Secret Santa Surprise: Book 29 in the Kindred Tales Series

by Evangeline Anderson

  A warm puff of air against her heated sex made her jump, but he stroked her soothingly. “That’s all right, baby girl,” he murmured in that deep, gravelly voice, softer now that he sensed her nervousness. “You don’t have to be scared—I’m not gonna hurt you. Just gonna eat your sweet pussy until you come. And there’s nothing you can do about it, all right?”

  “Y-yes. All right,” Leita gasped, feeling the muscles in her belly twitch with tension. “Yes, I…I understand.”

  “Good,” he growled. “Then just relax and let me taste you, baby. Just give in and let it happen.” He bent his head to the heated well between her legs again and she felt his thumbs on her swollen pussy lips, spreading her wide, baring her wet, slippery, heated interior to his sight, to his touch.

  Leita clenched her fists in their silky bonds. She could almost feel his tongue on her now, could almost grasp the pleasure her Master had promised her. She was so close…so close…

  She was awake, sitting up in bed, panting and drenched in sweat. She was also alone.

  “What’s the matter, having bad dreams again?” a sleepy voice asked from the pillow beside her.

  Leita McLain jumped in surprise, then sighed. All right—she was alone except for Schneider, but her sarcastic best friend hardly counted. True, he was male, but he was also a Tarbian—an ET species completely incompatible with humans. At least sexually.

  “Frustrating dreams is more like it.” Leita got out of bed and threw on a robe, making her way to the softly glowing info-cube suspended above her desk. There was a soft patter behind her and she turned just in time to see Schneider jump up on the desk and curl up under the cube, distorting the image. He loved the heat from the projection source.

  “Schneider,” she sighed, nudging him with her elbow as she pulled on the sensor glove she used to manipulate the cube. “Come on, I have serious work to do.”

  “Sure, some work,” he grumbled, reluctantly scooting his long, sleek body to one side. Leita had seen pictures of animals from Old Earth that Schneider somewhat resembled. She thought they had been called “otters”. Then again, he also looked a little something like a cat—one of the few domestic animals that had survived the flight from humanity’s abandoned home world.

  “It is work,” she insisted, calling up her company’s monthly records as proof. “See, I have to go over some figures.”

  Leita owned a small but profitable mining company on the far fringe of an asteroid belt on the edge of the Centauri solar system. She had inherited it from her parents, brave pioneers who had built the business from the ground up. The entire thing was completely mechanized, from the droid ships that went out to collect the ore she was after, to the sorting machine, to the refinery where the ore was smelted into metal and poured into molds. Once a month a company ship would come to collect the molded bars and cart them away to more civilized parts of the system, parts Leita longed to visit but couldn’t.

  She was a one-woman show and taking a vacation meant shutting the whole operation down. Now, if only she had someone to help her service the droids that broke down or got damaged while out mining the field, she might be able to afford shutting down for a month or so to find herself a little social life. What she really needed around here was a mechanic. A big, strapping, masterful mechanic. One with piercing eyes and warm, calloused, knowing hands and a really big tool belt…

  “Sure, I know what kind of figures you have to go over and they’re not exactly the numerical kind, either.” Schneider’s sarcastic voice dragged her out of her fantasy and Leita realized she’d been staring at the glowing cube for over a minute without doing anything.

  “Shut up,” she mumbled savagely, manipulating the cube until the site she really wanted to look at popped up. “So what if I like to look? It’s not like I’ve ordered anything.” Yet, she added to herself.

  For Her Pleasure proclaimed the glowing, purple letters at the top of the cube. You must be eighteen standard years of age to enter this site if human. Three hundred standard years if Bersinian. Bersinians were a particularly long-lived species of ET that didn’t reach sexual maturity for centuries. Leita felt sorry for them—she was barely twenty-seven standard years of age and so consumed with unfulfilled sexual longings that the idea of waiting another two hundred and seventy-three years to look at porn on the Web was unthinkably frustrating. Not that she wasn’t already frustrated enough.

