by Susan Grant
She buried her hands in her hoodie pockets and watched him work from under the rim of her ball cap, covertly enjoying the view of his fine ass in jeans. When he’d assured himself the coast was clear, he turned around and caught her watching him.
“Mrs. Darling,” he said. All thoughts of interstellar wars and alien invasions went out the window with the hungry glint in his eyes.
Did he have any idea how hot he was? Probably. She was sure he’d been with plenty of women over the years. “Tell me, Mr. Darling, how are you not married, or whatever your culture calls it when you hook up with one woman for life?”
Tension visibly tightened his facial muscles. Her stomach suddenly swarmed with butterflies. “You are married.”
He scowled and shook his head. “Absolutely not. But there is something I want you to know.”
“You’re pregnant.”
He coughed out a laugh.
She crossed herself. “Impotent?”
Cavin slapped his palm to his forehead. “Jana, no.”
“What then? I’ve run out of guesses.”
“I’m a high-ranking military officer.”
“I guessed that.” She was trying hard to see why this was a problem.
“Very high, Jana.”
At his grave tone, a wriggle of concern sprang to life in her stomach. “How high?”
“To be exact, I am the sixteenth highest ranking officer in the Coalition military of three billion soldiers.”
“That’s high . . .”
“Last year I received a promotion to prime-major. I report directly to Prime-Admiral Zaafran. He reports to the Supreme Commander and the Supreme Second—equivalent to your defense and assistant defense secretaries. Above him are the Prime Minister and the Queen.”
“I’m not surprised you’re a powerful man.” She could easily imagine him as he must appear in his world, a respected officer, glittering epaulets on his broad shoulders, a fitted uniform, dozens and dozens of medals on his chest. “From what I can tell, you’re brilliant. You’re sociable. A top-notch officer. And yet there’s an assassin after you.”
“I think I figured out why. It has to do with what I want to tell you.”
“I’m getting close to my bombshell limit for the week. In fact, I’ve probably exceeded it. But go on—give it to me, spaceman. Give me your best shot. I’m ready.”
He tipped his head. “Say again?”
“Tell me what the fuck it is already!”
He laughed then his smile slowly faded. “I’m on the short list of candidates to be consort to the queen. Perhaps some individuals aren’t in favor of it. And sent a REEF to eliminate me.”
Jana blinked. “Wait. You mean the sword queen?” The wiener-slicer, ball-dicer chick.
“Queen Keira, yes. She is nearing an age when in the royal view of things she is overdue to marry. I do not know how the freep I ended up on the list. Perhaps they thought a military man would make a good consort. I’ve been summoned to the palace. There will be some process by which a decision is made. I will not have a choice in the matter.”
Like a royal galactic The Bachelor show. “I’m bachelorette number seven. What number are you?”
“Last place, I hope.”
Dare she hope as well? How could a lowly state senator compete with the queen of the galaxy? A gorgeous vixen who whacked off offending male parts while she, nerd-to-the-max, got woozy over a paper cut. She may have a head start on winning Cavin’s heart, but the queen without a doubt had a better wardrobe, a better hairstyle and unlimited facials. And she’d bet her bottom dollar Keira wore jeweled tiaras, not baseball caps.
She shook her head. How could she think of her personal insecurities, when Cavin had risked everything for Earth—for her—including his life? “What does she think of all this? About you.”
“I doubt she knows who I am. I have never met her.” Cavin shrugged. He seemed somewhat embarrassed by the whole thing. “My hope was she would refuse me once we met in person.”
“I doubt that,” One look at Cavin and the queen would want him. What woman wouldn’t? “Can you say no?”
Tiredly he rubbed his face. “You don’t turn down the queen.”
