She forced her eyes open, his intense green gaze staring down at her.
His cock filled her. Her thighs strained from keeping them wrapped around his huge body for so long, as he wouldn’t let her come and kept her hovering on the brink of climax.
“Hold it,” he ordered, even as his thick shaft pressed upon her G-spot, pulling her closer.
“Please let me come!”
He grinned. “No, not yet. I must fulfill my promise.”
She tried to wiggle her body against him, to gain pressure on her clit or even more inside her, but he simply pressed her deeper into the mattress with his large body and held still.
“Please!” She knew she’d lose her mind if he didn’t let her come soon.
“Not yet. I am enjoying the view.”
Her fingers clamped around his arms, her hands not even able to span his massive biceps. “Please!”
He bumped his hips into hers. “No.”
Before long, Aine squirmed beneath him, whining. “Sammuel, please!”
“And finally, after all the begging, she says my name.” He bent his head to her neck and grazed his teeth along her flesh. “Ki’ato?”
“What?”
“Come hard, now!”
Her back arched as the supernova ripped through her body. He sat up and clamped his hands around her hips as he fucked her hard, deep, fast. “That is it, love. Come hard for me and milk my cock!”
The sensation, nothing like she’d ever known, pulled a loud cry from her as she felt him come again, triggering yet another orgasm as her body welcomed him, drinking him in, wanting to become one with him.
With every last ounce of strength wrung from her body, he rolled over and pulled her onto his chest, draping her over him, his cock still pulsating within her.
Aine slept.
* * * *
Aine didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, just that every muscle in her body seemed to ache in a pleasant way that made her poor clit throb…
No, correction, that was a hot, wet tongue stroking her clit and making it throb.
She tried to pull her legs together, to sit up, but two large, meaty hands pushed her thighs apart again.
“No,” Sammuel said. “Enjoy it.” He lapped at her, his tongue flicking and stroking, soothing and fucking her at the same time, even as his scratchy morning stubble coarsely rubbed against her oversensitive flesh. By the time he let her up, he pulled two more orgasms from her.
He looked rather smug as he propped himself up on his arms. “Good morning, love.”
She couldn’t help it. The look on his face drew a long, loud, crystal clear laugh from her.
His smile broadened. “And now I know what to do to make you laugh. One way, at least.”
“Ah, is that what you were up to?”
He kissed his way up her body until he planted one last kiss on her lips. “Not entirely. I wanted you to wake up happy.”
“What about you? Are you happy?”
He rolled onto his back. His stiff cock rose like a flagpole from his body. “I am sure I soon can be.”
Despite achy protests from her thighs, she quickly changed position and went down on him, sighing with contentment at the now-familiar taste.
“I will not bother holding back, Ki’ato,” he said as he cupped the back of her head. “So prepare.”
She was ready for him, swallowing him, refusing to let go even after he spent himself.
He tapped her on the head. “Up, love. I wish to have breakfast.”
She reluctantly released her hold on his member after placing a final kiss on it. “I thought you already did.”
Time for him to laugh. “Oh, Ki’ato, such a precious treasure you are.”
* * * *
Aine happily lost track of time. Jarl scrounged her a uniform, trousers from the ship’s stores, shortened so they didn’t trip her, worn under Sammuel’s shirts and belted to keep them from falling down her slender hips.
Hips that, if she were forced to swear to it, had developed a decidedly rounder shape than she had before.
One morning in the head, she stood in front of the mirror and studied her form. Sammuel stepped in behind her and cupped her breasts in his hands. He could rarely keep his hands off her if she was naked. Even clothed he frequently molested her, whether in their cabin or on a deserted lift, or even with her sitting in his lap on the bridge and his hand hidden between her legs by the loose folds of the shirt.
“You are beautiful, love.”
“My breasts are bigger.”
“Are they?” He hefted them. “Perhaps a little. That is normal.”
“What the fuck?”
With dizzying speed, he bent her over the counter and spanked her ass. “I warned you about your mouth, love. That type of speech does not befit you.”
She came up off the counter, enraged, embarrassed, and more than a little horny. “What the hell was that for?”
“I am your Master, and I am telling you I do not like hearing you speak like that.”
“Okay, for one, you said you’re my t’wren, not my Master, so back. The fuck. Off.”
He glared at her for a moment before bursting into laughter. Even as confused as she was over his reaction, she let him pull her to him. He smoothed his palm over her pink ass. “Because as t’arn, while we are equal under Master’s eyes as t’wren, I am also your Master because you are my responsibility. I brought you into our triad. It is my job to teach and protect you.”
“I don’t need protecting.” She forced herself to push away from him. “I’ve been taking care of myself for most of my life just fine, thank you.”
He pulled her back against him. “Do not argue with me, Ki’ato, or you will feel my hand on your ass again.”
“You cannot be serious.” She suspected he was.
“Be glad I cannot bear to take my belt to your sweet backside the way Master took his belt to mine.” He stroked her ass again. “Although I am sure I will pay for that lacking of strength when he finds out.”
