Cyberevolution Book One: The Awakening: Fifty Shades of Dark Kaitlyn O'Connor by Kaitlyn O'Connor, Kimberly Zant, Marie Morin, Stacey St.James, Goldie McBride (24)

"Then it must have been pleasure."

Seth looked hopeful again. "You think?"

Niles frowned.  "You did not interpret the screaming as pleasure?"

Seth frowned.  "I was certain it was ...," he hedged.

"But?"

Seth wrestled with his reluctance to admit that he was not certain, in fact had finally concluded that he had not given her any pleasure at all, and the vague hope that his logic was faulty and Niles would arrive at a different conclusion.  In truth, he had thought for a time that he had fried both his logic circuits and his biological brain because neither seemed to be working just as they ought.  "She seemed in a very great hurry to leave when I had finished," he finally said.

Surprise flickered through Niles, but he considered it thoughtfully.  "I do not find anything in my data to suggest that behavior to be an anomaly.  You pleasured her.  She was finished.  She left."

"My data says that also," Seth said slowly. "It did not seem ... right, however.  I felt pleasure.  I also felt a desire to sex her again."

"At once?" Niles asked in disbelief.  "Why?  The swelling did not go down?"

"It did, but it came back almost at once.  And it has been far worse since."

Dismay flickered through Niles but anger, as well.  He had thought that he might feel pleasure and it pissed him off that he had not even had the chance to discover whether he would or not and Seth was complaining because he had!  "That is fucked up!  You are saying it does not help to have the sex?"

Seth sent him a speculative look.  A look of cunning flickered across his features for a moment before he could mask it with a look of concern.  "It makes the swelling worse.  You should not do it."

Something about his expression instantly made Niles suspicious.  "If it is worse after, then why do you want to do it again?"

"I did not say that I did."

"You said exactly that!" Niles snapped.  "You said that you immediately felt a desire to sex her again!"

"Then," Seth clarified.  "Later, when I had had time to consider the situation, I realized that it only made things worse and that I should not do it again ... unless, of course, Danika asks.  I would not want to say no if it will help her."

That brought to mind the question Niles had wanted to ask before and, rather than pursuing the truth in the face of the pack of lies Seth seemed determined to feed him, he asked.  "She asked you to sex her?"

The question caught Seth off guard.  Truthfully, he could not recall how it had come about and he had been struggling to recall it so that he could convince her to allow him to sex her again.  "No," he responded before it occurred to him that it would probably not be wise to admit it.

Outrage flickered through Niles, although, truthfully, he thought he would have been just as angry if Seth had told him that Danika had asked since she had not asked him.  "You asked her?" he demanded.

"No." He had thought about it--a very great deal--but there was nothing in his data to suggest that that was acceptable.

Niles gaped at him, certain he must be lying.  "If she did not ask and you did not ask, how did it come about?"

He did not know!  If he knew he would have done it again!  He was not about to admit that, however.   Instead, he shrugged. 

Niles surged to his feet.  "You are saying you do not know?  I do not believe that!  You just will not say because you know you did not please her and you are afraid that she will allow me to fuck her and not you!"

When Danika returned some fifteen minutes later with the chow she'd gone to fetch it was to discover Seth and Niles on the ground.  Seth had Niles in a headlock.  "Will you guys knock it off!  What is with you lately?" 

Chapter Sixteen

Danika's first inkling that Reuel had implemented his rescue/retrieval operation was when she returned to base camp and discovered that half the ships were missing.  She stopped dead in her tracks and surveyed the compound again, thinking the ships had simply been moved for some reason, struggling with the thought that a rogue faction among them had stolen the ships.  At the same time that was running through her mind, she wondered how they could have taken off without her having heard the departure--or Seth or Niles. 

Without a battle, for that matter, that would have made enough noise to bring everyone from their guard posts.

Their post was deep enough in the jungle that they couldn't hear anything going on at base camp, but that was because none of the work being done at the camp produced a great deal of noise.  The ship engines should have made enough noise for her to hear it, especially the noise three ships made taking off.

She spotted several women among those working, however, and she thought that circumstance eliminated the possibility that any of the cyborgs had rebelled and taken the ships.  The only source of contention, as far as she knew, was the women the cyborgs had captured. 

Thankfully, despite the momentary fear that the ship Dane was in was among those that had disappeared, she discovered very quickly that it was still parked where it had been the last time she'd made the trek to camp to get food.  Hurrying toward it once she got over her initial shock, she jogged up the gangplank and moved briskly toward the sickbay, arriving breathless and on edge. 

She got her second jolt then.  The gurney Dane had occupied was empty. 

Despite the fear that had been fluttering in the back of her mind from the time he'd been wounded, the shock of seeing the bed empty was so profound she couldn't move for many moments, couldn't think.  It almost seemed as if every process shut down.  The burning need to breathe kick-started heartbeat and brain function, but so many thoughts and fears collided in her mind at the same time that she still couldn't process what had happened and arrive at any logical conclusions. 

The sickbay was completely empty.  With no sign of the medic-borg, she couldn't even think who to ask about Dane or where to start looking.  She finally turned on her heel and left.  She had almost reached the gangplank again when it occurred to her that Dane might have recovered enough to be moved to the crew quarters.  She didn't believe it.  His condition had still been serious the last time she'd checked on him.

But she wanted to believe it.

Struggling with the urge to simply collapse and let the grief threatening to overwhelm all reason gain the upper hand, she turned from the gangplank and hurried toward the stair to the hold.  She nearly lost her footing in her rush to reach the crew quarters, but the near disaster didn't prompt her to slow down.  Instead, she simply leapt over the last few stairs when she'd caught her balance, landing hard enough in the lower corridor to rouse the sole occupant.

He sat up in his bunk. 

For a handful of moments, they merely stared at one another in surprise.  Abruptly, Danika raced down the corridor toward him.

"Oh!  Thank gods!" Danika gasped as she neared him.  "Dane!  You're better!  I thought ...."   She couldn't get the rest out.  Feeling her forced smile collapse and her face crumple with incipient tears, she flung her arms around him and burrowed her face against his shoulder. 

Dane curled his arms around her, dragged her into the bunk and rolled, wedging her between himself and the bulkhead/wall of the ship.  She didn't get the chance to pelt him with the questions that filled her mind, fighting for dominance.  Almost before she'd settled good, he found her lips and planted his mouth solidly over hers. 

Welcome warred with doubt even as warmth filled her, but she was so glad to know he'd recovered when she'd feared he'd died that she didn't make any attempt to dissuade him.  She kissed him back with enthusiasm.

Her reception seemed to inspire him.  The doubts swarmed into her mind again when she felt his hand moving over her in exploration, thrusting her T-shirt up to massage her breasts and her briefs down to explore her mound.  He'd been at death's door only the day before.  He shouldn't be considering what he was clearly intent on.

She shouldn't let him!   

Maybe he just wanted a thorough greeting with a little heavy petting, though, to remind her she'd offered sexual recreation?

She forced herself to relax.  She'd just point out that they needed to wait until he was more recovered when he paused for breath, she decided.

"Dane!" she gasped when he broke the kiss.

He shifted downward and covered the breast he'd unearthed from her T-shirt, depriving her of breath for several moments.  By the time he'd thoroughly finessed it, she'd forgotten what she'd meant to say.  She struggled to recapture the thought while he searched for the breast wedged between his chest and the mattress.  She'd almost captured it when he gave up on the breast that seemed to be out of reach and returned to the first. 

Reuel's order to be discrete popped into her mind when Dane grasped the waist of her briefs and yanked her panties to her knees.  She managed to lift one eyelid far enough to scan the crew quarters within sight of Dane's bunk before he dragged her under him and planted his mouth over hers again.

She was so drunk with the endorphins flooding her brain by the time he broke the second kiss that she'd not only lost all coordination, the only objection she could think of when she felt the probe of his cock along her thigh was that she was bound at the knees by her briefs.  She managed to draw one knee up high enough to shift the binding to one ankle as he heaved upward in the bunk to align the head of his cock with the mouth of her sex.  She heard the dull clang of something hard hitting something metallic.

Almost before it could register in her mind that it was Dane's head making contact with the bunk frame, he levered himself up far enough to drag her down the bunk, planted his cock solidly against her cleft, and began thrusting.  For several moments, all she could feel was the stretch and burn of the skin in her nether regions.  Frustration filled her.  She wiggled her hips, trying to realign his cock and then struggled to reach between them when that didn't seem to do the trick.  Abruptly, he broke impasse and speared into her. 

A mixture of relief and pleasure replaced her frustration.  Coiling her free leg around his hips, she planted her heel in his ass and gave him a few nudges for inspiration.  He grunted, digging his toes into the mattress and shoving harder--hard enough to push her up the mattress several inches before her lubrication coated his shaft sufficiently to allow him to hit bottom.  It knocked the breath from her in an inelegant grunt when he did.

Heat wafted through her when he retraced his path and thrust again, however, and it was a lovely heat.  Making a sound of pleasure in her throat, she struggled to encourage him by curling her hips to meet him with each successive thrust.  She gave up after a very few moments, though, when she realized his weight had her pinned so tightly to the mattress beneath her that she had no room to maneuver.  Instead, she simply curled her hips until his rhythmic thrusts were pounding against her g-spot, driving her toward culmination so quickly that she was torn between the desire to reach it and the equal desire to hold it off to enjoy it longer. 

It wasn't a matter of choice, she discovered.  He drove her to the brink so quickly, she was dizzy with the climb, and pitched over it before she'd hardly realized she was teetering on the edge.  She gasped, groaned at the intensity of her climax. 

Thankfully Reuel's warning echoed in her mind before she could express her joy more loudly.  She burrowed her face against Dane's shoulder to muffle her groans. 

Even the pillow Dane had buried his face in failed to muffle his hoarse roar of repletion when he reached his crisis, however. 

Struggling to catch her breath in the aftermath, still pinned down by Dane's dead weight, Danika lifted her head with an effort to scan the crew quarters again.

The medic-borg, she discovered, was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring directly at the two of them.

"Oh fuck!" she muttered, allowing her head to hit the mattress again.  At least they'd only had an audience of one!

Somehow, she didn't think that was Reuel's idea of discretion, though.

"If you are recovered enough to fuck," the medic-borg said coolly, "you are recovered enough to return to duty."

Dane struggled to push himself up and turn on his side and promptly rolled off the bunk and onto the floor, landing with a loud crash and a groan--this time of pain rather than pleasure.

Snatching at the blanket to cover herself, Danika uttered a gasp of dismay and shifted to look down at Dane in consternation.

He stared back at her for a moment and finally lifted his head and glared at the medic-borg.

The medic-borg glared back at him.

"I told you I was ready to return to duty," Dane said sullenly.

"And now I am convinced!" the medic-borg retorted and then turned on his heel and departed.

* * * *

Danika was still weak-kneed as she and Dane made their way through the jungle to their  guard post.  She could well imagine Dane was in a good bit worse shape and she divided her time during the first part of the trek between fondly recalling the intimate moments they'd shared and berating herself for doing something so stupid when Dane, regardless of his superior genetics and amazing recuperation, shouldn't have been exercising his love muscle. His movements made it clear that he was still in pain and still weak from his ordeal.  Every time he looked at her, however, he grinned so broadly that she couldn't be entirely regretful about it--even if it had been stupid. 

It occurred to her about the time she realized they were nearing the guard post that both Seth and Niles were liable to take it badly if they figured out why Dane was in such a great mood, though, and she searched her mind for a distraction. 

"I don't suppose you know where the other ships are?" she asked.

Dane's smile vanished.  "Reuel took a group of volunteers back to Xeno-12 to search for survivors."

Danika hated to see Dane's light mood vanish so abruptly, even though she'd thought it would be a very bad thing for them to arrive at post with Dane grinning like the cat that ate the canary.  "Oh.  I hadn't thought about that.  I guess I should have since he said that was first priority--getting the ships ready for a mission."  She'd had other things on her mind, though.  "I still don't know why I didn't hear them leave."

Dane stared at her a moment as if wondering himself and finally shrugged.  "They left in the middle of the night when they thought it least likely they would be heard, or spotted even if they were heard leaving."

She supposed that explained why she hadn't heard.  She supposed she'd been asleep, but not only was it hard to accept that she'd slept that soundly, it was unnerving to think she had.  It also irritated her that neither Seth nor Niles had thought to mention it.

"I don't suppose you know when they'll be back?"

Again, Dane shrugged.  "Reuel said if they had not returned in four days, by this planet's cycle, that we should not look to see them again--perhaps at all.  We are under orders to disperse."

Danika stopped abruptly in her tracks, gaping at him.  "Disperse to where?" she demanded in disbelief.

"He did not have suggestions.  He merely issued the standing order that, if we were attacked by the Confederation, we are to disperse and do our best not to draw attention to ourselves and to blend in with the humans as best we can until the time when he can find a place for us and gather us together again.  We do not have the means or the resources to war with the humans even if that was our desire.  Munitions are very low.  We will have to raid to gather even enough for a running defense.

"Here we have found shelter and food, but there are no weapons or munitions to be had unless we can take a human base or one belonging to the Andorians."

Danika stared at him in dismay and dawning anger.  "Exactly when were we supposed to be informed?"

Dane looked disconcerted.  "I was there to hear--as were the others who were off duty from watch.  We were to inform those who could not be there because they were stationed on guard posts."  

Danika frowned thoughtfully as they resumed their walk.  "It didn't look to me like very many had gone with him."

"He took only enough to man the ships since he had hope of filling them with survivors."

"Good thinking!" Danika said dryly, struggling with her anger.  "But that leaves us with way more people than the ships that are left can carry.  That means all of us can't disperse--not from here, anyway.  I don't suppose he had a suggestion for that?"

Dane looked surprised.  "He asked for volunteers to draw the Confederation away--that is the plan if they come here to look for us.  Those who volunteered will take the ships up and flee in different directions, in the hope of convincing the Confederation that all have left.  Also in the hope that they can outrun them and survive themselves.  I did not volunteer our squad because you had said that we would stay here and build a homestead."

That speech completely deprived Danika of anything at all to say.  It was one thing to form a hypothetical scenario she realized she'd never actually been serious about and another entirely to find herself stranded on the fucking planet with no damned choice of whether to stay or not!

Her and her big mouth!

Both Seth and Niles seemed to take the whole thing in stride--as if they already knew even before she arrived with Dane and informed them of the orders! 

But then they'd both been awake when the damned ships took off.

She stewed over it while they all settled to eat the food she'd brought from base, discovering it was a lot easier to nurse her anger than to allow the fear churning in her belly and at the back of her mind to take hold. 

How could she possibly have forgotten how damned literal minded they were, she wondered angrily!  How could they not know it was just ... a lame attempt to make herself feel better about the gods awful situation they were in and to cheer Dane up?

She'd only been trying to put a positive spin on an impossible situation, damn it! Boost morale!  Especially hers!

She only emerged from her internal rage when the men rose and left her.

Insensitive assholes, she thought angrily!  Couldn't they see she was upset?  But instead of trying to reassure her they'd all looked at her like she was bomb about to explode and withdrawn to a safer distance!

Peace, of a sort, or at least silence, reigned until they heard someone approaching from the direction of base camp near dusk.  Immediately alert despite the fact that the direction indicated a 'friendly' rather than a hostile, they all took up defensive positions.

The rattling of the brush stopped while whoever it was was still some distance away.  "It is I, Basil!" the intruder called out.

It took Danika a few minutes to figure out who the hell Basil was.

It didn't take the guys even a nano-second.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Seth, Niles, and Dane all growled, almost in unison.

Having been hailed, it didn't seem to bother Basil that it wasn't a welcome.  He continued his approach.  "I have come to join your squad," he said cheerfully when he'd reached them.

Danika merely gaped at him in disbelief.

Seth, Niles, and Dane bristled like cur dogs. 

"You are not welcome!" Seth responded.

"We have a squad already," Niles retorted.

"We do not need another," Dane added.

Basil's expression hardened, his features taking on a mulish look.  "I have brought supplies--in the event that they are needed."

"We can collect our own gods damned supplies!" Seth growled.

"Not if you do not return immediately," Basil retorted, "and very likely not then.  They began to disperse the supplies on hand and no one from your squad was there so I gathered our share."

"There is no 'our'!" Seth growled threateningly.  "You are not a member of our squad!"

"Wait a minute!" Danika snapped, surging to her feet.  "What do you mean they started dispersing supplies?"

Basil set his burden down.  "Reuel left orders to disperse."

Danika gaped at him in outrage.  "But ... that was only if they didn't make it back in the time he'd set, damn it!  It hasn't even been a full day since they left!"

