Daahn Rising (3 page)

Her eyes opened slowly, revealing the heart-stopping green and gold that mesmerized him. She stared at him, hesitating, seemingly unsure, as the lenses darkened for her comfort.

Evan dipped his head, sealing his mouth to hers. The kiss wasn’t as forceful as the ones they’d shared the night before. It was slow, deep, dizzying.

“You know what I want to do?” he whispered against her lips.

She shook her head.

“Take you to the shower and bathe you from head to toe again.”

Zondra’s breathing hitched. “And then?”

“I’m going to bury my tongue between your legs. You bury yours between mine... Aside from eating — food, I mean — I suggest we spend my entire day off right here.” The insane need to play with Zondra as long as she’d allow was impossible to shake.

The scent rising from her said she wasn’t ready to kick him to the curb and go find one of her own kind yet.

Evan captured her mouth with a grumbled curse. The shower could wait. Food could wait. Everything but the woman in his arms could wait.

Sounds played at the edges of his consciousness, a door opening somewhere in the distance. Evan dismissed it and pulled Zondra flush to his body. He trailed his fingers over that luscious blue stripe on her back that drove her crazy for his cock, intent on spending his entire day off inside her.

The hands dragging her away came without warning. Evan launched up, swinging, growling out promises of killing whoever had dared touch her. Two bodies hit him at once, driving Evan to the mattress.

Voices rose from somewhere across the room, Zondra and another man. Evan tried to fight his way up, to throw off the two men holding him down, but their grip was nearly unbreakable. All the time, the third man was arguing with Zondra, driving Evan to the edges of madness.

Evan wrenched one arm free and laid a punch that unseated the attacker on his right. The answering punch came from the left, and prisms of startling color exploded before his eyes. The one he’d ousted landed hard, winding Evan in the process.

“Aleeks, no,” Zondra ordered.

“You might want to get her out of here,” the one on the right suggested.

“I’m not going down quietly,” Evan warned.

“As if you ever do,” the one on the left growled.

Evan’s fist shot out, but the smart-ass was faster than he’d counted on, and he missed. The one on the right got a bone-crushing hold on Evan’s wrist, and he faltered, which allowed the one on the left to do the same. That simply, Evan was pinned.

Across the room, the third was pulling a now dressed but deliciously mussed Zondra toward the door.

“You have no right to do this,” Evan shouted. “Zondra —”

“Is my little sister,” the one on the left snapped. “And she’s leaving with our
seir
, whether you like it or not.”

Something in his tone gave Evan pause. “
How
little?” he asked weakly. Zondra looked and acted adult, and he’d picked her up in a bar. He hadn’t asked her age. He’d just assumed she was over twenty-one.

I didn’t ask anything until after the first time. Not even if she was protected from pregnancy and disease.

How badly have I screwed up?
He remembered something about the Xxan aging faster than humans did. How young were they when they appeared adult?

“You’re not going down for statutory,” the one on the right assured him.

Evan breathed a sigh of relief that was sadly short-lived.

“Sixteen,” the brother answered.

Evan grimaced. The slamming door echoed his mental vision of career and life.

“Better,” the one on the right breathed. “Now I highly suggest you get a shower to clear your head, Duncan. After that we’re going to have a long talk about my goddaughter, who is nearly
seventeen
, by the way.”

He nodded, and both men eased off the bed, clearing the way to the bathroom. On his way to his feet, Evan got his first unencumbered look at them.

The taller was a Xxanian mix like Zondra, based on his dark glasses and his claim of being her brother. He appeared to be about Evan’s age, with dark hair and a jaw that was locked tight in anger.

Who could blame him?

Evan moved his gaze to the other. He was older by at least thirty-five or forty years, based on his graying blond hair. His very human and piercing blue eyes, as well as his calm demeanor, attested that he would either be the safer of the two or a formidable enemy.

Evan paused, staring at him, a fractured memory niggling at the far recesses of his mind. He knew this man from somewhere, in some context that he couldn’t place a finger on.

