Forgotten (19 page)

“
All right, we’re through
the fold and only a few parsecs from Flame and Frost.”

Rone’s deep voice pulled her out of her
forbidden thoughts and made her jump.

“
Oh, um…okay. How long
until we get there, then?”

“
Not too long.” He was
doing something with the controls. “We’ll be within hailing
distance soon. I’ll send out a signal.”

“
Tell me about
us,”
Kate said,
surprising both herself, and Rone, from the look he shot
us.

“
Um…” He cleared his
throat. “What exactly do you want to know?”

“
You know…” She made a
motion with one hand. “How we are together. What’s the, uh, dynamic
of our relationship?”

“
Hmm…” Rone appeared to be
thinking about it deeply. At last he looked at her. “We have a lot
of fun together. We’re playful…adventurous. I was much more serious
before I met you—you taught me to see the lighter side of
things.”

“
I did?” Kate raised an
eyebrow at him.

He nodded. “You did.”

“
Well, but…” Though his
statement was well worth considering, it wasn’t exactly the
information she was looking for.

“
But what,
Lalli?”
There it was
again—that little pet nickname—at least, Kate assumed it was a
nickname—slipping out. She reminded herself to find out about it at
some point, but not now.

“
Well…you said we’re
playful,” Kate said. “So what do we play?”

“
There is one game that’s
your favorite,” he started. “It…” Then he shook his head. “No,
never mind.”

“
What? Tell me!” Kate
demanded. “I want to know!”

“
No, I don’t think you
do,” Rone murmured. “Not after seeing your reaction to the breeding
chair—I don’t think you want to know at all.”

“
I
do,”
she insisted. “I get it—we were
married and we had…had sex.” Her heart beat faster as she said it
but she made herself keep talking anyway. “We’re both adults
here—come on and tell me, Rone—how bad could it be?”

“
It wasn’t bad at all.” He
sighed. “All right—it was actually a game you came up with. You
called it ‘Hide and Suck.’”

“
What?” Kate frowned.
“What’s that supposed to mean. Do you mean hide and
seek?”

The big Kindred shook his head. “No. Look,
are you sure you want me to tell you this?”

“
Of course I am,” Kate
said, although she was beginning to wonder. What kind of perverted
games had they played together to while away the time on the ship
she now found herself on?

“
Very well.” Rone sighed
again and ran a hand through his hair. “It started when you were
asking me how sensitive my sense of smell is.”

“
Oh? How sensitive
is
it?” Kate asked,
interested despite herself.

“
About a thousand times
more sensitive than the Earth animal you call a bloodhound,” Rone
said matter of factly. “And I was telling you that I could pick out
any particular scent—and that I was especially attuned to
your
scent.”

“
You mean like the smell
of my perfume or what shampoo I use or something?” Kate asked. But
he shook his head.

“
Not that scent. The scent
of your sex. Your pussy.” He nodded at the juncture between her
thighs and Kate felt her cheeks getting hot.

“
I…I don’t
smell,”
she protested
angrily. “I take regular showers and baths and—”

“
It’s a
good
smell—my favorite
scent in the universe. So warm and sweet and fresh…so
you,
Kate.” Rone closed
his eyes and inhaled deeply.

Kate wondered if he was smelling her now and
quickly crossed her legs.

“
Anyway,” Rone continued,
ignoring her protective gesture. “I was telling you that I could
find you by your scent—especially the scent of your
desire.”

“
You…you can?” Kate
squeezed her thighs together even tighter.

He nodded, his piercing
blue eyes half-lidded when he looked at her. “When your pussy gets
especially hot and wet it calls to me—your
scent
calls to me, anyway. I was
telling you that, telling you I could find you anywhere, especially
when you were aroused, and you challenged me to a
contest.”

“
What
kind
of contest?” Kate wasn’t sure
she wanted to know but she’d come too far and insisted she wanted
the information too vehemently to back down now.

“
You would go and hide
yourself someplace on the ship—and believe me, there are more
hiding places than you’d imagine because The Finder was originally
a smuggler’s ship—and then…”

“
And then what?” Kate
asked, almost in a whisper.

“
And then you’d start to
touch yourself.” He cast her a sidelong glance. “To pet and stroke
your pussy. And I would try to find you, by scent
alone.”

“
And if you did? What did
you do?” Kate’s breath was coming short for some reason and her
heart was pounding but she told herself it didn’t mean anything.
That his story wasn’t affecting her at all.

Rone cast her another burning look.

“
If I wasn’t able to find
you before you made yourself come, you would, ah, give me oral
gratification.”

“
A blow job,” Kate said
bluntly. “Okay, that sounds like something a married couple with a
lot of time on their hands might do, I guess.” Kind of a kinky
couple, making a naughty little game of it, but still, she guessed
she could see it. “But what if…” She cleared her throat. “What if
you found me before I could, uh, get off?”

“
Then I was allowed to
finish you off with my tongue,” Rone said in a low
voice.

Kate felt as though a bucket of cold water
had suddenly been dumped over her head. She sat up straight in her
chair and the warm feeling that had been slowly building in the pit
of her stomach abruptly dissipated.

“
I don’t believe that,”
she said, her voice sounding strangled in her own ears. “I
don’t…don’t do that.”

“
You didn’t used to,” Rone
said carefully. “In fact, it was one of the reasons we almost
didn’t get bonded—you were so against it. And I—”

“
You what? You wanted it
anyway?” Kate demanded.

