Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

He continued to stare off to the right of her knees and say nothing. His face was stone. His whole body was stone. Sweat was the only thing that moved on him.

Daria continued to stand her ground at the foot of the stairs, but the heart went out of her when he did not argue with her. She sighed and dropped her arm to her side. “It’s your decision,” she said. “You know my feelings, and I’ll only say one more thing about it. You haven’t made any progress in your search since the weather got to you, but E’Var has, and he’s made plenty. If you have any desire to catch up to him, then please Tagen, let me help you.”

She stepped away from the stairs then, knowing there was nothing more that she could say. He took them without looking back. She heard his door shut, and she was alone once more.

*

He did not come downstairs for the rest of the day. She did not go up, not even to bring him the food she knew his body desperately needed. Seeing him would only lead to more pointless arguing. What she needed to do now was leave him alone, and let him think about it.

As evening fell, Daria did the first thing that admitted out loud what decision she’d made. She put Grendel outside. The old tom complained bitterly for five full minutes and then lost interest and wandered off in search of mice. Daria finished the dishes and turned out the lights. The house was still. She went up to bed.

The light was on in Tagen’s room. Daria stood in the hall a little while, knowing she could never simply go over and knock. He was hanging on to his pride by his fingernails; he might give in if she walked in on him and ripped her clothes off, but he’d never forgive her for it. She had to let this be his choice, even if the choice was no.

She went to her room and sat on the end of her bed, staring at the wall without seeing it. This was not the way she’d ever imagined rediscovering her sexuality. After she’d been released from the hospital, she’d had to attend counseling paid for as part of the lawsuit against Kruegar and Lauder. She’d still been going places back then, not just driving around, and she could remember her therapist’s absolute fixation with Dan’s leaving her. ‘You’re angry,’ he had kept saying. ‘You’re angry because the attack destroyed your self-image and then Dan destroyed your sexuality. You’ll never feel desirable again until you rediscover your sexuality.’

Which was what she got for seeing a Freudian.

She could still see Tagen’s eyes, blazing like molten gold, incandescent with raw and furious lust as he looked at her. Telling her to get away from him. Wanting her so badly that he could not stand to be in the same room with her. She wasn’t sure if this was rediscovering sexuality or not, but it did make her painfully aware of herself as a woman. If it wasn’t exactly natural desire on his part, it still made her feel…something.

She hadn’t had sex in six years. Not even with herself.

Daria reached up, her fingertips sliding along the smooth plane of her cheek, tracing the scars she could not feel but knew were there. Tagen didn’t see her scars, not until she’d held them up like a hammer and hit him in the face with them. And he hadn’t pitied her for them. He’d been angry and disgusted with her legal system, but he hadn’t pitied her. She could never be a beautiful woman, not as a human and not by whatever standards his race judged beauty, but he would never see her as ugly, either. She could do a lot worse than a man like that.

Daria got up and took a shower. She shaved. She dried her hair, brushed and braided it so it couldn’t get in the way. She changed the sheets on her bed. Funny, how all the little rituals came right back. She switched off the lights but left the door ajar and lay herself down, naked. She would wait. She was nervous, but it wasn’t a bad way to feel. She was waiting for her man…and she really thought he would come.

Minutes crawled by, marked in red by the light of her digital clock. Shadows of trees cuts darker lines on the walls and ceiling as a summer breeze blew through. Silence. Stillness.

And then, a wedge of light pushed out into the hallway, there for a moment and then gone with the closing of Tagen’s door. Nothing, nothing for a long time. He had gone downstairs or he had gone back to bed.

A creak of hinges brought all her awareness back into sharp focus. His silhouette filled her doorway. He did not speak.

Daria sat up and pulled back the sheet that covered her. She waited, her heart pounding.

The door closed, but she couldn’t tell what side he’d been on. The first she knew that he was with her came when his hand touched her cheek.

“Be certain,” he said.

“I am.”

“I cannot promise to be gentle.”

“I know.”

His hand withdrew. There was the faintest of sounds, like the rustle of a moth’s wings, as his uniform fell to the floor. Then the shifting of the mattress as he knelt on the bed. She could feel the heat of his body, but he did not touch her.

