As Darkness Falls [Flights of Fancy 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More)

by Melodee Aaron

  “I’m sure that’s it. We know you and the Ling are very close biologically, and with so few of them around, it would be easy for our sensors to miss a small population.”

  He decided to press the issue a little. “Does your Empire provide help to other civilizations?”

  A small frown flickered across her face, gone so quickly that Logan wasn’t totally certain he even saw it. “Sometimes, but we usually stay out of a planet’s internal affairs. Speaking of which, the diplomatic people wanted me to ask about your Emperor. When might we have an audience with him?”

  “I am trying to arrange that, but it’s not as easy as you might think.” She didn’t need to know that Logan hadn’t discussed the matter with Kartime at all and had no intentions of doing so.

  Rabine laughed. “I can only imagine how busy our Emperor is, and I suspect yours is about the same. But this seems like a big enough event that he would want to be involved.”

  “Perhaps that’s true in human society.” He gave her his best smile again. “But Hargons are not human.”

  * * * *

  Rabine watched Alexa as she studied the results of the close range scan she’d made of the Ling woman. She didn’t like the look on the old woman’s face.

  Alexa took a sip of the Hargon drink. “Are you sure this woman was a Ling?”

  “That’s what she and Logan told me.” Rabine shrugged. “She didn’t look any different from the Hargon women we’ve seen, though.”

  “Well, her biology is extremely close to that of the Hargon, even closer than the long-range scans indicated. There are a few differences in the DNA and some extra proteins and enzymes but nothing major. Put it this way, the Hargon and Ling are far closer relatives than humans and chimpanzees. Just like humans and apes, the Ling and Hargon share a common ancestor.”

  “So what do the extra proteins and enzymes do?”

  “I have no idea. Don’t even ask me about the DNA differences.” She sipped at her drink again, and Rabine wondered how much of the stuff Alexa was consuming. “For all I know, this would let the Ling teleport without instrumentality. Or not.”

  “That’s not much help.”

  “I know, but it’s all I have. By the way, did Cliff talk to you?”

  Rabine paused. She’d finally admitted to herself today that she’d been avoiding him. He distracted her from her work, but it was a pleasant distraction. No matter if it was pleasant or not, Captain Davis wouldn’t accept excuses for the work not being finished in a timely manner.

  “Talk to me about what?”

  Alexa chuckled and swallowed from her glass. “Oh, he has some concerns about the Hargon.” She laughed again. “Maybe you should go find him.”

  * * * *

  The Hargon didn’t seem to actively hide anything from him or the other landing party members, but Cliff couldn’t shake the feeling that while they hid nothing, they led him to certain things. The security people Logan assigned to show him the Hargon weapons and ships were pleasant and let him look at everything he asked about, but they seemed to make a point of showing him their nuclear arsenal. The weapons were old, maybe thousands of years old, and primitive, like bombs terrorist groups made in back-alley warehouses on some worlds. Building a simple fission bomb wasn’t hard once you had the concept and the fissionable material. Yes, the Hargon would have to use care to avoid blowing the thing up or getting radiation exposure, but it wasn’t beyond the abilities of even kids with a little science training. He sat wondering why the Hargon wanted him to see old atomic bombs.

  The suite of rooms the Hargon provided to the landing party was nice, but it was clearly thrown together on short notice. The walls to the hallway were paper-thin, like they built the walls to turn a bunch of alcoves into rooms. He heard someone walking in the hall, and Cliff was sure the person stopped in front of his door several times, walked away, and then returned. A soft knock came at the door, a hesitation between the raps like the visitor couldn’t decide if they should knock or not.

  When he opened the door, his heart skipped a beat or two. Rabine stood there in the hallway, looking a little lost. He had barely seen her the past couple of days, and he wondered what he had done to offend her. He wrote off not tracking her down to ask as being too busy, but he knew the real reason was he didn’t want to know if he had somehow hurt her feelings.

