Page 17 of Sheltered in the Storm (The Fortusian Mates # 1)

CHAPTER 16

VOS

My Calla fell asleep before I finished bathing her and washing her beautiful hair. And for the first time since arriving at my home, she did not squirm or whimper in pain and even smiled slightly as she slept.

She did not stir when I rose from the tub, dried us both, and took her to the bed. Once I settled her under the covers, I did two things I rarely did: I drew the curtain over the window and closed the door that separated the bedroom from the rest of the house. I wanted Calla to rest in dim light and quiet.

Before I covered the window, I glimpsed Poe outside keeping watch. The heavy rain had eased and become more of a mist. She would happily guard our home for the remainder of the day, eating small creatures that entered the yard, tending her garden, and humming to herself.

My companion would likely be quite satisfied with this turn of events. Not half as satisfied as I was, however—nor a tenth as happy. My hearts felt full to bursting, and not just because I had given my mate orgasms that made her shake and scream in ecstasy.

Calla wanted me in bed next to her. Wanted my arms and tentacles around her. Wanted my cum on her lips and my cock in her mouth and cunt. And not only could I ease her worry and pain with a sound I made only for her, I could bring her to release with my touches alone. She was my mate. The joy of that simple fact threatened to overwhelm me.

I had earned her trust. If I could earn her heart, I would want for nothing. Even now, a deep contentment filled me, healing aches and hollowness I had thought would pain me for all my days.

Moving quietly, I took a box from under the bed and settled in beside my sleeping mate with my back against the wall. Two of my tentacles immediately slipped under the covers to coil around her arm and lower leg. Another wave of perfect tranquility swept through me as they drank in her taste and scent. The other two settled around her blanket-wrapped form, cradling and guarding her.

I took the lid off the box and withdrew a sewing kit and Calla’s flight suit, washed clean. I had not had much time to repair her only piece of clothing, but with a few hours’ work, I believed I could have it ready to wear. The material was extremely durable. Once I sewed it back together and patched the holes, she would no longer be forced to wear sheets taken from the bed as clothing. A man who preferred to avoid going into the village as much as possible became handy in many skills, including thread-craft.

I could go into town and purchase attire for her, but the shopkeepers would want to know why I needed clothing to fit a human woman. The longer I kept her presence secret, the safer we would be.

As I mended the cuts I had made in her uniform to remove it from her injured body the night I first brought her home, I watched Calla sleep and listened to the rain. Another few weeks and the rainy season would give way to drier months. My garden would fill with fruits and vegetables to replenish my stores of food. The ocean would warm, the nuoias and hurricanes would come less frequently, and life on Iosa would be close to paradise.

No, it would be paradise itself, because Calla was here.

Distracted by the thought, I stabbed the pad of my left index finger with my sewing needle. A bead of violet blood welled up.

Memories of Calla’s first night in my home flooded my mind: her mangled arms and legs, her cuts and bruises, her fractured jaw and skull. The list of injuries on the scanner’s screen that went on and on and ended with the prediction that she had less than one percent chance of survival.

My desperation had been a living thing that night, a monster of its own capable of nearly unspeakable things. It snapped its teeth and snarled at me, howling that if I failed to save Calla’s life that my own life was not worth having. I had resorted to an utterly desperate measure: sharing my blood and willing it with all my might and existence to do what the contents of my medical kits could not. My rage had only been quelled when Calla began to heal before my eyes and then miraculously survived the night.

And yet that greatest miracle of my life seemed to pale in comparison to what we had shared today and the closeness that had developed between us.

Now I had a chance to make her the center of my universe. I could not waste it by doing any less than everything in my power to ensure she was as happy and content in my presence as I was in hers.

Rather than get up and force my tentacles to relinquish their hold on my mate, I wiped my bloody finger on my pants leg. As I bent my head again over my task, I envisioned each stitch as another step toward my future with a fierce and tender woman who had called me a beautiful monster as if that was a very good thing to be.

Much to my surprise, Calla slept soundly all day and through the night. She had not done so since her first days with me. She did not seem to be in distress, only tired. I stayed close, leaving her side only to eat a quick meal and tell Poe that we were lying down together. Poe was quite happy to stay on watch and leave us to our rest.

Just after midnight, I finished mending Calla’s uniform and joined my mate under the covers, moving carefully so I did not wake her. She murmured and turned to face me in her sleep, snuggling close with her nose against my chest as if she wanted to breathe in my scent as much as I wanted hers.

