He tensed, but, “Good,” she said. “I can stroke you better if you’re wet.”
Her palm cupped the head, turning from side to side to oil her glove in his juice. The delicious feel of the leather rotating over those sensitive nerves made him drench her more. Her grip slid down easily, then up again faster. He thought back to his years in the workhouse and on the streets, when he would have given his eyeteeth for the smallest physical kindness. Now he had it, and it didn’t mean a thing. Overcome by it all the same, another tear of bliss trickled from his eye.
The woman touched his cheek with her second hand, a tenderness at odds with her detached expression. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t bare this soul-deep hunger for connection when she appeared so composed.
“Breathe,” she said softly. “Breathe through the rise and the climax will be deeper. Breathe and you’ll empty out.”
The best he could do was gasp. Her hand was suddenly moving faster than a human’s could. The friction of her strokes burned hotter than his blazing skin. He climbed the slope to coming until his body’s anticipation hurt. His stones felt as if that’s what they were made of. They pulled up urgently between his legs.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Go.”
She wrapped her second hand around his shaft, pushing both fists together at its center before pushing out again. His crown registered every finger that squeezed over it. She was stretching his cock in both directions. Her skill astounded him, not to mention the matter-of-fact manner in which she employed it—when all the while she nearly killed him with pleasure. Light flared behind his tightly shut eyelids a second before the climax tore out of him.
When he came, his hips jerked off the couch, joints and muscles straining without his control. Long, hot bursts of seed jetted and splashed down. He groaned as each brought him closer to complete relief, the sound harsh and guttural.
“There,” she said, milking the last sweet spurts. Then she let go.
His organ sagged without her to hold it, as replete as it had formerly been desperate. He opened his eyes and looked at her, forgetting he hadn’t wanted to. Her hand came out as if to stroke him one more time, but she pulled it back at the last moment and held it to her ribs. Her snug white glove was covered with his spunk, her heart pounding. He could see the quick vibration through her yellow robes. Whatever went on behind her alien silver eyes, she was not unmoved by what she’d done to him.
“Sor—” he said, wishing he could reach out to her. “You dint—”
“No.” She stood, her movements crisp and graceful. “I don’t need anything.”
This might have been the biggest lie she had ever told, but she clung to it. The human was tired, relaxed from his orgasm and still weak from the narcophane. She covered him with the blanket and retreated to the sleeper and its monklike beds. Privacy did not help. His shape was branded on her brain. His muscles. His cock. The fountaining of his seed. At the end, she would have given anything to feel those things on her naked skin.
She stripped off her gloves, as if that would help her deny it. She would have to clean them before they could be worn again, but for the moment she just hugged herself, standing hot and restless in the center of the rattling room.
She would not masturbate, no matter how her sex pulsed and wept. She knew she’d never forgive herself if she gave in. Loss of control was her enemy, this attraction wrong in every way she could think of—wrong and dangerous.
A man who shed tears of pleasure was the last person the Forettes’ daughter could afford to be drawn to.
Chapter 4
HARRY came awake hard and throbbing, as he very often did. His appetite for carnal gratification could be a nuisance. Most days, he would rather have gone straight out on his rounds than take care of it. Now his prick felt sore where the blanket chafed it. He tried to remember if he’d worked himself to release before he fell into bed. Had he drunk enough to forget? For that matter, had he drunk enough to make his house seem like it was shaking?
His eyes snapped open as the truth slammed back into him.
He was on a train going God knew where. He’d been kidnapped. And drugged. And a beautiful, black-haired demon had given him the wanking of his life.
His cock twitched hopefully at remembering that.
“Shut up,” he muttered, then experimented with sitting up.
His legs felt like they were made of rubber, but they worked. He was alone in the train car’s sitting room. It was the slate-gray hour before dawn, and he had to piss so badly he wasn’t sure he could think about escaping until he did.
Luck was with him. He found a bathroom behind the first door he tried. It was a little satin jewel box with a flush commode. He refrained from flushing when he was done, suspecting the mechanism would make more noise than was good for him. Sadly, the bathroom’s round window was too small for him to squeeze out of.
Resigned to doing this the hard way, he pulled on his trousers and grabbed his boots. He gave himself no time for second thoughts, but braced his trembling muscles and half-ran, half-threw his shoulder at the locked carriage door.
It burst open with a bang. He had an instant to notice how fast the landscape was racing backward before he fell—which he did for longer than he expected. Arms thrust out to catch himself, he hit a slope belly-first and slid. He was gasping when he finally stopped. The train had been running on a gravel grade maybe ten feet high. His chest was scraped raw from skidding down it, but other than that he was fine. Most important, the train was chugging on without him.
Shaking from delayed shock and fear, he pulled on his boots and got up. He’d landed in a rural village—in Jeruvia to judge by the shop signs. Unfortunately, he knew no more than five words of that language. He couldn’t stay here. He wouldn’t be able to ask for help or tell friend from foe. He looked back at the train, receding slowly along the tracks. The demon had to have heard him break the door. She was probably raising the alarm right now.