As if he’d spoken the thought aloud, the old man offered his hand. “Matthew MacNair.”

“
Admiral
MacNair?” Evan qualified.

A slight nod of his head was his only reply.

Realization left Evan cold. He’d not only slept with the fleet admiral’s sixteen-year-old goddaughter, Evan had given the officer in question one hell of a shiner. Ignoring the offered hand, he turned for the shower.

“I am completely screwed,” Evan muttered to himself.

“That goes without saying,” the younger man quipped.

Evan turned to glare at him, then disappeared into the shower.

****

“Do you have any concept of what you’ve done?” her
seir
asked. He made the turn out of the base gate and toward home.

“You won’t be pressing charges against him,” Zondra ordered. “I won’t forgive it.”

“Of course not.” He had the good sense to sound offended at the suggestion that he might do it.

“And I won’t stand for anyone battering him again, either.”

“They were defending themselves!”

“Evan was defending me.” Just the thought of that heated her blood, as it had when he’d defended her from Reynolds the night before.

Of course, nearly anything would arouse her right now. There was a reason the Xxanian father removed the female from her first lover in the aftermath of the quickening. She wasn’t thinking clearly right now, and neither was Evan.

There was a moment of silence. “Do you think you’ll choose to bind to him?”

Zondra’s body exploded in pleasure at the thought of it.

She’d heard females wanted to choose a mate after the quickening. The idea of actively seeking out an overbearing Dominant had always mystified her. But now that Zondra had enjoyed the quickening with Evan —
enjoyed is the understatement of the millennium!
— all she wanted was to mate with him.

Females rarely chose their first as mate. Then again, the male to sate the quickening was often a matter of chance or the choice of a female’s
seir
. Maybe Zondra only wanted Evan because she’d chosen him personally.

Maybe she wanted him because she’d always been drawn to human men.

Or maybe it was the aftermath of the quickening speaking out of turn. The female was always separated from her first after the quickening and confined to her nest for three nights. Until his
Zhigaaal
was filtered out of her system, and her
Zhigaaah
cleared his, the decision to mate could be attributed to the pheromones swaying the choice.

Evan has no Zhigaaal.
And still she wanted him this morning. A smile pulled at her lips.

She sobered, noting her
seir
scenting the air.
Scenting the change in me.
Whether or not she ultimately chose Evan was none of his business.

“Does one typically ask that question the morning after the quickening has been sated?” she asked pointedly. Zondra hurried on, not giving him a chance to answer. “He doesn’t have
Zhigaaal
. How could we —”

“You knew we intended to get you a crossbred Dominant for your first. You should have told us you were —”

“It came on suddenly,” she snapped. “And I don’t regret that Evan was my first.”

“He may,” her
seir
muttered.

Her temper flared. “What? How dare you say such a —”

“He’s human, and your
Zhigaaah
may well have begun the binding. Your pheromone is most potent at the quickening and mating. Why do you think we’d intended to call in one of our own males to sate you?”

Her heart stuttered. “It’s only been one night, not three days. The pheromone will work its way out of his system.”

Her
seir
shot her a hard look.

“Won’t it?” It came out a squeak she wished she could take back.

“We don’t know. When we learned a single infusion of
Zhigaaal
could bind a human woman — thanks to my own oversight — we made certain to call in crossbred Xxan for the quickening.”

Zondra worried at her lower lip. She hadn’t known that. Why hadn’t they told her? What if his hold on her waned, and he was bound and driven crazy? What would she do?

Her
seir
sighed. “If he is irrevocably changed, I pray you feel the same for him in three days as you feel now.”

I will.
What caused the certainty was a mystery to her, but it brought a smile to her face.

Her
seir
growled.

But I will be confined to the nest for at least three days.
Her renewed smile faded that quickly.

****

Evan strode from the bathroom and went still at the sight of Admiral MacNair and Zondra’s brother. “I get it. You’re warning me off, and I’ll stay away.”

If he didn’t promise that much, he’d find himself in the brig. Now that he knew Zondra was sixteen, she was hands-off. He didn’t have the excuse of ignorance anymore.