Especially that queen. Not if he didn’t want his voice a few octaves higher, that was. “But aren’t there deep problems in your government if someone is willing to assassinate a potential royal consort? It doesn’t say a whole lot about that someone’s respect for the queen, either. The only good thing I see in all this is that Coalition turmoil in any form is a weakness that we, Earth, can exploit, if it ever came to that. If your plan fails and we were fighting for our lives to the last desperate hour. And by God we’ll exploit everything we can.” She shook her fist. “We will not go quietly into the night!”
Cavin wore a marveling smile. “That was one hell of a speech.”
“It’s what I do.” Yet the fear of losing Cavin in this unexpected new way overcame her. She turned away, trying to keep her emotions bottled up until she could sort them out. Or eat them.
Phish Food. Pulling her hoodie over her head and discarding it, she made a beeline for the cooler where she’d stored a pint. The ice cream was more than half melted by now, but she didn’t care. She peeled off the lid. The aroma of chocolate and caramel drifted out. She shook with need as she buried a spoon in the melted ice cream and lifted it to her mouth. “Oh my God.” She closed her eyes. “Yes, yes, yes.” She offered him a spoonful. “Here, you have to try—”
Suddenly he was there, sealing his mouth over hers, his warm hands sliding over her stomach, along the hem of the T-shirt, questioning, not wanting to breach any invisible boundaries.
But she wanted him to touch her. Wanted his lips and hands all over her body. The scent of his skin was an aphrodisiac, and his taste, salty sweet. He made her dizzy. He made her ache for more. He made her so many things that she couldn’t begin to catalog them all.
He took his time exploring her mouth, tasting her, until all traces of chocolate had been erased.
“…a taste,” she finished dazedly when their lips finally parted and he gazed down at her, playing with a lock of her hair.
“It tastes very good, this fish food.” His green eyes glinted with mischief. “Oh, look. It’s run down your arm.” He lifted her arm by the wrist. Chocolate had dribbled all the way to her elbow. “You weren’t paying attention, Jana. Was something distracting you?”
Or someone. Removing the nail polish hadn’t worked; the Phish Food hadn’t worked—in fact, it had made things worse.
There wasn’t anything she could do to resist him.
She grew light-headed as he licked and kissed the ice cream from her skin. Desire flowed through her like warm syrup, thick and sweet. He kissed his way up her arm to her ear, where he breathed, “The next time you utter ‘yes, yes, yes’ it will be when we are having sex.”
She moaned. Her hormones had reached critical mass.
She felt him take the ice cream container from her, setting it down somewhere.
She pulled off his T-shirt and ran her hands over his bare back, feeling the ripple of hard muscle under smooth, silken skin. One flick of her fingers over the button on his waistband and he’d finally be hers…
She popped the button on his fly and pulled on the zipper, freeing him. He groaned. They tumbled onto the mattress, her falling backward with Cavin landing on top.
He drew her hands over her head, gazing down at her, his smile victorious.
“Is this cheating?” she asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re sort of engaged.”
“Not even close. My enemies are not the only ones not in favor of the union. I am not in favor. I wish the young queen well, I wish her strength—she will need it. But I do not want her.” His thumb brushed across her lips, parting them, but he didn’t kiss her. Instead, he captured her gaze, holding it, and she trembled with his intensity. “I want you.”
“I want you,” she whispered back
.
Well, there it was. Out in the open.
There was no queen between them.
His hands slid under her T-shirt, pulling it over her head, and her T-shirt. He traced the outline of her bralette, every seam, as if he were fascinated with it. Then it too was gone. The air in the room was cool, his hands hot, his tongue even hotter. When he took her nipple into his mouth, they both sighed.
“This only reinforces my opinion that you have the most amazing mouth,” she half whispered.
“And this—” he kissed and nibbled and licked his way from her breasts to her throat to her collarbone and back down to her belly button without missing anything in between “—only reinforces that you have the most amazing body.”
He knew his way around a woman’s body too. His fingers slid under the waistband of her jeans, then her panties, lowering them. He cupped her bare bottom as he brought his mouth to her ear. “You’re so soft, Jana. So sweet. All mine,” he breathed and slipped his fingers between her legs.