“You and me are going to butt heads if you think I’m going to sit back and let you paddle me like a child.”
“Ah, but you are a child in many ways, just as I was a child when Master picked me. He was over two hundred Earth years old by then. I was in my early thirties. You are even younger than I was.”
Okay, so he had a point. “I’m not going to tolerate being disrespected.”
“You disrespect yourself by talking like some low-class trash, Ki’ato. Considering Master’s status, it would reflect upon him very poorly for you to act that way in public. T’wren are considered extensions of their t’amar-te. It would look even worse to those around us if you speak like that. They expect much more of you.”
“They can kiss my ass.”
He dug his fingers into her ass and pulled her tightly to him. “No, only Master and I may kiss this ass, Little One.” The way his eyes crinkled told her he struggled not to laugh. Over the past day, she thought she had clearly heard whispers of his thoughts, could feel his emotions. Sammuel was already keying into hers, or so he claimed.
“You’re saying I’m not allowed to express myself?” she asked.
“On the contrary, you are encouraged to express yourself and speak your mind. You can do so without swearing like that, however. You can even disagree with Master and myself in public. It is how you do it and knowing when to drop it when told to do so.”
That took a little of the mental sting out of the spanking.
She draped her arms around his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Then exactly how am I supposed to ask you to fuck me?”
He threw his head back and laughed loud and hearty. “That is a perfectly acceptable usage of that verb, love.”
She ground her hips against his. “So if I come up to you and ask you to fuck me, I won’t be punished for that?” She batted her eyes at him.
“No, love, you would not be punished for that. You would, however, be fucked.�
�� His hands slid down her ass to the backs of her thighs. He lifted her and she wrapped her legs around him. “Like this.” He lowered her onto his cock, which had predictably grown hard.
He nipped the side of her neck, behind her ear, where he discovered she was extremely sensitive. “Now, love, is this what you wanted?” He thrust hard and deep.
She held on for the ride. “Oh, yeah.”
“Since you baited me, I think your punishment this morning is to not come and think about what you do to me when you tease and torment me.” He thrust harder, quickly coming with a deep, satisfied grunt.
Aine closed her eyes and dropped her head to his shoulder as she felt his seed flowing into her. Every day the sensation became more intense, her body yearning for his release.
With her body still wrapped around him, he carried her into the shower. He patted her rump. “Stand up, love. Let us take our shower.”
She glared at him. Her clit throbbed, screaming for him now that her body had another taste of him. “You’re mean.” She stuck her tongue out at him.
The corner of his mouth quirked in a smile. “No, love, I am not mean. I am simply figuring out the best way to keep you simultaneously happy and in hand until you have learned our ways.”
* * * *
She awoke from a nap the next afternoon to find herself alone in the cabin. It didn’t worry her. She imagined Sammuel probably had official business to take care of.
She lay there for a few minutes, her nose pressed against his pillow. Even his scent wrapped around her, a comfort despite being alone in the bed.
Was this love? Did she even care anymore if it was or not?
She caught sight of her knapsack on a shelf. Sammuel never asked to see the contents. When he returned to the cabin a little while later, he found her dressed in his robe and sitting at the table with the items spread out before her.
And she was crying.
He looked handsome dressed in his uniform, his coat making his already broad shoulders appear even more impressive. When he spotted her tears he raced to her side and dropped to one knee, unmistakable concern on his face. “Ki’ato, what is wrong?”
She sniffled and wiped at her face. “Nothing. I was just taking a trip down memory lane.” She started to reach for the items, to put them back, but he caught her hand and kissed it.
“Would you do me the honor of sharing them with me?”
She studied him, trying to decide if he was serious or not.
Of course he was. He made it perfectly clear that he wanted to know as much about her as she would tell him.
She nodded.
He stood, picked her up, then sat again with her tucked on his lap. She went through the items, one by one, as she put them away.
Her old ID and custody cards, identifying her and Aggie and her parents. Picture and video cards of them. The hat she wore that day.
Her braid of hair. The copy of her ID paperwork renaming her Lorcan. Picture and video cards of her with her fathers.
Last but not least her old bear, thread-worn in places but still in good shape.
“Aggie gave it to me,” she said. “I was just a toddler but I remember it. I think maybe my third birthday.” She wiped her tears away before slipping it back into the knapsack.
“I would have liked him,” Sammuel said. “Even though just a boy, he took his responsibility seriously—to protect his baby sister no matter the cost.”
“I remember the sound of the shots when we hid from the first group of raiders. I thought Aggie was a man. He was so tall, so much older than me. I thought he was an adult.” She laughed even through her tears. “Da—Mal—said he’d never forget how indignant I sounded the night they found me. How I insisted I was a ‘big boy.’ That I told them I asked Aggie how boys acted and he told me boys were very brave and strong and didn’t cry. I tried so hard to be like that.” She broke down crying again.
He stood with her in his arms and carried her to his bed, where she finally sobbed herself to sleep.
