“Forgive me. I was not respectful of your privacy because my past specimens have not required such consideration.”
He talked like Spock from the old Star Trek show her dad had loved, Maddy thought distractedly. But he still hadn’t put her down or answered her questions.
“The rest of my crew,” she said again. “Where are they?”
Calden sighed. “I do not know an easy way to say this so I must be blunt. From what we can gather, your ship went through a wormhole and came out the other side into an asteroid field. We surmise that it must have collided with one or more of the asteroids because it was ripped in two. We found only the back half of it—you were the only specimen collected by the droids, other than the frozen animal embryos and plants.”
“Stop calling me a specimen!” Maddy exclaimed. “And are you really saying that I’m the only survivor…that no one else is left? That they’re all…all…dead?”
The word would scarcely pass her lips. She felt sick saying it. So many people! Pierce, of course—they had grown apart but she’d been trying like hell to put them back together. And there was also Ana, the head biologist, who was becoming a good friend. She had the kindest way about her and she often asked Maddy to come have a cup of tea with her, even though she didn’t have much in her personal stores. Laurence, the engineering officer, had been funny and could always make her laugh and of course Captain Judith had been wonderful—so strong and sure of herself—she always inspired confidence. And so many, many more. Gone. Just…gone.
Maddy began to shiver, as much from shock as from the cold slime that was drying to a sticky glue on her skin. She had left Earth and most of the people she loved behind hoping to start a new life. And now that life had been ripped from her, along with everyone she knew. It was too much—just too much.
“G-gone,” she whispered, her teeth chattering. “Th-they’re all g-gone. I’m the only one l-left.”
Calden’s topaz eyes widened as he regarded her, still cradled in his arms. “You’re shivering—you’re going to start going into hypothermia. I must put you back in the nutrient bath to warm up.”
He started to lift her back into the tank but Maddy clung to him, pressing herself to his broad chest.
“No!” she gasped, blinking back tears. “Please, not back in there! I can’t.”
“But you’re really not ready to be out,” he protested. Still, he stopped trying to put her back in the tank and carried her out of the sliding door instead. They came out into another room, this one equipped with what looked like a shower stall at the far end. At least, it was a large rectangular space that was covered in strange blue-green tiles that looked like scales and there was a drain in the middle of the floor. It, like everything else in the room, seemed to be built for someone Calden’s size which reinforced her feeling of being a child in an adult-sized house. It was very disorientating.
When they got to the shower area, Calden put her down gently and began fiddling with some knobs and buttons located on the wall.
“Where…what…what are you going to do to me?” Maddy wrapped her arms around herself, feeling smaller than ever now that he had put her down. He was just so huge—nine feet tall at least, she estimated. The size difference made her feel like a kid being confronted by an adult—her head only came up to his elbow and she wasn’t short. In fact, at five-ten, she’d always felt like she was too tall. Now she wished she was a little taller so she wouldn’t feel so little and defenseless.Not that a few inches more in height would have made any difference. Not when Calden was a freaking giant.
“Relax,” he rumbled. “I’m just going to rinse the nutrient bath off of you and warm you up some.”
He detached a wide silver nozzle at the end of a long, snaky silver hose and pressed a button on the blue and green tiles of the wall.
At once a powerful jet of warm water spurted out, nearly knocking Maddy over.
“Whoa!” she gasped, feeling like she’d been hit with a fire hose. She staggered backwards under the intense water pressure, her feet, still slick with slime, slipping and skidding all over the place.
“Oh, forgive me!” Calden quickly made some adjustments and the water pressure lessened considerably. “I am not used to having such delicate…” He hesitated. “Such small, delicate people, as yourself to look after,” he finished at last.
Well, at least he hadn’t called her a specimen again, Maddy thought dully. Not that it really mattered. She was still trying to wrap her head around the idea that everyone in the Kennedy was dead except for her and now she was stuck in a weird alien science station or research facility or whatever this place with its slime tanks and oversized furnishings and fire hose showers was.
“I’m not that small,” she muttered rebelliously. “You’re just really big.”
“The Jor’gen Kindred are thirty percent larger than most humanoid species,” he agreed, conversationally. “It is one reason we have difficulty finding females to mate with.”
Sudden horror came over Maddy.
“Is that why you saved me and put me in your slime tank to, uh, defrost?” she demanded. “To mate with me?”
She was suddenly aware all over again of the fact that she was naked—naked and dripping wet and still mostly covered with slime which couldn’t be very attractive but then again, who knew what this huge gray giant with his glowing bronze eyes found attractive? She tried to cover herself with her mostly useless hands and started to back away from him.
Calden seemed to understand her horror because his eyes widened.
“No! No, of course not,” he exclaimed quickly. “I will never take a mate—it is forbidden here aboard the Mentat station. I wanted only to study you—and to see if you could give me information about the other specimens from your home world we found in the wreckage of your ship—some of which are already growing.”