Basil shrugged.  "If they return as planned, there will be no problem.  The supplies that we have will be safe.  We discussed the situation, however, and concluded that we could not be certain that Reuel did not lead his group into an ambush.  If that was the case, then we would not have four days.  We might not have even one.  We decided it would be best to disperse supplies now so that we would not lose them if there was an attack on our base camp."

Seth, Dane, and Niles all exchanged a speaking look. 

Danika's suspicions were immediately aroused.  "That wasn't part of the orders that Reuel gave before he left?"

"Not precisely," Dane responded after a brief hesitation.

"What do you mean 'not precisely'?" Danika growled.

Dane shrugged.  "He said that we must be prepared for an attack in the event the Confederation had already surmised that we had come here and that we must act in our best interests in his absence."

Basil nodded.  "And we discussed probabilities and decided that it would be best to disperse supplies in his absence."

It was a logical decision and Danika was still pissed off. 

Under the circumstances, she didn't think they should be too hasty about running Basil off.  He had considered the good of their group, after all, and collected supplies for them.  She pointed that out.

Seth scowled at her.  "He was not considering the good of our squad!  He has nothing more on his mind than fucking you!  We do not need what he has brought!  Dane!  Niles!  Return to base camp and collect our share of the supplies!"

Danika gaped at him. 

Dane and Niles both looked torn between following his orders and staying long enough to run Basil off.  After a brief hesitation, however, they headed toward camp at a lope.

Shrugging, Basil looked around for a prop, leaned against a tree trunk, folded his arms, and settled to wait. 

Seth narrowed his eyes at him.

Danika emerged sufficiently from her shock to feel the beginnings of anger.  "Just what the fuck do you mean by that, Seth?" she demanded.

Seth flicked a stunned look at her.  "By what?" he asked blankly.

"That nasty comment!" Danika growled.

Seth frowned, obviously reviewing the comments he'd made.  "I did not make a nasty comment," he said after a moment.

"Oh, yes, hell you did!  You said all Basil had on his mind was fucking me!" she snapped.

He looked surprised.  "That is a nasty comment?"

Danika glared at him.  "It implies an insult!"

Seth stared at her.  "I meant to insult the bastard!  I meant to provoke a fight, but he acknowledged that he is a bastard and sees no reason to defend his honor!"

"You insulted my honor?" Basil growled, instantly bristling.  Surging away from the tree, he stalked toward Seth.   "I will knock your head off!"

He barely managed to get the threat out before Seth sprang.  The two of them collided with an impact that Danika felt certain could be heard for miles.  Before she could gather her wits, they were in the midst of a battle of titans--slinging punches at each other, slinging each other around.   When they flew past her, bumping her hard enough to knock her off her feet, she scrambled for cover.  "Stop it!  Stand down this instant!" she bellowed at them. 

Either they didn't hear her or they weren't inclined to follow any orders at the moment that excluded pounding on one another. 

Realizing there was nothing she could do but get out of the way, Danika looked around for a safer place to watch and finally climbed the tree she'd taken cover behind.  It occurred to her that firing a shot over their heads might get their attention, but she thought they were already making enough racket to get the attention of any enemies within miles.  Beyond that, she had very little ammo left.  Wasting it in an attempt to break up the brawl--which might or might not work--didn't seem like a good idea.

Settling on a branch, she waited for them to finish venting.  It took them a lot longer than she'd expected it would.  They were still fighting when Dane and Niles returned. 

Seeing she had reinforcements, Danika called out to them.  "Make them stop!"

Dane and Niles looked up at her when she spoke and then shared a look.

"The bastard was right," Dane announced.  "We could not get much.  Most of the supplies had already been dispersed."

"Well shit!" Danika exclaimed, instantly distracted.  "What do we do now?"

Niles shrugged.  "We have the supplies that the bastard brought."

"There will be plenty for us for weeks once Seth sends him on his way," Dane agreed, nodding.

Danika gaped at him in outrage.  "That's ... that isn't fair at all!  He brought the stuff!"

Seth and the bastard--Basil--she discovered, had managed to beat each other to a standstill.  Both of them were still on their feet, but it seemed obvious to her that they were having trouble finding the strength to continue to swing at each other.  She climbed down from the tree.  "That settles it.  We'll have to take him as part of the squad."

Dane and Niles exchanged another look and Dane started forward.  "I will beat the bastard a while.  I am not tired."

"Don't you dare!" Danika growled.  "You just got well enough to get out of sickbay!"

Dane stopped in his tracks and sent her an indignant look.  "I was well enough to fuck!"

Niles sent him a look of outrage.  "You fucked her?" he snarled.

Dane gaped at him.  "She said that she would sex me as soon as I was well enough."

Niles punched him in the belly.

"Don't you dare punch him ... there!  Gods damn it!  He just recovered from internal injuries, you asshole!"

Rushing to Dane, who'd doubled over, she examined him fearfully as his knees gave out and then turned to glare at Niles furiously.  Balling her fist up, she punched him in the gut.  Pain exploded in her fist and paralysis went all the way up her arm to her shoulder.

Someone snagged her around the waist and whirled her in a circle.  She saw it was Seth when he set her on her feet. 

His expression hardened when he noticed that she was unconsciously massaging her arm.  He turned back to Niles and punched him on the shoulder.  "You have hurt her, you stupid asshole!"

Niles gaped at him.  "I did not hit her.  She hit me!"

"You should have ducked!" Seth growled angrily, punching his shoulder again.  Returning his attention to Danika, he shook his finger in her face.  "Do not do that!  You will hurt yourself!"

She chomped down on his finger hard enough he snatched it back and gaped at her in disbelief.  "I'm squad leader, gods damn it!  I say he deserves a spot in our unit!  He was watching our backs!  I don't care what motive you think he had for doing it.  He still did it!"

Seth, Dane, and Niles all turned to give Basil a malevolent glare, but after glancing at Danika again, they allowed the tension to ease from them. 

"Anyway, if we do end up stranded here, it's only going to increase our odds of survival with another man in the group."

None of them really looked convinced by the logic of that comment but at least they seemed less inclined to  start another fight.

Deciding the matter was settled, she sent Basil a smile that was a mixture of triumph and welcome.

Basil gave her a roguish look that was only slightly marred by the battering his face had taken from Seth's fists.  "Are you in the fucking mood yet?"

Danika was taken aback for a moment.  "No!" she snarled at him when she recovered from her surprise, planting her hands on her hips.  "I told you I'd let you know, didn't I?"

He looked so crestfallen Danika was almost sorry she'd snapped at him.

She discovered that Seth, Dane, and Niles were looking at her indignantly when she turned around.  "What?"

Niles glowered at Basil.  "When she is in the fucking mood she will let me know because I am a member of this fucking squad and you are not and she has not sexed me yet!"

"Before this gets any more out of hand we need to get one damned thing straight!" Danika snapped.  "I will NOT be spreading my legs any time you guys feel like fucking, because I wouldn't ever get the damned chance to close them again!  When I am in the mood, I'll let you know!  And if you four start pestering me, I'm damned well NOT going to get in the mood!"

Chapter Seventeen

Given the orders Reuel had left, and the supplies they had on hand, Danika thought it best that they hang on to what they could and hunt for food. 

Everyone agreed until they discovered she meant to leave two men on guard and take one with her on the  hunt.  That was immediately vetoed.  Despite the fact that Danika had knowledge and experience in hunting and none of the men did they were united in disagreeing with every argument she made to support her idea. 

As far as they knew, there were still hostiles lurking in the area and they weren't about to let Danika go anywhere with only one man to guard her.

While she appreciated the fact that they wanted to guard her, it not only pissed her off that they refused to simply look upon her as one of the group, but the suspicion that their main concern was about the pussy she was carrying around pissed her off more. 

"Well we can't leave our post unguarded!" she snapped.

They thought that over for a while and then Seth volunteered Basil to return to base and inform them that they were leaving their post to hunt for food.

Basil immediately looked deeply suspicious. 

"When they send someone to take post, we will all go," Seth said coolly.

Danika was also suspicious, mostly because she knew the guys hadn't accepted Basil even if she had and had told them they must, but also because Seth was so careful to look innocent when he made the suggestion.  Finally, she shrugged.  "He's right.  That would be the best way to handle it.  Reuel may have pretty much left us to our own devices here, but we certainly can't leave post without alerting them of the possibility of an attack."

She discovered that neither her suspicions nor Basil's were misplaced when Seth got up not long after Basil disappeared from sight and collected his alien weapons. 

"We were going to wait until he got back," Danika said.

Seth shrugged.  "He has had time to reach base camp and alert them.  He can catch up to us when he returns."

Danika considered objecting again, but the truth was the base was on full alert already due to Reuel's absence.  Beyond that, she thought the outer guard posts were mostly unnecessary since they'd driven the savages out.  They hadn't seen any sign of them since--apparently none of the posts had since they hadn't heard any sounds of an encounter.

Of course that wasn't by any means conclusive evidence that they'd driven the savages away for good.   She didn't think anything short of annihilating them would give them absolute certainty--which meant they were always going to have to be on the lookout for the primitives.

She supposed that was Seth's reasoning, as well, which made her wonder why he'd suggested Basil return to base camp at all since there wasn't actually an officer to report to. 

She dismissed it after a few moments.  Basil could find his way and if he didn't catch up with them, they'd rendezvous on their return.

Truthfully, the news had unnerved her.  She'd entertained a fantasy of putting down roots of some sort and now was looking at the strong possibility of harsh reality and she hadn't seen more than a few acres of the world she could be living on for quite some time.  She didn't just want to check it out.  She needed to--because if she found any nasty surprises, she was going to have a place on one of those damned ships when they left even if they did have to dodge Confederation fighters!

They hadn't had the time to determine much about the vegetation--as in which plants would be edible and which were poison.  And their frenzied activity and the battles they'd engaged in since landing had driven most of the wildlife from the immediate area.  Their supplies weren't going to last long.  She wanted to see what was available and how hard it would be to catch. 

Shelter of some kind was also vitally important.  The night time temperatures weren't survivable in the long term without some kind of shelter and those temperatures could drop even more if it happened that it was summer on Xeno-11. 

There was the cave they'd found, but that place gave her the creeps.  If push came to shove, she would endure staying there rather than freezing to death, but she wanted another option.  There was something about the place that just 'felt' like it was a sacred place to the natives.  She wasn't superstitious, but the natives probably were and if they decided to squat on a place that was sacred ground to the savages they were going to run into trouble really fast.

They followed the larger stream when they headed away from their post.  It was a rushing stream, which meant it made enough noise to mask their progress through the rustling brush at least somewhat.  Unfortunately, that also meant it made it hard for her to hear anything else, too, but although that aspect unnerved her, she figured it was a worthwhile trade off.  They needed to be watchful anyway and the stream would definitely be a place to attract the wildlife. 

They trekked about a quarter of a mile through the jungle before she saw the first sign that she'd been looking for.  She squatted down and examined the prints in the soft soil--small, cloven hooves.  Unless the creature just had dainty feet, she decided it was pretty small.  There were also a good number of tracks, which she thought could indicate some kind of herd animal.

Straightening after a few minutes, she studied the jungle. There wasn't a path.  Disappointed since she thought that probably meant she hadn't discovered a spot they used regularly, she moved on after she'd thoroughly examined the area, watching the ground for other tracks.   The further they went, the more tracks they found.  The cloven hooves appeared to be the most prolific.  Whatever it was that had made them appeared to be abundant. 

There were other tracks here and there, a lot of them smaller, a few that looked like they belonged to much larger animals.  Predators of some kind, she decided, feeling the hair on the back of her neck prickle. 

It was to be expected, of course.  There was always a food chain.  Every living thing made up a link in the cycle.

She just hoped that they could  take top position in that food chain.

She was contemplating calling a rest break when one of the men, Seth, she discovered when she glanced at him, abruptly closed a hand around her upper arm.  She looked at him questioningly as he pulled on her arm in a silent signal to crouch and then followed the direction he indicated with a nod of his head toward the limbs of the trees.

At first, she didn't see anything at all--because she was expecting to see the outline of warriors in the branches, or a predator of a different kind.  What she finally discerned among the branches, however, was regular shapes that weren't nature made. 

There was some sort of structure nestled among the foliage!  When she'd finally figured out what it was that she was looking at, she discovered others--many others.  And vines woven into what looked like swinging walkways or bridges. 

Feeling her heart leap with the threat of danger, she settled lower, straining to discern any movement that couldn't be dismissed as the result of air currents.   Maybe twenty minutes passed.  Danika discovered she was holding her breath and her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that she couldn't hear anything else.

She couldn't believe they'd walked smack into the middle of a fucking village without any idea they were so close to it!

She didn't think they were more than a few miles from the base perimeter they'd marked!

No wonder the damned savages had attacked them so ferociously! They'd settled in their backyard! 

She felt like kicking herself that it hadn't occurred to her that there might be a settlement nearby--because she would've realized that if there was, they would settle close to a water source!

Her muscles were beginning to cramp from the strain when Seth signaled that he and the others were going up for a closer look. 

Danika instantly wanted to veto that plan, but there was no getting around the fact that the village seemed to be abandoned.  They shouldn't have been able to walk right up to it at all.  As fierce as the primitives were, she felt sure they would have had guards posted.

Finally, she nodded.  She was the only one that had a 'real' weapon anyway.  It would be better for her to stay put and watch for any sign of a surprise attack.

Seth, Dane, and Niles 'melted' into the brush with surprising ease.  It surprised the hell out of Danika anyway.  They were a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, but they were like assault tanks--or she'd always pictured them that way.  She hadn't had the opportunity to discover they actually had stealth capabilities. 

Shaking the random thoughts, she focused on scanning the trees for movement.  In a few minutes, the men reached the trunks of the trees and scaled them.  Struggling with the urge to merely watch them, she made another careful sweep while the men moved silently along the overhead branches and ducked into first one hut and then another. 

Instead of feeling the tension begin to ease after they'd checked the first few, it mounted the longer they searched, the sense growing that the savages were waiting in one or more of the huts to attack when the men stumbled upon just the right one.

A faint rustle of sound behind her was the only warning she got of an approach.  The hair on the back of her neck rose even as she swung into action.  A hand clamped down on the barrel of her rifle as she swung to shoot.

"Damn it, Basil!" she growled under her breath.  "You scared the fuck out of me!"

His lips tightened, but he didn't say anything. 

Shaking her fear and anger with an effort, Danika returned her attention to the search in progress just as the men emerged from the last of the huts and climbed down. 

"Deserted," Seth reported when he reached her again, glaring at Basil balefully.  "I see you found your way.  You are a difficult man to lose."

"Don't be provoking!" Danika said tightly.  "You expected him to catch up."

Dane shrugged.  "But we had hope that he would not.  This place looks as if it has been abandoned for some time--days, at least.  I am thinking that they left after we did the sweep."

Niles appeared.  "That seems likely.  I found a trail leading northward.  They had made a very good attempt to cover their back trail, but they were burdened with belongings, very likely their young, as well.  There is a good bit of broken foliage that has had time to die and dry up."

Danika frowned, studying the huts above them speculatively.  "You think they're gone for good?"

Seth shrugged.  "There is no way to determine that.  We do not know their habits.  But they have left nothing that appears to be of any use or value."

"I think I'll go up and check it out," Danika said decisively.

The men looked surprised but they followed her.  She discovered they had climbed up by using vines that lay against the trunks.  Shrugging inwardly with the thought that they should be able to hold her weight if they'd held for the men, she shouldered her weapon, grasped the vine, and basically walked up the vertical climb.

Not that it was easy by any stretch of the imagination.  She didn't have the upper body strength the men had, even though she was extremely fit, and her arms, shoulders, and legs were screaming with the strain by the time she'd made the twenty to thirty foot climb. 

Stopping to rest and massage the ache when she got to the top, she studied the drop and finally concluded that the females were either much stronger than human women, or there was some other way the women and children got up and down. 

She didn't see anything to dispute that first conclusion after exploring the village from end to end.  Clearly the savages were something like primates--not just roughly humanoid--and the females rarely left the safety of the trees and the young less often than that.  It wasn't just accidental that the village could hardly be detected from the ground.  Every effort had been made to insure that it blended with nature.  There were still vines carefully arranged in a number of areas that looked like their purpose was as a safety line for younger, or at least smaller, tribe members. 

The huts had the smell of animal habitation--no surprise when the savages looked and behaved more like animals than higher thinking beings!  They had obvious skills, though, that no dumb animal would have.  The huts were well constructed, very cleverly constructed, actually. They were tight enough they showed no signs of decay from a constant wetting by rain and yet window covers had been fashioned so that they could be raised and lowered for ventilation or to let in light.  They were also surprisingly spacious--probably at least partly because they were completely empty--but she thought the structures must have housed more than one family unit.  There didn't seem to be enough of them to have accommodated the number of warriors they'd already encountered, and killed, let alone women and children unless they did house multiple families. 

