“My name is Khira,” she said and slid her hand into his.
Straightaway, she knew that touching him had been a mistake. Her body jerked as his energy surged across the barrier of their naked skin. Her nipples tightened so swiftly she felt as if they’d been pinched. Startled by the strength of the transfer, she couldn’t gather herself enough to move.
“Khira,” he repeated, stepping closer with his hand still clasping hers. “That’s a pretty name.”
Her sex was fluttering, tiny contractions that tugged her inner muscles into an even higher state of excitement. “Release my hand,” she said hoarsely.
Rather than do so, the human—Harry—put his second hand over hers, surrounding it. “Your skin is warm, Khira. I was thinking it would be cold.”
He was close enough for her to count his spiky eyelashes, close enough to map the green and gold striations in his human irises. There was barely an inch of difference in height between them, and to her surprise, the advantage was on his side. Her race was usually the taller one. As Harry’s thighs brushed hers, Khira wondered where her vaunted “demon” strength had gone. She seemed unable to call on it as his energy poured into her. Her head was swimming, her body aching with desire. She found herself swaying toward him, and discovered his thighs weren’t the only thing brushing her.
She didn’t need to see his erection. She could tell it was as large and hard and thick as it had been the night before. She watched his face, mesmerized, as he licked his lips and inclined his head.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
With the tip of his tongue, he touched the spot between the points of her upper lip. “Returning the favor you did for me.”
When he sealed their mouths together, Khira lost her power to move. Everywhere their bare skin touched, her body basked in etheric force. Where they didn’t touch, it crawled over her in hot, golden waves, seeping deliciously into her flesh until she felt as if someone had dosed her with an aphrodisiac.
Then, as if determined to make things worse, he pressed between her lips and stroked her tongue with his. His was a simple kiss: strong, direct, and absolutely wonderful. He sucked her as if he were feeding, embraced her as if she was dear. He couldn’t have known what he was doing by touching her this way, but even if he did, Khira could not hold back. She threw her arms around his hot, silky back and drew on his mouth with all the strength she had feared she’d lost.
Immediately, his hand slid down her back to her bottom, tilting her pubis firmly over his erection. This felt so good she simply had to hitch her leg around his thigh. Harry groaned in approval. She did notice when he began to gather up her tunic, but was too desperate to keep kissing him to object. After some exploration, he found the hidden back clasp of her matching silk trousers. He undid it neatly and thrust his big hand within.
His palm met new, bare skin. Her head jerked back in reaction, but he followed the movement and caught her mouth to his again. His hand slid down her bottom cleavage to her sex.
Their heights were too close. He couldn’t reach far enough to slide his fingers inside her. Realizing this at the same time she did, Harry turned her, hefted her higher, and pressed her spine to the warm ice wall. There his weight was able to hold her up.
He was panting when he unlatched himself from her mouth.
“Now,” he said, “let’s see how much you need this.”
She was too far gone to mind him wanting to know. Two fingers slid inside her with a squelching sound, each radiating energy so sweet it almost made her come. She bit her lip and clutched his shoulders to keep her moan inside. She could have saved her strength. His breath hissed through his teeth as her eyes went briefly black, the Yamish sign of a sudden spike in sexual need.
“What the—?” he began to say, but she cut him off.
“Let me move,” she said, squirming on his fingers, not wanting to explain.
“I’ll move,” he said a little shakily. “You just enjoy.”
His hand was agile, more than she expected. She closed her eyes in bliss and self-concealment as he thrust those two glowing fingers in and out of her. Her trousers had fallen to her hips, and Harry now shoved her underthings down as well. When he pushed the bulge of his erection against her naked mound, the moan she’d been trying to restrain ripped out.
He knew what she wanted. Breathing hard, he spread her outer lips with the fingers that weren’t inside her, baring her clitoris to the very welcome friction of his wool-covered cock. The effect of his movements was so powerful, juice gushed from her when she came.
“Lord,” he said, her pubis beginning to slip in his hold.
She couldn’t let him stop. She clamped her thighs around his waist and rocked herself hard and fast over his fingers. This time, she actually whimpered at her orgasm.
As good as it was, the climax wasn’t enough to satisfy her. She knew that even as she allowed her legs to slide down his heaving sides. She knew it even more when he kissed her, deeply, sweetly, his now-wet hand sliding up her side to her breast. A moment later, his second hand rose as well. He covered both small mounds as he leaned into and rubbed his body over hers, as if every part of him needed to feel her. It was the warmest, most sensual caress she’d ever experienced. Her breasts were encompassed in his gently squeezing hold, and even with her tunic between them, her nipples burned. She wanted him so badly her knees trembled.
“Mm,” he hummed against her mouth. “Keep touching me like that, and I might consent to be your sex slave.”
Her hands were clamped on his warm, bare rump. Completely without her awareness, they had pushed inside his trousers to find more skin. She was so horrified at herself, she finally mustered the self-control to yank them back.
“I did not bring you here to be my sex slave!” she said, aghast. Her arms weren’t working correctly yet. She pushed ineffectually at his hard, hairy chest, wishing she could be as offended by its solidity as she was by his smug amusement. Her temper snapped. “You…you are a human, a member of a deeply inferior race!”
