Page 45 of Invasive Species (Outcasts of Oloria #2)
“No, Gara, stay.” I stretch upward, resting against his chest. His warmth spreads to me, his scales firm under my fingertips.
A tingle builds inside me like an unpainted mural, singing through me desperate to be let out.
I run my hands over his color, each finger bumping across his soft scales.
They turn peach wherever I touch, a perfect record like the sweep of paint from a brush.
As I stroke up his biceps to his shoulders and up to his neck, his eyes slide half-close like a contented cat. Where my chest presses against his, the scales glow an eye-wateringly bright neon green, and a throb builds in my heart at the connection point between us.
I don’t have the words either to describe this. Only impulses.
“I want you,” I whisper, throwing myself completely open, as vulnerable as when I paint, more so, because Gara means so much to me.
Heat pools between my legs as he runs his fingers over my arms, the light touch sending shivers of pleasure through me and raising goosebumps in their wake, like I have scales of my own.
“I…” His heavy hands drop on my shoulders, halting me. “It's torture to say no, but I don't want to hurt you further, Arra-bellah.”
The warmth heads straight to my cheeks, which start burning. What am I doing? I’m about to climb him like a tree.
But for the first time in a long time, energy pulses through my muscles along with the itchy feeling of forgetting something important scratching at me. I want a fifty-mile cold swim, a hot chocolate, a list making session, all at once. I need it all. Now.
I need Gara .
“You won’t hurt me?—”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
Is he right? Either way, if he's saying no, I have to respect that, and I sit back on my heels on the squelchy bed, shivers of want passing through me. “My body’s hotly disagreeing with you, but I understand.”
“I’m also finding it hard to deprive us, but… it is for the best. We need the results back from the biopsy to know whether…” He trails off, scales dimming to a brackish brown.
“Whether…?” I prompt gently.
“It could be the mating bond hurting you,” he admits quietly. “In which case intimate acts are ill-advised, as we need to sever the bond, not nurture it.”
Nausea floods over me. “I know you're the sciencey one of us, but my gut is telling me, no, screaming at me that you're wrong.”
He takes a halting step back, the short distance between us already too much, cold rushing in to replace the heat of his broad chest. “Gut feelings do not trump science. We need to collect and analyze the data, firm up our hypotheses, and test them extensively.”
I slump to the bed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I know I am,” he says, but softly. As if he wishes he wasn’t. “But… perhaps there… is a way.”
“Oh?”
“Do you recall book 18 of Planet of the Pirate Prince?”
“Book 18?”
“The Pirate’s Princess Conquest.”
“That’s the new one, and I haven’t finished it yet. You read fast.”
“I do when it’s knowledge I’m ravenous to acquire.” His scales flash bright green. “In the manuscript, the pirate is restrained in his quarters during a mating frenzy. I can now appreciate how his desires drove him to the brink of madness. ”
“Spoilers,” I tease him with a wink, but the possibilities spool around me.
Gara’s breath goes ragged. “Meanwhile his mate is splayed for him, so desperate she stimulates herself looking at him through a separation of plasteek glass.”
Hot desire shoots through me, tingling across my skin. “Splayed, hm?” I slowly open my legs.
He swallows hard, gaze fixed on me. “Naked and exposed, and showing him how she pleasures herself.”
Gara’s voice is so clipped and authoritative that hearing dirty things drip from his lips increases the heat to blowtorch level.
I know, know, deep in my gut, Gara is everything I need.
This is the next best thing. Slowly, I peel off my loose robe, the thin fabric sliding down my shoulders and arms, followed intently by his hot gaze.
He’s laser focused on each inch of skin I reveal, a feral hunger rising in his eyes.
“Better back away,” I tell him as I unclip the light metal clasps pinning a wrap around my breasts in place. With each unraveled layer, my puckered pink nipples get more and more visible, and Gara’s breathing gets faster.
He slowly gets to standing, poised at the end of the bed, watching my every move. I’ll make sure he gets his; the idea of him watching me as he tugs his cocks fills my chest with shivery anticipation.