Daria reached for him, her fingers brushing the burning field of his chest and following it down to the stony shaft protruding below his hard stomach. She closed her fist around him, testing his girth, and felt something that was not entirely apprehension knocking at her ribs.

Tagen’s hand unexpectedly lit between her thighs, touching her with the same cautious exploration but without groping for her in the dark. Her body wakened all at once, becoming electric and hot, all her nerves tingling with urgency as she accepted his touch. His finger stroked along her cleft and up, finding her unerringly, and her hips moved to meet him. “I…cannot help but hurt you,” he said, and despite the pain in his voice, the part of him she held in her fist throbbed even harder.

“Lie down,” she said. She wasn’t sure if it would help or not, but she needed to feel as though she had some control. Things were moving so fast, and it was her fault. Hadn’t she skipped right past foreplay to take him in her hand? Hadn’t she, for that matter, skipped right past dating to take him to her bed?

Tagen obeyed, slipping around her to lay his head on her pillows, his hand still stroking her. She could hear wet sounds of sucking around his fingers and her cheeks crawled with heat. It had been so long, but still, should she really be so eager?

Yes, she thought, as his touch went deeper. Yes, she should be eager. He was a good man. She should be eager, and by God, she was.

She swung up over him and lowered herself to straddle his hips, feeling the width and reality of them—a man again in her bed—with undeniable excitement. His shaft probed at her; he uttered a low moan of tightly-mingled pain and relief as she fit herself against him. Slowly, bracing herself on his chest, she began to bring them together.

There was pain at first, invasive and piercing, as if her six years of abstinence had served to render her virginal once more. Like a virgin’s pain, it lessened as she moved. Tagen’s hand brushed at her thigh once and then disappeared from her. She could feel him shaking with whatever awful tension men feel when sex begins so carefully, but he did nothing to force her on faster. She willed herself to relax, sliding carefully up and then down again, claiming just a little more each time. The feel of him was more than she could grasp; it was like a color exploding just beyond her ability to see, like an earthquake just strong enough to tremor in her bones. Her desire whipped at her, but caution held her back. She moved with excruciating slowness, and let her senses scream free with the tangle of fear and lust and raw, unreasoning pleasure.

When she had engulfed half his length, he gasped hard and she felt a spurt of heat drive up inside her. She paused, wondering if that were it, if they were done, and then realized he was still hard as rock, still hoarse and trembling with need. She continued her slow climb toward joining, feeling with disbelief two more short jets of cum.

Finally seated against him, filled by him, the sensations became overwhelming. The slightest movement brought such crushing friction that pleasure was inescapable and terrifying in intensity. Daria rocked erratically, trying to acclimate herself to the sense of fullness, of fantastic heat and desire. She couldn’t experience him without needing to stop and compose, slow her breath and her heart, claw her mind back down from its shrieking ecstasy. She came to this sex as untried as a true virgin, hungry and fearful all at once. “Help me,” she stammered.

Tagen’s hands found her hips, removing all choice from her as he began to move her. A cry tore its way from her throat and her hands clenched on him involuntarily, but her hips bucked wildly, seizing on the pleasure he inflicted on her with greedy need.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked, but though his voice was strained, his hands kept on sliding her along his slickened length in a quick rhythm, forcing her to ride him with an abandon she yearned for but could not achieve.

“No,” she gasped. “No, it feels good. Oh God, it feels so good.” She began to cry helplessly, knowing he would misunderstand, but a slave to the storm of sensation. She could feel orgasm coming, like the tidal pulse that follows a sea-quake. It was terrifying, black and full, but a part of her opened up to welcome it.

Her scream came first, high and wild and despairing. Her body followed, explosive with pleasure, and as if some great unseen switch were finally thrown, Daria surged against him. Her hips ground and pumped in urgency, her hands clawed and pulled, and she drank him in with her whole body. She never stopped cumming. Wave after wave crested and crashed, driving her to a frenzy of hungry desire and fulfillment.

He was cumming as well, in and out of rhythm with her, thrusting hard and fast even as she rocked and pitched at him. The rest of him was rigid, an automaton of one purpose, locked in motion.

