by H. E. Trent
“Tell me,” she whispered.
Fuck.
“The normal things Jekhan men do when they have too much free time on their hands, Erin.”
“Be more specific. I’m not from Jekh. You’ve got to get me up to speed.”
Erin had wonderfully soft hands, but strong ones. Her grip was unrelenting and skillful. He could feel every one of her tugs all the way down in his curled toes. He suspected that even his hair was curling from her attention.
“I want to know what you do,” she said. “What do you like?”
“I like everything. I believe our males are somewhat more…sexually casual with each other than yours.”
“Stop dancing around the question, Headron.”
“I’m trying to answer.”
“You’re trying to stall. Stop that.” She slipped four of her fingers into his mouth and whispered, “Lick those.”
He obliged.
“Thank you.” She renewed her grip on his shaft, wetter now. Slicker and more terrible. He had no choice, really, but to reveal to her how long it’d been since he’d been touched.
Any second now.
“Still waiting,” she said.
He closed his eyes, nodded, and tried to distance his brain from the sensations of his body. If he could stop thinking about how tight his balls were or how his sensitive nostrils picked up the scent of her arousal, he could possibly answer her question in the way she wanted.
“With men we already know well, we tend to be more businesslike in asking each other to fulfill that need.”
“What need?”
“You’re really going to make me say the words, aren’t you?”
“Yep.” She made some twisting motion down his head and shaft that nearly propelled him all the way to Little Gitano.
“Gods, woman.”
“Still waiting, Headron.”
Grunting, he closed his eyes, clutched the covers hard, and took a deep breath. “I’ve fucked and I’ve been fucked by other men.”
“How many others?”
“Does that really matter?”
“No. I’d just like to chase away the suspicion that you’re far too sweet and innocent for your own good.”
“There’s nothing innocent about me, I assure you.” He pushed hard into her hand again and again and didn’t care that he was coming—didn’t care that she was laughing.
Her hand was covered with his hot, sticky ejaculate, and her warm breath tickled his ear.
“Erin…” He groaned.
He could come again. He could take himself in hand and pump out more of that useless liquid, and he probably wouldn’t feel any better afterward.
“So, many?” Her voice was a sultry purr, and her hand like velvet. Pure torture.
“Quite,” he said through clenched teeth.
“And you didn’t like any of them enough to keep them?”
“No.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Perhaps I’m too picky and they were just dicks and holes.”
Headron knew his past reluctance to take a permanent lover didn’t quite boil down to that. Selectivity did play a small role in mate choosing, but mostly, his gut hadn’t felt right with those men, and he firmly believed that instinct was what made beings evolve over time. He didn’t want to be left behind when progress was happening around him.
“You’re picky and yet you want me?” she asked with a giggle, and carefully freed her grip from his cock head.
“I want you because I’m picky.”
“Keep talking like that, and you’ll earn more brownie points than you know what to do with.” She slipped off the bed and padded out into the hallway, likely toward the bathroom, and he lay there for a minute wondering what “brownie points” were.
Likely nothing important.
The McGarrys always explained the more important of their turns of phrase.
He fixed his pants around his waist, and then draped an arm across his eyes. He had a more pressing concern to devote his mental fortitude to.
Finding a suitable male in or around Little Gitano who could both arouse Erin and not annoy the ever-loving stars out of Headron couldn’t possibly be an easy feat, but he tried to understand why Erin had made the deal.
She was an intelligent woman. She’d figured out the system, and the onus was on Headron for him to figure out how to work it to his advantage.
He refused to be swerved again. Erin was going to be his.
CHAPTER THREE
Esteben sat in the shadowy corner of his little cottage, as he did most mornings, and stuffed himself with starchy sustenance.
He liked the dark. The dark had been his friend those many years when some illness of the Tyneali blanketed his mind, and none of the cures known to doctors in Buinet had been enough.
Weary of tending to him, his lover—Shaid—had signed him in to a hospital. Then Terrans arrived. Esteben had been moved from one cage into a different kind. A jail rather than a hospital, and then he’d been let out on his own with no one to tend to him. Shaid was gone. The Terrans didn’t care. They needed space in their jail. He wasn’t dangerous, they’d said. Just sick, they’d said.
He’d been both, and perhaps being out on the street had caused those two things to bubble up, spill over into each other, and erupt. He’d been sick and dying, and angry. One thing fed the other, and gave him occasional pinpricks of clarity.
When the Buinet Riots started, he’d spent more time in blackout states than lucid. He kept coming to, finding himself fighting and snarling like a rabid Tyneali beast. There’d be so much blood on him, around him. No Jekhans who happened upon him had cared because they were raising hell. Those Jekhans didn’t care if there was one less cop or one less colonist to tread on them.
He’d done them a favor, they’d said. Better him than them, they’d said.
Esteben hadn’t looked at faces. Hadn’t needed to. A glimpse of Terran clothing was enough to make him fight.
The last blurry figure in a jumpsuit that had gotten close to him hadn’t let him fight. She fought harder, and smarter. She’d fought to deescalate his rage, not to hurt him, and he gave in.
