“Yes. It’s how we feel about each other.”
“I don’t see any color coming from your flesh,” she snapped, not too happy that he hadn’t explained his ability to create the emotion field—which felt like a mine field—before he’d set it up. God … Kirek would literally see her every feeling displayed as they made love. Although he’d promised her pleasure and he hadn’t gone back on his word, he’d upped the intimacy level, and she twisted inside, feeling as though he’d invaded her privacy.
The red haze darkened around her—matching her glum thoughts.
He didn’t seem surprised. “You’re having enough trouble dealing with your own feelings and don’t need mine to complicate matters. So I’m keeping my colors out of the mix for now.”
Who the hell was he to decide what she could and couldn’t handle? She glared into the mirror at him and sputtered, “You decided that I’m having trouble dealing with my feelings, so you’re hiding yours?”
“Hmm. That’s an odd way of looking at our arrangement.”
“There is nothing odd about it to me.” Annoyance rising, she tilted back her head to see his expression, tipping her breasts toward his mouth.
He held her firmly by the breasts and tweaked her nipples a bit harder. His voice remained calm, and yet she sensed that beneath the cool exterior was a will as strong as bendar, and he wouldn’t be hurried or distracted by her antics. “It’s my turn to make the rules … for as long as I like. I’ve decided you are thinking way too much. I need to give you more pleasure.”
With that pronouncement, even as her irritation spiked, her pulse quickened and flickers of orange burned through the dark red cloud.
He chuckled. “See? You want me in spite of yourself.”
“Damn you.”
“Ah, you’re such a sensual creature, and I fully intend to make use of every advantage you give me.”
Angel didn’t know if his words were a criticism or a compliment or a threat or a promise. But the slow circles he made with his palms over her breasts, plus the very direct stimulation to her nipples, was beginning to make her writhe with a need for more.
She was all for making love. Revealing her feelings was another matter. Even as she enjoyed his touch, she was furious with him for making her choose. But she was even more furious with herself for letting her flesh dictate her decision. Clearly, with orange and red burning away the black mist, she was more than willing to continue, and the knowing awareness in his expression only spiked the tension.
Still, pride made her attempt to summon one last shred of protest. “Once we’re done,” she said as he licked her neck and a shiver of longing stoked tiny red flames, “I … ah …”
“You were saying?”
His hands slid from her breasts to her parted thighs. She felt his hands smooth over her skin. Saw his fingers tease the inside of her knees. Yet, her breasts still felt as if he held his palms in the same place, and her nipples tightened under the pinch that duplicated his touch. He was using his psi on her suit, perfectly reproducing the pressure and heat and feel of his previous caresses. But unlike when he’d burned out his psi and she’d activated his suit for him, she hadn’t turned control of her suit over to him—he’d taken it.
“My suit isn’t set on automatic … How did you … ah … ah. How can I talk when you …”
“Look how beautiful you are.”
Tiny flames of orange and red rippled over her flesh. When his hands caressed the tender insides of her thighs, the reds dominated. She couldn’t wait for him to go where she wanted—but he took his time, teasing and taunting.
“Place your hands behind my neck.” He snapped the order, and she didn’t think. Before she knew what she’d done, she’d placed her hands up and behind his neck. “I’m locking them in place so you aren’t tempted to move.”
She didn’t mind. Again he used her suit, and although she knew it would now be useless to tug her hands free, she tried anyway. She was sitting on his lap, her back to his chest, her hands behind his head, and her legs open and dangling over his knees. In the mirror, her reflection showed a wild lock of hair falling saucily over one eyelid half closed in passion, her lips pouting with brazen lust, and her nostrils flaring as if to draw in the enticing scent of her mate. Her chest rose and fell, her breathing shallow and fast. Since he’d adjusted her suit to continue stimulating her breasts, her nipples had darkened and remained pointed.