I fell asleep not long after, almost drunk on the feeling of my mate in my arms and her warm breath on my skin. And I experienced no nightmares—only dreams of Calla.

Just after the sun’s rise, I woke from the most rejuvenating sleep I had enjoyed in recent memory to find another miracle: my Calla wrapped in a sheet, standing next to the bed.

Standing . Unaided.

I rolled to my feet so quickly that I had no memory of actually moving. “Calla!” I gripped her upper arms, my tentacles plucking at her sheet in worry. “What are you doing?”

“This again?” She smiled up at me. “You need to get your vision examined. You keep asking me what I’m doing when the answer is obvious.”

Yesterday, she had tried to stand but the pain was overwhelming. I did not understand how this was possible, but I could not deny the evidence of my own eyes .

“Standing does not hurt you?” I demanded.

“Well, it hurts a little ,” she admitted. “But not too badly. Just aches, really. No sharp pains at all.”

Not only was she standing, her cuts and bruises that only yesterday had been easy to see were either gone or almost healed. Alarmed and confused in equal measures, I took my medical scanner from the windowsill and passed it over her. The results made no sense, so I scanned again. Same readout.

“Vos.” Calla’s sharp voice and frown drew my attention. “Basic medical care etiquette: don’t scan me and then stare at the screen without speaking. It implies something very bad is going on and you don’t know how to tell me.”

“There is nothing bad,” I said, almost in a daze. I showed her the scanner. “You are nearly healed.”

“I suddenly healed while I was sleeping?” Her scowl deepened. “That makes no sense.”

Startled, I took a step back. My tentacles quivered in agitation.

“What?” she demanded. “What does that mean to you?”

I struggled to put my suspicion into words. “Because of my genetic engineering, when I am badly injured, I sleep for a day or more as all my energy goes to recovery. And when I wake, I am usually fully healed.”

“I don’t understand.” She sat on the side of the bed, still staring at me. “You didn’t give me any blood since that first night, right? You wouldn’t have done that without my permission.”

“Of course not.” I was glad she believed I would not do anything without her consent. “I did not even consider doing so.”

“Then how did I heal suddenly? Is it something about being on Iosa? Was it something in the bathwater? Something—” Her eyes widened. “Oh gods, Vos.”

The smell of her sudden fear sent me to my knees in front of her. My tentacles wrapped around her legs as I took her hands in mine. “Tell me what troubles you.”

She swallowed. “You say your healing ability is in your blood. Is it possible it’s also in other bodily fluids?”

“I have never—” I cut myself off before I finished the thought.

I had never healed anyone with my blood, but I had never tried.

I had never made that comforting cooing sound until Calla. I had never given orgasms with my tentacles and kiss until Calla. And I had certainly never healed any partner with my cum. Unlike my blood, there were instances in my past when that could have happened if it were possible.

The only answer that made sense was that I could heal my mate in more ways than with my blood. My Calla and I stared at each other in shared shock and disbelief.

A sudden terror gripped me: if she had reacted so strongly to the news that I had used my blood to heal her without asking permission, what would she think of me now?

“I did not know.” If I were not already on my knees, I would have fallen to them in my earnestness. “I swear, I did not know.”

She still smelled of fear, but now that scent was tinged with something else. Anger? Betrayal? No, hurt. Her expression looked bruised.

The thought she was in any kind of pain, emotional or physical, filled me with fear and rage. I did the only thing I knew to do: I cradled her and cooed. She buried her face against my chest, her shoulders hunched despite my attempt to comfort her.

I cupped the back of her head and kissed her hair. “Calla, please tell me what is wrong.”

“I don’t know why it hurts,” she said, her voice rough. “It shouldn’t, but it does.” She said nothing more for a long time.

Rather than coo again, since it had done little to ease her distress, I hummed a song from my homeworld, as I had done while bathing her the first night she had spent in my home. This lullaby was one of the few shreds of my childhood that had stayed in my memory despite every effort the Guard had made to eradicate such useless things.

Perhaps it was not so useless, though, because little by little Calla’s shoulders relaxed and the smell of her fear and hurt began to wane.

When she spoke, her voice was so soft even with my enhanced hearing I had to strain to make out her words.

“I’d just barely survived a firefight with three raider vessels,” she said. “I was on my way back to Outpost 60 in a half-working ship when I decided to stop at Jakora. I planned to bribe a mechanic to tell my commander my ship wasn’t able to make the trip back without repairs that would take at least three or four days. I wanted to spend those days drinking, swimming in the ocean, and fucking someone I’d never see again once I left.”