The brother snorted, curling his lip in seeming disgust. Bracketing his eyeteeth, his serrated hunting teeth were clearly visible. Evan didn’t doubt it was a warning.

“Enough, Aleeks,” MacNair ordered.

“Yes, sir.” But it was delivered in barely leashed fury. Aleeks looked much like one of the feral race he was descended from.

The admiral panned his gaze up Evan’s body, passing by bare legs and towel-wrapped midriff. His eyes stopped at shoulder height, and Evan’s muscles tightened in preparation for a fight. There was no question what MacNair had taken exception to.

Yeah, old man. Not only did I fuck her, we played hard. Have a problem with that?
Before he could open his mouth and flush his career, the old man started talking.

“How deep are they? Superficial, I hope.”

Evan shrugged. “They’ll heal. I’ve taken worse shaft riding.”

Of course, he’d only worked on an unsecured driveshaft once, and it had been an emergency. Though the band holding the hundred-and-fifty-feet-long, twenty-feet-in-circumference shaft motionless had slipped minutely, and the shaft had managed less than a quarter turn, Evan had been bucked off the top and dragged between the shaft and the tunnel wall. He’d come away with fifteen stitches in his leg, and it remained the single most terrifying moment of his life.

It was better than what could have happened, and Evan knew it, but he wasn’t about to admit that to MacNair. Let the admiral think he was reckless, if that’s what the old man wanted to think. The captain of Evan’s first ship hadn’t dared record the second incident, when Evan had refused the unlawful order to shaft ride again, so the only thing MacNair would find if he looked was the notation of the time Evan had been injured in the attempt.

If the illegal and highly dangerous activity shocked MacNair, he didn’t show signs of it.

“She didn’t have a choice, you know,” Aleeks stated.

“Enough, Aleeks. One more time and you can wait in the car.”

A slice of pain hit solidly in the center of Evan’s chest, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. Evan attempted to hide it. “So this was... what? Some kind of alien mating season? She’d have taken any stiff cock?”

“Climbing into your lap and fucking you senseless isn’t out of the question,”
Zondra’s voice purred in his memories.

And why would he care if it was? There hadn’t been any promises between them. It was supposed to be the one night, and it had been one hell of a night. He pushed away the errant thought that it had been the single best night of his life.

“Yes and no.” MacNair interrupted the sex tape running again in Evan’s mind. “Yes, it was the quickening, Zondra’s sexual maturity. No, she wouldn’t have taken any cock offered. You know as well as I do that she turned away at least one man before you. Zondra needed someone strong enough to dominate her. You were.”

He nodded, trying to force his cock to subside. Just the reminder of how he’d pinned her hands down and —

Stop thinking about it, or you’ll never go down, asshole.

As if reading his thoughts, MacNair answered. “Ah, yeah. And there’s that.”

“I’ll stay away,” Evan repeated, abruptly aware that he was growling much as Aleeks was.

“You’re not going to want to.”

No shit! Was it my boner that tipped you off?
Evan kept his mouth shut tight, well aware that it wasn’t too late for MacNair to destroy him. Why the admiral hadn’t so far was a mystery to him.

“Her
Zhigaaah
— Zondra’s sex pheromone — is going to keep you somewhat... aroused for several days. Maybe two. Maybe three.”

“Bonus plan all the way around,” Evan muttered.

“Fuck off, Duncan,” Aleeks shot at him.

Evan returned fire. “I guess I’ll be doing a lot of
that
in the next few days, huh?”

Even if he wanted to pick up a few one-night stands — the idea made him ill — the last thing Evan needed was to pick up another teenager and complicate this further.

MacNair stepped between them, glaring at Aleeks. The younger man nodded his grudging agreement.

The admiral turned back to Evan. “I can arrange for time off, Duncan.” He let the offer hang between them.

“Don’t do me any favors.” Maybe work would keep him sane. At least it would give him something else to think about.

“If you change your mind —”

Evan locked eyes with him, warning MacNair off. “Any other cheery news?” he asked.