Deep Indigo (21 page)

She glared at him and dug her fingers into the shallow wound across his upper bicep.

“Augh!” He let out a hoarse cry as pain lanced through him again. He staggered, his knees nearly buckling. Gritting his teeth, he manacled her hands in his good one and jerked her toward him, so their lower bodies met.

She was panting, her horrified gaze on their hands. His blood smeared them, bright against their pale skin. She shook her head, her lips drawing back in a silent cry of denial.

Then her lips curved upward, in a horrible parody of a smile and she leaned against him, rubbing herself on him like a cat, her body lissome.

“So sorry, Commander. Just couldn’t resist toying with you a bit more, before we begin the final contest. Really, you’re so gullible. As if the mere sound of your voice could vanquish my power.”

“You’ll destroy her,”
Navos raged.
“Is that what you want?”

“Of course. But you first. Never say I’m not a gentleman.”

A great wave of power began to build. He could feel the pressure building, like ozone before a huge thunderstorm. When it rushed over them, Navos was afraid it would drown both of them. He could not fight it head-on, he perceived now. Cyan’s power combined with Nelah’s was too powerful. He might battle them both back, might even win, but she would be trampled in the process. He fought back the despair that threatened.

“I won’t let you have her,”
Navos vowed fiercely. He kissed her.

Her mouth was sweet and soft under his, but he didn’t linger. Instead, he forced his injured arm up, about her waist, and held her hands against his chest as he pressed a line of kisses to her ear. His face pressed against her cheek, he began to speak—aloud.

For the first time in a very long time, he had no idea what he was doing. He knew only that he had to reach her somehow, had to reach the real Nelah.

Instinct drove him—he who never behaved according to such base impulses. Human impulses.

“Nelah, listen to me,” he murmured. “You love me. I understand now. You’d never let yourself go the way you have in my arms, unless you loved. Never let me into your mind, let me experience every part of our lovemaking with you. Never let me share how my every touch, every kiss, every inch of me felt inside you.”

Her hands stilled in his. She was listening. He pressed a kiss to the shell of her ear and went on. At any nanosecond, the huge, dark wave Cyan was building would crash over them.

“Remember how we are together,” he said fiercely. “Like no two Indigons ever before, or again. I’ve never known such passion before, flower. Didn’t know it existed.”

She caught her breath, lifting her gaze to his. Her eyes were blue again, full of emotion.

“Daron,” she managed.

He kissed her again, hard, her soft mouth opening beneath his, giving way to his with sweet surrender. She kissed him back then and for one heady instant it was as if Cyan, the crew commanders and the guards were gone, leaving only the two of them.

She tugged at her hands again and he let her go, to feel one of her arms slip up about his neck.

“Fools!”
Cyan sneered.
“Enjoy the last kiss either of you will ever know.”

“Don’t let me go,” Nelah pleaded against Navos’s lips. “Don’t let him use me.”

“I won’t,” he swore fervently.

Dare he hope, just a little? Absurd as it sounded, it seemed to him their physical contact, this reminder of their passion, was having an effect no amount of psychic defense could ever have. For the first time she was looking at him with her eyes, not those of a vessel.

“Daron, for God’s sake,” said Craig urgently on his link, jolting him back to the room, as well as the fact they were the cynosure of other eyes. “This is not the time for sweet nothings! Everyone’s going crazy out here! You’ve got to do something…”

His voice was lost as a psychic wave of power the likes of which Navos had never experienced crashed around and in him and Nelah. She cried out, arching in his arms and he felt the same power race through him, building, building, building… Cyan’s maniacal laughter echoed through their minds, drowning Craig’s voice, drowning everything, rising in a suffocating wave of heat and power and darkness.

Ah, great God, it was too much. He was powerless, they were going to die. She and Cyan together were too powerful.

Nelah dove at him, but instead of attacking him, she kissed him. Her teeth cut into his lip, her clever tongue whipped into his mouth, her arm tightened about his neck even as she yanked fiercely at his jacket with her other hand.

Strangely, over all the thunder crashing around them, he could hear the soft sobbing of her breath, could feel her heart beating against his own. Feel her communicating with him, not on a psychic level, but on a very human one.