If Cavin’s mouth was amazing, his hands were even more so. Her desire for him went from syrupy thick and sweet to as swift and molten-hot as lava.
She arched into his hand, greedy for more. Her thighs opened for him. No inhibitions, nothing to hide. His fingers caressed, tortured, dipped inside her. He took her to the edge, holding her there. Then he slid lower on her body and touched his mouth to her, to her very center, and her world exploded.
Shuddering, she clamped one hand in his hair; the other twisted in the bedsheet, until she at last flopped, boneless, against the pillows.
She let out the deepest of sighs as she came down from orbit.
Cavin smiled down at her. “Better than fish food?”
“What’s Phish Food?” she asked dazedly.
He grinned. “Good answer.” He leaned over her, pinning her with one muscled thigh. “There’s one more thing before we…”
She lifted her chin. “No.”
“Yes.” For some odd reason, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m not like other men.”
She took a quick inventory of the parts he’d need to complete the act. They all seemed to be rock-hard and in working order. “Sure you are.”
“To make love to you, I have to assume my true, alien form.”
For a second or two, the silence in the room roared.
His true alien form? What did he mean? Was he green…with pointy ears? Tentacles? Antennae! Her mind spun with possibilities, most of them awful. She didn’t know what to think, or to say.
“I understand if you no longer want me.”
“You know me better than that.” She lifted her chin and tried to be brave. She was less sure about the sex, though. Depending what he looked like, it might be something she’d have to work into. “I want you no matter what you look like.”
There was a breathless pause. Then his mischief-filled eyes lifted to hers. He was Cavin, all over again. “Kidding,” he said, his face glowing with held-in laughter.
A sound came out of her that fell somewhere between a laugh, a curse and a sob of relief. “You…you…” She shoved him, but he was too solid to move. “Alien monster. Beast,” she hissed. Trying hard to be fierce, she pushed at him as he tried to appease her, slapping his hands away. How could he laugh so hard and manage to appear apologetic at the same time?
Finally, he overpowered her with brute strength and size. At first, laughter lingered in his face. Then, for a long, intense moment, he soaked in the sight of her, his expression open, vulnerable. “Goddess help me, Jana. I love you. With all my heart, I do. I may do my share of kidding, but never about my feelings for you.”
She closed her eyes as he slipped his fingers into her hair, his entire body pressed against hers, skin to hot skin. “In my mind, the last few days, I’ve made love to you so many times. We’d be on the ship, in my bunk. Sometimes we’d be outside.”
His breath rushed past her ear and made her shiver. “Where outside?”
She felt his lips form a smile. “There was this one world...covered by the thickest of rain forests. The air was steamy, dense. Seductive. It felt painted on you, the air, on your skin. Everywhere it smelled of the plant life, the flowers. It was a long trek on foot to where we had to deploy. We walked all through the night into the day, and the day cycle on that world was very, very long. If you were there with me, our hair, our clothes, would be drenched by the rain.”
He ran his hand up the length of her body. “I’d strip you, kiss the water from your skin, chasing streams of it with my tongue, everywhere it went. Then I’d take you, up against a tree, your legs wrapped around me.”
Moving her thighs apart, he slid inside her, stretching her.
She muffled a cry against his shoulder. His hot, whispered words seared an image behind her eyes: a steamy jungle; Cavin, his pants down around his knees; her: naked in the warm soaking downpour, pressed against a slippery, wet palm tree, her thighs open, locked around him—him thick and hot inside her.
He with drew then pushed deep, and again, deep and slow.
She hissed, arching against him. “I’ve never done it against a tree…”
He smiled. “It wouldn’t matter where we were. Inside, outside, it wouldn’t make a difference. Only how it felt being inside you, Jana. That’s all I’ve wanted to know. How you’d feel…”
She found his mouth and kissed him. Not soft, not tender—hungry. She couldn’t help it; she needed to feel him, to feel him now, moving as he held her face in his hands, his mouth wet and hot, as their breaths came faster. No one could make her respond as Cavin did. Never had. Never will. From the very first time they shared an innocent, childhood kiss, he’d spoiled her for anyone else.
