The Auction (3 page)

“He is not as patient as I am. Better to take your chances with me.”

I turned from my position scoping out exit strategies to find the blue one standing a few feet away. I swallowed convulsively. He’d removed his pants, and now he stood naked. In a lot of ways, he was like people. In other ways, very different. He was broader, had more developed muscles, and was a color that didn’t occur in my kind, but he wasn’t horrific. I ignored the tightening of my stomach. There was no way I was going to allow myself to be physically attracted to someone who was such an unnatural color. Or that had wings. And claws. Not to mention the teeth he was letting show for my benefit. I conveniently ignored the fact that I’d had a similar reaction to the red one while on the auction block.

Finally, I allowed my eyes to go where I hadn’t let them travel yet. It was no stranger than any of the many cocks I’d had before. There were no barbs. Thank God. But size was an issue. Some of the guys I’d grown up around had crassly referred to their member as their
pole
. Such a description was laughable and a testament to how over-inflated their egos were. But the dragon, yes, he could get away with such a descriptor, and no woman would giggle at him. More likely she’d run screaming.

My gaze traveled back to his face to see the sharp teeth fully displayed in a smile. I wasn’t sure if the smile was menace or garden-variety male pride, but I wished like hell I’d better blended with the other girls at the auction and avoided this fate altogether.

He extended a hand. “Come.”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

His eyes held mine captive. “I need to be inside you,” he said softly.

The space between my legs throbbed to life. Certain phrases tripped my switch, and that phrase was one of them, even from an alien being, apparently. The idea of him
needing
to be inside me. As if I were some kind of sustenance for him.

I backed away, careful of the cave entrance. If I fell again, I wasn’t sure he’d waste the energy to come swooping to my rescue. I found myself pressed against the wall in the kitchen. He didn’t move closer. The idea of punishment had already left my mind.

Until the red one came back.

He entered the cave and put a sack of food on the table. I didn’t know if he’d stolen it from our people or if they had an entire civilization that saw to food preparation as well. I’d expected him to fly in and throw a carcass in the middle of the floor. He looked between me and the blue one. And then the hisses and clicks and gesturing started again. It got heated as growls were thrown into the mix.

Finally the red one turned his gaze on me. He growled and moved forward, gripping my wrist hard and leading me down the unexplored hallway toward his den. The anger radiating off him was so terrifying I wanted nothing more than to be back with the blue one again.

When we reached the room, he flung me to the ground and advanced. “Why didn’t you go with my brother?” His voice came out a snarl.

What was I supposed to say to that? I just looked at the ground

“Answer me!”

His shout pissed me off and suddenly the intensity of my anger matched his own. “What do you mean why didn’t I go with him? Why didn’t I just go and rip off my clothes and throw myself at the strange alien guy with wings and a cock too big for me? Because I’m not crazy?”

“It’s not too big for you. I know you can take it.”

I put my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut because something in his voice was turning me on, and I knew that wasn’t the appropriate response. These were monsters that were going to kill me.

He moved toward me and I scrambled away. “Stay away from me. You killed my parents.”

He raised a brow. “I’ve killed no one.”

“Then another of your kind did.”

“And what would my kind want with your kind, other than the reason you’ve been brought here?”

“Food?” My voice was small and unsure when I said it because it seemed they weren’t hurting for food, and I really didn’t know his culture well enough to judge. Being offensive and racist wouldn’t win me any mercy.

He laughed that terrible laugh. “I don’t think so. Your kind would be far too gamey for our taste. If your parents were killed in the wild by a creature, it was probably the mambose. They fly, but they’re smaller than us. They hunt in packs and have no intelligence to speak of. They’re common animals, little better than your kind. But they only attack when people are alone. They won’t go into cities.”

I opened and shut my mouth several times like a fish. I desperately wanted to verbally spar, but he was sitting in a chair now, his claws out and clicking in an impatient manner on the table beside him. It was the eeriest sound I’d ever heard, even more than the clicks they used as part of their language.

