Terran (Breeder) (7 page)

Marlix eased down next to her. She scooted close. “When I
kiss
you, open your mouth,” she commanded.

“Open my—”

Tara covered his lips with hers. She closed her eyes so that her lashes formed crescents on her cheeks. Marlix stared as the tip of her tongue stroked the outside of his mouth before slipping inside. Debauchery to be sure. Depraved. But…monto…so good… She surprised him again when her eyes sprang open, and he found himself drowning in a sea of green.

“You’re supposed to close your eyes,” she murmured against his mouth.

“Why?”

“It’s better that way. Trust me, okay?”

He could not and did not trust anyone except for Urazi, but her request seemed harmless. He had nothing to fear from her; he could overpower her.

He closed his eyes.

She kissed him again, and without the distracting visual, her touch electrified him. Her lips caused his to tingle.

He groaned.

She smiled against his mouth and pressed her body even tighter to his. Such softness for such a commanding creature. Under her tutelage, he learned how to kiss and found he could not get enough of her sweet taste. He plundered her mouth with increasing fervor. When he came up for air, she turned her head to the side, and he could not resist the curve of her neck. Perhaps one could kiss other parts besides the mouth? Tentatively, he sucked and nipped her creamy skin.

Tara moaned and arched her neck, an incitement to his lust.

Twice he tried to roll her over to take her, but both times she resisted. “I’m not ready yet.”

Ready for what? he wondered. But he was enjoying their game, so he did not force the issue.

She grabbed his hand and placed it between her legs. “Touch me, here,” she said.

He tangled his fingers in damp curls. “You’re wet!” He looked at her.

“Umm,” she murmured, unconcerned, and he surmised the moisture was a Terran response. Though shocked at first, he liked the way his fingers slipped and slid among her folds, so he plunged two fingers into her channel. A groan erupted from his throat as he encountered even more wetness. Her muscles contracted.

Monto! He imagined her grip around his manhood. He’d never taken a female there—it had never been required because he had not yet sought to produce a son.

Her muscles squeezed his fingers again. “You feel good,” she said, and he felt ridiculously pleased. “Now rub my clit,” she said.

“Your what?” He frowned.

“My clit.” She grabbed his hand and guided it to the anterior of her sex, to a small nub. “Like this.” Her hand moved his in slow circles.

He watched her face, saw pleasure in the way her features scrunched up. “That’s good. Keep doing that,” she said. He wasn’t sure, but she seemed to produce even more moisture the longer he rubbed.

Her eyes fluttered shut, but he preferred to keep his open so he could watch her face contort with satisfaction, though it caused his cock to ache more. When he penetrated her, he would ejaculate in seconds.

She removed her hand from his and closed it around his erection. Pleasure shot through him, and Marlix jerked; his hand froze. All focus centered on his erection. Throbbing. In her hand.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

He resumed with his massage of her sex as she pumped his. Her moans increased his arousal. His body shook with the need to use her, but he held off, awaited her instruction.

Marlix gritted his teeth as pressure built. He started to consider that perhaps she intended not to bring him pleasure but to torture him, when she unhanded his swollen member and urged him onto his back. He stared when she straddled his hips. She grabbed his tumescence again and guided it to her wet channel.

“You want to breed?” he gasped.

“No.” Pink hair flounced. “I can’t have children.” But then contrarily, she sank onto his manhood, and he could think of nothing but the tight, wet sheath enveloping him.

She massaged her clit as she raised and lowered herself on his manhood and incited a riot within his body. Her breasts, the nipples taut and hard, bounced with her movements, and though he’d never done such a thing before, he lifted his head and latched his mouth onto the right one. Her moan of encouragement caused his desire to spike.

“I’m going to come,” she said.

He sucked harder on her nipple, picturing her pierced by his insignia. He could be the sole Parseon to own a Terran.

“Marlix!” she cried out his name, and then her channel contracted around his erection, ripples squeezing him, and a dam inside him broke, and he thrust harder and faster, and groaned, snared in the jaws of ecstasy.

