by Ruby Dixon
He grunts and kneels by the fire, stoking it.
“You’re not a chatty sort even on the best of days, are you?”
He glances over at me. “And you would talk to the walls if they would listen.”
My smile grows tight. “You’re making this whole ‘truce’ thing hard, dude. Fair warning.”
I expect another grunt from him. Instead, he nods. “That was not kind of me. I apologize.”
I sit back, surprised that he caved. “Well…okay then.” I move toward the fire and sit across from him. “You want help with dinner?”
“Dinner?”
I gesture at the kills. “Dressing those? Skinning? Making it food?”
He gives me another narrow-eyed look. Not an angry one, I think, but more along the lines of trying to figure me out. “It is my job to provide for my mate.”
“Ah.” I think for a minute, and then hug my knees to my chest. My bare feet wiggle near the fire. “Can we save some of those skins for boots for me?”
He nods.
“Thank you,” I say softly. “I’m not going to run away, just so you know. There’s nowhere for me to go.”
Again, he nods. I stare into the fire as he begins to skin his kills. I need to get him talking, if only so I can crack open the hard shell that seems to be around his mind. He’s a hard man to figure out, this Raahosh. “So tell me about this place.”
He looks up at me. “This is my cave.”
“No, not this place specifically,” I say, gesturing at the cave. “This planet. This entire world. I don’t know anything about it other than that it’s cold.”
Raahosh grunts, and for a long moment, I think he’s going to ignore my questions. Then, he pulls out a smaller knife than his skinning one and begins to cut the meat into smaller, bite-sized chunks. “This…is the warm season. We say it is the bitter season, and the colder months the brutal season.”
My eyes go wide. I sputter. “But there’s three feet of snow on the ground!” How can this possibly be warm?
His mouth curves slowly, and I see a devastating smile spread across his face. It makes the breath escape my lungs and turns his hard, blade-sharp features into something deadly sexy. “You will just have to get used to the snow.”
“Snow. Right.” I ignore the throb of my girl parts in response to that smile. My cootie starts up and I mock-cough, thumping my chest to try and shut it up. “So this is…summer?”
He cocks his head, mentally searching through words, I imagine, and then nods. “What you call winter is a time of very little light. The suns barely show their faces and there is much darkness. It grows much colder and game grows scarce. That is why it is so important to hunt so much during the warm months.”
I nod, digesting this. Okay, if this is about as warm as it’ll ever get, I’ll live. I won’t like it, but I’ll live. “And you’re a hunter?”
He nods and offers me a bite of red, bloody meat. I take the bit from him and pop it into my mouth, raw. A burst of flavor sweeps over my tongue and I moan. It’s so good this way.
His hands jerk against the kill and as I watch, his breech-cloth gets tight over his groin. Oops.
“Um, it’s tasty. Sorry.”
“Do not apologize.” He cuts into the meat viciously. “I am pleased that I can feed my mate.”
Yeah, I can see that he’s pleased. There’s no hiding that fact. I eye the enormous length from under my lashes for a long moment. He hands me another tiny chunk, and I lean forward and take it into my mouth directly from his fingers without thinking. His glowing blue eyes flare, and my cootie starts up all over again.
Stupid cootie, always fronting me out.
Raahosh watches me chew, and when he holds another piece of meat out to me, he pulls it away when I reach for it with my fingers. He wants me to eat from his hand again. I lean in and let my tongue graze his fingertips, just because it’s cruelly fun to tease him.
And it turns me on. Just a little.
His bloody fingertips trace my lips before he pulls back again, and then he shifts on his haunches. His cock is a hard bar against his leg, bigger than any dude’s junk has the right to be.
“So, what is that creature called?” I ask him, rubbing a hand up and down my arms to stop the goosebumps from rising on my skin. I’m totally turned on right now, damn it. Raw meat and an asshole captor should not be making my girl parts juice but I can’t seem to help myself.
