by JoAnn Ross
She had dreamed of this. For years. But never, in all her fantasies, could she have imagined such raw hunger. Such burning need.
The heat was unbearable. She writhed on the flowered sheets. Her body became slick with sweat. She begged Sebastian over and over again, in word and in desperate action, to end this torment, but still he continued, driving her higher with only his mouth and his clever, wicked hands.
Dreams became reality, secret fantasies fulfilled.
Her hands clawed at the sheets as she tossed her head back and forth, aching for him.
“Sebastian.” His name came out on a ragged plea when his teeth nipped the delicate skin at the insides of her thighs, but there was no pain. Only more need.
“Not yet.” His tongue soothed the flesh his teeth had marked. “I want you to remember this.” His breath was a hot sirocco, wafting over what had become the wet, warm center of her world. Universe. Galaxy. “I want you to remember me.”
“How could I ever forget you?” she gasped as his mouth moved to that nub of exquisitely sensitive flesh. “Or this?”
She arched against him, bowstring taut, offering, begging, challenging as, with only his mouth, he took her to the very edge of reason. Then beyond.
Shards of light and heat arced from that sensitive core, shooting outward like a comet, throughout her body in a surge of shimmering golden release.
He held her, waiting for her trembling to cease. And when it finally did, he stood up and stripped off his jeans, briefs, and sweater.
Kirby gazed up at him, taking in the breadth of his wide shoulders, the muscular torso covered by a dark arrowing of hair, his strong, dark legs, and realized that while he might be half-Logosian, he certainly looked all human male. And a very aroused one at that.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited for this?” he asked as he returned to the bed and drew her against him. “How long I’ve been waiting to lie with you like this?”
“All of a week?”
He heard the faint edge of regret creep into her tone and did his best to kiss it away. “All of my life,” he corrected after they’d come up for air.
After reaching into her bedside table drawer, she pulled out one of the condoms Emily had given her. But before she put it on him, she pressed a kiss against the knobby tip, gathering in the moisture that had collected there with her tongue. When she would have done more, taken him deeper, he forked his hands through her hair and pulled her back.
“Not yet,” he managed on a mouth that had gone as dry as the Saltakam plains. “I would never last.”
“Next round,” she suggested with a slow, dangerously erotic smile. He’d had to grit his teeth to keep from exploding as her clever hands rolled the latex deftly over his length.
Then he dragged her down onto the bed, his fingers digging into her waist as he pulled her on top of him. Hot skin against hot skin.
Slipping his hand between them, he stroked her still-ultrasensitive flesh. Kirby had never enjoyed being touched so shortly after climaxing, but his wicked clever fingers were teaching her that there was a razor-thin line between pain and pleasure. More.
He slipped one finger into her. “You’re so warm.” Another. “And wet.” The wonder in his voice made her feel like the sexiest, most desirable woman on the planet. On both their planets, she thought, with a wonder of her own.
“For you,” she said. He was the only man who’d ever made her feel this way. The only man she’d ever feel this way with.
Kirby splayed her fingers against his chest and met his smoldering gaze as she began to move slowly, gliding up and down, loving the feel of him inside her. Loving him.
Excitement began to rise, even higher and hotter than before. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and pressed her knees against his hips as she began to move in a rhythm as old as the forces that had formed both their universes.
The hunger, the need for her was in his blood like a drug, and Sebastian realized, with a sudden, blinding clarity, he could search all the galaxies through several lifetimes and never meet another woman so perfectly matched, both mentally and physically, to him as Kirby Pendleton.
To Sebastian, making love to Kirby was like being given a glimpse into a forbidden secret world. The idea of living the remainder of his days without her was unfathomable. But what choice did he have?
Before he could come up with a solution, logic disintegrated, reason dissolved, and there was only now. Only this mind-shattering feeling of absolute, amazing abandon.
Sebastian’s first thought was that he was dying. The second and more powerful thought was that he had found the mythical heaven so many Earthlings believed in.
His last coherent thought was that he never would have imagined it possible to experience triumph and defeat at the same time.
* * *
Kirby lay steeped in sensation, the blood pounding in her veins, her limbs as limp as wet spaghetti, as a series of aftershocks quaked through her body. She’d never been so attuned with anyone as she’d been when she’d felt his blood pounding inside of her with the same strength and rhythm of her own. They had, mind, body, and soul, completely, been one.
“I never knew,” she murmured, as Sebastian returned from the bathroom after taking care of the condom. And didn’t she need to write her sister a thank you note for her condom generosity?
“I know.”
She feigned a pout at his blatant masculine pride. “Once again I’m fascinated at how the male ego manages to transcend normal realms of time and space.”
“This has nothing to do with ego,” Sebastian argued. “Male or otherwise.” Joining her on the bed again, he ran his palm up the back of her leg, over her rounded butt, to the base of her spine. “I knew what you were thinking, my love, because I happened to be thinking exactly the same thing.”
“Oh.” She rather liked the idea that what they’d just shared was as important to him as it had been to her.
