she murmured.
‘Bath’ her inner voice whispered right behind that, her senses having swiftly assessed the situation.
There was a narrow beach at the edge—no sign of any sort of predators, two legged or more, and it was the warmest day she could recall since she’d been stranded in the seventh circle of hell!
The instant all of that connected in her mind, she bounded forward and began to jog toward the edge of the lake.
She caught Dar and Kael off guard. She had a good head start before they emerged sufficiently from their stunned surprise to try to catch her.
She chuckled playfully when she realized they were giving chase and ran faster.
Dar wasn’t laughing when he tackled her, however. He was clearly furious.
“Little fool!” he snarled. “Do you not see the steam rising from the surface? We have no notion how hot it is! It could boil you alive!”
Rolling off of her, he jerked her to her feet none too gently.
As if she wasn’t already throbbing all over from being tackled and body slammed, Monica thought indignantly, trying to pretend she didn’t hurt all over from his roughness and struggling with twin urges to cry like a baby and cold cock him with something that would rattle his brains!
“She did not know,” Kael pointed out, his voice tight with his own anger and fear.
For a moment the two glared at one another as if they would come to blows. Finally, Dar shook his anger off. “Check the perimeter. I will find something and test the water.”
He focused on Meeka once more. “Sit!” he growled, pointing to the ground.
Monica sucked in an indignant breath at the command, but she sat, glaring at his back when he turned and walked off.
The throbbing pain from the fall/tackle eased off fairly quickly. She didn’t know how he’d managed to knock her down without causing serious injury and pain, but the truth was, as angry as she was about it, he hadn’t actually hurt her.
He was limping, though, as if he’d banged up his previous injury.
Served him right!
She felt guilty as soon as the thought crossed her mind, realizing finally that he must have had some reason to behave so strangely, or at least think he did.
That supposition sank in more fully and made her blood run cold as he approached the lake and dipped a piece of vegetation in that he’d found. When he pulled it out, he examined it carefully then tossed it aside and lowered his hand until it was just inches from the surface. After hesitating for several moments, he ‘tapped’ the water’s surface and finally, slowly, put his hand in.
Monica surveyed the lake with new eyes, noting the steam rising from the surface.
She’d thought it was just fog, ordinary condensation because the water was warmer than the air temperature.
Nausea rose in her throat as images of diving in and being boiled alive danced through her head.
Why hadn’t she thought about that when she knew there’d been an eruption of a new volcano in that area where they’d crashed, because of the eruption.
She knew this world was unstable from the impact.
Dar turned to look at her for a long moment and finally summoned her with a hand gesture.
A lump rose in her throat.
The discovery that she’d had a close call with death, or at least the possibility of it, had killed her joy in finding a place to bathe.
“Is ok,” Dar said coaxingly.
She should have felt secure in his judgment considering the lengths that he’d gone to to make sure it was safe before he allowed her in, but she discovered that the sense of security she’d been feeling pretty much since she’d joined Dar and Kael was more fragile than she’d realized. She merely nodded, though, instead of trying to argue—which was really difficult anyway. “Ok. I don’t want to anymore.”
He gave her an exasperated look, but instead of trying to coax her again, he shrugged, surged to his feet and stripped off his clothing—the meager rags that covered his privates.
Monica didn’t actually have the chance to look away. She was too shocked to command herself to.
And she got an eye full!
She thought she’d already seen pretty much everything he had because the ragged garment he was wearing didn’t even cover as much as the ragged/holey pants Kael wore.
But he had a gigantic penis erectus! And a gigantus set of testicles!
She didn’t realize her jaw had slid to half mast until she discovered how dry her mouth was.
Feeling her face turn as red as fire, she looked away, but not before she caught the look of amusement on Dar’s face.
Before her discomfort had time to wane, Kael stripped and strode past her to the water, his penis swinging like a pendulum.
She didn’t look at his face, but she suspected he would be wearing a similar amused smirk.
Purely male reaction?
Or were they more than just very close friends, she wondered abruptly?
When they’d settled in the water, she surreptitiously studied them, looking for clues that they might be related.
Dar, she discovered to her discomfort, was studying her when she finished studying Kael’s face and looked toward him.
“What do you think she is thinking?” Kael asked.
Dar flicked a look at Kael when he spoke. “I am fairly certain that it is not the same thing that is on your mind.” He paused. “Or mine.”
“That is disappointing,” Kael said wryly. “The only female I have seen in well over a year, and she has no interest in us.
“Well, the only pretty female that I have interest in,” he amended before Dar could comment.
“Has it been no longer than that?” Dar asked, his voice sounding a little strange. “It feels like a lifetime.”
Kael, drawn by that odd tone in Dar’s voice, flicked a look at him, saw that he was staring toward Meeka and turned to look and then simply stared, dumbstruck, mesmerized.
