He pumped a squirt of Terran sanitizing gel into his palm with a grimace of impatience that Shauss understood and could sympathize with. During their rotations on the planet’s surface, they’d all had to rely on less-than-efficient Terran technology in order to limit the Terrans’ awareness of their own technology. The less Terrans knew about them, the better off they all were.
Watching Tiber rub the gel into his hands, Shauss suddenly felt an icy trickle in his belly. It could have been Tiber whose lean hands were savaged by the steripod. Tiber’s well-modulated voice screaming hoarsely. Tiber’s amiable features contorted in agony. Why that should disturb him, he couldn’t say. Only yesterday, he’d have felt a stab of satisfaction at the idea of Tiber suffering some freakish but survivable accident. Now, however…
He frowned, unnerved by the knot of cold anger burning inside him. Perhaps the protectiveness he felt was a natural outcome of being primary in their bond. Now that he thought of it, he’d be similarly disturbed if it were Hastion lying there.
“Commander.” Dr. Snow left Shelley’s bedside and approached them, his wrinkled face almost as white as his hair, his usual expression of arrogance noticeably absent. “I’m humbled by your medical technology. Injuries of that degree would probably have resulted in amputation on Earth. It pains me to think that the overzealous response of our government will deprive our citizens of such incredible advances in medical science.”
“Yes, well, it pains me too,” Kellen said, “but until such time as the powers that be are willing to reopen communications, there’s not a lot I can do about it.”
“Damn Republicans,” Snow muttered. “At any rate, I just wanted to personally express my admiration and gratitude. I hope you’ll allow us to learn all we can while we’re aboard.”
Kellen nodded. “That is our desire, as well.”
As the doctor returned to Shelley’s side, Monica said under her breath, “He’s a registered Republican, you know.”
Even as amusement pulled at his lips, Shauss yanked her against him in a brief but heartfelt hug. Peserin, it could as easily be her in the stasis chamber! Why hadn’t that occurred to him earlier?
Breathing deeply in an attempt to regain some equilibrium, he murmured, “I’ve never understood this system of different parties within the same government.”
Monica grinned up at him. “Who the hell does?”
* * * * *
When Shauss stepped quietly into his quarters, Jasmine was sitting at the table, sucking the tip of her finger. He was gratified to note that, though he hadn’t ordered Empran to confine her, she hadn’t tried to leave.
As she pulled her finger free of her lips, he moved to alert her to his presence but stopped when she dipped her fingertip into the soil of the potted plant and then returned it to her mouth. She sucked it clean and returned it to the plant yet again.
“You must be very hungry indeed,” he said.
She started and a flood of scarlet ran up into her cheeks.
Shauss cocked his head to the side as he stared at her.
“Um…” She stared back for a long moment, a few grains of dirt still clinging to her lower lip before saying in a low voice, “I like dirt.”
“Excuse me?”
“I like dirt,” she repeated more loudly with shaky defiance.
Warmth flooded his chest. “I like you,” he told her.
She smiled. “I like you more.”
He smiled slowly. Strolling over to the table, he picked up her hand and brought it to his mouth to suck her soil-coated finger into his mouth. He moved his tongue around, enjoying the natural flavor. “So you like soil.”
“For some reason it reminds me of you,” she said, her voice breathy.
“Should I be offended?”
“Not at all. I’ve always loved the taste of soil. It’s earthy and fresh and clean. I’m always puzzled when people think dirt is…dirty. To me, it’s totally natural.”
Shauss stared down at her, startled by a spurt of longing for the home he’d forsaken. Some of the happiest moments of his childhood had been spent playing in soil while his father worked.
He leaned down and laid his open mouth on hers. The taste of soil between their tongues wasn’t the least bit out of place, and he spent long moments savoring this tentative, sweet connection between them. It was becoming apparent that they were anything but incompatible.
Pulling away, he held her chin and examined her cheek. A very faint bruise shadowed the bone. “I wish like hell I hadn’t done that. It hardly seems fair that I get kisses from your dreams, while you get a slap in the face from mine.”
“At least you didn’t chop my head off,” she said. “And it really was my fault. You’d made it clear you didn’t like that, but I just…wanted to taste you.”
“You truly do enjoy it.”
Pink surged in her cheeks. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Perhaps we can enjoy that activity together.”
He drew her to the bed and pulled her clothes off her before divesting himself of his uniform. Lying back on the mattress, he ignored her slight resistance and maneuvered her until she was sitting on his chest.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I’d rather just concentrate on you.”
“Or I could turn you around and just concentrate on you,” he threatened, flexing his hands on her thighs.
“Ogre,” she replied without heat, leaning down to wrap her hand around his rapidly hardening flesh.
“Get used to it.”
With one more solemn look over her shoulder, she lowered her head and swirled her tongue around the head of his cock.
Shauss broke into a sweat. Peserin, but she was hard to resist! When Monica had pleasured him this way, she’d done so almost…methodically. Looking back, he realized it was her first time and she must have been relying on whatever information she’d gleaned from her studies to guide her. She had sucked him with single-minded determination to prove a point, something she’d accomplished with humiliating ease.
