“No,” I lied.
“That’s not the truth.” He smiled. “I can tell when you are lying. Your heart rate skips a beat.”
“Maybe I have an irregular heart rate.”
Then the idiot kissed me.
Chapter Nine
There was no logical reason in the galaxy why he should taste so damn good.
I melted into him. He tasted even better than I remembered. He smelled delicious, illogically of fresh air and wild greenery, as if he had just come off some planet full of life. I opened my mouth to taste more of him.
Lava flowed through my veins, filling my body with heat. I was melting. I wanted him on me, in me, filling me.
I threaded my fingers in his dark hair, intending to push him away, actually pulling him closer so I could have more of his hands on me, more of his tongue inside my mouth. My toes curled. I arched against him. The thin layers of fabric between us were no match for the strength of his bulge against my thighs.
I realized what I was doing and broke free of his kiss.
“We can’t do this.”
“I’m listening. Though not necessarily to the words coming out here,” he said, resting a fingertip on my lips. I had to restrain myself from licking him.
"Then from where?"
"From here,” he said, his hand drifting downward to my heart. His palm smoothed over my nipple, alert through the fabric. “And here.”
I grabbed his forearm, intending to stop him or slow him somehow. “I know what you’re doing,” I said, trying not to let myself be distracted by the sinewy muscles of his arms
He hooked his fingers along my waistband and skimmed it. “Educate me, Captain.”
Argh. I’d hate myself if this worked. I’d hate myself even more if I didn’t try. It was time to try a dose of reality. “You’re trying to make me forget.”
He paused momentarily, but then he hooked his fingers and yanked the underskins downward, exposing my mons. “Maybe I’m trying to make myself forget.” Muscles flexed and he moved downward. “Once I have my mouth on you, we won’t be able to think of anything else.”
I shuddered, my hands in his hair.
He kissed my navel, took a deep appreciative sniff, and smiled. “In case you’re wondering, it’s true what they say, Captain,” he said, his fingers stroking my slickness. “Werewolves can smell everything.”
I shivered and clenched. Fuck.
He smiled, so satisfied with himself. His fingers caressed my folds before he placed the ball of his palm against my wet clit and began to rub.
I tried to bite down on a sigh, but it was too late, I could feel delicious pressure building. I squirmed against his magic hands. “Anduin could walk by any moment.”
He slipped a finger in. I couldn’t help but thrust against him.
He smiled and swirled his finger in, even as he continued that exquisite assault on my clit with his other hand. “You know as well as I do that Anduin is not leaving the cockpit until the end of his shift in the next hour or so. And trust me, he knows.”
I clenched my teeth trying not to make a sound, but he redoubled his efforts. Somehow I managed words. “He knows what?”
He thrust his finger in. I let out a gasp and he pulled back. “He knows how you feel about me, even if you don’t.”
“Wait, what?”
And then he lowered his mouth to my pussy.
I was so hot with his fingers inside me that the flicks of his tongue on my clit, alternated with the gentlest of nips, was enough to send me over the edge. Pleasure caught fire, sparking a conflagration that tore through me, burning away my oxygen, leaving me shuddering.
I fell into him, helpless to stop, as he curled an arm around me. His cock, still engorged, lay against my stomach. It was inhuman how hard he was, how much control he had in holding himself back.
He spoke directly into my ear, his stubble brushing against my earlobe. “Doesn’t it feel good to surrender?”
I loved touching the hard planes of his chest, the laddered strength in his torso, the elegant V-line of his hips. “You keep speaking of the pleasures of surrender, yet, you really should be more familiar with what you advocate.”
He wrapped a hand around my wrist, catching me before I touched his cock. His voice was hoarse, his eyes gold. “Is that what you want?”
“Would it matter?”
There was an odd wary hesitation in his eyes.
“A great deal,” he said slowly, as if reluctantly revealing a secret. For a moment, he seemed fragile. And then I blinked because I was fooling myself. The distance between the werewolf prince and I would always be measured in light years.
I reached for his cock again. This time, he let me touch that thick velvet length. “Why me?” I asked. He flexed as I wrapped my hand around him. “What use do you have for me now that our plan's gone to shit? I'm not worth anything to you.”
He watched as I caressed his length. I needed more lubricant so I licked my hand. His eyes flowed as he watched my tongue, made a sharp intake of breath when I wrapped my hand back around him. “You’re different, Skye.”
My heart jumped, but my head stayed level. I played with the rim of his cock. “You could do with more originality, Ral, especially since I finally have you in my hands.”
“Never been so good with…” he stopped and closed his eyes, bucking into my hands when I rubbed my thumb on his tip. He finally gasped out, “words.”
I wanted to hear more, but it was better for both of us if we recognized what this really was: sex. I kissed a trail down that cobbled path to his cock.
“Admitting a weakness?” I said. I lowered my mouth to his shaft. “I expected more of a fight.”
With a challenge like that, he had no choice but to stop trying to make this more than it was. He opened his mouth to reply, but instead he let out a groan when I began licking long strokes.
“Skye,” he said, through clenched teeth, as I licked and kissed his crown, “you are the exception.”