“Undress.”

I stood frozen, unable to look away from the open doorway. There wasn’t a single door that closed inside their dwelling, so the urge to flee, no matter how stupid, was strong.

“Go ahead. See how much worse it gets for you.” He stood then, as if prepared to run me down if necessary.

“Please . . .” I said, the tears streaming down my face.

He just stared at me, like I was a curiosity. Like he’d never seen tears before. Maybe his kind didn’t have tear ducts. When you really thought about it, crying was a rather bizarre thing for any creature to be capable of. What purpose did it serve other than revealing too much?

He moved a few steps closer to me, until he was right inside my personal space. His claws receded with a little
snick
that made me jump. But his eyes hadn’t moved from my face where the tears were sliding down. The pad of his thumb swiped the moisture off my cheek. He looked at it a moment, curious, then licked his thumb.

“Salty. What do you call this?”

“Tears.”

“Tears,” he repeated as if it was a word that hadn’t made it into his language lessons.

“I thought you said you knew about my kind. You know the language. How can you not know about crying?”

“We lurked near men, mostly. Men don’t do this. Is it a response only women can do?”

“Men can do it. They just usually don’t.”

He seemed to consider that for a moment. “What makes it happen?”

“Fear. Sadness. Some people cry when they’re angry.” The strangeness of the situation had caused my crying to stop. I felt like an experiment, like he might start making notes, which would be better than any of the alternatives.

“Why did you stop? I want to see more of these tears. I like them.”

I didn’t know what to think or say to that. Everything just kind of stopped, my brain too overloaded with fear and the sense of bizarreness to do or process anything else. Then he spoke again.

“Why are you still dressed?”

Take control of the situation, Belle. Don’t wait for everything to come to you. If you seduce him, you still have the power.
The self-delusional mental talk got my hands moving to the straps of the dress. I managed to still the shaking enough to let them fall off my shoulders, and then the dress fell in a whoosh.

He tilted his head to the side, perplexed by the slip I wore, as if he didn’t expect more than one layer of clothing—nor could he determine the purpose of such.
Sure
they were smarter than us. If they couldn’t grasp layers and tears, my money was on my own species’ intelligence.

“Take off the rest,” he said, his eyes drinking me in, greedy to see what a human female looked like fully bare.

When the slip joined the dress on the floor, he walked several circles around me, touching and poking and prodding. Fascinated. I tried to stop the flutter in my stomach at the way he looked at me. I’d never been looked at so intensely before. Not by any man. Not even while Stephen Thurman had been coming in my mouth.

“Go lie on your stomach on the bed.” He must have seen the fear in my eyes, because he added: “I’m not going to fuck you. I’m going to punish you. My brother will fuck you first. That is our way. We share our mates.”

The situation moved into sharper focus. I was to be the plaything of two alien beings much bigger and badder than me, trapped in their mountainside cave. Would they fuck me together or just separately? Were both of them that big? Were their tastes exotic? Weird? What exactly would I be subjected to here?

A single tear rolled down my cheek, and he smiled.

“Please don’t hurt me.”

“You should have thought about that before you disobeyed.”

I’d expected him to hit me, but instead, he held me down on the bed, and then his claw was pressed against my back. I cried out at the burning sensation as my skin broke apart.

“Please, stop, you’re killing me.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. I am not killing you.”

He’d arranged me so that my feet were planted on the floor, with my upper body draped over the bed, exactly the position one might expect to be in for rear entry sex or perhaps a spanking. He kept clawing methodically as I lay there and sobbed.

The more I cried, the more he seemed to like it. His erection pressed against my ass, as he spelled out words. It was my language. To try to control the pain, I focused on deciphering the message. When he was finished, what I came up with was: Bad Slut.

The words, even more than the pain, made me cry harder. I didn’t know why. He hauled me up to stand and turned me to face him. His tongue darted out. I was taken aback by the fact that it was forked, like a snake, but thicker. Before I could ponder yet another difference between us, he was licking the tears off my face while he held me in something like a lover’s embrace.