Without warning, his arm snapped up and around her. He rolled, taking her with him and pinning her under his weight. He reared above her and slammed his hands against the headboard of her bed, his weight looming god-like and only half-seen in the shadows above her lust-glazed eyes. His hips continued to drive at her, cumming with nearly every thrust. His breath came in harder pants; sweat dripped from his flesh to sizzle on hers. She could not keep her hands still; they pulled and scratched at him, trying to pull him down, to bring him fast against her. She wanted all of him, all of him, but the little that he gave her was maddening enough.

He roared suddenly, a deafening, eruptive sound, and slammed against her with all his strength in one last, brutal movement. She felt his seed at last, a great rushing jet of it, drumming deep into the heart of her. Then he fell, completing her with the mass and reality of him, crushing a final, shivering release from her still-humming body.

She held him, her hands creeping slowly up the slick sides of his ribs to rest on his back. She could feel nothing but the receding of that consuming black tide, nothing but the dry snap and thrum of wakened pleasure. She could feel nothing but the stunned joy of what she had done and what she had taken. She thought she might still be crying, but she knew she was smiling as well.

It had not been gentle. It had not been lovemaking of the kind she remembered, the kind she had once shared with the man who might have married her, who might have given her children. It was rough and hungry, not unskilled but certainly not considerate. It was sex, pure and unapologetic, as hot and fierce as lightning, and it was very good sex.

His hand brushed her cheek, and she could feel his concern as he smoothed her tears back into her skin.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said quaveringly. “Don’t you dare. I wanted it and it was everything I wanted.”

He rolled away, and the feel of him, even now, sliding free of her was enough to waken a ghost of yearning throughout her body. She stretched, contented in every searing fiber of her being, and reached for him.

He caught her hand out of the air and squeezed it lightly before placing in on her chest. “I thank you,” he said. “You cannot know enough. May I…come back to you when the sun rises?”

“Yes,” she said.

Tagen sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

Daria’s satisfaction curdled and froze in her chest. “You’re leaving?”

“It is too hot to lie together.” The mattress creaked and there was a rustle as he collected his clothes. As before, he made no sound as he crossed the floor. She still thought he was there looking down at her, when he suddenly opened the door. He closed it behind him without another word.

Daria lay stunned, her heart still beating down from the frenzies of sex. She could still feel echoes of orgasm running electric through her body, could still feel the rawness in her throat from her screams. She had given him all she had until every restraint lay shattered. He, on the other hand, he had scratched an itch and then gone back to his room.

Blinking tears, Daria got up. She changed the sheets again, and carried them, damp and fragrant with sex, downstairs to wash them. When she was done with that, she’d mop the floors.

Was that all there was between them? Was that really it?

Maybe she’d wash the walls.

Why was she even surprised? When you took out all the times they’d just stood around and argued with each other, they’d probably only had three conversations. She couldn’t blame him. He only took what he was offered, and he never promised her a thing.

And the cupboards.

She wanted to die.

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Chapter Twenty-Four

Tagen awoke with the light of late morning prying at his eyes and the itch of early Heat sinking into his tsesac. He waited for the crush of despair and bitterness the latter should have inspired and felt none. He could not remember sleeping so well, not even in his own bed on Jota. He was completely relaxed, completely at peace. And he was hungry. That had to be a good sign.

He rose and dressed himself in the snug human clothing. The feel of the alien fabric brought Daria to mind and he growled good-humoredly to himself. There was something profoundly moving in the way she strived to meet his needs, even through her fear of him.

All his needs.

Were it not for Heat’s furious claws sunk inside him, he could have easily been amazed by the passions of his night’s partner. He was going to have to rethink his notion of humans as fragile. She had been in every way his equal, if not his master. Thinking on it now, remembering with fondness the dazed cries she’d unleashed as she rode him to climax, brought him a profound gratitude and a yearning that set his heart to burn.

She had mated with him. Against every taboo that surely stood in place, she had taken him inside her. She had freed him from his agony and she had taken a brilliance of pleasure in the process. He had asked if he could come to her again and she had not hesitated before saying yes. When he lay with her today, it would not be after hours of Heat had savaged his senses. He could woo her, show her the care such a female deserved, and find more than mere relief in her welcoming arms.