“I experienced my first sexual encounter on my name day,” Sebastian explained, “when I turned sixteen. But lovemaking on Logosia is not the same as it is here on Earth.”
She had to ask. “Is it better?”
She could feel his deep, rich chuckle against her breasts. “I always considered it quite satisfying,” he allowed. “For a purely mental experience. I have recently discovered that there is much to be said for human physicality.”
“You’ve never made physical love before?”
“No. At least not with a partner,” he clarified, needing to be totally truthful after she’d been so honest in sharing her body with him. “Logosians are taught that they’re too superior to mate as the populations of lesser groups continue to do. Adolescents are taught at an early age that it is selfish, unseemly, and fails to contribute to the group.”
“Yet your population continues.”
“Those the elders choose to reproduce use much the same method of artificial insemination as you do. Then the fertilized cells are implanted in surrogates or replicants.”
“Replicants? Like in Blade Runner?” Nate had made her watch it with him back when she’d been in middle school, and she’d found the humanoids in the movie even scarier than any of the Halloween franchise films.
“In a way. Yet their life span is much longer than that of thirty years in the movie, and they’re allowed, in rare instances, to form pair bonds of their own.”
“That all sounds very depressing.” Kirby felt a bit of the postcoital glow fading.
“I never gave it a great deal of thought, because that’s how life was. Is,” he said, as if to remind them both that this was not his home and he’d be returning once he and Nate were finished with their work.
“If you don’t have physical sex, then how do you…”
She looked away, unreasonably embarrassed at the question, which was ridiculous, Kirby told herself, since she and Sebastian had been as intimate as two people could be.
“Know what to do?”
“Yes.”
He ran his hand lazily down her body, from her shoulder to her thigh. “I merely followed my instincts.”
“Your instincts are very good.” Better than good. They were mind-shattering.
“Ah, but you provided all the inspiration.”
His deep voice, rough with emotion, curled around her like a warm woolen blanket. She looked up at him, her heart in her eyes. “I love you, Sebastian.”
“And I love you, Kirby Pendleton.” He looked down at her, his gaze as sober as she’d ever seen it. “With my entire human body. And every atom of my Logosian mind.”
She heard the regret in his voice, read it in his eyes. “But it doesn’t change anything, does it? Not really.”
“No.”
He’d tried to warn her. Tried to warn himself. But the chemistry between them, as well as the never-before-experienced emotional bond, had been too strong from the beginning.
He framed her sweet, heartbreakingly sad face with his hands. “I wish I could say it did. But it doesn’t.”
Then he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, his eyes on hers as he kissed her fingers, one at a time. “I have to return home, Kirby. I have my work, my family, my life—”
“I know.” She pressed her free hand against his lips, unwilling to listen to any more logical reasons why they could not spend the rest of their lives together. On the island. In her house and in her bed.
“Don’t talk,” she said desperately, pulling him onto her, drawing him into her again. “Not now. For now, I just want you to make love to me again.”
Truth might be reason, but there was one truth Sebastian wasn’t prepared to share with Kirby. He wasn’t precisely the celibate a man of his level was expected to be. He’d started experiencing sexual release during his adolescence, and, as he’d gotten older, had, although he’d known it made him more human, less Logosian, continued masturbation into adulthood. Which, he’d assured himself over the years, was less of an infraction than other males he knew who’d frequent Janurian brothels while off planet.
But congress with his own hand, as stress-relieving as it might be, didn’t begin to come close to equaling the mind-blinding lovemaking he’d shared with Kirby. Having once tasted the ripe, sweet, forbidden fruit of sexual pleasure, Sebastian was ravenous. His own desires no less fevered than hers, he willingly complied.
Again and again, all night long.
* * *
Sebastian was relieved when Kirby agreed to spend the next day at home. Mostly in bed, which had become his favorite place to be.
When they weren’t making love, they talked. Kirby wanted to know everything about Logosia, and Sebastian tried, as best he could, to explain his home planet, skimming over the part about it being a tightly held patriarchal society. He was feeling too good to get into yet another argument concerning female equality. Besides, his time with Kirby Pendleton had made him realize that his sister was correct. Their system was not merely sexist, but misogynistic.
And wouldn’t Rosalyn laugh to know that it was a woman who’d made him see the light?
“What about Earth in your time?” Kirby asked. She sat up in bed, pulled her knees to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. “Obviously it’s still spinning.”
“It is, indeed.”
“That’s good news in itself,” she decided. “That we haven’t managed to blow it up or pollute it out of existence. How about California? I guess it hasn’t dropped into the sea yet, since that was your original destination.”
“No. But a major earthquake is due any time.”
She laughed at that. “It’s nice to know some things stay the same. What about the homeless? And the forests?”
“A coalition of government and private enterprise solved the homeless problem in the twenty-second century,” Sebastian told her. “The forests, unfortunately, have gone. Although third-and fourth-growth forests were farmed, eventually the harvesting became too expensive, and wood products were replaced by superior amalgams.”