I needed him to stop talking so I took as much of him as I could into my mouth. I wrapped one hand around the rest of him, and stroked his balls with the other. He groaned and shuddered. Now it was his turn to twist his fingers in my braids. The sounds of his speechlessness stoked wet heat at my core. Turnabout was more than fair play, especially when it came to a man who could single-handedly take down six angry tiger shifters.
“Skye,” he said again, “You make me break all my rules.”
I lifted my head and crawled up to him, pausing to nip a hard erect nipple before pressing a finger to his lips. My other hand was still slowly pumping his cock. “No need for such silly stories.”
He grabbed my wrists and stopped me. “I want to come inside you.” He flipped me to the mat. In the space of a heartbeat, I was underneath him. His reassertion of control quickened the heat in my veins. Stars, I was so lost on him.
He slid right into me, no fencing this time. I wrapped my legs around him and clenched. He gritted his teeth even as he moved slowly at a torturous pace. “Move! Damn you.” I grabbed his perfect ass, scratching at him, trying to make him go faster. “You make me crazy.”
“You do the same,” he said, before swallowing my mouth with a kiss.
My arms went around his neck. His thrusts accelerated. His tongue did the same. His tongue, his cock penetrated. One by one the pleasure built, shattering my defenses.
“Faster, more.”
He broke the kiss. He alternated biting and licking my ear, my neck, my mouth.
“Ral, faster, harder, more,” a rising breathless chant to the rhythm of our bodies. He savagely licked and bit my earlobe, my neck, my shoulder. The pleasure surged from my core, reaching, building, rocketing so high, too good, so psychotically amazing, so….
Fucking.
Amazing.
We lay there together on the floor of the common area. Our panting breaths were heavy in the silence.
I didn’t know what this was. For a microsecond I l
et myself ponder what it could be in a perfect galaxy, but I shut that down. There was no place in his life for someone like me. But I didn't need a life with him. Just this moment.
I could have him for this moment.
It had to be enough.
He stood up, walked over to a cabinet, and brought back some wipes.
I took the proffered wipes and tried to clean myself up, but he did it for me, gently, almost lovingly. I didn't know why, but I couldn't look him in the eye. He grabbed my chin and forced me to. “Hey. What are you thinking?”
Everyone means things during sex. It’s what comes afterwards that really matter. “Don’t worry about it.”
I stood up, walked back to where my exo-armor was. I would have preferred to not go into it so filthy, but I needed invulnerability. I let out a sigh when it slid over me, welcoming me home. For some reason, it wasn’t as comforting as I thought it would be. Clearly, I needed a shower.
“Thanks for the diversion, Your Highness.”
His sharp eyes saw everything. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said again.
“Do people actually tell you what they’re thinking when you ask them?”
“Yes. Usually I include descriptions involving their spleen wrapped around their neck if they don’t comply.”
And that was reason # 2,703 it wouldn’t work.
“I’m on shift. I need to go.”
“Skye.”
I didn’t turn to look at him. I couldn’t look at him. But I stopped, bit my lip and forced out an even formal tone. “Yes, Your Highness?”
His gaze was a weighty solid thing on my back.
“We’ll talk later, Captain.”
Anduin shifted over to the co-pilot seat as I slumped into my chair. He was munching a bag of something crunchy and definitely bad for most sentient beings.
I pulled the control screens toward me. “You should get some rest.”
“I’m waiting for the stink of sex to clear out. The cockpit is only soundproofed for human ears, you know.”
I rolled my eyes, reached for a screen, and turned up the air filtration in the common area. “It won’t happen again.”
Anduin wasn’t human. But he wasn’t a shifter or angel either, the two known variants of humanity. He had once tried to convince me that his kind was a different branch of humanity, shortly before deflecting a barrage of laser blasts with a wave of his hand. To this day, I wasn’t quite sure what he was, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a species well known, if at all.
The sound of something being sucked through a straw resounded throughout the cockpit. How was it possible to drink loud enough to rival starship engines? I turned towards him.
He ignored my death glare. “Whatever you say. As long as I get paid.”
No matter the species, there’s a certain bond that’s formed between colleagues when you’ve escaped certain death involving poisonous eels and an ugly clown. You don’t need to chit-chat about the upcoming asteroid field or the best strategies to avoid quantum vortex. You get straight to the vicious truth.
He crunched, the bag rustling. He was one of those guys who somehow managed to not only subsist on fake foods but actually look like he didn't. I guess he was handsome in his own way, if you liked that look. Loving him would have been easier, certainly, but call me prejudicial. It was one thing to friend a fight-whore who sided with the highest bidder, wholly another thing to fathom fucking him. Anduin’s loyalty went to the highest bidder, always. The best thing about him was that he was loyal, as long as he was under contract, which is more than you could say for some mercs. One day, he’d sell me out to someone who offered more. But so long as I remembered that, I always knew exactly where I stood with him.
Anduin started talking with his mouth full. “I hear you encountered tiger shifter zombies.”
“Merc, finish chewing before you talk. I don’t know what attacked us back on Ketu-7.”