Meeka was undressing.
He had had no notion she was so cunningly made!
His brain melted down and his cock stood at attention.
She looked at both of them uneasily when she reached the edge.
Dar cleared his throat and his voice was still raw when he spoke. “It is safe, Meeka.”
She looked disconcerted, but she moved carefully into the water. A pleased smile curled her lips. “Oh my god! It’s hot! It feels great!”
“Loka’s balls, that is tempting!” Kael murmured in a low growl.
Dar sent him a hard look. “That is why we will not move closer to her.”
“And if she comes to us?” Kael asked in a strangled voice.
“She may discover two mindless, very randy kilden,” Dar murmured, then added dryly as he watched her move slowly in their direction, “She may be more terrified than thrilled. We will be lucky if she does not take to her heels if she realizes just how randy we both are. Just because we are not put off by the fact that she is not one of us it does not follow that the same could be said for her.”
Kael frowned. “She does not seem … repulsed that we sleep so closely to her. In fact, she does not even seem uneasy anymore as she did in the beginning.”
“That only means that she has accepted the warmth and safety we offer. She has not
shown an interest in mating—some curiosity, granted, a degree of acceptance—but she has not encouraged more that I have seen.”
Clearly she had no notion of how slender a thread his self-control was or she would not look at him in just that way—wide eyed with uneasy curiosity and shyness—when she was close enough that he could pounce upon her.
He was oh so tempted to take it as an invitation, but the uneasiness in her eyes kept him firmly planted where he was.
Chapter Eight
Monica was not bold. She had never been known to do anything daring and certainly not risqué. She kept telling herself that she wasn’t now. She needed a bath! She had a chance at a bath and it was nothing more than good sense to make use of the situation because she’d already learned the hard way that water was way too important for life to squander it on hygiene in a general way.
Unfortunately, she’d never gotten used to the community baths they had on the mother ship. Every bath day was sheer torture for her. She bathed in record time and retreated. There was no pleasure to be derived from it beyond the fact that she smelled fresher and felt better for a few days.
The fact was, unless they were going to make camp near this lake, it could be a very long time before she got another chance.
Their interest was palpable and it made her uneasy.
It could just be curiosity.
After all they were alien to one another.
Lust was probably the furthest thing from their minds.
She settled gingerly in the water when she’d waded in deep enough to cover herself—she thought.
The water was just hot enough to take some adjusting to the temperature.
And she discovered she hadn’t gone far enough to cover her breasts. The water level was just enough to cover the bottoms.
Trying to act casual, she scooted a little further and felt better when the water was lapping the tops of her breasts.
She slid a surreptitious, sideways glance at Dar and discovered both Dar and Kael were as stiff as pointers.
Her heart fluttered uncomfortably in her chest.
It took an effort even to think of something to do but finally it occurred to her that she could rub her skin. She tried scrubbing with a little sand from the bottom but decided that was just too abrasive and focused on rubbing and scraping lightly with her nails.
Her hair, which had grown to a staggering length during the outbound voyage, floated and swirled around her, lightly brushing her from time to time and startling the hell out of her. Every time it brushed against her, she jumped, certain some living thing from the water was checking her out for dinner.
The water felt absolutely divine, but everything else about the experience was unnerving. She scrubbed all over and resolutely stood up to climb out.
The air was absolutely frigid!
It had felt chilly before she’d gotten wet, soaked in hot water a good twenty minutes!
Now it felt as if it was forming an ice sheet from the residual water on her skin. Shivering, her teeth beginning to chatter together like castanets, she hurried back into her suit.
She began to feel warmer immediately, but her hair was sopping wet. She twisted it until she’d rung all of the water out that she could and then began trying to work her fingers through it to detangle it.
Dar and Kael had gotten out, as well.
She was peripherally aware of it and still so focused on her task that she flinched when one of them touched her shoulder and whipped a startled look around. Dar, she discovered, was holding a piece of what appeared to be a comb. Instead of handing it to her, though, he placed it on the ground beside her and began working with his fingers to divide her hair into sections.
Monica was more than a little disconcerted, but she hadn’t been having a lot of success in detangling it herself. She was willing to sit still if they were willing to help her tame it.
‘They’ because as soon as Dar had worked one part, Kael took it into his palm, fisted his hand around it, and produced another piece of a comb to work at the tangles, starting at the ends—which showed he had a good deal of familiarity with the chore of detangling long hair.
There was an intimacy to the task that she hadn’t really counted on, an escalation of sensual awareness, in her, at least. It wasn’t that she was particularly aroused by his actions, but she very quickly became hyperaware of him—of his gentleness and dexterity as he worked quickly to detangle her hair and divide it into more workable sections.
