There was a hot mouth attached to one of her breasts, pulling at it and sending spirals of pleasurable heat through her and the binding she used on her breasts was wedged beneath one of them causing the discomfort. Since Gabriel was the only man that had ever given her pleasure with his touch it didn’t take more than a handful of moments to connect the dots. Confusion still wafted through her.
Hadn’t he changed his mind about fucking?
It seemed to her that he had, but as she roused a little further, she verified that it was definitely Gabriel and if the hand wedged between her belly and her trousers, slowly inching toward her mound, was any indication, he had coupling on his mind. Briefly, she debated whether to ask him if that was what he had in mind or not, but talking seemed like too much effort. In any case, she was still torn between the conflicting desire to go back to sleep and interest in rousing enough to enjoy his sexual play.
She was also comfortable enough clothed that the idea of stripping her clothes off didn’t have a lot of appeal.
She decided to let him have his way. If he wanted to fuck badly enough to figure out how to get her out of her clothes, he could do it. She was too sleepy to feel like dragging them off and then putting them on again.
Apparently the lack of fight was enough to convince him she was willing. He ceased trying to wedge his hand far enough down her pants to reach her sex and rolled to a sitting position. She felt pressure around her waist and then heard the telltale sound of tearing fabric. The binding at her waist disappeared abruptly. Consternation filled her.
She was still trying to figure out whether her clothing had been rendered permanently useless or not when she felt him grasp the sides of her trousers. He dragged her across the hard floor about a foot past the part she’d warmed with her body before he managed to dislodge the pants from her hips. Her bare ass settled against the cold stone, bringing her fairly wide awake as he finished pulling her pants down her legs and tossed them aside. She sucked in a sharp breath at the feel of ice against her previously warm buttocks, but he shoved her knees apart and dove over her before she could catch her breath, wedging the hard mass of his double cock against her cleft and commenced the search for the warm hole that was his goal.
The icy cold, gritty floor against her ass had instantly banished the currents of heat that had been churning through her and with it all interest in coupling. But the probe of his cock at her ass galvanized her into helping him find the right place to tuck his cock. She tried arching away from the probe, but there was no way to escape when he had her pinned to the floor and his dick was too far back along her cleft. She reached between them a little frantically and made a grab for it.
He groaned when she managed to curl her fingers around it. “Baby. Yes.”
She decided not to point out that the gesture wasn’t enthusiasm but preservation of her asshole. Instead, she dragged his cock to the right spot and then curled her legs around his hips and tried to pull him into position.
That was when she discovered she’d grabbed the wrong cock. The upper one was wedged into the mouth of her sex and the lower now probing the taint and edging toward her asshole. Grunting, she levered herself upward and made a grab for his cock again, nudging the upper dick away from her sex and trying to align the lower one.
He shoved her hand away and grabbed his genitals himself, but to her relief he aligned himself for her comfort. She relaxed again as he pumped against her, trying to breach the opening. Her body’s moisture enveloped him once he managed to wedge the head of his cock inside of her and he slid home with a groan of pleasure.
Lexa discovered banked heat from his earlier stimulation and felt the tension inside of her begin to build as he stroked her channel and her clit simultaneously. Eagerness began to replace the compliance of before. She moved with him, struggling to capture the bliss his possession promised and had just reached a point where she knew it was a possibility when she felt him stiffen. Dismay filled her along with the certainty that she’d missed her chance to reach it. In the next moment, she heard him groan as his body gathered itself for release and then felt the heat of his ejaculation flood her channel. It set off a tiny quake within her that promised glory and then crashed as he slumped heavily against her, blowing heated air in her ear.
A sense of being misused filled her as he gathered himself and rolled off of her. She fought it, waiting to see what he would do next.
He snored.
Well, it wasn’t actually a snore, she decided, having been kept awake many nights by Ralph’s snores. It was more a hard breath, but there was no mistake that he was asleep almost the moment he settled beside her.
Shivering, she shoved aside the heavy arm he’d left settled on her chest and got up to find her pants. She didn’t feel up to trying to assess the damage. She merely pulled them on and settled down once more, struggling to recapture sleep and ignore the sticky wetness between her legs and the throbbing ache of her sex.
She wasn’t his woman and he didn’t want her to be, she thought somewhat resentfully, but he didn’t mind fucking her?
Chapter Fourteen
Lexa’s resentment didn’t last long. Most of it had arisen from being awakened from a deep sleep to fuck and then left hanging without culmination. Part of it was due to the fact that he’d been too focused on his pleasure to notice, or apparently care, that he’d damaged her ragged clothing with his enthusiasm. By the time she’d assessed the damage and discovered she really couldn’t tell that her clothes were in any worse shape than before she’d decided that his anxiousness to fuck her was actually rather flattering … in a way.