  She scrolled through the species list that included almost all known forms of alien life that inhabited the galaxy except Periis. Periis were an exclusively homosexual male species that reproduced by budding. There was also no mention of Toliwogs, a group of hyper-religious creatures that inhabited one small moon in a distant galaxy.

  Toliwogs believed that an appropriate punishment when one of their number was caught masturbating was amputation of a hand. Since Toliwogs had twelve hands, it was entirely possible to gauge how dirty an individual’s mind was by counting the number of remaining hands. Only Toliwogs with eleven hands or more were permitted to enter the priesthood. Toliwogs with less than three hands were excommunicated and could sometimes be seen in spaceports with signs that read “Please lend a hand to the handless”.

  At any rate, Leita was glad she wasn’t a Bersinian, a Perii or a Toliwog as she found “human” on the long list and clicked on it with her glove. There was the standard fare, erotic stories, mind link personal ads, even feely fantasies that could be hooked directly into your nervous system to give you an intensely pleasurable mind movie that felt exactly like the real thing. Well, almost. Leita knew from bitter experience that nothing but a living, breathing, hot-blooded man in your bed felt like a man in your bed. Too bad she no longer trusted men.

  Tonight Leita wasn’t interested in the standard stuff, not even the brand new S&M feely fantasy that normally would have caught her eye. She flipped straight to the premium section of the For Her Pleasure site and stared at the choices, biting her lip.

  “Mm-mm-mm,” Schneider murmured, breaking her concentration. “Small, medium, and extra large. Decisions, decisions.”

  “Shut up,” Leita commanded again, studying the 3-D images floating above her cube. She nervously nibbled at her left thumbnail as she manipulated the cube with her right hand.

  “Companion 2000” the purple letters flared. “Guaranteed to grant your every sexual desire and fulfill your need for companionship.”

  “Hey, I thought I fulfilled your need for companionship,” Schneider, protested, slinking his long neck around so that he could read the words over his shoulder.

  “Until you gain about two hundred pounds of muscle and grow some considerably larger equipment…” Leita started, then saw the hurt look in her friend’s wide golden eyes. “Aw, c’mon, Schneider, you know I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that sometimes, well, I have needs.”

  “Needs to bankrupt the company,” Schneider muttered huffily, beginning to groom his whiskers as he always did when he was upset. “You ought to be using that credit on hiring a new mechanic to fix the droids instead of dropping a wad on some overpriced blow-up doll.”

  Leita gritted her teeth. “We’ve been over this, Schneider. The last two times I tried to hire someone, they took the credit and ran, remember?” It was really hard to find a man who wanted to stay out here at the ass end of the solar system and fix broken droid ships. The first man she’d tried to hire, after her parents’ death in a scouting accident, had simply taken his pay of a month’s credit and run off in the night. The second one, Eddie, well, he had been a real prize.

  The sleazy, smooth-talking con artist had managed to make Leita believe that he loved her. She’d told him everything—even her most private fantasies, the ones that made her hot and cold, the ones that made her wake up drenched in sweat and filled with longing night after night. The ones she was most ashamed of. Eddie had pretended to play along for a good long time—almost six months. Then he’d gained access to her private quarters and stolen her mother’s jewelry and her fat
her’s platinum-plated chronometer along with six months’ profit on his way out the door. The only thing he’d left her, besides a broken heart, was a note telling her exactly what he thought of her fantasies and desires.

  It had taken Leita a year to recoup financially and she still hadn’t recovered emotionally from the betrayal. Unfortunately, just because her heart wasn’t up to a romantic relationship didn’t mean her body had stopped craving sex. If anything, Leita craved it more. All alone, except for Schneider, in the spacious but empty life pod from which she controlled the mining operation, she sometimes physically ached for the touch of another human being.

  She wanted a pair of strong arms to hold her tight, a deep, soothing masculine voice to murmur sweet nothings into her ear, a warm, hard body to curl around hers in the dead of night when she felt cold and frightened and alone. Most of all, she wanted someone who wouldn’t think she was crazy or strange when she admitted her darkest needs and desires. She wanted a man, but there was no way to get one to stay. No way except to buy one—or the next best thing.

