Learning to Blush (25 page)

Thorton was about ten words into the explanation before she clapped her hands back onto her ears and said, “Urgh, no! Lalala! No! Of course not! Who would DO that? Don’t answer, I don’t want to know!” She put her hands back down and pulled up her panties under the covers.

“You might like having attention back there if you give it a tr—” he began to say.

She swiped her hand through the air. “
No
.” There was still a stupid smile on his face. She wanted him desperately to wipe it off; it was making her nervous. “Stop grinning like that!” she demanded.

“I’m just… pleasantly surprised,” Thorton admitted, shrugging. “I thought you’d done it all!”

“All the
normal
stuff.”

Thorton got onto his knees and then picked her up easily into his arms and turned her around. “I’ve got to see this beautiful, untouched bottom,” he announced.

She screeched. No one had ever seen her bottom before; ever. Not for any reason! Not even the day before during their 'Union’. “Stop it! No! Flip me back over! I don’t want you to see my—”

“I’m just going to mount you a little,” he said, and nipped her shoulder seductively.

Her eyebrow rose. “Then flip me over.”

“I want to do it this way.”

“You’re not gonna do it this way,” she informed, but he pulled her panties back down and pushed the skirt she’d fallen asleep in out of the way. She could feel his eyes on her bare bottom.

She screamed. “No! Stop it! Get off!”

The hands that had been gripping her around the waist suddenly loosened enough that she was able to scamper away off the bed, pulling her panties back up. She pressed her back against the nearest wall. “You’ve never been taken that way?” he asked, confused.

“No! Front only!” she decreed, feeling her throat tighten with embarrassment.

“Nobody’s even
seen
your bottom before?” he questioned, looking incredulous. “
Nobody
?”

Not since she was an infant; and she liked it that way. But the way he spoke about it made her so defensive, tears sprung to her eyes. “No. I don’t do that, Thorton. Just stop talking about it.”

He finally stopped grinning. He apparently realized that she wasn’t playing a game with him, that she really was upset. “Penny, come here. We’re just talking, okay?”

She stayed right where she was, eyeing him suspiciously. He patted his lap, looking very concerned, and that concern was the only reason she stepped away from the wall.

When she was close enough, he swept her up into his naked lap and he kissed her cheek. He rubbed away a tear that was just escaping the side of her eye. He took her hands into his and kissed her knuckles. “I keep forgetting how young you are—I keep thinking you’re as wise to the world as me, despite you being less than half my age. I’m so sorry. And it’s easy to forget that you grew up in a very different place. On Swaraan, anal play is very, very common. But maybe it’s not so common where you’re from.”

“I just don’t do it. It’s gross,” she pouted. “Tell me you’ll never try to ask me to do it.”

“I’m not asking. I’m
telling
you we will, eventually,” he stated matter-of-factly.

She knew it! She struggled to get off of his lap, but he pinned her to his knee. “Not this morning, Penny,” he assured to calm her. “But you’re my wife, and this bottom of yours is mine, and I want to see a lot of it. You have the most gorgeous body in the universe; you can’t hide it away from me.”

“I’m not going to let you,” she promised firmly.

He frowned and a dark look passed over his eyes. “I don’t need you to
let me
,” he finally said firmly. “Now unless you want to show me
a lot
of your bottom this morning, you’re going to stop making decrees. Is that clear?”

She ground her teeth together. “You ruined a perfectly good morning,” she pouted angrily.

He sighed and kissed her cheek. His hand crept towards her inner thigh. “The morning’s not over. Lay back, Sweetheart, and I’ll make love to you your way.”

“I don’t wanna,” she pouted. “You’ve ruined the moment.” She let him lay her down on the bed, though. He pushed up her shirt and began to nip his lips over her hardened nipples.

“You don’t wanna?” he teased, stroking his fingers over her panties and against her mound as he began to suckle her nipples one after another. When her hips rose to meet his fingers, he hooked his finger underneath the waistband of her panties and this time he pulled them all the way off. “How about now?”

She chewed her lip awkwardly, admitting to herself that his fingers were feeling pretty magical. He noticed her expression and gave a chuckle. “There’s my good girl. Spread your legs for Daddy, now.” She blushed more—she had never thought Thorton was the talk-dirty type. “Hm,” he said in her ear. “The things I’m going to teach you, Babygirl.”