Or there was another village nearby.

The location and situation was a good one, Danika decided.  The tree dwellings were high enough to protect from all but climbing predators and even few of the annoying flying, biting insects seemed able to fly so high.  They were cool, even now that they'd reached the heat of the day because of the shade from the tree foliage and also the wind currents.  She thought they'd also be tight enough once the sun went down to keep warmth in. 

She hoped so, at any rate.

"This wouldn't be a bad place if we could get rid of the stench from the savages," Danika said after she'd thoroughly examined everything. 

The men all looked at her doubtfully and she shrugged.  "At least temporarily.  It would beat the hell out of rolling in sleeping bags on the ground.  We don't have any sleepwalkers among us, do we?" she asked jokingly.

The men all looked at her blankly.

"Never mind.  I vote we make this our base if the shit hits the fan.  Let's see if we can find out how close the neighbors are."

They didn't find any sign of another village.  Danika wasn't convinced that that meant there wasn't another one uncomfortably close, but they didn't have time before dark to explore a lot further. 

She was still pleased with the results of their exploration.  She'd seen signs of a fairly abundant food supply and shelter that appealed to her a hell of a lot more than the cave.  All they'd have to do was figure out how to catch the food and fend off the natives if they decided to reclaim their village!

She was exhausted by the time they reached their post again, too tired to comment on the fact that no one had shown up to guard the position while they were gone.  She was sure the men had to be tired, too, and was somewhat resentful that they weren't showing the signs of fatigue she felt, but still grateful when they took over sorting the supplies.  Basil handed out food kits.  She ate mechanically and then curled up in her sleeping bag and passed out. 

Despite the fact that she’d managed to sleep through Reuel’s departure, Danika discovered with relief and a great deal of annoyance, that both her survival instincts and her training were still very much a part of her. 

Something touched her.

She was on her feet and swinging before she was even conscious.

Everyone else was also on their feet and at full alert the moment she sprang into action.

Including Basil, who caught the brunt of her defensive maneuvers.  The pain of contact brought her more fully awake.  “What?” she demanded drunkenly when she realized it was Basil she’d pummeled and not a tree.

“What is it?” Seth growled.

Still too groggy to fully assimilate what was going on herself, Danika looked around at the men surrounding her through blurry, watering eyes, trying to figure out what had happened.  After rolling it around in her mind for several moments, she finally realized what it was that had awakened her from deep sleep. “Something touched me,” she supplied finally.  “I know I didn’t just dream it.”

Seth, Dane, and Niles immediately zeroed in on Basil, narrowing their eyes at him. 

“Basil was on watch,” Seth growled.  “You did not see anything?”

Basil shrugged, his expression a mixture of discomfort, defensiveness, and irritation.  “I did not.  It was I.”

Danika stared at him, trying to assimilate that.  “You what?”  She frowned, realizing finally that he wouldn’t have caught the brunt of her assault if he hadn’t been directly beside her when she’d launched her offensive.  “You touched me?  What the hell for?  Is it my turn to stand watch?”

“I am next in rotation,” Dane ground out. 

Basil shrugged.  “I thought that I would ask if you were in the fucking mood yet.”

Danika gaped at him.  “You woke me to ask?” she demanded disbelievingly.

Niles’ eyes narrowed.  “He did not wake you to ask,” he snarled.  “He thought to catch you off guard and sex you while you were sleeping!”

As if she could sleep through that!

She wouldn’t need to, though, if she was far enough gone by the time she did realize what was going on to have no desire to object.

Danika was awake enough by that time for Niles’ assessment to make complete sense … particularly since she’d had time to realize that the touch that woke her was a hand settling on her breast.  Anger flooded her.  “You scared the piss out of me!  I thought something had crawled into my sleeping bag with me!”

“Something did,” Seth growled.

Much of Danika’s anger melted away as Seth’s attitude finally penetrated her confusion and irritation enough that she realized the guys were more pissed off than she was.  They were going to be pounding on one another if she didn’t diffuse the situation.  She held up a hand.  “It’s Nile’s turn,” she said bluntly, in no condition to try to be more tactful even if she’d felt like it—which she didn’t at the moment.  “I’m not doing you before my guys and I haven’t done Niles.”

‘Her’ guys received that information with mixed feelings.   

Basil wasn’t too happy about it for that matter.  “I am part of your squad now,” he pointed out mulishly.

Danika sighed, glanced around at the men again, and dropped back into her sleeping bag.  “Yes—the key word being now.  Me, Seth, Dane, and Niles have been together since the start and it wouldn’t be fair for you to cut in line.  Seth was first, Dane second, and Niles is next … then you.  And I’m tired and I’m going back to sleep,” she added when she discovered Niles was looking hopeful and Seth and Dane didn’t look any too happy about the arrangements.

* * * *

Everyone was still in a fairly foul mood when they awoke the following morning—including Danika although she’d managed to drop back to sleep fairly quickly after the ‘episode’. 

Except for Niles who still looked to be wavering between hopefulness and resentment that Basil had tried to use guerilla tactics to leapfrog over him and get into her pants before him. 

Danika did her best to ignore the brooding violence in the four men, but she could see that she was going to have to take care of the sexual aggression that was boiling between them before they erupted or nobody was going to be focused on the important project of surviving!

She was aggravated enough, at first, to consider doing the ‘deed’ just to get it over with and shut them up—for a little while, anyway.  Regardless of the fact that she’d acknowledged that the sex thing, while not really what she would consider a chore or a duty, was more in the nature of ‘medicinal’, though, she realized that it damned well wasn’t going to make her happy to consider it in that light or, more importantly, for them to. 

Unfortunately, once she’d reviewed the discussion the night before, it occurred to her that they might take it that way.  She damned sure hadn’t meant it that way!

Her interludes with both Seth and Dane had been spontaneous.  So impulsive, as a matter-of-fact, that both times it had resulted in a good bit of discomfort and embarrassment for her.  She’d thought when the opportunity arose that it would simply happen—and hopefully without the embarrassing aftermath she’d experienced both times before. 

She supposed, after a little thought, that she was just going to have to forego spontaneity, at least this time around, and take the initiative.  Clearly, although neither Seth nor Dane had left anything at all to be desired once it came right down to it, none of the men had the foggiest idea of how to go about seduction!

She toyed with the idea of a three way as they set out, once more on the hunt for food.  On some levels, the idea interested her.  It would be an efficient way to wrap things up, for one thing, and she was always in favor of efficiency.  Then, too, it had a definite kink factor that appealed to her.

She discarded the idea without a lot of reluctance when she’d factored in her aversion of the intimacy between them becoming anything approaching ‘duty’ or ‘chore’, however.  She cared about them.  At least, she cared a lot about her guys.  And she wanted Basil to be a part of her family.  She wouldn’t have suggested it, fair or not, if she hadn’t felt like he could very easily find a niche in their group—and in her affections. 

Actually, she simply decided to shelve it for the time being.  Maybe when they got more comfortable with one another it would be something they’d all enjoy, but at the moment not only did it seem too impersonal, it seemed like just the sort of thing to set off an all out war. 

By the time they’d spent the better part of the day tramping around the woods in hope of stumbling upon something they could kill and eat, setting snares as they went and even digging several capture pits, Danika decided she was going to have to make an opportunity to take care of Niles. 

She wasn’t inclined to think of any of her squad mates as shy—per se.  The intimacy they wanted was just something so far beyond their experience, and the data they had, that none of them really had a clue of how to ‘seduce’. 

Basil, of course, was no wiser—and no better at it, despite the fact that he was more inclined to be excruciatingly blunt about what he wanted, but he at least gave her something to work with.  She was fairly certain that all she was going to have to do in his case was say ‘ok’.

After a great deal of thought, she finally decided that that would probably work just as well with Niles as Basil.  It might make her uncomfortable, but she supposed she might as well get used to it since it didn’t seem likely they were going to learn seduction when they had no one to practice with but her and she sure as hell didn’t have a clue of how to ‘teach’ them that!

When they’d returned from their second fruitless hunt, therefore, and eaten another meal from their dwindling rations,  she got up, stretched and fixed Niles with a pointed look.  “I think I’ll go down to the pool and bathe.”

Niles stared back at her uncomprehendingly.

“I will go with you and watch your back,” Seth volunteered at once.

Annoyance flickered through Danika.  She was oh so tempted to let him.  She wanted him.  As much as she’d enjoyed sex with Dane, the shower sex with Seth still ranked as her number one all time favorite romp and she’d been vastly disappointed despite her embarrassment that they’d broken things off so abruptly she hadn’t even had the chance to bask in the afterglow—well, she had broken them off. 

As tempted as she was, though, that certainly wasn’t going to help Niles’ or Basil’s feelings, and it wasn’t going to calm the waters worth a damn!

She smiled at him with an effort, feeling her face heat with discomfort.  “As much as I enjoyed our last bath together and would love to repeat it, I thought Niles might want to wash my back,” she said as tactfully as she could.

Seth blinked at her, his jaw sagging slightly in surprise. 

Which was Danika’s first clue that he’d really meant to watch her back!

Before she could wallow in her embarrassment for misinterpreting his offer, however, Niles shot to his feet.

“I will go.”

Relieved when no one else said anything, she led the way from their guard post, struggling with the breathlessness and the leap in her pulse that instantly assailed her, partly from nerves and partly from anticipation.  Niles fell into step beside her. “I will go ahead and make certain that it is clear.”

Danika frowned as he strode off, wondering if her none-too-subtle hint had gone right over his head, too. 

It hadn’t—exactly—but he wasn’t convinced he’d gotten the message either.  He was sitting on one of the stones near the cave when she arrived, frowning at the water lapping against the rock.  He got up when he saw her.  “I have checked the cave and also the perimeter of the pool.  There are no creatures here that you need be concerned about.”

Disconcerted, Danika looked around a little vaguely.  “Well!  That’s good news!”

Niles frowned.  “Pardon … but did you say ‘watch’ your back?  Or ‘wash’?”

Danika bit her lip, struggling with a mixture of amusement, discomfort, and uneasiness.  A seductress, she wasn’t, however, and the question disconcerted her.  Beyond that, she hadn’t actually given a lot of thought to the possibility of ‘creatures’ of any kind.  She’d simply needed an excuse to find a quiet place to be alone with him to do the horizontal tango and a reminder of the need to check for creatures did nothing for her libido.

She’d really hoped he would ‘get’ it and they could avoid the awkwardness she felt at that moment.  Sighing, she mentally braced herself and peeled off her T-shirt and then her briefs.  Niles’s gaze instantly zeroed in on her—well, everything below the neck.  If she’d been in any doubt of that, she certainly wasn’t by the time she’d reached him and lifted her hands to rest them lightly on his chest. 

His gaze remained fixed until she was too close for him to focus on her body anymore.  He lifted his head then and blinked at her. 

She didn’t know if  it clicked in his mind then what the plan was or if nature simply took over, but, to her relief, her touch seemed to be all the prompting he needed.  His arms came around her like a trap slamming shut and tightened, bringing her fully against his length.

Chapter Eighteen

For many moments Niles did nothing more and the suspicion had begun to creep into Danika’s mind that he hadn’t gotten the idea after all, despite the hard log of flesh that rose up between them, when he dragged in a shuddering breath and began to explore her with his hands.

“We did not bring anything to bathe with,” he said in a strangled voice.

Dismay flickered through Danika.  Excuse or not, she’d fully intended to make use of the pool!  “Shit!” she muttered.  “What are we going to do now?”

Niles paused in his exploration, clearly deliberating on the matter.  “I will go back and collect what we need.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Danika said after only a moment’s thought.  “Why don’t we just soak?”

Niles’ hold on her slackened.  Before he could pull away, Danika grabbed his ‘handle’.  “After sex,” she said, amusement tingeing her voice.  “I don’t know what effect that cold water will have on this fellow, but I have a bad feeling he might … uh … try to hide.  I’ve heard they don’t like cold much.”

Niles cast a rather desperate glance around the area and finally scooped her off her feet.  Carrying her to an area where tall grasses grew, he trampled a bed in the midst of it and then set her on her feet.  She smiled up at him and then lay down, pillowing her head on her folded arms.

Niles followed her down, settling partially on top of her.

“Mmm,” she murmured, “That’s what I love about you guys.  Always on top of things.”

He studied her expression for a long moment and Danika wondered what he was thinking.  After a moment, he lifted one hand and began to explore her lightly, tracing his fingers over her breasts and down her torso to the light nest of hair on her mound and then back again.  “To love is to feel strong affection,” he murmured.

Danika felt her amusement die.  Her throat closed as a mixture of desire and compassion filled her.  “It is.”

He met her gaze again.  “And this is something that you feel for me?”

Danika thought about it—not that she was in any doubt that she felt a strong bond to each of them, but she hadn’t actually intended the comment as a confession.  She realized, though, that subterfuge was no more a part of who they were than dishonor.  He wouldn’t try to use it as a weapon against her.  “Yes, it is.”

He smiled abruptly and Danika almost felt like her heart stopped for moment.  Her chest tightened uncomfortably. 

His smile waned and he studied her seriously. “This is something I feel for you also.”

Doubts rose in Danika’s mind.  How could he even know what love was, she wondered?  But then he kissed her and silenced the voices in her head, evoking pleasure and warmth and then heat as he explored her all over with his hands and his mouth.  It was almost magical, the way he made her feel—in spite of the crunch and rattle of grasses beneath them—and the itch.  The glow of Xeno-11’s moons glinting off of his skin and hers, the play of shadows, produced an intimate cocoon and when he joined his body with hers she felt more than passion, she felt … loved.

And she got her wish—a glorious climax and the time to savor it afterward without an embarrassing interruption!

For a short time, they lay entwined, enjoying simply touching.  Finally, Niles pulled away.  “I will go back and collect what we need to bathe.”

Danika was reluctant for him to leave, half asleep, and not particularly enthused about the idea of jumping into the chilly water now that the night was rapidly reaching an uncomfortable temperature.  She was still warm from their love play and not anxious to exchange pleasure for misery.  He rose and left before she could object, however. 

She lay where he’d left her, drowsing, listening to his movements, trying to decide whether to get up and follow him back or not.  She could always bathe in the morning—when it wasn’t so cool.  She hadn’t actually wanted to bathe to start with.

She still hadn’t made up her mind when she heard him return.  He dropped down beside her. 

“Are you in the fucking mood now?”

Danika’s eyes popped open.  Without a great deal of surprise since she’d instantly recognized both the voice and the question, she discovered that Basil was lying on his side beside her, his head propped on  his fist.  Irritation wafted through her, but she was too mellow from her bout with Niles to feel like blasting him with her temper.  “Basil,” she said a little testily and then stopped, uttering a huff of irritation.  “Yes.”

He stared at her blankly for a moment, as if he was confounded by her response.  Before she could urge him to do it and be done—which she felt like doing, ungracious or not, since she most definitely was not in the mood having been thoroughly satisfied by Niles—Basil crashed over her like a tsunami. 

And he made it clear very quickly that he was far more interested in being thorough that swift, regardless of the obvious signals he gave off of hunger to the point of desperation.  With her skin already excruciatingly sensitive, his ministrations had her clawing at the crushed grasses, and then his back.  She hadn’t thought he could arouse any warmth let alone heat, but she’d begun to pant, moan, and finally growl at him before he finally got to the point. 

She grunted, letting out a low, animalist groan when he speared into her, sheathing himself deeply before he set a frantic pace that sent her over the edge within a matter of minutes.  Her climax crashed over her in waves so intense that she found herself gasping out hoarse little screams of mindless pleasure and finally hit a high note that echoed through the forest.  Basil curled tightly around her as he hit his own peak, squeezing her until she began to think, vaguely, that he was going to crush her. 

She was too far gone to worry about it overmuch. 

He nuzzled his face against hers and her throat when he’d caught his breath.  “You are so beautiful,” he murmured a little drunkenly. 

Danika found herself smiling—mostly with amusement, although it was certainly nice to know the guy was half-blind!  “You’re so sweet!” she grunted a little breathlessly, patting his shoulder.  “Do you think you could get off now?  I’m having a little trouble breathing.”

Dragging in a shuddering breath, he obligingly rolled off.  When he did, Niles, who apparently had returned as promised, kicked him in the belly, adding enough impetus to help him roll several more times.

Danika jackknifed upright.  “Niles!  You’re back!”

He was glaring at Basil, apparently waiting to see if he would get up and continue the fight.  Basil glared back at him, seemed to consider it, and finally merely sprawled out tiredly, rubbing his belly.

Niles transferred his attention to her.  Holding out his hand, he helped her to her feet and steadied her when she staggered slightly. “I have brought bathing supplies.”

