Adaptation

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  She wanted nothing more than to bask in the aftermath of a stupendous climax, to lay plastered against Ronan, enjoying the heat radiating from him and the musky scent of their love play. She felt like a ragdoll when someone-Dax she decided-hauled her off Ronan's lap and planted her firmly on his own. She was so hypersensitive that every touch was almost as much agony as ecstasy as he fondled her keenly sensitive breasts briefly and then began struggling to mount her on his hood ornament. The moisture that lingered wasn't sufficient to overcome the clenched muscles along her channel from her recent climax. She discovered he wasn't the least bit discouraged by the lack of a warm, wet welcome, however. He persevered and she thought, briefly, that she was going to get a full lower body skin lift from his efforts.

  Fortunately, her skin yielded to his determined efforts to connect with her on the deepest level. Moisture abruptly flooded her channel and he sheathed himself inside her, the intimate abrasion of his skin along her inner flesh sending out shockwaves of intense, completely unexpected sensation.

  She'd mentally yielded to the inevitable, braced herself to endure the semi-torture of having her hypersensitive flesh stimulated when it had already experienced a surfeit of pleasure. She was surprised and not terribly pleased when she felt a rise in her body toward a second release. She had little choice but to ride it out, however. Dax, or as he was calling himself at the moment, Davi, was feverish with the anticipation of his own release. The steady, pounding thrusts forced her over the edge once more. Any thoughts she might have had that a second climax couldn't possibly compare to the first were shattered. She was shattered with the force of it.

  Her hoarse screams of release prompted alarms in the robotic driver again. "Is this an emergency?"

  "Shut the fuck up!" Ronan growled.

  "I'm … I'm … oh god! I'm coming!" Kate gasped insensibly.

  "Coming where?" the computer inquired.

  "With … uh … Never mind! I'm fine! No danger here!" Kate managed to get out in a drunken, slurred voice. Unless one counted the possibility of passing out!

  "You are intoxicated, yes?"

  She was, but not from alcohol! She roused sufficiently, however, when Ronan shot forward on the seat, clearly with the intention of permanently silencing the robot guiding their vehicle, to grab his arm. Not that it would've worked as a restraint if he hadn't stopped himself! "We'll be stranded here if you disable the robot-then the cops will come. Destruction of property," she gasped warningly.

  Ronan subsided, but anger radiated from him.

  Clearly, he didn't appreciate the robot trying to interfere with the mating process!

  He grabbed her and passed her to Jarek.

  "Oh god! Not yet! Give me a few minutes to catch my breath!" Kate gasped as she felt Jarek envelop her in a passionate embrace. He tensed but eased his hold on her.

  "You are not ready?"

  "I'm ready to pass out," Kate muttered, ignoring the twinge of guilt she felt at the disappointment and doubt in his voice.

  "You have broken her!" Jarek snarled, shifting around, she suspected, to glare at either Dax or Ronan or both.

  Despite her weariness, Kate felt amusement drift through her. "I'm not broken. I'm just … not up to screwing again right now."

  "You will tell me when you are?"

  "You'll be the first to know!" Kate assured him wryly. To her relief, that seemed to pacify him. He relaxed and spent the remainder of the trip to her place driving her insane by focusing on fondling her and sucking passionate welts on the tender skin of her throat and breasts. She ground her teeth and endured the best she could, struggling to ignore the stimulus to her oversensitive flesh.

  She was relieved when the shuttle halted in front of her place-briefly. The Sirians piled out, fought a short round over who was going to carry her inside, and then Jarek slung her across his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and raced the others to her door. It was unfortunate-for her door-that she was in no state of mind to verbalize the pass code. Jarek plowed in to it when it didn't open, took a step back and then kicked it in with his foot. She didn't hear the door hit the floor inside. The security alarm blared, deafening her and sending the Sirians into a brief, panicked search for the source.

  "Disable alarm!" she yelled above the din, hoping to save at least some of the property from Sirian destruction since she could see they were quite willing to take the place apart until they found the source of the noise and silenced it. The moment silence reigned, Jarek dismissed the distraction and headed toward her bedroom. She caught a glimpse of Ronan as he lifted the door from the floor, examined it, and then carefully propped it against the broken frame.

  Any doubts that might have lingered that she'd found the Sirians vanished in those few moments-and there hadn't been a lot of doubt to begin with. Jarek knew precisely where her bedroom was and headed toward it unerringly. He wouldn't have known if he hadn't already been in her place.

  "You are ready to fuck now?" he asked as he tossed her onto her mattress and followed her down.

  Their English was improving by leaps and bounds!

  She was tempted to tell him she might be ready by the next day-or maybe the next week-but the 'foreplay' he'd treated her to while he was waiting for her to be ready was enough to convince her she was probably as ready as she would ever be.

  It was just as well. He caught her ankles, played 'make a wish' with her legs and tested her readiness with his dipstick before she could catch her breath and say anything at all. She uttered an inelegant grunt when he plowed inside, aided by the copious moisture she'd gathered inside her channel, with enough force to push the air from her lungs. It was all uphill from there. After two mind-blowing climaxes, her body responded with some sluggishness to the possibility of a third, but it did respond. Her lack of interest as to whether he made it to the finish line before her and thus left her choking on his dust, vanished fairly quickly. She experienced several tingling jolts that she decided was all her body could muster in response and then hit orbit when the big one erupted.

