The Spawning (33 page)

It was almost as boring to spend the day with twenty women who had nothing to

do but talk as it was to spend the day alone, Miranda discovered—not so much the first day, but a little the second and a good bit more the third since they’d pretty much run dry of fresh material to discuss and couldn’t think of much to do but complain.

Khan collected her at the end of each day, took her to his pod and fixed food for both of them and then left her to the bed alone until she dropped to sleep. He cuddled her willingly enough when she demanded it, but not with any particular enthusiasm.

Miranda wasn’t particularly needy in a sexual sense, but she found that she was becoming more and more needy for reassurance. The third night, she lay in wait for him,
pretending
to go asleep. As soon as he settled beside her, she rolled toward him as she’d been in the habit of doing, but she didn’t stop there. She thought it was possible that he was just too exhausted to feel any urge for sex. Her first few caresses were tentative because of that, but the moment she felt his cock rise against her, she became more pointed.

He didn’t resist. When she pushed at him to get him to roll onto his back, he turned. Eyeing her a little warily as she promptly climbed on top of him, he settled his THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 147

big hands on her hips, but more as if to keep her balanced there than in any way that she could think of as sexual.

Refusing to give in to the nagging doubts, she leaned down to explore his face with her lips, his pointy ears, and then his throat and chest. He’d begun to shift restlessly beneath her by the time she’d traced the tattoos on his chest with her lips and tongue and teased the rings piercing his male nipples.

She hesitated, trying to decide whether to move back up for a kiss or lower. She didn’t want to yield up control, though. Scooting back until she was seated on his thighs, she continued her exploration downward over the hard, rolling muscles of his abdomen, undulating her body as she did so, so that she was pressing her sex intimately against him.

She heard him swallow when she reached his belly. His hands came up to grip

her upper arms, tightened. She nuzzled lower until she found the root of his cock and then traced it with the flat of her tongue until she reached the tip. He sucked in a harsh breath and held it. A shudder rippled through him as she focused on the head of his cock, stroking it with her tongue and finally opening her mouth over it and sucking.

His hands tightened bruisingly on her arms for a moment and then he released his hold. Grasping the mattress in his fists, he uttered a choked sound and sucked in another harsh breath as she traced the ridge of the head with her tongue and sucked his cockhead into her mouth again.

Encouraged, feeling her own body quicken in response to the rising tide of desire she felt in him, she settled more comfortably and began to stroke and suck at him rhythmically. He shifted beneath her, his hips rising as she took his thick flesh as deeply into her mouth as she could. Tremors began to wrack him, became harder. It drove her own heat index upward, increased the excitement pumping through her until she felt dizzy with it.

He released his frantic grip on the mattress and grasped her head, seemed

undecided as to whether to make her stop or show her the rhythm he wanted. He yielded to the second impulse, guiding her for several moments until she’d mastered the pace and then releasing her to dig his fingers into the mattress again.

“Miranda,” he growled abruptly as if it had been torn from his throat. A

desperate warning, or plea, she wasn’t sure which, but she thought it was a warning. Her heart thundered with excitement. Sucking in a deep breath, she moaned her own pleasure around his shaft, increasing her pace. The moan or the pace broke his hold on his control. He grabbed her head again as if he meant to push her away. She clamped down more tightly on him, sucking his flesh for all she was worth.

His cock bucked in her mouth and then his semen flooded it. A dizzying rush of triumph swamped her. Swallowing, she pulled at him more greedily until he ceased to come and his cock softened in her mouth.

Tired, but still buzzing with excitement, she finally released him and lifted her head to look up at him. His eyes were closed, his breath still ragged. She climbed up him until she was staring down at his face.

