Three Worlds 01 - Seduce Me In Dreams (10 page)

By now, both of his hands were cradling her head, his thumbs stroking over her incredibly soft cheeks again and again as he became more liberal in his exploration. He pressed his palms gently against her jaw, pulling apart her teeth, allowing him access beyond them. His tongue swept into her mouth, instantly finding hers, encouraging her into exploring with him their shared taste and textures. She made tiny little noises, short sighs of wonder and appreciation, at regular intervals. If Bronse had not been so swept up in the way she tasted, the way she made him feel, he might have teased her for her innocent vocalizations.

Bronse broke away from the addictive act of plundering her mouth with a strangled groan. He pressed his lips to the corners of hers, the grip of his hands against her face and around her head tightening reflexively. “Sweet Beyond, Ravenna, you‟ve never been kissed before,” he uttered fiercely in belated realization.

“No, never,” she affirmed with short, panting breaths that spilled a fiery heat over his face. “But I want to be kissed again.”

Bronse had no idea how he could possibly resist that kind of invitation. Why in hell would he even want to? Bronse couldn‟t think of any satisfactory answers, not that he gave himself much time for contemplation before he dragged her luscious mouth back under his own.

He was the last man in the galaxy who would find virgin territory interesting, or so he might have thought ten minutes ago. He preferred women to be experienced and skilled. Easy come, easy go, so to speak.

Ah, but there was something to be said for the sweet, slow feel of a woman who was learning to explore her own desires in a kiss for the very first time. She slipped eagerly into his mouth, her inquisitive and ambitious tongue rubbing delightfully sensuous strokes against his.

Ravenna sought his taste with slow and quick curiosities, the flick and tangle of her tongue devastating in its sumptuous explorations. She wriggled imprisoning fingers into his short hair and against his scalp so she could keep him exactly where she wished him to be—sealed tight to her suddenly hungry mouth.

Unfortunately, Bronse was not as innocent as she was, and his more practiced body was responding to her allure with a hellish heat and hardness. Holding her in the encompassing cradle of his lap and arms, he shuddered roughly around her. Her ambition drove him crazy as she sucked his tongue and lips with increasing fervor and very obvious excitement. He felt the blush of her face against his own, a telltale burning heat that told him she was just as affected as he was, though she may not have as easy an understanding of it as he did. Ravenna was pressing flush against him now, her breasts thrust against the muscular wall of his chest, their delicious weight painfully tempting. He could feel the points of her tautened nipples prodding him teasingly. Her round, generous bottom was snuggled deep in his lap.

Great Being, she was made for loving, Bronse thought fervently.

She was young, he knew, but not so young as to explain why she had never known the kiss of a man. What male could look at her and resist the temptation? Surely she had been approached by
someone
.

Bronse shoved the thought aside the moment he entertained it, not liking the idea of it. He stopped short of identifying the sudden emotional response as jealousy, but he did acknowledge that he was intensely glad to be her first. And one kiss, he quickly found, was hardly sufficient.

As his passion was roused to a point of frenzy, he dismissed her explorations and opted for what could only be described as ravishment. Ravenna gasped in breaths when she could as his kisses bruised her lips and scorched her tongue. Her raspy inhalations drove Bronse crazy. His hands swept down to her neck, his thumbs stroking the column of her long throat. By the Great Being, her skin was like Yojni silk! Only much, much warmer. Much more vital. Her pulses were thrumming wildly beneath his fingers.

He broke away from her mouth so he could feel that pounding cadence of her life‟s blood beneath his lips. He pressed his mouth to the upper pulse point just below her jaw, feeling, hearing, and tasting her response as he touched his tongue to her carotid artery. The feminine musk of arousal wafted over his senses, and he groaned with the agonizing understanding and its consequential response. He was aroused to the point of rigid steel, the evidence of it nudged up firmly against her hip, and, damn her, she kept shifting her soft bottom against him until he thought he would explode.

Bronse wanted nothing more in that moment than to toss her beneath him on the floor and show her about two dozen other things she‟d been missing in this particular venue. He was shouting for it. Roaring like a beast demanding release. By everything holy, he could slake a hundred hungers on this incredible creature!

But …

After all, it was only a …

Dream.

Ravenna woke with a cry of impassioned despair. The moment she did, all the delicious heat and liquid sensations that Bronse had sent melting through her vanished under the onslaught of incredible agony.

She was lying on her stomach on the crude pallet they forced her to sleep on. She was trapped under the stiffness and pain of her own body, the smallest movement a brutal torture.

How had she ever fallen asleep in the first place with such pain? She must have passed out, she realized, the darkness of unconsciousness bridging the distance between her and Bronse. That depth of existence had no doubt also allowed for the length of time and clarity of feeling they had shared as well.

Gods, there had been such feeling!

The conflict of arousal and the excruciating throbbing from her earlier punishments brought tears to her eyes. Did she cry from pain? Or was it the sudden deprivation of those intense, skilled lips that were shockingly soft and contrastingly voracious all at once? Was she already missing those calloused hands against her skin? Ravenna swam in a sea of confusion, the brutal replacement of reality rushing back into her as the dream faded to its realm of the semi-unreal. Her skin burned, yes, but it was the fire of torn and swelling flesh and not the smoldering of a man‟s sensual caress.

Ravenna had spent hours manipulating the guards with her powers and promises, but it had come to a crashing end when the shift had changed and their relief had found her sitting in state and decidedly unlashed. They had rectified the error before she or Kith could even speak to protest. Kith had screamed in rage as she was beaten first with a cane until she swelled, and then with a thin lash until she was covered in dozens of cuts that bled in rivers over her skin, soaking her clothes.

