The Huntress (25 page)

“Sonv’a bitch!” he exclaimed, voice slurring as though he’d forgotten human speech.

“I told you not to stay in there too long.”

He slumped against the wall, struggling with two different realities. He might remember where he was, but his body seemed slow to catch on. He kept seeing flickers of motion out of the corner of his eyes, and his muscles twitched with remembered movement. It had been a deadly game between him and his
Nacrid
cat. Who would be predator and who would be prey? The hunt had pared him down to bare bones, all primitive instinct, senses pushed to the limit. Kill or be killed. It was hard to register the safety of his surroundings when adrenaline still surged like electricity through his body.

It had been the most challenging test of his survival skills that he’d ever experienced.

“Christ Jesus.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like that. I left you some food in the mess. Ema can give you a restorative if you think you need it.” The slight rise in his tone made the last sentence a question.

Stone shook his head.

“Figures. It’s late. You should rest, Stone.”

The android departed and Stone slowly stripped out of the VR suit, the sterile air of the ship cool against his sweat-slicked skin. With deliberate care, he pulled on his clothes and headed out of the gym, trying to ignore the hum of the ship. The almost subliminal sound made his skin tingle and the hair at the nape of his neck prickle with a displaced sense of danger.

Resisting the urge to look over his shoulder constantly, he went to the mess hall, shoveling food into his body as though he hadn’t seen it in days. The meal steadied him and he began to think more clearly. That amazingly real program explained a lot about hunters. No wonder Mea hadn’t been afraid of him. Why be afraid of an ordinary man when you’ve spent time staring down a
Nacrid?

Thinking of Mea started a different kind of chain reaction in his body and he got to his feet with a sharp shake of his head. Clearing the table, he left the mess and moved down the corridor to his quarters. His muscles still twitched in reaction to the hunt even though his mind started to fog with weariness. A shower would help him relax, help him sleep.

It didn’t work the way he expected. The shower relaxed his muscles but cleared his mind. He felt refreshed, energized even—he was still pumped from the program.

And thoughts of Mea kept sneaking up on him. He tried to block them, pacing shirtless and barefoot to work off this new burst of energy, but images of her asleep, warm, and smelling of secret female things steadily shredded his self-control. And pissed him off.

She’d called him a human being, but so far he’d been nothing but an animal, reacting instead of acting. Worse, if he kept touching her, he was going to wind up being her animal. That thought made his guts twist in fury and fear, but images of her wouldn’t leave him alone. He tortured himself with molten memories until it suddenly occurred to him that she’d wanted him. He wouldn’t put it past her to fake it, to pretend an attraction to further her inexplicable games. But he knew somehow that her responses had been real.

She
wanted
him.

He was out the door and across the corridor between one ragged breath and another. Again, her door was not locked. Torn between anger and need, he stepped stiff-legged into her quarters.

Mea was not asleep, pacing her quarters in another shapeless wrap. When she saw him, she sagged as if in relief. “Thank god.” Not waiting for him this time, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around his neck, whispering against his mouth, “Where have you been?”

Unable to stop himself, he kissed her deeply. A frantic voice in the back of his mind demanded control—some kind, any kind, or he was lost for good. The only thing that saved him from caving without a struggle was her wrap. If she’d been naked, it would have been hopeless. At least, that’s what he told himself while he pulled her arms away, still kissing her desperately. She wrestled with him briefly until he pushed her toward the bed. He wasn’t going to be able to stop touching her, but goddamn it, she was going to suffer for tricking him, trapping him, driving him insane.

He was going to make her beg.

If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have seen the huge flaw in this plan, but what he was doing couldn’t be called thinking. Not even close—he was reacting again, to his anger and to her hot-honey taste, her sweet scent, her electrifying desire.

Lowering her to the bed, he caught both her wrists in one hand and held them over her head. Then he tugged her wrap open and began teasing her, torturing her with his tongue and teeth, with the merciless stroke of his fingers. He held himself away, refusing to touch her with anything but his mouth, his hand, but he discovered that it didn’t matter. The flaw became painfully clear—in torturing her, he was torturing himself.