Danika pasted a bright smile on her face.  “Great!  Let’s bathe and get back.  I’m dead on my feet!”

* * * *

Danika realized when she woke that it had been four days since Reuel had left.  Unless he’d returned during the night and she’d slept through it—which wouldn’t have surprised her considering how exhausted she was after her romps with Niles and Basil—he hadn’t returned and wasn’t likely to.  It seemed inarguable that he and his group had run into trouble and Reuel had told them he wouldn’t lead trouble back to them.

When they’d eaten, they gathered up all of their supplies wordlessly and headed toward the abandoned village.  Danika was preoccupied with speculations regarding the missing group through the first part of their trek.  It wasn’t until she emerged that she discovered that hostility radiated from every male.

Feeling both dismayed and defensive, she examined their stiff postures, hoping she’d been mistaken.  Niles’s expression lightened when he caught her glance.  A faint smile curled his lips.  Before she could relax, however, he flicked a narrow-eyed glare at Basil.  She followed his gaze and discovered Basil was returning it … and then some.  Noticing she’d turned to look at him, he grinned at her, waggling his brows.

Danika bit her lip and looked away.

He tripped and sprawled out with a grunt.  Startled, Danika whipped a look at him and then Seth, who’d been directly behind him.  The satisfied look on Seth’s face was enough to arouse the suspicion that he might have had something to do with Basil’s ‘clumsiness’, but he wiped the look from his face immediately and gave her a bright smile.

She found herself smiling back at him despite her suspicions, but she couldn’t dismiss the undercurrents she thought she’d felt even though Basil picked himself up without a word, brushed himself off, and merely glared at Seth.  

Her defensiveness rose another notch.  She didn’t recall that any of them had objected when she’d told them point blank that she’d taken all of them as lovers—or at least intended to.  She’d expected that to bring some sort of peace.  Apparently it hadn’t—not altogether anyway.

But maybe her guys were just resentful that she’d included Basil when they still considered him an outsider and not really a part of their squad?

She recalled abruptly with a mixture of dismay and uneasiness that Niles had told her he loved her—well, not in exactly those words, but words to that effect.  It had warmed her when he’d said it because she cared about him, too, but although she knew the guys behaved as if they cared about her, she also knew that they’d been programmed to take care of her. 

She hadn’t actually believed he did.  She still wasn’t convinced, but taking them all as lovers was certainly going to cause more friction, not less, if they did.  They were going to be more territorial, and not as a group that excluded Basil since he hadn’t yet been accepted.

But maybe she’d simply misinterpreted their tension?  Maybe it was simply a matter of being disturbed that Reuel hadn’t returned and all of the ramifications of that?

That was certainly enough to make everyone tense and on edge!

They weren’t too distracted to approach the village carefully.  Once they’d determined that it was still abandoned, they set about making themselves at home.  After checking out all of the huts, Danika settled on the largest one that seemed to have been constructed best. 

Leaving their supplies at the base of the tree, she opened all of the window openings and propped the shutters up to allow it to air out and she and the men hauled water up to scrub it down.  “It would make things a hell of a lot more comfortable if we could figure out some way to bring the water up that didn’t include hauling it up with vines,” she muttered after the fourth or fifth pitcher.

Seth, who’d been working with her, paused, studying her for a long moment.  Or maybe he was just thinking?

“Water will not flow up hill,” he responded after a moment.

“Duh!  I know that!  I was just thinking maybe we could rig something up to catch rain?”

He moved out of the hut and stood for several moments with his head tilted back, studying the canopy above them.  She didn’t know how he could do that!  She swayed the moment she looked up.

He caught her arm, steadying her.  He didn’t release her immediately, though.  He seemed to be struggling with something.  “What you said last eve,” he finally said, “did you mean it?  Or were you just saying it to make me feel better?”

Danika stared at him blankly, trying to recall what she’d said.  She remembered asking him that when she’d been wounded and for a moment that was all that came to mind. 

“You said that you would love to do that with me again,” he prompted.

She put the shower sex together with her complaint about the water situation abruptly.  Before she could inform him, testily, that she certainly wasn’t in the ‘mood’ at the moment, not after the sex with both Niles and Basil the night before, she realized that there was nothing sexually suggestive about the question.  He looked … troubled. 

“I did not … do anything … wrong?” he asked, reddening faintly.

Danika gaped at him, feeling dismay, disbelief, and empathy wash over her.  “Of course not!  Why would you think that?  My god!  I screamed loud enough I woke up everybody in the crew quarters!”

He frowned.  “It did not seem to me that you were … pleased.”

Danika felt her dismay deepen.  Impulsively, she moved closer to him, lifting her hands to capture his face.  “It was wonderful.  I loved every minute of it.  I was just … uncomfortable when I realized how … uh … indiscrete I’d been.  It wasn’t you at all!  I was embarrassed about my behavior.” 

He frowned, obviously considering it and still confused.  “You seemed … distant afterward.”

Danika grimaced.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.  I was just … distracted.”  She studied him for a moment to see if that had sunk in and if it had helped his feelings. “Hey!  You know me!  If I think you’ve done something wrong, I let you know.  I wouldn’t just keep it to myself and be mad.”  She shook her head at him and then rose on her tiptoes and dragged his head down to plant a kiss on his lips.  He took it as an invitation for more and dragged her tightly against him, kissing her deeply.  She was so dizzy and disoriented by the time he released her that she would’ve fallen out of the tree if he’d let go. 

She sent him a rueful smile when she’d caught her balance.  “I’m crazy about you, you know.  But I’m going to be pissed if I fall out of this tree—assuming I’m able to get up again.”

“I would not allow you to fall,” he said, smiling faintly in return.

Danika chuckled.  “I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t do me any good if you fell on top of me trying to catch me either.”

To her relief, he released her and returned his attention to the work of cleaning.  Well, partial relief.  She really wasn’t in the mood for sex, but the kiss had definitely piqued her interest. 

They decided after they’d done what they could for the moment to improve their comfort level and eaten their noon meal to go out and check the snares and the capture pits since they hadn’t had any luck so far in simply stalking and bringing something down.  Three of the snares had been tripped, but whatever it was that had tripped them had been big enough to tear the entire snare loose and get away.

The capture pits were a bonanza.  They captured three small, cloven hoofed animals that looked like something between a rabbit and a tiny deer—and a wild pig. 

And one of the women from one of the other groups. 

Her men had just managed to extract her when Danika and her squad arrived to check the pit.  Danika assessed the situation quickly and decided diplomacy was needed.  “Shit!  Those fucking savages left traps!”

All four of her men glanced quickly at her in surprise, but, to her relief, they didn’t say anything—because Jane and her men looked pretty pissed off.  Especially when they discovered Jane had sprained her ankle in the fall.  Fortunately, the medic-borg that had attended Dane when he was so badly wounded seemed to have joined Jane’s squad and was able to determine that it was a sprain and not a break and not even a very bad sprain. 

Danika debated briefly while her men fought over which of them would carry her back to their camp, but she coveted the medic-borg and she thought that trumped any of the reservations she had about inviting the group to join hers.  “We found the village.  The savages had abandoned it and the accommodations aren’t half bad.  If you guys want to follow us back, you can check it out yourselves …?”

The guys seemed more inclined to head back to the camp they’d made, but Jane nixed that.  “Really?”  She seemed to consider it.  “I think even huts would be better than just a sleeping bag.”

“Well, they are huts, but they’re pretty tight—good defensive position, too.”

She didn’t think any of the men were happy about the situation, hers or Jane’s, but the medic, Joseph, won the toss, hoisted Jane into his arms and indicated that he was willing to follow.

Danika made it a point to avoid the capture pits they’d dug, but they had three little beasts just waiting for the cook pot.  She glanced at Seth.  “You think you guys could come up with something to corral our catch?  I mean, we don’t have any way to keep our kills from spoiling except the stream and that won’t keep the meat long.  I think it would be better to just pen them up until we need them.”

Seth nodded and the men discussed the possibility of designing a prison for their pig-deers.

Jane, as she’d hoped, was thrilled with the treetop village—not as thrilled once the guys had devised a hoist to get her up, but Danika figured that was most likely because of the ride.  She settled on a branch, propped against one of the trunks after she’d examined the hut Danika had chosen and directed her men in cleaning the one she’d chosen. 

“Do you think that we can trust them?” Seth asked when she joined her men to see how they were doing with the pen they were erecting. 

Danika shrugged.  “I don’t really know Jane, unfortunately, but she seemed inclined to be glad she’d been kidnap … uh … rescued.  I think it’s safe enough for now, anyway, since there isn’t a base anywhere near us.  Besides, I think having a medic-borg might come in handy.”

* * * *

The first fingers of dawn were just lighting the sky when Danika came awake with a jolt, aroused to full awareness by a sound that didn't 'belong'.  It still took her a few moments to figure out what the sound was.  By the time she had, the men were already on their feet and had rushed outside. 

Engines!  Hard on that realization, she heard engines roar to life far closer.

The lookouts had spotted enemy crafts!

The Andorians coming to claim the prize?

Or the Confederation ships arriving at last?

She froze for several moments after she'd gained her feet, torn between a fierce desire to try to make it back to base before the ships took off and the certainty that it had been too late by the time she'd woke.  Finally, she rushed outside to stare up at the sky as everyone else was doing.   In the near distance, she saw the ships shoot skyward.  Any doubts that the first engines she'd heard weren't a real threat vanished.  As swiftly as their captured ships ascended, missiles and lasers began lighting the sky above them like fireworks--on steroids. 

For all that, they couldn't see much of what was happening.  The canopy of the trees didn’t just prevent them from being spotted.  It prevented them from seeing much of the sky at all.  Strain though Danika might, she couldn't actually see any of the crafts that she could hear in the aerial battle.  She didn't hear or see much in the way of return fire, though--no surprise since they'd had very little ammunition for the ships' cannons either.  But she also didn't hear any crashes or explosions loud enough to indicate a hit.

Her hopes rose that their ships were going to break through the atmosphere where their odds of escape would, hopefully, improve tremendously given the agility of the small crafts and the improvements they'd made to them.

"They didn't even wait to see if the damned camo worked!  The enemy might have passed over without ever spotting them!"

"They were under orders not to," Basil replied.  "If they were found here it would endanger those who could not leave.  The order was to make certain they were seen and to lead the Confederation away--if possible.  They cannot know how many are aboard the ships.  This way, if they succeed in escaping, the Confederation may assume that all who are unaccounted for have fled."

And they might not!  The might decide it was worth searching the area!

The village they'd discovered suddenly seemed way too close to ground zero.  Fear and frustration assailed her.  They’d just begun to make the place livable!  She hated like hell to give it up!

And she wasn’t going to, she decided angrily, not unless they had to!

* * * *

Danika hadn't actually expected to be able to establish a comfortable routine.  She'd thought the village held out the best promise for survival, but she was happy to discover that she'd underestimated the situation by a far piece.  Little by little, they managed to utilize local resources to make their abode reasonably comfortable--far more comfortable, in fact, than anything any of them had had since they'd joined the service. 

It had been touch and go for weeks.  Even though she'd known a good bit about hunting, and had experience, she was in a completely different environment and hunting animals that were only vaguely similar to those she'd hunted before.  As they'd become more proficient with the crude weapons they had at their disposal--or she had--however, her luck had improved accordingly.  She’d taught the men how to fashion the snares and capture pits she and her father had used and that cut down on the time spent stalking prey, particularly since they were fortunate enough to capture enough animals alive to start a small herd.

The water was damned cold for bathing, but it was a close source for good, fresh drinking water and the temperature worked really well for preserving what they did catch and kill for days, which was as long as it lasted anyway--a few days. 

Less than a week after the 'decoys' left them in sole possession of the area, if not the planet, they ran into another group.  By the time a month had passed, they'd established a regular village of their own--well, they hadn't actually built a village, but they occupied it along with most of the others who'd drawn the 'short straw' and ended up staying on the planet. 

Danika didn't actually consider that they'd gotten the short end of the stick after a few weeks, though.  She didn't know how any of the others were faring--those who'd managed to leave the planet and hopefully the solar system--but they weren't doing badly at all. 

Not everyone shared her view.  She discovered that those who'd stayed included all of the squads that had a female squad leader and several of the women, naturally enough, just couldn't be pleased.  Most of them seemed to just be glad they weren't living on the verge of disaster, anymore, and had some comforts. 

They watched in vain, for a while, for the return of the Confederation forces and/or the return of the cyborgs, but they'd been there almost half a year before they saw any sign at all of outworlders.  At that, they only saw ships far into the distance, not close enough to be a threat or close enough to identify, for that matter, beyond the fact that they were deep space freighters.  The ships could have belonged to either the Andorians or the Confederation. 

They didn't figure, even though it was obvious someone had won the war for possession and exploitation of the planet's resources, that they needed to worry about the threat of intruders for a while, anyway.

The knowledge even gave them a morale boost, as a matter of fact, because they knew there would be ships to leave the planet if that became desirable or necessary.  All they had to do was launch an assault and take one.

Danika discovered she was happy enough to consider the future when and if the time came.  It took a while for the others to accept Basil as 'one of the family' but she felt like she had a family and, aside from the fighting from time to time, it wasn't bad living with them at all. In fact, it was pretty damned fantastic. 

She loved her guys.  They were a dream team--a little pushy about sex now and then, but not too difficult to handle and there was nothing they weren't fantastic at. 

She thought if Reuel ever did find that world he was hoping for, that she might not be all that keen to give up what they had and start over.

On the other hand, she'd come to realize that home was wherever they were, her guys.  If Reuel found a place that the cyborgs could truly call home, without the constant threat of a war with the Confederation hanging over them, that was the only thing that could possibly make life any better.

Epilogue

Danika had always known that fate was a capricious bitch.  The moment it seemed everything was going good, fate stepped in to slap one down.  And yet, despite her certainty that that was usually the case, she’d fallen so comfortably into the routine of life on their ‘homestead’ that she’d managed to shove her worry over who shared the planet with them far into the back of her mind long since when the first threat appeared on her horizon.

They rarely saw any of the ships that regularly transported goods to and from Xeno-11, although it wasn’t unusual to hear one at least a few times a year.  That was why she barely paused when she heard the engines she’d dreaded in the first couple of years that they’d spent on the planet.  By the time it registered that it was coming far closer than any had before, the ship was nearly overhead.

Fortunately, none of the cyborgs in their little village were as complacent as the humans among them.  They’d collected their weapons and were waiting and watching tensely as the shadow of the craft slid across the ground beneath their treetop village. 

Galvanized, finally, by the possibility of threat, Danika began snatching down the wet laundry she’d just finished hanging to dry in the breeze.  Balling it into a wad, she cursed under her breath because she knew with absolute certainty that if eyes had been trained on the terrain below the ship, the telltale flutter would’ve already been seen.  The ship had already glided past by the time she’d gathered the laundry.  Dropping it to the walkway, she dashed to the hut she shared with her men and grabbed her weapons.

It flickered through her mind that, such as they were, they would be pretty much useless if there was a firefight.  They’d long since used up the little ammunition they’d been left with when the cyborgs had abandoned the planet.  Now they had nothing but the crude, primitive weapons they’d fashioned themselves and those would be pathetically inadequate against an attack by the technologically superior Confederation … or the Andorians, for that matter.  Memories flooded her mind of their own ‘war’ with the primitives when they’d first arrived and her heart sank.

They were up shit creek!

She shook the thought.  She had something precious to protect.

She was almost certain she did, anyway.

A knot formed in her throat.  She hadn’t told any of the guys what she suspected.  She hadn’t wanted to get their hopes up if she was wrong.

Now, she might not get the chance.

She pushed it from her mind in the next moment.  It was just as well she hadn’t told them.  They wouldn’t want her to join the fight, and, despite the fact that the cyborgs were a formidable force—armed or not—they were going to be heavily outnumbered and outgunned. 

Everyone would need to fight.

She saw the same white faced fear and determination on the faces of the other women as she left her hut.  Without a word, they moved to the vines used to descend to the ground and joined the men below.

Seth’s expression was hard when she met his gaze.  “They have landed.”

Danika nodded a little jerkily.  She didn’t bother to question his assessment.  “Do you think they spotted the village?”

He shook his head.  “I think we must assume that they were using infrared and will know we are here.  Take the other women and move to the caves.  They will not be able to detect your heat signature there.  Dane, Niles and I will go to see if we can determine what their business is here.  The others will form a perimeter around the cave and wait.”

Basil scowled at being excluded from the scouting party until it apparently occurred to him that Danika was to be left in his care.  He nodded then and the entire group began to move as quickly and quietly as possible into the jungle, using the thick foliage to hide themselves and stepping carefully on the thick carpet of leaves on the ground to camouflage their tracks. 