“Study me?” A new fear came into her mind. “Are you planning to cut me up? Dissect me like a frog in a biology lab?”
Calden looked horrified.
“I do not know what a frog is but I promise, I would never harm you, Madeline” He sighed. “Forgive me—I fear I am not doing an adequate job reassuring you. I’ve never had a specimen—er person—that I could talk to before.”
“You might as well call me a specimen,” Maddy said dully. “For all I know, I’m the only human left alive anywhere. I guess that makes me something to study.”
“Was your planet destroyed?” Calden asked gently. He began to run the stream of water over her again as he spoke and to Maddy’s relief, some of the slime started coming off. She tried to help the process along by rubbing herself but her hands still didn’t want to work right so she wasn’t very effective.
“It was about to be,” she said, remembering the dark, awful days when the invaders came. “By a race that called themselves ‘The Scourge.’ Our government had been preparing an expedition to go out and seek new Earth-like planets for the human race to live on. They sped up the schedule and got us launched and away before the Scourge could stop us. We got away but then…then…” She frowned. “I can’t remember what happened—what’s wrong with my memories?”
“They’ll come back to you in time,” Calden assured her.
“Are you sure no one else made it?” Maddy asked, feeling the lump in her throat again. “No one else from my ship? Ana or Laurence or…or Pierce?”
“Pierce was your mate?” Calden’s deep voice was neutral.
“Yes.” Maddy nodded, her dripping hair flinging green slime with the action. Though the stuff he called “nutrient bath” seemed to be coming off her skin, it stuck to her hair stubbornly.
“And I suppose you loved him very much. I am…sorry for your loss,” Calden murmured.
“No,” Maddy said bluntly, too emotionally overwrought to keep her thoughts to herself. “No, I didn’t love him. But I was trying to love him. I’d like to think we were trying to love each other.”
Calden frowned. “Forgive me but I don
’t understand. I have never had a romantic relationship myself—is it necessary to try to love someone?”
“Sometimes it is,” Maddy said and sighed. “We were in love when we first got married but then we just…grew apart. He was married to his work and then he decided he didn’t want kids. Of course, the expedition to another planet was supposed to change all that. They only allowed fertile couples to go. Once we got where we were going, we were supposed to start a family right away. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to go with him instead of just asking for a divorce.”
“A divorce?” Calden frowned. “What is that?”
“A…parting of ways. What people do when they outgrow each other.” She frowned, turning around in the spray of water so that more of the slime could be washed off her back and hopefully out of her hair. “Don’t your people have anything like that—a way for a man and woman to get away from each other if their marriage doesn’t work out?”
“I am a Kindred, as I said before. We have no parting of ways between male and female because we mate for life,” he rumbled, running the jet of water over her back and behind. Maddy wanted to cover her bare ass but that would have meant taking her hands away from her breasts and sex—not that her hands were working properly because they still weren’t.
“No divorce, huh?” She looked over her shoulder at him. “That must make for some pretty interesting shouting matches.”
He frowned. “Why would you shout at the one you are bonded to? Most arguments stem from misunderstandings. A soul-bond, such as my people form with their females, eliminates such errors.”
Maddy didn’t know what he was talking about—they seemed to have strayed into a wholly philosophical discussion on marriage somehow and all while he was hosing her off. Again, the situation felt surreal.
But there was one aspect of her current predicament that felt entirely too real. The green slime had come off most of her body but her hair was still stiff with the stuff. And there was still some of it up inside her too. Ugh! She pressed her thighs together uneasily, wishing it would just slide out on its own but the slime seemed stuck up there. Well, she couldn’t do anything about it or her hair with her useless hands. Reluctantly, she realized she would have to ask for help.
“Calden?” she said, turning to look at him again, while keeping herself covered as best she could. “Is there any way to get this stuff out of my hair? My, uh, hands don’t seem to want to work right which is kind of scary.”
“Your hands aren’t working properly?” He frowned. “Let me see them.”
“If I do that, you’ll see all the rest of me too,” she protested, taking a step back. “I mean, I know you already saw most of me but at least I was covered in green slime then—now that I’m all washed off except for my hair I’m just…” She shook her head. “I don’t like feeling so exposed, especially to a guy I just met.”
Calden shook his head. “If you fear that I have some kind of sexual interest in you, Madeline, please put that thought far from your mind. As I said, mating with a female is expressly forbidden here aboard the Mentat station. And even if I wished to mate with you, I could not. You have only to look at our respective sizes to see that it would be quite impossible for me to fit my shaft inside you.”
That made her cheeks feel hot for some reason but she lifted her chin and refused to show her embarrassment. Well, if she was no more than a scientific specimen to him, then it was probably okay to let him see her naked, even if it did make her feel really nervous. She was plus-sized and she’d never been very comfortable in the nude, even with Pierce. But Calden seemed to be only interested in her in a scientific capacity.
