The Spawning (10 page)

Miranda’s eyes widened.

There was a pregnant pause from the other Hirachi. “Khan?”

Khan heaved an irritated breath. “Go back to the compound, Adar, and make

certain none of the other little fools decided to take a stroll through the jungle.”

Shifting his grip from her waist to her arms, Khan rolled onto one hip and

dragged her to him, studying her face almost curiously as his anger began to dissipate.

“Why did you run?”

Miranda debated whether honesty was the best policy or if sarcasm might get her killed. He seemed to have his temper under control, however. “I thought the chance at freedom was worth the risk,” she said finally.

His dark brows drew together. It was confusion that clouded his eyes, however, not anger. “I freed you.”

She gave him a look. “Thanks,” she said dryly. “I’ll just be going now, then.”

A mixture of anger and amusement flickered in his eyes. “You would not survive one night in this jungle,” he said finally.

“I considered that. I thought it beat the alternative.”

He studied her for a moment, his expression growing steadily angrier as that sank in. He tamped it with obvious effort. Getting to his feet abruptly, he clamped one hand around her upper arm and stalked through the jungle, following the trail he’d trampled down in his chase. Miranda kept up the best she could, trying to maintain her dignity.

Her ankle was killing her by now, though, and she didn’t have the adrenaline rush to help her ignore the pain.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 43

Either he ignored it or he was just too furious to notice it until they’d regained the path. Uttering an irritated breath, he released her arm, looped his arm around her back, and scooped the other beneath her knees. She grabbed his shoulders instinctively to keep from falling as he swung her into the air. Uncomfortable when she found herself almost face to face with him, she considered removing her hands, but there was no where to put her arm except around his neck.

She tried to ignore the fact that her position squashed her left breast against his chest, the hard muscles beneath her palm, the tickle of his swinging hair as it brushed across the back of her hand and arm where it rested along his back.

She tried not to look at his hard, angry profile, or study his ‘elf’ ears, tried to ignore the heat of his body and the fact that her damp skin clung to his. She did her best not to breathe deeply because every time she did she felt his intriguing scent winding its way deeper and deeper inside of her and felt a warming shimmy begin in her belly.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said finally.

He turned his head to meet her gaze briefly and looked away again.

Miranda swallowed with an effort, realizing she’d offended him a lot more deeply than she’d realized. A spark of anger followed the guilt.

He hadn’t made any bones about the fact that he found her, and all of the women, completely unappealing! Why should she worry about wounding his ego?

In uncomfortable silence, he carried her back to where Teron was tending the last of the injuries, bent over to settle her gently on the ground, and then straightened and left.

Miranda watched him as he strode away, relieved that he didn’t seem inclined to punish her for running, confused about it if it came to that. The ‘caterer’, Adar, she remembered, blocked her view of him by crouching beside her, and she dragged her gaze from Khan to look at the man uneasily. Amusement danced in his eyes to her surprise.

“You run very fast, little warrior. I would like to see how fast you can run uninjured.”

Miranda felt her cheeks reddening.

Teron uttered a disapproving snort. “The ankle is worse.”

Miranda glanced at him. Apparently noticing even though he was focused on

wrapping Lynn Patterson’s knee, he slid a glance at her. His gaze flicked over her.

Shaking his head, he returned his attention to his patient.

When Miranda looked at Adar again, she saw that he was holding out a flat

looking disk that she supposed must be used as a dish. There were several completely unidentifiable food-like substances on it.

“The other females did not seem to care for the food, but it’s all that we have just now,” he said almost apologetically.

A guilty blush climbed Miranda’s cheeks as it occurred to her to wonder if she’d given her thoughts away. She managed a smile as she reached to take the ‘dish’. “Thank you.”

He nodded, eyeing her speculatively. “Try to eat it,” he said gently.

She felt her smile tighten. “Are you going to watch?”