I rubbed my nose against her hair, fighting irrational anger at whatever hypothetical partner she might have found. Truly, I understood the urge to do all the things she had described. Her voice belied the emptiness she had felt and sought to fill on Jakora. Many who went there did so for the same reasons. I could not hold it against her.

I had done the same more than once on Jakora and similar worlds: endless drinks, recreation, sex with partners whose full names I had never asked. And I had left as lonely and unfulfilled as when I had arrived. Once glance at her grim expression confirmed she had fully expected the same outcome. We could lie to others about what we had found in such places, but never to ourselves.

“Then I hit some kind of debris in space,” she continued, and now her voice sounded almost harsh. “It tore off one of my fighter’s wings and sent me spiraling toward the surface of some moon I didn’t even know existed. In a wild twist of fate that I can’t begin to process, I ended up kidnapped by raiders and then rescued by a beautiful monster who can heal me and only me, comfort me and only me, and make only me come just with the right touch.”

She looked up at me then, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears and pain that seemed to rip all my hearts right out of my chest. “And it fucking hurts because everything about you seems like it’s made to take care of me, a scrap who fell out of the sky and deserves none of it at all.”

A scrap . A Ganaian pejorative meaning worse than garbage. My rage and grief at hearing the word applied to my mate made me sick to my stomach. My tentacles quivered with the desire to slaughter whoever said such a thing.

With my hands, my tentacles, my teeth, I would tear to pieces anyone or anything who hurt my Calla or called her a scrap. But who could I kill when my Calla hurt herself? The people who had called her that word were not here—only their ghosts, whispering in her mind. Such ghosts could not be killed. I had spent a lifetime trying to kill my own.

All my life I had solved problems for others and myself by dealing death. Nothing had prepared me to face this moment, when I must try to heal wounds I could not see.

“You are no scrap,” I said, my voice hoarse with the depth of my anger and sadness. “You are a treasure. A gift. Priceless beyond compare.”

“To you, maybe.” Her mouth twisted. “When I was born, I was a scrap. Once my mother sold me to my keepers on Ganai, I was a commodity who bled to make them lots of money. To the Alliance Defense, I’m a skilled but easily replaceable pilot they can use to protect colonies and travelers from raiders and invasions. But who am I?”

I too had asked this question throughout my life, especially during and immediately after my service in the Guard. Even now I struggled to answer, but at least I believed I had finally found the path to finding that answer.

“You must define yourself not as who or what you are to others, but to yourself,” I said, tucking a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “Tell me who you are, Calla Wren.”

She swallowed hard. “I don’t know. Who are you, Vos Turek?”

I tilted my head and considered. “I am a former assassin now keeping a home on a quiet moon, living as peacefully and by my own rules as I can. I am haunted by nightmares and struggle to see what my future holds, but I have reason to hope for happiness—if not here, then somewhere.”

My Calla thought about what I had said for a long time.

“I am a former child gladiator,” she said finally. “Maybe now a former Defense pilot. I’m sharing a house with a big crab and a sexy cephalopod man and it rains here all the damn time. I have nightmares too and I don’t know what my future holds, but I want happiness, either here or somewhere else.”

Her expression turned fierce. “I like to protect people who can’t protect themselves and I like to fight every once in a while to keep my skills up and because I’m good at it. I don’t like being told what to do and I want to make my own rules for once.” She glanced down at herself. “And I’m so very happy to be mostly healed because I’d love to be carried by you because I want to be, not because I have to be. So I guess all that is who I am. Am I too much?”

“Never.” I stroked her cheek with my thumb for the first time without having to be careful not to touch a cut or bruise. What a wonderful simple joy. “I am so very glad to make your acquaintance, Calla Wren.”

She smiled, and it felt as though the sun came out even though the rain continued outside unabated. “Likewise, Vos Turek.” She ran her hand through my hair to cup the back of my head. “Have we just really met for the first time? ”

“Perhaps.” I returned her smile. “I have so much to learn about you still.” I touched her face. “I cannot banish hurtful words and your terrible mistreatment from your mind any more than I can from my own, but while you are with me, I will dedicate my life to replacing those things with better days and better memories.”

“As long as you let me do the same.” Calla slipped her fingers between mine and held on. “I can’t reciprocate your healing abilities, though, so our deal seems lopsided in my favor.”

I kissed her forehead. “You may not mend my cuts and bruises, but you heal wounds you cannot see. Speaking of mending…” I withdrew the box from under the bed and slid it over to her. “I have a something for you.”

