“They do appear to be buildings of some kind,” Rafe acknowledged, frowning. “But I think it’s better we stay away from them if possible. The natives might be hostile.”
“We don’t know that,” Whitney objected. “They might be peaceful and willing to help us. What if they’ve mapped out the area around their planet and solar system? It might give us a reference point as to where we are and how to get home.”
She had a point, Rafe had to grudgingly admit. But he still didn’t like to approach the inhabitants of a strange planet without scouting carefully ahead to see if they were dangerous or not.
“I tell you what,” he said to Whitney. “Let me get the ship fixed first and then we’ll do some recon to see if they can be trusted or not. If we find someone we think might help us, we’ll take a chance and try to make contact. But not unless I decide they aren’t dangerous.”
She frowned. “I thought you were letting me make the life and death decisions.”
Rafe shook his head. “Not about this. The decision to land risked both our lives equally. The decision to contact an alien species we’ve never seen before will put you in much more danger and it’s my job to protect you.”
Whitney put a hand on her full hip.
“And how is that? Why am I more in danger than you are in that situation?”
“Because you’re much more valuable. Think about it,” Rafe said patiently before she could contradict him. “Your scientific knowledge of alien life forms and bio-genetic engineering is priceless. While all I know how to do is pilot and protect.” He shrugged. “It’s obvious between the two of us whose life is worth more—and is more worth protecting.”
“It’s not obvious to me.” Whitney’s voice was low and firm with none of its usual bubbliness. “Your life is important too—every bit as important as mine, Rafe.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, but I don’t see it that way. Now let me land the ship—I think I see a clearing up ahead in the middle of the forest. The trees should keep us shielded from prying eyes.”
She got a stubborn expression on her lovely face and he had the idea that she wanted to argue some more about his life having equal value to hers, but Rafe was too busy landing the battered little ship to fight with her about it. She was the important one—she was his mon’dalla—which, if he was being honest, meant a lot more than he had admitted to her. Mon’dalla was a term of affection—an endearment most often used by a warrior for his mate, not just something a Protector would call his charge.
But that was neither here nor there. The important thing was that he intended to protect Whitney with his life—even if it meant protecting her from herself. Her bubbly, optimistic personality made her naturally assume that the natives of this planet must be peaceful and helpful but Rafe had seen enough of the universe to know that wasn’t necessarily true.
The point being that we’re going to keep the hell away from them unless I’m damn sure they’re friendly, he told himself grimly. Because there’s sure to be a hell of a lot of them if they’ve got buildings big enough to house hundreds of thousands at once.
With that intention firmly intact, he landed the ship with a slight jolt in the broad clearing. It was time to assess the damage and make repairs—hopefully in fairly short order.
After all, they had a Hallow-bean party to attend back home on the Mother Ship—if they could ever get back there.
Six
“These trees are amazing—they’re about the size of the Giant Redwoods back home on Earth. Some are even bigger.” Whitney craned her neck to study the leafy tops of the vast trees soaring far into the turquoise sky above. Even the smallest one had a trunk so big in circumference that a small car could have driven through it comfortably with room to spare on either side. And the bigger ones were so vast they were as big around as a city block.
They had smooth gray bark with little flecks of white and black in it and broad purplish-green leaves almost as big as her torso. She halfway wished she was a Botanist instead of a Zoologist, so fascinating was the alien flora.
“Just stay close to the ship while you admire them,” Rafe growled distractedly. He was stripped to the waist as he worked on the patch of hull which had been damaged, showing a broad, muscular chest that had several intriguing scars she had never seen before. “I don’t want you wandering off and getting lost in the scientific wonder of it all while I’m not there to watch your back,” he added.
Whitney opened her mouth to protest indignantly…and then closed it again. She had to admit, she did tend to get lost in the excitement of exploring a new world. Several times Rafe had saved her from falling into a bog or lake and even once, from walking off a cliff, when she was so engrossed in studying the fauna of a new world.
He glanced at her and seemed to read the expression on her face.
“You know I’m right—admit it.” But there was a touch of humor in his deep voice.
“All right, I admit it.” Whitney sighed. “But it’s just about killing me to be on a strange new world without taking notes and samples and finding new animals to take back to the Mother Ship.” She lifted her chin mutinously. “I don’t see why I can’t just look around a little while you fix the ship.”
Rafe frowned.
“We still don’t know what class of planet this is—the animals out there might be huge and predatory,” he pointed out. “With trees this big and the gravity and oxygen content on the high side, this world could support much larger creatures than you’re used to. Think of your own dinosaurs which roamed on Earth millions of years ago. Would you like to run into a Tyrannosaurus Rex with no protection?”
“Well…no,” Whitney admitted reluctantly. He did have a point about the oxygen and the gravity. She was damn glad to have the regulator strapped around her wrist which controlled both so that she could comfortably breathe and walk around without being squashed like a tin can under a heavy boot. “But we don’t know for sure if there are T-rexes or anything like them out there,” she added, and swept out a hand, including the entire immense forest in her gesture.
