"You're dreaming of him, too?" he said coldly. "Not just me."
With a vehement shake of her head, she wrapped her arms about his lower back. "Only of you."
"Then you're not making any sense to me. Shit. What am I doing? All these years with your kind, and it's always just been about a good fuck. Why should you be any different?" He grasped at her arms, trying to pry her apart from him, but she wasn't about to back down. She buried her face against his chest even harder, breathing in his scent, trying to get more of him into her body, her being. It was vitally important that she not lose him.
"Now you're just angry," she whispered against his chest, "but you're not listening to me."
"He's your lover; that's what I'm hearing. At some unknown future time, you and he become lovers." His voice was sad suddenly, not edged with the white-hot anger that he'd been unleashing against her just a moment before. "You'll follow any vlksai who'll get in your pants; that's obvious." He wrestled apart from her, shoving himself along the edge of the bed until they were separated by several feet. She kept her hands extended, still reaching for him.
"I know you're hurt, but don't be cruel to me. Don't stoop that low, S'Skautsa." He said nothing, so she continued. "It was this weird instinct, this need to help him. And I'm not going to say I understand it, but somehow—I swear, and you won't believe me—it's tied to you. To you, Scott. To everything I already feel for you, and I'd like to think you know how deep what's happening between us really is."
"I thought I did."
"It's real—the visions, the dreams—they're as real as we are right now." She slapped at the bed between them for emphasis. "As important. But this man, when he saw me, Scott.…" She let her voice trail off, unable to explain, and for the first time in their confrontation she sensed him really listening. After a long silence he reached for her hand, pulling it within his own.
"Tell me," he urged her softly as their fingers threaded together.
"I think he loved me very much. And he's trapped here, and maybe it was his reaction that got to me, the way it hit him when he found me, I don't know. I just know that I had to help him. It was the same thing that made me come with you. You! To your compound that day, when I jumped on the transport. It all has something to do with you, Scott."
"What did you dream about him?" Scott asked cautiously. "What were we doing?"
She snorted. "Not having sex, don't worry."
"That's highly unusual," he agreed in a husky voice. "Then it must have been a dream about the baby."
She winced, remembering how difficult her delivery had seemed in her dream; Scott didn't need to know that. He did need the bottom line about her presence here with his perceived enemy, though. "It was mostly a dream about you. You turned to Jake in the dream and told me that I had to help him when he came to me."
She burrowed her face against his turtleneck shirt, feeling his warmth flood her. "You asked me to go with him," she continued. "And that's the only real reason I went with him, Scott. The only important one. Don't you see? I'd go anywhere you asked me to."
For a long moment he said nothing, simply held her close within his arms, pressing his face against the top of her head. At last he released a low, jaded-sounding laugh. "Maybe you're as insane as I am."
"That's extremely possible."
"Hope, I really care about you. You get it? You're not just another woman to me. I don't think you ever could be."
"I feel the same way. I promise you." She pressed the back of his hand to her lips. "I want you to know that I really do just.…" Love you. That was what she wanted to say, but he wouldn't believe her, not now. Not yet.
He scooted closer again, pressing a soft kiss against her temple. And suddenly she was wrapping her arms around him; his mouth was over hers in a hungry, urgent kiss. Alien, human; it didn't matter what or who they were as she lost herself in his arms. His mouth was warm and tasted tangy as his tongue thrust into her own mouth, demanding. This man never asked for anything he wanted: He simply took it. And he wanted everything inside of her, including her soul—that had been clear from the very first time he'd kissed her.
She ran her hands underneath his shirt, feeling his warm skin, the silky carpet of hair on his chest. Every ridge of muscle on his abdomen, every scar made her own body come alive as she felt him—truly felt him—for the first time. Plunging his fingers through her hair, he cupped the back of her head, tilting her face so he could kiss her even more deeply.