Once I’ve got the robes open, I push them off my arms and toss them in his direction. They don’t get far because I’m a shit shot, fluttering between us to pool on the quivering jello bed.
Gara’s gaze darts to my pussy. “There appears to be a change there.”
I lift my head to check all’s ship shape downstairs. Tight knots of curls cover my pubic region. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, shaving hasn’t been a priority.”
“It’s… interesting. I wonder what it would feel like.” He st rokes his chin, then his pink tongue slides out to lick his top lip.
The sight sends a pleasant quiver up my spine. I murmur, “I wish you could find out. Tell me what you want to do to me.”
He sucks in a breath. “I want to press my lips along your jawline and down along your neck,” he begins.
I stroke my fingers in the same path, and he groans.
He licks his lips before continuing, “My mouth will close around one of your nipples.”
I trail my hand down. “Left or right?”
“The one closest to your heart.”
A frisson of warmth blooms inside me at how sweet and sexy he is. “I'm no atomological expert?—”
“Anatomical,” he corrects gently.
“That too, but I think that’s the left one.” I skim my fingers over my skin, wishing for it to be Gara’s huge hand swirling around my breast before hovering my fingers over my pebbled nipple.
A moan rips from him. If he’s this heated already just seeing me on display for him, he’s going to cream his pants by the time I get to the main course.
Licking my lips, I stop fucking around and squeeze my nipple, pretending it’s a precise pinch with his fingers as I twist back and forth. The pleasure-pain melds into the storm gathering between my legs, and I have to press my thighs together briefly.
“Good,” Gara pants, slack jawed. “You like that.”
“I do,” I whisper, leaning back. Once I’m lying flat on the toasty jello, I say, “I’m imagining you behind my back, enveloping me from behind.”
“Yes,” he says, voice low and rough. “I’d hold you in my arms, hands on your breasts.”
“And I’d rub myself just like this…” I grind backward, but in stead of the hard scaled surface of his honed torso pressing against my ass, I sink deeper into the jello. I arch my back, ass in the air to free it, and my legs and shoulders settle lower into the bed instead.
Gara makes a choking noise, and I lift my head to grin at him. His legs are shaking, scales strobing red to green like demented Christmas lights.
“Teasing you is kind of fun,” I admit.
“I’d tease you ,” Gara promises. “Arra-bellah, I want to see you touch yourself the way you like.”
Ah, well. I need a heavy vibration to get enough clit stimulation to come, but my Magic Wand is back at Ellen’s farm, hopefully well-hidden and not just under the covers like always.
I can get myself off lying on my front using a fist and my bodyweight, but it’s not the visual feast I want to bestow on Gara.
I move my hands to my pussy… or try to. I’ve sunk so deep into the orange-soda colored substance that I can’t move my arms fast at all, and it’s like trying to push through treacle.
I gulp. I’ve had nightmares like this, where I can’t move from my bed and run from whatever’s chasing me, but I’m awake and aroused and I can’t do anything about it.
“Um, Gara?”
“Arra-bellah,” he pants.
“I’m stuck.”
“Then we’ll get you out of the nutrient-bed…
” His face turns mischievous, and there’s a whole other beautiful side to Gara that I immediately want to fuck and paint, preferably both together like before in a fuckpaint session lasting many, many hours.
He looks like a trickster god. “Unless you want to stay like that?”
“Gara, I need you.”
He snaps into all business. “I’ll get you out?—”
“Gara, I want to come.” There’s a needy whine to my voice. It’s kind of hot, kind of frustrating, and it fuels the knot of heat growing in my midsection.
“Then let’s free you and you may do so.”
“But I want you inside me.” Where’s this coming from? I’m not shy about my needs, but even I know this is a bit much.
Even though it’s the truth.
I know intuitively I need Gara in order to be safe, whole and well, as if he can work magic and make everything go away.
But I could be on my deathbed and likely to die any heartbeat away, and I’d still take the risk, not because I’m thinking with my pussy and desperate for an orgasm, but because I know .
Gara’s my cure.
“Please!” I beg.