Alien's Concubine, The (13 page)

Gaby sighed. She was a sucker. She
couldn’t help it. Whether it was purely all in her mind or not, the
fantasy did things to her she couldn’t imagine feeling with anyone
else—anyone real. “Why do you call me Moonflower?”

“
You remind me of
moonlight,” he murmured, amusement in his voice now. “I had never
seen hair or skin this pale before.”

Gaby wrestled internally for a moment.
“Sheila is far more fair than I,” she said finally. “And
younger.”

He didn’t pretend not to know whom she
was talking about. “But you are my flower,” he murmured, sending
shivers of awareness through her as he nibbled the side of her
neck. “When you are nestled next to me, I imagine I can smell the
sweet nectar of your flesh, feel the petal softness of your
skin.”

She supposed his love talk was a bit
flowery and archaic, but she found it appealed to her. It didn’t
sound corny when he said it. It made her feel … beautiful and
desirable. No one had ever made her feel like that
before.

His last comment pierced her lazy
euphoria, though. “Imagine?” she asked, twisting in his arms to
look up at him.

His gaze moved over her face and then
his expression hardened with reluctance. His eyes became
shuttered.

When he said nothing more, she turned
again and settled back against him. Glancing down, she studied the
sharp contrast between his dark skin and the white, white skin of
her breasts and belly that had never seen the sun at all. She
protected her skin as best she could whenever she was outdoors, but
even so her shoulders and arms were darker than her natural skin
tones. Lifting one of his large hands from her thigh where it had
come to rest as she’d turned to look at him, she examined it,
tracing the lines in his palm, exploring his long, tapered fingers
with hers before she matched their hands palm to palm.

His hand dwarfed hers, made her feel
delicate and feminine.

“
It isn’t real, is it?”
she said sadly.

She heard him swallow. She felt his
breath within his chest as it moved against her back, felt his
warmth. She’d felt his breath against her skin, his mouth. She’d
felt his sex nestled snugly within her own, found glorious release
in the feeling of connection between the two of them. No one had
ever given her such rapturous climaxes. How could none of that be
real?

She shivered, abruptly cold, when he
withdrew. In a moment, though, she felt him lifting her upward. He
turned her so that she was facing him, sitting wantonly astride his
lap where he had perched on the edge of the tub.

“
You cannot begin to
imagine the hunger you stir in me. I want to feel this as you do,”
he muttered in a rumbling growl that seemed equal parts frustration
and desire as he fisted one hand in her hair to tip her head back
and lowered his head to cover her mouth with his.

For a split second, she felt nothing,
and then she opened her mind to him and his scent and taste flowed
through her in a heady rush. She felt the heat and pressure of his
mouth, the faintly rough texture of his tongue as he explored her
mouth, ravished it with his possessiveness. Closing her mind to her
doubts, Gaby reveled in the heated cloud of pleasure that enveloped
her.

Her palms and fingertips tingled with
sensation as she lifted her hands and skimmed them lightly along
the bulges and dips of his strong arms, across his broad shoulders,
and then downward over his hard chest. She felt his heart pounding
against her palm as she cupped his bulging pecs and when she traced
a path downward, she curled her fingers around hot, turgid flesh
that jerked within her grip.

Nothing had ever felt more real, more
right.

Crazy she might be, but she loved the
feel of him. How could every inch of her body, every fiber of her
being come alive with the taste, and touch, and feel of him if none
of it was real? Everything inside of her wanted to join with him,
to feel him as a part of herself.

He broke the kiss as she rose up to
guide his cock into her passage, watching her movements, his hands
catching her buttocks to help her to balance. He surged upward when
she had engulfed the head of his cock within the mouth of her sex.
The moisture slickened walls of her passage fisted around him in
need as he bore down on her hips to slip deeply inside of
her.

He pressed his lips along her throat
as she threw her head back in ecstatic pleasure at feeling him
surging deeply inside of her. She felt the nip of his lips and
teeth, the warm wetness of his tongue as he explored her throat and
the side of her neck and her ear.

She turned her face into his cheek,
blindly seeking his lips once more as he slowly surged and
retreated along her passage, massaging her deeply as he ground his
groin against her. He met her offering with a ravenous need that
was contagious. Heat surged through her at the urgency of his kiss.
She felt her body climbing toward its peak with dizzying speed. She
struggled against it to hold onto the pleasure only a little
longer, but it was like fighting fire with gasoline.

Her body fluttered with the first
threatening quakes of release. He broke the kiss, catching her
tightly against him as he set a more desperate pace, driving her
control beyond her grasp. A long, keening moan broke from her lips
as her body began to quake and seize with release.

The intensity of her climax drained
her of energy. She leaned weakly against his chest, her cheek
resting on his shoulder, trying to gather her wits, to fight the
desire to simply allow herself to drift away on the cocoon of bliss
that closed around her. The soothing stroke of his hands as he
caressed her body brought focus to her dwindling awareness of her
surroundings. Something teased at her mind. She was inclined to
simply ignore it, but it defied her attempts to push it
away.

He hadn’t come, she realized finally.
She hadn’t felt his hot seed inside of her. She hadn’t felt his
body convulse with the same pleasure that she’d
experienced.

With an effort, she lifted her head
from his shoulder and met his wary gaze with confusion. He lifted a
hand and skimmed it lightly over her face. “Sleep,
Moonflower.”

* * * *

Gaby resisted when she felt herself
drifting toward consciousness. She felt far too good to give it up,
but even as she uttered a deep sigh and snuggled deeper into her
pillow something began to tease at the back of her mind that wasn’t
all warm and fuzzy. It was as she began to wonder if it was morning
already that she realized she couldn’t recall going to bed, and
then she remembered everything.