A thin strand of hope threaded its way through the crushing blackness. Twining about his senses, tickling and teasing, leaving a faint musky perfume…hers.

Nelah, female, warm and soft and alive, in his arms.

Kiss her back, taste her sweet, wet mouth, feel her response to him alone. His. His to hold and protect. To mate.

To mate…yes, that was it. They were mates, not only in intellect, but on a deep, visceral level. A passionate level.

Cyan’s voice screamed at them, pressing the suffocating darkness harder around them. Navos staggered, the room rocking under his feet as something thunked against the bulkhead outside. Nelah in his arms, soft and pliant, yet demanding as she lifted her legs to wrap them about his waist, pressing her softness against his groin, rubbing and rubbing until everything in him rushed to his loins, in a blazing, surging demand for more, more, more.

He reached between them to rip open his jacket, felt her hands on his skin with shuddering relief. Broke away from her mouth only long enough to strip her top off with one yank, then dove back into the kiss, hanging on like a lifeline, her breasts against his chest, silky skin under his arms, suckling at her tongue as if it were life-giving nectar, giving her back reassurance and breath.

He bucked in her hand as she found his penis, rigid and straining at his soft pants.
Ah, love, yes.
Clasping hand, sweet squeezing fingers, but not enough.

He found the waistband of her tights and ripped them savagely, so she was naked save for the tights hanging in tatters from her legs, knowing he left bruises on her soft skin.
Sorry, sorry, love
…
must feel your sweet, flowing heat in my hands, ah there!

His, his, his…he lifted her with her sweet ass in his palms and drove into her pussy in one mighty thrust. Ah, great God beyond, such driving need, such hot, wet bliss surrounding him, her whimpers of need and joy echoing in his ears as he turned them so her back was against the wall and began to thrust in her with battering swiftness.

Opening his eyes, he looked into hers, aching sweetness flooding him as he saw the love and passion in those gentian blue eyes, so lovely, so vulnerable. Let her see the love in his own, the passion blazing for her alone, lighting up the darkness, driving it back, back, back…away from her, away from the
Orion
with every powerful thrust of his body, his penis inside her tight, clinging heat. Ah, so good, so perfect to have her thus.

“No! This isn’t possible, you can’t do this to me, I’m Indigon, I have powers, I have her, not you not you not you…”

She stiffened, shaking her head, a whimper of fear in her throat. He had to distract her, bring her back to him, to this.

“Everyone…sees you, flower,” Navos whispered to her, feeling his balls draw up so tight he knew he was going to explode in nanoseconds. “They’re all watching you. They see how beautiful you are, filled with me.”

Her eyes widened with shock, with excitement. He smiled, savage with triumph as he felt her orgasm begin. “Now they’re going to watch you come, my lovely flower.”

She moaned, a high sweet paean, her eyes losing focus as she imploded around him, her pussy milking him rhythmically.

“No! I’ll break you, both of you—”

“Go to the seven hells, Cyan!”

He slammed into her one last time and light exploded outward in a supernova of ecstasy as he came, pumping his life-giving fluid into her feminine depths.

He cried out, a deep shout of masculine triumph, and she again with him. For one moment, their voices drowned out their tormentor’s cries.

Navos sagged into Nelah’s embrace, his forehead on the wall behind her. They were both trembling, exhausted, awash in perspiration, his come and, he very much feared, his blood.

Even filled with the physical, mental bliss of the most powerful orgasm of his life, he could feel the laser wound throbbing, burning. Only locking his knees kept him upright.

“One last…thing,” he said hoarsely. “Flower…we must send…power back to him.”

She moved her head groggily, turning her face against his. “All right,” she muttered. “Put me down.”

He shook his head slightly. “Can’t…move. Just…let me…”

“You can’t…do it,”
Cyan raged, although his voice was ragged now, as if he were slipping the tether of coherence.
“It’ll take more than a cheap sex performance to best me, you fools.”

Summoning every reserve of his will, Navos gathered his psychic power and slipped into her mind. In through her thoughts, sweet, bewilderingly feminine territory. Further, spanning the proportions of her brain, humming with bliss, the remnants of terror and there—there, wrapped around her cerebral stem, like a horrid weed growing in a lovely garden, the device.