Chapter Seven

His cock still inside her, Tara collapsed on top of Marlix and buried her face in his neck. Beneath her, his chest heaved. Tara smiled. It had been easy to seduce him, though he’d caused her some consternation at first. However, the big baboon had come around. She’d flown by the seat of her pants with no specific plan but assumed she’d have more opportunity to escape if he trusted her enough to let down his guard.

It had gone much better than she’d anticipated. For such a domineering control-freak Neanderthal, he’d been accommodating. It appeared one could teach new tricks to an old Alpha. Not that he was ancient. How Parseon ages and Terran ones compared, she did not know, but he appeared to be about midthirties.

“You were good.” She stroked his ego but realized she spoke the truth. After a little tutoring, Marlix had turned into a decent lover. And he had a rockin’ bod.

“Good at what?” he asked.

Okay, work remained to be done. “Never mind,” she said.

His hands rested at his sides. He raised them, and she could sense his hesitation, his indecision, before they fell on her shoulders. He took a breath. Did he intend to push her away? Sex with Marlix had given her an advanced crash course on the cultural differences. Anal sex was the norm and occurred at the whim of males with no attention paid to a female’s needs. Alphas reserved vaginal intercourse for breeding. She had a strong hunch the female she’d heard earlier had been crying out in pain. Her stomach twisted. How awful. Females existed on the fringe of society, used—abused—by the males.

Which made Marlix’s accommodation all the more baffling.

He exhaled and smoothed his hands down her back. “Your skin is very soft.”

It sounded like a compliment. “Thank you,” she said and tightened her muscles to squeeze his cock, still half-hard and lodged inside her.

He sucked in his breath. “You did that on purpose,” he growled. Holy smokes, he had a sexy voice. If he were to talk dirty to her…but Tara guessed he didn’t know any sexy words.
Hey, baby, want to breed?
She stifled a snort of laughter and squeezed his cock again.

“You are teasing.”

He sounded so affronted, she did giggle then. If she had to get captured by an alien and had to sleep with him to secure her freedom, well, she could have gotten stuck with a worse kidnapper. Had he not abducted her, she would have no reservations about rolling around in the sheets with him.

“Yes,” she said in a pseudo-serious tone.

“Why?” Her mockery flew over his head.

“You make it impossible to resist.”

He fell silent for so long she lifted her head to peer at his face. Puzzlement had narrowed his eyes. She disengaged but stayed close and leaned on one elbow. “What is it?” she asked.

“I was thinking about what you said.”

“What was that?”

“That you did not wish to breed. That you could not produce offspring.”

She knew he had intended no malice, but his comment hit her like a sucker punch. She pressed her palm to her abdomen as tears sprang to her eyes. Blinking, she rolled away. She had packed her possessions and her anguish and fled Terra, convinced a new life, a grand adventure, would dull the pain. Until now, it had seemed to be working.

Picture-sharp memories flooded on a wave of emotion so strong, the incident could have occurred yesterday. Striding through a dark shuttle garage from her personal vehicle to her flat, her arms laden with packages. Did she have enough food in her apartment to fix dinner, or should she have picked something up? Then footsteps. Bobby. Her neighbor. The loner. Since she’d moved in, he’d asked her out many times. She had let him down easy at first, but as his overtures grew more frequent, brasher, and more suggestive, she’d rebuffed him far less politely. The glint of a knife. Packages hitting the ground. She’d focused on saving her face but had lost something far more precious.

Pressure built behind her eyes, her cheeks.
Suck it up. Suck it up.

Marlix seized her arm, his touch firm but gentle. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing.” She averted her gaze. “I cannot bear children.”

“Why not?”

Was he devoid of all manners? All social graces? They may have done the horizontal tango, but that did not entitle him to ask probing, personal questions. She stiffened and lifted her gaze to glare at him. Good God, was that
sympathy
on his face? She did not need an alien’s pity.

“Because of this!” She raked a hand across her fading abdominal scar and burst into tears. Mortified, she buried her face in her hands.

She had not cried when Bobby left her bleeding out on the shuttle garage floor.

She had not cried when doctors managed to save her life but had informed her the damage had weakened her uterus to the extent she would be unable to carry a child to term.

She did not cry when Mother Nature mocked her with a visit each month.