Then, too, she had been warm and willing right up to the point where he’d deposited her ass on the cold, gritty floor and she could hardly blame him for the fact that that had pitched her back to ground zero when it seemed doubtful that he could’ve known that it had or would. He’d taken the time to arouse her. It had just seemed like a callous disregard for her pleasure because she’d just gotten warmed up good again when he came.
And, in the scheme of things, she’d been treated far worse—many times. At least she’d enjoyed it—right up to the point where he’d left her behind.
And he’d been clearly appalled that she’d misunderstood what he’d said to her, she reminded herself. She had misunderstood. He hadn’t tried to mislead her.
If she’d had any sense, she would’ve realized immediately that he couldn’t possibly have meant what she thought. It was just what she’d wanted to hear him say. She hadn’t realized it until she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it was as plain as day to her now.
She wanted to be his woman in the worst kind of way—for all of the reasons any woman ever wanted to be claimed by a man. She thought she’d probably wanted to when she’d asked him to show her how he could make it feel good, before he had. She didn’t think she would have been interested in him showing her if that hadn’t been the case.
She couldn’t say that she’d actually expected the sex they’d engaged in the night before to smooth things between them when Gabriel had been so distant and cool after the misunderstanding, but she was dismayed that it seemed to make him more distant.
Did he think she was the one that had initiated the sex? Or that she was trying to use it to convince him to take her as his woman when he’d already told her that it wasn’t possible?
Those thoughts made her a little resentful despite the reasoning that had settled her previous issues in her mind. She was tempted to inform him that she’d been dead asleep and it definitely hadn’t been her doing. And that she didn’t want to be his woman so he needn’t worry about that!
Of course she was still trying to convince herself that she didn’t want to be his woman, but there was no reason he had to know that.
As badly as she wanted to argue with him about those things, though, she finally decided she wasn’t angry enough about it to risk arousing his temper.
She could just show him she didn’t have any interest in
being his woman by behaving as coolly toward him as he was behaving toward her!
In any case, he, mostly, redirected her mind by striking off to search for the farm as soon as they’d eaten the following morning since she’d told him that she wasn’t certain she could find Ralph’s village unless she started from there. It wouldn’t have been a search except that she’d wandered for so long without any particular goal in mind other than finding the next watering hole and the next meal. She knew the general direction, but only had that vague concept and none about the distance. Beyond that, nothing looked the same from the air—or rather everything looked the same.
Of course, the terrain she’d traveled through didn’t vary enough, truthfully, that it would have been easier if they’d walked.
They did plenty of that, anyway. Gabriel would take her up and fly for great distances and then they would land and walk awhile. The rations he’d brought with him gave out after the second day. Since he’d divided his food with her, she felt guilty about it. He would’ve had plenty for twice that length of time if he hadn’t shared with her.
He dismissed her apology coolly but it didn’t make her feel any better, particularly since they were forced to suspend their search for the farm for several days in order to find food to keep going.
And Gabriel wasn’t happy with the food they did find.
“We can’t eat that,” Lexa informed him after she’d examined the cans he’d brought back with him from one of his expeditions.
He looked indignant. “Why?”
“When the can looks like that it means the food’s bad. It’ll make you puke your guts out, give you the runs, and maybe even kill you,” Lexa informed him matter-of-factly.
He looked revolted and uneasy. “How do you know the other won’t?” he demanded.
Lexa shrugged. “Well, you don’t always, but usually … and if it stinks when you open it and looks really gross, then I don’t eat it.”
He didn’t look the least bit interested in eating the canned food she approved once she’d heated the contents. “This looks disgusting and it stinks.”
Lexa looked at him in surprise. She was already halfway through her can, but she offered to swap with him.
“Yours looks worse and smells worse.”
Lexa frowned at him. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“You said if it stank ….”
Lexa rolled her eyes. “Well it doesn’t taste like the stuff you eat or smell or look nearly as good, but it’s still food and it’s better than nothing.”
He didn’t look like he agreed, but he ate it.
Lexa snickered at his expression.
He sent her a sour look. “I’m glad this amuses you.”
Lexa chuckled. “It’s the look on your face every time you take a bite.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I think you deliberately chose the nasty one for me.”
“I offered to trade.”
He grinned reluctantly. “Which makes me wonder if you just wanted to trade because yours is nastier and I got the less nasty one.”
She chuckled but shook her head. “After a while you just learn to eat what you can find and be glad you have something to put in your stomach. It beats not having anything to put in your stomach.”