Erin had gotten him to the farm, and there’d been a doctor who actually knew all the things wrong with him and how to fix them. A country doctor knew when all the doctors in Buinet hadn’t.
There’d been his brother and his new niece.
There’d been a place for him.
He was “cured,” but he was still wild and alone. He couldn’t do anything about the wildness—the urges and the temper, at least not yet.
Being alone, though…that was mostly his choice. Talking to people made him angry. They told him too much about what was happening in the world and about how much had changed since the Terrans came, and then expected him to be in good humor. They expected him to “Go with the flow,” as his brother’s woman might have said.
Esteben scoffed and shoved some more toasted bread into his mouth. He’d have to eat in a hurry, or Courtney would return soon carrying Kerry oddly on her jutted hip. She’d clean up his house and look at him in that pitying way, and he’d get angry for no reason.
Just looking at her made him angry, which was irrational. The part of his brain that was highly cultured and evolved knew that he was irrational. Courtney was Terran, yes, but she’d saved Murki, and she was good to Murki. She’d given him a baby.
Murki had always been good about collecting the right sorts of people, even if class and society said he should have been looking elsewhere for partners. Murki had never been one to do what was expected of him, though. If he had been, he would have never snuck off with Trigrian, and they likely wouldn’t be safe—or as safe as any Jekhan could be in the current climate—on Trigrian’s family’s farm.
From where Esteben was sitting, he could see the front door of the main house through his side window. Someone pulled the door open. Reflexively, Esteben held his breath.
Just Murki.
/> And Murki was heading right toward the cottage.
Esteben brushed crumbs off his tunic and managed to sit up a little by the time Murki knocked.
Murki let himself in without waiting for Esteben to answer. Esteben hadn’t relocked the door after Courtney brought his breakfast.
Murki gave a curt bow, and his knowing gaze quickly scanned the room.
There was nothing in the cottage worth seeing. Nothing had changed since his brother’s last visit the day prior, and nothing had been interesting then, either.
“How are you this morning?” Murki asked.
“If that’s your way of asking if I feel charitable enough to be around your precious lovers today…” Esteben shrugged. “I’m certain I could manage.”
“You’re right. They are precious,” Murk said flatly. “I’m pleased you’ve finally made that observation.” He moved to the rarely used small kitchen, and fiddled with the knob on the cooking apparatus. “Did you enjoy your breakfast?”
Esteben grunted. “Good bread. Good fruit. Who picked the fruit?”
“Courtney did, but don’t read any symbolism into the choices. She picked what was ripe.”
“Too bad. I thought perhaps she were inviting me to a secret tryst.”
Every food in Jekhan culture had a meaning. People had to be especially careful when giving fruit to individuals outside their family groups or they could make accidental propositions and find themselves in all sorts of trouble.
Murk leaned his ass against the counter edge and crossed his arms over his broad chest.
Not starved at all, that one. “His lovers keep him well fed,” Esteben muttered. He could picture them hand-feeding Murki as if he were some kind of spoiled sultan.
Their father had been a large man, and Esteben could see glimpses of the late merchant in his brother. He’d always looked more like their father. Esteben, supposedly, favored their mother, though he was just as tall as his brother. Unfortunately, he hadn’t overtaken his younger brother in weight. If he kept consuming bread at the rate he was, however, Esteben would be fat and jolly in no time.
“Do you need anything else before you get to work for the morning?” Murk asked. “More coffee?”
“Foul stuff, isn’t it?” Esteben held up the canteen full of the dark brew Courtney had brought out. “Has a certain…piquancy. Disgusting, but positively addictive.”
“The addictiveness is due to the caffeine. It’s what Courtney calls an ‘upper.’ In time, you get used to the taste. Add enough sweetener, and you hardly notice the foulness.”
“Hmm.” Esteben poured another small cup and brought the rim to his lips. “You know, Father would have made a fortune introducing this beverage to the masses. He always had a good sense of what would sell.”
“May he rest in eternal peace.”
“Along with most of our family.”
Murk closed his eyes, and nodded.
Their parents were dead, as was their second father. Killed in their sleep, at least. They never knew how close the Terrans were.
“We’ll see how well it sells when the first crop is ready,” Murki said. “Trigrian has been tirelessly tending the plants. We may not have enough beans to sell for a few years, but that will be the plan.”
“Mm-hmm. Let’s see.” Esteben counted off on his fingers. “Coffee beans. That weird cacao product. Sugarcane. What else are you planting that’s so unfamiliar to the Jekhan palate?”
“Other than a few familiar staple grains Trigrian insisted on having available for the McGarrys and their friends, most of what we plan to grow will be native to Jekh.”
“Farming.” Esteben snorted and took another sip of coffee. “Our family hadn’t been the sort to have dirt under their collective nails for at least four centuries.”
“I’m familiar already with your derision of the occupation, but farming is honest work, and everyone here needs to do his or her part to support the endeavor.”
“Or else what, leave?”