He blinked at her, his skin darkening, and then chuckled uncomfortably. “No. I will go away and pretend I don’t notice when you bury it in the sand.”

Consternation filled her. “Is that what the others did?”

“Some.”

It made her feel badly, and she wasn’t even the one who’d behaved so rudely.

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“We haven’t eaten anything in a long time. That makes it hard to eat and … hold it down.”

“I’ve fetched more water,” the ‘waterboy’—Gerek she deduced since Khan had

identified Adar for her—broke in. “Mayhap you could drink a little and then nibble and wash it down?”

Miranda studied his earnest face. “I think I lost the other one … uh ….”

He grinned, rueful amusement dancing in his eyes. “You held onto it longer than I would have if I’d had Khan in behind me,” he said with a chuckle.

Miranda couldn’t help but grin, albeit wryly. “I didn’t actually know it was

Khan. I thought he was further away, and it was
him
that was right behind me.” She nodded at Adar.

“Adar.”

“I am Gerek.”

“I’m ….”

“In need of having your ankle seen to,” Teron broke in before she could finish.

She glanced at him, but as bad as her ankle was throbbing, she didn’t particularly want to hike her ankle in the air when Adar and Gerek were already hovering in front of her and looked way too fascinated in her ‘assets’. Taking the bottle from Gerek, she planted it solidly between her legs in the dirt and finally yielded to Teron’s determination to lift her foot.

Gerek and Adar exchanged a look and politely got to their feet. Gerek sent her a wicked smile, however, his eyes gleaming with devilment.

“I’m Miranda,” Miranda said, looking up at them, “but everyone calls me

Randy.”

Either it confused them or they were just having trouble trying to pronounce a name obviously strange to them. Nodding, they both turned and left. She watched them until they’d reached the water’s edge and waded in.

“I will have to carry you to the water if you’re to go in with the others. I think it would be good to soak the ankle, but not good to try to swim. In a few days, mayhap.”

Miranda transferred her attention to Teron’s face, studying what she could see of it as he focused on wrapping her ankle. There was a faint frown between his brows, but she thought it was from concentration.

“Is this too tight?” he asked after a moment, lifting his head.

Miranda looked down at her ankle, focusing on it. “I don’t think so,” she said finally.

He flicked his fingers lightly along the bottom of her foot. “Do …?”

Caught completely off guard when he tickled her foot, Miranda uttered a choked laugh and tried to snatch her foot away from him.

He looked at her with a mixture of surprise, confusion, and amusement. “I

suppose that answers that question. I will check it again in a while and make certain it isn’t so tight as to cut off blood flow. For now you must bathe the cuts and scratches and then I will put ointment on those that seem to need it. I will carry you down to the water if you’ll allow it.”

Miranda stared at him unhappily. She didn’t want to offend him, too, but the

plain fact of the matter was that she was too acutely self-conscious about her nakedness now to feel comfortable with the idea. Maybe it seemed seriously belated—and maybe it THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 45

was—but she’d been in such a state when she’d arrived that there hadn’t been a lot of room for worrying about that particular aspect of her situation. The pain hadn’t worn off, but the shock had, at least mostly, sufficiently that she’d become increasing aware of and uncomfortable about her nudity.

She supposed the episode with Khan had really brought it home. Right up until he’d caught her and they’d wallowed all over one another in the jungle, her focus had been on everything else—fear, pain, and survival. There hadn’t been anything the least bit sexual about the wrestling match when she’d been trying to get away and he’d been determined to prevent it. She was sure neither one of them had thought beyond that.

And yet, from the moment he’d swung her up into his arms and against his hard

chest, it seemed to put a whole new light on it. She’d not only been abruptly completely conscious of him as a virile, and extremely attractive male—alien or not—but the wrestling match, in retrospect, became almost … like foreplay, as if it had primed her awareness. She suddenly remembered every touch even though she hadn’t consciously been aware of it at the time.