  Thankfully, that seemed to pacify them. When she'd finally stopped screaming hoarsely and Jarek had stopped shuttering with his own release, she fell back toward earth like a comet burning up in the atmosphere, hovered briefly in a semi-comatose state, and then dropped into a deep pit of darkness.

  She woke to daylight and a heavy mound of man flesh, feeling as if she was going to burn up or suffocate or both. When she finally managed to lift her head to try to figure out why she was so damned hot, she discovered all three men were piled around and on top of her. It was the heavy weight of muscular arms and legs that made her feel as if she was being crushed to death and the heat their bodies were giving off that inspired the sense of lying in a campfire.

  Grunting with the effort, she tried wiggling out from under the pile and then began shoving weakly at the weights when that didn't work. Ronan roused first and shifted toward her rather than away, staring into her eyes. She couldn't quite decide what might be going through his mind or what he was looking for, but she felt a strange sensation inside her head.

  He shifted away from her abruptly, shoving at Dax.

  Feeling distinctly unsettled, even a little dizzy, Kate struggled off the bed, looked around with a strange sense of disorientation and finally located the door to the bathroom.

  "Way too much glory," she muttered as she braced herself against the lavatory and examined her reflection in the mirror above it.

  Ronan frowned, trying to decide what she meant by that comment, but his uneasiness at her reaction to his attempt to probe her mind quickly redirected his thoughts. As instinctive as it was for him to try to communicate mind-to-mind, it dawned on him abruptly that he had never actually probed Kate's mind-any of the humans-in an attempt to communicate.

  Except the woman at the mating place and that had not gone well at all, he recalled. Her mind had almost seemed to shut down completely at his attempt to probe.

  He could, and had, captured random t
houghts that they had seemed to project when they were reasoning things out in their minds, but the fact that the humans verbalized their communications had made it immediately clear that mind-to-mind exchanges were alien to them and useless as a possibility of communicating.

  That was why they had worked hard to learn the human way of communicating.

  He had not actually considered that it would be impossible to communicate with them mind-to-mind, though, and he certainly had not considered that it might cause damage to try.

  In a sense, being around her was no different than being around his own kind. Unless they were trying to communicate, they guarded their minds from intrusion by others. Occasionally, one might catch an unguarded thought, but by-and-large they only shared when they wanted to.

  He felt a need to know Kate's thoughts, however. Their survival might depend upon the turn of her thoughts, for it was extremely doubtful that she would inform them of any suspicions that arose in her mind. Beyond that, and as little as he liked to admit it even to himself, Jarek's remark in the mating place bothered him.

  In the scheme of things, it did not matter whether Kate knew and acknowledged them as her mates. Regardless, it was their seed that she would carry to fruition and their off-spring and their clan that would benefit from the union.

  She had already acknowledged and accepted them as her mates, however, and as Jarek had pointed out, she had just accepted three others, as far as she knew, to take their places. Granted, they had not, apparently, succeeded in sewing their seed in the first attempt and it was not uncommon for females of many species to chose another mate if the first did not successfully impregnate her, but it still rankled. No matter how many times he assured himself that it did not matter since, in the end, they would breed with her, it was a source of dissatisfaction that made it very difficult to feel the sense of triumph and satisfaction that he had expected to feel.

  He did not like it, he decided. It did not matter why he did not like it only that he did not!

  Unfortunately, he was not in any position to inform her that they had spiked her attempt to replace them by assuming another guise!

  Chapter Eight

  Much of the strange disorientation had vanished by the time Kate had completed her morning ritual, but her search for an explanation for it still hadn't turned up an answer that satisfied her. She felt hung-over. Since she wasn't actually in the habit of drinking, she supposed she could put the odd weakness and confusion down to the drink she'd had the night before, but that didn't completely satisfy her either. Adding the sex she'd indulged in to the equation seemed a little more convincing as an explanation and yet still left her with a niggling of uneasiness.

  Illness? That thought sent a hot/cold adrenaline rush through her that sped her heart up uncomfortably. Like all of the scientists on the project, however, she'd been inoculated against everything they could think of including several new immunizations developed specifically for colonists from the microbes that had been collected directly from Sirius. In any case, they hadn't actually encountered anything, as of yet, that differed tremendously from microbes they were at least somewhat familiar with.

  They'd been relieved but not extremely surprised to discover that the theory of panspermia had been proven beyond doubt by their research into the microbes of Sirius. Colonization beyond their own star-system might be a new development, but they'd been a multi-planet species for decades now, and a great deal of research had been done on every world they'd conquered to date. Granted, the worlds to date that had been colonized had all been in their own system and it had seemed more reasonable that they hadn't encountered microbes that hadn't differed a great deal from those that resided on Earth itself. However each new environment they studied that had yielded up the same, or cousins of, familiar virus and bacteria that was already known had cemented their understanding of life in the universe and convinced them long since to accept panspermia as a fact and not just a theory.