Danika had lost most of her fear long before they reached the cave.  In point of fact she was so irritated that Seth had told her to hide with the other women that little else occupied her mind beyond the focus on moving swiftly and quietly. 

Still, she knew it was the right thing to do.  There was no option for them, really. 

Well, they could’ve simply abandoned the village and fled, but that wouldn’t have bought them a lot of time.  If the intruders had detected the village, they’d surely check it, and if they did they would find enough there to convince them it wasn’t primitives who’d been living there. 

And then they would follow.

This way, they’d at least know what they were up against … before they went on the run.

Anger flickered through her.  She didn’t want to give up the damned village!  It wasn’t the most comfortable place she’d ever lived but it beat the hell out of living on the trail!

And if she was right and she was pregnant ….

Before she had time to think of any really awful possibilities, the scouts returned without any attempt whatsoever of stealth. 

Danika had already stepped into the mouth of the cave, in clear view, before she spotted the troop of men behind hers.  She froze, feeling adrenaline shoot through her.

“It is safe to come out,” Seth said, although he was frowning.

No doubt because she’d given her position away!  Stupid!  She had gotten way too complacent and forgotten way too much about soldiering!

Fortunately, she realized that the men following her squad were cyborgs. 

Dane grinned.  “Reuel sent them to get us!”

“They have found a world for the Cyborg Nation!” Niles said, grinning as broadly as Dane.

Danika blinked at them and then stared at the other cyborgs.  “Seriously?” she said, trying to decide how she felt about it. 

The leader of the group Seth had brought back stepped forward and bowed slightly.  “Greetings!  I am Captain Jared.  I have been sent by General Reuel to bring you all home. We do not have much time.  We are bound to have company if we linger here long.  We entered on the dark side of this world, and came in low, but we cannot expect that we were not detected.  They are bound to send someone to investigate a landing here.”

Danika gaped at the man in dismay.  “Just like that?”

Captain Jared frowned and turned to look at Seth questioningly.

“We are rescued,” Dane said before Seth could say anything.  “They have come to take us to the Cyborg Nation.”

“Well!  We don’t know a damned thing about this new world!  What about everything we’ve done here?” Sheila said forcefully, drowning out the questions and complaints of the other women in the group.

The men, all of them, looked baffled, vaguely angry, and dismayed.  “We have built a beautiful city!” Captain Jared exclaimed.  “It is a beautiful world, there is land for everyone, and it belongs only to us—the Cyborg Nation.”  A thought apparently occurred to him.  He looked a little uncomfortable.  “Well there are primitives, but we have taken all that we need for ourselves and they do not give us much trouble.”

Danika frowned.  “To build?”  Before the man could respond, she continued.  “We have a place here.  We just got comfortable, damn it!”

“We do not want to go?” Niles said doubtfully.

Danika gaped at him.  Contrarily, the moment he suggested that they stay where they were she began to consider the possibility that the new world would have far more to offer than the primitive life they now had.

She had to think about the baby!

Supposing she was pregnant!

She bit her lip and glanced around at the other women, realizing abruptly that they’d just gotten used to the conditions they’d had to deal with.  They certainly weren’t in an ideal situation.

And she might be pregnant!  Did she want to raise children here?

She didn’t.  They might never know the difference, but she did.

Life might still be uncertain on this new world, but they would be with an entire nation of cyborgs.  It would be safer—a much safer place to rear a family than what they had here.

She shook her head.  “No.  We do want to go.  It’s just … Never mind!  I would’ve liked to have more time to think about it and consider everything, but I’m not staying here if Reuel has found a better place for us!”

“What about our personal belongings?” Jane demanded, dismay threading her voice.

Captain Jared looked disconcerted as if it hadn’t occurred to him that they might have belongings they’d want to take with them!

“Two men from each group will return to collect personal belongings and rendezvous with the ship in …,” Seth said, then paused, calculating, “twenty minutes.  Is that acceptable?”

The captain looked displeased, but he finally nodded.

Danika worried all the way to the ship that she’d made the wrong decision, but as soon as she boarded she knew she’d made the right one.  She’d forgotten how absolutely divine modern civilization was! 

While they were waiting for the men to return, she collected a new uniform from supplies and headed for the facilities to take a bath.  Half of the women were already there ahead of her and she settled to wait her turn with a mixture of impatience and amusement. 

“Don’t tell me,” she said to Sheila as she emerged, “the bathing facilities were the deciding factor.”

Sheila hesitated and finally shrugged.  “I admit that was part of it.  The truth is … I think I might be pregnant and I didn’t want to have my baby there.”

Shock rolled over Danika.  “Have you told your guys yet?” she asked finally.

Sheila reddened.  “Since I don’t know which one … uh … no.”

Dismay flickered through Danika.  She hadn’t considered that!  She didn’t have a clue herself who might have fathered hers!  What the hell was she going to do about that?

Then it hit her—real, modern facilities! 

“If they have a med-bay … and I don’t see why they wouldn’t … we could get a DNA test done,” she muttered thoughtfully.  She didn’t realize what she’d admitted until she focused on Sheila again.

“You, too?”

“Me three,” Jane admitted, joining them.

Surprise flickered through Danika.  Not that they hadn’t all been doing plenty of ‘practice’ at making babies, but it still seemed odd that none of them had gotten pregnant before and now three of them—at least—were.  What were the odds?

Make that one hundred percent, because they discovered fairly quickly that that was definitely the case.  They’d been on the verge of having a serious population boom in their little village!  She supposed nobody had mentioned it because, like her, they weren’t completely certain and/or they were worried about it for a lot of reasons. 

They didn’t have to make up an excuse, thankfully, to get tests run.  They were told to report to the med-bay for a complete examination as soon as the ship cleared the solar system and had made the first jump. 

Luckily, there was a programmed med-tech onboard because the moment the cyborg examining her announced that she was pregnant their medic-borg—Jane’s man, Joseph—went catatonic at the news and couldn’t do anything for a while but stare at Jane, or more specifically, her belly.

“We can … reproduce?” Joseph finally said a little hoarsely.

The medic sent him a strained grin.  “The first child, a female, was born to Reuel and his woman.  There have been many since.”

Joseph looked like he might faint for several moments.  Finally, he staggered over to Jane and stared down at her.  “You are also breeding?”

Jane reddened and looked undecided as to whether she was insulted by his choice of words or not.  “Maybe,” she said finally, cautiously.

“I will check,” he said forcefully, looking around for a scanner not in use.  It looked like he might fight Danika’s medic for the one he had in use, but fortunately, he finished with it before he had to do battle with Joseph over possession. 

Danika cleared her throat.  “Did you do a DNA?”

The medic nodded.  “I will have to compare it to your men before I can ascertain who fathered the infants.”

It took that a few minutes to sink in.  “Wait a minute!  Did you say ….  You said infant, right?”

“I said infants.  There are two.”

A sense of wonder filled Danika … for all of ten seconds.  Then images began to flood her mind of tending an infant.  She’d been really young when her last brother was born, but she remembered the pure hell that had followed.

And she was going to have two!  Double everything!

If the guys didn’t head for the hills the minute the infants produced a chorus of demanding squalls …!

She quelled the thought.  Her men had had her back through hell and back!  They wouldn’t abandon her just because of a couple of teeny, tiny babies!

In point of fact, although they were all stunned speechless when she finally made the announcement a few days later, and she could see that Basil and Niles were terribly disappointed when they discovered one of the babies was Seth’s and the other Dane’s, they actually looked more pleased and terrified than anything else. 

She didn’t have a clue of how that had happened, but after she’d thought it over she had decided that fate had actually smiled on her for a change.  She was going to have one for Seth and one for Dane—at the same time.  Two down!  Only two to go and she’d be done with the whole business, nobody would be left out, and she wouldn’t have to worry that she’d disappointed any of them!

Actually, it didn’t go quite that smoothly.  She’d finally decided that the best thing to do was to downplay the paternity of the babies.  They were so damned territorial and competitive!  “I have an announcement,” she’d said brightly when they’d gathered in their cabin for the night.

All four had looked at her in surprise.  “What?” Seth asked.

“We’re going to have a couple of new members joining our squad.”

Within a split second all four looked as black as thunderclouds.

“We do not need more squad members!” Seth growled, clearly voicing the opinion of the entire group.

Ok, so maybe that hadn’t been the best way to put it.  “I didn’t mean …,” she said testily and then broke off.  “What I’m saying is … I’m pregnant!”

Four jaws went slack.  They all looked perfectly blank. 

“Breeding,” Danika clarified, then added, “little cyborgs?”

The four men exchanged accusing looks. 

“If y’all are going to start a fight, you might as well just head to the brig!” Danika snapped.

To her relief, it finally seemed to really sink in.  The stunned angry looks gave way to uneasiness.  Dane actually chuckled—a little shakily, granted, and he looked a bit more panicked than pleased or amused, but he seemed to at least be trying to accept the news gracefully and with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “We are to have a family?” he asked doubtfully.

Danika sent him a look of gratitude.  “We already are a family.  Now we’ll have two more.  I hope you guys are going to be ready to go to work on our homestead once we get to the new world, because I’m really looking forward to decorating a nursery before the babies get here.”

She’d been more than half joking, but the comment seemed to be just the thing to steady them.  They immediately set to work designing the house they would build once they’d settled on the homestead they were assured was theirs as soon as they got to the Cyborg Nation.  Danika was pretty engrossed in the project herself at first, but after a while she decided to settle back and let them handle it.  If she didn’t like the floor plan when they got done, she’d veto it and make them start over.

Somehow she thought she probably wouldn’t have to.  They were detail oriented and thought of things she hadn’t. 

In any case, she was content to sit back and watch them and daydream about finally having a real family of her own.  Thank gods she’d been drafted and kidnapped from her home world!  She might have settled for somebody just like Tommy Dancel and ended up with a tiny, crude little cabin on a rough frontier world!  Instead she had four beautiful absolutely wonderful men.  They were going to build her a palace. And she was going to have babies as beautiful and wonderful as their fathers! 

The End.

 

 

The following is a special extended sneak peek at an upcoming Kindle Unlimited Release.

 

 

 

 

Interstellar—The Visitors:

The Dragon Lord

By

Kaitlyn O'Connor

(c) Copyright by Kaitlyn O'Connor, April 2007

(C) Cover Art Eliza Black, August 2012

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.store.newconceptspublishing.com

 

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

An ambiguous mixture of emotions ran along the periphery of Raina Willows’ mind as she carefully polished a three foot segment of the dark mahogany balustrade. Narrowing her eyes, she studied the section critically. The light powdering of dust she’d been stirring around, she saw, had collected in a groove on the bottom side of the railing. Settling her rump on one of the stairs, she speared the polishing cloth with the nail on her index finger and ran it back and forth along the decorative furrow until she’d removed the pale line and then focused on the intricate carving that supported the balustrade.

It was archaic, Raina decided, but she still wasn’t altogether certain of how she felt about it. Vaguely resentful, she supposed, maybe a little threatened.

Threatened might be a little strong, she amended, lifting her head briefly to flick a gaze around the vast foyer of the mansion, but something like that.

From the moment she’d first seen the place, from the outside, the fanciful notion had swept over her that she was walking onto a movie set for a filming of a vampire flick or a ghost story. The gothic mansion and its setting had the sort of theatrical feel to it that gave her a mild case of the willies even before she’d set foot inside, and the interior of the place was even more gothic--heavy crushed velvet draperies on all of the tall windows, heavily carved furniture, dark mahogany moldings everywhere.

She wasn’t sure why she’d worked so hard to get the job.

Aside from the fact that she desperately needed work, that is.

Cleaning lady wasn’t exactly the sort of thing one could put on a resume to get a leg up in today’s world. She’d gone after the job because she’d thought it would be a cinch to get it and she’d been beat out by the competition on every other job she’d tried for over the past couple of months. Immediate needs had finally overrode the desirability of career building.

She’d felt like a peon, though, from the first moment she’d been interviewed, and that, at least, was no exaggeration. The housekeeper had looked like a character out of an old horror/vampire flick, not quite medieval but damned close in her severe, mid-calf length black dress, her gray hair slicked back and knotted at the back of her head in a style that looked like something out of the eighteen hundreds.

Raina had known immediately that she’d fucked up when she’d shown up for the interview in jeans and a knit top, be they ever so neat. The housekeeper, Mrs. Higgenbottom, had looked her over as if she smelled something that stank--like shit.

It was menial work she was applying for, though. How the hell was she supposed to guess they’d expect her to dress up just to crawl around on her hands knees to clean? She’d figured she should wear work clothes. She’d worn her best jeans and a neat, almost new, conservative knit top.

It had been obvious immediately that she’d figured wrong. The housekeeper, she strongly suspected, would’ve pitched her out on her ass right then and there, without an interview, except for Mr. Smith. The woman’s face had looked as if it was about to crack wide open with outraged contempt--that Raina had dared to show herself like she was--when she’d looked up and met Mr. Smith’s gaze. Raina hadn’t noticed a single emotion ripple across the man’s face and yet after that exchange of gazes, the housekeeper had settled and started the interview.

What was up with that, anyway?

So far, she’d met--not been introduced to, but had them pointed out to her--Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. Black, Mr. Green, and Mr. White.

No way in hell was she believing that was their real names.

They were like--a security detail of some kind, reminded her of glimpses she’d had of the secret service men that surrounded the President--they were that fucking scary! Maybe a little more scary.

Except for the detail of slight variations in hair coloring, they almost looked like a matched set of bookends--all of them were at least six foot tall and built like bouncers on steroids. All of them wore suits and dark glasses. All of them had hard angular, strangely exotic faces and looked as if their faces might crack if they ever used any of their facial muscles for anything approaching a smile. They all had unfashionably long hair, which was smoothed back on their heads and tied at the base of their skulls into a ‘ponytail’ that should’ve made them look ridiculous but somehow didn’t--probably because they practically dripped testosterone.

Like the housekeeper, they all wore black, except their suits weren’t throwbacks in style like the housekeeper’s dress--or dresses. Either the woman wore the same dress every day or she had a closet full of the identical style. It was Raina’s third day on the job and she’d yet to see the woman wearing anything that looked the least bit different from the dress she’d worn the day Raina had come to interview a week earlier.

She had yet to see the mysterious Mr. Simon Draken, her actual employer, but, as curious as she was about the man, she actually dreaded the possibility of running in to him.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Higgenbottom, had spent most of her first day on the job telling her what was expected of her and laying down the ‘rules of the house’.

She was a servant, not to be seen or heard--at all--which was where the archaic attitude came in. Mr. Draken was a busy man and rarely left the west wing, where his ‘suite’ lay so she was assured an encounter wasn’t likely, but if she happened to be in an area of the house when he did pass through, she was to try to make herself invisible and never to look directly at the man.

Archaic!

It made her uneasy, though. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to look at the guy because she was a servant and dirt beneath his feet, and maybe there was some kind of dark and creepy reason she wasn’t supposed to look at him.

It was a flaw in her personality, she supposed, that aside from engendering a good deal of resentment in her, the restrictions had also given rise to a wealth of curiosity she might not have felt at all if Mrs. Higgenbottom hadn’t been so adamant that she was forbidden even to look at the man. Her active imagination had instantly began to conjure speculative images.

The mansion almost looked like it could’ve been from the Dark Ages, in style anyway. Except for the style of the architecture, it didn’t look old, but the house didn’t look new either, mostly because she couldn’t imagine the craftsmanship evident in the place having been mass produced or even handcrafted by modern day millworkers.

So she figured he must be old, especially with his archaic expectations of his household staff.

He was obviously filthy rich, too. Even if this estate had been handed down to him, she couldn’t imagine a younger man wanting to live in a place like this--single, she thought. There’d been no mention of a Mrs. Draken.

The fact that she’d been forbidden to look at him made her think he was deformed or disfigured in some way.

Maybe not.

The security detail that guarded the place as if it was Fort Knox suggested he might be someone who’d, at least at one time, been famous, maybe a political dignitary or something.

Or maybe not. She supposed it could’ve just been his wealth.

Shaking the thoughts off, she focused both her mind and her gaze on her work for a moment, examining it carefully. She didn’t want to get fired when she hadn’t even collected her first paycheck and Mrs. Bitch, old as the crow was, had the eyes of a fucking eagle. If there was so much as a speck of dust or a smudged fingerprint, the old bat would make her start over from the beginning.

She’d been trying to convince herself this was just the ‘new girl’ shake down, typical of most jobs where the boss led you around by the short hairs and cracked the whip over your head until they were certain you’d been properly broken in and cowed. If she could just make it through the initiation phase, it would be smooth sailing after that.