At that, he pushed back from her himself. Khira had to grab her trousers to keep them from falling down, but he didn’t laugh at her. Indeed, his face had gone stony.
“That’s right,” he said. “You Yama are smarter, stronger, faster, and just plain better in every way. The thing is, when you aren’t shrinking back from humans in horror, you’re leaning forward in fascination—like a cold, old man trying to warm his hands at a fire. Why is that, if my race is inferior?”
Stung by his words, and now secure in her clothes, Khira straightened her spine. “I really couldn’t say. I am not a doctor of psychology.”
“Then what are you a doctor of?”
He almost tricked her into answering. Khira pulled out her comm, judging it time to call the guards. Before she could, Harry put his hand over hers. Fresh, hot tingles swept from his palm, threatening to dissolve the strength she’d managed to gather. He seemed to have figured out what the communication device was for.
He leaned toward her, his musky scent much stronger and—to her dismay—much more agreeable to her nose than a Yamish man’s.
“You don’t need your guards to make me do what you want,” he said, low and dark. “You have that power all by yourself.”
She tried to pull her hand away but could not. She didn’t understand this. She had drawn off what seemed like a considerable portion of his etheric force. He should have been the one who felt weak.
“You are trying to toy with my mind,” she said, “to make me think of us as allies so I’ll let you go.”
“Why can’t we be allies? You claim you don’t intend to harm me.”
“I don’t, but there is nothing you can say or do that would convince me to set you free.”
“Not even when you’ve finished what you’ve planned for me?”
“No,” she said, and stubbornly set her jaw.
To her amazement, the human smiled crookedly. “Well, one out of two isn’t a bad st
arting point.”
“This isn’t a negotiation!” Her exasperation caused her to raise her voice, a loss of face the human appeared not to notice.
“Yes it is, Khira,” he corrected, with far more calm and sureness than she’d displayed. “As you’ll discover when you try to get what you want from me.”
She’d heard all the nonsense she could tolerate. His threats were empty. He had no power here—none! Composing herself with an effort, she twisted free from him and summoned the guards on her comm. They could keep him company while he ate. He’d see how well his smelly male wiles worked on them.
The guards were laughing. Harry was eating at a square white table in his room, and they were laughing at everything he said. Khira watched them from the observation chamber and shook her head. Evidently, the guards’ experience with humans had entailed them going more native than was advised.
Either that, or listening to Harry wax rhapsodic over his grilled swordfish was funnier than a scientist could comprehend.
She hoped Harry realized how dangerous his new friends were.
Shoving aside her annoyance, Khira pulled up the results of her initial scans on the viewing screen. As far as she could tell, Harry’s energy signature was within normal parameters for a human. His aura showed minimal signs of depletion, no more than she would expect after a long day, and definitely not enough to account for her intense reaction to his touch. His testosterone levels were higher than males of her race, so perhaps his scent had sensitized her. Had he been Yamish, the fact that she liked his smell would have indicated they were genetically appropriate candidates for producing offspring. Since Harry wasn’t Yamish, Khira didn’t know what conclusion to draw.
You have been ignoring your personal life, she reminded herself. Spending too many hours with your research. Her strong attraction to the human, while unusual, might have been no more than her libido protesting its neglect.
She squirmed in her rolling, molded workchair, not convinced there was enough neglect in the world to account for her current state of neediness.
She signaled one of the guards with her comm, bringing him from his laughing slouch to review posture. Harry watched the transformation curiously.
“Let the human use the bathroom when he’s done eating,” she said. “Then strap him to the crystal bed.”
It was time she initiated her experiment. The human would never understand who was in charge until she did.
Harry was relieved to discover that jokes comparing good food to sex amused males from all cultures. He’d sensed a bond with Khira as he pleasured her, a commonality of lust at the least, but her stiff withdrawal cast doubts on his chances of exploiting it. If the beautiful doctor refused to relent, he’d need a backup plan.
His hope to recruit the guards’ aid vanished as soon as he saw their reaction to Khira’s call. Their laughter stopped in an instant, impersonal coolness replacing it. When they strapped him naked onto the glassy bed, he didn’t bother to struggle. Never mind his claim that Khira would never get what she wanted, she had the upper hand for now.
One of the guards, neither of whom he could tell apart, patted his shoulder before he left.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “Dr. Forette is brilliant—and highly motivated. This will go well.”
The gesture seemed kind, and probably out of character, but Khira’s “motivation” hardly addressed Harry’s need for help to get out of here.
Sweat broke out on his forehead as the strange bed he was strapped to slowly tipped upright. A long, clear cylinder began descending from the ceiling, surrounding him on all sides. In its walls were embedded instruments whose function he could not guess.
“Hey!” he cried as one snaked out to suck a bit of blood from his arm.
“I cannot drug you,” said the doctor’s disembodied voice, seemingly in the tube with him. “These procedures require an unclouded mind. Please try to think calm thoughts.”
“You try to think calm thoughts,” he muttered. “You’re not the one in here.”
