by Roxie Ray
And as Gallix’s eyes sharpened and narrowed, I knew he wasn’t feeling so sane right now either.
We wanted this. Needed this.
And sane or not, the only way to satisfy ourselves right now was to give in.
“Blood. You’re so damned tight, Eve…” Gallix’s breaths were ragged. They matched mine, inhale for inhale. Gasp for gasp. “So hot. So wet.”
“Yes,” I whispered. I dug my nails into his back and relished the way he snarled as he hissed at the sensation. “I’m yours. I’m yours.”
“Mine.” Gallix’s cock twitched within me. It set off a chain reaction, the kind we’d been building toward ever since he positioned my pussy over his hard, thick tip. “Moons. You’re mine, Eve. Mine. I’m gonna…I can’t…”
“Please! Yes!” I couldn’t whisper anymore. The sounds leaving my throat were high and breathy, but they weren’t at all quiet. They couldn’t be. Pleasure was bubbling up inside me, rippling through my body and leaving me spasming in the wake of his every thrust. “Gallix—Gallix, yes—”
“Eve!” He forced the words through his teeth. His lips were pulled back, revealing his fangs. Against my ass, his balls tensed, then released over and over again.
Then, I could feel it. His cum gushed from his tip, thick and hot and in hard, intense bursts. I could feel it inside me, mixing with my own wetness. I could imagine it coating my cervix, sinking deep inside me and flooding my womb.
We clung to each other in the aftermath of our orgasms like the gravity had just gone out. If Gallix’s weight hadn’t been on top of me, I was half-sure I would have just floated away.
“I’m sorry, bright eyes,” Gallix purred in my ear after we were both able to catch our breaths. Our bodies were slick with sweat. Inside me, his cock was still twitching and stiff. “I…I shouldn’t have done that.”
I pushed him up so I could look at him. After a long moment of staring deep into his eyes, I couldn’t help but smile.
“I asked you for it. I wanted it,” I told him. “You don’t need to apologize. That was perfect, Gallix. Perfect in every way.”
“Mm. If you say so.” Gallix raised his eyes to the night behind us. “Don’t suppose this is how you imagined losing your virginity, though. Would’ve been nicer, for example, if I’d managed to get you to a bed.”
“I said it was perfect.” I stole a kiss from his lips and giggled. “None of this was how I imagined it…but that doesn’t make it any less good.”
“You’ll need something new to wear now, though.” Gallix shifted his hand over to pluck my ruined nightgown up off the ground. It was torn cleanly in two down the front. Definitely not wearable anymore. “I’ll have to find you…I dunno. A shirt, or something. Maybe something survived the fire.”
“I’ll wear a grass skirt and leaves if I have to,” I said with a laugh. “But for now, let’s not worry about clothes, okay?”
“Don’t mind being naked around me now?” Gallix smirked. His eyes glowed with pride.
“No,” I said softly as I brushed my fingertips across his cheekbone. “I don’t suppose I do.”
In the end, it turned out that more of Gallix’s wardrobe had survived the fire on the ship than we’d originally thought. His shirt fit me like a dress, reaching almost all the way down to my knees, but it was better than a grass skirt.
Plus, to my delight, when I managed to smell past the scent of smoke…
It smelled like him. Or maybe I just smelled like him.
“Where did Pax and Ora run off to?” Gallix scratched his head as he looked around camp. “Think we scared them away?”
“With the way they’ve been looking at each other lately, I have a feeling they probably slipped off to do exactly what we just did.”
“Can’t blame them. What we just did…well, vringna, it was damned stupid, but I’ve gotta admit, it felt pretty good.” He turned his head slightly. “You don’t regret it, do you?”
“Not at all.” My pussy clenched at the memory of Gallix’s cock thrusting inside it. A trickle of his seed spilled down my thigh and I found myself blushing a little. “But…I might need to go get cleaned up.”
“Go,” Gallix agreed. He nodded to the pool. “Do what you need. I’ll keep watch.”
“You’re going to protect me, huh?”
“Always,” Gallix swore with a smile. “With a cunt like yours and lips as sweet as those… Blood, Eve. I’d protect you with my life.”
