Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan Page 5

  “I am curious about something, Ailyn,” she said as he lowered her to the ground.

  “What?” he asked. He was haphazardly braiding his long hair. He frowned. “Would you cut this for me when we go back to the cave?”

  “No,” she stated emphatically then continued speaking as though that matter was settled. “Why do you keep to yourself up here? Didn’t you get enough solitude when you were on Riezell-Nine?”

  “But it gets in the gods-be-damned way, ionúin,” he complained.

  “If you cut yours, I’ll cut mine.”

  “No!” he nearly shouted. “You’ll do no such thing! I love your hair.” He reached out to touch it in the moonlight. The glow from the heavenly body overhead seemed to catch in her white tresses and gave her a mystical look that turned his cock hard as stone.

  “Then don’t mention cutting yours again,” she warned. She tugged on his braid. “I find it very sexy.” Before he could argue anymore, she ran out into the stream, laughing.

  Ailyn watched her backstroking her way through the water and closed his eyes.

  “Ehemann!” she protested as she felt her clothing vanish.

  He opened his eyes and grinned at her. “You don’t need them in there,” he said then dropped his breechclout to dive in after her.

  She whooped and struck out in the stream, swimming as fast as she could but she was no match for him even if it had been over twenty years since he’d been an aquatic champion. He easily overtook her and wrapped his arms around her, bringing her up against his naked body, his hard cock sliding between her legs so she was straddling that powerful rod.

  “When it is safe to thrust into you, ionúin,” he said, “you are going to make me one very happy man.”

  He was supporting them in the water, his powerful legs scissoring to keep them afloat but she clamped her thighs tightly around his shaft and ground her hips against his.

  “You have no idea, ehemann,” she whispered, and slanted her mouth over his. She thrust her tongue deeply into his mouth and rubbed her bare breasts against his chest.

  Pure, electric lust drove straight through Ailyn Harmattan. He had many years of forced celibacy to catch up on and with one potent kick of his legs, he shot them backward toward the shore. His hunger was like a living beast ripping at him with unsheathed claws. He came out of the water, fell to his back with his lady still clinging to him and flipped her over so she was lying beneath him.

  “You are an evil woman, Shanee,” he said in a deep, husky voice.

  “And you are…” she began, but his lips were on her breast and his teeth were nipping at her nipple and she became like warm honey, flowing beneath him with her legs spread wide in invitation.

  Ailyn’s body was between her thighs, his cock bent down along her slit but he knew better than to take her. She was highly fertile and just one errant drop of his sperm would impregnate her. He knew it as surely as he knew he was about to explode to have her. Even the top of his head felt as though it were about to burst open.

  He released her nipple and licked his way down her chest, her belly, her abdomen, until he could pluck at her nether hairs with his teeth.

  “You are beyond evil, ehemann,” she accused. “You are malevolent!” Her fingers dove into his thick hair. “Do it, Ailyn. Do it!”

  Although she was arching her hips up to him, he shook his head. As much as he wanted—needed—to thrust into her warm sheath, he would not. It was sheer torment and his cock burned so fiercely it was painful but he would deny them both.

  For now.

  Shanee shuddered as his lips closed over her clit. His tongue was laving it and she was squirming, grabbing handfuls of the loose sand beneath her, her heels digging into the mud for they were barely out of the water. As his tongue dragged along her folds, swirled over her aching flesh, she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

  He was poised between her legs and looked up at her, the moonlight lovingly caressing his handsome face. “Would you like to see true malevolence, little Amazeen?” he drawled.

  The Primary Riezell Guardian lifted her head to look down at him. There was something so primal in his gaze, so possessive, that she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. “Ailyn?” she questioned.

  Very deliberately he thrust his index finger inside her then his middle finger. He swiveled his fingers until he could touch that fleshy pad he sought within her. She was keenly aware of his other hand beneath her rump and when he slowly insinuated a finger into her anus, she nearly shot up from the ground.

  “Ailyn!” she cried out, and she heard him laugh a second before his lips closed on her clit.

  There was no way to describe the things he was doing to her, Shanee thought. Her body was flaming, her womb jerking. The ripples of pleasure were so intense, so concentrated, all she could do was lift her hips and moan.

  In and out his fingers and thumb went as he suckled that swollen bud where all sensation was gathering. She bore down on his hand—impaling her lower body on his fingers—and her fingers speared through his hair to hold his head to her cunt. He was stroking that spongy spot inside her and causing such unbelievable pleasure she thought she would fragment. Powerful, forceful spasms began high up in her channel then shot downward in a wave that had her screaming her release.

  Ailyn lapped at the sweetness that flowed from his lady’s cunt and ground his stony erection into the wet ground. He came at the same moment she did though it shamed him to do so. He would have preferred having been inside her sweet channel.

  Half in and half out of the stream, he lay there with his cheek pressed to Shanee’s belly. He was striving to get his ragged breathing under control as her hands smoothed his wet hair.

  They lay like that for a long while. She was staring up with wonder at the moon above them and he was looking at the dark jungle beyond. When he spoke, his warm breath fanned over her naked hip.