Without warning, spinning sunbursts of violet light shot out from a dozen of the tube’s devices, followed by an eerie rising and falling wail. Every hair on Harry’s body came to attention. Whatever the machine was doing, he wished it would stop. Both light and sound buzzed through his skin, penetrating tissues that should have been unreachable. His heart began to thunder inside his chest, and that scared him, too. He sincerely hoped he was too young to die of apoplectic fear.
Unbidden, a memory from his childhood rose. He’d been ten and so hungry he’d stolen a raw potato from the workhouse kitchen. Another boy had informed the matron, and, as punishment for his theft, Harry had spent two days locked in a dark closet. Though the experience nearly killed him, Harry had refused to cry. A few months later, he’d run away to live on the streets where, ironically, he’d eaten better than he had from “charitable” hands.
He’d had to sell a piece of his soul to do it, but that had simply taught him the value of doggedness.
This will be the same, he told himself. He pushed away the panic his lack of comprehension caused. The darkness and hunger he’d experienced in that closet he’d understood. But the differences between then and now didn’t matter. He would be free.
This became his prayer as Khira’s machine performed its mysterious operations. Instruments crawled over him on little metal legs, pricking him intermittently with needles. The violet sunbursts turned purple and blue and green. The unearthly music circled around him, murmuring sounds he almost thought were words. He saw things that weren’t there. Clouds floating beneath him. The whispering tops of trees. Snowflakes crystallized from the water inside his cells, and then in structures even more miniscule, structures Harry didn’t have names for.
Peace, the tiny, spiraling ladders soothed. This song is perfecting us.
Harry strove to ignore it all, repeating only I will be free, like the endless mantras he’d been told Yskutian monks performed. He would rather have confronted any danger with his fists, but if his head was all he had to work with, by God, his head was what he’d use.
Chapter 5
SHE’D thought there was nothing the human could do to stop her, but she’d been wrong. Twenty-four hours had passed, and none of her carefully planned modifications were taking effect. She’d increased the modulator’s power as much as she dared. She had the genetic sequencer taking samples every fifteen minutes, but nothing achieved results. Each time his DNA looked like it was changing, the next test would reveal its codes had snapped back. Harry had gone into some sort of trance, and the interference from his brain waves was wreaking havoc with her programs.
The guards had been by the observation room no less than three times to check on how she was progressing—and to remind her that she had better make progress soon.
“We understand if you feel sorry for him,” one had said. “The human is likeable. But that’s no reason to go soft.”
“If it helps,” the second put in, “the future won’t look bright for either of you if you fail.”
Khira assured them she was neither “going soft,” as they put it, nor about to fail. This was just a glitch that she would work out. These things happened to all researchers.
The minute they shut the door behind them, she put her head in her hands. She’d brought the human here to save him from mortal danger, and now he was in it up to his ears. The fact that she shared the danger didn’t improve her mood.
Harry’s unexpected stubbornness was narrowing her choices. She was going to have to do what her kind did best: wrap as pretty a package as she could around an outright lie.
As soon as Khira released the straps that bound him to the crystal bed, Harry sagged onto his knees. The state she found him in worsened her shame. His skin was pale and clammy, the purple circles beneath his eyes testifying to the fact that he had slept no more than she had. He stared at her, dull-eyed and breathing hard, like an ox who’d been led to slaughter only to find his end delayed
.
A coil of cold, hard metal seemed to be twisting in Khira’s chest. This was not what genetic science was supposed to be. In her heart, her chosen field was clean and beautiful. It was about possibilities.
Wrenched, she touched his pale, perspiring cheek with her glove. Harry flinched as if expecting worse. Khira dropped her hand.
“I’m ready to bargain,” she said.
“You’ll let me go?”
His voice sounded like gravel. Khira gathered her will to lie convincingly. “If you want to go, I’ll release you after a year.”
Harry barked out a laugh. He waved in the direction of the modulator, now retracted into the ceiling. “A year of this?”
“This will be over soon.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said more bluntly than any Yama would.
Khira fought a blush even though her last statement had been true. “If you don’t cooperate, those guards will kill you.”
“I thought you didn’t need my cooperation.”
“I was wrong.” She drew a breath to give herself time to decide. Maybe it was best to let him know what the problem was. “You’re doing something in your head. It’s interfering with my programs.”
The stare he treated her to then was calculating. She could see his color coming back.
“Oh, please,” she said, purposefully putting scorn into it. “Don’t think you’ll gain anything by continuing this obstruction. If my experiment fails, the guards will just get rid of you and snatch someone else.”
Harry growled with animal frustration, then pulled her forcefully down to her knees with him. “How can you do this? I don’t care how advanced you Yama are. I’m a person. Flesh and blood like you. How can you treat me like a specimen and still sleep at night?”
Her reaction was completely inappropriate. When he seized her face in his big, hard hands, heat coursed from the contact straight to her sex. Everything between her legs pulsed with hunger—her clitoris, her labia, the suddenly slick passage that led to her womb. She knew his fingers wouldn’t quell her craving again. Only his cock could do that, only the hard, driving thickness that would lock their separate bodies into one.
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