The Bargaining (6 page)

When her shivers began to give way to a constant, subtle shaking, he lifted his head and slowly slid his fingers from her quivering sheath. He licked the last traces of moisture from them and shifted his position on the cot, coming to rest beside her, one hand propping up his head, the other, still warm from her pussy, resting on her belly and offering occasional reassuring caresses.

He watched her face for several long minutes. Her eyes stayed closed, but her lips were parted as she tried to regain her breath. Her nipples were beaded, whether from cold or lingering arousal, and patches of gooseflesh raised the skin of her arms into curious rough swatches of silk. It took a long while before her breathing settled into a normal rhythm and her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks.

“Come on, little bit,” he urged, voice rough and low. “No time for you to fall asleep. I know that would feel good right about now, but we’ve got work to do. You gonna be able to help me now?”

Her eyes opened, dark and shining in the dim light, but they had lost the frantic look he’d seen earlier, and now they gazed up at him with clear calm. Her cheeks flushed a dusky pink color, but her voice was soft and steady when she answered him.

“Yes, Deacon. I am ready to help as best I can.” She drew a deep breath and turned to face him more fully. “What do you need me to do?”

Chapter Ten

Kili stood nervously behind the door, just where Deacon had positioned her, and waited for the guard to respond to her three loud knocks. She and Deacon had gone over the plan half a dozen times in the last hour, from this first contact with the guard to the minute she fastened the safety harness around herself in the co-pilot’s seat. The rebel prisoner, she was discovering, left very little to chance.

She prayed silently that their plan would work. It didn’t even need to go smoothly, just so long as it ended with both of them in a ship and hurtling through space far, far away from Ankhar. Over the years, Kili had learned not to ask for too much more than what she absolutely needed.

Her part of the plan began now, as soon as the lumbering guard managed to drag himself down the hall to the cell. Once Deacon had overpowered the guards and confiscated their weapons and a uniform coat, Kili would lead the way out of the jail and through the confusing warren of corridors to the exit. She would use the stable exit, so that if anyone did see them, they would assume she was being escorted out of the prince’s house and to the Shunned house for punishment. No one would ever think twice about Kishantiana earning another punishment.

Shivering, Kili tried to tell herself nerves had made her shaky. She preferred it to the real explanation, which had a lot more to do with embarrassment. She had to use her years of training now to meet the rebel’s gaze, after the way she had behaved. After the things he’d done to her. If she let herself think about them, she would be useless to him. She needed to concentrate, for both their sakes, and putting their recent intimacy out of her mind would help her to stay clear for that much longer. Her nerves had grown jumpy enough without making everything more difficult for the two of them.

She had every right to be nervous. Once she and Deacon made it out of the palace, they still had almost five kilometers to travel to reach the outpost he had mentioned. Much of the way crossed barren landscapes where darkness would offer their only cover. She hoped no keen-eyed watchman had patrol tonight.

Her ears had tuned to every scrape and chirp in the quiet prison wing, so she heard the muffled thud of footfalls on stone as the guard made his way toward them from his post around the corner. She glanced over her shoulder to the cot. Deacon lay on his back, his trousers unfastened and pushed aside to bare a fascinating triangle of skin and hair between his pubic bones. Kili tore her eyes away from the sight and reminded herself it was like a costume, something he’d done to appear more convincing to the guard. Not something she should be staring at.

He glanced at her long enough to smile and wink in reassurance. Then he turned away and slung his arm over his brow line as if shielding his eyes from the light while he slept. She marveled that he could be so casual after everything that had happened. But, she reminded herself, it made sense. After all, she was a
nitara
and he was a man. What they had done could almost be considered natural, inevitable. Except, in her whole life, no man had done to her what this prisoner had.

Concentrate
, she scolded herself, tearing her gaze away from his bare skin. She needed to be focused and fearless if their plan was to work.

Please, Powers, let this work.

