The Ninth Orb (26 page)

And with every groan and shudder that told her of his escalating pleasure, Eden felt her own intensify, felt her body rising toward release.

And she caressed him more feverishly, so caught up in her own growing excitement in pleasuring him that she scarcely noticed when he reached the point when he could no longer remain still at all. Abruptly, a hoarse groan rumbled from his chest and scraped his throat as it emerged. “No more,” he said harshly, releasing a sobbing breath. “Edie,” he gasped hoarsely. “I am on fire.”

Reluctantly, she released him, lifting her head.

Uttering a sound of frustrated need, he caught her arms and jerked her to her feet, tearing at the closure of her suit. It gave way at his hard tug, opening from the neck to one knee in one swift motion. He skimmed shaking hands down the flesh exposed and then closed his hands on her waist, lifted her, and settled her on her desk, struggling to drag her suit off and taste and explore her body at the same time.

His caresses were rough, untutored, mindless with need and it enflamed her own burning desire. She didn’t need finesse. She needed raw desire, a hunger to match her own, the clumsiness of desperation and urgency.

“I know I am of no use to you. I am a warrior, not a breeder. I have no seed to fill your womb with babies,” he murmured harshly, almost feverishly as he burrowed against her, tracing kisses over her face and neck and throat, “but I want to know what it feels like to bury my flesh inside yours, to feel your body wrapped around mine.”

Eden felt her belly clench in want at his words, felt liquid heat curl inside her. Something painful fisted around her heart, as well. “Shhh,” she said soothingly, curling her arms around him and kissing him as he kissed her, feverishly, on any part of his flesh that she could reach. “Don’t say that. Don’t think that. I want you, too. It’s all I ever wanted.”

He went still at that, lifting his head to meet her gaze for a long moment. Dragging in a harsh breath, he caught her face between his palms, covering her mouth in a deep, ravenous kiss. Her translator, having defied gravity and rough caresses, finally tumbled from her head unheeded as he slipped his hands upward, threading his fingers through hair.

Breaking the kiss almost as abruptly he’d begun, he grasped her suit, nearly unseating her as he wrested it from her hips and tossed it aside. “Now,” he gasped, his voice a hoarse growl as he reached for her once more.

Too mindless with need to know or care what he’d said, Eden reached for him as he moved toward her again, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. He lifted her, reversing their positions so that it was he who lay back against the hard surface of the desk. She came up on her knees, slipped a hand between her thighs to part her flesh as she grasped his cock and guided him to the mouth of her passage, pressing down until she felt the head of his cock enter her.

Gasping, she lifted her head as she pressed slowly downward. He was watching their bodies joining, she saw, his eyes half closed, his face taut. Her belly clenched, pushing against his flesh. Lifting slightly away, she pressed down again, feeling his cock stretching her as her body’s moisture began to ease his possession. His cock jerked as she at last took him fully. Leaning forward, she braced her palms on either side of him and kissed his throat and chest. “Hold on for me, baby,” she murmured against his skin as she lifted her hips and bore down again, slowly at first and then more quickly.

She heard his teeth grinding as he caught her hips, but he made no attempt to still her movements. She uttered a throaty groan and began to move faster as her body, already pushed to the limit, swiftly scaled the heights to the peak. “Oh god! You feel so good inside me, baby,” she gasped as her body began to quake in the first hard convulsions of release, pushing him beyond his control so that he began to shake with his own imminent release. “Oh my god,” she groaned as the full force of it rolled over her and she struggled to keep thrusting until she felt his hot seed spilling inside of her, heard him groaning with his own culmination.

Gasping, shuddering with the tiny aftershocks, she finally collapsed weakly on top of him, trying to catch her breath. He went limp, as well, his arms dropping to the desk on either side of him.

She didn’t want to move. She wanted to lay draped over him and drift blissfully into oblivion but the hard surface was hell on her knees and after a time couldn’t be ignored anymore. Stirring reluctantly when she felt his flesh slip from her body, she lifted her head and looked down at Baen.

He was lying perfectly still, his eyes closed, but when he felt her movement, he lifted his eyelids enough to peer at her beneath his lashes. A slow smile curled her lips. Leaning down, she nibbled playfully at his lips. “I think that made the whole trip worthwhile,” she murmured.

A faint frown appeared between his eyes, but his lips curled in response to her smile.

She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said softly, kissing him lightly one last time before she began to struggle off of him and the desk. He sat up, looping an arm around her to steady her and then allowing her to slip slowly to the floor.

He was reluctant to release her even then, but allowed his hand to drop when she pulled away and looked around to see what had become of her clothes. Spying her suit dangling from the back of a chair across the room, she crossed to retrieve it and then headed for her private washroom to bathe off.

As she bathed the sticky semen from her thighs, a frown marred her brows as a memory surfaced.

Baen had said he was sterile. Did he know that, she wondered? Or was that what all of the warriors were told? After studying the matter over for a moment, she found a bottle and collected a specimen for testing.

When she returned to her office, she saw that Baen had dressed himself and was busy collecting the things that had fallen to the floor from her desk during their wild tango.

He turned when he heard her, holding out the translator.

Her lips twisted wryly when she saw it. She supposed it would have been too much to hope for that the fragile piece would survive their wild bout of lovemaking.

Shrugging, she took it from him, moved around the desk and summoned her assistant.

The place reeked of sex, but then the woman had probably been watching most of what had happened on her monitor, so Eden sincerely doubted she would be shocked.

It was amazing, Eden reflected later, that sex was such a panacea for tension. Despite the usual aggravations she had to deal with throughout the remainder of the day and the thoughts that niggled at the back of her mind most of the time, she felt more relaxed and less jittery than she had in months.

