Maddison, Karly - Time Slip [The Xephon Alliance 1] (Siren Publishing Classic) (6 page)

“You just mate with them instead?” she responded to his statement then watched his eyes narrow slightly. He was much more cautious than Lunox or Tipha, who had both jumped right into her little traps. If she couldn’t find some leverage with this male, then she really was in way over her head. She licked her lips and parted them slightly, dropping her gaze to his mouth suggestively.

“Oh, you will like me by the time we get to that stage,” he replied with a small, calculating smile. It was almost enough to warn her off.

“Shall we test that with a kiss?” she whispered seductively. He didn’t look too romantically swayed by her suggestion, but he did look curious to find out what her hidden agenda might be. He leaned forward with that lightning speed the Xephons had. It always caught her off guard. His mouth covered hers before she could prepare her senses for the assault. Not that his incredible, warm lips covering hers reminded her of an assault. More like falling onto a radiator and starting to melt a few moments before one caught the full heat and went up in flames, she decided. And it seemed like the elephant had lifted off her lap.

So, this was enough to distract him from his psychic hold on her? She leaped toward him and threw him backward onto the floor, crashing the couch in the process. He was damned strong, but she was fast and skilled. In three seconds she had him spread on the floor with his back to the carpet.

* * * *

He had to give it to her for being so fast. Now that the amazing kiss was over, he could have used a tap on her, but she wasn’t nearly as strong as she thought she was, so he just used his own superior strength to flip her off him and pin her to the crashed couch. Now he could see why Lunox and Tipha had given up. To their credit, they’d hung in for several days. He’d been with the she-devil for only a few minutes, and already she was more trouble than she was worth.

Xephons had little experience with such aggressive females. In his world most women were acquiescent and mannered.

He looked down into her amazing eyes. They were like the stained glass in the cathedral windows he’d seen on Earth once. She had to be the most beautiful woman on the ship, maybe in the universe, but she was also about the crankiest female he’d ever met. He rubbed his bandage as he contemplated her.

“Now that you’ve found out that kissing me disarms my taps, I’ll be sure not to let you get too close again for a while.” He rose to his feet gracefully, dragging her up by the scruff of her neck. He kicked the couch back up the right way as if it were a pillow. “Next time, you’ll want me to kiss you so bad, you’ll ask without tricks against me in your head.”

“Me? Ask for a kiss?” She snorted. “When hell freezes over.”

“Xephons do not believe in hell,” he pointed out smugly. “You seem to think you are too good for anyone. You have been quite malicious to Lunox and Tipha, and now you have been dumped on me.”

He dropped his hold on her neck and towered over her as if regarding a crack in the pavement. She looked ready to crack, too, maybe even scream. She tried a useless and ineffectual push on his chest. He totally ignored it.

“I’m not sure why Captain wants to punish me so dearly, but I do need to remind you, we are a finite population here on this vessel, in an unknown part of the universe, so it will make life pleasant if as many of us as possible can actually get along. Some of the pairs are doing precisely that, you know.
Getting along
.”

Well, that was a bit of a lie, telling her that Captain had assigned him to her in a new partnership. Truth was he’d manipulated it to suit himself, but more importantly to spare her from that moody pilot who had asked for her and the disaster that would have led to.

“If you really don’t like me, I will never touch you again…but that will make life eternally dull for both of us. It’s obviously going to be your call, isn’t it? I was already assigned to have no pairing due to my age…that was before you hashed your way through two partnerings…so you see, you are an unexpected bonus, though I fear you might really be a curse if you are going to make trouble all of the time.”

* * * *

Kash absorbed everything he said. It was hard to argue with any of it.

“Just exactly how old are you?” She’d been wondering about his age for some time. What was the cutoff age for the Xephons to be assigned a female, she wondered? With thirty of them to twenty-one Earth women, it left nine Xephon males unpartnered.

“Forty-four.”

“Bullshit!”

“There goes that potty mouth again.” He raised an eyebrow at her as he plunked her down on the couch. He didn’t look a day over twenty-five. Just exactly how long were these people’s life spans? Seemed a bit mean that the older guys missed out. Hell, what was she thinking? Siding with the Xephons? This scheme of partnering was crazy. Or was it? What if they really were stuck here forever?

Chapter Six

Home seemed a long way away right now. She was used to being an educated and liberated Earth woman. She was used to the power her education and knowledge gave her when she was in familiar Earth systems, and the respect it commanded there. Here, she had nothing. The captain told her what to do, and she jumped through his hoop. Tinny snatched at her resting hand suddenly and enveloped it in his much larger one, pulling her up.

“Come wif me to the meal,” he said in his faulty English. Was it evening already? Obediently, she followed him down to the dining hall where the mixed crews assembled to eat at such times. He sat up at the top, near the captain, with her against him on the left, a completely different scenario from her last meal. He had high rank here, though she didn’t really understand their ranking system, apart from who the captain of their vessel was. She caught site of Lunox and Tipha further down the table, staring at her curiously and giving Tinny pitying looks that he didn’t bother to acknowledge.