Yet here, in front of an alien who could not understand her despair, she wept and wailed. With his palm, Marlix petted her head, two light taps. Repeated the action on her shoulder. Once on her thigh. He patted as if he were trying to find the right button to push to switch off her tears. “Tara…” Her name rumbled, the first time she’d ever heard him use it. “Do not—do not…”

The bed moved when he sat up. He settled an arm around her shoulder, his embrace tentative, awkward, as if he’d never hugged anyone. She cried harder.

He pulled her against his chest, and she found herself clinging to him, sobbing against his neck. He tightened his arms, enveloping her in a cocoon of his warmth and strength.

Marlix, the big baboon, the Neanderthal, her abductor, said nothing but rested his cheek against her head and rocked her.

* * * *

“Monto!”

A shout awakened Tara out of a dead sleep. She jackknifed to a sitting position. Masculine features had twisted into an expression of horror.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” She followed Marlix’s horrified gaze to the red stain beneath her, all over her.

Oh great. Just what I need
. She did a quick mental calculation.
Yep. It was that time.

“I must summon the physician.” He raked a hand through his hair and leaped out of bed.

“Urazi!” he shouted.

“No! Stop!” Tara lunged for his arm. “It’s okay,” she said in a soothing voice. “I’m all right.” She knelt on the bed and hung on to his wrist, aware of the stickiness between her thighs. She avoided looking at the embarrassing mess.

“I have injured you. I never should have used you. I knew you were too small.” With his free hand, he thumped his chest hard. He appeared stricken. She glanced at herself and winced. Blood smeared her hips and thighs and spread across the bedding as if she’d bled pints instead of a fraction.

“I am not hurt,” she reassured him. “This happens every month.”

“You bleed like this every month? How do you survive?” Though still wide-eyed, he appeared a little calmer.

She released his arm and yanked at the bed covering, then wrapped it around her waist. Sheesh! She even had reddish-brown smudges on her chest and abdomen from having touched herself without knowing it. She looked like she had after Bobby— “Parseon females don’t menstruate?” she asked.

“Monto! Of course not.”

“How do their bodies prepare to carry a baby, to give birth?”

“Not this way!” He swept a hand in an arc. “This is normal?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t happen like this. Usually I can predict when the bleeding will occur, and I can prepare so it doesn’t create a mess. I don’t have the stuff with me.”

“What do you need?”

“It’s called a
menstru-cup
.” She had to use the Terran word due to a lack of a Parseon equivalent. “I insert it, and it captures the—” She broke off. Marlix had paled. Sweat glistened on his forehead. He had whitened like he might pass out. “Okay, too much information.” Tara suppressed an amused smile. Men were such babies.

“I doubt such a device exists on Parseon,” he said.

It didn’t. She’d been briefed she would need to stock up on supplies. “I have what I need at my housing unit and at my shop at the Bazaar.”

“At the Bazaar? I can retrieve it for you,” he said.

Tara could have kicked herself.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot
. How stupid could she be? She’d blown her best chance for escape. If she had let Marlix believe he’d injured her, he would have called the physician, probably a Parseon one, and given their unfamiliarity with her physiology, she might have been able to convince them to rush her to the Terran infirmary. Marlix had concern for her welfare, and she should have played on his sympathies.

She assembled a quick plan. “I can write down what I need.”

The memory of his tenderness as he held her while she cried, his accommodating sexual behavior, and his horror when he thought he’d injured her triggered a frisson of guilt she was betraying him in some way.
He kidnapped you!
Tara hardened her resolve. “You can take the note to Ramon. He can retrieve what I need.”

Marlix’s face tightened. “Ramon.” His name sounded like a curse.

Tara gaped.
Good grief, he’s jealous!
She suppressed an amused snort. She had a hunch a possessive Alpha was a dangerous Alpha, and she had no wish to jeopardize Ramon’s life. She no longer worried about her safety; Marlix wouldn’t hurt her. That she believed.

The inappropriate sense of guilt returned, but she ignored it, chalking it up to the beginnings of Stockholm syndrome in which hostages developed sympathy for their captors.
You must be stronger
, she chided herself.