Scott broke the kiss after a long moment, pressing his face against her cheek. Hope Harper tasted sweeter than any woman he'd ever kissed. Her body was so soft and delicate, she reminded him of a seashell that Jared had once shown him when they'd first arrived on Earth, the way the curves and lines were so finely drawn, the raw beauty of it. He'd marveled at the thing for hours, just turning it in his hands. They didn't have anything like it back home; they didn't have anyone like Hope back home either.
So could he possibly share her, and with one of their enemies no less? "We're together in the future, but now you tell me that you and that bastard are, too?" His voice quavered slightly, bringing tears to Hope's eyes.
"I'm not saying that I'm with him. But somehow it fits together, like a puzzle."
His tone became defensive, hurt. "You leave me for him, huh? That it?"
"Scott, I'm your wife in the future. I know it. I've seen it, too. But this guy, he told me things, or didn't tell me—alluded to them, I guess. I think he knows how I—" She couldn't say it, didn't have the heart to tell him.
"How you what?"
"I'm dead in his future, Scott. That's what I think. And I want to know how, why. I don't want to die soon, not when there's so much ahead of me. If he knows what happens to me, then I can find out what my mistakes are." He began to shake slightly in her arms, and she whispered, "I don't want to die on you, or our baby."
"I will never let anything happen to you," he pledged fiercely. "You're under my protection, and that's why you are coming with me. Anna will get you out of here, and I'll face my enemy. Not you, but me."
"I'm perfectly capable. You think because I can't see well that I can't look out for myself?"
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to!"
He stroked her hair, just winding his fingers through the length of it as if she'd always belonged to him. As if he had every right to own every inch of her body. "You're in the middle of a war you don't know anything about—and you've trusted this man blindly—"
"Really bad word choice, Dillon—"
"Without knowing what kind of man he is. Not every Antousian is like me, you know."
"That's just it," she said softly. "You hate your own people so much that you can't see any good in them. Or yourself. It's not me who's blind, Scott."
He sucked in a harsh breath, but said nothing. She reached toward him, trailing her hand upward until she made contact with his face. He needed a shave, and the beard growth scratched at her skin as she cupped his jaw, rubbing her thumb back and forth. She needed to feel him. Who was she kidding? She needed to see him, but it was impossible. Her eyes drifted shut, and she focused on what she could glimpse—the man here beside her, so alien in so many ways, yet familiar. Achingly familiar, beyond anything that had transpired between them these past two weeks.
Scott's eyes drifted shut as he felt Hope explore his face, just as she'd done earlier in her room, only this time there was a desperation that had been absent before. She needed to know more of him, to see more of him; he sensed it. As a gazer, it was something he understood all too well, that need to pry into things, to glimpse beyond what was on the surface. He could only imagine how being nearly blind must suffocate her, especially at a tense and emotional moment like this one.
Any minute that vlksai would return, and although Hope said to trust the man, it took everything inside of him—every last ounce of resolve—not to whisk her out of this motel room and back to certain safety. But then there was just Hope, here beside him. Fingerti
ps, stroking over his jaw, tracing and feeling. Human hands touching him.
He sucked in a breath as she trailed her thumbs over his closed eyes. "Why?" was all she asked, her husky, sexy voice filling the small distance between them. He swallowed hard, struggling to breathe even though his heart was about to explode out of his chest, it was thundering so rapidly.
"Why what?" he asked softly.
She jerked back, pulling her hands away, and he opened his eyes. "I-I wondered why you closed your eyes."
"To really feel you," he answered, taking her face within his own hands and drawing her lips to his. "I wanted to see things through your eyes right now. This moment."
"All that exists is the purest sensations," she answered, brushing her lips over his. "Sense, touch."
"Desire," he added, hardly recognizing his own voice; it was that filled with lust.
She moved closer, practically climbing onto his lap, but halted, cautiously running her hand across his thigh. "What about your injured leg? Is it better?"
He shook off the question. "Don't worry about it." His leg felt perfectly fine; she felt more than perfectly fine, heavenly, right here atop him.
"You need to get back," she cautioned. "You're still recovering—you shouldn't be here."
