The Spawning (34 page)

Teron nodded. “Leaders making bad decisions. This is what brought about the

destruction of our own civilization.” He fell silent, thoughtful. “Ideally, how would you want things to be?”

Miranda looked at him questioningly.

“For you. The big house and many children?”

“I think I could safely say the majority of women, me included, would like to see fathers doing what they once did—taking care of the family so a woman could nurture her children. I think most women would find it rewarding enough to make their ‘nests’

and tend their children, that that’s what they really want—and to be respected and appreciated for the importance of that job.

“I mean, really, what could possibly be more important than making certain the future generation is taught the things they should be? I can tell you from first hand experience what happens when that doesn’t—people reach adulthood with no respect for the rights of others, and they’re not civilized. They look like it, but they’re really just animals that look like human beings, and they prey on the weak. That’s all my job was, really, rounding up the animals and caging them so that they couldn’t hurt the civilized humans, and it seemed to me that there were more animals and fewer civilized all the time.”

She smiled at him wryly. “If I could fix the world ….”

His own smile was wry. “We have a new world. It needs a lot of fixing.”

Miranda made a derisive sound of amusement. It was better than crying. “A lot!”

They got up and did the kitchen cleanup together. It felt companionable and

Miranda liked it.

She was still tense when they’d finished. Anticipation was certainly a large part of it, but there was doubt. She supposed there was always doubt until there was THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 152

familiarity.

She didn’t hesitate, though. When he took her hand and led her into his room, she followed without reluctance, the anticipation shimmying inside of her. He turned to face her when they reached his bed. Lifting his hands to remove the combs that held her hair, he turned to set them on a small table beside his bed and then reached to smooth her hair with his palms and fingers.

“I have never seen hair of this color,” he murmured, studying the glint of her hair as he sifted it through his fingers. He met her gaze. “Or eyes the color of growing things.” He touched her cheek, lightly traced the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

Miranda smiled faintly. “Or freckles.”

He shifted closer, grasping her waist and drawing her up onto her toes to meet him as he bent to brush his lips along hers. “Or anything half as beautiful as you are, Miranda,” he murmured against her lips, nibbling at them, lightly sucking at first her top lip and then her lower, fuller lip before he sealed his mouth to hers.

With no more than that, no touch beyond his hands on her waist and his lips on hers, he awoke every nerve ending, made her breathless with expectation even before she felt the touch she’d been waiting for, needing. Heady longing swept through her mind as he stroked his tongue along hers and her taste buds exploded with the taste of him. Heat shimmied along her nerve endings and warmed her blood as she drew his scent into her, breathed him, entwined her own essence with his.

Enthralled, Miranda lifted her hands to brace them against Teron’s hard pecs, to steady herself as dizziness swept through her, tumult erupting inside of her.

He lifted a hand from her waist to cup her head as he deepened the kiss, sucking at her tongue, entwining his with hers, sweeping the tip along the silky inner surface of her mouth. Giddy with the drug of rising passion his caresses evoked, weak and heavy, and yet with a sense that she was becoming as insubstantial as the heat wafting off her in waves, she slipped her hands up his chest to grip his shoulders.

She was too dizzy to stand on her own when Teron’s lips parted from hers and he lifted his head to study her face. Guiding her to his bed, he climbed onto the mattress with her, catching the hem of her gown and drawing it off over her head. She settled back against the mattress, staring up at him a little dazedly as he climbed from the bed again, pushed his boots off and peeled his trousers down. His broad shoulders and long black hair briefly hid the rest of him from her view, but when he straightened again, she allowed her gaze to wander down his narrow hips and muscular thighs before returning to examine his sex. Turgid, it stood up aggressively, the soft sack beneath drawn up, as well.

He climbed onto the bed with her then, settling on his side and explored her with the feather light touch of his long fingers and his gaze, teasing the red thatch of down at the apex of her thighs before he met gaze. Her throat tightened at the fire in his eyes.

Her entire body went taut, her heart pounding erratically.

Holding her gaze, he glided his hand upward after a moment, cupping one breast and massaging it gently before he transferred his gaze to the globe he held in his hand. A faint frown appeared between his brows as he studied her breast. Lifting his hand, he tracked the faint blue tracery of veins in her breast. His voice was rough when he spoke.

“Fragile, as soft as the petal of a flower,” he murmured when he reached her

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 153

nipple and traced the areola, watching in apparent fascination as it tightened, making her nipple swell even more.

Settling closer, he toyed with the tip of first one breast and then the other, plucking at them lightly until they were throbbing almost painfully with the blood engorging them and it was all Miranda could do to drag air into her lungs for the escalating anticipation coursing through her. She stilled when he leaned toward her at last, watching his face as paused a breath away from a touch and finally plucked at the tip he’d decided to endow with his attention with his lips, flicking his tongue lightly back and forth over the tip and driving her insane with the need for more.

She released a moan of pleasurable agony when he finally settled his mouth fully over her nipple and began to suckle it, feeling for several moments as if she’d black out from the intensity of sensations pelting her. Her womb contracted at the first hard drag of his mouth. Heated moisture coated the walls of her sex, which fluttered, needful of his possession.

She lay still for a time, cupping his head to her, basking in the currents sizzling through her until it built to a point where she couldn’t be still anymore, where she began to feel fevered and desperate. A mixture of despair and intense longing fluttered through her mind when he transferred his attention to her other nipple, teasing it with the same leisurely torment as the first.

“Teron!” she gasped a little desperately when he released it and began to explore the soft mounds with light brushes of his lips. “Please?”

She felt his lips curl against her skin.

“Please what?” he asked huskily, charting a trail with his lips to her throat. “Kiss you here?”

