Nell Thorn (12 page)

Nell felt nauseous. She was being sold as a project.

“You sick fuckers,” she ground out.

A ripple of derogatory laughter echoed about the sumptuous room.

“Yes, indeed, lady. Sick Rim fuckers, better get used to it,” called out one wag.

“So, how much am I bid?” the auctioneer shouted out above the general amusement.

There was a pause as the first bid was waited on.

Nothing was forthcoming.

“Come on, ladies and gentlemen—look at what you are getting. This is the real deal! This
was
a Sector Commander of the Galaxy Elite Fleet, and
what
a Sector Commander. This is your chance to ‘fuck over’ the Fleet.” He mimicked her swearing almost perfectly.

Much raucous laughter followed his words. It was some time before the level of amusement dropped sufficiently for another question to be heard.

“Who is the vendor?” asked a clear voice from the back of the room.

“Sir, I cannot divulge who the vendor is, but suffice to say he is more than prepared to meet you after the sale for the exchange of funds.”

“It’s a Fleet traitor,” Nell called out. “My predecessor, Gordon. So you might want to think again about handing your money over to a turncoat bastard.” Nell felt better for letting everyone in the room know Gordon was behind it. “Just how many of your relatives do you think he’s killed in the course of his career? Think on that before you give him your credits…”

The auctioneer looked as if he were about to explode. “Silence her!” he roared. “She’s divulging confidential customer information!”

Despite rough handling and their best efforts to cover her mouth, Nell fought to carry on her protest. “Ask yourselves what the Fleet might do. No…better still, ask what—” Nell demanded, her voice rising to fill the room.

Oof!
She was seized from behind by a giant of a man, who she managed to incapacitate by back-kicking him in the balls. As he dropped to his knees, releasing her, another two set upon her, wrestling her to the floor as she fought them every which way. They pushed Nell down, held her cheeks in an iron grip, brutally squashed a sonic gag into her mouth and secured it. Her arms were hauled up behind her back, locked, and she was pushed down on to her knees, her tunic rucked up on one side to expose her bare breasts.

The room was almost quiet, save for the desperate scuffling noises as Nell fought on, mute, her gaolers attempting to keep her in a kneeling position, the audience hungrily drinking in the aggression before them. The two men eventually stilled her by pushing her onto her injured side and holding her head hard against the venue floor.

“At last, silence!” the auctioneer announced with a great show of relief. “So, you may indeed ask yourselves what the Fleet might do, or…”

“Even better still, ask yourself what
I
might be capable of doing,” interrupted a familiar voice from the back of the room.

Whereas Nell’s objections had brought laughter, this brought a stunned silence.

“It’s the Rim Lord, Rowe!” The horrified whisper from one of the tables was clearly audible.

Rowe walked slowly up to the auctioneer’s podium before looking around at the assembled faces sat at the dining tables, long and hard. “And now I know who you all are.”

There was one moment of frozen disbelief before pandemonium broke loose.

Everyone attempted to dive through the exits at once to escape.

* * * *

Nell lay on her side on the floor, hair in her face, deafened by the vibrations of hundreds of feet running for the exit.

In he comes, I’m lying here, hair in my eyes, tits hanging out, no face paint, looking like shit, and he looks like…
Nell slowly shook one particularly thick lock of hair from her eyes and looked up at the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

She gave a heartfelt groan.

A roll of nausea swept over her, followed almost instantly by panic. If she threw up with the gag still in her mouth, she’d choke.

“Nell, are you okay?” Angel was suddenly by her side. He looked into her eyes and must have seen the desperate fear in them as he moved quickly to remove the gag. “She can’t breathe.” Angel finally managed to pull the gag from her mouth, “Man… You’re damn lucky you never got that tag removed, Nell!”

Being glad about having her backside chipped was a first.

With the gag gone Nell lurched forward onto her hands and knees and promptly vomited over both Rowe’s and Angel’s boots.

“Unlike you, I won’t be requiring a receipt,” Rowe told Nell as he crouched down to gently wipe her mouth clean. “Gordon’s dead. I killed the fucker on the way in.”