Anxiety shimmered in his gut at the memory and he tensed. He hadn’t hesitated to let her go down on him—he had thought he’d watched enough Terran pornography to have completely disassociated fellatio from the brutal act his father had perpetrated on his mother. But when Monica took control and forced him to ejaculate, the vision had come screaming back in vivid detail, and he’d very nearly snapped her neck. It had taken him hours to regain control of his rioting emotions.
A soft mewl brought him back to the present and he relaxed almost immediately. There was nothing methodical or calculated about Jasmine’s touch. She worshipped his cock as though it held the very key to her existence, laving it with her tongue, nibbling it with her lips, and administering gentle suction as she dew it deep into her throat. Her hands were busy as well, sliding over his thighs and tugging at his tightening scrotum, squeezing his balls until he thrust upward uncontrollably and then easing him with a tender massage. All the while she whimpered and moaned like she’d never known such pleasure.
It dawned on him then that sucking him was the only pleasure she was experiencing.
Ashamed to have lost himself in her caresses for so long, he tugged her knees over his shoulders and pulled her back. She slipped her hands under his buttocks and dug her nails in, unwilling to give up her prize, so Shauss reached up and grabbed a pillow, stuffing it behind his head to accommodate the difference in their heights.
When he parted her flesh delicately with his thumbs, she stilled for an instant and then resumed her attentions with an intensity bordering on desperation. He knew she wanted him to ejaculate in her mouth but he wasn’t ready to give her the kind of control that came with her fingers in his waste canal. Besides, he wanted to enjoy the lingering torment while he returned the favor.
Craning his head forward, he drank in the scent of her arousal with fierce satisfaction. There was no doubt she desired him just as fiercely as he did her.
Overcome by the need to devour her,
he wrapped his arms around her hips and buried his face in her sweet cunt, loving how she moaned and squirmed in his hold. He would love to make her come this way but he didn’t want to make her feel inadequate by trying to force the issue. Perhaps as they grew to know each other and developed more trust, they could find ways to help her orgasm more readily.
It wasn’t long before her smell, her taste and her ardent attention to his cock had every inch of his skin in flames. Ignoring her protests, he turned her until they were face-to-face and kissed her wildly.
When he pulled back for air, his chest heaving, she kissed his throat. “Oh God, Shauss, I love you so much,” she breathed.
Power and elation blasted through him as he claimed her mouth again. She was his!
Pushing her back into the mattress, he spread her thighs and plunged into her. He knew he’d have to turn her when his spur began to erupt, but right now he wanted to face her, kiss her, enjoy her.
She writhed and moaned beneath him, clawing his back as she tore her mouth away from his. “I love you!”
In that moment, Shauss knew he would never tire of hearing those words.
Lacing his fingers over the top of her head and resting his chin on them, he held her in place as he sank deeper and deeper under her spell, thrusting and thrusting and rapidly losing his mind. Fire gathered in his balls, drawing them up tight, and he gritted his teeth, trying to hold back his burgeoning spur. Jasmine was going to come this time, he could feel it, and he didn’t want to turn her until it happened.
The fire raged out of control, searing its way up his spine and raising chills all over his body. His spur bumped her and she moaned frantically. Reacting purely on instinct, he let it ram her again and again, as desperate for her orgasm as she was. The reverberation sent shockwaves through his cock and his balls and even his ass, and he choked on his own cries. Peserin, he was so close! They were so close!
Suddenly Jasmine arched up against him, raking his back as she screamed again. “Yes, oh God please, yes!”
Her cries sent him into a frenzy of powerful thrusts, and the feel of her convulsing around him was all it took to send him spinning over the edge into oblivion. He shouted unintelligibly, forcing himself as deep as possible to spew his seed where he wanted it to grow.
Utterly drained, he lay over her, rubbing his chin in her hair. When he rolled to the side, he noted with satisfaction that she was just as drained as he was, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow and rapid.
Then he saw the blood staining her cunt and thighs.
Chapter Thirteen
Tiber jerked in surprise when Shauss appeared naked, holding an equally naked and apparently unconscious Jasmine in his arms. His flaccid phallus and thighs were smeared with blood.
“Oh hell, what happened?” Monica demanded.
“She’s bleeding between her legs,” Shauss told her roughly.
Tiber led him to the nearest exam table. “Perhaps her menses has commenced.”
“No. We were mating face-to-face and my spur…” Shauss swallowed. “Tiber, I lost control. I injured her.”
Tiber gaped at him for an instant and then turned to Jasmine, who stirred as Shauss laid her down.
Her eyes opened. “Tiber? What happened? What am I doing here?”
“You’ve been injured.”
She looked blank and then her eyes widened. Obviously realizing she was naked, she tried to cover everything with her hands.
“I need to examine you,” he said gently
“No.”
“Jasmine—” Shauss started.
“I’ll do it.” Monica’s tone brooked no argument.
Tiber hesitated, the fine hairs rising all over his body. Something momentous was happening here. He knew it with every cell in his body. But what?