He glances down at the raw meat and cuts another piece for me. “We call it two teeth.” He pulls back the lips of the creature to show me two gigantic fangs. It’s like a beaver. Kinda. A vampire beaver. With a row of spikes along its back and fuzzy, fluffy feet.
Okay, so it’s nothing like a beaver, but my brain feels better associating it with earth animals.
“You’re not eating,” I point out to him as he holds another bite out for me.
“My mate comes first,” he says, and gives me another scorchingly-intense look as he pops the meat into my mouth and then brushes my lips with his thumb. “I will eat when she is sated.”
I squirm a little. This is the most bizarrely sexualized meal I’ve ever had. I shouldn’t be enjoying myself half as much as I am. “Tell me about your tribe? Your family?”
The hungry, aroused look on his face vanishes, and I see his expression tense, becoming a mask of indifference. “I have no family.”
“None? But what about your parents?”
“Dead.” The look on his face is closed off.
“I see. No brothers or sisters?”
He shakes his head. “My mother only resonated the once for my father.”
“Ah.” Raahosh seems lost in thought, so I continue on. “Do you have close friends in your tribe?”
“Vektal.”
Getting this guy to open up is like prying teeth. “I met him. What about the others?”
He eyes me. “Why do you wish to know?”
“Because I’m going to be living there soon? They’re going to be my tribe, too?” Saying it aloud makes me a little heartsick. “What if they don’t like me?”
His thick, ridged brows draw down, as if he doesn’t quite grasp this. “You are my mate. There is no like or dislike. You will be part of the tribe.”
“Easy for you to say,” I tell him. “You grew up with them. You’re the same species. I’m a weird outsider who won’t stop talking, remember?”
He gazes at me for a long time, expression inscrutable. Then, after what feels like forever, he offers me another chunk of meat. I take it, and he says, “There are two kits in our tribe currently. With Georgie, that will be three. And if the others resonate, that will be more.”
I absorb this information. “And women? How many women?”
“Without the humans? Four, if you do not include the kits.”
I blanch. That leaves a lot of unsatisfied men. Maybe it’s a good thing that Raahosh hid me away in this cave for a bit. I wonder if the other girls that didn’t resonate are going to be fought over like scraps at dinner. “How many men?”
“Twenty four of us are left. Twenty unmated.”
“Left?”
He nods, carving another piece of meat away. “Life here is difficult. We lost many of our tribe several years ago on a bad hunt. Four of our men were killed and one female before we could bring down the ta-li.” He shakes his head. “It was a bad time.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“It is why the women no longer hunt. It is not that they cannot, it is that we will not risk the life of the tribe by putting them in jeopardy.”
I open my mouth to reply and he immediately pops another bite of meat into it. This feels like a shushing tactic, so I chew quickly and then continue. “But you have the human chicks now. That means that you’re no longer one big sausage party. That’ll bring the tribe up to…” I count for a moment. “Twelve humans and thirty of you guys means there’s forty two of us. Plenty of hunters.”
“Not many will wish to risk their mates on a h
unt,” he said, offering her another piece of meat. She refused it, and he ate it, instead, his expression thoughtful. “Many will no longer want to hunt at all.”
“Why not?”
“Hunts are very solitary by nature. We got out for long periods of time into the snows. We might be gone a full turn of the moons before returning home.”
“Like a month?”
He shrugs. “Most hunt alone. It is easier to cover more ground that way. We hunt smaller game in many different directions and cache the kills under the snow so we can recover it later, when the land is forbidding and all the good game has gone to hibernate to get out of the ice.”
“So hunters…are alone a lot? It’s probably not the worst thing in the world, given that you’ve only got four girls back at home,” I muse. “Is that what you do?”
He nods. “I am a hunter. I spend more time out in the wild than at the tribal caves.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why spend more time alone than back at home?”
His glowing blue gaze neatly pins me in place. “There is nothing for me there. At least in the wild I can provide for my people. At home, I only see what others have that I do not. Sometimes it is…difficult.” The look he shoots me is utterly possessive once more, and I know he’s talking about mates.