Of the size of his hands—the size of him compared to her.
She supposed that sudden awareness should have alarmed her.
But that didn’t feel like the sensation snaking its way through her and chasing away the cold.
She’d become used to being around them in a way that had dulled her awareness of their sizes relative to her. She’d thought of Dar as the big muscular one and Kael as the ‘wiry’ one. Now, she realized her perspective had been skewed by the ‘contempt’ of familiarity.
Kael wasn’t small or slender by any stretch of the imagination—not compared to her size. He only seemed that way, she realized, because Dar looked to be half again his size—was built more like a fullback or a competition weightlifter while Kael had a build similar to a baseball player or maybe basketball, although he wasn’t actually much taller than Dar.
A sense of anticipation took root and began to grow in her the closer they came to finishing the task they’d set for themselves.
She hovered seemingly endlessly when Kael finished the section of hair he was working on and released it, sitting back but making no attempt to move away.
Dar took that section and began to weave it together with the section he’d untangled until he had a single, thick braid nearly to her waist.
The sound of tearing cloth drew her attention and she glanced toward Kael. He held up a narrow strip of fabric from his trousers. Dar took it and she felt the tug as he tied the ends of her hair with it.
Instead of releasing it when he was done as Kael had, Dar hesitated for a long, long moment and then fisted his hand around the hair at her nape. Giving the braid a firm tug, he brought her crashing gently back against his shoulder.
Monica met his gaze in shocked surprise, but the heated desire, the intent in his gaze was hard to misinterpret. It went through her like wildfire, spreading heat, jacking her heart rate, energizing, electrifying and at the same time draining her of strength.
Not once, not even for a split second, did doubt creep in.
As he closed the space that separated them and she felt the heat of his breath, she felt weaker and weaker with anticipation until she began to think she might hyperventilate and pass out and miss the thrill of her life.
Thankfully, that didn’t come to pass. There was a brief moment of wonder when he pressed his lips to hers, when she felt his taste and touch and scent as an invasion, as an alien breach of her personal space. And then she was enveloped in a conflagration of warring sensations that swept her away from the world she had crashed upon and into the glory and wonder of infinity, of love, craving, and belonging. Desire filled her like a welcome home, ousting any seeds of doubt that might have taken root and lingered.
She discovered the texture of his skin and the strength of his muscles with her hands as he explored her mouth with his tongue, strumming more desire with each stroke of that part of him along hers. She spanned the length and breadth of him with the expansion of her senses.
She found herself wanting more, wanting to tear off the suit she’d just donned so that she could feel his body against her own.
His withdrawal was so abrupt it left her reeling, too dizzy even to open her eyes until the world stopped spinning so crazily.
When she finally managed to pry her eyelids up and part the darkness, she saw that he was staring up at the sky.
Alarm went through her. His posture alone signaled a threat, but her body was sluggish in changing gears. She felt heavy and uncoordinated as she shifted away from him a
nd tried to gain her balance.
Something white drifted lazily toward her, hit her nose with an icy bite.
She stared blankly at the smattering of others she could see.
Abruptly, Dar surged to his feet, carrying her with him. “Loka’s balls! Kael! It is snowing! By the gods! We are done for if we do not find shelter fast! Maybe even then,” he muttered, scanning the area around them and the horizon in every direction. He felt sick to his stomach as the full implication settled inside.
He had found a sprinkling of tiny green shoots when he had been searching for something to burn. It had given him hope.
It was nauseating how quickly that could be snatched away.
Any hope at all that tomorrow would be better, that there was promise of better, at least, of resurrection of their world from a dying planet inhaling its last gasp to a living thing.
Kael was on his feet in a moment, but it was more a reaction to Dar’s sudden movement and a dim awareness that that suggested danger than because he sensed it himself. He was too deeply drugged by the desire he’d felt in Dar for Meeka to gather his wits for many moments. He simply stared at Dar blankly, struggling to jar his sluggish mind to comprehend.
“It is mid season, Kael! The hot season! It is snowing!”
“It should not be snowing,” Kael echoed, turning it in his mind, digesting it, absorbing with a growing fear he could not identify immediately. “God’s balls!”
“We can exclaim over the horror later—after we find shelter,” Dar said grimly. “You are more familiar with this area that I. Where?”
Kael turned in a circle, trying to orient himself. Nothing looked familiar but the lake and even that was not entirely as he recalled. There were no trees, no structures to serve as landmarks.
The government had had an intake facility not far away, though, a tall office building surrounded by a collection of low lying buildings with basements!
Struggling with a sense of panic, he looked up and found the bright area that indicated the sun and then tried to overlay the view with memory. “This way, I think,” he said finally, striking off in a westerly direction.
Exodus: Extinction Event Page 7