With one swift lunge, he surrounded it, enwrapped it so thickly that Cyan had no time to move and then gathering every bit of his will, he began to send power into it.

“Yes!”
Her power curling around his, buoying him up, entwining with his like new branches in a mighty tree, growing and growing to wrap inward and crush the dark canker in their midst.
“Yes, love. I’m with you.”

Navos caught his breath as sheer exhilaration rushed through him, a chorus wild and sweet singing in his psyche. And she was there, the sweetest song of all, light and life and joy, urging him onward. And unbelievably, he felt physical arousal surge through him again as well, felt his penis harden inside her, his balls tight and aching again for release.

“Daron!”
Her pussy squeezed him as she tightened her legs around him, her nails digging into his back.
“Again?”

“Oh, yes,”
he replied, even as he kissed her, locking his mouth with hers as he began to thrust again, her pussy sleek and hot with his come.
“Wouldn’t want…to disappoint…our audience.”

“Omigod, they’re watching us. Omigod, oh yes, oh, Daron, I want the whole galaxy to see you loving me, you’re mine, I love you!”

“Yes,”
he agreed and felt her pussy begin to milk him rhythmically. As she came, her psychic power spiked, wrapping around his as surely as her arms enfolded him.

“Yes, love, now!”
Together they destroyed the thing that had been planted in her brain, sending the dark power rushing back from whence it had come.

They heard their tormentor scream. It made this second climax even sweeter than their first.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Beryl Mazarin looked contemptuously at the gibbering wreck of her lover, huddled in the lounge area of her luxurious space cruiser before the holo-vid display of a tall, lean man and his slender, lovely mate, still locked in coitus. So much for their plan to destroy Daron Navos.

She watched for a moment, her face tight, as the holo-vid Navos lifted one hand to the Cobalt woman’s face and touched it with infinite gentleness. Then he straightened, staggered and slid slowly to the floor. His silver uniform was saturated with blood, oozing from the wound on his shoulder.

The girl tried to catch him, of course, and then knelt over him, not even caring she was nude, save for the ridiculous scraps of fabric hanging from her limbs.

She put her hands over the wound on his shoulder and pressed hard, babbling something to the holo-cam, her face white and frightened.

Turning away with a sharp movement of her draping garments, Beryl Mazarin activated her com-link.

“Send someone back to the lounge at once,” she commanded. “We’ve garbage to jettison.”

Craig, Slyde, Sirena and Tessa stood in silence for a moment as the holo-vid of Navos’s stateroom filled with medics and guards who quickly ascertained Navos’s wound was, while bloody, easily treatable, loaded him on a gurney and trundled him off to the infirmary. Nelah, wrapped in a coverlet, followed on another.

“Hah,” managed Craig finally. He sounded as if his throat was full of sand. “Great God beyond. Did they just…vanquish Cyan and his implant by—?”

“By fucking?” Sirena asked. She blinked slowly, as if coming back to herself. “Why, yes, I believe they did.”

Tessa’s eyes were wide and dazed, her cheeks flushed. “Oh, my,” she breathed. “I always wondered…all that intensity and control.” She fanned herself with one hand.

“Mmm, yes,” Sirena agreed. She and Tessa exchanged a look.

“First time a war has ever been won on that particular battlefield,” Craig muttered. He ran one hand over his flushed face, as if to wipe away the shock of witnessing his long-time friend and second-in-command in a prolonged incident of complete intimacy. But then his eyes met his wife’s and heated. He held out one hand to her and she went to him.

As Sirena’s huge husband rose, she met his eyes and smiled. “Not really the first time,” she murmured, going to him.

Slyde pulled her into his arms. “True. And I won that war.”

“We both won,” she chided him.

Craig kissed his wife, thoroughly. He whispered something in her ear that made her blush. Then he straightened, once again the captain of the
Orion
.

“Are things returning to normal on the ship?” he asked.

Slyde nodded. “According to Izard and the others, we have some bewildered passengers and crew, who can’t remember quite how they got assorted bumps and bruises.”

“I suggest free drinks all around,” Sirena said. “That’ll help them forget completely.”