He stopped for a moment and pulled back to look in my eyes. “I love the sound and smell and taste. You will make more tears for me.” It wasn’t a request.

The idea that I might not be able to please him and stay safe because he’d always be trying to make me cry more upset me enough to cause the tears to start flowing again. He gave me a nod of approval and a smile that might have been comforting if not for the pointy teeth that came with it. Then he went back to lapping up the tears he’d caused.

Inexplicably, I found myself responding to the gesture. It was so animal and primal and oddly comforting. My legs fell open as I unconsciously pressed my mound against his thigh, rubbing against him, trying to soothe the strange ache that had started in response to the power he held over me.

“Stop. You will go to my brother now.” He pointed at the door, his tone and posture regal. I could do nothing but obey him. I was too afraid he’d start slicing my skin up again. The pain had receded a little. I think I was in shock. I couldn’t believe he’d marked me like that for such a small rebellion. He’d said he wanted a mate. Was this how these creatures treated their mates? If it was, no wonder the females of their kind were dying off. Who could survive their brutality?

I felt a little woozy walking down the hallway to the other room. I stumbled in the doorway, gripping the edge of the wall to stay upright. The brother sat on his bed, looking to be reading something off a computerized screen. He got up quickly when he saw me. I tried to cover myself from his gaze. Despite the fact that I was bleeding, the first thought on my mind was to protect my modesty from at least one of them, however futile and stupid the effort.

He made a sound that was probably a curse in his language, then lifted and carried me to his bed. He laid me down in much the same way his brother had and I struggled a little, the tears working their way down my face again.

He appeared equally baffled by the concept of tears, but though he seemed to find it odd, he didn’t ask questions. His focus was on my back.

“Why aren’t you healing?” he asked.

“What?” It was the strangest thing he could have said.

“You’re bleeding. I don’t understand.”

“H-he cut me, with his claws.” What did he mean
why was I bleeding
?

“I know what he did. It’s a common punishment for our kind. What I don’t understand is, why hasn’t it started to heal yet? You shouldn’t still be bleeding.”

In his world maybe. In my world, slicing skin like that made you bleed for a while, and I was losing too much. My eyes started to drift closed, and a panic went through my head, a warning that closing my eyes may result in them never opening again. He seemed to sense the danger as well because he shook me.

“How do I stop this?”

I could hear the fear in his voice, that maybe humans were so fragile nothing could stop the bleeding once it started.

He got panicked then. “He can’t lose you. I can’t let him lose you. How do I stop this?”

“Pressure. Need . . . something to soak up the blood, and pressure.” My eyes had closed by this point, and I could feel the slow drift coming. Then blankets were being pressed against my back.

“How long will it take?” He was frantic.

“I don’t know, no one has ever sliced my back with claws before.” I couldn’t believe I could manage a sarcastic sentence. The situation couldn’t be that bad. Could it? I looked over to find the red one standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, observing the scene before him as if he hadn’t created it.

The clicking and hissing and growling started as they argued in their language. Then the red one disappeared down the hallway. He returned a few moments later with a cup of some type of fruit juice. There was a thin tube in the cup; I’d never seen one before. He put the little tube in my mouth.

“Drink. It may help.” It did help once I managed to figure out the drinking out of a tube concept. The juice was unfamiliar to me, but sweet and cold. The dizziness receded. Maybe I hadn’t lost too much blood. Maybe I just lost too much on an empty stomach. I’d been too anxious before the auction to eat.

“I didn’t know you didn’t heal,” the red one said.

“
I
heal
,” I said, exasperated by their inability to grasp variant healing times. His study of humans had been cursory at best.

He gave me a look that indicated this was another point in his column for the superior species award. I rolled my eyes and dropped my head back down on the bed. I felt a strange safety in knowing that neither of them seemed to want me dead. I knew it would always say
bad slut
on my back, but it
was hard to get too worked up about the scarring at the moment. At least I wouldn’t be able to see it every day.