“Like what?” she worried.

He kissed her neck and then rubbed his phallus against her mound. “Firstly,” he growled in her ear. “Daddy’s gonna teach you how to blush.”

For some reason, Penny was blushing already.

Chapter Ten

Thorton marched heatedly down the long stretch of hallway that led to his apartment. He was grease-stained and sweaty from being on-duty on the engineering deck, and he was tired from having to appear at Ellie's disciplinary trial in the early hours that morning.

The fact that he no longer had Ellie working under him was predictable. He knew once she stole that ship several months before that dishonorable discharge from the service might have occurred.

Still, it was going to be inconvenient. She might have been a pain in the ass, but when he thought about the hours spent training her, and her potential, and the fact that by now she knew even more about certain systems than he did, it made him realize that she was going to be a loss that was going to be hard to recover with anyone else.

What pissed him off was the admiralty that morning. They had the power to unanimously decide, without any permission from Jack, to fire her and they were going to despite evidence that it was probably better to keep her on duty than discharge her. But the admiralty hated her—they hated the fact that she was a woman, and they hated the fact that she had human blood in her, they hated how easily she made everyone around her look bad, and more than anything, they hated how much she seemed to mock their authority.

She wasn't mocking it now—last he checked, Jack had to rescue her out of the room right after sentencing to keep her from balling into the fetal position in the middle of the courtroom. Admittedly, Thorton might have wanted to do the same thing in her position—he had never seen the admiralty completely ostracize and ridicule anyone as much as they had done to her.

Another thing that pissed him off was the knowledge that Penny's brothers were undoubtedly in his apartment right now, their boots up on his coffee table, eating vast quantities of his favorite foods, and speaking to each other in Shal'ta now that they knew how to do it, even though they knew both the Swarii and the Human common language to speak to each other just as easily. The days when he could come in, kick off his boots, and relax as soon as he got home were over.

What made Thorton stomp all the way back to his apartment, though, wasn't the injustice in the work place or the fact that his in-laws were childish morons. It was because his wife was a filthy rotten
liar
.

She told him that she'd seen Fie, that she had been given the clean bill of health! She told him that nearly two weeks ago. Finally, after meeting up with Fie, he learned that she hadn't been into see Fie at all, and had done everything she could do to even avoid Mary, Fie's human assistant, as soon as the two of them were introduced.

He opened up the front door. “You—” he pointed towards the three boys sprawled across the sofa. Mike was balancing a bowl of nuts on his stomach,.“Get out of my apartment.”

“What happened to 'make yourself at home?'" Tim complained… in Shal'ta.
Unnecessarily
.

“Don't you have a job?” he demanded of Michael, who Jack had supposedly placed in the engineering core, although Thorton hadn't seen much evidence. He'd never seen Michael on the job site, but he had seen a lot of Michael on his sofa lately.

“Yeah, I'm done. I said from the get-go that I'll only work human hours,” Mike said, and then added, “Four long hours a day…” he joked and shoved one of the twins with his boot. They both gave a snigger.

“Fine. I don't care where you go, you can't stay here. I'm talking to my wife.” He looked around. “Where
is
my wife?” Suddenly, he recalled Ellie's day. Mike was working on the ship and had a bachelor's apartment, but the twins were staying with Jack for now. It was settled that, against their wishes, they would soon attend the preparatory academy on Swaraan, since they were technically too young to acquire a work permit. “Is she with Ellie?”

“Nah. Jack gave us all the heave-ho. Said we weren't helping,” Tom complained.

Thorton could imagine it. He knew his wife's kin well enough to know that they were probably telling Ellie that the Swarii were all a bunch of bastards, an inferior race, and it was better that she not help them win the war, after all. It was easy for them to say things like that, since they'd never met a Frian before.

Thorton peered down at the twins. “Don't you have school to study for or something?”

“Don't rub it in, Ass,” Tom gritted. “Besides, we're not going to the Academy.”

Thorton raised an eyebrow, strangely curious by his response. “Why?”