He opened his eyes finally to stare up at her, his eyes still glazed. Smiling faintly, she dipped her head to nip at his hard chin. He lifted his arms abruptly, curling the fingers of one hand tightly in the hair at the nape of her neck, coiling his other arm around her.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 148

Dragging her down to him, he melded his mouth to hers and kissed her deeply,

with appreciation, with burgeoning hunger. He rolled after a few moments, pressing her down into the mattress and fitting his body to hers almost in one motion. Curling his back, he watched her face as he merged his body with hers. She closed her eyes to hold the pleasure inside, clutching at his arms as pleasurable tension coiled more tightly inside of her with each delightful stroke of his flesh along her channel.

He paced himself to her gasps and moans of pleasure, reading her needs, meeting them almost before she recognized them herself until he brought her to completion. The moment she began to seize in rapturous convulsions, he began to plunge faster, racing to catch her and then uttered a deep, hoarse groan in concert to her higher pitched cries of bliss, jerking as his body expelled his hot fluids into her channel.

Sighing blissfully in the aftermath, she snuggled against him when he turned to position the two of them on their sides and allowed herself to drift into slumber, supremely pleased with herself that she seemed to have broken through the wall he was trying to build between them.

Seemed
, Miranda thought, dismayed, being the operative word. Teron came to collect her the following evening. Gerek about a week after that and then Adar.

The ‘nursery’ began to feel a lot more like a harem, to Miranda, at least.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 149

Chapter Seventeen

It was impossible to refrain from looking around for Khan when she’d gotten used to being with him every night, had begun to feel less strange about being in his home and more as if it was becoming hers, too. She supposed she shouldn’t have grown that accustomed to it in such a short length of time, and there was still some awkwardness to it, but she’d grown used to it enough that she’d seen that she could very easily fall into the habit.

She saw the understanding in Teron’s eyes when she finally met his gaze, saw a flicker of something else that made a blush of guilt and an undeniable surge of desire rise in her.

There wasn’t much more than a hair’s worth of difference between Teron’s pod

and Khan’s. The layout was almost identical, certainly. His ‘couch’ was lined with pillows, though, four across the seat and one along the back, as if it was a work in progress.

She felt the awkwardness and the mixture of anticipation and nerves familiar to her from previous attempts to launch a new relationship. She could tell Teron felt it, too, but he headed straight into the kitchen to prepare food, which gave him something to do.

She followed him after a brief hesitation, offering to help prepare whatever he’d planned to cook. He looked a little surprised, but described what he needed from the refrigeration unit. When she’d lined it all up on the counter near the basin, he took the knife and showed her how to do what he wanted. Folding his arms over his chest, he settled a hip against the counter and watched her.

She glanced up at him a little questioningly after a moment. “Am I doing it right?

Or getting on your nerves?”

A faint smile curled his lips. “A little of both.”

She chuckled, ignoring the twinge of irritation she felt at the comment. “I’m working blind here. I’ve got no idea what any of this is or what you mean to do with it.”

“We’re pretty basic,” Teron said wryly. “Food and plenty of it. The quantity is far more important than the taste.”

Miranda doubted that. She lifted a brow at him.

He shrugged, grinning. “In our society, warriors do not—or did not cook. We

had to … acquire the knack to survive, but since none of us paid a great deal of attention to the preparations—generally weren’t even present, it’s been mostly guess work. Then, too, although many things are similar here, some that seem to be actually aren’t and even when it’s close, it’s just close. Not the same.”

Miranda nodded. “Those things ya’ll killed before tasted a lot like beef. The texture of the meat was even similar, but they sure didn’t look anything like a cow. I wouldn’t have guessed just to look at them that the meat would be so much like beef. The roots
looked
like potatoes, but they tasted like … chalk,” she said instead of ‘shit’, which was what she thought about it.

“But you have the skills of one familiar with cooking.”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 150

Miranda smiled wryly. “Oh, I was a regular little Suzy Homemaker when I was a little girl. I had visions of being a Mommy and that was pretty much my only aspirations.

I was going to have a huge fairytale wedding, live in a big house, and produce a houseful of children.”

She could tell Teron hadn’t grasped half of what she’d said and it wasn’t entirely because of the language. The concept was probably completely alien to him.