Tagen showered and shaved, armoring himself against the disheveling effects of a new summer day. There was a thought worrying itself free from the Heat-leadened fathoms of his mind, and he was content to let it. Something to do with the news reports he had seen on the tee-vee, specifically, with the images that sometimes appeared behind the media-purveyors as they spoke. There was some connection, he was not sure what, but he sensed it was obvious and that he would be mightily annoyed at himself once it did break out and reveal itself. For now, ah, he was rested, he was hungry, and he was…

He was happy.

Tagen toweled off briskly and dressed, grinning fiercely at nothing at all, and marveling pleasantly at the intoxication that seemed to be occupying his soul. Who would have thought it? Who would have thought it from a human?

The scent of cleanser struck him like a hammer as he came downstairs, flattening his newfound good mood. He went cautiously into the kitchen and there was Daria, lying curled on the tiles beside a bucket of nearly-clear water. Even in sleep, her face was strained and marked with tears.

The heart in him froze and dropped away, leaving him hollow. He’d hurt her. He knew he had, but not like this.

He took only two steps into the room before the sound of his talons on the tiles roused her. She stirred with obvious stiffness and blinked up at him, her face waking by slow degrees to puzzlement and pain.

“Do not fear me,” he told her, showing her his empty hands. “I am putting you to bed. And that is all.”

“All?” Her face crumpled and she turned away, awkwardly standing and bending to fetch the bucket. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have expected—” She sobbed once and put the bucket back down, slopping water over the sides. She pressed her hands to her face and shook in silence.

“I hurt you,” he said, his voice strained. He wanted to touch her but did not dare for fear of sending her into panic. He felt sick, physically sick. He couldn’t watch her and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. What had he done to her? He had tried to be so careful and he had hurt her so much.

“You didn’t hurt me,” she wept. “It’s my fault. My fault for thinking it was anything but what it was.”

What it—? For no reason at all, Tagen found himself thinking of the tee-vee again, and in particular, of the programs it broadcast that showed humans in their wooing moods. He was a military man and he thought in straight military lines, but he was capable of making the occasional leap of insight, and he made one now.

Thunderstruck, Tagen started for her, one hand reaching to close over her arm. “What it was,” he echoed, “was a true thing. I felt what you gave. I felt what you took.”

She pinkened and pulled away. “Don’t say things you don’t mean,” she said angrily. “It’s cheap. I don’t need to be placated. I can live with it just fine. You needed to fuck and I let you. I was stupid to think there was anything more to it than that!”

“A fuck?” Startled and then profoundly stung, Tagen turned her roughly to face him. “A fuck?! Only that? Gods, I grieve that you could even think so!”

“You didn’t even kiss me!” she shouted.

He gaped at her. “I do not know how!”

“You could have asked.”

He couldn’t seem to find his footing in this conversation. He shook his head, shook it harder, and then tried again to reason with her. “Heat does not allow for tenderness such as I have seen when humans mate. I only tried—”

“If you say not to hurt me one more time, I’ll scream!” she yelled. “You did hurt me, dammit! You hurt me when you got up and left, like I was…like I was your damn Pumpmaster 5000! You don’t have to be in love with me, but you could at least pretend to like me a little! You just got up and left!”

“It was hot,” he argued. “There is affection and then there is comfort! Can you look me in the eye and tell me you could have slept if I had held you through the night?”

“Maybe!” she snapped. “I would have tried, at any rate, because that’s what people do when they like each other! They try to get along!”

“Is this how you try to get along?” he shot back, his voice rising. Her answering flinch was as good as a slap. Tagen stepped away and took back some self-control. “Did you say you wanted me because of your liking for me? No. You said you would lie with me because you feared Heat was killing me. You did not say you wished to mate with me, you said you would help me. And you did not kiss me, either,” he added irritably.

She dropped her gaze, her lip trembling, and looked at once furious and miserable.

“No,” Tagen said, sighing. “I did not try to please you. I did not think I would be welcomed. You took pleasure anyway and I was grateful. My one thought—scream if you so desire it—was not to hurt you. You simply do not know how easy it is to hurt you.”