She saturated his senses with her lush curves and lithe limbs, with her silky soft skin and addictive flavor, but it was her responses that made him ache and throb with a soul-deep need. She writhed and arched under him, gasping and shivering at every touch of his mouth, moaning with maddening passion. She was stronger than he, but even though her hands clenched repeatedly, she didn’t try to break his grip on her wrists. She allowed his seduction, gave him control along with every wild response he’d ever imagined from his sensual hunter.

He was in flames, shuddering with the clawing need to be inside her.

Yet he stubbornly continued to punish them both, teasing and tantalizing without fulfillment until she gasped, “Bay, please! Oh god, I love you, please.”

Her words drove through him like a powerful jolt of electricity. His control disintegrated as if it had never existed. Pressing full length on her and growling like an animal into her mouth, he fumbled with his pants. With a quick jerk that proved how easily she could have thwarted him, she freed her wrists and helped him with frantic, urgent tugs. Then he was free and tunneling into her melting heat with all the wild power in his body. Moments later she arched, keening while her inner muscles contracted around him in savage provocation. Helpless to prevent it, he gave a hoarse cry as his world blew apart.

Dying must be like that,
was his first thought when his brain limped into motion again. At first he simply tried to remember how to breathe, amazed that any part of him still functioned at all. But memory was a ruthless thing, and once it got its teeth into him, it shook him like a dog and didn’t let go—memory of his response to Mea’s words. The abyss opened again in front of him, and he slid relentlessly towards the edge, darkness eating at him.

Gasping, he rolled away from her and off the bed. Forcing his rubbery legs to hold him, he pulled up his pants and stumbled toward the exit. She was silent and still behind him. He refused to look at her as he left.

Back in his own quarters, Stone dropped chest down onto the cool metal floor and fought to get himself back under control, body and brain. He’d set out to make her beg, damn it, and succeeded. That’s why he’d lost it. Not because the fool woman had mentioned that fanciful word again. He’d nearly convinced himself when exhaustion finally caught up with him.

His last thought before falling into oblivion was
I have to avoid her from now on, whatever the cost.

Chapter 20

The next day, Stone discovered that avoiding her wasn’t going to be too damned difficult, since she was avoiding him. He spent the day with the kid on the pretext of using Regan as a buffer, which turned out to be a pretty flimsy excuse, since they saw Mea twice the whole day. She smiled and laughed with the kid but didn’t even glace his way, as if he was suddenly invisible. He should have been relieved, but he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did—that day.

He wasn’t totally off the hook, though. Regan managed to torture him in a different way, coming up with little comments like, “If you stay, we can do this every day,” and “We make a great family, don’t you think?” She called him Dad like she’d forgotten he had a name and smiled at him like he was the sun, moon, and stars.

It made his skin itch as if it wanted to crawl right off him, but he put up with it, staying with her even after it became clear that Mea wasn’t going near him. He even stayed with her when Warren called her to her lessons. The subject was boring as hell—some history thing about asteroid mining—but the kid treated it and the android the same way she had treated Stone and knife throwing. And she never forgot he was there. Every once in a while she’d look over and ask him a question or just smile at him.

Damned irritating, but at least the kid was consistent. As the day wore on, Mea’s absence pricked like a splinter under his skin. It made him restless, edgy, annoyed for reasons he didn’t understand and didn’t want to explore.

And the android was too quiet. Occasionally he’d catch Warren watching him with a strange, unreadable expression. His attitude toward Stone was suddenly bland and almost courteous. Stone felt like he was back on
Nacrid
territory, hunted and paranoid.

But nothing happened. The day ended, he saw the kid off to bed and went to his own quarters, all without incident. Sleep avoided him as neatly as Mea had.

Stone’s final day on the
Starfire
was much different. He knew he was in trouble when he entered the mess hall that morning and Mea smiled at him. Her eyes never left him, watching his every move with green and terrible intent.