She made a humming noise of pleasure when he did, tilting her head back to give him better access so he could explore her entire throat and neck.

“And here?” he asked when he reached her ear, tugging at the lobe with his lips.

“Should I kiss this pretty little shell?”

She was too feverish with need to fully gasp anything he said, but goosebumps

erupted all over her as he traced the swirls of her ear with the tip of his tongue, his heated breath teasing her almost more. “Yes,” she whispered a little hoarsely.

“Every where?”

Her throat dry from her panting breaths, Miranda swallowed with an effort, torn between the lure of more pleasure and the rising desperation to feel him inside of her.

She shook her head.

“Is that a yea? Or a nay?” he murmured, winding his way back along her neck to her breasts.

She gripped his shoulders, digging her fingers into his flesh. “Don’t tease me anymore. I want you inside of me,” she whispered.

He leaned away, stroking his hand down the length of her body until he reached her mound. She parted her legs as he pushed his hand between them, lightly skimming his fingers along the lips of her sex. “Here?” he asked huskily, when he parted the lips and stroked his finger along her cleft.

“Teron!”

He chuckled, pushing her legs wider and shifting his hips between them. She

gasped, arching her back when she felt the head of his cock butt the mouth of her sex, THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 154

press into her.

Straightening his arms to lift his upper body away from hers, he tipped his head down to watch as their bodies slowly began to meld, curling his hips to press forward and then allowing the muscles along her channel to expel him as they tried frantically to grip his turgid length. Watching him through her lashes, she finally tipped her head up to see what he was studying with such rapt fascination. Her belly clenched as she stared at their connection, watched his cock disappear inside of her body.

He lifted his head, met her gaze for a long moment, and dropped to his elbows.

Shifting his arms beneath her shoulders, he watched her face as he curled his hips and drove deeply. She sucked in a sharp breath at the glorious mixture of pain and pleasure as he impaled her on his thick flesh, squeezing her eyes tightly.

“Miranda?”

She opened her eyes to look up at him. “It feels so good.”

His face went taut. He released a pent up breath raggedly. Tightening his arms around her, he began to thrust and retreat in a cadence that drove her swiftly upward to her peak, shattered her with the magnitude of the eruption. She moaned as it seized her, arched against him, shuddered with the quakes, gasped his name in praise. He groaned as he followed her into glory, shaking with the force of his own climax and finally stilling, gasping for breath.

He dipped his head to kiss her forehead when he’d caught his breath and finally shifted downward to seek her lips, kissing her with gusty appreciation. He moved off of her then. Settling on his side, he dragged her close and curled his arms around her to hold her against his length.

“Still among the living?” he murmured near her ear.

Miranda chuckled. “Barely.”

* * * *

Teron dragged a frame-looking thing from an alcove and a basket of colorful fibers when he’d taken her to his pod the following day. Settling on the floor with the frame braced between his knees, he carefully separated the fibers and began to attach them one by one at the top and the bottom, forming vertical lines. After watching him for a few moments from the couch, Miranda joined him, studying what he was doing more closely as it dawned on her that this was how he’d made the pillows on his couch.

He flicked a glance at her after a few moments. “Would you like to try it?”

It looked simple enough. She discovered it wasn’t quite as simple as it looked.

Holding the frame just right took some getting used to and the fibers, which were like thin ribbons, had to be kept flat when they seemed to determined to twist. Leaving her to it when he saw she had the knack for it, he went to prepare a meal.

He had it ready long before she’d managed to attach fibers all the way across.

Almost reluctantly, she set it aside and joined him. The dinner discussion was about the weaving. Happily, she’d already gotten a little experience with it in building the hut. It was a fairly simple process. It just took practice to turn out a piece tightly woven enough without bunching the fibers or twisting them and making the piece rough.

They returned to the living room after the meal and Teron finished attaching the vertical ‘threads’, which she discovered were from a plant that grew in marshy areas near the sea, and showed her how to weave the horizontal pieces through the verticals. She’d woven almost an entire inch before he took the frame from her, set it aside, and drew her THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 155

into his bed.

The following day, after he’d taken her to the nursery and left her, he returned a little later with the simple loom and more than enough fibers to keep her occupied. She was dismayed until she discovered the fibers weren’t compromised by the water in any way. It didn’t penetrate. She had only to set the frame up for a few minutes to allow the water to run off. The fibers he’d brought to add to the weave had to be hung up to drip dry, but she simply spread them across the top of the frame.

Miranda doubted, under any other circumstances, that her project would’ve drawn more than a vaguely curious gaze or two. Between their boredom and the lack of anything even vaguely civilized, though, a good percentage of the women were

downright giddy with excitement, so eager to learn the craft themselves that it was hard to gather in a tight enough group to instruct them.

By the end of the week, every woman had a loom and the majority were at least

making an effort to produce a piece. The malingers, of course, barely paid lip service to the effort and managed to screw theirs up every time anyone helped them restart their project. When they finally discovered they couldn’t convince any of the women to take over for them and make their pieces, they settled sullenly to the task, but it was easy to see their men were going to be doing any real weaving that got done.

It was tedious and repetitive. Hunching over the thing made joints ache and

complain. Weaving the thin pieces of fiber could be nerve wracking and frustrating and the fibers were thin enough it could slice the fingers if one wasn’t careful, but it was also rewarding. They could talk while they worked and still actually make progress toward making something and after doing a few pieces they were accomplished enough to start figuring out ways to work simple designs into the pieces by carefully sorting the varying colors.

Miranda had just begun to feel settled despite the strangeness of being passed to a new man once a week, when she discovered the men intended to return them to the compound. She’d spent the week with Adar and had expected that she would be ‘rotated’

to Khan the following day. Instead, Teron arrived and led her into Adar’s bedroom to examine her.