Melanie squatted opposite him and observed his quick movements. “I didn’t know you’d been to the gatherings.”
“No one knows except my brother and Kyan,” he replied. “We kept it secret from the rest of the village.”
Melanie clenched her jaw. “I’ll bet you did.”
His eyes darted to her face. “You don’t understand. We went there with the Paramilitary Corps. We worked with the Galactic Police to arrest the traffickers. That’s how we wound up there.”
She stared down at his hands flicking back and forth over the dead fish.
All of a sudden, his hands stopped. She looked up to see him staring at her. “Did you think I went to the gatherings as a guest?”
She didn’t answer. She kept her eyes fixed on the blood stain spreading over the grass.
He stared at her and waited for her to answer, but when she didn’t respond, he humphed and shook his head and went back to work. He muttered under his breath, as much to himself as to her. “The gatherings made me sick. I couldn’t stand to look at the women there. I never would have set foot near them except in the line of duty. After we busted three of them, Wink and I agreed to leave the Corps to come back home.”
He talked on to himself with no expectation that she would answer him. “I suppose some people might think that makes us weak. We couldn’t stomach the job, and then those poor, wretched women traveled on our ships to the rehabilitation centers. We had to pass them in the corridors on our way to the commissary for meals. No man with a beating heart could stand it.”
Her eyes crept back to his face. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “And your brother feels the same way?”
“Of course he does,” Wit snapped. “We’re not monsters, you know. We’re not Toom.”
“What about Kyan?” she asked. “He’s been to lots of gatherings, going undercover to rescue the slaves. He and Natalie went undercover together, and they performed before the crowd to find Tina and Amber and…...and me.”
He wadded up the moggie’s guts and flung them into the bushes. Then he wiped his knife on the grass. “I don’t know how it is for Kyan. Maybe if you had a strong mate like your friend Natalie to go undercover with, it would be different. I suppose he didn’t perform with any real slave, did he?”
“Of course not,” she whispered.
“There. You see?” he shot back. “No man could live with himself if he had. He certainly couldn’t show his face on his home world if he treated another living creature like that.”
He took the bloody carcass to the stream and washed it clean. Then he set off through the trees again. Melanie didn’t move. She stared at the sunlight playing on the water as it cascaded over beds of gravel. She didn’t listen to his footsteps fading into the distance.
The light and the whisper of water calmed her and carried her away into a dreamworld where the past didn’t exist. Nothing existed, not even her. She was nothing but a dream, like this stream. All at once, Wit’s voice broke in on her reverie. “Are you coming?”
She didn’t turn around, but her ear detected him standing right behind her. She kept her eyes on the water with its soothing pattern of rainbows and sparkles. He would lose patience in a minute, and then he would leave. How she would find her way back, she couldn’t guess. But that didn’t matter. She would be by herself, at least.
But he didn’t leave. He stood still and waited. Then he squatted down next to her. “Did I say something to offend you?”
Her throat tightened. What was the point of trying to explain? He said how he felt about the gatherings, and the Toom slaves, and everything else. He wouldn’t listen to a word she said. She should have known better than to talk to him in the first place. She should stick to the Eblians who didn’t know anything about her past.
Sure, the Eblians knew the Toom were evil sex traffickers, that they enslaved women and altered them with regeneration beds, and then sold them to the highest bidder at enormous gatherings with thousands of males who used the slaves one after the other. Knowing that was a far cry from experiencing the gatherings firsthand.
Melanie couldn’t stand to look Kyan in the eye if he wasn’t partnered with Natalie. He understood, and he loved Natalie just the same. No other man could hope to understand her innermost feelings. No man could understand the dark secrets lurking in her heart.
All at once, Wit sat down next to her on the bank. He gazed out at the water along with her. He sat in silence for a long time. Then he murmured, “Was it the Toom?”