He gritted his teeth, clasping both of his hands about her waist, anchoring her closer to his own tensed body. "I won't leave you to him." Between his legs an erection had tightened his pants, straining and pulsing, begging for release. It hardly mattered that his leg ached a little bit; his third leg wanted only one thing: to fuck Hope Harper like mad, to drive into her, and hold her, and never let her out of his arms.
"I don't feel anything for him—it's you," she breathed against his cheek, and a stray strand of her hair tickled his face.
"You're asking me to trust you."
"Yes."
He'd never trusted anyone, not anyone apart from Jared and a few of their most inner circle. He'd certainly never trusted a human, not in the way she was asking it of him.
"Touch me, Hope," he begged. Suddenly. He needed to know—hell, he had to know what would happen if she did. Maybe if he was certain, he could let her walk away with their fugitive.
She nuzzled him, her lips warm and wet against the bristling beard of his cheek. "Where, Scott? Tell me, where?"
He growled, agonized that she was going to make him spell it out. "Between my legs, damn it." It was the wrong time, totally wrong, with every reason to get her out of here—to follow the other man's trail—but he couldn't seem to stop himself.
Just as she'd slowly felt out the terrain of his facial features, she slid one palm onto his upper thigh, then moved it into the place where both his legs met, finding the hard ridge of his cock. It swelled even more at her touch as slowly she rubbed her hand back and forth over his uniform pants, bunching the material. She wasn't gentle, not that he would have expected her to be. She worked him hard, then slid her other hand underneath the jutting erection and took hold of his balls, squeezing them until he groaned in painful ecstasy.
But she didn't relent. Working at the waistband of his pants, she managed to lower the zipper and, with a quick jerk, unfasten them. His swollen shaft sprang free into her cupped hand, filling it heavily, and her cool fingers closed about his thick tip, squeezing, stroking. He growled low in the back of his throat, clenching his thighs against the bed. With one hand she spread him open wider, sliding her fingertips along the underside of his cock where a large vein pulsed.
"Is this what you had in mind?" she purred into his ear, stroking his balls, rolling them in her hand.
"Insanity." He grunted, jerking at her sweater, yanking it halfway up her chest. His palm made contact with one ripe, buxom breast. For such a small woman, there was one area where All had graced her with size: the one that just so happened to matter to him most.
He pushed her face into the crook of his neck, and her grip on his long erection grew frantic, out of control, her strong hand sliding over him back and forth, until his own wetness slicked her motion.
Licking his ear with the tip of her warm tongue, she purred, "At least now I know how beautifully made you are," she teased, tightening her grip about him. "You feel … astounding."
And just that easily he was pushing her back into the mattress. He had her sweater up about her shoulders, had his own pants shimmied halfway down his thighs. Her pants were gone, seemingly by magic, just lost in the lust of the moment. The two of them were a tangle of limbs and lust and emotion, each grasping at the other with such desperation; he'd never felt anything like it before, not with any woman.
"He'll come back soon," he cautioned in her ear, shoving at his pants. As he rolled her beneath his body, he gasped slightly, and she stilled beneath him, clutching at both of his shoulders.
"We shouldn't do this, not with your leg still hurt."
"It barely hurts at all," he said, then added gruffly, "You be on top."
"You're not serious?" She collapsed into the pillows, seeming to study him, when he knew she was really only searching the darkness around them.
"I'll let you go with this other man because I trust you, but not before I make you mine," he told her, rolling her atop him as easily as he might have blown on a feather. "All mine, Hope. Understand? I won't hold back, not if you're going with him."
She nodded, and by the alarm clock light he saw anxiety knit her brows. "You're afraid of me."
She slowly shook her head from side to side. "Never. Not at all."
He cupped her bottom, sliding her atop him. Only her panties separated their groins, and he lifted into the silky web of material between them, nudging against her despite the thin membrane of separation. "Then what?" he asked in a throaty, lusty voice.