“Because I know how to wield a fucking gun, is why! Like hell they'll take us anywhere we don't want to go!” Tom snapped his eyes narrowed with aggression.

Tim ate a big bite of his sandwich, too nice to say anything like that, but too angry to naysay his brother.

Thorton rolled his eyes as if a pet goldfish had made a threat against him. Not many things in the universe were much less scary than Tom, with his boyish face and bright, childlike eyes with his extra-long eyelashes. “Okay, Tom. That's right. Fight—” he paused, and turned to Tim. “Who's he always fighting, again?”

“The man,” Tim promptly reminded.

“Right. Keep fighting 'the man', Tom. Knock yourself out.” He gave a lazy masculine pat to his chest, a universal thump of 'revolution', but then he pointed towards the door. “Don't knock yourself out before you leave, though. Get gone.”

“I don't know when it happened, but you became a giant asshole,” Mike grumbled, but he was pulling his boots off the coffee table as if he planned to go somewhere. That was a good sign.

Thorton didn't get into it with Mike. It wasn't going to go anywhere good, and Thorton had already cleaned his clock. “No idea where Penny is, then?” he asked.

“Nope,” Tim said in a way that made Thorton pull his eyebrows up with doubt. The kid had said it too sharply for Thorton's taste. It felt like he was hiding something. “No clue.”

“Tim.”

“Um. Well, there's that dude that's been teaching her computer stuff…”

Thorton's eyes narrowed. “What's a
dude
?”

“A g-guy,” Tim replied, his tone dictating he knew quite well that Thorton didn't want to hear that his new, young wife was off somewhere alone with another male.

Thorton leaned over Tim. “
Who
?”

* * *

Poor, poor Jio. He was even more sexually deprived than Thorton, and Jio was younger than Thorton was! You'd think he never looked at a pair of tits before, and if he had, he hadn't gotten over it.

He had been staring down her shirt, unabashedly, for the last two hours, giving her instructions on navigating the mother ship's piloting mainframe between eyefuls.

“You don't have to watch them so close, you know,” Penny finally found herself chuckling in a casual way. “They're not gonna bite if you take your eyes off them for a second.”

“Hm?” Jio said dreamily to her breasts.

“My
breasts
can feel your eyes, Jio,” she clarified.

Jio jumped back like her breasts were indeed going to bite him. His youthful, flawless face that was normally pale was now beet red. “I…I…I…!” he stuttered, and then he gave up on trying to explain himself, looking like he just swallowed glass.

“It's okay, Jio, really. Despite being distracted, you've been a huge help,” she said with a smile, gesturing to the computer monitor.

He swallowed again and gave a very wobbly smile. “I've barely helped. You seem to know your way around.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, it's pretty different from what I'm used to hacking into on Earth, I guess, but the fundamentals are the same. I guess it's sort of like when a doctor plays vet for a day—different bone work, but all the same parts are there.”

Jio was looking south again. She rolled her eyes—this wasn't even her lowest-cut shirt! “Go ahead and touch them, Jio. Maybe some of the wonder will leave you.”

Jio, again returning to a dark hue of red from head-to-toe, snapped his head up. Surprisingly, he asked, “Seriously?”

Penny smirked. “Sure.”

He reached out, slowly, his hand shaking.

“If you grab one it will be the last thing you touch with that hand, I guarantee it.”

Jio looked like he was going to faint when he heard the voice, yet he and Penny both jerked their heads in the direction of the office door. Of course, Thorton was standing there.

“Oh my God, Thorton,” Penny said, rolling her eyes at Thorton's dark expression as he came stomping up. “You're like a monster in a horror movie or something. How do you pop out of the ether like that? What's your secret?”

“You want to lose the attitude,” he assured her with a growl. He was looking at Jio, though, with a death-stare.

“She invited me to touch,” Jio panted with fear. “She did!”

“What she has is not hers to offer you,” Thorton growled in return. “She's mine.”

“Yes, sir,” Jio nodded, without any hint of argument in his expression. “I'm so, so sorry Thorton—”

“
Commander
,” Thorton corrected snappishly, despite the fact that Thorton had told Penny that Jio was a very close friend; one of Ellie's rescuers. They had gone on missions together.