“You’re stringing me along,” she said. “And it’s too little, waaay too late.” She turned away, swiping at her eyes.

Tagen moved before he could think, seizing her and pushing her roughly against the counters, his body crushing hers. His hand twined through her hair, pulling her head back and exposing her sleek throat to him. Heat was there, heightening but not commanding, and he let it fill him with flame as he moved his mouth over her. He could taste the sweat that beaded her skin. He could feel the blood as it pulsed from her heart. He bit slowly, savoring the resistance of her until his teeth threatened to draw blood.

She gasped and struggled, then clutched at him, shivering in his hands. Her lips were working soundlessly, her eyes shut tight. Tagen closed his mouth over hers as he had seen humans do on tee-vee and she struggled again, scratching and punching at his shoulders. He gripped her tighter, kissing her with bruising force until she shuddered and began to kiss him back. Her tongue met with his unexpectedly and he let her guide him, exploring this human thing as fascination led swiftly to violent desire.

It was unnatural to be so aggressive, to take what a female had not first offered, but he followed his instincts, growing bolder as she continued to melt against him. He did not know what she wanted. He gave her Jotan wooing instead, his hands drawing down her belly where sensation was sharper, careful of his claws…but not too careful.

Her hands crawled up his chest, rubbing, caressing, and he mimicked her unthinkingly. She arched into his palm when he cupped her breast, and then she shoved him away with a high, sobbing moan. “Just stop it! You don’t mean it!”

Tagen snarled furiously and picked her up, thumping her hard on the countertop. He pushed himself between her thighs before she had time to kick him away and pulled her sharply to him, preventing even a token gesture of escape. He was hard already, and he caught one of her flailing hands and brought it to that hardness, growling, “You think that I do not?”

She tried to pull her hand away, but he forced her instead to stroke him. He watched her face contort with passion and dismay, felt her shudder in his grip, and on the second pass along the length of his shaft, her hand slipped beneath the waist of his coverings and closed around his flesh. He released her. She remained.

“I wanted you,” he breathed, and pushed her shirt up in pools over his hand to lick at the sweat between her breasts. “Did you think I did not want you?”

“You were s-so adam-ment about n-not obligating—”

She finished with a cry as he closed his mouth around her nipple. He sucked the hard bud carefully between his teeth, and her hand on his shaft clenched.

“How could I tell you?” he demanded. “When you have been so afraid that I would force myself upon you? I have seen that fear in you from the day that first we met. And then you did allow me to sex with you, because you did not wish to see me suffer, you said. On my world, we would not consider that a passionate invitation. Gods, can you know how cruel you were in your compliance? To permit me to come to you in Heat, when I wished only to come to you like this?”

He cupped the full curves of her bottom and pulled her hard against him, shaping her to his rampant desire, and thrusting his hips at hers. “You said if I were human, if you knew no fear, you would have taken me to your bed before this,” he growled, biting and sucking at her jaw, her neck, her breast. “You said you found me attractive. You could have drawn a knife and stabbed me with less pain!”

“Then why didn’t you—?”

“Because I am Jotan and I am male, and we do not go to females, they come to us!” Tagen forced his hands to release her and he stepped away, breathing fast and hard. “Tell me what to do,” he snarled. “Tell me how to win you. Tell me how to please you. Tell me anything, but tell me, Daria Cleavon! You expect me just to know these things!”

“I know.” She was flushed and would not meet his eyes. Her hands rose and rubbed at her arms as though she were cold. Her face was pinched with hurt and unhappiness, but more than anything else, it was a lost and child-like confusion that haunted her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know what I want. I just know that you’re the first…the first man that I…”

Her hand found her cheek, covering that small part of her that she had allowed to become her whole self, her whole world, and suddenly Tagen was furious. Not at her, but at Earth, at this hot, miserable, poisonous planet that had first spoiled and then forsaken her.

He closed the distance between them in a single, swift step and yanked her hand away from her face. “Stop that!” he snarled, fighting for calm and yet roaring it anyway. “Stop doing that to yourself!”