The thoughts that niggled at the back of her mind refused to be completely silenced though. As relieved as she was that Baen returned his post, behaving as if nothing had happened, and nothing had changed, she found it a little disconcerting, too.

It hadn’t just been wild sex between them. Baen had told her in the only way he knew how that he loved her and what they’d done was make love, not merely have sex to assuage each other’s needs. She was as certain of that as she was that Baen had no real conception of love as Earth people knew it. Nothing in his background could have taught him and yet she didn’t doubt for a moment that he’d meant it when he had told her she was everything to him and nothing else mattered.

The most disturbing part of what he’d said, though, was that nothing would matter to him if she left him.

She tried to convince herself that it was merely a figure of speech, but where would Baen have learned that as a figure of speech? From what she understood of his culture, and she thought she understood it pretty well now, they didn’t ‘leave’. The men entered into a sort of contract with the females that chose them and there they remained for the rest of their natural life.

She went cold all over when it occurred to her to wonder if she’d inadvertently spoken of their plans while Baen was near enough to hear and she’d been wearing the translator. She didn’t think she had, but Baen had been trained to be unobtrusive. Sometimes he would stand almost perfectly still for hours without making any sound at all.

Had she gotten busy, been so distracted by her frazzled nerves and the weigh of her duties that she’d ‘forgotten’ he was in the room?

She couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she worked at recalling each meeting she’d had on the subject, she simply could not remember any time she’d been wearing the translator. She had, in point of fact, made it a habit to discard the translator as soon as she arrived in her office.

So had one of the others been wearing theirs and she just hadn’t noticed?

Or was she building a mountain out of a mole hill?

Maybe Baen had just been around them enough that he’d figured out that they didn’t consider sex a life commitment to the partner they’d chosen to have sex with?

Chapter Twenty

Between her preoccupation with the state of affairs in the colony, the progress with the secret evacuation plan, and her concern that Baen might have overheard something he shouldn’t have, it wasn’t until it came time to retire for the night that it occurred to Eden to wonder if the intimacy she’d allowed Baen might have serious repercussions to all concerned. She’d been well aware at the time that what they were doing was forbidden in his culture. She hadn’t cared--then. The sexual frustrations she’d suffered in the weeks since she had taken her pazaan added to the desire she’d had for Baen from the first had left no consideration for good sense.

When Cal took her hand to lead her to her room to prepare for bed, however, it dawned on her forcefully to wonder if he would be jealous of her. He had never been with a woman and he had indicated that he felt more than simple lust.

He hadn’t shown jealousy or possessiveness before, but had she broken a barrier that should never have been broken? Would it come spilling forth now in a tide that could no longer be contained?

It made her uneasy thinking it might.

One thing she certainly couldn’t afford--or any of them--was to start a war within their own pazaans, not when they still had many weeks of preparation before there was even any hope of leaving with a minimal chance of surviving relocation.

Hind sight was always twenty/twenty, she thought wryly, wondering if it would be better to refuse her favors to any of the men for a few days until she was more certain of where she stood with Baen.

She hadn’t done so before, but it was her pazaan, after all. Obviously, since they’d split into three groups instead of four, they expected some down time for her cycle if nothing else.

She was sated from her gymnastics with Baen earlier and she didn’t particularly care whether she had sex or not, especially since there was no real passion to it when she ‘performed’ with her pazaan--actually, no passion at all.

The question was, would Baen’s ability to feel and express passion be expressed in rage and violence toward the others if she did what she knew she had to do, which was to keep them all pacified until she was in a position where she no longer needed to concern herself with how to keep the peace?

She could read nothing in his expression as Cal led her from the gathering room, but how much faith, she wondered, could she place in his expression when she knew now the depths of passion he hid behind that wall of cold distance most of the time?

Was it the same with all of them? Had they just been conditioned to hide those deep emotions? Or had they been conditioned not to feel them as they’d first believed?

She didn’t know, but she realized even as they reached her bed room that if Baen was jealous, putting the other men in her pazaan off for a few days wasn’t going to change that.

She might only succeed in riling them all up.

Baen was intelligent enough, she knew, and disciplined enough, to contain his feelings, however he might feel about it. And since he was the one who always went with her into the city, she could try to reason with him, if necessary, when the others weren’t around.

Truthfully, she couldn’t see a lot of reason for jealously, even if he was so inclined, because what happened between her and the men of her pazaan was mechanical at best.

As far as she’d been able to see, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the consummation ceremony that had begun her official claiming of her pazaan and any other time. The men had been carefully divided into groups, one week with a group and then a rotation to the next--she supposed so that if she did conceive, then they would have a clearer idea of who’d successfully fathered her offspring--sort of like the firing squads of ancient times, she supposed, where all the men in the squad fired, but only one had a real bullet. Except in this case, only one made the goal, but all of them had the possibility and could think they might have been the one.

Unless, of course, they believed that the group had fathered the offspring, which wasn’t really that farfetched considering their mating practices and the fact that their women had litters. Maybe their women were able to produce a multitude of eggs at once and each could be fertilized by a different donor?

Without research, which they weren’t likely to get a chance at, they would probably never know.

And even if that was the case, it didn’t change the fact that nothing like that was going to happen to her.

She just hoped it was going to take the men a while to figure out that the Earth women they’d taken as their queens were not the fertility goddesses their own women were.

Preoccupied as she was with her thoughts and anxieties, Eden still hadn’t made up her mind whether to beg off for the night or not when she discovered that they’d reached the bath room.

As with the first time, Cal helped her to undress and handed her over to the others before removing his own clothing.

It was only as they led Eden into the pool to bathe her that she made a startling discovery. Baen had joined the men in the pool. Stunned that he’d so boldly broken with tradition, Eden’s gaze flew from one man to the next, trying to see how they felt about what must seem odd behavior to them at the very least.