Chapter Eighteen

The betrothal reception had been marvellous.

Dominic Danyeo and Rennick Stannick had found Kate at Port Luz, exactly where Nell had left her. The resulting celebrations had been lavish, if a little edgy, with everyone all too aware of the implications of such a public alliance of people from ostensibly opposing sides of the Rim boundary.

Nell felt absolutely no need to tell anyone of her own good fortune, although she had caught Danyeo’s wink. Standing as he was, between Stannick and her sister Kate, Nell hoped the head of the Danyeo Collective knew how to keep his mouth shut. If the word got out about her and her current relationships, the resulting fallout would be huge. It would be far bigger than the scandal surrounding her sister had ever been. The fact was that, as a member of the Galaxy Elite Fleet, she would never be allowed to fraternise with a potential enemy, and Rim Lord Rowe was just that. With more wealth at his disposal, more firepower than even the richest worlds in the IGW could manage combined, he would always be seen as a very real and potential threat. Nell would be identified by Talbot and those like him as a vulnerability, a liability, something that needed to be either neutralised or disposed of if the Fleet was to be kept safe. It would be her turn to be either neutralised or displaced. Not a comfortable thought and one that added an element of danger that made Nell feel as if she were walking on the edge of something perilous. But she told herself it would all be fine, once she had worked Rowe and Angel out of her system, purged the attraction that seemed to sing through her blood every time she saw them. She would return to her work for the Galaxy Elite Fleet, older, wiser and rather more experienced than she had been before.

Nell had no doubt that Rowe and Angel felt absolutely the same.

They seemed to be enjoying exhausting the attraction between the three of them as much as she was.

It wasn’t as if it was actually anything more, was it?

* * * *

“Rowe? Angel?” She was never first to arrive at whatever rendezvous they had meticulously selected. They always seemed to be able to get there before she did.

They crept up on her silently from behind.

Nell gave a surprised laugh and backed up as her lovers advanced on her purposefully, until her legs hit the bed and she toppled over backwards.

“On your belly, lean over the bed, Nell.” Rowe crawled over her as she scrambled to turn over, taken aback at his sudden metamorphosis into a hungry predator. “I do believe I beat you fair and square in a challenge match. I would like to remind you that I do have certain rights…”

Nell shivered with anticipation and nodded her head. Angel was meanwhile stripping her of her clothes, smiling at her reflection as she watched him in a huge mirror on the wall opposite the bed.

“Ours,” he whispered in her ear as he fastened the thinnest shimmering, silver band around her neck, the fragile circlet trembling with the vivid blue and indigo gems of rarest rimzanite. Precious gemstones found only at the very edge of habitable space.

“It’s beautiful…” she whispered, before adding wryly, “and maybe a little less obvious than my old one. I can’t really accept this, the value—”

Angel stopped as she spoke and said, “Is irrelevant, Nell. Please…accept it. From us both.” He kissed her soundly whilst Rowe brushed her hair from her eyes. “Nell, say now if you don’t want to do this.” Rowe looked behind him as Angel moved round. “Angel?”

“I want this,” Nell told him clearly as Angel removed the last of his own clothes to reveal his lean, beautifully muscular body.

At the sight of bare, masculine flesh, Nell could feel the slow burn of desire start to lick its way up from between her legs.

Angel climbed onto the bed beside Nell as Rowe turned back and grasped her buttocks, pulling them apart so he could touch her. His long, strong fingers kept delving and probing her hole as she went hot and cold with need. It was a confusing desire that pulled at the pit of her stomach.

His touch was firm and controlling. He knew exactly what he wanted.

Nell felt the warm drizzle of oil between her cheeks as Rowe started to caress in a circular motion around the rosette there. He slid one finger in first and she moaned, particularly as Angel had started tickling her clit with his tongue. Rowe added more oil and two fingers next, leaving her feeling uncomfortably full.

Then three.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” she mumbled into the covers.