Forcing her gaze not to wander back to Deacon’s reclining form, Kili turned toward the door. She gave in to one last flash of panic and bit down hard on her lip, running her hands roughly through her hair to disarrange it. A few deep breaths later, she called on twelve years of hard-earned self-control to paste a look of blank calm on her face and arrange herself into the statue-still pose of a perfect
nitara
.

The thud of footsteps grew louder and finally stopped just outside the door. There was a moment of quiet and she could see out of the corner of her eye that the guard was looking through the window to check out what was going on inside the cell. Her breath halted for a tense moment while she waited to see if he would issue orders before he opened the door. When she heard the metallic rattle of keys and the snick of the lock opening, she said a quick, silent prayer of thanks.

The door swung outward to reveal the smirking guard. “Wore himself out on you, did he?”

Kili kept her head bowed under his blunt perusal. “He fell asleep after he finished.”

“Couldn’t have been half trying, if he left you able to walk,” the man said, laughing at his own joke. “But what can you expect of an offworlder reb?”

Her gaze stayed on the floor and it was a good thing, because her jaw clenched at the insult to Deacon. So far, he’d shown her more worth admiring than any Ankharan male ever had. She’d never felt anything like the sensations that had overtaken her when he’d --

She hastily cut off the thought and forced a suitably meek reply. “He is no Ankharan man, that is certain,
darash
.” Swallowing hard against the bile rising in her throat, Kili sidled closer to the arrogant guard and gave him a sidelong glance through the veil of her eyelashes. “I am afraid so long as a
nitara
has given me entirely different expectations.”

She saw the guard shift, his eyes glinting with lust. He slung the barrel of his blaster over his shoulder and ran a finger from his free hand down the bare skin of her arm. Kili clenched her teeth and simpered.

“Gotten used to servicing a real man, have you?” He licked his lips and stared at her breasts. “That must mean you’ve got heat to burn, eh?”

Slow, shallow breaths prevented her from vomiting, but it took effort. “I’ve got something for you,
darash
. If it pleases you.”

The guard snapped up the bait like a hungry fish. “I’ll show you what pleases me, girl. Get on your knees.”

His hammy hand landed on her shoulder and began to push her to the floor right there in the cell, with Deacon on the cot just a few feet away. This was not what they had planned. Kili fought off the panic and forced a demure smile.

“Surely you do not wish to share your pleasure with such a lowly thing as a rebel prisoner,” she said. “Perhaps
darash
would prefer to go outside, where he can relax and enjoy himself.”

“Oh, I’ll enjoy myself. Don’t you worry.” He leered down at her and used his free hand to unfasten his trousers, pushing the fabric away to reveal his erection. “Now open your mouth and I can start enjoying myself right now, girl.”

Kili honestly thought she would lose it right then and throw up all over the guard’s heavy boots. The act she had performed hundreds of times without thought or reaction had been rendered utterly repulsive by the soft caress of a man she had just met, a rebel prisoner who had no right to touch her at all. After what Deacon had done to her, the idea of servicing this man made her throat swell closed and her stomach heave.

I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t.

I have to. There is no choice.

There’s got to be another way.

Which you won’t be able to find in the next ten seconds, which is about how long you have before he pries your mouth open and takes the decision out of your hands. Now suck. You’ve got nothing else to offer this escape plan.

Kili closed her eyes and drew in a slow, shallow breath. She needed to blank her mind, the way she had every day for the past ten years and more. Just push it all away and pretend to be somewhere else where no one could reach her and nothing could touch her. Certainly not a repulsive, arrogant guard she would rather skewer than serve.

Don’t think
, she reminded herself.
Just do
. Her mind in a different place, her body on autopilot, Kishantiana parted her lips and leaned forward just before the room around her exploded with violent fury.

Chapter Eleven

Deacon held himself perfectly still from the time Kili knocked on the cell door to summon the guard. With his body relaxed and his arm slung across his face, he knew he appeared deeply asleep to anyone who would enter the room, a perception reinforced by his deep, rhythmic breathing. What an observer wouldn’t see was that the shadow from his arm concealed the slight opening between his eyelashes that allowed him to keep watch over the events in the room, or the way he had been trained for years to be able to spring into action from a state of total relaxation with no thought, no delay, no hesitation. And no one could see the way his mind refused to leave the topic of a very sexy and very confusing woman behind, even with the business at hand.