  He couldn’t help smiling at her. “Hi.” He was happy just to see her. That didn’t mean he could string words together into a meaningful sentence.

  “Evening.” She looked around for a moment. “Are you busy?”

  “No, not really. Just thinking.” He stood aside and waved his arm to the room. “Please, come in.”

  Rabine hesitated, her eyes studying the empty room behind him. Finally she shrugged a little and walked into the room. She sat down on the sofa and stared at him as he closed the door. “Alexa said you needed to talk to me.”

  Cliff realized his mouth had gone dry again. He was fine—well, maybe not fine, but he would survive—until she walked past him. He’d come to understand Rabine had a thing for jumpsuits—black jumpsuits—and she wore one tonight. As she’d crossed from the door to the sofa, he’d caught sight of her legs and ass. Just like all the other times he’d tried to describe something about her to himself, Cliff couldn’t find the right words. He tried “amazing,” but that sounded like a circus sideshow act. “Phenomenal” was worse, more like a science experiment. Maybe “to-die-for” was right because he knew her body was worth dying for. No, not just her body—Rabine was worth dying for.

  He frowned as he wondered where that came from, but he didn’t have time to puzzle about it too long. She sat on the sofa, her long legs crossed and her left foot dancing nervously in the air as she waited for him to speak. Cliff swallowed hard and worked to find enough moisture to make his mouth work. “She did?”

  “Well, not in so many words, but she said you have some concerns about the Hargon.”

  He could think of at least a million things other than aliens to talk to Rabine about, but maybe he could actually make sense if he stuck to a safe subject. “Yeah, I do. They aren’t smart enough to have the technology they have, and things that break are just sort of cobbled together.”

  She frowned. “Like what?”

  “I saw a bunch of nuclear weapons today that are held together with chewing gum and duct tape.” He laughed a little. “They can’t fix them right, so how could they have built them?”

  “I don’t know.” She stood and paced the small room. As if he needed more evidence of the hurried preparation of the suite, each room contained only a sofa-bed, an armchair, and a small coffee table. An end table with a lamp completed the furniture inventory, and the room was almost crowded. As Rabine moved to dodge the obstacles, her body flexed in delectable ways, not at all unlike that first night he met her and watched her dancing. “You’re the expert at technological history and weapons. You tell me.”

  He swallowed again, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of her body. He still hadn’t come up with anything other than perfect to describe her breasts. And it still sounded corny, even to him. “Damned if I know. I don’t think they built them at all. The Hargon either found the weapons and ships, or someone gave them the hardware.”

  “Who?” She stopped right in front of Cliff and turned to face him. “Who would give a primitive society such weapons and then leave them to fend for themselves?”

  She was less than half a meter from him, her eyes looking up into his as she waited for his answer. This close, Cliff could see only her face, and her dark eyes swamped even the amazing—was that a calliope in the distance?—beauty of her face. He’d decided Rabine’s eyes were black, like her hair, but now, this close, he saw flashes of light in the blackness. Like distant pulsars in the depth of space, the light blinked and pulsed to its own hypnotic rhythm as he stared. Cliff felt her eyes beckoning to him, pulling him in no less than a tractor beam could drag an asteroid to a mining ship. Every instinct in him screa
med for him to pull away, to run and save himself before her eyes hauled him beyond the point of no return, but he didn’t want to break free. He wanted to get even closer, like a moth to a flame, and the consequences didn’t matter.

  As man had done since the first of the genus homo had looked across the savannahs of Africa, Cliff subdued his instincts, suppressed the urges of the hardwired functions left over from his evolutionary ancestors. Instead of running away, his brain—his human brain—took control and he stood his ground, not sure what to do next.

  He would think of something.

  * * * *

  Crosley considered what Leilend told him and the others about her meeting with the human woman Rabine, but he didn’t know what to make of it all. While Leilend had been nebulous about some things in her waking dream when she spoke to the others, she told him the full dream, going into great detail about the session in the forest of her vision. He wasn’t ashamed of the fact that her tale excited him, and he’d taken his wife, fucking her three times before their meeting with the rest of the resistance leaders.