“Okay,” she said at last, peeling one useless hand away from her breasts and holding it out to him. “What’s wrong with it?”
Calden turned off the water for a moment and took her hand in his much larger ones. Again Maddy felt like a child confronted by an adult. His hands were massive compared to hers. But he was extremely gentle as he examined her, his long fingers delicately feeling her own, much smaller ones, as he frowned in concentration.
“I believe your fine motor skills didn’t develop properly because you left the nutrient bath early,” he said at last. “The easiest way to remedy this would be to put you back into the bath and—”
“No!” Maddy backed away from him, her back hitting the cold, scaly wall behind her. “No—I don’t want to go back in the slime!”
Calden sighed as though she was a difficult child and he was humoring her.
“All right—I won’t force you to go back into the tanks. But we will have to find an alternate method to develop your fine motor skills. And in the meantime, I must take care of you and do for you what you cannot do for yourself.”
“You…you will?” Maddy wasn’t exactly sure what that would entail. Would he have to touch her? A lot? But anything seemed preferable to going back into that tank of warm, snot-like slime and letting it coat her again.
“I will,” Calden said firmly. “I was granted special permission by FATHER to study you—therefore you are my responsibility. I will start by washing the nutrient bath out of your hair. Turn around.”
Maddy turned her back to him again and after a moment there was the scent of soap—not flowery like she was used to—just very clean and crisp. Then she felt long fingers in her hair. As before when he had been running the stream of water over her body, Calden was firm but gentle. He massaged her scalp in a way that made Maddy’s eyes flutter closed and then took his time working the soapy lather through her long strands of tangled hair. To her surprise, he didn’t pull her hair once and after he was finished rinsing her off, not a bit of the slime was left in her long, auburn hair.
Well, that’s good, she thought. I’m almost completely slime-free.
The key word being almost.
“There you go,” Calden said, running the warm water over her entire body for a moment and then shutting it off. “I think that’s all of it.”
“Um…” Maddy shifted uncomfortably, not sure how to broach the subject. Maybe she should just keep quiet and live with the slime that had gotten into her unmentionable areas? But God, it was really uncomfortable and irritating! In fact the longer it stayed up there, the more irritating it felt, almost as though there was some kind of chemical in it that wasn’t meant to be in contact with sensitive body parts. She was beginning to have an itching, burning sensation that was getting worse by the minute.
Calden seemed to sense her discomfort because he frowned at her in concern.
“What is it, Madeline? Did I miss some?”
“Not…exactly.” She bit her lip, still unsure how to continue. Damn it, if only her hands worked she could ask for some time alone with the spray nozzle! As it was, this was just horribly embarrassing.
“Madeline, please…” Calden crouched down so that they were at eye-level. “Please tell me,” he said earnestly. “I want you to be comfortable for your stay here. If there is something wrong, you must let me know.”
“I…um…” Maddy took a deep breath. Fast—just say it fast and get it out, she told herself. “There’s still some slime—some, uh nutrient bath, up…up inside me,” she said in a rush. “And it’s really starting to itch and burn.”
“Ah.” Calden nodded understandingly. “The nutrient bath isn’t meant to be taken out of the tanks. When it has been exposed to too much oxygen, it becomes an irritant.”
“Can you…” Maddy felt as though her whole body was hot with embarrassment. “Can you, uh, get it out? With the water, I mean?” she added quickly, because she had a sudden mental imagine of him sliding those long fingers inside her, which made her feel hotter and more embarrassed than ever.
“Of course.” He nodded gravely. “If you would just spread your thighs a little? And hold onto my shoulder for balance.”
This was easier said than done. Maddy would have liked to grip his broad shoulder with one hand and stand as far back as possible. But since her hands weren’t
working, she was forced to lean close enough to brace one forearm against his shoulder instead, which put her a lot closer to him than she wanted, considering what he was about to do.
Still, there was no help for it. The slime inside her pussy was itching and burning like crazy by now—she needed to get it out of her, even if the position she found herself in was completely mortifying.
“All right now…” Calden murmured, turning on the spray again. He had removed the slime-smeared jacket he’d been wearing and underneath he had on a kind of black tank-top which clung to an extremely muscular chest. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a scientist would wear but then again, what did she know? He was from an alien culture—doubtless they had different ideas about what constituted proper professional clothing.
Of course, all these thoughts were just to try and distract her mind from what was about to happen. Maddy told herself she would be fine— she would just think of something else and let her mind be distant as he used the warm, pulsing stream of water to wash her out.
But she was completely unprepared for the intense feeling the moment the warm spray hit her open sex.
“Oh!” she gasped as the warm water jetted against her clit. God, it felt so sensitive—as though she’d never been touched! It was like all the nerve endings were new and it barely took anything to get her going.
“Are you all right?” Calden pulled the water away at once, his topaz eyes wide with concern. “Did I hurt you? I know this is a delicate area for a female.”
Awakened by the Giant: Brides of the Kindred Page 3