The intricate carving of dragons and vines and strange, exotic flowers was beautiful, she supposed. She’d thought so before she was told to clean and polish the damned thing anyway. All the tiny crevices and grooves collected dust, though, and a cleaning rag and polish just didn’t get it insofar as removing the dust in the minute fissures.

Unconsciously rolling the kinks out of her shoulders and back, she glanced surreptitiously around the foyer again. Seeing no sign of Ms. Hatchet-face, Raina lifted her head for a more thorough search. All the doors along the foyer within her view were firmly closed and after a moment, she slipped the toothbrush out of her jeans pocket.

The woman would probably shit a squealing worm a mile long if she caught her using a toothbrush, which was why Raina didn’t intend to get caught. She also didn’t intend to spend the entire day cleaning the fucking balustrade that wound up both sides of the foyer in a grand, horse shoe shaped curve.

Draping her cleaning rag over the handle of the toothbrush, she dipped the soft bristles in the cleaning solution and made short work of the balustrade support, darting an occasional guilty glance around to make certain she wasn’t caught at it. When she’d finished, she used another rag to wipe off the excess cleaning solution and then stood up and leaned over the balustrade to clean the outside.

Somewhere in the rounds of balancing and cleaning and the need to finish the task quickly, she became so focused on what she was doing that she not only forgot to keep a look out for her nemesis, the housekeeper, but she also didn’t pay any attention to the march of many feet on the upstairs landing until they slowed and finally stopped.

It was the cessation of the sound that finally penetrated her absorption. Instinctively, she glanced up and froze as she met the gaze of the man standing at the top of the stairs.

His eyes were unlike any she’d ever seen--on any human, or animal for that matter. Even with the distance separating them the color--a strange gold flecked with orange-rust--seemed to jump out at her. The black pupils didn’t look ‘normal’ either. Instead of round, as they should’ve been, they were elongated, almost diamond shaped.

It wasn’t the eyes, though, that caused her such a jolt. It wasn’t anything her eyes were registering, because she wasn’t actually aware of noting and cataloguing his physical attributes at that suspended moment in time. She wasn’t the sort of person who went around talking or thinking in terms of ‘auras’ and yet she’d felt his even before she looked up, an almost electrified charge in the air that had already been crawling over her and prickling her skin even before she looked up. Once she did look up and met his gaze, she was enveloped in something like a force-field that was ten times stronger than that first awareness, a powerful, unidentifiable ‘something’ that seemed to suspend her breath in her chest and her heart and then jumpstart both with an electric current that made her heart take off like a runaway freight train.

He seemed almost as frozen as she was, though she was quite sure, later when she could think at all, that it wasn’t for the same reason or anything approaching it.

For her, the closest she could come to describing her feelings later was that she was awestruck, as if she’d found herself in the presence of some deity, or a being with god-like powers--or a sex god of the silver screen.

After a long, long moment, while her heart hung suspended in her chest, and the air she’d sucked into her lungs and held slowly depleted of oxygen and began to bleed a dizzying current of carbon monoxide into her feeble brain, he lifted a pair of sunglasses and settled them over his eyes. The movement, or the sudden release of her captive gaze, allowed Raina a handful of seconds to gather an overall impression of the man before she became aware of the men surrounding him, standing slightly behind him.

A security detail, her mind clicked.

The mysterious Mr. Draken, her mind added.

The toothbrush in her hand.

Guiltily, Raina made a belated attempt to hide the contraband in her hand. She averted her gaze but not before she saw her guilty movement had drawn his attention directly to the toothbrush she’d tried to palm.

She was never to be seen, or heard, and under no circumstances to look directly at the man. The color left her face in a rush as those rules, drummed into her head over the past several days, belatedly filtered into her mind. Straightening abruptly, she grabbed her tray of cleaning supplies, galloped down the stairs, and around the curve, flattening herself against the wall. Her heart, jump started by her abrupt awareness, was galloping in her chest at around ninety miles an hour. Her lungs, laboring overtime now that she’d remembered to breathe, pumped like a bellows, over oxygenating her blood so rapidly she thought for several horrifying moments she was going to pass out.

Triple shit, she thought in dismay as she caught a glimpse of the housekeeper’s shoes in the doorway off to her right!

She’d broken every single damned rule in the space of a heartbeat and topped that off by galloping down the stairs like an idiot, drawing even more attention to herself!

She flicked a look at her hand by her side and saw the bright blue handle of the toothbrush sticking up out of the cleaning cloth. As casually as she could, she rotated her arm so that the handle, she hoped, was hidden from the woman’s view, but she had a bad feeling it was way too late to be worrying about the damned toothbrush. Even if Hatchet-face hadn’t seen the toothbrush, she’d probably seen her gallop down the stairs, and seen her look directly at the man--Simon Draken--staring at him as if she’d heard a chorus of angels singing in the background.

She knew it had to be him. As stunned as she’d been, she’d been dimly aware that he wasn’t alone even before she glanced up. The fact that four of the security men had flanked him was enough to assure her it was ‘his lordship’ himself.

She frowned at that thought. She’d been too mesmerized to take in any particular details about him, but she certainly hadn’t gotten the impression that he was old. His bearing had been ramrod stiff--almost military, although ‘regal’ was what popped into her mind from out of nowhere--not bent with age. His bearing aside, the impression she’d gotten was one of exceptional height, and massive proportions, not a body shriveled with age.

Not fat.

He wore black like everyone else in this bizarre household, but it hadn’t been a suit. The slacks had been tailored to fit narrow hips and long, lean legs. The shirt, almost ‘blousy’ and old world looking, had been open at the neck, but his shoulders were broad and straight and the silk-like fabric had draped what seemed, in retrospect, hard, bulging muscles a body-builder would envy.

The men were halfway down the stairs before her hearing picked out the sound of their footsteps over her drumming heartbeat. Inwardly, she cringed, wishing she hadn’t stopped by the stairs. She’d been lucky to make it as far as she had, though, without her legs completely losing muscle tone and dumping her in the floor. She was fairly certain she wouldn’t have made it down the hall to the service area without embarrassing herself.

Sweat beaded her brow when the contingent reached the foot of the stairs and paused. The housekeeper was still watching her. She wasn’t going to look, even though it was eating her alive to glance in that direction just to see if he was looking at her.

She wasn’t going to.

She slid her eyes in his direction. She couldn’t see anything but black shoes and calves clad in dress pants--and a pair of knee high black boots. The toes were pointed toward the door. For some reason, though, she had the impression that he’d glanced in her direction.

Paranoia?

After that brief hesitation, the entire party went out the front door.

Raina expelled a breath of relief when they disappeared.

She counted to ten, expecting to hear the crisp footsteps of the housekeeper. She knew the woman wasn’t going to bellow at her from down the hall.

“Mr. Draken will be back in an hour,” Mrs. Higgenbottom said finally, her voice sounding almost mild for her. “Be certain you’ve finished with the balustrade and moved into the dining room by then.”

More than a little stunned, Raina nodded, but the soft click of the door told her the woman hadn’t waited for any kind of response.

Her entire body slumped as the tension went out of her. Feeling dazed and more than a little confused, Raina moved away from the wall when the weakness finally subsided and strength slowly began to return.

She hadn’t been dismissed.

Yet.

The old bat was probably going to wait until she’d finished cleaning and then fire her, Raina thought morosely.

And how the hell did she know he’d be back in an hour? Where would he go on the island that would take him an hour to get there and back? He wouldn’t be leaving the island. It was a fifteen minute ride around it to the dock and another ten to fifteen from there to the mainland, twenty or thirty to the city limits ….

Shaking that puzzle off, Raina hurried up the stairs and hustled to finish the seemingly endless task in the time allotted. It wasn’t just that she was concerned about the housekeeper, either. The entire episode had left her feeling strangely disoriented and jumpy. The man exuded cold and dangerous. As scary as she’d thought his watch dogs were, the main man made them seem warm and cuddly in contrast.

That was the impression that had made her heart stop and her breath freeze in her lungs, she decided.

The image of his strange eyes hung in the back of her mind as she worked furiously to finish the cleaning and polishing so that she could play least in sight when the man came back.

Emotionless, she thought, not just cold in the sense that he might have been looking at a roach that had had the audacity to creep out from under the rug. His eyes, his expression, had been as cold and distant as if there was no soul in the body.

She’d seen a flicker of … something, though, she realized after a while. Fleetingly, so briefly she would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been staring into his eyes, she’d seen something pass through them, an acknowledgement of her presence, she supposed. Surprise, maybe? As if it had been so unexpected for him to discover an actual living, breathing being cleaning his house that it had jolted him out of that faraway place where his mind ordinarily dwelt.

* * * *

Such turmoil churned through Simon as he left the house that it was only habit that guided him down the path he’d worn over the years from the house to the sea. He found he could not sort the confusion of thoughts and impressions, even though he felt a need to do so, and that disturbed him almost as much as the fact that he was in a state of disorder at all.

He had not expected to encounter the woman--his people knew he did not like to deal with outsiders--but he was not unaware of the woman’s presence in his house. As little interest as he had in such things, he was kept informed of everything that went on around him. That was a given. Whether he was interested or not, his rank placed as many obligations upon him as it did his people.

And that being the case, he should not have felt such a jolt of … shock upon encountering her. Should not have felt even a great deal of surprise, let alone stunned to such a degree that it seemed to suspend him in time so that he’d found himself unable to move, or think, or even breathe for a seemingly endless time.

It was shock that he’d felt, though, he finally acknowledged, an unpleasant jolt of stunned … what?

He still was not sure, but his mind obligingly recalled every image it had recorded in those moments, every impression, and tumbled them around again in an effort to find some explanation, some logical reason for the disturbance.

A small, pale face surrounded by untidy locks of dark, reddish brown hair emerged dominant, and most strongly of that impression was the eyes--because they seemed larger than anything else about her face. More vaguely, he had had the impression of clothing that had seemed far more suitable for a man--at least the men of his culture--fitted, though there had been nothing at all mannish about the body the clothing so faithfully conformed to--large, soft breasts, a narrow waist, nicely rounded hips and shapely thighs.

He had noticed everything about her body, he realized with a mixture of surprise and irritation. Without any actual intention of doing so, without even a conscious awareness of it, he had catalogued every pleasing curve, could remember very clearly every detail of shape and size, even a calculation of firmness and softness.

Arousal, he realized as he felt his body stir again only at the memories. Part of it, at least, had been desire.

He examined that with suspicion, searching for a reason to dismiss it, and realized that he could not. The potent attraction, unwelcome as it was, unfathomable as it was, had been the greatest part of the jolt to him.

He had not been with a woman in …. He could not exactly remember the last time. He had a vague memory of expending himself on some nameless, faceless female, but nothing beyond that--no perception of time. In truth, he had ignored his physical needs so long he rarely felt it to any great degree anymore and he could not even recall when he had managed to quash even the call of his manhood.

That explained it, though--need. It was not want. It was only nature demanding he remember that his body had needs besides the intake of nourishment and the need to rest.

That did not explain why, though, the eyes bothered him so much, why the expression on her face haunted him.

She had felt it, too, he realized after a few more minutes of thrashing the idea around in his head, feeling almost more stunned by that realization. That was why he had felt such a jolt. The look in her eyes, on her face--it had mirrored the same, inexplicably powerful force of attraction that he had felt.

Reflected back at him, he wondered? Overlain there by his mind’s eye only because it was what he felt? Or had she actually felt it, too?

Frowning, he examined that more carefully.

He did remember it correctly, he finally decided, but the attraction wasn’t all that he’d seen. It might not even have been the emotion that dominated that little face that he’d found so appealing, so strangely fascinating.

She’d been focused on his eyes, paled as she stared him, froze like prey that has sensed the interest of a predator.

He hadn’t been wearing his glasses, he realized abruptly, feeling anger and far more disappointment than he should have.

He had scared the hell out of her.

* * * *

The conflicting thoughts and impressions did nothing to settle Raina’s nerves. As tired as she was by the time she’d managed to finish, she was still jumpy. The faintest sound made her stiffen and cock her ears to listen intently until she’d identified it.

She was frantically polishing the last segment of the balustrade when she heard the sound she’d been listening for--the faint scuff of soles on the walkway outside the front door. For a split second, she froze like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. As she stared at the door, though, and saw the door knob begin to turn, she grabbed her cleaning tray and darted toward the formal dining room on tiptoe.

God only knew why she thought that would help anything. The cleaning supplies jiggled and rattled with each step, noisily marking her quick retreat. She almost spilled the thing in her haste to clear the doorway and close the door behind her.

Struggling not to pant for breath like an obscene phone breather, Raina, inspired by some insane impulse she couldn’t resist, paused before closing the door completely. Holding it with no more than a thin sliver between the door’s edge and the frame, she peered through the minute opening as the men entered the foyer.

He was in the forefront again. Despite the panic that threaded through her veins, she allowed her gaze to take a full sweep of him before she focused on the hard planes of his face, studying his profile as he came into full view.

He hesitated fractionally as he placed one boot clad foot on the first stair. For a split second, she thought he knew she was there, that he was going to turn and look straight at her.

He didn’t. He mounted the stairs and disappeared from view, leaving her to wonder if she’d just imagined that slight hesitation.

When the last of his escort had disappeared up the stairs behind him, she very carefully closed the door, wincing as she heard the click as the door caught and wondering if it only seemed loud to her or if it actually had been loud enough to carry up the stairs.

After glancing around the vast dining room vaguely for a moment, she finally moved to one of the dining chairs that lined the wall nearest her and collapsed weakly on the seat.

Staring at nothing in particular as her mind focused inwardly, she tried to sort the unfamiliar riot of emotions inside of her. With a touch of surprise, she finally realized that uppermost was almost a sense of awe, giddiness--vague hysteria--as if she’d discovered herself in the presence of some rock star or god of the silver screen she’d lusted over and fantasized about for years--except this man was a complete stranger. She was absolutely certain she’d never seen that face before. She would never have forgotten it. So how, him being a nobody as far she was concerned, could he have had that kind of effect on her?

Chapter Two

Audric studied the prince surreptitiously as he followed in his wake, ostensibly scanning their surroundings for any sign of an assassin. He knew the others were alert for the possibility, though, and only half his mind was focused on that constant vigil. The other half was focused on the prince himself, searching for some outward sign that his ruse had been detected.

Simon had seen the woman. There was no doubt in his mind that, for the first time since he could remember, something had finally penetrated the shield of ice Simon had erected around himself. Unfortunately, since he’d been behind his half-brother, as was his place, he hadn’t seen what sort of effect it had had on him.

He was still heartened. Even a tiny fracture was welcome after all these years when he’d almost lost hope that he would ever again see the man he’d worshipped since he was child, guarded with his life since he was old enough to take his place in the royal guard.

When Simon stopped at last on the promontory where he always stopped, staring out at the sea, Audric motioned for the royal guard to take up stations and then moved to a position that would allow him to keep watch and still catch an occasional glimpse of Simon’s profile.

Uneasiness filtered through him when Simon turned his head and stared at him for a long moment before his gaze focused inward again and he turned to stare out to sea as he had ritualistically once a week since his exile from his homeland. He knew, if the others didn’t, that this was Simon’s penance for living when the woman he’d loved more than life had died, taking his heart and soul with her.

To everyone else, it might seem as if Simon was hardly aware of where his eyes focused. It was just a sea, not the sea that had swallowed Evangeline and taken away the light in Simon’s eyes.

He knew, though. The very first time they’d come to this spot and looked out at the sea the image that had been printed indelibly on his mind forever had surfaced instantly and he’d thought for several moments that he would throw up.

That was why Simon came here, not because this sea reminded him of home, but because every time he looked at it, he saw Evangeline’s long black hair drifting in the tide, saw her lifeless eyes staring back him.

He came to torture himself. For living? Maybe. Probably. But Audric thought it was also because he was searching for his lost soul, trying to figure out why he was still alive--or still breathing. What Simon had been doing since he’d been exiled didn’t actually constitute living. Existing more accurately described it.

Despite every effort he’d made himself to banish that nightmare, Audric felt it grip him again the moment he acknowledged it, felt the memories wash over him in a sickening tide.

He’d been afraid and struggling mightily with the effort to hide it and maintain his dignity when they’d been brought out, they thought, for execution after the months they’d spent in that stinking prison. He’d told himself he’d expected nothing less, that he was surprised they’d even waited as long as they had. He’d told himself it was better to get it over with than to die by degrees, slowly rotting in prison, becoming less of a man and more of an animal every day.

When they’d brought Evangeline out, he’d felt sick, certain they’d brought her to watch, fearful that he’d shame himself when he died. He’d been so focused on that that it had taken him a while to figure out what they were doing.