Anka was stretched out on the edge of
the bed beside her, his back against the wall. She blinked at him
several times and closed her eyes again. “That was a dirty trick,”
she muttered, but without heat. Because despite the dark thoughts
hovering at the periphery of her consciousness, she still felt …
wonderfully replete.

And then her stomach growled,
reminding her she hadn’t eaten.

Ok, so fabulous sex didn’t do anything
for that kind of hunger.

And nothing at all, apparently, for
his hunger.

She lifted her head and stared at him
a long moment. “You can’t feel what I do,” she said, determined to
know the truth.

He turned his head to stare down at
her for a long moment. His eyes were tumultuous, but it was hard to
say what emotions were seething inside of him. His expression was
taut, but not angry. “I feel … more than you imagine.”

Gaby pushed herself upright. “I want
to understand.”

She could almost hear him grinding his
teeth then. “I want,” he said harshly. “We all want things that we
cannot have.”

Anger surged to life as Gaby stared at
him in surprise. “My mind isn’t primitive, you superior asshole!”
she snapped. Rolling off the bed, she stalked from the room,
slamming the bathroom door behind her.

For all the good that would do, she
thought angrily. If he wanted to come in he didn’t even have to use
the fucking door!

He didn’t follow her. She didn’t know
whether to be relieved or not, but when she went back into the
bedroom to find clothes, she discovered he was gone … or maybe just
not in a form she could see. She didn’t sense his presence, but
then she was still too ticked off to focus on anything
else.

By the time she’d fixed herself a
light supper of soup and sandwich, she’d calmed down somewhat. She
was still insulted, but it had occurred to her that he probably
hadn’t intentionally insulted her.

It didn’t make it any better to think
he considered her intellectually inferior because he was used to
being around humans of inferior intelligence, or at least far less
knowledge. From what she understood, humans basically had the same
capacity for learning now as they’d had as soon as modern man had
emerged. They had just taken many, many centuries to accumulate
knowledge that they could share with one another.

So what was he, she wondered as she
settled in her living room to stare at the blank screen of the TV?
Obviously, he had no intention of enlightening her.

Energy, she realized almost at once,
but something else. If he’d been pure energy, he wouldn’t have had
consciousness, would he?

His kind had to be something along the
lines of spirits, or ghosts, she decided. Except she wondered if
they’d ever had a physical form of their own. She’d begun to think
Anka hadn’t despite the fact that she’d connected the mummified
remains with him, still thought of it as ‘his’ body because even in
its current state she could see that it had once been as he
appeared to her now.

Or was there a ‘they’ at
all?

At the museum when Anka had left he’d
shifted from form to energy, appeared only as blue light. When
she’d ‘dreamed’ in the temple, she’d seen the blue lights all
around her before they’d taken the form of the dancers. Somehow,
though, she didn’t think it had been others like him. She hadn’t
‘sensed’ but one real presence, as crazy and unprofessional as that
seemed to her. She was certain, somehow, that he’d been alone in
the temple.

In any case, if he knew there were
others like himself, wouldn’t he have been searching for his own
kind if he felt the ‘urge’ to procreate?

That alone seemed to indicate that
there could not be others, or at least that he didn’t know of any
others.

That realization made her feel empathy
for him and a connection with him that she hadn’t felt before. She
had always been alone. Which was worse, she wondered? To be
surrounded all day by others and still feel apart from them, as
alone as if they hadn’t been there at all? Or not having even that
much?

Was that why, or at least part of the
reason, he seemed to want to attach himself to her? Had he gone
into her mind and discovered that she had no one either?

Or was it only that the time most
creatures in nature felt at one time or another had come upon
him—the need, desire, instinct to procreate—and he was single
mindedly searching for the way to complete the cycle?

That thought was an unhappy one. He’d
made her feel special in a way no one ever had before, in a way
she’d been starved to feel, she realized with more than a little
anger, embarrassment, and disappointment. She felt—stupid to have
succumbed to the illusion of being important, special, when it
seemed likely that he’d only ‘chosen’ her because she was
available, or most handy at the time.

It was disturbing how lowering that
thought was, how deeply it wounded her. She felt herself sinking
into a veritable quagmire of depression over it, found herself
picking apart every moment they’d been together and re-examining it
for the flaws she was suddenly certain must be there.

She should have felt ridiculous and
silly every time he called her Moonflower. Instead, it had made her
feel beautiful and desirable, cherished even. He said it so
caressingly, as if he’d been saying ‘dearest’, ‘sweet heart’. He
must know her name like he seemed to know everything else about
her, but he never called her Gabrielle, or even Gaby.

It robbed her of individuality, she
decided. It seemed to her, then, that it was a way of getting
around acknowledging her as a person. It was like the guys that
developed the habit of calling a woman ‘baby’ so that they wouldn’t
fuck up in the throes of passion and call their latest lay Cheryl
when she happened to be a Debra, or whatever.

He didn’t feel what he made her feel,
either. She’d been too enthralled by the things he made her feel to
realize it before tonight, but he didn’t really share her passion.
He could make her cum so hard she felt like she’d had a brain
seizure, but he wasn’t similarly affected. He didn’t
cum.

Because he couldn’t. He might be a
real entity, but he wasn’t an entity of the physical world.
Everything he did to her happened in her mind. He made her body
believe it sensed his touch. He made her believe she could feel his
heat, taste him, breathe his scent.

Was he completely detached during all
this? Was he sitting back and watching her gasp and moan and
writhe, convulse with pleasure so intense she’d never believed such
a thing possible?