  “Anyway, the Companion 2000 is more than a ‘blow-up doll’,” she told Schneider, manipulating the cube so that the three size choices rotated in turn. “The skeleton is tempered titanium and the brain is the best and most advanced cybernetic synthi- organic cognitive structure on the market today. All covered in genuine vat-grown flesh that comes in a variety of skin tones and textures—vanilla, caramel, or dark chocolate.” Did this site cater to women or what? she thought, smiling to herself. “Also you can pick from smooth, medium hairy, or gorilla.”

  “Listen to you,” Schneider sniffed disdainfully. “You’ve been surfing this site so often you have all the specs memorized. It’s disgusting.”

  Leita sighed. “Like I’d expect you to understand. Tarbians only have to mate once every fifty years. You spend one week—one single week, mind you—producing and hatching your offspring, then you go off and never see each other again.”

  “And that’s the way we like it,” Schneider stressed. “Most of us, anyway. The last time I hooked up with a female, she actually wanted me to hang around an extra couple of hours—ugh! I just can’t stand it when they get clingy.” He shivered, a move that displaced his sleek coat of tan fur so that he had to spend a moment grooming it back into place with his long pink tongue and small, six-fingered hands.

  “The point is,” Leita said, rotating the dark chocolate-colored medium-sized man figure, “just because you don’t need someone to hold you at night doesn’t mean I’m happy sleeping alone.”

  “You’re not sleeping alone,” Schneider protested. “I sleep on the pillow right next to you. Just because we have incompatible body parts and you humans are so freakishly huge I can’t service you sexually—”

  “Schneider, please. You know what I mean.” She went back to studying the Companion 2000 series, deciding which one to get. What really drew her eye was the extra-large size in caramel-colored medium-hairy. Her interest flagged the site’s auto- sale personality and specs began appearing on the cube.

  “The Extra Large Companion 2000 is between six-foot-two and six-foot-six” read the purple words, marching like obedient insects beneath the 3-D figures. “Two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty pounds of Old Earth Standard solid muscle will be at your sexual beck and call. Penis size is, of course, proportionate to the size of the Companion. We guarantee satisfaction both physically and emotionally. All Companions in the 2000 series have been programmed with correct and sensitive emotional responses for every occasion. Be the envy of all your friends—you’ll swear you have the perfect man!”

  “I’d be happy to have any man at all,” Leita muttered to herself, still eyeing the extra-large, caramel-colored, medium-hairy Companion 2000 wistfully. “But I guess this is the next best thing.”

  “What are you going to do with that thing once you get tired of it?” Schneider demanded, lashing his long tufted tail in disgust. “Store it under the bed or in the closet? It can’t really love you, Leita. Or have an intelligent conversation, or share your interests, or help you fix the droids.”

  “No.” Leita sighed. “I know that, Schneider. But I can manage the droids on my own as long as I stay here to keep on top of things. And I have you for scintillating conversation.”

  “But what if it goes crazy and runs amok?” Schneider asked anxiously. “That’s a pretty big dildo you’re ordering there, Leita. It could do some serious damage if its wiring goes wrong.”

  “Don’t worry. I can’t really afford the extra large anyway—it’s over four thousand credits more than the rest put together.” Regretfully, she turned her attention to a smaller, cheaper model. For Her Pleasure was running a special on a small, vanilla, smooth-skinned Companion with blond hair, she was dutifully informed by the scrolling purple letters. If she ordered now, she would get free shipping straight from the manufacturing plant on Osiris and she could have the new Companion 2000 in her bed in under one solar month.

  Leita bit her lip. It wasn’t really what she wanted, but it was what she could afford. Besides, maybe Schneider was right—the small Companion was about her size and less likely to do damage if something went wrong. Making her decision, she placed the order and was rewarded with a confirmation number.

  One small, blond, smooth, vanilla cure for sexual frustration was currently on its way to her door. Leita just hoped she could hold out until it got to her. Those damn sexy dreams she kept having were hell on a girl’s libido.