“Of course,” he said reluctantly, taking a step back, “she would be more comfortable with a female physician tending her.”
Jasmine bit her lip, and then said, “Please. Can I have a gown or something?”
Tiber immediately grabbed a gown from the cabinet and passed it to her, surreptitiously studying the bloodstains on her thighs.
Monica raised a brow at them. “A little privacy, boys?”
When they stepped into Ketrok’s lab, a memory detonated in his brain, knocking the breath out of him. Was it possible…?
Turning to Shauss, he found him stepping into his uniform, which he must have summoned via Empran. “We need to observe them. Now.”
* * * * *
Monica examined her carefully. “Well, you got what you wished for. Was it worth it?”
Unable to say it convincingly, Jasmine nodded. Neither of them spoke as Monica went to work, using a clear gel and some kind of gun-shaped instrument to heal the torn tissues surrounding her wide-open nook.
“Well, that’s about the best I can do with the training I’ve had.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” she said as Monica helped her up. “It feels like nothing ever happened.”
Monica paused and then looked her in the eye. “The bioscience team detected a virus infecting the steripod.”
“What?” Jasmine stared back, totally baffled by the change of subject. “What are you talking about?”
“Shauss didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That sterilizing cube you touched in the infirmary literally ate the flesh off Ketrok’s hands this morning.”
Remembering her vision of Mark pulling bloody stumps out of the block in Dr. Ketrok’s lab drained every ounce of blood from Jasmine’s head. “Oh my God.”
She swayed. Monica caught her before she fell and helped her back onto the bed.
“Oh my God,” she said again. How close had she come to actually getting eaten by that thing? She’d laughed it off when her mother told her she was psychic, but now she was beginning to wonder.
“They think it’s a genetically engineered virus, and apparently spots of a similar infection are showing up on the biologic pad in general access areas.”
Jasmine stared at her in shock. A genetically engineered virus. The words chased themselves round and round the inside of her head, their implications too horrible to contemplate.
“Do they have any idea how the cube was infected?” she asked sickly.
“Most likely by someone touching it the last three or four days.” Monica’s stare never wavered. It challenged her, demanding an explanation.
“You think I did it.” Jasmine’s voice was as flat as her heart.
“I don’t know what to think here, Jas. Everything in me says, ‘No way, she couldn’t have done this’ but…”
Licking suddenly dry lips, she said, “I swear, I would never do anything like that.”
“I really want to believe you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Jasmine, someone infected the steripod and the pad, and it’s a pretty good bet they did it deliberately.” The statement hung between them like a loaded gun.
“So I’m tried and convicted?”
“No. I’m just saying that it’s a pretty big coincidence.”
What could she say to that? Monica was right—it was too terribly coincidental to be a coincidence. A cold fear spread in her stomach as she thought about her father. She hadn’t heard from him in months. He could be anywhere, doing anything, and not only did he have the means and the motive to create such a virus, but he might even have the connections to get it aboard the ship—he’d arranged for her job at the compound easily enough.
Would he have gone through with a plan like this, knowing her safety was on the line? In his fight against the Garathani, was she expendable?
“Your face tells me you’re thinking of someone who might have been involved in this,” Monica said.
Jasmine hesitated a split-second too long before answering, “No.”
“You’re lying.” Monica got right in her face. “Jasmine, if you know of other Narthanis who might have had something to do with th
is, you need to come clean now before someone else gets hurt.”
“Other Narthanis!”
Jasmine gasped and whirled around.
Shauss looked ready to kill.
Chapter Fourteen
“Shauss, oh God.” Oh please, no. Jasmine felt fragile as spun glass. The way he was looking at her right now was worse than anything she’d ever dreamed, and after what they’d shared last night and this morning, the pain was infinitely worse. Her heart quaked with what she was losing.
She gathered the flimsy gown behind her with a shaking hand, chiding herself for her foolishness. What had she thought was going to happen when she refused the pheromone blocker—that he would just blindly accept that she was one of the hybrids?
“Something you forgot to tell me, Jasmine?” He didn’t sneer. In fact, he was just about dead in both face and voice.
“Shauss…” she said desperately.
Tiber stood beside him, looking stunned. “You’re Narthani?”
Jasmine took a deep breath. “Yes.”
Shauss stalked all the way around her. Then he bellowed as he struck out with one foot. The table flew across the room and crashed into the wall.
Jasmine flinched and made herself as small as possible as he continued to circle her, breathing so heavily he reminded her of a bull pawing the earth. God, she prayed, please let it end quickly.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The commander appeared out of a flare bubble. “What do you mean Miss King is Narthani?”
“She just confessed it,” Shauss spat.
Monica said, “Shauss, don’t hurt her.”
He immediately got in her face with one finger, “You!” Visibly reining in his wrath, he drew a loud breath before saying, “You stay out of this.”
Monica held her ground. “I’m serious, Shauss. Don’t you hurt her.”
Shauss pointedly ignored her. “Permission to treat Jasmine King as a hostile, Commander?”
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