“At least try it, sweetheart,” Rowe whispered in her ear. “It means we can both be with you at once if we can do it this way.” His cock pressed against her sphincter and she gasped as the pressure relentlessly pushed and stung cruelly. Finally, she could not help but push out and suck him in. She felt if she was being stretched all ways but the right one.

“I really want to…I just…” Angel moved out of the way as Rowe shifted slightly.

She gasped as he started to rock her backwards and forwards, slipping her gently, persuasively, onto his cock. He leant forward and pinched her clit between his thumb and finger, the excited sensation mixing shamefully with Nell’s urge to push against his hard length. He started to move in and out in long, measured strokes that alternated a stinging pain with burning need.

As he buggered her, Nell moaned with arousal in time with his thrusts, but he didn’t come. Instead, Angel moved in as Rowe left her, strong and lean, his own rock-hard erection sliding all too easily into the opening so recently eased by Rowe.

Angel enfolded her in his arms and rolled her so that she lay on her back on top of his muscular body, impaled on his cock. Rowe’s eyes were silver-grey fire as he sat back on his heels and studied her from head to toe before kissing her mouth long and hard. His capable hands ran over her breasts, palming her nipples as Nell’s head fell back in helpless arousal.

“Rowe, please,” Nell begged, knowing exactly what she wanted. She opened her legs wider, tipped her pelvis as she encouraged him to enter her. He slid his beautiful cock into her lust-swollen cunt in one thrust. Taking a deep, trembling breath, she watched as Rowe braced himself above her and Angel, then established his own rhythm.

He was good.

Long, slow thrusts, relentlessly timed to perfection.

Rowe’s gaze was beyond her shoulder. He was watching Angel’s face as he fucked her, rocking against Angel’s cock as it sat in her anal passage.

Nell caught their reflection in the mirror. All she could see was Rowe’s and Angel’s bodies moving in a sinuous harmony, their muscles flexing as they thrust into her, but then she noticed her hand entwined with Angel’s as if she were watching someone else being fucked by two incredibly gorgeous men.

It had to be one of the hottest things she had ever witnessed.

So hot, it was too much. The tremulous feeling of a rising orgasm made her breath shorten to gasps.

“Say it,” Angel hissed, his breath unsteady as his climax built.

“I’m going to come,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and trembling. “I’m going to come now.” Both men were moving so deep she could feel their balls brushing her legs each time they drove into her. Her climax started to roll over her and, even as they continued to fuck her, she groaned in ecstasy at the sensations that pulsed through her.

“I love you, Nell,” Rowe whispered in her ear as he drove into her. “
We
love you.”

“So much,” gasped Angel, breathless.

I love them too, so much! I’ll never get enough of either of them, ever!

Throwing back her head, she managed a throaty laugh-come-scream. “Good, because I love you both even more!”

Loved them like this. She loved the feeling of Angel losing control beneath her, of Rowe coming to a roaring orgasm with a shout of release as he poured himself into her.

Nell loved it. She loved them.

It
was
making love, after all.

Life was good on the edge.

Also available from Total-E-Bound Publishing:

Captain Kate

Sophie Angmering

Excerpt

Chapter One

“Dump the lot.”

Dominic Danyeo braced himself against another barrage of fire from the Galaxy Elite Fleet ship.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
A volley of shots broadsided them as they sat virtually immobile, trapped against the side of a small moon.

“All of it?” Rennick Stannick was always remarkably calm under pressure.

“No politically sensitive data is to get into fleet hands.” Danyeo rubbed his face, clearly exhausted from seventy-two hours of fighting, “The government of Prime 7 will have to wait. Delete all of it.”

Whump. Whump.

“I always said this was going to be a risky trip.”

“Your comment is noted. Update on the servers?”

“Wiped.” Rennick grabbed for the edge of the flight desk as another barrage of fire hit.

“Good. Smarten up, Stannick, time to abandon ship. Make sure the collective know we need picking up. I don’t want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary in the company of the GEF and remember this was supposed to be a covert operation.”