Run then, he thought, eyeing the woods beyond the town’s last small cottages. Hopefully, between the dimness and the train taking time to stop, he’d find cover enough to hide.
Khira jerked awake the second the door banged open. The human had escaped. He had leaped from a moving train. She grabbed her tiny comm unit.
“Tell them to stop the train,” she said as soon as the guard answered. “The human has escaped.”
“I understand,” he responded, for once all efficiency. “We’ll get him as fast as we can.”
She ran to the window to see if she could spot him. The figure she saw was small, but that had to be the human running and stumbling across open ground. She couldn’t imagine how he was doing it. He should have been too wobbly to walk for another day. Her throat went tight at his determination. Even a lowly human treasured his freedom.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, stroking the chilly window as the train’s brakes screamed. “If you knew the whole story, you’d know I have no choice but to bring you back.”
She didn’t know what explanation—or bribe—the guards had given the engineer, but they had the train stopped and the human back in their control within a quarter hour.
Khira joined them at the edge of the bare gray woods. Frost crunched on the fallen leaves, but the air smelled country-sweet. She dropped the satchel she was carrying and drew in a breath. The human was struggling violently between the guards, doing his level best to enlarge their knowledge of human swear words. The naked rage in his face was frightening.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “you couldn’t have outrun them even if you weren’t drugged. Yama have a mean racing speed of thirty miles per hour.”
This didn’t seem to soothe the human. He snapped his mouth shut, then immediately burst out again. “You have no right to hold me against my will! I’m a free citizen of Ohram, with a business to see to! Whatever you’re trying to get from me—trust me, lady—I’m not giving it up!”
One of the guard
s stuffed a gag into the human’s mouth. Evidently, he’d heard this speech before and dismissed the idea of this human having a “business” as easily as she did. Would a businessman have been drinking in that seedy pub? Would he be wearing such shabby clothes? The guard nodded at the satchel. “You removed the prohibited technology from the car?”
“Yes,” she said, knowing just as he did that they couldn’t return to the train even if they knocked their captive unconscious. One witness could be bribed to silence, but three Yama traveling with a human were bound to raise questions among a few hundred. “Can a transport collect us here?”
“Requested one already,” said the other guard. “They’ll be here before sunup. I doubt these villagers will see a thing.” He jerked his chin at the human. “You want us to redose him?”
“No,” she said, her body clenching at the thought of another round with him and the kicker. That idea appealed to her a bit too much. “Just put him in restraints. I want his system clear of drugs by the time we land at the Mount.”
The silent arrival of the Yamish transport turned at least half of Harry’s fury into awe. The flying vehicle—which Harry didn’t notice until it hovered right above them—was the size of a four-horse lorry. Shaped like a chevron, its dull pewter metal matched the still-dark sky. It landed light as a feather on a stretch of winter-bleached glass.
Harry whistled as a section of its side rolled up to form a door. Everyone suspected the Yama had technology they weren’t sharing, but no one knew it was as advanced as this. He almost forgot to struggle as the guards gripped him from either side and carried him into the, thankfully, well-heated vehicle.
Once inside, the guards strapped his legs, arms, and neck to a leather seat. The female demon situated herself beside him, as calm as if she saw people being strapped to chairs every day. Then the transport took off again. From the inside, the walls of the flying machine were transparent. Harry watched the ground fall away at a dizzying rate, the village and the train shrinking down to toys.
“Blimey,” he breathed, unable to keep the exclamation in.
Interestingly, the lady demon looked as if she were trying to restrain a smile. Head down, she busied herself with what he soon discovered was a doctor’s kit. It contained a salve that she dabbed gently over his abraded chest.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked in an undertone, sensing she was likelier to answer than the guards. They had buckled themselves into seats directly in front of him and the doctor. At the very front, in the curve of the chevron’s nose, sat a uniformed male driver.
“You are injured,” the doctor said, her gloved hand smoothing salve across his belly with a care that had his cock stretching. Harry tried to ignore the response.
“I mean, why have you kidnapped me?”
She pressed her full lips together and withdrew her hand. “You’ll be fine. The utmost care is being taken for your safety.”
“But I haven’t agreed to come with you. You must know what you’re doing is wrong.”
She closed her kit and set it on the transparent floor of the vehicle. “You’ll be fine,” she repeated, and said no more for the remainder of the ride.
That ride carried them rapidly out of Jeruvia and over the North Sea. Harry gasped and gripped the arms of his chair at the sight of whitecaps so far below. The demons must be taking him to the Northland, to their home. He’d be surrounded by people who barely considered him a rational being.
He closed his eyes and began to pray silently. He’d gotten out of tight spots in his life before, but he could not imagine how he’d squeak out of this.
They flew for perhaps half an hour, during which time ice flows and families of whales appeared. Under other circumstances, Harry would have been enchanted. Today, he was hard-pressed to see how things could get worse.