His amusement vanished but he seemed thoughtful as he finished his food. “I’d ask what you do with the container when you finish but I already know. Every village I’ve been in has piles of these empty containers strewn everywhere and adding to the stench.”
Lexa felt her face reddening with a combination of discomfort and irritation. “They ain’t reusable and it don’t do no good to bury them.”
“It would at least cut down on the disgusting odors that permeate the villages. For that matter there is other waste that could be buried that would improve the living conditions.”
The criticism stung since she knew he was saying he thought they were all nasty, disgusting creatures. As much as she hated it, though, he had a point. She thought the villages were disgusting, too, but it was the same everywhere. Anytime there were a lot of people living close together—well, there was no avoiding the smells.
She’d thought Ralph was nasty and disgusting. He stank and he had vermin living in his hair and crusty filth all over him. She’d discovered at the first village they went through that he wasn’t by any means the only one either. There were more people like him, or worse, than there were that hit at bathing even occasionally and the men were inclined to drop their pants and take a piss on any corner—some of the women, too, although most of them had enough sense to know that was just begging for rape. They usually found a place to hide to take care of their business, but they still left it lying around.
She didn’t see that there was much they could do about it, though. Obviously, his people didn’t have a clue of just how much of a struggle it was just to survive or they wouldn’t think of them as savages, or animals, that were too stupid to know better.
Well, she supposed some of them probably were too stupid to know better.
Maybe a lot of them.
But that didn’t change the fact that water was so hard to get that they couldn’t afford to waste it for cleaning. It didn’t change the fact that food was so hard to get that most of their time was spent hunting it and it didn’t change the fact that, as dangerous as the villages were, they were still safer than living in the open like she did. And when people crowded together for safety in villages it just made food and water that much harder to get.
It wasn’t as if they wouldn’t have welcomed the chance to live more comfortably, like the udai obviously did.
Those thoughts made her wonder if telling Gabriel where the villages were wouldn’t actually be a good thing. She’d done her best to avoid any of the villages she could remember passing through before because, although she mostly trusted Gabriel, she didn’t trust his people.
It was pretty clear that Gabriel was contemptuous of humans—he hadn’t actually tried very hard to hide it!—but he had never harmed any that didn’t deserve it as far as she could see. In fact, most of his wrath seemed reserved specifically for the gangs that hurt everyone else.
She still didn’t feel comfortable about the reasons he’d told her that his people claimed as their reason for ‘helping’ hers. She still didn’t trust that they actually wanted to help. She thought Gabriel believed it and he was the smartest man she’d ever known, but that didn’t mean he knew what his people were up to. They’d sent him out to kill the vicious bullies that were raping, torturing, and killing their own kind and she didn’t really have a problem with that, per se. She thought they needed killing.
On the other hand, it was the gangs that protected the people in the villages. They were the meanest, but also the strongest. How were the people going to protect themselves when all the strongest among them had been killed?
Well, she supposed if all the gangs were gone there wouldn’t be much the people had to protect themselves from—except, possibly, the udai.
* * * *
Lexa thought for several moments after they’d landed and she had a chance to see the place that she’d been mistaken. This couldn’t be the farm. As she stared around in dawning dismay, though, she saw a few things she recognized that made denial impossible.
The roof of the tiny cabin where they’d lived had fallen in and the door and shutters were missing or hanging awkwardly, leaving gaping holes. Scraggly weeds grew along the rows in the garden that she and her family had so carefully formed every spring when they planted again, hoping each time that the seeds would sprout and they’d have more food than they could possibly eat. The big tree where she and her brothers had played was scarred and burned, but she saw the rope they’d used to make a swing still hung from its largest branch.
There was a body hanging from it now instead of the thick stick they’d used as a seat—a skeleton actually, but the long white beard and hair were unmistakable.
She swallowed with an ef
fort around a lump in her throat that felt like it would choke her. “That’s Sir.”
“Stay here,” Gabriel said grimly.
She didn’t think she could’ve moved if she tried. She was afraid he would find the bodies of her brothers and she would have to accept that Ralph hadn’t lied about disposing of them. She nodded a little jerkily, watching Gabriel as he moved closer to examine the body.
Feeling weak and dizzy and strangely empty, Lexa dropped to the ground and waited while Gabriel explored the ruins of what had once been her family’s farm. He moved to the door of the cabin, stood looking inside for a few minutes and then went in. He wasn’t gone long before he came out again, his expression like granite. He glanced toward her and then left the cabin and disappeared behind it.
She tried not to think about the other bodies he might find.
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 20