By the time he got a plateful of food and sat down, every inch of his skin was on fire and beads of sweat formed on his forehead. Then the kid deserted him, cheerfully announcing that she’d be in the gym. The android sitting at Mea’s elbow and muttering over a digital pad was the only reason Stone didn’t bolt, figuring she wouldn’t do anything in front of Warren.

He figured wrong.

After the kid left, Mea studied him for a moment with that disconcerting smile curving her lips, letting him take a bite of food before she said, “I missed you yesterday, Bay. Did you miss me?”

He nearly choked at the husky tone, the sultry invitation in her voice. Swallowing the bite of food with a painful gulp, he rasped, “We had a deal,” avoiding those knowing green eyes.

“Ah, so you did miss me,” she responded with a hint of sensual laughter. “A whole day without sex—”

“Not what I meant.” His hand clenched hard around his fork as dark heat flared in his groin. “You said no demands, no strings.”

“Mmm. You know, our deal was a little vague on the details. For example, I’m fairly sure I never agreed to being used and then discarded.”

The hiss of danger in that last word pulled his eyes to her face. Something in him twisted at the hard lights and whispers of shadow in her emerald gaze. “Discarded,” he repeated without comprehension until his memory supplied the image of him stumbling out of her quarters with his pants at half mast. Fleeing the dangerous implications in her bed. Had she taken his escape as some kind of insult? “You said you loved me,” he accused in a low mutter.

Those oddly disturbing shadows faded from her eyes and her mouth curled at the corners. She propped her chin on one hand and studied him with feline intensity. “Did I? No wonder you ran.”

He scowled at her but couldn’t really argue. He
had
run.

“All right, I’ll add no declarations of love and affection to the fine print. As long as you agree to let me show you the rules of engagement. Don’t worry,” she added in a smoky voice when he tensed. “I promise you’ll enjoy every moment.”

Mea stood and sauntered around to his side of the table with a terrible, fluid grace. Captivated by the hunger in her eyes, he didn’t move as she braced one hand on the back of his neck and straddled him, swift as a cat. Sinking with deliberate provocation onto his lap, she smiled into his eyes. “Do we have a deal?”

He didn’t hear Warren leave, had forgotten the android existed as some tension inside him snapped. He surged to his feet and cleared the table with a sweep of an arm, lust kicking him hard when she locked her long legs around his hips. Her nails dug into his skin and her teeth flashed in a reckless challenge that called to everything primitive in him. He laid her flat and pressed his body into hers, kissing her with wild abandon. Breakfast turned into lunch before they were through.

Throughout the day, Stone discovered that Mea’s “rules of engagement” seemed to consist of total surrender on both sides. She conveniently forgot the “no demands” part of her deal and seduced him at every turn, but he made a pretty easy subject of seduction. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her. That should’ve terrified him, but she didn’t give him time to consider it, overwhelming him over and over again with the power of their mutual desire. His loss of control didn’t seem important when he saw the light in her eyes or heard her laugh softly in his ear. Only at the end of the day, when he lay finally sated, recovering in her bed with her curled against him, did he remember caution.

Too late.

A deep, heavy lethargy pushed him into the soft cushion. That alone didn’t alarm him until he tried to move and couldn’t. Then he tried to speak. And couldn’t. He fought it with all he had, but his eyes wouldn’t stay open.

As his mind blurred unnaturally, Mea lifted her head and looked at him. Tears streaked her treacherous face. “I’m sorry,” was the last thing he heard before darkness closed over his head.

Chapter 21

Sluggish and groggy, Stone fought his heavy eyelids open and struggled up on one elbow. Something was wrong, but fog filled his mind and he couldn’t think straight. Blinking slowly, he looked around. He was in Mea’s quarters, but she wasn’t there and there was a strange stillness to his surroundings. He felt like he had when Ema had healed him, but that would mean…

Memory returned and he shot to his feet, ignoring dizziness to yank on his clothes. She’d
drugged
him. Rage flowed, making him shake with violence, and he gave it free rein to bury a stinging sense of betrayal.