Clinging to him, she lost herself in the sensation, losing herself in him, as if she’d never been able to completely do with anyone else.
Magic.
A clear, pure surge of joy took her, her body shuddering, a physical upheaval that rocked her to the core and plunged them both into stunned exhaustion.
After a while, Cavin folded her in his arms, his musky scent enveloping her. She molded the length of her body to his, her leg draped over his hip, his knee between her thighs. In that moment, it was hard to imagine they’d ever been apart.
She circled her fingertip lazily over his body. “I wonder what it would have been like if we hadn’t separated as children,” she said dreamily.
“We would not have been behaving like this, not in the beginning. But as teenagers…” He kissed his way to her shoulder and gave her a little bite that made her yelp. “All I can say is that we would have married young.”
“Very young.” She slipped her hands from his and framed his hard jaw, tracing his features with her thumbs, absorbing how the boy’s face she remembered had been altered by years of living, sometimes quite brutally it sounded like. “But then you wouldn’t have been able to be a Marine.”
“As a young couple, we would have needed an income. One-half of the Coalition population is either in the military or employed serving the military. But I wouldn’t have wanted to risk leaving you a widow. I would have searched out a backwater posting, a low-risk location, a non-Marine position. A quiet life for as long as the war allowed. A life together…”
As he spoke, she let his descriptions sweep her away. Cavin had a gift. He could paint pictures in her mind with words, from erotic images of jungle sex to sweet and blurry-edged visions of an idyllic existence on a distant world: a home, children running barefoot in the grass. Her wearing a pretty cotton sundress, Cavin catching her around the waist and spinning her close for a kiss. Like the cover of a sweet, cheesy greeting card. Then the realist in her filled in the details. “I’d have missed my family. And I’d have lost the chance to go into politics. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to make a difference in this world. To give something back.”
“Then we would have stayed on Earth. I would have sent my father off without me.”
Jana imagined herself as a nine-year-old
bringing Cavin home: “Look what I found, Grandpa!”
“Whatever our decision would have been as children, to stay or to go, we’d have made it together,” he said. “And whatever our future decisions are to be, we will make those together too. We will never be apart again.”
“What are you saying, Cavin?” She lifted up.
“I will not return to Sakka. I’ll resign my commission. This world—it’s where I belong.”
“You’ll always have a home here,” she murmured.
“Because you are here.”
Overcome by emotion, she pressed her hand over her heart then pointed to him, flattening her hand over his thundering heart. “I love you, Cavin. We’ll never be apart again.”
They kissed on the promise as if their love could seal it.
If only it could.
Fresh from the shower, Jana twisted her damp hair into a bun, watching Cavin gathered up his scattered clothes. He was gloriously, unselfconsciously naked. Nothing beat watching him pull on his clothes. Well, except watching him take them off.
He hugged her close, planting a hard kiss on her lips before he disappeared into the shower. “I’m starving. There’s a vending machine in the lobby,” she called over the noise of water.
She tugged her ball cap over her eyes and walked briskly down the hall, sorting through her purse, looking for singles. She jumped in the elevator and headed down to the ground floor. It stopped at the second floor. The doors slid open.
A pair of teenagers huddled, smoking something in a pipe, and jerked their eyes to her. They were young but big and looked like thugs. She immediately pressed the control button, trying to get her heartbeat slowed back down.
Just as the elevator doors started closed, hideously slow, they lunged at her.
A hand slammed over her face, cutting off her scream.
She struggled, but he jerked her roughly against his wiry body as if she was a beanbag doll, floppy and compliant. They kicked open the stairwell door, and dragged her down the stairs to the ground floor. “Let’s go for a ride, bitch.”