I swallow hard. So he voluntarily exiles himself for long periods of time so he’s not around all the happy couples? My heart twinges with pity. No wonder Raahosh is crappy being around people. “Dammit, don’t make me feel sorry for you.”
He grunts and savagely cuts another bit of meat off the kill, then chews it, the expression on his face bitter. “I do not want your pity, woman.”
“Pity’s all you’re getting from me tonight,” I quip.
He bares his teeth in a snarl. “Your words are not amusing to me.”
“I wasn’t trying to amuse you,” I point out. Then I get to my feet, irritated. “Ugh. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“I want my mate,” he grits out, still at the fire. “That is how this works. The khui has decided that you and I shall be mated. Nothing in that can be changed. You will be mine, and that is all there is.”
“Is that so?” I turn back to him and put my hands on my hips. “I want to go hunting. How do you like them apples?” He cocks his head, and I realize he’s trying to analyze my words. “It’s a human saying,” I snap. “I want to hunt and provide for myself. And you know what? I’d like to decide for myself, too. When do I get to decide what I want, damn it?” I fling my arms wide. “Everyone around me thinks they know what I should be doing, but you know what I want? No, you don’t, because no one asks me.”
“You want to hunt,” Raahosh says in a flat voice.
“That’d be good, for starters.”
“Very well. I will take you hunting in the morning.”
I blink at him in surprise. His mood seems dark, but he’s…going to let me join him hunting? “Really? Just like that?”
“Provided…” He pauses and gives me another heated look.
“Oh, here we go,” I mutter, then wave at him to continue. There is always a catch, isn’t there? “Lay it on me.”
“I will take you hunting if you lay with me tonight as mates do.”
“If you think I’m going to bone you for the privilege of hunting–”
“Not sex. Boning?” He looks at me curiously. “Not boning. Just touching. Holding each other.”
My guilty little heart twitches again. He’s lonely. God, I am such a dick. Poor Raahosh, to get stuck with the most stubborn woman ever. I soften. “I can handle that, I think.”
Raahosh gives me a silent nod, and then straightens. “We should clean the cave and prepare for the hunt tomorrow if we will be out.”
“Let’s do it,” I say, hiding my excitement. Truth is, I’m a little nervous and fluttery at the thought of sleeping in his arms tonight and letting him touch me. My mind goes back to the fierce pussy-licking from earlier and a pulse of need rocks through me. My cootie immediately starts purring so loud it sounds like a chainsaw. Dammit, cootie. Show some restraint, girl.
We putter around the cave for the next few hours and it’s surprisingly companionable. Raahosh makes me a pair of shoes with some scraped leather hides he’s been saving for the past few days. I knew he’d treated them with a mash of innards and crap he’d used from the critters themselves, and the results were a tough leather with a bit of fur on the inside to keep my feet warm. They are little more than mittens for my feet with drawstrings at the ankles, but I’m pleased with them nevertheless. I work on my bow, and when I tell Raahosh about the kind of material I need for the bowstring, he produces something from his traveling pack that’s a lot like a thick twine. I string my bow and hope for the best, and then set about making arrows. I have to use bone for those, and the ribs and wing-bones from something unnameable that looks like an ostrich with shorter legs — four of them, mind you — ends up being perfect. I now have arrows that are a little bit shorter than I am used to, but lightweight and deadly as needles at the tip after a good sharpening. I sharpen and fletch my arrows for what feels like hours, until the fire dies down and I’m nodding off with the knife in my hand.
Raahosh takes the arrow from my grip as I struggle to stay awake. “It is time to sleep,” he tells me.
“Oh, but I’ve only got four of them,” I tell him with a soft protest. “That’s not a lot of hunting.”
“We have spears and knives as well. You can learn more ways to hunt,” he says, voice low and tender as he carefully puts my bow and arrows aside. “Come and undress for bed, my mate.”