Plates with some kind of steaming, cooked grain, similar to rice with a yellowish tint to it and a slightly nutty taste, passed along the table. Kash ate her whole plateful. A few pieces of fruit rolled toward them from further down the table. Tinny grabbed a red orb and started to cut it, then passed her half. It tasted like a peach. She ate with relish. When he saw how much she enjoyed it, he passed her his untouched piece. She hesitated for a moment then ate it hurriedly.

Down the table, she noticed some of the paired females were fawning over their Xephon males, while a few sat sullen beside their nervous-looking partners. Had they been arguing? Perhaps they would grow to like each other or request a repairing. Not that she would ever grow to like Tinny or want to be paired again. Her legend had gone around the ship, and nobody wanted her after Lunox and Tipha had tried. She’d been advised by captain to make an effort with Tinny or end up with nothing. She preferred nothing.

She glanced at him as she munched her peach fruit. He discussed something with the captain. Might he be second-in-command here? Or third? They conversed in their own language, and it gave her no clues to the goings on of the Xephon vessel. She had not bothered to learn Xephon tongue, though almost all of the males had bothered to learn the dominant Earth language at some stage in their pasts. She had to give them some credit for doing that.

She watched his expressive hands, covered in tight, black gloves with round holes at the knuckles and no glove-fingers. His talons exhibited a slight blue tint to them. She couldn’t help remembering as she looked at them that some other males’ claws had ended up in his arm. What had that been all about?

After the meal, he dragged her back to his room and showed her the shower and toilet and some cupboards where she could keep her clothing and meager supplies. She couldn’t help noticing the bed. It looked big. Covered in plush, faux-fur blankets, it seemed tempting to lie on for a moment. If she jumped in it, she might disappear.

The bedroom had a few glowing, blue mini lights above the bed that gave it a peaceful ambience. There appeared to be no separate bed for her. Did he think he would ever get her in there with him? Well, he probably did, come to think of it. He’d already shown what he could do to her on the couch earlier. If he wanted to, he could make her march to his bed and climb right into it.

She went back out to his tiny lounge and stared at him. He fiddled with some contraption on the table. It appeared all metal and wires and glass, like a mechanical brain. He seemed to have forgotten that she was in the room.

* * * *

Tinny used the device as a distraction from his situation. If he didn’t have something to do, he started to think too much about the likelihood of never returning home. His mind would stray to the possibility that he might never see his four sisters again, his mother, his father, or the northern lights dancing in Xephon skies. If he didn’t occupy himself with activity, he also noticed he had a hostile female in his room intent on challenging him at every opportunity she could find. He pushed his thoughts down with a slight grimace.

“What the hell is that?”

“Must you always swear? For someone so pretty, you are not much of a lady.”

Kash snorted at his comment and appeared to home in on the pretty. “You think I’m pretty?”

“Yes…” He glanced up from his machine. “Pretty arrogant, and pretty rude and pretty cantankerous,” he said, with a slight twist of his lips.

* * * *

For a heart-stopping moment she was distracted by his mouth as she remembered the taste of him. “You’re a smartarse,” she replied. “Always got an answer.”

She stared at his bent back. He had such long hair. It lay all the way across his back down to his tail bone. Did he have a tail? She stared at his peachy buttocks with approval then looked back to his hair. Bits of it twisted like matted rope. She wanted to reach forward and touch it, so she did. It was much silkier than she thought it would be despite the unkempt knots. Might it be a woman’s job in Xephon society to keep their mate’s hair tidy? Is that why all the single soldiers and the captain had matted hair? She had to be right, because since some had been paired off with Earth women, gradually their hair had become tidy and sleek. She smiled at her little insight of some cultural norm. Unkempt hair was like a sign that you were an unpaired male. No woman was looking after it for you.

“When was the last time you had smooth, silken hair?”
 

He shot upright and glared at her, and she knew she had hit the nail right in the middle of its proverbial head.

“That is not your concern,” he snarled, tapping her over to the corner to sit on the edge of the couch. She couldn’t do much when her legs were beyond her own control.

“This is a contraption I’ve been working on that can bend time.” He deliberately distracted her from her overly personal question.

“Oh, what rubbish! If you sent us back in time to before we came here, all those happy couples at the dinner table will no longer exist, or even know each other anymore. Did you think about that?”

“It is not rubbish, my beauty. Already I have sent an apple and a rat through two days into the future. As for going back in the past…I haven’t worked that out yet.”

“Looks like junk to me. When are you going to release me?”

“When you stop insulting me.”

“I have stopped.”

“Should I be grateful?” He glanced over at her.

“Do you want me to undo the knot in your hair?” she asked.

He regarded her as if she offered him some malevolent trick.

“You can try.” He released her, and she crossed back to him again. He went back to working on the device that so easily absorbed all of his attention.

She experienced an unreasonable desire to be more important than the machine. Gently, she picked up a matted piece in a long lock of his hair and slowly worked to untangle it. He ignored her, but somehow she knew he was secretly pleased.

Still playing with his hair, she watched as he fiddled with wires.
 
“Do not get too close,” he warned.

“Why?” She stuck out her hand and poked the damned piece of rubbish. A flash of white light erupted.