In that, he underestimated his ill fortune. The transport came to a sudden, floating halt over a gigantic, craggy island of ice. The highest peak glittered like a diamond in the morning sun, its steep sides glowing blue and green from within. The transport descended until it alighted on a flat platform near the mountain’s top. Men in smart black uniforms that matched their driver’s scurried out in lockstep from a cave nearby.
Harry didn’t have enough breath to whistle. There would be no running away from this.
“We’re here,” the doctor said, her hand coming out—unthinkingly, Harry assumed—to touch his knee. She was a picture of suppressed excitement as she leaned forward in her seat.
God help me, Harry prayed, because some absurd part of him was excited, too.
The human’s mood was grim by the time the guards escorted him from the transport. He neither resisted nor tried to flee. Khira hoped he realized he had no chance of escape and was prepared to make the best of his situation. She was not, however, betting on it.
They reached the lab at the end of the tunnel without incident. Khira told the guards they could leave. Though the pair exchanged one of their clone looks, they complied.
Khira was relieved. The human had to learn to answer to her, with or without the emperor’s men to back her up.
At the moment, he was running his hands in wonder across the shielded ice walls of his room. Mount Excelsior was a glacier, stabilized and adapted for lab use twenty years ago. All the lovely greens and blues of the ice mountain’s former travels had been preserved. Even she, who had studied every spec she could get her hands on ahead of time, experienced a wash of exhilaration at being here. She was sorely tempted to run her hands across the walls herself.
That, or give in to her hunger to stroke the human’s spine. He had left his shirt on the train, and his bare back was a wedge of thick, male muscle covered in silky skin. She regretted not getting the chance to touch it the night before, if only because it led to the equally spectacular rounds of his bum.
She had never had a man this strong-looking in her bed.
“The walls are warm,” he marveled, beginning to turn. “I can see they’re made of ice, but they’re warm.”
He caught her licking her upper lip. The nervous gesture exposed the dark forked marking on her tongue, the very marking that had led humans to label her kind demon. Though he didn’t seem repelled, the human’s face went still. He stared at her mouth, causing its surface to buzz oddly. Then he lifted his gaze to hers. She tried to read his emotions, but humans expressed themselves through their auras differently than her people did. All she registered was a sudden increase in his focus on her.
“You must be hungry,” she said, feeling the need to distract him. “I will request you be brought a meal.”
Perhaps a taste of superior Yamish cuisine would convince him he was better off where he was. She had no illusions that, just because he’d stopped struggling physically, his resistance was at an end. She could almost see the wheels turning in his mind as he paused to consider her.
“I’d like you to join me,” he said.
This took her by surprise. “To join you.”
“One thing I’ve learned is that if you can’t get the better of someone in a fight, you have to bargain.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “You have nothing to bargain with.”
The bed sat in the center of the room. It was formed from a slab of clear Northlandic quartz, chosen for its light and sound conducting properties, and mounted on a shining, moveable frame. Khira did not appreciate the fact that she noticed it so starkly now, or that the human chose that moment to step to it and put his hands on the silver rail. They were big, capable hands with long fingers. Khira had seen that when he stroked the wall.
“You can tell me why you brought me here,” he said. “Maybe I’ll decide to cooperate.”
Oh, she did not like his reasonable tone. It stank of strategy. In fact, it stank of a self-possession humans weren’t supposed to have.
“I do not require your cooperation,” she said coolly.
The human’s slow, canny smile was almost enough to make her believe that he could read a
uras, too, that he could see her hidden remorse and guilt.
“You may not require my cooperation, but I think you want it. You wouldn’t have bothered to treat my injuries if that weren’t true.”
“That was simple civility. Any Yama would have done as much.”
“Would they?” He crossed his arms to express his doubt.
Khira had been unjust. His chest was every bit as compelling as his back. The way its pectoral muscles bulged made her body feel all too warm. She was as wet as she’d been the previous night when she gave him ease. She grimaced as a creamy trickle slid down her thigh. Her voice was rough when she answered him.
“I admit my job would be easier if you weren’t fighting me.”
“So I’m a job.”
She did not deign to confirm his guess. “You will not be harmed,” she said instead.
At this, he shook his head. “Lady, I already have been. But I’m willing to overlook that if you’ll break bread with me.”
Breaking bread sounded like a ritual she shouldn’t join, but he wasn’t finished disarming her. “My name is Harry,” he said and stuck out his hand.
She stared at it. She was familiar with the human tradition of shaking hands, but she’d removed her gloves the minute they landed. The things had been stained with salve and, before that, with his emissions. She’d tossed them into the first disposal unit they’d passed.
His eyebrows rose at her reluctance to reciprocate. “This is the part where you tell me your name.”
He was only asking her to press palms. If she did not do it, he would think her afraid of this obvious attempt to forge a bond of sympathy. The shake would be a brief contact. Unless she pressed the whorl of energy above his heart, she wouldn’t absorb much of his essence. If agreeing lulled him into complacency, what was the harm?
The harm was that she didn’t know the harm, but she pushed the caution away.
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