Beyond that, it dawned on her forcefully that her attempted escape had brought her into the limelight, so to speak. Khan had carried her back. Gerek and Adar had been waiting with food and water to tempt her and Teron to treat her injuries. Maybe the other women wouldn’t think anything about it. Maybe, if they’d thought about it at all, they would be sympathetic that she’d suddenly been surrounded by aliens, but she knew damned well if the four males hovering over her had been human men the rest of the women would be contemplating cutting her throat for being the center of attention.

Maybe they would be anyway since the harsh fact was that they were completely

at the mercy of these Hirachi males and the other women would feel threatened in the sense that they’d see it as trying to make points with their new ‘masters’?

It was unreasonable, she thought resentfully. She hadn’t gotten any more

attention than any of the others—just all at one time—but there was nothing really reasonable or fair about survival mode.

Before she could think of a polite way to decline, a shadow fell over the two of them. Even as she looked up, she was hit with an avalanche of fabric. She jerked instinctively, expecting pain until her mind identified what she’d been pelted with.

Khan’s expression was as thunderous as it had been the last time she’d seen him.

Having dumped the gowns he’d brought them on the dirt beside her—half on top of her—he pivoted and stalked toward the other side of the compound.

Teron twisted around to stare at his back.

Miranda watched him for several moments herself and finally pushed the gowns

off of her that had fallen on top of her. “Uh … my ankle’s a little better now. I think with the wrapping I can hobble down to the water on my own steam. It would probably be better anyway … to keep mobile, you know.”

Teron leaned forward and scooped her up despite her protest. “It will be better if you stay off it as much as possible,” he contradicted her, both his voice and his expression grim.

She slipped her arm around his shoulders, wiggling a little to try to put at least a little distance between herself and his bare chest. She heard him grinding his teeth and flicked a quick look at his face. He was studying her, she discovered, from beneath hooded lids, his golden eyes tumultuous. Chastened, she subsided, realizing abruptly that THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 46

not only had she not succeeded in putting any distance between them, but her wiggling was only making things worse since she was rubbing all over him.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 47

Chapter Five

Teron strode quickly toward the water and plunked Miranda on the sandy soil

near the lazily lapping waves with the air of discarding bad luggage. Straightening without a word, he stalked down the beach and into the water.

“My, it must be nice to be the prom queen,” one of the women commented in a

perfectly audible voice that she’d lowered just enough to give a pretense of not intending to be heard.

It brought Miranda’s focus back instantly from her contemplation of the healer. It was hard to guess which one of the women had made the remark, though. It seemed a good half of them were giving her evil looks. The others were pointedly gazing off into space as if they were alone in the universe.

She’d expected it, and it still unnerved her and pissed her off at the same time.

Deciding to ignore the remark, she shifted down the sand in a sort of crab walk to reach the water, wondering if she should try to bathe off without getting the bandage wet.

There didn’t actually seem to be any way she could accomplish both, however, so she decided to just disregard the binding and focus on bathing.

The water was salty, which seemed to rule out any possibility that it could be anything but an ocean. It occurred to her after a few minutes that she’d simply assumed it was water and only water, just like she was used to back on Earth, and that it could have any sort of chemicals in it that could be toxic to her—to humans. It didn’t seem to bother the Hirachi, though, and although they were from an entirely different world, she thought—unless he’d been lying—that the insistence by the lizard-man that humans and Hirachi were closely related genetically must mean that what was alright for one was alright for the other.

That was probably dangerous thinking, but she didn’t know much about science.

Genetics, she understood, on the forensics end, at least. Beyond the narrow scope of science directly related to her job, though, she didn’t know a hell of a lot, and didn’t even remember much of what she’d learned in school. It had taken all she could do to memorize the elemental table, the names of the planets and moons in her own solar system—basic science—and she hadn’t had any use for it since so she hadn’t retained a hell of a lot.

The salt stung, which was what had brought about her sudden awareness of and