She frowned. “A gift? I don’t need a gift.”

Perhaps she was not used to receiving gifts, or receiving gifts that did not come with strings attached.

“I respectfully disagree.” I put the box in her lap. “Please.”

With obvious reluctance, she lifted the lid and stared. “Vos, is this—my uniform?”

Now who was asking questions when the answer was obvious? I smiled. “Yes.”

With almost childlike wonder, she let go of my hand to pick up her repaired flight suit. “It’s all sewed back together.” Her gaze swept over it and then moved to my face. “You did this?”

“Yes,” I said again. “Bedsheets are not adequate clothing for you. Neither is a patched uniform, but until we can obtain something better, will this do? Your boots are in fine shape.”

She ran her fingers over the uniform, inspecting my repairs and smiling. “This is incredible, Vos. Thank you so much.” She started to pull my head closer, then hesitated. “Um, I guess a kiss isn’t just a kiss if you’re holding me with your tentacles.”

“Perhaps not.” I caressed her, then forced them to release her so she simply lay cradled in my human arms. “May I kiss you now? ”

In answer, she grabbed me and kissed me so hard that my lips felt as though they would be bruised, and the feeling was the most delicious kind of joy and pain. When her mouth yielded under mine, I drew her closer, reveling in her taste and the way her little tongue teased mine and danced along the sharp edges and points of my teeth.

She drew back, smiling playfully. “I liked that kiss. How many tentacles does it take to turn a kiss into an orgasm, do you think?”

“Should we find out?” I trailed the tip of one tentacle along her bare arm before letting it coil around her wrist. “I for one am curious.”

She shivered. “I like how that feels.” Slowly, she kissed me, much more tenderly this time, and even a little tentatively.

When no release occurred, I wrapped another tentacle around her left wrist. Her kiss became more demanding, but still no orgasm. Gently, I encircled her right ankle. The scent of her desire grew, but she did not shudder or cry out.

I broke our kiss and raised my head to look into her eyes. “The answer may be four, my Calla,” I said.

“Could be.” She was breathing more heavily now, her lips swollen and desire shining in her eyes. “I’m willing to see if we’re right, if you are.”

Was I willing to feel her writhe in my arms and hear her call my name? It was as if she had asked me if I wanted to breathe.

“And if we are right, what else would you ask of me?” I brushed her lower lip with the pad of my thumb. “Tell me what you want.”

She shivered again and held my gaze. “I want you to hold me down with your tentacles so I can’t move at all.”

I let the tip of my fourth tentacle brush her left leg. “What else, my mate?”

She whimpered. “I want your cock.”

“You may have it.” I dipped my head and nipped at her ear with my sharp teeth. “What should I do once you are at my mercy?”

She took a deep, shaky breath. “Then I would like you to fuck me, Vos. Make me scream.”

My brave Calla, asking her monster to make her scream.

But even as much as my desire made my hands and feet and tentacles tremble and my cock throb with need, two matters had to be settled first.

“My Calla,” I said, very seriously, my hand cupping the back of her head so I could look into her eyes. “I must know that you are healed and I will not hurt you if I am…enthusiastic.”

Her gentle smile melted me.

“You saw the scanner for yourself,” she said. “A nearly clean bill of health from a reliable source. I think enthusiasm with reasonable care will keep me from needing medical intervention.” Her smile faded. “I will tell you if something hurts in a bad way, I promise.”

I had anticipated that response…but I had no idea how she might reply to my second question.

“What of pregnancy?” I asked. “There is a chance we could create a child.”

A dozen emotions flashed in her eyes—more than I could process or understand.

“As you might imagine for someone with my background, I’ve taken steps to ensure there will not be any accidental pregnancies,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact even as her eyes darkened with what I thought were bad memories. “Not permanent steps, yet, but very certain ones. So you don’t need to worry about that.”

I had no thoughts of my own about children, and certainly it was a matter for another day. For now, my world was Calla, and she had asked for my cock, and for me to make her scream.

Without warning, I wrapped my tentacle around her left ankle, and then I lifted her head to press my lips to hers .

My mate screamed in ecstasy, her body going rigid in the throes of an orgasm. She sobbed and wailed, thrashing against the iron grip of my tentacles and human arms. The sound of her cry ignited my senses and my body in entirely new ways.

And I knew as surely as I had known anything in my life that I would do anything—anything at all—to hear that scream again and again, for the rest of my days.