"I'm afraid of falling this hard for you," she answered, bowing her head. "After this, I'll never feel the same. Everything will be five thousand times more intense."
"Good," he said, puffing his chest out. "That's how I want it. You knowing that you belong with me. Not any other man."
"It's Jake. Jake Tierny, that's his name." Scott stilled beneath her, his hips dropping back from their upward thrust. "Do you know it?" she asked quickly.
"Never heard it before in my life," he admitted. That was what disturbed him. Yet something about it seemed to ring through the darkness, electrifying them both. Each knew the name had some massive significance between them; each felt it. But Scott would be damned to hell if he was going to tell Hope that he understood—that he knew, despite everything between them, despite the fact that he was a panties-width away from making love to her—that Jake Tierny was the biggest obstacle they'd ever face. A mountain, a fortress, a freighter.
The gazer in him saw it all in that split-second moment of revelation: Jake Tierny would drive a wedge between them, and it would never go away. Because, quite simply, Hope Harper would always love Jake Tierny. The shot fired across eternity was heard right there in that bedroom.
"Get off me," he whispered, very gently taking hold of her and sliding her onto the mattress beside them.
"I want this," she insisted, but he reached out to kiss her on the cheek. It was a strange, chaste kiss for an insatiable lover like him.
"It's not the right time," he disagreed, slowly tasting her mouth, then her face. Sniffing at her to really draw her scent into his lungs. "Not like this."
"You said you wanted—"
"I have to chase him, Hope. You do know that, right? I can let you go, but he's my enemy."
"I don't believe that."
"I know you don't, but I've been at this war for a lot longer than you. I chase. You'll run, and he'll run, too, but in the end? I'm going to have this guy's balls on a chopping block." Especially so he won't take you from me. Especially, that.
"You could stay here, try to hear him out. He says he's your ally."
Scott rolled away from her. "If he comes here I have to kill him, Hope. And you've told me you don't want that." His voice sounded harsh, pained as
a wounded animal. "I can give you a head start, but I can't let him go. Or you, if you go with him."
She felt a tugging motion that rocked the bed slightly, then heard his zipper as he closed his pants again. They'd been so freaking close to making love, to doing the one thing she wanted most in the world. For a long moment she considered telling him she'd forget Jake Tierny and his strange quest.
Scott blew out a tired-sounding sigh. She rubbed a hand along his back, surprised by the hard ridges of muscle, the way every line seemed so sharply defined. He had a lean, gorgeous body, not an ounce of fat or needless weight. She slipped her palm beneath his shirt, feeling the warm smoothness of the skin along his abdomen as she circled him from behind.
"I don't want to lose you." She caught herself with a laugh. "I mean, if I have you, which is pretty much a crazy stretch to begin with."
"You have me, Hope." He groaned softly. "Help my vlksai soul, but you have me. Completely."
"Then trust me," she urged, oddly aware that the room was growing brighter around them. "Please."
He laughed, a strange, bitter sound. "I do trust you, Hope," he told her. "But that man is my enemy—and more important? He's my king's enemy. My feelings for you can't come into play with that."
And the room around her seemed to fold in on itself, dividing her from him, pulling at her. She opened her eyes and found Jake Tierny examining her; at least, that was what it looked like through her fuzzy, splotchy eyesight. "Where's Scott?" she demanded, rubbing her eyes. "What's happening?"
"I left for a few minutes," Jake told her, his deep voice so different from that of the man she'd just been with.
"Scott was here—what happened?" None of it made sense.
"He's nowhere around here, Hope," he told her gently. "You must've been dreaming."
She jerked upward in bed, clasping at the bedspread, disoriented and feeling tears prickle her eyes. The bedside lamp was on, and she glanced first one way, then another, hardly able to believe that Scott hadn't truly been with her. Their experience together had been absolutely real—they'd nearly made love!
But as concrete and palpable as their time together had been, she could feel it receding like some distant shoreline. The only thing that lingered was his strange, altered scent.
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