I knelt at the edge of the pool and splashed water between my thighs, washing them clean. I could still feel more of Gallix’s cum inside me. To my surprise, I liked how it felt. I liked how I felt. My cheeks were flushed, and my body felt exhausted but light all at once.
I liked it a lot.
“Eve!” Gallix shouted my name from behind me. I turned just in time to see him shift his body between the tree line and my own.
Something was rustling in the jungle. Something big—and coming right our way, too.
“Back to the ship! Go!” Gallix barked at me.
I picked myself up and broke out into a run toward the ship, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to.
Pax, Ora and Ronan emerged from the jungle. Pax’s eyes were flashing, panicked. Ora’s face was ghostly pale. And between them, Ronan was slumped with his arms around their shoulders. He looked like he couldn’t hold himself up—and as he stumbled forward a second later, it turned out that looks weren’t deceiving.
He hit the ground hard, his shirt marred bright red with blood.
“We found him in the jungle,” Pax explained breathlessly. “He could barely stand. I think he must have been attacked or—”
“Rutharians,” Ronan rasped. “They have…Marisa. Killed three. Three more still out there.”
Gallix rushed to Ronan’s side as my stomach twisted into a knot.
Marisa. She hadn’t just run off and gotten lost.
She’d been taken.
And now, I didn’t know if Ronan was going to survive the wounds he’d sustained in trying to save her.
I didn’t know that we’d be able to save her at all.
12
Gallix
“Come on, soldier.” I shoved my arms beneath Ronan’s bleeding body and hauled him up. He was heavy and limp. Dead weight. “Eyes open. Talk to me.”
“I am dying, Gallix.” Ronan blinked his eyes open like his lashes were made of lead weights. His voice was a weak, labored rasp. “At least…let me pass…beneath open skies.”
“You’re not dying, you old baz-terd. Not on my watch. You’re not allowed.” I lugged him into Bessie’s wreckage against his wishes. The table in the canteen was still standing. I laid him down on it like an operating table. “That’s an order, you hear?”
Ronan let out a ragged breath, then reached up to grab me by the front of my shirt. For a dying man, the way he jerked my face down towards his was surprisingly strong.
“Let me die beneath the moons, Gallix,” he growled. His eyes were a weak red, like blood in water. “Take me to…the sacred cave. To the jungle. Anywhere but this damned ship.”
“I need you in this damned ship so I can operate on you, dung-for-brains.” I cupped my hand beneath his skull and lifted his head up so I could press my forehead to his. “You’re not dying, because I’m going to save you. Once that’s done, you can fight me about whether or not you’ll allow me to.”
A hint of a smile. Just barely, but it was there.
Ronan was a stubborn one, but I was always going to be stubborner. As he closed his eyes and nodded, it seemed that he’d managed to remember that.
“How is he?” Pax arrived with the emergency lanterns Eve and I had recovered from the medical kit. They flooded the canteen with a holy purple glow. Eve and Ora came in behind him, Ora pale and twisting her hands, Eve, determined.
“Dunno,” I admitted. “But we’re about to find out.”
“We need to get his shirt off.” Eve moved to my side and placed her fingers in the spaces betwe
en Ronan’s buttons. She tore his shirt apart with a low grunt, sending the buttons scattering across the room. Normally, I would’ve been opposed to my female—my mate—undressing another man, but the furrow in her brow and the focus in her eyes told me she knew what she was doing. Moons only knew how. And given the circumstances…For Ronan, just this once, I’d let it slide.
“Blood,” I swore as I saw the full extent of Ronan’s wounds.
Two shots from the Rutharians’ blasters had passed through him just above his left hip and just beneath his shoulder. Thankfully, the heat of the blasts had cauterized those wounds and missed his vital organs. Each shot had left a hole in Ronan big enough to stick my thumb in, if I’d been so inclined. They’d heal with time, leaving him with only twisted, puckered scars to add to his collection.
Those weren’t the problem. The problem was the sword wound to his chest, ragged and torn, and the gash under his arm, which was gushing blood like the water from the falls over the pool outside.