* * * *
He spent her nap staring at her less than peaceful face. He had no doubt she lived her entire life like that, trying to be something she wasn’t, keeping herself closed off to hide from the pain. Not deep in her mind yet, but he sensed old memories troubled her, the pain she didn’t know how to release still as sharp and jagged as it felt when just a scared orphaned child hiding in a cargo hold.
When he stroked her cheek she nuzzled more tightly against him.
How did Master tolerate being away from him? Just pulling himself away from her long enough to file his status reports and receive his updates had been torture, and she was on the same ship!
She awoke a little while later. Her soft brown eyes had already lightened. In a few weeks, they would turn the same dusty green as his and Master’s eyes.
“How did you meet him?” she asked. “You know my dirty laundry. Tell me how you ended up here. You were a highly decorated, brilliant Confederation captain. I studied you in the Academy. You’re required reading.”
“We do not pick our fate, Ki’ato. It picks us.” He smiled as he thought back through the years, several lifetimes it sometimes felt like, to that day.
“Like you, I was alone. Not orphaned, but estranged from my family. I grew up on a mining planet farther within the Confederation borders than you. Raiders were not an issue, but my father was a drunk. As soon as I turned sixteen I signed myself onto a cargo freighter and ended up at a space station where a Confederation battle cruiser had docked. I ran into a group of crew, talked with them, and they introduced me to their captain.
“He took a liking to me. Not in an inappropriate way, mind you, but as a mentor. An older brother. I crewed on his ship for six months until he obtained me a place at the Academy. And from there, as you already know, history was made.”
“No, I don’t already know. How did you meet him?” She reached up and played with his long braid, fascinated by it compared to her short hair.
He also noticed she still had problems deciding how to refer to their Master, but it didn’t matter. Once they completed the ritual she would totally understand it wasn’t slavery, but freedom, joining a triad. As he recalled the events, he opened his mind to her even though he knew she couldn’t quite read his thoughts yet. At least she could easily feel his emotions.
“We were on a mission patrolling a hostile border region where the raiders made frequent incursions.”
Chapter Eight
“Dammit! I said I want a status report!” Captain Jorvis yelled at his engineer. The raider’s lucky shot had nearly pierced their hull.
“Working on it, sir!”
“Work faster,” he growled.
The raiders had separated their ship from the rest of their troops, using the asteroid ring to draw them in and cut them off. Jorvis knew the plan had risks, but he hadn’t counted on a stray radiation burst weakening their shields and making them vulnerable to enemy fire.
The other Confederation forces were fighting their way back to them, but Jorvis had a raider bounty on his head. The raiders, seeing their chance to take him, wouldn’t let him slip away again.
Six hours later, with their engines disabled and shields practically nonexistent, he gave the order he dreaded. There were enough Confederation forces in the area keeping the raiders busy that the life pods should be safe until their retrieval.
He ordered everyone off the ship, himself last. He set the self-destruct sequence before taking the final life pod. He hoped it would blast him out of range of the explosion and clear of the asteroid ring. The nearby planet, Ectar 9, wasn’t his first choice for a hiding spot, but his departure might not be noticed because of the blast.
Unfortunately, his luck didn’t hold out. A raider managed to get off a shot at his pod, disabling his sensors before another Confederation ship took it out. Busy with the fight, they couldn’t retrieve him.
The crash landing didn’t kill him. As he unbuckled his safety harness and dropped to
what had been the ceiling of the life pod, he suspected maybe survival wasn’t a good thing.
He’d been prepared to die, but not this soon. And the rocky, harsh surface of Ectar 9 wasn’t his first choice of gravesites either. A quick death during re-entry would have been preferable to slowly and painfully dying of thirst and his injuries over several days.
The atmosphere was thin and more than a little on the sulphurous side, but still breathable. He dragged himself out of his life pod and toward a rocky hillside where it looked like several caves could provide shelter.
Later that night, he felt his fever grow. The crash shattered his right leg. It had only been through sheer force of will he crawled across the rocky hardpan to hide in the caves. All he had in the way of supplies were one water bottle and his sidearm.
He wondered what it felt like to die by his own hand.
Before dawn the next morning, he gave serious thought to testing the theory when he heard rocks skittering down the hillside below his hiding spot. Pressing himself against the wall, into the shadows, he waited with the energy pistol in his lap.
A voice from outside called to him. “Captain Jorvis?”
He didn’t want to answer, knowing it could easily be a raider, but something about the depth and timbre of the voice pulled at him, comforted him.
“Here,” he gasped.
A large head appeared, silhouetted in the dim, grey pre-dawn light behind him. “Captain?” Two raised hands appeared, empty of weapons. “Captain D’arsolan Ker-Pythan, Act’huran fleet.”
For the first time since his childhood, Sammuel felt like sobbing. He dropped his pistol. “Oh, thank the gods!” One of their shadow ships.
The Act’huran had to stoop to enter the cave. At least several inches taller than his own six-seven, his large body made Sammuel feel small by comparison.
As the man’s face came into view, Sammuel saw his green eyes first, dusty green like summer grass just past spring prime, intense, drawing him in. His long, blond hair had been tamed into a braid. “How badly are you injured, Captain?”
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