In the dream, Bronse had not seen the half of it. What he had seen had been what her mind had represented to him, and somehow she had managed to make it seem less than what it truly had been. She could not have him acting rashly. She appreciated her ability to conceal the truth of her condition. Especially now that she was learning that beneath all his logic and reserve, Bronse was a man of deep passions. Awake once more, Ravenna knew that her condition was even worse than she had thought it was. Only Kith could tell her how awful the abuse had been, for only he had truly seen the whole of it. She had been given the occasional mercy of blacking out twice during the process.

But at least she had not been molested again. That was very important to her. If she had let the earlier shift of guards continue without interruption, they would have incited one another into all manner of perversions. At least she had been able to skip over that torture, sparing Kith from suffering any more of it. For all his martial arts training, for all his gruff bluster, he would always be an empath and therefore would always be truly sensitive. He would never have been able to bear watching her be defiled. He would never have survived it without permanent damage to his soul and with his psyche unscathed. As it was, she worried that the experience of watching her torture had done him a great harm already. One could never be sure. Psionics were very precarious personalities sometimes.

Ravenna wiped the sweat from her brow, then pressed her burning face into the rolled rag that served as a pillow. The skin on her back was stiff with dried blood, and the wounds, she could feel, were weeping in places. Was she still bleeding? She did not think so, she realized with a growing sense of dread. If it was not blood, then it was likely to be something far worse.

A chill shivered sickly through her, reinforcing her fears.

Justice had no idea what had crawled up the commander‟s ass, but she was just this side of committing a major infraction against a senior officer. Commander Chapel had been in a raring nasty mood for the past twenty-four hours, and there wasn‟t a single crew member who wasn‟t feeling the backass side of it. Even the medic was making himself mighty scarce after daring to suggest that the commander might need something to relieve his tension. Needless to say, the suggestion wasn‟t well received.

Justice glared over her shoulder at the one and only member of the crew who would survive telling the commander to kindly remove said bug from said ass. Lasher cocked a brow at her in response and calmly stared her down.

“That‟s easy for you to say,” she grumbled. “He isn‟t chewing nails and spitting them out at
you
.”

Lasher was well aware that Bronse was in a bad mood. Frankly, as far as Masin was concerned, Chapel had as much a right as anyone else to have a decent funk now and then.

Granted, the timing was poor and the cause was questionable, but Bronse was just venting.

Lasher knew he would steam down after a while. Hopefully it would be before he alienated the entire crew.

Lasher finished studying his schematics for the mission. He had done so dozens of times, and now he felt ready to present the mission parameters to the crew when they met for the midday meal. They would be touching down in nineteen hours. That gave them time for chart review, mission review, reports, rack time, and gear-up.

Lasher logged off his CompuVid and stood up. He trekked back to Medbay, and the door hissed open easily at his approach. The pneumatics of the door actually were drowned out by the compressors that misted the air with disinfectant every time someone passed through the portal.

On large flight ships and on space stations, a laser shower was used instead, more efficiently zapping away all surface bacteria from visitors and doing so without their notice. Lasher brushed a hand back through his lightly dampened hair. The mist would evaporate in a few seconds.

“Jet?”

“Yeah?”

Jet popped up from behind one of the diagnostic palettes, a laser wrench in one hand and a calibrator in the other. The medic was obviously tweaking his equipment in anticipation of any possible casualties.

“I need a favor.”

“A sedative for Commander Chapel?” Jet asked hopefully.

“Yeah. Right. When Hepraps fly.”

Jet sighed with clear consternation. “It would last only five hours. Plenty of time to relax and refocus. He needs to focus, you know.”

“I know. But where would you hide on a ship only so big after those five hours were up, Jet?” Lasher sighed softly. “I‟ll talk to him about this after midday. Listen, I need a specialized med kit.”

“Specialized?”

“Yeah. I‟ll tell you exactly what I want and you tell me exactly how to use it. Okay?”

“Something I should know about?” Jet asked warily. He might be a medic, but Jet was as much IM soldier as the rest of them. Medics always stayed with the ship. They never went directly into the field. The ETF crew members had plenty of basic first-aid training to get them back to the ship. There was no need for a medic until after they reached extraction.

“Negative. Let‟s just call it a gut instinct, okay? C‟mon, jack me up.”

Jet gave him a crooked grin. “Come into my laboratory …”

Bronse sat in the mess hall working up a report while he waited for the rest of the crew to arrive for midday meal. He was tired, and he rubbed at his forehead and temples where a bitch of a headache was throbbing rhythmically. Focusing on the VidPad was no easy trick. Focusing on writing a mission report for a mission he was certain was bogus was even harder.

With a disgusted grunt, he tossed the VidPad on the table and set both hands to work at massaging his temples. How could he concentrate on anything? How could he work calmly through the day when every minute meant endless possibilities of torture for an exquisite, helpless woman? And for a brother she clearly was devoted to. When he thought of all the things they could do to her between that moment and the undefined moment when he would finally reach her side, he was blinded by rage and a sensation of angst that he had never known in all his life.

Why had he spent precious time manhandling her? Kissing her and slaking his lust on her when he could have been advising her on ways to avoid torture? On ways to counteract it? Tricks and methods of foiling a torturer‟s intents could always be learned and used. He should have been telling her those things! He should have held on to her and comforted her.

Why did he always push her away by excusing his behavior and feelings as only part of a dream? Chasing her away. Chasing himself away. He was himself in those dreams, yet somehow better than himself. Or was it the woman? By all that was cursed and holy, Bronse wanted the answers! What was worse, he could not turn to a single one of his crewmates to help him sort out this tangle of emotions, actions, and reactions. Lasher was already looking at him like he‟d gone crazy, and Bronse suspected that Masin was hunting for a reason to relieve him of his command.