Disbelief, he thought, had gripped all of them as they watched the executioners bury Evangeline in the sand up to her neck, and comprehension was slow in coming. For a long while, he had simply stared at her, the men around him, the men standing on the beach, watching the slow, inevitable approach of the tide. Even when it had finally clicked in his mind what they were about, he hadn’t been able to believe it.

It was just Jaelen’s sick way of tormenting them to the bitter end, he was certain.

And it was.

What it was not, was a show merely to torment them.

He should have known that when he saw how excited Jaelen was, but there was no reason to kill Evangeline. It served no purpose. Killing them served a purpose. Killing Simon would have served a purpose, because he was the rightful emperor. He should have ascended to the throne upon his father’s death--not Jaelen, the treacherous, backstabbing little worm.

There were times when he was not certain which part of that nightmare sickened him the most, watching Evangeline die, or watching Simon slowly fall apart; remembering the terror in Evangeline’s eyes, or remembering the terror in Simon’s; watching her slowly swallowed up beneath the sea, or Simon, tearing and clawing at the chains that bound him like a raving madman, sobbing and begging like a child for them to kill him instead.

Audric’s stomach lurched sickeningly with the memory.

He’d loved her, too, fallen in love with her long before she had caught Simon’s eye and captured his heart. No one could be around her for any length of time and not love her. He had understood that, understood that Simon could no more help loving her than he could and, moreover, that she had never been meant for him. She had been Simon’s long before he had finally noticed, or acknowledged, the woman his father had chosen for his bride.

For the most part, the same could’ve been said of Simon, that it was impossible not to love the man himself completely aside from his title. His men and his subjects had loved him, worshipped him as a god, as flawed and imperfect as he was as a man. In fact, it had almost seemed as if his flaws were as integral a part of why he was so beloved as his perfections, as if everyone had been drawn closer, felt that they could love him and not merely hold him in the awe and respect his birth entitled him to.

It was their love that had destroyed him, just as it was his love for Evangeline that had destroyed her. If he’d been hated, or if his people had even been indifferent, his enemies could’ve simply disposed of him, given him the death that was all he’d wanted when they were through with him. As it was, Jaelen had deduced fairly quickly that killing him would only make him a martyr for rebellion, would bring the entire realm into revolt. So instead, he’d broken Simon, crushed the life from him, and left the shell to appease the people, held him ransom for their behavior by sending him into exile.

As long as they knew he was alive, that he would pay in blood for any attempt at revolt, the people endured--ever hopeful, as he was, that one day Simon would return and destroy the usurper.

Which was why, as much as he loved Simon himself, he’d been willing to risk being accused of treachery by bringing the woman into the house.

It had seemed safe enough. He’d checked her out thoroughly before he’d allowed the interview. She had no one. If she had to go missing, no one would be looking for her.

It seemed unlikely, too, that Simon would realize what he was up to. Physically, she looked nothing at all like Evangeline, which was hardly surprising since she was human. Still, there was something about her that had instantly arrested his attention, something in her wide green eyes and delicate features that had snared him once he’d managed to drag his attention from her body.

Clad in snug fitting jeans and a body hugging top, every lush mound and curve was blatantly evident. He hadn’t needed to see what was beneath the clothes to know that body was a siren call to any lustful male, human or draconian, and his mind had already been churning with possibilities even before he’d examined the face that went with it.

Viewed dispassionately, he supposed she was more ‘interesting’ than beautiful, but he doubted very much that many men realized she wasn’t. He wouldn’t have if not for the fact that his lustful thoughts had abruptly shifted to possessiveness and from there, naturally enough, to what sort of opposition the others might present … which had brought Simon to mind.

That had brought her into clearer perspective, impelled him to take a step back and try to view her with more objectivity.

She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way of looking at a man that blinded him to her slight imperfections--a strange mixture of boldness and shyness, of frankness and mysteriousness, of appreciation and wariness--that aroused every hunting instinct. From the moment he’d first met her gaze he’d been drowning in conflict. He wasn’t sure which instinct was most dominant--the primal and purely male need to conquer and dominate or the urge to protect, but neither could be ignored and he knew, if he felt it so powerfully, Simon would not be able to resist those urges either.

The last time he’d tried to divert Simon with a woman, though, the results had been disastrous. She’d been too blatantly sexual, too obvious a plant to tempt his appetite because he’d been stupid enough to choose a woman that bore too striking a physical resemblance to Evangeline--not that she’d really looked like Evangeline. Tall and elegant and shapely enough to tempt most any man, her hair had been long and black like Evangeline’s, her complexion like fine porcelain.

But, unlike Evangeline, the woman had been all too aware of her appeal. She had been too focused on her appearance, too aware of her sexuality. Every move she made had seemed calculated. Every toss of her midnight hair, every faux shy glance and timid ‘come hither’ smile had been as blatant an enticement as if she’d stripped naked and waved her tits and ass in their faces.

She’d pierced Simon’s self-absorption, all right. He’d taken one look at her and shut himself into his rooms for weeks, staring at the wall and refusing to eat more than a morsel of food as he had in the first months after Evangeline’s death until they’d thought he would starve himself to death.

He let out a disgruntled sigh as Simon turned at last and headed back to the house, disgusted that he’d succeeded in getting no more of a rise out of Simon than that brief flicker of surprise and interest.

If Simon didn’t want the woman, he was going to have her himself, he decided--assuming he could grab her before the others managed to.

They had noticed. Simon might be dead to the world around him and everything in it, but the rest of them had blood in their veins, and a woman like Raina caused that blood to heat and centralize in the groin effortlessly. She didn’t even have to look interested. The sway of that delectable ass of hers, the bounce and sway of her pert breasts was enough to make a man instantly forget where he’d been going and follow her off hopefully, sniffing for just the hint of her womanly scent.

Despite his abstraction, as the others fell into formation beside him, he noticed Haig was trying to catch his attention. Frowning, he glanced at the man questioningly. Haig lifted his right wrist and tapped the face of the watch he wore.

Perplexed and more than a little irritated, Audric sent him a dismissive look and returned his attention to Simon. He didn’t know why Haig was so attached to the damned time piece. It wasn’t as if time meant a hell of a lot to any of them.

It jelled in his mind after a moment, though, and his head snapped toward Haig again. Haig nodded significantly and nudged a chin in Simon’s direction.

Maybe, Audric thought, the petite brunette had managed more than a little crack in the ice? He’d been too deep in thought himself to realize Simon had stayed far longer than he usually did, and he hadn’t been wearing that white faced look of someone who’d been stabbed in the chest, now that he thought about it.

He’d looked … thoroughly pissed off, but Audric could deal with Simon’s temper.

He was still unconvinced that his ruse had had any notable effect until they stepped into the foyer again and Simon hesitated, briefly, before ascending the stairs, as if he was aware the woman was peering at him from the dining room.

* * * *

Having successfully, he thought, dismissed the turmoil that had chased him from the house, Simon braced himself as he trained his gaze on the restless swells of the sea and focused his mind inward, summoning Evie to him. Instead, her image filled his mind. Wide, startled eyes the color of the changing sea--green and gold and blue, and dark and mysterious--surrounded by a thick fringe of curling black lashes. The long bridge of a straight nose that ended above a short upper lip, lips that were too narrow, too thin, too determined--not soft and yielding and feminine--and beneath that a small, jutting knob of a chin that bordered on belligerent, high cheekbones that created faint hollows in her cheeks, an oval face.

It wasn’t a beautiful face at all.

And worse, it belonged to a human.

He didn’t know why it had stuck in his mind’s eye so solidly that it had thwarted his attempt to recall Evie’s face, but he felt something stir to life inside of him that he hadn’t felt in a long time--anger--resentment--pain, real pain, not just the distant ache of it that never went away completely.

He turned to stare at his head guardsman, his bastard half-brother, Audric, speculatively. Audric returned the look unflinchingly, but he thought he saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Guilt?

Returning his gaze to the sea, he struggled to banish the image that had supplanted his beautiful Evie, called her to him with a mental command that bordered on desperation. They weren’t going to take that away from him, too!

As tortuous as all his memories were of her, as much as they aroused a deep, unquenchable hunger inside of him, he had to have them to keep from going completely insane. The memories were all that anchored him anymore to the world he had to live in. He endured the last of them because he had to. He couldn’t summon the others without remembering those horrible, gut wrenching last moments of her life but it was a price he was willing to pay to remember the rest.

So he watched her die--every time he became so empty he couldn’t stand the emptiness anymore and sought her out. Over and over again, he felt the helpless rage well up inside of him until he was choking on it, felt the bite of the chains he had fought against with every ounce of strength he could summon. He felt the suffocating terror that seemed to go on forever and ever as the water advanced in rolling waves, covering her and then washing out to sea again, leaving her choking and coughing and fighting for breath until he couldn’t breathe, until at last it consumed her completely and all he could see was her wide, terrified, beseeching gaze as her midnight hair floated and swirled around her and her eyes slowly dimmed as her soul left her.

The regret came next, regret that he’d failed her, that she’d died for loving him, but mostly for loving her. If he hadn’t loved her quite so much, mayhap they would’ve allowed her to live and taken him instead.

If he hadn’t loved her so much, mayhap he would have seen what was coming. Instead, he had been so wrapped up in her, willfully closing himself off from the world he’d never truly wanted, submerging himself in his joy of her and ignoring all the warnings of treachery until it had been too late to save either her or himself by the time he’d become aware of the danger hanging over them.

Arrogance. More even than his preoccupation with Evangeline, it had been his arrogance that had destroyed them.

Because it had not occurred to him, even once, that his younger brother coveted the crown, that he was gathering to strike the moment their father died and take the throne that should never have been his--that was to go to Simon and his heirs forever.

He was the crown prince, had been born to rule. He’d known from birth that he would one day, that it wasn’t a matter of choice for him. Everything had been destined, his entire life laid out for him before he’d even had the chance to live it--even Evangeline had been chosen for him and that had rankled. Of all the things about his life that chafed him, that had angered him the most. Gods he had been furious when he had found out his father had arranged that binding without even consulting him!

He had been so spoiled, so accustomed to always having everything his way that he’d refused to have anything to do with her, ignored even his curiosity to see what she was like. The day he had to bind with her, he’d thought--the day he was shackled to the woman his father had chosen would be soon enough to deal with her.

He should have had more faith in his father. Whatever else he was, his father had loved him. He should have known his father would choose carefully for him, would’ve picked a woman he could care for, not just whatever female was most politically advantageous.

It had pricked at his manhood, though, made him feel more of a child than a man, and that had enraged him so much that he’d behaved more like a spoiled, willful child than a man.

Until he saw her.

He’d been caught instantly by her gracefulness, by her beauty of form, the body that had seemed designed expressly for the purpose of depriving a man of his wits, but from the moment he’d pushed back her veil and seen her face for the first time, looked deeply into her wide, beautiful eyes, he’d felt as if he was drowning and soaring into the heavens at the same time.

Love, as unfamiliar as he was with it, it had still claimed him the moment he met her gaze. He had not recognized it for what it was, at first. It had taken him a while to sort through the myriad of powerful emotions and identify it, but it had been there from the first, awaiting only a drop of encouragement to grow wildly out of control.

No thought had entered his mind when he had gazed into the eyes of the woman bound to him for life. Awareness of anything beyond her had faded to nothingness. They might have been completely alone instead of in the midst of a grand, royal binding ceremony with hundreds of onlookers.

Habit was all that had guided him through the rest of the formalities, the manners and stilted customs that had always annoyed him, but that had been drummed into him until it required no thought at all to perform as was expected of him.

It was just as well, he’d thought wryly, later, when he could think at all. Because his instincts from that moment were purely primal, savage, urging him to slough off any semblance of civilized behavior. Urging him to grab her and carry her off to his lair at once, to stake his claim on her, and defend his sole right to her to the death if any other male so much as glanced in her direction.

He’d seen that look in many women’s eyes in his life, for he was crown prince and not hard on the eyes, accounted handsome by most, though he’d always taken that with a grain of salt--not love, not even exactly desire, but--worshipfulness--as if he was a god. For the first time in his life, though, it had made him feel like a god--more powerful than an ordinary mortal, more desirable.

He’d succumbed in that very moment, so enraptured by her perception of him that all he could think of was being what she wanted and needed him to be, terrified that he would slip and fall and she would wake up and see he was just an ordinary dracon, not special in any way beyond the accident of his birth.

For two years out of an entire life, he had walked among gods, known passion unlike anything he had ever experienced, love that was for him alone, as a dracon--not because he’d been born a prince--known true happiness, not just an absence of unhappiness or boredom or strife, known what it was like to look forward to every day with eager anticipation.

And then as instantly as the snuffing of a candle, it was all gone--all of it--his beloved father, his princess, the daughter he had adored--everything--snatched away from him so jarringly that he couldn’t even take it all in in the months he’d spent in prison.

Until the very day he was marched from his cell to his execution, he had still believed he was the god-like being Evangeline had perceived, believed he would still overcome, that he would take back everything that had been taken--somehow.

It had come as a shock to realize he really was going to die, that he really was just an ordinary dracon after all, not even a prince anymore. He’d still had his pride, though, that inborn arrogance that had been so carefully cultivated in him because he’d been born to rule. He’d braced himself for death. As afraid as he’d been when they’d gathered them all, he thought, for execution, he’d told himself he was ready for it, that he could face it with dignity and strength--show them all that he was the prince, whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not. He could face it like a dracon, even though waiting for the execution was nothing in the world like facing a foe on the battlefield where one knew one had a chance to live as long as strength and skill held out.

And then they’d ripped all that away from him by dragging his beautiful Evangeline out onto the beach in front him and killing her instead.

He’d been far more afraid when he saw what they meant to do than he had been when he had expected to be the one who watched death slowly overtake him. He’d been petrified, mindless with it, unable to summon any of the quick wit he’d always prided himself on.

He’d tried. The gods knew he had--reasoning, threats, bribery--and begging when nothing he’d said had had any effect at all other than bringing a glint of hard satisfaction to Jaelan’s eyes.

Evangeline hadn’t pleaded for her life. She’d only stared at him with her beautiful, wide golden eyes, hopefully at first, and then without hope, but with fear and resignation. “I love you, Simon,” she’d called to him. “Don’t watch. Don’t let them use me to hurt you. Please don’t watch.”

He hadn’t been able to tear his gaze from hers, though. Somewhere in the madness his mind had beguiled him with the hope that he could hold on to her. If he just didn’t let go, he wouldn’t lose her.

This time as he remembered, instead of feeling the emptiness wash into him as he watched her soul fleeing from him, instead of the soothing, hurtful images of the happiness he’d known and lost, he saw Jaelan’s smile of triumph--not Evangeline’s smile of love. He heard the complacency in Jaelen’s voice as he banished him forever, not Evangeline’s teasing voice echoing to him through the forest as she raced him to the glade that was their special place.

Rage and hopelessness warred inside of him instead of a bittersweet taste of peace, a remembrance of the days before when all he had known was the joy of greeting each new day because he had anticipated that it would be as grand and glorious as the day before.

And when he struggled to thrust those memories from his mind, strained to reach for Evie and wrap his mind in the warmth of her, her scent, the soul deep beauty of her, a pair of wide, soulful green eyes peered back at him. An image of a rosebud of a mouth parted in surprise teased him instead of Evie’s generous, full lips curling in a tempting smile. Instead of visualizing Evie’s long, graceful arms and legs twined about him as they made love, the press of Evie’s full, generous breasts against his chest, he remembered the compact little body of the human woman and saw himself striving over her, felt a rippling heat-wave move over and through him as he imagined her body engulfing his flesh.

And for a just a moment, so fleetingly he could almost convince himself he’d imagined it, he saw the look in her eyes and knew what it was. He felt the impact on his soul just as he had the first time he’d looked at Evie. And stark terror hit him--the paralyzing fear one feels in anticipation of inescapable pain. The fear that threatens to swallow one up when the certainty fills one that what is about to happen, and cannot be avoided, is going to cause excruciating pain, even before the nerves detect it and send the sensation flooding into the mind.

Sucking in a harsh breath, he thrust it from his mind, telling himself he didn’t see that at all, feel what he’d thought he’d felt.

Anger and resentment flickered to life inside him, began to boil like acid through his veins. He wasn’t going to feel that again. Even if he had wanted to feel those things, no one could make him feel that again. Evie had given it to him and she had taken it with her to her grave.

He was safe. He couldn’t die again because he was already dead.

But she had cut up his peace. Just by being there, she’d punched a hole in the wall he’d so carefully erected to shield him from the pain he couldn’t bear, ripped away his ability to summon the comforting memories that were all he had left.

Damn her!

Giving up finally in his quest to relive the past as he had every miserable day of his life since he’d lost Evie, he turned away from the sea and fled back to his prison, hoping that he could at least find the peace of nothingness again even if he couldn’t feed his withering soul on his memories.