But what irritated the hell out of her were the red and orange clouds telling her how much she was enjoying his domination. She liked his touch and his slow, sensual caresses that caused her flesh to shiver and ache. She liked his taking control, liked how he slipped into the role with an ease that focused all his interest on her.
In the mirror, he watched her, tested her, taunted her, making her feel cherished. Adored. As if he had all the time in the world to find out exactly what would please her.
Although she couldn’t move, she couldn’t ignore the genuine pleasure of having all his interest centered on her. The rest of the galaxy had ceased to exist. There was only the two of them, and he appeared quite intent on discovering different ways to change his stroking to give pleasure.
One minute his pace was slow, the next, a bit more urgent. Just when she adjusted and craved a bit more, he maddeningly gentled his touch.
Her bottom felt … warm … as if he’d turned up the suit temperature, and the heat began to raise a pulsing need between her thighs. “Oh … no … what are … you doing?”
“Rystani men often spank their women during love-play.”
“What?” She twisted her head to glare at him.
He didn’t seem to notice. “The spanking is given to increase the woman’s pleasure. Gradual heat causes blood to flow to the buttocks and increases desire. I refuse to cause you pain, so I simply created the end effect.”
Her voice was breathless, amazed, and husky with need. “My butt is hot. Burning.” And his hands on the insides of her thighs moved with infuriating slowness. Wild with frustration and anticipation, she panted between words, “I … need you to …”
“Look at your passion red colors. Are those flickers of purple I see?” He sounded quite proud of himself, as if he were painting a masterpiece of slashing emotion and spiking heat over her flesh.
“Does purple mean I’m finally going to have an orgasm?” she demanded, hating the way she sounded almost as if she was begging.
“Purple is the color of deep-seated feelings.”
“Like love?” She scowled at him. “Are you out of your freaking mind?” If there had ever been any purple there, the color was now gone, replaced with hovering black clouds as if he’d doused the flames with water.
“Black is the color of fear.”
“You know, I really might grow to hate you if you don’t quit playing—”
“You want me to stop touching you?”
“Damn you. I want you to make love to me—not play with my emotions.”
“I can’t create your emotions.”
“Why not—you were born in hyperspace.”
He didn’t bother answering her rhetorical sarcasm. Instead, his voice remained cool and almost disappointed. “I’m only showing you what you feel.”
“Maybe I don’t want to see what I feel.” She most definitely didn’t want him seeing what she felt but kept that obvious notion to herself. She closed her eyes.
His calm tone invaded her thoughts, refusing to allow her to shut him out. “When we were in the rock pool, you didn’t ask me what I wanted.”
“That was different.”
“Was it?”
His hands advanced to the very top of her thighs. She sucked in her breath, refusing to answer his question. She didn’t want to look at herself or the colors. Didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to think.
Damn. Damn. Damn. She had wanted a simple fling, and he was making things … complex.
“Open your eyes,” he coaxed.
She peeked. The black
had vanished. So had the purple and red. Yet the yellow and orange flickers remained, signaling her willingness for more of his touch. Oh, yeah. She most definitely wanted his clever hands back on her body. She squeezed her eyes tight again.
“If you hated what we were doing, you wouldn’t still want my touch.”
“Of course I want your touch. I’ve never denied it. I like sex.”
“If all you wanted was sex, you could have hired a holosim,” he pointed out.
“I could have also pleasured myself.” She ground the words past her clenched jaw, her tone raspy. “It would have been a hell of a lot more satisfying than you.”
“Patience.” His hand brushed over her mons, sending hungry licks of heat to her center, until her stomach knotted and her muscles drew tight.
“Wow,” she said, breathing out a happy sigh.
“More?” His so-sexy and husky tone, more than the sensation he’d created with his hand, caused her to open her eyes and stare. The wisps of yellow and orange had formed giant reddish clouds that engulfed them both.
“Yes. More.”
“Look at us,” he demanded.
“We’re on fire.”
“That’s all you, woman.” His fingers skimmed her slick flesh. “Your synthari is so soft and so welcoming, so in tune with your real needs.”