“We don’t know that they’re not out there, either,” Rafe growled, sounding stern. “So until I fix the ship and we ascertain if it’s dangerous, you’re going to stay right by my side. Understood?”
Whitney could have bristled at his authoritarian tone, but she decided to tease him instead.
“All right then. I guess I’ll just stay here and watch the local scenery,” she remarked, looking pointedly at his broad, bare chest. “It’s plenty worth watching, I can tell you.”
Rafe gave her a startled look—it often seemed to surprise him when she flirted with him. When it didn’t fly right over his head, that was.
“Are you talking about me?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Whitney drawled, batting her eyelashes at him so he couldn’t fail to draw the right conclusion. “It’s not ever day I get to see you with your shirt off, you know. It’s a pretty nice sight, I must admit.”
“It’s not something I would think you’d care about.” Rafe frowned at her. “And I believe what you are doing is what you Earth people call ‘sensual harassment.’”
“The correct term is sexual harassment,” Whitney corrected him, smiling. “Though it can get sensual too. That could be fun.”
“That is foolishness—stop distracting me.” His frown deepened but was there a faint flush on his high cheekbones? Whitney thought there was—maybe she was finally breaking through that tough outer wall her mysterious Beast Kindred Protector had around him.
She was about to say something else—to tease him further, mostly because it was fun and she was bored—when a flash in the purple and green underbrush caught her eye.
“Hey!” She tugged quickly at Rafe’s bare, muscular arm which he had raised above his head as he made repairs to the ship’s hull.
He gave her an irritated look.
“I told you, stop distracting me, Whitney. You know you’re fucking gorgeous and all these teasing lit
tle attempts to make me rise for you take my mind from the business of fixing the ship.”
At any other time the fact that he was one, swearing, when he almost never did and two, calling her gorgeous, would have taken up her immediate attention. But this time she was distracted by the rustling in the underbrush.
“Look!” she insisted in a low voice. “There’s something coming!”
“What?” Rafe was immediately on alert. Together they listened and watched the bushes closest to the ship.
After a moment the sound grew louder and something stepped out into the clearing, only a few yards away from the ship.
Rafe’s dark brows pulled low over his forehead, his blaster out and ready in one hand. But there appeared to be no need to use it.
“What in the universe?” he asked in a low voice.
“It’s a woman,” Whitney whispered. “A bare-ass naked woman. At least that’s what it looks like. And she’s staring right at us.”
Seven
The naked woman, who was lean and sinewy and looked to be in her early twenties, wandered cautiously closer, never taking her wild-looking eyes from the two of them. She had pale ivory skin with scratches and scars plainly visible in some places and long, wild brown hair which looked like it had never even had a nodding acquaintance with a brush or comb. Her breasts were small and firm and high and she didn’t seem to care at all that they were on display.
She moved, Whitney thought, with an animal grace and perfect indifference to her own nudity. She was tall—almost as tall as Rafe—but not nearly as muscular. Her lean, naked body reminded Whitney of a greyhound or a whippet—something built for speed and agility. And indeed, the woman looked like she might take flight at any time.
For a long moment, the three of them just stared at each other but finally Whitney decided to say something.
“Hey,” she said in a low, coaxing voice, trying not to frighten the woman. “How are you? We’re new here—can you tell us where we are?”
She would have taken a step towards the woman, but Rafe reached out a hand to grab her arm.
“Be careful, Whitney,” he murmured, frowning. “She smells…strange.”
Whitney couldn’t smell the woman at all and her words didn’t appear to have had any effect. Though her translation bacteria should have made her able to talk to anyone of any culture, the woman didn’t look like she understood. She cocked her head to the side for a moment, as though considering Whitney and Rafe intently. But then, maybe sensing they were no threat, she seemed to lose interest and her large grey eyes fixed on something crawling at their feet in the long greenish-purple grass.
Whitney’s eyes followed hers and she nearly let out a yelp of excitement. Here was the first native animal she’d seen since they landed and it was a beauty! It was a large, grasshopper-looking insect with vivid pink and gold markings and three sets of hind legs instead of just one.
The alien insect was large too—as big as a toy poodle. Probably it was able to grow so large because of the high oxygen content on this planet, Whitney speculated. She remembered learning that back in Prehistoric times when Earth had extra oxygen, there were three-foot long centipedes and spiders as big as basketballs running around. Not that she wanted to meet any of those but the giant, jewel-bright grasshopper with three sets of legs was amazing. She simply had to catch it and bring it back with them to the Mother Ship, she decided.
“Look at that!” she murmured under her breath, nudging Rafe’s arm with her own. “It’s the perfect specimen. I have to get it!”
“You don’t know if it’s poisonous or not,” he objected, instantly on the alert. “I do not think it is wise to attempt to capture any specimens from this world when we know nothing about it.”