  “At first,” he said, “when we were brought to Theristes, I couldn’t get enough of being with the people here. It had been so long since I’d spoken face-to-face with any one and I was eager to learn about them, their worlds, how they had adapted to becoming Reapers. I was so excited I don’t think I slept all that much those first few days but then the novelty wore off.”

  His fingers were still inside her and he lay there a bit longer just feeling her pulse beating through the softness. Gently he released his intimate hold on her and brought his arm up to lie over her thigh.

  “One day I realized I had had enough company and I ventured out into the jungle as another of us had done. I spent the entire day just sitting by a little pond and watching the monkeys playing tag in the branches overhead. When I came back that evening Tariq sought me out and asked me to walk with him.”

  “Had he been worried about you?”

  “No,” he replied. “He knew what was happening inside me. He’d spent over fifty years in Cell Two. He understood. He told me that when Cair Ghrian had brought him back to Theristes, he’d undergone the same manic desire to be constantly with his people but then had come the day when he needed to go off on his own. Thankfully Bahiya understood and allowed him his space.”

  “A wise woman,” she said.

  “He told me if I wanted to spend some time alone that was my right. I could go off and find a place of my own and know that there would be no bars, no locked doors to keep me in that place. I would have freedom to go and come as I liked with no one to deny me.”

  “And so you found the cave.”

  “That first night in the cave, I realized that all my life I’d been imprisoned in one way or another,” he said. “When I was a child, I was kept in the nursery away from my parents—most especially my mother—and when I was old enough to walk and talk, I was sent to my grandparents who were wonderful people but my grandmother was so afraid something would happen to me that there were always guards around me watching every move I made. When I went to the military academy, it was like being in prison. You were told
when to get up, when to eat, when to bathe, when to go to bed. Every facet of your life is controlled by the school. Fleet Academy was worse yet and even after I had a modicum of freedom on my father’s ship, I wasn’t free to come and go as I pleased and I was answerable for everything I did, every decision I made—right or wrong—and if that decision did not meet with my father’s approval, I was punished for it.” He shrugged. “I was in a prison there too, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “It must have been liberating in the cave.”

  “I found peace there,” he said. “When I’d get lonely for company, I’d trek across the mountain to the village, spend a few hours or days and then come back. There is another man who visits me but he comes very rarely. I was as content as I knew how to be but…”

  “But something was missing,” she said.

  “And now I know what it was.”

  She said nothing for a long while and when she finally spoke, she felt the tension gathering in his body.

  “I will have to go back to Riezell, ehemann,” she said. “General Strom gave me a month’s leave that started from the day I arrived here. He will expect me to return. I won’t be free of my duty for another two years.”

  “Can’t you resign your commission?” he asked. “Ruan Cosaint’s lady as well as Cair Ghrian’s left the Guardians. Why can’t you?”

  Shanee tucked her lower lip between her teeth. She didn’t know how to explain to him that it was her destiny to be a Riezell Guardian, that she had given up much just to be allowed the opportunity to try out for the elite assignment. She was a warrioress and that was what gave her life meaning.

  He pushed up from the ground and moved so he was sitting beside her. “You like the danger,” he accused. “The adrenaline rush of being a Guardian.”

  “It’s more than that,” she said, also sitting up. The ground was getting cold and a light breeze had sprung up to chill her. She wrapped her arms around her bare breasts.

  Without a blink of his eyes, he waved his hand and a black shirt and britches appeared to cover her flesh. Another wave and he was clad once more in a breechclout.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. She raised her knees and laid her head down on them. “Can I tell you why I don’t want to give up being a Guardian?”

  “You can tell me anything,” he said, but she could hear the hurt in his voice.

  “How much do you know about Amazeen?” she asked.

  “Very little,” he said then cast her a glance. “I was surprised you had both breasts. I’d heard your people took off one.”

  Shanee nodded. “Most do,” she said. “If you are right-handed, it would be the right breast and the other way around if you’re left-handed. It is considered expedient in the use of a bow.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “Makes sense.”

  “It is left up to each woman if she wants to have it done. I didn’t. I knew I wanted to be a warrioress but I knew my fighting would be with dagger, laser or crossbow and with a crossbow, you don’t have to worry about getting your tit caught in the string.”

  “Are you good with those weapons?” he asked quietly.

  “I am an expert with those weapons,” she replied. “My mother saw to it. She is the defense queen.”

  He nodded again as though that information had been expected.

  “Amazeen do not like to truck in the affairs of other worlds,” she said, digging her bare toes into the sand. “We keep mainly to ourselves although there are other female groups with whom we interact.”

  “Like the Hell Hags and the Multitude,” he said. “My mother belongs to the Multitude.”

  “I thought as much. She has that air about her,” his lady commented.

  “So how did you get permission to join the Riezell Guardians?” he asked.

  Shanee looked out across the stream. “I didn’t get permission,” she said. “I left and cannot return. As far as my tribe is concerned, I am dead. I became an outcast when I stole my mother’s Fiach runabout and journeyed to Riezell.”

  “Did being a Guardian mean that much to you that you would throw away your heritage?” he queried.

