Page 41

With a sinuous, slithering noise, oil-black restraints whip out from somewhere beneath her—from somewhere, it seems,insidethe bed itself. They wrap around her wrists, pulling her hands back from his body and pinning them against the mattress. Tight but not painful, inexorable but with that strange, warm give, almost like living flesh. She’s helpless beneath him, a knowledge that builds the heat at her core. When he presses his hips forward so the ridge of his cock scrapes over her naked sex, she bucks into him and moans.

“You like to fight me, don’t you?” He does it again. “Especially when you can’t win.”

“Those are yours,” she says. “They’reyou.”Then she gasps again as another glistening black tendril twines around her leg, coiling upward along her sensitive inner thigh toward her core. A wave of euphoria spills over her, pleasure layering upon pleasure: her helplessness, his eyes on her, his mouth on her other nipple now, drawing another moan from her throat.

“Oh, sweet little love.” He draws back, a wrenching loss of his touch. “Haven’t you noticed?Everythinghere is.”

Little love…“It was you, in my dream.” The tendril climbs higher.Exploring, delicate as a single finger dancing a slow path between her legs, insinuating itself among her folds, spreading her slick around her opening and making her tremble. “Ah.Did that…happen?”

“It was still a dream, mostly. Merely a test. I had a lot of material to analyze, and much of it was contradictory. Nonsensical.” A wry grin flashes over his face and he drops his head to kiss his way up along the opposite leg from the tendril now ever-so-slowly coiling around her aching clit. “And alarming, at times. Do human women really prefer ashadow daddy?”

“Shadow—what material?” A terrible thought assembles itself from the wreckage of her higher brain functions. He took her vibrator when he picked her up, like an X-rated Barbie accessory, so what if he… “Cassiel! Have you been reading my Kindle library?Those books aren’t educational! They’re fiction. No fuckingwonder.”

He raises his head, blinking at her. “It seemed like rather a lot of fucking, to me. And very educational.”

“Oh, so now you’re sassy too? What gives you theright?”

“I hoped I could persuade you to forgive me.” His tongue flicks over her, then away, making her twitch and whine. “I had an imperative to fulfill, and I didn’t have much left in me. If I couldn’t keep you warm, fed, breathing…space is very cold and very dark, you see.”

“You could havetold me!”

“Would you have believed me?”

“No,” she sighs, as he settles between her thighs. “But it’s not…ah…what I like reading is afantasy.When it comes to reality, I prefer…”

“What?”

“Honesty.”

He looks up at her, eyes darker than she remembers. “Then,” he says, “honestly, all I want right now is to make you come.”

* * *

She tasteslike the rich salt of ancestral seas, like the tang of an alien spring, like rich air he’s never breathed.

She tastes likehome.

Her ecstasy washes over him, a rising tide. She keens and moans, music marked by breathy little gasps, variations of the song that called him across the empty darkness to her small, bright world.

He laps hungrily at her, finding his new center of gravity in the small bundle of nerves at the top of her slit, where her pleasure builds, wave upon wave. Her body trembles beneath him, her legs shaking around him. She opens like a flower, frilled lips slick with her arousal.

Exploring her, he runs his tongue lower, drawn to her entrance by her heady, coaxing scent.Hereis where he wants to sink himself deep inside her, give her all he has. Instead, he works her gently open with a tendril, the slender, deft appendage finding the most sensitive spot within her. Rhythmic pressure draws a desperate, wanton noise from her throat, and then, in broken syllables, the name he gave her to call him by.

“Cassiel…”

The sound is too sweet. He wants to hear it again. With gently increasing pressure, he plunges deeper inside, redoubles his attention at her clitoral bud, and spreads her open with his fingers, seeking more access, more sensation, more breathless noises as his own intoxication grows. Drunk on her juices, achingly hard, he can barely maintain control over the surging instinct that demands he follow through on his imperative. He could take her, rut her, breed her here and now.

He shudders at the thought of filling her, spilling his seed within her until her belly swells with the promise of new life, new worlds,potential energy.

But he made her a promise.

Instead, he brings her to her peak again and again, thrusting his fingers inside as he explores further. The press of another tendril against her lower hole raises the pitch of her frenzied cries to gratifying new heights. She instantly yields to his invasion there, her muscles fluttering as they clutch and spasm around him. “God,” she whimpers, “yes, please fill me. I want you inside me.Everywhere.”

He pushes deeper into her tight warmth, fingers working her cunt in rhythm as he suckles her swollen clit. Her words dissolve into inarticulate screams, her limbs shaking as she comes apart, and he loses himself in her climax. Every part of him shudders now, not just the one atop her. The colony trembles as the power of her pleasure flows through it, moves it, drives it toward its inevitable end.

She pulls him back to himself, fingers clawing at his shoulders in a bid to draw him upward, to cover her further. It takes a few of her seconds for him to process her breathless, panting words.

“I want your cock,” she says. “Let me see you. Feel you.”