I should have protested that I wasn’t his mate, but all that comes out is a yawn. “I can sleep in my clothes.”
“Not if we are sleeping as mates,” he murmurs. “This is what you have promised to me.”
So I did. I’m too sleep-drowsy to protest, and I don’t realize just how exhausted I am until he stands me up and my legs feel like Jell-O. When Raahosh leans me against him and begins to undo the laces at the neck of my tunic, I realize he’s warm and oddly soft, despite the hard protective ridges along his arms, chest, and other parts of his body.
My hand goes to his pectorals and I rub them under his vest. “You’re soft,” I murmur. Touching him is like touching…suede or doe-hide. There’s a fine layer of fur on his skin that I didn’t notice until now, but it’s soft and oh-so-warm and I can’t stop petting him. I actually don’t mind the thought of sleeping naked against him if he feels like this.
My cootie purrs an agreement, the little whore.
“Arms up.” His voice is a soft rasp, and I sleepily raise both of them before I can stop to think. In the next moment, my tunic whisks over my head and then I’m topless in front of him. My cootie’s humming in my breast, and my nipples harden, even as I yawn again. “Pants,” he says, and he’s not grabbing at me or making me feel weird, so I obediently step out of them and hand over the clothing. I watch with sleepy eyes as he turns away and carefully folds my things, setting them nearby. Then, with his back to me, he begins to undress.
That gets my attention. I watch his arms flex as he undoes the laces in the front of his chest and then removes his own tight-fitting tunic. Then he’s down to his tall boots and his breechcloth. I’m totally creeping on him at this point, watching his ass flex as he undoes the ties on his breechcloth and it slides to the ground. He steps out of it, lifting one leg with casual grace, and I see the sway of his balls from between his legs. Then his ass flexes again and his tail lashes, and I just stare.
Why is a tail sexy to me? Why does the sight of it flicking over that taut ass do terrible, nasty things to my girl parts? He glances over his shoulder at me, and the look is so heated, I get all aroused and squirmy. I’m not sure if us being naked together is a good idea, but I also don’t think I could stop even if I wanted to.
And…I kinda don’t want to.
He turns to face me again and his cock
juts forward from his body, long and obvious. He’s completely erect, and I try not to stare at his different anatomy. I’m no virgin, but Raahosh has a monstrously huge dick, and to top it off, it seems to have…ridges along the top, the bumpy, rough plated areas like his arms and chest have.
That will either feel really awesome or really awful.
I frown as I stare at the blunted horn a few inches above his cock. I remember it from last time, but the sight of it baffles me as much with a second viewing. “What’s that for?”
He steps forward and his hand caresses it in a way that makes me feel filthy with lust. “My spur?” He shrugs. “It is part of my body.”
“Yes, but does it have a purpose? I mean, other than to freak out Earth girls?”
Raahosh takes my hand and moves me toward the nest of furs. “Do your men not have such things?”
“Yeah, that’s a big no.”
“Do I frighten you? Is that why you turn me away?” He looks almost hopeful.
Weird. “I’m not scared of you.”
His expression blackens. “Then you turn me away for other reasons.”
“Reasons like, oh hey, it’s not my choice? That’s enough reason for me.” I thump to the blankets and slide into them, scooting to the far edge of the nest. The blankets make a nice, snuggly bed, but they don’t make a very large one.
He doesn’t get into bed next to me, and I hike the covers up to conceal my breasts, suddenly embarrassed. I’m the only one, because he squats next to the bed and studies me, and his cock sticks out like a third leg as he rubs his chin and muses. I try not to make eye contact with, ahem, his small head.
“Is it because I am ugly?” he asks after a long moment. “Is that why you hate being mated to me?” He rubs the scars on the side of his face thoughtfully.
I frown up at him. “You’re not ugly.”
“I am scarred. Surely you have noticed.”
I snort. “I’m not blind. It’s a little obvious.”