His voice, always deep, had thickened with a passion he couldn’t disguise. Through the red cloud in the mirror, his eyes glinted with ferocious hunger. His lips tensed with a wicked tension. His jaws were locked, the cords in his muscular neck were rigid—he clearly was barely keeping his own passion in check.
Seeing how much he wanted her, knowing he was holding back to give them both pleasure, upped her own need. She no longer cared if she begged. “Please … Kirek.”
His tone rippled with ferocity. “Tell me what you want.”
“To finish.”
He growled in her ear. “Wrong answer.”
He changed her suit settings, and cool water droplets trickled over her skin, followed by warm sluices. He increased the heat on her bottom. Maddeningly, he caressed the slick folds between her legs ever so slowly, ever so careful to stimulate … but not enough.
As he stoked her into a frenzy, in the mirror an erotic red cloud thickened, broadening in scope, lengthening in depth. Her bottom stung from heat, and she could no longer hold back a soft moan of desperate need.
“Tell me what you want,” Kirek demanded again.
“Huh?” She couldn’t think much beyond the wondrous pleasure he was giving her.
“Look in the mirror.”
Once again the red cloud had deepened, this time with vivid purple slashes. Purple meant … what? What had he told her exactly? How could she think when his creative fingers keep her right on the edge?
Purple meant … purple equated to love. No. That wasn’t right. He’d said “deep-seated feelings.”
Obviously, she couldn’t deny the molten passion bubbling through her veins like fierce lava, and Angel had no difficulty accepting that at the moment she was a creature devoted to lusty pleasure.
But she sensed that her pleasure wasn’t enough for him. He wanted her to … to … what? Say what? Be what? What the hell did he want? No, that was the wrong question. He’d asked her to tell him what she wanted.
Damn. “I can’t think when you’re doing … ah don’t stop. Please … do … not … stop.”
“I won’t,” he whispered into her ear.
He drizzled icy droplets over her, tensed her flesh with the hot water that increased her pulse right along with the magical rhythm of his fingers. He never stopped caressing her breasts or stroking the sensitive folds of her flesh. His hands and psi were no longer enough. All his carefully applied stimulation had made her receptive nerve endings require more than usual.
“Look at us.” His tone might have remained a whisper, but pure satisfaction rushed through him and into her.
Purple swirled into the red, mixing, dominating the colors so vibrant she couldn’t tell where one began and the other stopped. “Is that us?”
“Us?”
“In the mirror. You and me?”
He chuckled. “No. That’s still all you.”
Oh … my … God. He’d built a thunderstorm of need, but the purple flashes now overshadowed the yellow flickers and the red clouds, making her uneasy. Uncertain.
She licked her lip. “I don’t think … this is such … a good idea.” As she spoke, black tendrils of smoke once again wiped out the slices of purple, leaving a murky red haze.
“See what happens when you think,” he teased.
“What? What just happened?” She felt caged. Frantic. Tight. “Why can’t we just have sex?”
“Because I don’t want just sex.” At the moment she didn’t care that he didn’t want sex. She’d never ached so badly in her life. He’d aroused her, teased her. Then he spoke slowly, as if to make sure she wouldn’t miss one word. “And I take what I need.”
She whispered, her tone needy. “You can’t take what I don’t offer.”
“Exactly.” He shot her a grin so wicked, so determined, so absolutely resolute that whatever she’d been thinking, whatever she’d been about to say, evaporated like a ray of starlight amidst a thunderstorm. Her throat closed tight. She couldn’t breathe.
How could she argue when the damn Rystani had agreed with her? How could she think when he had her so on edge that she had to grit her teeth to prevent a scream of sheer frustration? How could she protest when her body yearned for completion?
“Tell me what you want.”
Had he asked again, or had his demand kept reverberating in her brain long after he’d ceased saying the words? She was losing control, and if he hadn’t locked her arms behind his head, if he hadn’t physically restrained her with his psi, she would never have been able to sit still, open, allowing him access to all of her.
