He traced his fingers over the outside of my panties and I shuddered. Pressed against his stomach, in his lap, this proved very one sided. “You’re out of my reach.”
“There’s nothing I would like more than to have your hands on me, but not tonight. I’m too close, have been since you opened your eyes in my med bay and I pretended not to notice to give you a minute.”
He pulled my panties down my legs and then off, throwing them somewhere in the room. For the moment, I didn’t give a flying fig about mess. Dane ran his hand over the outside of my core, his body vibrating behind me. His hardness pressed into my spine and I rubbed against it, drawn by a strong urge to feel him all over my body.
“I can already feel how wet you are. I know it’s the pregnancy, I know you’re needy, but I’m going to pretend this is all for me.” He pressed his nose to the back of my head. “I’m selfish like that.”
I squirmed until I very awkwardly could look at him. With my shoulder pressed into his chest and my side turned, I wasn’t comfortable, but he was visible. “You’re one of the best looking men on any planet. How could you think me feeling like this isn’t for you, about you?”
“Mel…”
I hoisted myself up a little and bit on his lower lip. “Your blue eyes, your blond hair, this body you keep hidden. I saw you out there carrying David, knew you would save his life. You believed it, too. You practically glowed with the energy of it all. I don’t know if I’m your wife because you won’t tell me, and for now that’s fine. I don’t have to be psychic or have my memories recovered to understand completely why she picked you. I’ve been wearing a shirt all day that smells like you. If I’d woken like this with anyone else tonight, I’d be in the shower, not naked on his lap.”
His eyebrows sloped downwards. “I actually believe you.”
“That’s good, since I’m not lying.”
He kissed me hard, his tongue pushing between my lips until I had to gasp to keep pace with him. The hardness pressed into me. My neck strained. I wasn’t in the best position to begin with, and I nearly slipped out of his arms.
Dane grabbed me tighter before he turned me around, losing the kiss and regaining his position from before. His finger rubbed inside me. “So hot.”
His words were more a groan than anything else, and I squirmed against him. “More, please. Please. Please. Please.”
“Don’t beg. You don’t need to with me. If you need, I provide.”
Steady fingers found a spot inside me I didn’t even know I had. He swirled his fingers over it once and my hips bucked. “This is like my first time. I mean, obviously not; I have the evidence with the baby. But I am sort of faking knowing what I’m doing. How did you know I wanted it right there?”
“Sh. I can make you come by touching you there over and over. Or I can fill you inside. Both are possible, too, although if I watch you come I’m going to spill myself.”
I couldn’t think. He wanted me to make choices? “I want what you want. I need you. Take me however you desire.”
“On your knees. Come on.” I did as he instructed. I’d crawl on the floor if that was what he wanted. “Headboard, both your hands, hold on to it.” He pushed the order with a pat on my rear end. Dane knee walked toward me. He must have taken off his shorts at some point, because my ass was now straight against his own skin. His thumb slipped inside me, touching that spot again. My body bucked and I almost lost my grip on the headboard.
“Easy.” His voice was a whisper in my ear. “I’m going to take care of you. Just hold on, sweetness.”
The tip of him pressed against my entrance before he jerked all the way inside. I cried out, from the invasion and the sheer pleasure of having him so deep inside me.
Dane’s forehead pushed on my shoulder while one of his arms moved until his hand covered mine on the headboard. “Talk to me? This okay?”
“Better than okay.” His cock twitched inside me, and my muscles spasmed. He moaned my name before he jerked out and plunged inside me again. My neck was too heavy. There was too much pleasure. How was I supposed to keep it up? With nowhere else to go, I leaned against Dane. He needed to support me or else I might dissolve into a puddle on the floor.
“I’ve got you. Tell me if it’s too much.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. Please, more.”
I lost track of time. He moved, and eventually I figured out how to make my hips meet his jerks in a rhythm that worked for us. His breathing changed. I could tell from how frequently he grunted that was drawing close to completion. I wanted to come, desperately. My body cried out for it and every time I said his name it was me begging for him to get me there.
But it wasn’t all I desired. Dane needed to come, too, or the finale would be a hollow pleasure for me. What was the point of doing this alone? I wanted him with me.
“You’re so tight.” His words were as tense as his body behind me.
“Dane. Please. Both of us. I need you, I need this.” His fingers moved from where they gripped my shoulder to my pussy again. As he pressed deeper inside, so far I thought I might never know again where he started and I ended, he found the bundle of nerves he’d touched before and this time he pinched me. I cried out, my body releasing. Again and again and again…
Dane followed, my name on his lips like a prayer. His forehead on my back, his lips kissing my shoulder blades, every move he made telling me he was there with me. I closed my eyes, finally able to breathe for the first time in months.
Sometime later, my head lay pressed against his chest. I listened to his heartbeat. He was awake, staring at the ceiling. I moved just enough to scoot a bit to take his hand in my own.
He adjusted, meeting my gaze in the darkness where the only light came from under the door leading to the hall.
“You okay?” He’d been so quiet. Then again, so had I. Maybe sometimes there didn’t have to be words to fill the hours.