The gods help him. He didn’t think he could live and bear it if he had to feel everything again. This time, he would go mad!

Chapter Three

Raina was so tired by the time the housekeeper let her go for the day, it took all she could do to climb the stairs to the loft apartment she’d been given above the garage. “Who would’ve thought cleaning and polishing would be so damned hard?” she muttered to herself as she sprawled in the first easy chair she came to and stared tiredly into space.

Actually it wouldn’t have been if the place hadn’t been so fucking huge, and every damned thing in it hadn’t been made out of wood. The whole bottom half of the walls had been paneled in wood in the damned dining room!

She was starting to hate wood.

If Ms. Hatchet-face hadn’t told her this polishing business was just a once a month thing, she would’ve quit before lunch and headed back to the mainland--even if she’d had to swim the damned inner-coastal waterway to get there!

If she didn’t get used to this, in a hurry, there was no way she was going to be able to take classes next quarter. She didn’t have the energy to think!

The longer she sat, the more inclined she was to forget supper and head straight to bed. She didn’t even feel up to taking a bath. Expelling a deep sigh, she pushed herself up and headed for the bathroom, dragging her clothes off and discarding them piece by piece as she went. She was down to her sports bra and panties before she even reached the bathroom. Stopping by the four poster bed to push her sneakers off and wiggle out of her jeans, she held onto a post to balance herself as she pulled off her socks and dropped them and then padded barefoot into the bathroom. The cool tile felt like ice under the warmth of her soles, and she gritted her teeth as she hopped onto the bathmat to adjust the water.

She hopped off again as the twist of the knob produced a clanking, knocking noise and a sputtering of rusty water and then a long, agonized groan. Wincing at the sound, she grabbed the knob and twisted it to ‘off’. The groaning stopped. After staring at the thing in consternation for several moments, she tried it again, just in case the first time had been a fluke. This time the pipes groaned first and coughed up a couple of frigid blasts of water, sputtered a few times, and then just dripped. Turning the faucet off again, Raina glared at the shower for a couple of moments and finally spun on her heel and stalked back into the bedroom/kitchenette/living area.

A scan of the main room produced the information that there was neither a phone nor an intercom. What a surprise!

She looked around in disgust even though, when she’d dragged her belongings upstairs upon her arrival, she’d been delighted with the place--actually loved it. She didn’t love it without frigging water, though!

She didn’t feel like putting her clothes back on, trudging down the stairs, across to the main house to find somebody to help, and then back again!

Abruptly remembering she’d glimpsed someone working in the garden when she’d followed the covered walkway to the garage, she moved to the window that faced the garden and looked down. There was a man on his knees pulling weeds from one of the beds. She looked down at herself, but then shrugged. She was wearing a sports bra not one of those lacy, seductive things that revealed almost as much as it covered. Pushing the window open, she leaned out.

“Hey!” she called out in a loud whisper. “Psst! Garden guy!”

The man stiffened and glanced around.

“Up here!” she called again, leaning out the window to wave at him.

He lifted his head and gaped at her.

The thought crossed her mind that he might not be entirely bright.

“My water isn’t working,” she said plaintively. “Do you know anything about plumbing?”

He stared at her a long moment and finally shook his head. “I’m the gardener.”

Raina huffed an irritated breath. “So? You’re a man. Don’t you know anything about plumbing?”

“I know about flowers.”

All righty then! The guy was a few cards shy of a full deck. “Who takes care of things like this then?”

He frowned, scratching his balls while he studied over the question.

“Oooh! I didn’t need to see that,” Raina muttered, immediately averting her gaze. As she did, her eyes collided with the gaze of the man standing at an upstairs window of the main house. Startled, she jumped and then dove behind the edge of the window she’d been leaning out of only moments before. Embarrassment flooded her cheeks the moment she did. “For christsake, Raina! That was stupid!”

“I’ll get Mr. Smith. He’ll know!” the gardener called up to her.

“No! Wait!” Raina hissed. It was too late, though, she saw in dismay. The man had already galloped off toward the main house. “Shit!” She glanced around. It was one thing to let a halfwit see her in her sports bra, but she had a feeling Mr. Smith, if he came at all, would expect to be able to inspect the pipes.

Unwilling to waltz across the room and dress when she had no idea if the man was still standing at the window, Raina glanced up and saw a rolled shade above the window. Grabbing hold of the bottom edge, she snatched it down--all the way down. She stared blankly at the edge she still had in her hand, stared down at the crumpled, unrolled sheet lying on the floor, and then popped her head up to look across the garden again.

She didn’t see the man she’d glimpsed, or thought she’d seen, before, but the drapes were open and moving slightly. Dropping the shade abruptly, she darted across the room, snatching up the clothes she’d discarded and bundling them in her arms as she headed for the bathroom to dress. Deciding not to bother with her shoes, she strode across the main room when she left the bathroom, grabbed the doorknob and snatched the door open.

There was a wall of man on the other side. Evidently, he’d been just on the point of knocking. Raina nearly had heart failure. “God!” she exclaimed, pressing a palm to her pounding heart. “You scared the piss out of me!”

He tilted his head at her. She couldn’t see his eyes. He was wearing the sunglasses all of them seemed to wear all of the time, but she didn’t need to see his eyes. The movement of his head was enough to assure her he’d surveyed her from head to foot.

She wondered if he was the one that had been standing at the window and if he’d watched her strip tease on the way to the bathroom, but finally decided he probably couldn’t have seen that far into the room even if it had been him.

Especially not with the dark glasses.

What was up with that anyway?

Did they sleep in the damned things?

“Dere is no vater?”

Raina blinked at him several times before her brain translated his heavy accent. Smith? With an accent like that? Where were these guys from anyway?

He moved past her without waiting for an answer, striding toward the bathroom. Her hand still on the doorknob, Raina turned to watch him. His head barely cleared the doorframe--brushed it, in point of fact--and he had to angle his shoulders slightly to fit through the narrow doorway.

Ok. So he was a little more than six feet tall.

Which meant the main man was a lot more than six feet tall, because she distinctly remembered he’d been noticeably taller than the others. Releasing her grip on the doorknob when the weakness in her knees finally subsided, she trailed after him and peered into the bathroom.

He’d crouched beside the tub and was twisting the knobs. The pipes let out another squawk of protest, coughed, and produced a flood of ugly brown water through the tub spout. He studied the flow for several moments and switched the tub to shower.

The pipes rattled and quaked, but no more than a spattering of water emerged.

He came to his feet, studied it frowningly for a moment and finally balled his hand into a fist and hammered on the wall. Raina stared at him blankly a moment and finally bit her lip, trying to keep from smiling.

He glanced at her before she had the chance to straighten her face. After staring at her for a long moment, his lips curled faintly in response.

She gave up trying to hide her amusement. “You think that’ll do it?”

His dark brows twitched together and then the frown vanished. “No pain to try.”

“Hurt,” Raina corrected when she’d translated. “It doesn’t hurt to try. You don’t speak English very well, do you?”

He shrugged, returning his attention to the ‘problem’. After surveying the wall he’d been beating on, he stepped back to examine the wall than enclosed the pipes. “No need. Uders speak same.”

“Oh,” Raina said as he grasped the edge of the panel and ripped it loose. Reaching into the cavity, he pounded on the pipes again until Raina more than half expected them to break and spew water all over the bathroom. “I’m not sure that’s a good ….”

She didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. The pipe broke and water began to gush in every direction, spurting in Mr. Smith’s face and soaking the entire front of his suit. Raina clamped a hand over her mouth as he dove for the handles and tried to shut the water off. Unfortunately, shutting the water off that was running into the tub only increased the volume of water shooting out of the pipes. Within seconds the entire bathroom and both her and her ‘plumber’ were soaked to the skin.

“Shut-off valve!” Raina exclaimed suddenly remembering the plumbers in her previous experience had always found one to shut the water off when they needed to.

Clearly, he’d never heard of one, however. He merely glanced at her and looked around for something to try to plug the pipe with. Squeezing past him, she shielded her face from the shooting water the best she could and peered into the dark cavity. There was no sign of a knob of any description, though, and she abandoned the effort.

“Downstairs!” she said. “There has to be one to the apartment!”

She hoped. Abandoning him to try to dam the flood with towels, she hurried across the main room and galloped down the stairs. Water was already pouring through the ceiling of the garage and onto the floor. Skirting the cars, she headed toward the closet at the far end. There she found a washer and dryer and a water heater. There was a blue ‘wing’ type valve closure on one of the pipes leading up from the water heater. Grabbing it with both hands, she twisted it as far as she could in one direction.

“Did that help?” she yelled at the ceiling.

“Hot!”

“Sorry!” Grabbing the valve again, she twisted it in the other direction until it wouldn’t go any further. “How ‘bout now?”

“No hot!”

“There’s still water?”

“Yes! Much vater!”

After looking around a little desperately, she finally discovered there was another valve just above the water heater on a pipe leading up from the back side. She discovered she couldn’t reach it, however. After scanning for something to help her reach it, she finally climbed on top of the washing machine. She still couldn’t reach it without standing on top of the water heater and she had a bad feeling it wouldn’t hold her weight. Finally, she compromised by putting one foot on the water heater and leaning to reach the other valve. Listening to the rush of water in the pipe, she turned the valve in first one direction and then the other until she couldn’t hear the rush anymore. “I think I’ve got it!” she yelled at the ceiling.

“Stop vater?” he asked, directly behind her, giving her a jolt.

His hands settled on her hips as she wobbled precariously. As politely as she could, she pushed his hands away and turned to face him. “I can get down.”

“I help,” he said implacably. He caught her waist and pulled her from her perch before she could object further. She grabbed for his shoulders to steady herself as he lowered her.

He seemed in no great hurry to let go of her once her feet had settled in the puddle on the floor. Trying not to feel alarmed or threatened by the fact that the guy was not only a monster, but as hard as granite all over, she removed her hands from his shoulders and pushed at him. Almost reluctantly, he dropped his hands from her waist and Raina drew a breath of relief.

“You’ve got water on your glasses,” she pointed out, as much to distract herself from her uncomfortable awareness of him as to distract him from his sudden interest in her.

He pulled the sunglasses off, looking down at his soaked clothing for a dry spot to wipe them on.

Seeing his dilemma, Raina said, “I’d dry them for you, but I’ve got the same problem.” She was almost sorry she’d pointed that out. It drew his attention to her at just about the same moment she realized her blouse was plastered to her skin and transparent enough she could clearly see her bra through it. Worse, the chill of the water, or the excitement of having him whisk her from the top of the water heater as if she weighed no more than a feather, had her nipples sticking out like twin bumpers on a caddy. His gaze zeroed in on the hard little nubs until heat climbed into her cheeks. She forgot all about her embarrassment, however, as he flicked a glance up at her face.

As quickly as he looked down again, frowning as he rubbed the lenses of his glasses on his coat and then put the glasses on, she saw he had the same, really strange looking eyes as Simon Draken.

Were they related? Or was it just some trait of the people from wherever it was they were from?

“I should go check the damage,” she said, abruptly far too keenly aware of how close they were standing and the way the room, tiny already, seemed to have shrunk around them. He was a big man. As accustomed as she was to being around people all the time who were taller than her, she rarely even noticed--unless they were a lot taller than her, and he was. Not only that, but he was just plain big. His hands had very nearly spanned her waist, she recalled, abruptly feeling vaguely uneasy.

She had a small waist. She’d always thought it was her best asset and had worked to keep it that way, but even so, twenty inches was a hell of a hand span--or two handed span.

He followed her back across the garage and then up the stairs. She tried not to feel threatened. There was no reason why she should. He hadn’t been the least bit pushy, hadn’t crowded her space until he’d pulled her off the water heater, but even at that she couldn’t say that he’d purposefully intruded within her personal space. The utility room wasn’t big and he was.

She regarded him with wide-eyed uneasiness when she discovered he’d followed her to the bathroom and stood in the doorway. He met her gaze and then looked away, a faint frown between his brows. “This is mess.”

Distracted, Raina surveyed the room glumly. “So much for a bath,” she muttered. “Guess I won’t be getting one.”

“You come to big house. Stay there. This must fix.”

Her shoulders slumped dejectedly. She really, really preferred staying in the little apartment, mostly because she really, really didn’t like the idea of staying in the ‘big’ house with Mr. Smith and his friends from giant world. It was unnerving enough to be around one of them. Being around all of them made her feel like a cat romping through a lumbering herd of buffalos, in imminent danger of getting squashed if she didn’t watch her step. The alternative, though, was trotting to the big house every time she needed to use the bathroom and that didn’t appeal to her a lot more.

Besides, she reminded herself, Mrs. Higgenbottom stayed in the main house. Shrugging, struggling to shake off her uneasiness, she followed him as he left the bathroom and went to get her suitcases. Fortunately, she hadn’t had the chance to unpack. He took her suitcases from her, shoved one under his arm and caught the handle of the other.

He dwarfed them. If she’d had any doubt about his strength, or his size, being purely the product of an overactive imagination, she no longer did. It was all she could do to drag the things. He had both under one arm, and they practically looked like briefcases--ok, slight exaggeration, like overnight bags instead of full size suitcases. She preceded him from the apartment, surreptitiously peeling her shirt loose from her skin and fanning it to try to dry it a little. He’d used all the towels to mop up the water.

She just hoped she didn’t run into the ‘gang’ on the way to her room.

It made her uneasy when they looked at her. She couldn’t see their eyes and she was pretty sure it was just paranoia, but she felt like they were sizing her up for dinner … and she didn’t want anything that big humping her leg.

Catching her arm as she headed to the main entrance, he guided her through the garden and in the back way, leading her up a narrow back stairway. When they reached the upper floor, she stepped aside to allow him room to exit the stairs and then followed him down the hallway. Opening the last door at the end, he pushed the door wide and indicated with his hand for her to enter. She went in cautiously, glancing around.

She shouldn’t have been surprised that it was as elegant as the rest of the house, but she was. A huge king sized bed was the focal point, mostly, she supposed, because it was the biggest thing in the room. A tall armoire claimed much of the opposite wall. Beyond that, there was a long dresser with a large mirror, a small chest on either side of the bed, and a desk.

Raina looked around the lavishly furnished room uncomfortably. “You sure it’s ok for me to stay here?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes, you stay here. Shower dere.”

She followed the direction he’d indicated with a nod of his head and then went to the door and opened it. The bath was beautiful, the room huge. Pleasure welled inside her, and then more doubt. “Maybe we should ask Ms. Hatchet … uh … Higgenbottom? I mean, this looks like a guest room. Aren’t there other, smaller rooms?”

He shook his head. “Go. Bath. Is ok.”

She smiled at him tentatively. “Bathe--you should work on your English.”

He straightened from settling her suitcases, smiling faintly. “You teach, yes?”

Raina chuckled, but wryly. “I’m not sure I’d be a very good teacher.”

It was impossible to tell much about his expression with the glasses, but she could tell he was studying her. “You teach you speak. I teach my speak.”

It was easier to translate that time. She was getting used to his broken English. She decided to ignore the suggestion, regardless. He was way too interested. She wasn’t going to encourage him. “How long have y’all been here, anyway?”

He frowned faintly and finally nodded. “Five.”

Raina looked at him curiously. “Five what? Months?”

He looked puzzled. “Full cycle,” he responded finally, extending a finger and drawing a circle in the air.

Raina studied the motion for several moments in complete confusion. “Years?”

He thought it over and nodded.

A shiver went through her. She glanced down at her wet clothes and decided that was reason enough to be shivering. “Uh … I guess I’ll just go get that bath and get some dry clothes on.”

He didn’t move. After chewing her lip for a moment, Raina finally decided he’d get the idea that it was time to leave when she went into the bathroom.

She hoped he got the idea.

When she’d locked the door, she moved to the shower to turn it on. A heavy blast of water shot forth instantly and relief flooded her. Stripping off her wet clothes while she waited for the water to warm up, she kicked the pile into a corner and finally climbed in. Pure bliss filled her as the heated water beat down on her, washing away the chill from her wet clothes and the tiredness and tension from her muscles. It felt so good, she almost hated to get out.

Finally, reflecting that there were bound to be some really pissed off people if she used up all the hot water, she shut the water off and climbed out. A small linen closet yielded a stack of fluffy towels--huge fluffy towels. Ordinarily, she wrapped her wet hair in one towel and used a second to dry herself, but the towels were way too big to form a turban. She settled for scrubbing the towel over her wet hair until she’d gotten most of the water out and then wrapped it around her like a sarong.

A jolt went through her when she stepped out of the bathroom intent on grabbing clothes from her suitcase.

Mr. Smith was standing directly across from the bathroom, stark naked.