While it wasn’t her flesh she wanted to deny him, but the feelings he so carefully drew from her, she wasn’t getting any satisfaction. The purple colors that emerged when she couldn’t control her lust—the ones that meant deep-seated feelings, which she wanted to deny with every atom in her body—kept getting in her way when he forced her to look at them.
She was spitting unnerved that every time the purple showed up, he made her think, ruining all the delicious tension by interrupting her physical sensations. Every damn time she looked in the mirror, black wiped out the purple, denying her completion.
“Let me go. Now.” Perhaps he heard the anger in her voice, perhaps he’d decided she’d had enough of his silly games, or perhaps he couldn’t hold back any longer himself.
One moment she’d been waiting on him, the next he set her free. She jumped from his lap and spun to face him, hands fisted on her hips. “I should walk away.”
All his psi touches ceased. Her flesh ached for his attention to her breasts, yearned for the heat on her bottom. The icy droplets and warm sluicing had also vanished, leaving her feeling empty.
His eyes narrowed to twin slits of blue heat. “Is that what you want?”
“I wanted you … before you …” She waved her hand at the mirror, confused because she wanted nothing better than to fling herself back into his strong arms and use sex to chase away her chaotic thoughts.
“You wanted me before I what?” he prodded.
Before he’d showed her those colors in the mirror. “Before you showed me that you’re a freak of hyperspace.” The minute she spoke in anger, she regretted her outburst. Normally she kept her temper under tight control, but he had made her feel vulnerable, and that had made her careless. She raised her hand to her mouth wishing that it wasn’t too late to recall the hateful words.
At her insult, another man might have winced in pain, but Kirek’s eyes revealed only a hint of disappointment before he shut down all expression and went into Rystani-stoic mode. “Sorry,” he apologized, “I pushed too hard.”
God. After what she’d said, he was
apologizing to her. Could he possibly understand that she’d lashed out because he’d made her confront feelings she didn’t want to acknowledge? “I wasn’t ready … I didn’t mean what I said about you being a freak. I’m sorry, too. I was frustrated and confused.” She glared at him, still annoyed, still on edge, still unsatisfied.
“I backed you into a corner, and you came out swinging, so I can’t claim foul if I got punched.” A tiny smile curved his lip. “So what do you want?”
Stars.
“How did I end up with the most persistent, most determined, most arrogant male in the galaxy?”
He laughed. “You got lucky.”
“Wrong,” she muttered as her anger cooled and her repressed passions resurfaced. At his use of the Terran expression for making love, she couldn’t help shaking her head and grinning back.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m rarely wrong.”
“If you were perfect, you’d know that I need to get lucky again.”
“Again? So you still want to finish what we started?” He raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
Her lower jaw dropped. He knew the Earth euphemism. He’d been playing word games with her.
His grin widened. “Just call me Mr. Perfect.”
“Mr. Perfectly Annoying would be more accurate.” It was about time he realized that she knew how to play, too. “You keep asking me what I want.”
“Yes?”
She advanced, her breasts coming within inches of his lips. As his breath fanned her flesh, her nipples pebbled. “Ask me again.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“I want you to stop burning starlight. I want you—”
“Finally, you’re admitting—”
“I want you on your knees with your mouth between my legs.”
“Darling.” He grinned, as if he’d been expecting those very words, and dropped into position, placing his big hands on her bottom and drawing her toward the heat of his mouth. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“I’m … not …” His tongue found her center. “Your darling. I’ m not … your … ah … ah.” His tongue worked magic, and her breath came in gasps. Her muscles clenched, and her thoughts turned to pleasure, but she needed to make him understand. She would never again belong to anyone. Threading her fingers into his thick hair, she steadied her tremors. “I’m … not … yourrrrrrrs.”
Rystani Warrior 04 - The Quest Page 14