He nodded, taking our joined fingers and kissing them. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been better.”
“Dane.” I didn’t want to spoil things, but I did need him to understand where my head and heart stood. “We shared the most intimate thing two people can. I loved every second of it. You…I never imagined it could be like that.”
He nodded, pulling me against him again. “I didn’t either.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. Presumably, we’d done it many times before. If I asked, I’d get a non-answer. Anything that ever gave me too big a clue was avoided unless one of them was too angry to keep his mouth shut. Dane. Geoff. Nolan. They’d all screwed protocol. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know the little I did.
“We don’t know each other. Not really.”
“You’re right.”
I expected him to argue, so when he didn’t, it took me a few seconds to even answer again.
“I’d like to know you, everything about you. I want to be there for you. I want you there for me. Is that okay to say?”
His seconds of silence worried me. Had I said the absolute wrong thing?
“I always want truth from you. Like now. Like before, when you told me it was me you wanted. If sometimes the opposite is true, and you want me to leave you alone, or I’m pushing too hard, I need to hear it. I’ll always tell you the truth.”
“Okay.” I ran my fingers over his whiskers. “How did you end up here? You’re from Kakstan. It’s a big planet. One of the ones we hoped to get sent to from Master’s. How did you end up on the Artemis in this room with me?”
Dane kissed my fingertips. “I got lucky.”
“That’s not really an answer. If you’re not going to tell me, just say you aren’t.” The half-responses were going to put me over the edge. “‘I’m not going to tell you, Melissa,’ will at least make it easier to digest.”
“Do you really want my story?” Dane propped himself on an elbow to look at me. “Not too dour or self-indulgent?”
He didn’t make any sense. “How are we going to know each othe
r any other way?”
“We could forget about the past and live for the future.”
He didn’t sound like himself when he said those words, more like he recited something told to him or that he’d read. “I have no past, so if you’d prefer…”
Dane’s kiss took me by surprise. It wasn’t meant to seduce like before. This one I knew for the claiming it was meant to be the second his lips hardened against mine. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Promise me you won’t leave me to my past. I hate being alone with it.”
“Only if you promise me you’ll not abandon me to the future I know is coming. The one where I have to get into a machine that’s going to hurt me to recover memories I can’t even imagine having.” My voice shook and I looked away. It was possible to show him too much of myself. I understood what he said about self-indulgence. I should keep my dark thoughts where they belonged, to myself. We were too intimate, lying limbs entwined, my insides still weeping from where we came together.
“Don’t get in the machine.”
I jerked at his words. “What?”
“I thought I wanted your memories returned. I still do, but not if it frightens you. I hadn’t let myself think of the pain. We can go on from here without them. We’ll figure it out.”
“Dane.” I said his name because there wasn’t anything else to vocalize. We both knew I would end up in the machine.
“I was born in Kakstan. The fifth son of my family. They were so determined to be one of the families to have a girl. The percentage of females born in Kakstan is slightly higher than other places in the galaxy. Lots of theories as to why that is. Girl clusters. Big social standing to get one. But I was boy number five. My father had a wife because he was the personal physician to King Conrad. My dad almost missed my birth, barely made it to the planet, because he’d been in Ochoa three days before, delivering Cooper. Funny, in a central casting of life kind of a way.”
I wanted to ask questions, only I didn’t want him to stop, so I listened, collecting his information, hoping there would be a time in the future I could press for more.
“I’m smarter than my brothers. Sounds terrible to say, but we did promise each other truth. They’re very good doctors, but none of them could do what I did. By the time I turned fifteen, I’d completed all the education I could, except for medical school. Even that only took me a year.”
Between Wes and Dane, it was amazing the ship could carry their IQs. They were so heavy with intellect.
“Go on.” I ran my fingers over the hard muscles on his chest. Smart didn’t mean happy, and it didn’t mean safe. They still lived in the same world I did.
“My mother used to sleep with other men when my father went away. I’m pretty sure Dad knew. She kept her birth control chip on and never got pregnant except by him. We all look exactly like the old man. Mom grew bored easily, but there’s not much to do on Kakstan, if you’re not studying medicine or talking about it. Some of the women form little clubs. Personally, I think we should let the women who want to become doctors try, but that’s downright scandalous.”
He stopped talking, his eyes distant in the way Geoff’s had been when he’d told me about the mine. I planted a light kiss on his arm, bringing him to the present.
“One of the Noble guards stationed there took a liking to Mom, but she wasn’t interested in him. He got jealous of the men she did pay attention to. He raped her. It was awful and very violent. It happened when I was sixteen. After that, she wasn’t the same. Not that she’d ever been mother of the year, but I wanted her as she’d been. I started reading incessantly about memory.”
He rubbed at his eyes, and I settled next to him. If he wanted to stop, I wouldn’t push. Presumably I knew all about this anyway, and when I got in the machine that would hurt me, the knowledge would return.