“
I
needed
it,” he murmured, looking at
her directly. “It’s a Kindred thing to want to please your mate
with your tongue—to lick between her thighs and taste her honey
right from the well of her sweet, wet pussy. But with Wulvens…” He
shook his head. “With us, it’s a whole different thing—it’s a
biological drive. An imperative. We don’t just want to taste our
mates—we fucking
have
to.”

“
And you told me we
couldn’t be together unless I let you do
that?
And I
bought
it?” Kate demanded. “How
stupid could I be?”

“
Not stupid at all,” he
said softly. “I know why it bothers you—or why it did back then,
anyway. I know that you had a bad experience back in school and you
decided you never wanted to try it again.”

“
You do?” Kate felt
violated all over again. “I’ve never told
anyone
about that.”

“
You never told me the
details, if that makes you feel any better. You just said you
didn’t like it because of a bad experience.” Rone sounded tired and
miserable.

Kate couldn’t help thinking “bad experience”
was the worst understatement she’d ever heard. If she closed her
eyes, she could still see the look of disgust on Greg Compton’s
face, could still hear the note of revulsion in his drunken voice
when he said—But no. Kate pushed the awful memory away.

“
I still don’t believe I’d
do that with you. Um, let you do it to me, I mean,” she said
shortly.

“
I didn’t think you would
either,” Rone said quietly. “But when I explained about the Wulven
drive to taste their mates, you agreed to let me try it—to see if
you could let go of the past and if I could make it good for
you.”

“
And…and could you? Did
you?” Kate’s mouth felt so dry she could barely get the words
out.

“
I was very slow and
gentle. I spent a long, long time just kissing and licking your
thighs…rubbing my cheek against your mound.” There was a faraway
look in the big Kindred’s eyes, as though he was remembering one of
the best things that had ever happened to him. “You were shy at
first—didn’t want to let me take off your panties.”

“
What…what did you do?”
Kate’s heart was beating hard again but she didn’t know
why.

Rone gave her a lazy smile. “I kissed you
with them on. Petted and stroked and rubbed you until your hot
little pussy was so wet I could see right through them because your
cunt honey made them transparent.”

“
You…I…” Kate didn’t know
what to say. “Did you ever…did I let you…you know, take them
off?”

“
After a long, long time,
you finally trusted me enough.” His eyes were half-lidded with lust
as he looked at her. “Then I was able to really lick you—to spread
your sweet little pussy wide open and lap and suck and taste your
honey right from the source. Gods, I love the feel of you trembling
all around me, moaning and calling my name…the taste of your
honey…the warm, sweet scent of your pussy…”

“
Okay, that’s enough” Kate
protested uneasily. “I take it you were successful in ‘making it
good for me.’”

“
To judge by your
reaction, yes. You came all over my face,” Rone told her, his voice
deepening to a soft growl. “Came so hard for me, baby. After that,
I knew we’d be able to be together. And we worked out a kind of
schedule.”

“
A schedule? We had
a
schedule
for
this?” Kate absolutely couldn’t believe it. But Rone was
nodding.

“
I was allowed to kiss you
awake in the morning and kiss you to sleep at night. And then
sometimes in the middle of the day if we weren’t working on a case,
we’d go to the tasting swing.”

“
The
what
now?” Kate could barely believe
they were having this conversation. “Is there some kind of a sex
swing in the bedroom I didn’t see? Right beside the
breeding
chair,
maybe?”

“
It’s a specially made
swing you can lie in which supports your weight evenly all over,”
Rone explained. “It hangs from a hook in the ceiling of our
bedchamber. It’s…folded away right now. I couldn’t bear to have it
out, to have it remind me of you when you were gone. When you were
lost…”

The sorrow and loss in his voice made Kate
ache for some reason.

“
I’m sorry,” she said
awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to…to sound so skeptical. It’s just…I
find all this kind of hard to believe. Feeling the way I do
about…some of the things you’ve been describing.”

“
I know how you feel,” he
said quietly. “You feel the same way you did before you met
me—before I earned your trust and you let me in.”

“
Yes, I guess that’s
probably true,” Kate said, feeling self-conscious all over again.
“Um…but this need to…to taste your mate. Does it have anything to
do with the
hunger
I keep hearing about?”

His eyes flashed. “Where did you hear
that?”

“
Well, Emily said
something about it, but she didn’t really know what it meant. And…”
Kate took a deep breath. “And I heard you discussing it with the
priestess you went to visit last night.”

His eyebrows lifted. “You followed me to the
Sacred Grove?”

Kate flushed. “I know I
shouldn’t have eavesdropped but I wanted to know what was going on.
But I still don’t. So what
is
the
hunger?
”

“
The
hunger
is nothing you need to be
worried about,” Rone said in a low voice. “I have it under control.
It doesn’t concern you.”

“
Except I think it
does.
If I’m really
supposed to be your wife, that is.”

“
You’re not supposed to
be—you
are.”
His
eyes flashed. “And you followed me because you do not trust
me.”

“
I don’t
know
you,” she pointed
out. “And I still can’t even
touch
you without having a panic attack. So I need to
know—”

“
Greetings, pilgrims,”
said a sweet voice.

Kate’s eyes jerked up to the viewscreen
where a woman with pure white hair and angelic features had
suddenly appeared. She was plump and smiling with long white
eyelashes and white brows to go with her hair. Her eyes were a
pure, pale purple unlike anything Kate had ever seen before.

In fact, the more she looked at her, the
more Kate thought she looked completely unearthly—somehow angelic.
She halfway expected to see a pair of fluffy white wings sprouting
out of the woman’s back or a harp appear in her hands.