  Between that fact and the immunizations, she ought to be able to dismiss any fears that she'd come down with something completely unknown and possibly deadly.

  It was next to impossible to reason the fear away, though, once it had planted itself in her mind even though a somewhat frantic internal self-examination produced the information that she didn't feel anything else that seemed to be a symptom-just weak and vaguely disoriented-which could be explained away with the night she'd just had.

  There were always new mutations, the evil side of her brain reminded her. Even on Earth itself, environment played a role in producing new strains of old enemies that could be deadly.

  She'd been studying the Sirians for over a year, though, with no ill effects.

  Of course, in the beginning, she'd taken care to wear protective gear when she went into the habitat. Despite the fact that they continued to take precautions not to cross-contaminate their environment with the alien world they were studying, however, they had not only relaxed a great deal once their research had assured them that the microbial life of Sirius was much the same as Earth's. There was also the inescapable fact that they were embarking on a massive colonization project that was going to make it nearly impossible to prevent cross-contamination for very long at all.

  She still couldn't completely dismiss her uneasiness, but she finally managed to push it to the back of her mind with the reflection that she was risking raising alarms in the Sirians by 'hiding out' in the bathroom. She discovered that anxiety was misplaced once she left the bathroom. The Sirians had deserted the bedroom, but she discovered them in the living area of her home, examining everything curiously.

  They didn't seem the least bit alarmed about the discovery that she'd packed up most of her belongings since their first visit, however, merely curious-and maybe a little confused.

  It dawned on her abruptly that she knew almost nothing at all about them. She'd spent a year studying them with the mindset that they were animals and that preconception had skewed her findings so radically that she might as well not have studied them at all. The scientists that had studied their biology had probably reached as many false conclusions as she had, and were probably still more knowledgeable about them than she was.

  It occurred to her as she watched them, however, that they seemed more guileless and innocent than lacking in intelligence. A layman might arrive at the conclusion that they weren't particularly bright given the fact that they clearly didn't understand what the half of her stuff was let alone what it was for, but she'd been enlightened. She wasn't going to jump to such a conclusion again!

  Guileless, though. Subterfuge, despite their behavior of late, didn't seem to be intrinsic to them. Otherwise, she thought it might occur to them that their behavior alone was a dead giveaway that they were aliens and that everything was completely unfamiliar to them.

  Acknowledging her presence finally-She didn't think they had only just noticed her arrival-Ronan paused in his examination of her packing crates and straightened, studying her face with a piercing look that made it abundantly clear that he knew something was up even if he hadn't figured out what.

  A wave of dizziness washed over her. It suddenly seemed surreal that she had concluded these 'men' were aliens when they looked nothing like the creatures she'd studied. Almost as bizarre as the fact that she knew-knew-that the one staring at her was the one she'd named Ronan-regardless of the fact that the face was unfamiliar to her now.

  "What dese?"

  Kate blinked back to reality, relieved that the wave of dizziness passed off so quickly that she was left wondering if it hadn't been physical at all but rather disorientation from her conclusions. Briefly, she debated whether to admit what they were or not. It occurred to her forcefully, however, that she'd been presented with the opening she needed. "Packing crates," she managed, forcing a bright smile. "I'm a colonist-Well, will be." Discovering she couldn't maintain the pretense that she was completely unaware of who and what they were, she looked away and then headed toward her kitchen
. "The next colony ship leaves for Sirius next week. I plan to be on it," she added, trying to sound both excited and off-hand at the same time.

  She was a little surprised, and disappointed if it came to that, that they didn't immediately leap on the lure she'd thrown out. Instead, when she nerved herself to peek at them to gauge their reaction, she discovered that they'd returned to examining the crates.

  "You guys hungry?"

  That suggestion brought them into the kitchen.

  Her skin prickled when they spread out rather than settling on the stools to wait and watch while she prepared food.

  "Splain," Ronan said, propping against the counter beside her and folding his arms.

  The tone of his voice, even the stance he'd assumed, was so very human-like-so very alpha, commanding Earth male-that it set Kate's back up.

  It also made her uneasy since it abruptly occurred to her that the Sirians might not have realized the motive behind their abduction. If they were as guileless as she'd concluded earlier there was no reason for them to have reached such a determination. Clearly, regardless of their superior understanding, the Sirians had no civilization even approaching that of Earth. Otherwise, something would have been detected in the surveys.

  Even if that wasn't the case, these Sirians would certainly have no way of reaching such a conclusion, she thought unhappily. They'd never actually even been to their home world!

  Maybe that was a good thing, though, she thought hopefully? Maybe they wouldn't see past the opportunity to return to their world? Maybe they wouldn't instantly become hostile when they realized humans were invading their world with an eye to claiming it for their own?

  "Well," she said a little shakily, focusing on the food she was preparing, "I'm sure you must know about the new world we discovered in the Sirian system and that it's been opened for colonization? They say it's a lot like Earth-actually like Earth before Earth became so overpopulated and destabilized because of the strain on its resources."