  “It was more than that,” she said. “I had very strong feelings about the Border Wars. For the most part Amazeen stayed out of the conflict though we sided with the Alliance. Had my mother ever gotten the chance, she would have taken Ryden Bakari captive. She is very enamored of the Burgon.”

  Ailyn smiled. “He has his problem with women, doesn’t he?” He nudged his chin toward the mountain. “There are over a hundred women here from his seraglio. He never laid a hand to a single one of them but they speak of him as though he were a veritable god.”

  “My mother and her sister think he is,” she told him. “You were Coalition captured by the Alliance yet you went with Rory Quinn and the others to fight for the Burgon.”

  “I admire Ryden Bakari. Had it not been for him, we might all still be locked in con cells on R-9. He not only put an end to the making of new Reapers, he gave us our freedom. Like all the others, I owed him. When his family was massacred by the New Coalition, I felt I should help out of respect for Bakari.”

  “He deserves that respect and allegiance,” she said.

  “So you wanted to make a difference in the outcome of the war,” he said. “How did you wind up in Riezell then if you were…?” He stopped, blinked and gave her an astonished look. “You were sent there by the Alliance.”

  She cocked one shoulder. “I was killing two birds with one stone as I saw it. I was aiding the Alliance and I was joining the Guardians. Life was beginning to turn as I wanted it to.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  She met his gaze. “You can come back to Riezell with me,” she suggested.

  “To be your kept man?”

  Shanee frowned. “No, as my husband. You don’t have to let your mother know you’re there.”

  “There is no way under heaven or above hell that she wouldn’t find out, ionúin,” he said. “Nothing happens on that planet that her spies aren’t privy to.”

  “Even so, you don’t have to see her. Primä One and Primä Two wouldn’t allow anyone into my quarters without your direct consent.”

  “Primä One and Primä Two?”

  “My cybots,” she answered. “They had been assigned to me by General Morrison when I was sent after Rory Quinn to arrest him and when Morrison decided to off himself, I asked for permanent custody of P1 and P2. There was some finagling but the ’bots are mine.” She laughed. “I’ve reprogrammed them and they are as loyal to me as if I had given birth to them. They’re my babies.”

  “Class 10s, huh?” He drew in a long breath. “That’s seven feet of pure power. There was one on the Tiogar’s ship and I stayed well away from it. They only had Class 2s when I graduated Fleet Academy. Those things scare me.”

  Shanee made a rude sound with her lips. “As if anything could scare a Reaper,” she said then winced at labeling him such since he’d asked her not to.

  “There is one thing that every Reaper is scared shitless of,” he said.

  “Other than water and fire?”

  “Well, aye,” he corrected himself. “But you can stay the hell away from fire and water can be overcome. This can’t.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ghorets,” he said.

  Instinctively Shanee glanced down at the ground, half expecting to see one of the three-foot-long silver and green vipers with florescent blue venom—the bite from which could kill a human in the blink of an eye.

  “There are no snakes on Theristes,” he told her. “Lizards, but no snakes and the lizards aren’t venomous.”

  “I don’t think there is a humanoid alive who isn’t terrified of ghorets,” she said with a shudder. “Their bite can’t kill you though, can it, like it can the rest of us?”

  “No, but I’m told you will wish you could die after being bitten by one. Tariq said when he first arrived on R-9 and they began experimenting on him, they put
a juvenile ghoret in his cell to see what would happen when it bit him. He was sick for days afterward. He said if it had been a full-grown specimen, he would have been much sicker and the illness longer-lasting.”

  “You very neatly changed the subject, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “I’m not going back to Riezell ever again, Shanee,” he said.

  “But, Ailyn…”

  “No,” he said, and the word left no doubt in her mind that it was final.

  Chapter Four

  Elspeth Harmattan-Jost could barely breathe as she lay in her huge four-poster bed and stared out at the snow falling gently over the gardens of her new husband’s estate. Her head throbbed brutally and as she lifted a hand that shook worse each day with the palsy that was killing her, the simple action seemed to take all her waning energy.

  “What can I do, Mother?” Felix asked, his eyes filled with worry. “The Riezell Guardian has gone after Ailyn. Please try to hang on until he gets here.”

  Giving her youngest son a faint smile, Elspeth closed her eyes. “Pray he arrives in time, Felix.”

  Realizing his mother had slipped once more into the slumbers that claimed her more frequently and for longer periods of time, Felix hung his head. He had taken leave from the new military transport to which he’d been assigned to be with his ailing mother, though there didn’t appear to be anything he could do for her. Much of the time she preferred her privacy and would not allow even his stepfather into their bedchamber.

  “She is fading fast,” the vice-counselor had told Felix. “I have been on the horn every day with Command Central but there’s been no word from Iphito.”

  “She would only have reached Theristes in the last day or so, Father,” Felix reminded the man, almost choking on the title his mother insisted he give Jost.

  “I expected daily reports!”

  “Reports of what?” Felix had countered. “What the Amazeen was doing on board the LRC? What good is that?”

  The vice-counselor had cursed and then stomped out of the room. He cared as much for Felix as the young man did for him and therefore there was no love to lose between them. If anything, Felix hated Jost almost as much as he did his oldest brother.