“But that’s the essence of scientific inquiry!” Whitney argued, still under her breath. She didn’t want to startle the naked woman, who was still watching the jewel-bright grasshopper as intently as they were. “When you find something new, you study it! Besides, give me some credit. I have collection tools in the ship. I won’t touch it with my bare hands and it won’t take me a minute to pop it in a stasis cage.”
“I still don’t think—” Rafe began and then the naked woman who had wandered out of the forest ended their argument for them by pouncing on the alien insect and ripping its head off.
“Sweet baby Jesus!” Whitney put a hand to her mouth as the woman crunched noisily and messily, swallowing the head with its gleaming compound eyes and then diving in for another bite of the still-twitching body. Green goo was dribbling from the side of her mouth but she didn’t even bother to wipe it away—just kept crunching with a kind of single-minded intensity that reminded Whitney of a lion with its kill.
“Well, I guess that puts my fear that it might be poisonous to rest,” Rafe remarked dryly. “Though that certainly isn’t the way I would have gone about testing it.”
“She stole my specimen!” Whitney exclaimed indignantly. “Right out from under my nose!”
“You want to fight her for it?” Rafe raised an eyebrow at her. “I think you might lose—she appears to want it more than you.”
“Of course I don’t want a dead specimen!” Whitney exclaimed. She took a step closer to the crunching woman and tried to talk to her again. “Excuse me,” she said politely. “Excuse me, but can you tell me what that thing is that you’re eating? What do your people call it?”
The woman looked up at her for a moment but only to hiss threateningly through green-goo coated teeth and then retreated a few steps away to continue her meal.
Whitney frowned and went back to Rafe.
“What’s wrong with her, do you think? Maybe she’s some kind of feral child—left out here when she was little to fend for herself? Maybe that’s why she doesn’t talk?”
“Possibly,” he allowed. “But I’m surprised there are humanoids on this planet at all. I wonder how they came to be here?”
“Who knows but I wonder if we should try to take her with us and find someone who can help her?” Whitney asked. “I mean, we can hardly leave her out here to fend for herself, naked in the woods like that.”
“I don’t know—she seems happy to me,” Rafe objected. “And she clearly knows how to survive. She—”
Just then there was more rustling in the bushes and another person stepped out of the undergrowth—this time a man.
He too was naked, Whitney saw, and he seemed to be about ten or fifteen years older than the woman. He had a long black beard that looked like it had never been trimmed and long black hair the same color.
When he saw Rafe, he growled threateningly at first but when the big Kindred made no move towards him but only pushed Whitney quickly behind him, the naked newcomer seemed to lose interest.
“Hey, at least let me watch,” she protested, sticking her head around her Kindred Protector’s broad shoulder to see what the naked man would do next.
“Just stay behind me,” Rafe said tightly. “He smells strange as well. There’s something going on here that I don’t understand and I don’t like it.”
The naked man advanced on the grasshopper-munching woman and made a low, grunting sound in the back of his throat. At first she hissed at him, as she had at Whitney, but then her nostrils flared and she seemed to catch a whiff of his scent.
Whitney could smell it too at this point—a thick, musky odor that traveled through the air to sting her nostrils though strangely, she still didn’t smell the woman. She wrinkled her nose at the pungent aroma but the woman didn’t seem to mind it at all.
The man approached the naked woman again, still making the low, grunting sounds and this time she let him come nearer. To Whitney’s surprise, he ducked his head and sucked one of her nipples into his mouth.
“Hey,” she muttered to Rafe, who was still standing protectively in front of her. “What does he think he’s doing?”
Whatever it was, the naked woman seemed to love it. She dropped the half-eaten grasshopper carcass, threw back h
er head and made high mewling sounds of apparent pleasure and delight as the man sucked first one nipple and then the other. Her mewling got higher and higher—becoming almost like singing as his hand found the wild bush of hair between her thighs and his fingers worked themselves inside her.
“Wow, they’re really going for it,” Whitney remarked in a low voice. Though she had been teasing Rafe earlier, actually watching this kind of live action sex show with the big Kindred made her feel a little uneasy. She shifted beside him, pressing her thighs together. Was the sight affecting her or did it have something to do with the strange, pungent aroma coming from the mating couple?
“They do appear to be enjoying themselves,” Rafe remarked dryly as the woman sank to her knees and began sucking the man’s large cock. “And they don’t appear to care that we are watching them in the least. They’re acting like a couple of animals.”
His words gave Whitney an idea.
“Wait here,” she murmured to him. “I just want to get a piece of equipment from the ship.”
Before Rafe could protest, she ran lightly to the side door of the ship, which had a silver ladder hanging from it, climbed up, and went to get what she needed.
When she came back down, Rafe was watching in apparent bemusement as the man mounted the woman from behind. They were rutting in noisy mutual gratification when Whitney snuck up from the side and pointed her Mental Monitoring Device at them.
The MMD looked a lot like a chunky, silver gun but instead of shooting bullets, it read brain waves from a distance. It was an invaluable tool when she was trying to be certain a specimen she wanted to collect wasn’t sentient before she took it.
Pairing with the Protector Page 4