“These aren’t clean cuts.” Eve shook her head as she assessed the damages. “What did the Rutharians stab him with?”
“Their swords, most likely,” I said. “Jagged, twisted metal. Meant to inflict pain just as much as they’re meant to kill.”
“I need water,” Eve barked at Ora. “Boiled. Clean. Light a fire—I don’t care who sees it. Cool the pot in the pond before you bring it back in but be quick about it.”
Pax and Ora stood in the doorway, frozen in horror as they looked on. Neither moved.
“Go!” I snarled at them. “Now!”
“We need surgical tools. He’s losing a lot of blood.” Eve slung the med kit off her shoulder and dumped it out onto the table next to Ronan. “Are these sterilized?”
“They are.” I grabbed a pair of clamps and passed them to her. “Stop the bleeding long enough for me to see where they nicked the vein and I should be able to cauterize it.”
“With what?” Eve pulled on a pair of gloves from the kit, which were comically large on her dainty hands, then scrambled to locate the slippery vein. “Bit of metal from the fire Pax is starting?”
“Nah. No time.” I drew my blaster and fired it twice against the floor. The tiles cracked and blistered black where the shots hit. It left the tip of my blaster glowing white hot. “You got the vein?”
“I’ve got it,” Eve said, “But, Gallix—”
“No time,” I repeated. I glanced down at Ronan apologetically as I moved the blaster’s tip toward the vein Eve had clamped off. “Hold him down. This might hurt.”
We worked for what felt like hours. Ora and Pax hauled pot after pot of water into the canteen while Eve and I treated Ronan’s wounds. At first, Ronan hollered through every cauterization, every stitch. There was no escape from the pain for him. All our bottles of sedatives had shattered during the crash, leaving the bottom of the med kit sticky and riddled with broken glass. But thankfully, eventually Ronan passed out. It was a blessing for all of us.
At least for as long as he was unconscious, we could work in quiet and didn’t have to hold him down anymore.
“Okay,” Eve finally said, backing away after she gave his chest wound a final stitch. She raised her wrist to her forehead, wiping away the sweat that beaded her brow. “That’s all I can do.”
“Pulse is steady. Stable.” I held my fingers against Ronan’s neck for a few seconds longer than I needed to, just to be sure. “You’ve done enough.”
“Not just me. Us.” Eve moved to me as she stripped off her bloodied gloves. I took her into my arms and let her rest her weary body against my chest. “Do you think he’ll make it?”
“Bleeding’s stopped. No major organs hit—though, just barely. He was lucky.”
“I don’t know that I’d call him lucky right now.” Eve glanced down at the work she’d done on his chest—which zig-zagged back and forth to close the ragged wound—and let out a heavy sigh. “Those Rutharians are monsters. Those swords…”
“I know.” I smoothed her wild curls down over the back of her head and held her tight. “That’s not the first time those swords have tasted Lunarian blood—but the Rutharians who were swinging them are dead now. It’ll be their last.”
“Thanks to Ronan,” Eve whispered. “He nearly gave his life trying to keep us safe.”
“He’s a soldier, Eve. That’s what soldiers do. Had I been in Ronan’s place, I would’ve done the same.”
“I’m glad you weren’t.”
I glanced down at Ronan, whose chest was rising and falling steady and safe, but just barely. His breathing was still too shallow for my liking. His skin was ashen and pale.
“Don’t say that.” I took Eve’s smooth, soft cheeks in my hands and turned her face up toward mine. “If I could’ve traded places with him, I would’ve. In a heartbeat.”
“You don’t say that,” she snapped back at me. Suddenly, there was fury burning in the hazels of her eyes.
“Why not?”
“Because it was scary enough almost losing him.” Eve tore her gaze away. “I don’t think I could handle losing you.”
“You’re not losing anyone, darling heart. Not me. Not him. No one. Not tonight.” I pressed her face back against my body again and hugged her tighter than ever. “Let’s get you to the fire. Ronan’s stable now. He needs to rest—and so do you.”
I put my arm around her and helped her outside. Her little body was exhausted. Truth be told, mine was too. As we sat near the flames, Ora brought over a final pot of water and set it between us.