He ignored my admonition, crunching even more loudly. “If it was what the kids say it was, then it’s nothing to ignore. Reanimation is an ancient branch of quantum biology. Some of the Ealens actually managed to do it, before they killed themselves off.”
The Ealen was the long-dead alien species that had bioengineered shifters from human genetic stock to be their weapons. So many of the derelict structures scattered across hundreds of worlds and the darkness of space spoke to their galactic empire, but now they were all gone, victims of their own endless wars. Everything strange, weird and unexplainable was almost always attributed to Ealen technology.
Well, it wasn’t like Anduin was going to do anything about it. There wasn’t any money in it.
He stopped his crunching for a moment. “Did your suit take samples?”
I gave him a side-eye. “Why? Is it worth something on the black market?”
Anduin laughed. “Even if it was, you wouldn’t sell it to me. No. I’d like to see what your spectrum analysis says about it.”
What could it hurt? A swipe sent the information to his screen.
He read the information and closed the report.
The look on his face was unchanged, but the way he now gripped the armrests of his seat was something else, something that told me whatever was on Ketu-7 was something unusual.
That was saying a lot, considering Anduin himself was rather “unusual.”
He realized I was looking over at him, and probably realized what I was thinking. So it wasn’t a surprise when he changed the subject.
“What do you know about werewolves?”
I decided to let him derail. I could circle back to the zombies later. “Not much. I suppose artificial habitats like the ones I usually end up flying around don’t have much room to run and hunt.”
He set down the bag and gulped something from the massive drink container next to him. “You don’t fuck with werewolves unless you have a plan.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you afraid of His Highness?”
“I’m not the one fucking him.”
I gave Anduin a dirty look. “I have other things to worry about other than him. Like figuring out how to sneak on to one of the most heavily guarded planets in the system without being detected and get out. Not to mention avoid being court martialed too.”
Anduin laughed. “If you pull this shit off, I’m sure His Highness could put in a good word for you. If staying in the military is what you want.”
“What else would I want? Oh no, don’t give me that look. You don’t have any right. Unless you want to start talking about why you’re so interested in those tiger shifter zombies.”
Anduin gave me a look, calculating how much I knew. I could hear the tightness in his voice. “A job I left unfinished. That’s all. Right now, that’s less important than how much you know about House Nightclaw.”
Interesting how he kept trying to change the subject. This hadn’t ever happened before.
I decided to go along with his questioning. “The same junk everyone reading the interstellar tabloids knows about them. Nightclaw is one of the richest and oldest Houses of the werewolf home planet. Three brothers. Prince Ral is the third and youngest. He likes fast ships.”
Anduin replied, “Prince Ral may not be heir to the Alpha but he’s the real mind behind the scenes. He’s the one who sets their strategies and orchestrates their political maneuvering. If this works out, the House of Nightclaw might end up the Alpha House of Alzar-4.”
Politics made my head hurt. Put me in a fight involving faster-than-light speeds and weapons of mass destruction any day. Ral was not only not in my league, he wasn’t even in the same galaxy as me. “You’re saying that he’s not any regular royal werewolf. He’s going to be ruling an entire planet. That's an excellent reason not to get involved.”
Anduin stopped rustling his stupid bag of loud food. “Did you ever ask him about his mother?”
I paused. “What is there to know?”
“Ral’s mother was a love marriage. She wasn’t a werewolf. She was a hu
man of no fancy lineage. Just an ordinary merc. Her name was Jane and she was from First Earth. The Alpha married her after he swore off marriage as a political contract.”
I thought about the idea for a brief moment. Rage filled me with the idea of seeing Ral next to someone else.
I took a deep cooling breath.
I was Captain Skye Daring, an officer of United Coalition forces. I was a pilot. I was a soldier.
And that’s why this could never be.
Anduin startled me with his next question. “You want kids?”
In the life I led, children were best thought of as a distant fanciful dream, like owning my own private island in the Southern Sea of Gaia. “Those tiger zombies must really have you spooked if you’re asking about my child production intentions.”
Anduin gave me a look. “Reanimation is a threat not to be taken lightly.”
I glanced through the window, saw the undulating rainbow waves of an upcoming radiation field. A little blip projected on the window showed us our next stop, Varra’s Waystation.
He stood up. “You need to work on your disguise. And I have to look into something.”
The merc was right. I had more important things to worry about. Before we launched ourselves on a hopeless mission on one of the galaxy’s most impenetrable planets, all I had to do was stop and buy a new ship in a place where the owner wanted my head cut off and thrown out of an airlock.
The door closed behind him, leaving me alone with my thoughts in the cockpit.
Finally, at last, some damn peace and quiet.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ral. The history of Ral’s mother is why he didn’t see our social difference as a problem.
But his father’s history was why it was.
I tightened my grip on the yoke. I was fooling myself even contemplating anything long term. We’d known each other over a matter of days. We were from two completely different cultures with completely different expectations.
I liked being alone. No attachments, no expectations but the thrill of flying.
There was nothing but heartbreak and a nova-level explosion of a mess when getting involved with a werewolf prince.
Wanted By The Werewolf Prince: a paranormal space adventure fantasy romance (Space Shifters Chronicles Book 1) Page 10