  Most of the Ling had visions of some type, but historically the waking dreams of the women were more detailed and accurate. While the passion in Leilend’s dream must mean something in and of itself, Crosley wondered more about the deeper meanings. He thought it clear that he, Leilend, and Rabine were coming together for some reason, as was the unnamed man from the dream, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe making love was the only reason.

  The full meaning of the dreams and the reasons for the confluence must be important. Crosley knew it was probably of vital importance.

  * * * *

  Rabine’s mind ran away with the conflicting information she and her team gathered about the Hargons and Lings, and she knew the situation had pulled her in and tangled her mind in the convolutions. She forgot she was alone with Cliff and that she’d been trying for the last week to shove the building attraction she felt for him down deep in her mind so she could focus on her job. When she stopped in front of him and asked who could have set the Hargons up in the nuclear weapons business, the fact that she stood very close to him suddenly became of utmost importance.

  Cliff looked calm. In fact, his expression gave away nothing of his thoughts, and he simply stared into her eyes. Gone was the shyness she’d found in him that first night at the club. Also gone was the serious look on his face from the day at the mess hall. Instead, he looked like nothing, his expression neutral and unreadable.

  “Rabine, do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”

  She half-expected him to grab her and kiss her and then drag her to the floor while clawing at her clothes like a wild man. If he didn’t do it soon, Rabine was going to grab him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You.”

  “I know that!”

  He stood calmly, his face a study in distracted neutrality. “I’ve never known anyone as beautiful as you are.”

  Rabine wondered if she looked as confused as she felt. He made no move toward her, but shoved his hands in his pockets. Somehow, perhaps instinctively, she’d prepared herself for Cliff to take her, not that he’d need to force himself on her. At some point in the last few days, she’d realized she wanted him, and now that the time was right, he just stood there like he could wait for the end of the universe without taking his hands from his pockets. Confusion gave way quickly to frustration, and her frustration moved aside for a flare of anger.

  She struggled to keep her voice even. “Is that what you’ve been trying to say since the other day at brunch?” Her resolve faltered a little, and shrillness she didn’t like crept into her voice. “Is that all?”

  Cliff shrugged a little. “Partly, yes. I have no idea how to say the rest.” A smile slowly came to his lips, a sly smile that looked like he’d just figured out the answer to some question the best minds in the galaxy had long ago given up on. After a lifetime of failures, Cliff had finally found the answer.

  Rabine didn’t even know what the question was.

  He moved, but she didn’t know how fast. Her own clinical analysis of what happened surprised her, but it seemed the space-time continuum fell apart around her. She wondered if, somehow, she was in motion with respect to Cliff at relativistic speeds because time seemed to slow down, and the universe around her moved in slow motion. She wasn’t sure, but there may have been something screwy with causality as well because when her reflexes tried to make her sidestep his arms as they reached for her shoulders, he reacted before she moved.

  His hands felt strong on her shoulders, and he held her fast, but his grip didn’t hurt. Rabine knew any resistance she could offer would be enough to make him release her. The fact was she didn’t want him to let go. Her skin tingled where his big hands touched her, and waves of heat rolled through her body.

  Cliff pulled her toward him, and even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t have stopped. He pressed his lips to hers, and when his tongue parted her lips to dive into her mouth, Rabine found a taste to rival the scent of his body. All clinical analysis of the physics of the situation left her mind, and waves of animal desire swept over her as the sweetness of his lips and mouth spread warmth through her. She slipped her arms around his waist, the muscles in his back flexing and roiling under her hands as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders to pull her tighter to him.

  His breathing, much slower than the rapid panting rushing through her nose, caused his body to expand and contract in her arms, pressing his chest against hers with each respiration. The pressure of Cliff’s body against hers in alternating undulations made her nipples erect, and she wondered for a moment if he felt them pressing like small rocks against his chest.