He seemed to catch the breeding part pretty well, though.

She was actually sorry she’d brought it up. She could see the questions in his eyes. Shrugging inwardly, she finished the tale. It seemed unlikely he’d grasp much more of it than he had the other. “Reality actually sucks, though. I outgrew it when I got old enough to notice I wasn’t living a fairytale life myself and couldn’t expect it. My father drank, and it got worse the older I got. When it reached the point where he beat the shit out of my mother and put her in the hospital, she divorced him, and then it was just the four of us—my mom and my brother and sister—and pretty rough since she didn’t really make enough to support the family in comfort. My brother went off to war and came back in a box. My sister married a bastard just like my father. My mother remarried … and did just as badly the second time around, and I decided to be a cop.”

He hooked a finger beneath her chin and turned her head toward him, tipping her face up to examine it. “To protect others?” he guessed.

Miranda frowned. “Maybe,” she said honestly. “I think it had more to do with a stupid romantic idea I had that it was an exciting career, rather noble, and that I’d be respected. The reality was that a lot of it was boring and tedious, scary and life threatening—I had to deal with the dregs of society, and believe me when you crawl around in shit you don’t feel the least bit noble—and most people hate cops unless they need them. The minute any guy found out I was a cop, they lost interest in dating me.”

“What is this word ‘dating’?” he asked curiously.

Miranda couldn’t prevent a wry smile. He might not catch much, but he caught

the key words. She searched her mind and realized the closest word in his language that seemed to correlate was courting. She had her doubts that their concept of courting was quite the same.

He looked surprised and then confused. “I don’t understand why being a cop

would make you undesirable to your males. They don’t admire the skills of a warrior?”

“Not much,” Miranda said dryly. They didn’t admire anything that smacked, in

any way, of ‘manliness’.

In all honesty, it didn’t particularly make her feel better to think that that skewed perspective they’d gotten of her as some kind of ‘warrior woman’ might be why ‘her’

men found her desirable. She wanted to be wanted for what she was. She wasn’t a warrior woman, not by any stretch of the imagination. She was just ‘a’ woman, who wanted to be desired, and loved, and have someone that she could love.

They ate fish. She was getting pretty tired of fish, particularly since she’d never been terribly fond of it to start with, but she supposed it was far easier to get fish where they were currently staying, and she doubted it was as hazardous.

She didn’t want to be on a steady diet of roast ‘beast’ for that matter.

Inwardly, she sighed. Variety—that was just one more thing she missed.

Teron had two chairs at his table so they were able to sit down together and share the meal. Teron pushed back from the table when he’d finished, but he didn’t attempt to THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 151

rise. “This ‘fairytale’ life you spoke about before, that you wanted when you were a child, this was because this is expected in your society?”

Miranda studied him with surprise. She’d never actually wondered where she’d

gotten the idea from. She supposed she must have picked it up somewhere. Or maybe it was just the child’s eye view of the way things were supposed to be like when she grew up? She had some good memories from before her father had begun to drink so heavily, though. Maybe it hadn’t entirely been skewed by her childish mind?

“It was once upon a time,” she said finally. “I think the government is more

responsible for the crumbling than any other one thing, even individuals—not that I think they’re blameless. But how stupid is it to gather up the best—the smartest and bravest men, and send them off to war to die? And the government has, over and over. You have to wonder how that effected the gene pool—It certainly couldn’t be good for it.

“Their economics policies mostly demolished it—sending jobs to foreign

countries so our men couldn’t support their families, and raising taxes all the time. When a man couldn’t support his family anymore, the women had to get out and help support the family, which left the children to be raised by strangers who didn’t love them and to whom tending them was just a job.

“That’s what happened to my family, anyway, and a hell of a lot others. I’m not excusing my father. He was weak to turn to drinking whatever the provocation and it sure as hell didn’t help matters. But it was frustration that pushed him that way, and a sense of failure.”