Melanie closed her eyes. “You don’t understand.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t get them out of my head. It was as terrible as you say, but the regeneration beds made it wonderful. They say not many women respond to the beds the way we did, but it was wonderful. Maybe only the bed was wonderful, but it was the most wonderful experience I ever had. I don't think I could ever feel that way again with any ordinary man.”
He listened in silence.
“Maybe you’re right,” she went on. “Maybe I should forget about choosing a mate on Eblian. The Eblians are good people. You wouldn’t want a woman like me.”
He didn’t say anything, and Melanie’s heart sank into her shoes. He would get up and leave for certain, now that he knew she was that sort of woman. She was exactly the sort of woman he came home to avoid.
At last, he did stand up. Melanie closed her eyes again. The sunlight put her to sleep. At least she could fall asleep and escape this for a little while. She could escape being herself, being the kind of woman a man like him would walk away from and never look back.
He stood next to her on the bank. Then he bent down. He picked up the rock moggie in one hand and took hold of hers with the other. He tugged her upwards. “Come with me to my house. I’ll give you something to eat.”
Chapter 9
Melanie followed where Wit led. She didn’t bother to look at the forest or try to recognize where they were. Only one thought raged in her mind. His hand burned hers at the end of her arm. She would have yanked her hand out of his grasp if an inexplicable force hadn’t held her still. Only her legs moved.
Not even her thoughts worked right. Somehow, the forest softened over her head. It didn’t press down on her with the same oppressive darkness. The creatures living in the canopy didn’t screech so loud, and dainty shafts of light penetrated to the soft floor underfoot.
At length, Wit slung the rock moggie over his shoulder and grabbed a creeper out of the undergrowth. He squeezed her hand tighter, and her feet left the ground. In an instant, he set her down on a platform exactly like the ones outside the Eblian village. A leafy hut perched between the branches not far away. No other dwellings were in sight. “What is this place?”
“This is my house,” he told her.
“Yours?” she asked. “You mean yours and your brothers?” What if his brother came back and found her here?
“This is mine,” he replied. “Wink’s house is down the valley.”
She tried to peer through the trees, but she couldn’t make out any valley. She didn’t know the country well enough to know where he meant—not that it mattered. He tiptoed across one of those swaying bridge branches to the house and climbed the steps to the front door. He vanished inside.
Melanie let out a heavy breath. The Eblians prided themselves on their hospitality to anyone who made it as far as their village. She learned that from Kyan and Rika. Whatever happened in that house, Wit would look after her. She couldn’t be more certain of anything.
She crossed the bridge and entered the house to find Wit slinging the moggie up onto a counter of split timbers under the front window. She strode across the one big room and gazed through a window in the opposite wall. Expansive forest stretched as far as the eye could see, with no sign of another house or a village anywhere. Just how far removed were they from the rest of the population? Her friends wouldn’t have any idea where she was. They wouldn’t even suspect she was missing for….well, for quite some time.
She tur
ned around to find Wit staring at her with an intensity that made her freeze in her tracks. He stood still, and his eyes burned in his head. Melanie couldn’t take her eyes off his face. She would recognize that look anywhere, the look of a man intent on one thing.
The recognition sent a shock wave through her being, but a burning streak of fire sizzled over her skin and into her deepest guts. He didn’t bring her here for something to eat, unless he planned to devour her from the inside out.
Her knees wobbled, and her thighs melted. He understood what she told him by the stream. He understood it better than if she’d got down on her knees and begged him to take her then and there. Even looking at his face right now made her genitals ruffle and ooze.
His arms hung at his sides, with his hands flexed and his shoulders square. His eyes pierced her soul. He read her reaction with perfect accuracy. He knew what she wanted, and she knew what would happen next. His expression left no doubt in her mind.
He bent down and picked up a thin stick from a box of firewood by the door. She watched his fingers curl around it. He knew exactly what to do with it. An ache of longing seared her heart. What were the odds that she would find the one man on this planet who understood what she needed, what she craved, and possessed the determination to give it to her?