Murki narrowed his eyes. “No one’s holding you here against your will, Brother. You’re well enough to set out on your own if that’s what you want to do. You can go back to Buinet and see what sort of hell is still being waged there. Perhaps try to round up our half-brothers or see what news there is of all of our women who’ve been taken off-planet. You can, oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged in that way that indicated he knew exactly. “You could get yourself caught by Terran authorities and have another tracking chip implanted into your head, or worse.”
“Is this your ever-polite way of telling me to count my blessings?”
“I can be polite or rude. I doubt the tone would make much difference to you. The sentiment, however, would be exactly that. So. What do you choose?”
Esteben closed his eyes and dragged a hand down his face. Choice was a luxury he hadn’t had since he was a man of around twenty and beginning to make lucrative trades on his own. Before Shaid had abandoned him.
“Why don’t you just bring Kerry here for me to mind? She doesn’t judge me.”
“Because she’s an infant. She doesn’t know she should be judging you yet. Besides, I believe she’s perfectly content where she is today. Courtney and Brenna are canning fruit for market. Kerry adores Brenna, and enjoys the commotion.”
“I haven’t spoken with Brenna yet. I don’t know which of those warm female bodies she is.”
A lie, but Murk didn’t call him on it.
There were so many women on the farm, comparatively speaking to the ratio on the rest of the planet. He didn’t let himself get excited about the numbers, though, even if three were supposedly Jekhan.
“Which is Brenna?” Esteben pressed.
“Brenna is a good friend to my Courtney. That is all you need to know. Perhaps if you left the house and met the people, you’d be more familiar with the names those warm female bodies belong to.”
“I know Kerry’s name, and that’s enough. I’ll make a trader out of that child yet.” Esteben snapped his fingers and pointed to his brother. “She’s got the right genes. You wait and see.”
Murk let out a ragged exhalation, likely peeved at the subject change. Murk being Murk, he’d never try to redirect. He wasn’t the sort of man who’d belabor a topic. “If she’s happy with that occupation, I’ll give my blessing with no qualms.”
“You’ll never get over that, will you?”
“Over what? Father trying to force me into an occupation I was utterly disinterested in because it was what the family expected of a male Beshni?”
“Could you fault him? Your art wasn’t going to support you in the manner in which you’d become accustomed, in spite of your dreams otherwise. You were always a dreamer, Murk.”
“Dreaming and Trigrian kept me alive when I had nothing else. And my art supported me just fine as a young man before the Terrans came. You would have known that if you’d deigned to visit before you fell ill.” He added in a softer tone. “Or after. Perhaps we could have helped.”
Esteben waved a dismissive hand at him. He’d had no interest in being a spectator to his brother’s happiness when he was so incredibly miserable. “So, what chore would you have me do today? Something suitably mindless, I hope.”
“Mindless enough. Owen wants to start installing the nighttime sensors around the perimeter so we can monitor the farm more easily. After last night, we’re somewhat more motivated to get the installation moving along.”
“What happened last night? I didn’t hear anything.”
“You always were able to sleep through any commotion, otherwise, you would have discovered my affection for Trigrian much sooner.” Murk’s lips stretched into a tight grin.
Esteben needed a moment to catch onto his brother’s implication. He groaned and collapsed backward onto his bed. “Even then you were… Ugh.”
The Beshnis had taken Trigrian and his siblings in after their parents had been killed in a transport rig crash. Trigrian had been a teenager at the time, and Murk just a f
ew years his senior.
“Tell me you didn’t,” Esteben said.
Murk shrugged in his usual don’t-give-a-damn way. “All things considered, I was very well behaved. We shared a room most nights for years before we were intimate. You didn’t notice.”
“Apparently,” Esteben muttered, and rubbed his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to. He’d been too busy enduring his own lover’s highs and lows and wondering if the relationship had been a years-long mistake. The relationship looked good on paper. They were both from the prosperous lecht class—old money going back at least fifteen generations. Their families socialized in the same circles. Shaid and Esteben should have been perfectly suited for each other, but they had too many philosophical differences for true compatibility. For one thing, Shaid hadn’t been interested in completing their trio, although Esteben had warned that Beshni men needed females sooner than most. For another thing, Shaid had been what fine Terran literature referred to as “a trifling-ass whore.”
Esteben cracked his knuckles.
“Tell me what happened last night.” He was in dire need of a redirection of his thoughts. He already wasted far too many hours regretting his years with Shaid. “Contrary to what you might think, I do care what happens here. I have to live here.”
“In your own way, I suppose, and you don’t have to live here. You choose to for the moment, and I hope you’d choose to stay.”
“With Trigrian’s blessing, right?”
“His, mine, and Courtney’s. That is how healthy trios work, is it not?”
“I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t call our parents’ trio functional. I’m not entirely certain our mother liked either male toward the end.” He clucked his tongue and pondered further. “Or if she liked them ever.”
“No. She was beautiful and they were rich. That was the glue holding them together, however that’s a discussion for another day, perhaps. I can only ponder so much of our melodramatic past at once.”
Esteben nodded, and gestured for his brother to continue.
“Erin and Headron were on patrol last night. They subdued three trespassers at the northwest corner of the property. The peacekeepers came to fetch them early this morning.”