“Dane…”
He interrupted, talking fast. “When we have trauma, the adrenaline causes the memory to imprint harder. You might not remember something funny that happened three days ago because there’s no stress, so your body doesn’t release a hormone causing you to relive the moment over and over. I became obsessed with the idea, and by the second half of medical school, I believed I had the tools to take the trauma from my mother.” He winced like the memory pained him. “It worked.”
“And?” That couldn’t be the end of the story.
“With a treatment of synthetic hormones designed to counteract the permanence of the cortisol-infused traumatic imprint, I made her forget everything that happened to her. My beautiful, albeit shallow, mother came back to herself. The Nobles took note.”
I bet they did.
Chapter 10
Bruises
“THE Nobles commissioned the mind wiping idea a decade before to help their soldiers deal with the horrors of their lives on the outer planets, and had gotten nowhere. The main doctor wanted my help to make it happen this time.”
Dane kissed the top of my head. Once. Twice. A third time. I didn’t move. If he needed to reach out to be okay with this story, then he could do so as much as he liked. Ever since I’d woken alone in the room at Master’s, with no idea who I was, I’d been attention-starved. I’d wanted to be better than this, a good woman with nothing but a bright future ahead of me. Wrapped in Dane’s arms, I was perfectly satisfied for the moment with where I’d landed. Although I might feel differently when it turned to morning, the darkness and the quiet talking cocooned us in a blanket of safety that, at the moment, I’d be content to stay in always.
“They’d gotten nowhere. My work, it helped. Soon there were five of us working on it. I almost never went home.
“Boom. We did it. Breakthrough. I was so damned proud of us. All those women I thought we were helping. They’d had such bad, sinful lives. Anything the Nobles believed, so did I.”
“Something changed.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, because obviously something had shifted for Dane or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
He nodded. “I’d been monitoring a woman they brought in. She was about thirty-five years old. She begged me not to put her in the machine. I assured her, as I did all of them, that she wouldn’t remember the pain. She asked me not to do this to her son. He was five, and he needed her.”
“Oh, wow.” I’d been pregnant and focused on that while I lived in Master’s. It never occurred to me to wonder if the other women had left more than a lifestyle I wasn’t to approve of anymore. Had they left families? Did I have any other children? What about my parents? Were they alive, worried about me? Wow, I really was a selfish, narcissistic person. I had to do better.
“I know. I tried to stop the wipe, but the Nobles wouldn’t hear of it. I got so angry. It really made me start to reevaluate the whole thing. Who were we to decide these women didn’t get to keep their memories? The child would never have his mother. Surely, mind wiping should be saved for special circumstances, like if the woman asked for it. Trauma or no other choice.”
“What did they do to you?”
He shrugged. “Oh, you know, the usual. Threw me out of the program. Made me look like a fool publicly. I got off easy. The Nobles are vicious. We know, for example, they routinely infect populations of planets with diseases we can’t cure to wipe out undesirables.”
I gasped. “They do what?”
He nodded once. “I only wish I was lying. The things they do are so awful, Mel. I don’t think there are lines they won’t cross. I went home. My parents took me in, even though I’d humiliated them. I was there the night my mother killed herself.” His voice broke. “Although we wouldn’t know about it until the next morning, or I’d have done something.”
“Oh, Dane.” I threw my arms around him. “I am so, so sorry. Why? What happened?”
“When I erased her memory, I never gave it much thought past bringing her back to us. I didn’t consider the ramifications of what her life would be. Everyone knew something about her she didn’t. Years of that, it wore her down. She couldn’t ta
ke it anymore.”
I could see how it would become too much, although I had no intention of telling him that. I wasn’t suicidal. We didn’t need to put worry about my mental health in his head.
“You have to promise to tell me if this gets too huge for you. We’re not telling you about your life because we plan on taking you to The Bridge to get your memories returned. Otherwise, if you want, I’ll tell you everything I know about you.”
He’d followed my train of thought. I almost told him to go ahead. I opened and closed my mouth twice. I didn’t know what I wanted yet. If he was one of my husbands, I wanted the memory of our time together. One of these guys had made a baby with me. I wanted to remember doing so, even if getting in that machine scared the crap out of me. I asked the next logical question instead. “How did you end up with the Nomads?”
“I had a very public nervous breakdown in Ochoa. I actually screamed at the King during a ceremony. They locked me up. That should have been it. You don’t publicly humiliate a member of the royal family. But the Nomads rescued me. They wanted me to build them a machine to reverse the memory loss. I was desperate for redemption, so I agreed.
“After I spent five years on the project, I did manage to make the science work, but not as easily as the erasing went. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and protocol aside, I don’t know why. Some women get it all returned. For others, it doesn’t work. Still, some get it weeks later. Months. Years. And the third group is the worst. They get their past, but the brain doesn’t integrate it. They’re always operating in two versions, like the pre and post wipe are in constant argument. That’s very rare.”
I closed my eyes. “I really don’t want that.”
“It’s much more likely you’d have one of the first two things happen. And there are things we can do now to help. Drugs, to make the process work better.”
I placed my hand on his mouth to stop him. There was nothing he could tell me about the technique to make it more palatable. I’d really rather he simply stop trying. “At what point did you end up here?”
Kidnapped by Her Husbands Page 12