He jerked his head toward her. “Get down on the ground.”
His voice touched her skin, and her lips fell open. She squatted down on the floor, but she kept her eyes on his face. He followed her down with his eyes. Her body burned for some contact with him—any contact, painful contact, devastating contact—anything to tell her he was there, he was with her, and he desired her.
He regarded her in her lowly position. Then he pointed at her with his stick. “Turn around.”
She understood his eyes better than his words. She dropped onto her hands and knees and turned around. She pointed her ass at him and gazed up at him over her shoulder. Her vulva blossomed open and sent out tendrils of pheromones to call him closer, to lure him into her.
Her position drove her out of her mind. It harkened back to the days she spent in training with her old masters, Fo and Te, on the Toom ship. They took her apart piece by piece and put her back together again until she begged for more. She would take anything they could dish out and howl in ecstasy.
But this was nothing like the old days. This was real. No regeneration bed infected her body and her mind to yearn for him. No weird energy altered her cells to make her more receptive to him. No training, or indoctrination, or slavery made her yearn for his hand to take her and own her and use her and fulfill her.
The hazy bliss of the regeneration bed remained light-years away, in the depths of space. She would never experience that again. But this! This was a thousand times more tangible, more visceral, more acute. Any touch from this man would shatter her very being. He would sweep away the doubt, the fear, the uncertainty. He would blaze brighter than the sun and thaw her heart.
She would never be a slave to him. He read in her eyes and in her body what she wanted, and if he couldn’t do that, he would get her to tell him. She would tell him what she wanted in a heartbeat. She would beg him for it, and he would give it to her. Oh, how he would give it to her! No one could give it to her better than he could.
He stared at her with her back end turned up toward him, and the fire of passionate desire burned through his superior reserve. He couldn’t stop himself from breathing heavy at the sight of her, and his nostrils flared. He could smell her from across the room.
He stepped toward her. Melanie panted through her open mouth. Closer he came, and he stopped right behind her. He lifted his stick and trailed the end of it up the inside of her thigh. She gasped for breath and almost closed her eyes, but she fought the urge to turn inward and kept her gaze fixed on his face.
He drew the tip of the stick up her inner thigh to the crease of her leg. Then he sawed the stick itself forward and back across the fabric of her jumpsuit. Melanie couldn’t hold back a squeak of overwhelming desire. Her back arched, and her ass turned toward him. She rocked her hips back and forth in rhythm with the stick, in time to it sliding in and out between her thighs.
Wit pursed his lips, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He pulled his stick back and scratched the tip across her ass. Then he ran it down her other thigh and back up to the cleft between her legs. The stick dove between her thighs, and its slender edge ran up along her clitoris.
Melanie threw back her head and moaned. Her juices spread down her thighs and dampened the inside of her jumpsuit. She gasped and groaned in aching desire. He pumped the stick along her throbbing clitoris, and she humped it as best she could, but it was too thin to give her any satisfaction.
Wit growled under his breath. “Is this what you like? Is this what you want?”
“I want it,” she whispered.
He took a step to one side, and the stick slid out. He laid it across her ass. “Is this what you want? Say what you want?”
“Give it to me,” she croaked.
He shook his head. “Not yet. We haven’t finished yet.”
“I can’t stand it,” she cried. “I want it so bad.”
He only shook his head. “You don’t want that, do you? You don’t want to bend over for me and then go home, do you? I wouldn't be doing you any favors if I let that happen.”
She rocked her hips back again, but she found nothing waiting for her but thin air. “But I want it so bad!”
“That’s not what you want,” he told her. “This is what you want.”
The stick whistled through air and came down stinging across her ass. She screamed in surprise and pain, but he only brought it back and down again in another stinging smack. Every stroke brought a shriek from her, but they only drove her higher into rapturous delirium.