“Oh, I hate that idea.” She sighed and shook her head. “Well, we’ll just have to change the future,” she decided. “Have we had a woman president yet?”
“Five.”
“Well, that’s good news. What about the Boston Red Sox?”
“They have been on a several-solar-revolutions-long losing streak to the New York Yankees.”
Another sigh. “Damn Yankees,” she muttered.
“But they have a new owner, so fans are hopeful,” Sebastian tacked on, in hopes of putting a smile on her face. His strategy worked.
“This is so amazing.” She shook her head and looked at him, her eyes moving slowly over his face, as if memorizing his features. She pressed her hand against his cheek. “I like the beard you’ve got going on.”
“In truth, I’ve been afraid of your razor.”
She laughed. “Well, I still like it. Though I’d just as soon you not take it as far as one of those lumbersexuals.”
“Which would be?”
“Guys who seem to be making a statement about reclaiming their masculinity by growing heavy, long, old-fashioned lumberjack beards. They cut down trees,” she tacked on, in case he might not get the reference. “Lumberjacks. Not all bearded men.”
“I have no intention of cutting down a tree.”
“Well, that’s good news.” She snuggled closer. “I never, in a million years, would have imagined that I’d be lying in bed with a Logosian astrophysicist.”
Something belatedly occurred to her. “Your name. Is it really yours?” She hated thinking that she might have cried out a false name during their lovemaking.
“It’s mine,” Sebastian assured her. “Sebastian is my birth name. But when males reach the age of maturity, they are encouraged to choose a name they feel better suits them. My family name is Vardanyian. My father chose it because it’s Logosian for Justice. He was a magistrate and later a diplomat.”
“Why did you chose Blackthorne? The only other person I ever heard of with that name was the hero of Shogun. But you undoubtedly haven’t read that.”
“I have. My mother has quite an extensive library due to my father always bringing her antique books he’d find on diplomatic trips to Earth. But that’s not why I chose the name.”
Though, since he was both blessed and cursed with a memory that never forgot a thing, a quote from the book popped into Sebastian’s head. When John Blackthorne was thinking that he’d left all his life’s passion at the feet of his forbidden love. And how he’d never again know that spirit-joining ecstasy that had ignited them. And couldn’t Sebastian identify with that?
There would never be another Kirby.
Therefore, once he left Rum Runner Island, he would never again know passion.
“That’s a good assumption, though,” he said, not wanting to dwell on that negative thought now. “And even more suitable given that the novel’s John Blackthorne was shipwrecked in a strange land. But the true reason I selected it is because of an old movie I found in the archives when I was young and trying to learn about my mother’s home planet.”
“What one?”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“You’re kidding!”
“On the contrary, I am every bit as serious as a Logosian Elder,” he said.
“In the first place, that’s not an accurate movie if you want to learn about Earth in the time your mother lived here,” she pointed out.
“A fact I discovered for myself while watching it. But it was still very exciting. We do not,” he admitted, knowing he could be accused of treason for talking negatively about his planet on foreign soil, “have a very stimulating planet.”
“From what you told me about lovemaking, I figured that out all for myself,” she said. “Give the place another two hundred years and you could end up like those people in the Star Trek TV show who lost their physicality and evolved into pure energy and pure thought.”
“Organians,” he said. “And the possibilit
y has occurred to me, and some others considered to be more radical thinkers. But it’s not spoken of except within very small circles and would undoubtedly take more than a mere two centuries of evolution to occur.”
“I’ll take your word for that. So, I still don’t remember a Blackthorne in Butch Cassidy.”
“There wasn’t. But once I watched that movie, I became enamored with the idea of Butch Cassidy and searched for everything I could about him. Which led to my discovery of another film that suggested he’d changed his name to James Blackthorn and lived out the rest of his life in Bolivia.
“The government scribe who put my name change into the government database accidentally added an e at the end. Since dealing with bureaucrats can be a Hadean nightmare, I decided to leave it the way it was.”
She laughed at that. “It’s good to know that some things are universal. It’s also interesting to know that you took a twentieth-century American outlaw as your role model. Though, I have to point out that Butch and Sundance were romanticized versions of the real thing.”
“True. Yet against logic, the romance of their adventures appealed to me.”
“They were rebels. So perhaps choosing Blackthorne for your name was your way of expressing your own inner feelings of frustration of living in a society that doesn’t permit any rebellion.”
He ran his hand down her hair and drew her close. “How do you know me so well?” he murmured wonderingly against the top of her head.
She looked up at him and smiled. “Simple. I love you. And,” she reminded him, “I seem to be able to read your mind.”
“Can you tell what I’m thinking now?”
She took a long time, pretending to look deep into his steady gaze. “You want to make love to me.”
“That’s very good.”
“It was also easy,” she said on a soft laugh. She ran her hand over the sheet that was tented over his lower torso. “Since your Logosian mind keeps sending the same message to your very human body.”
Laughing, she pulled the sheet away and drew him to her. That was all either of them was to say for a very long time.