  Pierce ducked another laser blast and dodged into the shadow of the large building to his left. Damn, when the deal went south, it went south in a hurry. ‘Course, he hadn’t expected to recognize his contact, or for that matter, to have his contact recognize him and decide he’d rather collect the bounty that was out on Pierce’s head than finish their negotiation. Shie-lu had always been an untrustworthy asshole, though Pierce had to admit for the amount of the contract on his head, he might turn his own self in—that was, if he thought he could get out of it alive. And that was looking more unlikely by the minute. Pierce returned fire, noting his light pistol was getting pretty low on charge. He was already outgunned, if he didn’t find a place to lay low pretty quick he was going to be deep fried as well.

  He glanced up at the building he was crouching by—looked like some kind of a factory. Osiris was famous for manufacturing most of the luxury goods in the galaxy, so it was probably a sensu-couch plant or a luxury hover-mobile assembly line. But what they made inside didn’t matter to Pierce, what did matter was that there would probably be lots of shadowy corners to hide in until his contact turned assassin gave up and left.

  Another laser blast passed over his head. Damn—they were getting closer. Rather than shooting back, Pierce crept quietly around the side of the huge building, letting his fingertips trail along the rough plasti-steel surface of the wall as he searched for a door in the dark Osiris night. He found one just as another blast passed over his head and jimmied the lock without too much difficulty even though he couldn’t see what he was doing. Natural mechanical aptitude, that’s what he had. Of course, using it to get into places he shouldn’t instead of in honest trade was one of the things that had gotten him into the mess he was in now.

  As he eased the door closed behind him and entered the dim interior of the plant, Pierce reflected that maybe it was time to get out of the urban areas of the galaxy and head someplace more rural—someplace with a quiet, relaxed attitude and no people to recognize him. After all, it wasn’t like he loved living in the big, dirty cities he usually found himself in. It was just that most profitable crimes took place in the city rather than in a cornfield on a snug little moon at the ass end of the galaxy. You had to go where your business took you—that was Pierce’s motto.

  There was another blast of laser fire outside but it sounded farther away this time. Good, maybe Shie-lu and his thugs had been thrown off the scent. Speaking of scent— Pierce took a whiff of one of his armpits and wrinkled his nose in
disgust. He’d been running since his shuttle kissed dirt on Osiris and he hadn’t even had time for a shower. He wasn’t a guy that minded getting dirty on occasion, but it would be nice to get a chance to clean up. As soon as he got out of this, he promised himself, he was going straight to the Pleasure Baths on Bast Six where there were plenty of friendly whores and lots of opportunities to bathe with them.

  Of course, a man couldn’t settle down with a whore and lately Pierce had been thinking about that. Not that he wanted to settle down, of course, but he was getting kind of old for the life he was living right now—always on the run, always hopping from one payday to the next one step ahead of the law and only half a step ahead of the thugs who wanted his hide. It would be nice to find someplace quiet with a willing woman and just relax for a while.

  There was another blast outside and he backed up, eyeing the strange shadowy forms of the unfamiliar machinery looming around him in the darkness. The whole place had a weird, chemical smell that he didn’t like one bit. Pierce sniffed the air—vat- grown flesh—that was it. So maybe this factory wasn’t just making sensu-couches or luxury hover-mobiles.

  Most of the known galaxy’s sex toys and marital aides were also exported from Osiris. Maybe he’d stumbled into one of those places where they made cybernetic whores for the super rich. Although, how a man could stand to screw something that had grown in a vat of chemicals was beyond him. Pierce wasn’t overly picky about his women—they only had to be warm, willing and friendly—but he drew the line at artificial pussy. That was just going too far, even if a man was desperate.

  He stepped backward again and bumped into a long, rectangular box that looked a lot like a coffin. A shiver ran down his spine. He wasn’t superstitious but it didn’t seem like a good sign to find himself right beside a big-ass sarcophagus-looking thing when Shie-lu was trying to collect the bounty on his head. Something in the box seemed to rustle and he jumped back, knocking into another box with his pistol aimed at the first one. He half expected some cybernetic ghoul to rise from the shadows of the fancy coffin and tell him to prepare to meet his maker. There was nothing though—just his own harsh panting in the darkness and the sick stench of vat-grown flesh in his nose.