He let go of her and grabbed at the shirt he wore, ripping it when he could not seem to pull it off fast enough. He caught her hand again and slapped it down over the keloided scars left by some years-past blaster fight, a starburst of raised flesh he had never bothered to have repaired. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded. He seized her head when she tried to wrench away and made her look at him. “It is skin, Daria. Skin. It keeps the life in our bodies and it keeps the weather from getting in. It does not define us. It does not command us. It is only skin.”

He stepped back and pulled her with him, off the counters and behind him as he marched her through the house and out to her yard. He stopped when he came to the raised garden with its little wall of stone and put her in front of him, cupping her face and making her look at what he needed her to see. Her lindaria, her hateful little weed, twining delicately out through the cracked rock to seek the sun.

“That is what you are,” he said. “That is what I see when I am with you. I see the vine that grows through stone.”

She made a sound, something between a sob and a scream, and tried to break away from him.

“You credit me with saving you,” he said, holding her implacably in his iron grip. “You tell me you were drowning in fear and that I have pulled you free. You do yourself injustice, Lindaria Cleavon. I am just another stone, and you have grown through me. The strength was yours and it was with you all the while.”

With great reluctance, he let her go. If he had not reached her after all of that, then Earth had won, and he never would.

She didn’t run. She didn’t hide her eyes and she didn’t cover her scars. She didn’t even hit him, a thing Tagen expected and could not have blamed her for. She stood shivering and looked down at the weed in her garden. When she finally spoke, her voice was whisper. “If I asked you to leave right now, would you go?”

He felt something inside him break open and bleed. He had no will left to argue with her. He had fought, and he had lost. “Yes,” he said, and turned away.

Her hand caught his. “And if you wanted to stay, would you?” Her eyes met his, bright with her human tears, searching.

“Yes.” And, gods help him, he meant it.

“Then stay. Please stay.” She looked at his hand in hers, brought it to her lips and kissed it. One of her tears fell, tracing a trail down to drop off his claw. “I want you to stay.”

He cupped her chin and gently brought her head up until her gaze met his. “And what else do you want?” he asked quietly.

Her mouth worked but she made no words. She looked at him in helpless silence, trembling.

How easy it would be to take, he mused. To ease the stiffness from her small frame with his unrelenting touch. She would fold, he knew. She had resisted him in the kitchen, but she had clung to him in the end. It would be so now. He had only to fight her a little.

But he was tired of warfare. “I am male,” he reminded her, and stepped forward so that she could feel the proof for herself. “You are female. The females come to us. The females command. Command me, if you want me.”

Color flooded her cheeks and she cast her eyes about despairingly before meeting his gaze again. “I…Kiss me.”

It was a start.

Tagen bent and touched his lips first to her cheek, kissing the scars that laced along the side of her face. Then lower, nipping lightly at the delicate curve of her jaw. He kissed the hollows of her slender throat, smiling to find the racing of her pulse just beneath the thin skin. And finally her mouth, sharing her breath and feeling her lips part to admit him.

The sun was on his back, spurring him to greater urgency. And she was warm against his bare chest, warm and soft and insistent all at once as she brushed her fingers through his hair and pulled his mouth even harder against hers. He pulled away, seeking breath and a moment’s stillness before his needs wrested control from him, and she bit him, her human teeth sending sheer fire right through to the heart of him.

He must have cried out because she drew back at once, looking nervous. “Did I hurt you?” she asked.

He stared at her dazedly and then pulled her hard against him, invading her mouth and groaning as she met his caresses with the red passion of tooth and claw. He was untried in the ways of her wooing, as much as she was with his, but they found a common ground together and fought there to give as much as they could to the other.

Her hands tugged at his clothing, bringing painful awareness of that barrier back to his mind. He drew away, trying to puzzle out the fastenings on her frayed shorts, and finally panted out an apology and shredded them in his claws.

She laughed, the sound like water tumbling blessedly over the molten rock of his mind, bringing clarity back to him enough to delight in her again. He had never known such a female; he had never experienced such vulnerability and strength, such passion coupled with such sincerity. He unknotted the tied folds of her shirt and pulled it from her with an exaggeration of gentleness, just to show her that he still knew how, and then lifted her in his arms and pressed his mouth over the swelling of her breast.