“Give me your hands, vringna,” I purred to Eve. “Let’s wash them clean.”
“How did you know how to heal him?” Pax asked from across the flames. He was pacing, blaster drawn and eyes on the tree line. “Were you a healer yourself, back on Earth?”
“I worked in the kitchens in our work camp,” Eve said. I massaged her hands beneath the warm water, and she didn’t fight me about it. “So did Ora.”
“There were explosions all the time there. Old chemicals, forgotten land mines. And the medical tent…it wasn’t a lot of help,” Ora explained. “I think it was there more for the guards than for us. When accidents happened, we workers had to take care of ourselves. I never had the stomach for it, but Eve stitched all kinds of people up. She was amazing.” Ora sat down next to Eve and cuddled in close. “She still is.”
“There wasn’t any other choice.” Eve brushed the praise away like it was nothing. Ridiculous female. Couldn’t even take a compliment when she’d damn well earned it. “But now that it’s done…I’m worried, Gallix. If Ronan is right and Marisa is still out there…”
“I know, vringna.” I placed a kiss against her forehead. Her skin was still salty with sweat. It lingered on my lips, the taste of the ocean. “Don’t worry. We’ll get her back.”
“I just keep thinking about those swords…what they did to Ronan.” Eve hung her head. “Marisa can’t fight back like he did. What if she’s already dead?”
Across the fire, Pax and I shared a look. The Rutharians were known for the ruthlessness with which they killed their foes…but where females were involved, particularly human females, we both knew Marisa wasn’t in danger of being killed.
At least, not at first.
“She’s not dead,” I assured Eve. “But we need to get her out of there. The sooner, the better.”
“And Ronan deserves retribution.” Pax glanced nervously at the trees again. “We cannot let this go unpunished. We must retaliate.”
“You need to fix us a ship,” I told him sternly. His passion was pure and true, but misplaced. “I’ll go.”
“No!” Eve looked at me like I’d just announced a death wish. “Gallix, they’ll kill you! You can’t!”
“Ronan killed three of them already. Only three left. If six-on-one odds didn’t kill him, three-on-one sure as shootin’ won’t kill me.”
“Gallix, you can’t—”
I stopped her protests with a kiss. The hard, fast, fierce kin
d. When our tongues tangled together, it was a battle—but I rarely fought a battle that couldn’t be won.
“Look out for yourself, Eve,” I breathed against her lips. “Ora, too. She needs you.”
“I do,” Ora said quietly. “After what you did for Ronan…we all do, Eve.”
“I don’t care, Gallix.” Eve curled her fingers around my collar and held tight, like she could somehow keep me there if she clung to me hard enough. “I need you.”
“Which is why I’ll be back in no time.” I smiled at her. “Marisa with me, too. She can call you a slut again, I’ll bark a few Lunarian swear words at her—it’ll be just like old times.”
“You’re not understanding me, Gallix. Is your communicator chip broken?”
I laughed. “I understand you just fine, vringna. I’m just telling you that I’m going anyway. Nothing you can do to stop me, either.”
I unwound her fingers from my shirt and rose. But to my amazement—and immense frustration, for that matter—Eve rose as well.
“Then I’m going with you,” she insisted. “You’re not going out there alone.”
“You?” This time, my laugh wasn’t quite as kind. “You don’t know how to fight, Eve. Can’t wield a blaster, and I imagine you’d be more of a danger to yourself than anyone else with a knife.”
“Teach me then.” Eve stepped in front of me, blocking my way. “You need backup. I can learn.”
“You are small and delicate,” I said with a chuckle. “You do realize I could pick you up and move out of the way without breaking a sweat, right?”
“I am small and fierce.” Eve held her hand. “Give me your gun. Even if I can’t aim, I can be a distraction. And barring that… I’ll bite their ankles while you go for the jugular.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Don’t I look serious?”
Eve blinked as I stared her down. She had one hand on her hip, her stance wide like she was ready to fight. Her breasts looked especially full beneath the oversized shirt she was wearing, which didn’t indicate much about her seriousness but was always worth noting in my book.