He switched the stick down hard across her raised buttocks. “Is this what you want?” The whistle of the stick singing through the air told her when it would strike, but that didn’t prepare her for the surge of intoxicating power racing through her veins with each stroke.
“Yes!” she screamed. The stick came down again. “Yes!”
“Is this what you want?” He gritted his teeth, and his knuckles whitened on the stick.
Three strokes hit her in quick succession. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Say you want it,” he ordered.
“I want it!” she screeched.
“Beg for it,” he told her. “You know you want to beg for it.”
“Oh, yes!” She couldn’t stop screaming in time to his strikes. “Give it to me. Spank me! Beat me! Fuck me!”
He brought his stick down again and again across her ass until she closed her eyes, threw back her head, and screamed with all her might. Red hot fire scorched her ass and hips and down the back of her thighs, but unstoppable passion drove her to greater excesses of screaming and begging. She pushed her ass back into the stick when she heard it whistle toward her. She drank in that stinging pain in greedy gulps. It set her on fire. It brought her to life for the first time since she left Earth.
Nothing the Toom ever did to her, none of the whippings and excesses of the guests at the gatherings could hold a candle to this. This was no paying customer, no illicit trafficker in contraband slaves. This was a living, breathing man who cared about women, who threw away a career in the Paramilitary Corps because he couldn’t stand to see women mistreated. He cared about her. He cared about giving her fulfillment.
When this was all over, he would comfort her and sooth her and tuck her into her blankets. He would cook the rock moggie to give her something to eat. He would never do anything to hurt her. He would never do anything she didn’t want him to do. In the end, she held all the power. She would decide what they did and how they did it, and he would do her bidding.
But she didn’t have time to think about that now. Wit set his stick aside and moved to her side. He put his hand under her and, with expert fingers, ran down the buttons on her jumpsuit. He sli
pped the buttons out of their holes, and the suit fell open. Her bare breasts tumbled out into his waiting hands, and the room spun in front of Melanie’s eyes.
He cupped the delicate orbs in his palms and rolled her nipples between his fingers. She moaned under her breath, but she couldn’t look at him. She teetered on the brink of a swoon, and her hips rocked back in search of something solid.
He put his other hand down between her legs from behind and massaged her aching vulva. She pushed her juicy lips back into his hand, and her engorged flesh melted into his touch. He pinched her nipple tighter and banged her clitoris with his knuckles until she sobbed in mortal desire for him.
All at once, he withdrew. He walked away to the other side of the room and left her devastated and alone. She stayed where she was, but she didn’t dare turn around to see what he was doing. Out of nowhere, his voice split the silence. “Stand up.”
She labored to her feet with rasping breath and turned to face him. He stood by the counter. The limp moggie lay in the same place he put it when he came in. He glared at her with smoldering eyes. “Take that suit off.”
Melanie struggled to pull herself together to obey. She unbuttoned the few remaining buttons and pushed the suit off her shoulders. She slid her arms out of the sleeves and dropped the suit to her hips.
“Stop there,” he barked.
Melanie jumped, and her hands fell away from the suit, so it rested around her hips. Wit waited until she finished. Then she raised her eyes to his face and realized he held a length of tough twisted rope in his hands. He strode toward her and unwound the rope at her feet.
He lifted her hands in front of her, and she knew enough to hold them there while he bound them together at the wrists. She relaxed into her fate. The rope took all her cares away. She could trust him now. He lashed her wrists together and looped the rope into a tight knot. She tugged at her hands, and they wouldn’t move. The firm restraint gave her peace.
Wit tossed the remaining length of rope up to the ceiling, and it fell over a rafter overhead. He caught the other end and pulled it down. He hauled Melanie’s hands over her head until she hung from her wrists from the ceiling. Her breasts swayed in mid-air, and no amount of struggle would free her.
Alien Romance Box Set: Eblian Mates Complete Series (Books 1 - 3): A Sci-fi Alien Warrior Invasion Abduction Romance Page 21