He watched her as she stood before the door, nearly shaking with nerves. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. To anyone who didn’t know her, she probably looked as calm and serene as any good sex slave ought to be. Deacon did know her. Intimately, as a matter of fact. He had felt her, scented her, tasted her, and he knew the fine, almost imperceptible tension in her spine and limbs signaled a huge case of nerves. And he couldn’t much blame her.

How would he feel, he asked himself, if he had lived his entire adult life the victim of slavery and abuse? If he had been raped so often, he came to think of it as normal, began to think of rape as sex and sex as a chore? Would he have the courage she had shown to take a stand and make the effort to change his circumstances in the only way he could think of? He liked to think he would, but he had no way of really knowing.

He could still feel and taste her shock when she came under his hands and mouth. Nothing could disguise the fact that she had never felt that kind of pleasure before. It boggled his mind. A sex slave her entire adult life and she’d never had an orgasm.
How the fuck did that happen?
Even if her job was to give someone else pleasure rather than to feel it herself, the man she’d served didn’t deserve the name if he’d never even taken a moment to give her even a little bit of it in return. Where Deacon came from, real men give as good as they got, in all the ways that mattered. It was a motto a lot of them liked to apply to battle, but the good ones knew it held doubly true in the bedroom as in the battlefield.

Maybe when this whole mess was over, he could make her think that way as well. His cock was practically insisting on it. Shit, it had given up insisting an hour ago and moved right on to begging.

Forcing his mind off his crotch, Deacon shifted his focus back onto Kili and the door beyond. He saw her posture abruptly straighten and heard the faint clomp of a heavy tread in the hallway. The guard had finally decided to answer her knock. Willing his muscles to relax, he prepared to wait while Kili did her job and flirted with the scumbag guard until she could rig the door for Deacon’s escape. But every single thought of that plan went out of his head the minute that scumbag forced Kili onto her knees and tried to shove his cock down her throat. That’s when Deacon’s instincts made an executive decision and activated Plan B.

Deacon hadn’t been aware that Plan B existed, but his reflexes seemed to think it consisted of launching himself off his cot with a feral roar and heading straight for the throat of the blaster-armed guard.

The battle happened in slow motion, the way it always did, but the Ankharan guard had good reflexes, and Deacon realized mid-lunge that even slow motion wasn’t going to be enough to save him. That blaster launch was going to hit him right in the chest and neutralize him before he laid more than a finger on the guard. At least, it would have if Kili hadn’t seen him coming and reacted with the instincts he’d have expected of a trained rebel agent, not of a terrified, half-naked sex slave. Before the guard could draw aim with the blaster, Kili turned her torso sideways and threw herself at him, catching him with her shoulder right square in the middle of where he’d just commanded her to put her mouth.

The guard went down like an anti-grav generator in a black hole. He gave a short, choked shout as he fell to the floor in a fetal position, hands clutching between his legs, blaster landing in Deacon’s big hand a split-second before it would have landed on the floor.

He wasted no time. Shouldering the blaster, he grabbed Kili’s hand and jerked her to her feet, dragging her out the cell door and into the hall. “Which way is the guard station?”

She blinked up at him in confusion. “What?”

“Which way is the -- shit! Never mind.” He could hear the pounding of running feet coming down the hallway toward them and shoved her behind him. “Get down!”

He didn’t see if she obeyed, but he didn’t have time. The minute the second guard rounded the corner and came into sight, Deacon fired the blaster and sent the Ankharan flying back six feet into the wall behind him. Deacon grabbed Kili again and headed for the direction the guard had come from. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here. Now!”

He took three giant steps before he felt the jerk on his shoulder that came from holding onto an immovable object while trying to move very quickly indeed. He whirled around and glowered at her. “What the hell is the matter with you? Come
on!
”