  She hoped so.

  * * * *

  Cliff didn’t intend for this to happen because he feared how Rabine would react, but now here she was, in his arms, returning his kiss.

  He didn’t think she wore any kind of perfume because he hadn’t smelled the sickening sweetness of the artificial scents so many women wore when she came into the room. On the other hand, he didn’t recall ever smelling what he thought might be cologne on her in the past. Then again, his olfactory nerves might be burnt out from hanging around with the girls on the ship because of their habit of wearing strong, sweet scents, many spiked with pheromones.

  That didn’t mean Rabine’s aroma wasn’t intoxicating, because it was. When he’d pulled her toward him, the smell of her body nearly knocked him down and could easily leave him a babbling idiot if she chose to pull away now. Cliff couldn’t even begin to catalog the smells that made up Rabine. Maybe a chemist with a trillion credits worth of lab equipment could have broken things down into simple compounds, maybe, but he knew it didn’t matter. She smelled wonderful, like all the good memories of his past.

  But even the experience of her beauty and aroma nearly swamping him didn’t prepare him for the taste of her lips. When Cliff pulled Rabine to him and pressed his mouth to hers, he understood what happiness truly was. Having been all over the galaxy, he’d tasted amazing and exotic food and drinks considered to be some of the best known, but those delicacies all paled next to the flavor of her lips.

  Like a bolt from the red sky of the alien world, Cliff felt like he’d stepped out of his body. He watched with detached interest as he and Rabine held each other tight and kissed, their mouths moving together as their tongues dueled for penetration. It came to him with a clarity he remembered from lab classes in his past that something was very different. Instead of thinking about his next move with this woman, how to push her closer to the bed, how to get her clothes off, how to get her on her knees with his cock in her mouth, or how to get rid of her once he climaxed, all he thought of was how to hold her in his arms forever, how to keep her from leaving his side, and how to tell her these things.

  In what he knew was a rare flash of insight for him—or for any man, for that matter—Cliff realized these things didn’t matter at all. The fact that he held in his arms the mo
st beautiful and amazing woman he’d ever known, and that she responded in kind to his attention, was the only thing that mattered. He forced his mind back into his body and found his body had done its own thing in his absence.

  His cock was hard in his pants, and his balls ached for release. Cliff wanted Rabine, but not just to fuck her. He wasn’t sure he really understood what the term meant, but he wanted to make love to Rabine.

  He moved his arms, slipping them down Rabine’s back until his hands cupped her ass, and he pulled her hips against his body. The stiffness of his cock pressed hard against her, and his dick throbbed.

  Her response was to wrap her arms around his neck, pulling their heads tighter together, and to wiggle her body against his, her slender stomach rubbing against his dick. A tidal wave of want and desire washed over him, and Cliff knew he had to have her. He also retained enough of his senses to know that if Rabine were to pull away now and tell him to stop, he would obey her wishes. He might have to turn his sidearm on himself to keep from taking her, but he would do whatever he needed to do to please her, no matter the cost.

  Cliff pulled her pelvis tighter to his, and Rabine still moved against him, her body moving first in slow gyrations, then speeding up like the way she moved on the dance floor, but this time, instead of the movements fascinating him visually, the motion pushed him closer to coming in his pants. He didn’t want that—something in him knew shooting his load wasn’t important just now, and he feared if he came, he would be spent and unable to please Rabine. The thought of that happening saddened him, so he stepped away, releasing her firm ass from his grip, and swept her up into his arms.

  Chapter 5:

  Forever Afternoon

  Rabine wondered if she would need to plant another haymaker to Cliff’s jaw to get him on the floor with her. He stepped back from her, but she knew all was well when he scooped her into his arms and walked toward the sofa. His lips never left hers as Cliff carried her, and she loved the flavors that danced through her mouth.