“I’m not Dr. Mareesh,” she said.
“No, you’re young and naïve.” Calder grabbed the hypo out of the box and pressed it to his arm.
She tried to snatch it then stopped as though fearing she’d hurt him.
Fearing to hurt
a Shareem.
Gods, what an innocent.
Calder lifted the handheld, seized her frozen hand and jabbed her thumb onto the thumbprint pad. “There. Done.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I just did.”
She gaped at him. “I could lose my job for that.”
“Then don’t tell anyone.”
Calder rose from the table, towering over the woman by a good foot. She’d snuggle nicely under his chin. That is, if she ever removed the stick from her butt.
Her chest rose and fell, a shapely bosom waiting under the layers of garments. He’d love to peel back the cloths, lower his head to one of her tightening nipples, rub his tongue over the firm bud.
No.
Calder didn’t get to have sweet fantasies with sweet women. His purpose was to fulfill rough, nasty, dirty fantasies for women who could afford it. Whatever they wanted for whatever amount of time they paid for, no safety words and no stopping.
The women signed consent forms before arriving that said Calder could do to them anything he wanted. Anything he deemed necessary.
“I’ll be back in six months,” he said.
He gave Dr. d’Arnal’s curved ass a slap and walked out. He wasn’t allowed to touch women without their permission, but Calder liked to bend the rules when he could, and her ass was so very spankable.
He heard her gasp of outrage as he went and permitted himself one little chuckle.
*
Katarina d’Arnal had no idea how long she’d stood with her handheld to her chest and her mouth open.
He’d touched her. The Shareem had touched a highborn woman without permission. And the
way
he’d touched her…
She felt a tingle on her backside the exact size and shape of his hand. What would it feel like to have him smooth his hand there instead?
It was forbidden. He’d broken all the rules—not allowing himself to be scanned, grabbing the hypo and inoculating himself.
What had she expected? A grateful Shareem, happy that she’d tried to help him not spread disease or father children?
Katarina had always felt sorry for men on Bor Narga, relegated to lesser jobs because it was thought they didn’t have the intellectual capacity for business or government. Men in the slums of Pas City often didn’t get good health care because their women wouldn’t pay for it. Hence Katarina’s volunteer work in this clinic. She wanted to help men in need.
Men of Pas City included Shareem. The clinic’s director, who didn’t think much of Katarina’s soft heart, had said, “If you love males so much, you can have the Shareem.
One’s coming in at two.” The woman had sneered when she’d said it. Doing a Shareem check was considered a crap job.
His name was Calder, the appointment roster said. The first Shareem Katarina had ever seen in the flesh.
And what a Shareem. The man was huge. She’d never seen a man with as large a body, with such power when he moved. Every part of him was gigantic.
Every
part, her cursory research on Shareem had said.
His eyes, shadowed by his head cloths, had drawn her in. No,
sucked
her in, as if she’d become a puppet on strings the minute he’d looked at her. She’d done what he’d said with only token protest.
Shareem blue, she’d heard the color called. Shareem eyes were larger than those of a normal man, the irises a bit wider.
But there was something wrong with him. His bared arm had been covered with ropes of scars and mottled flesh. She recognized that he’d been burned so deeply that skin grafts hadn’t completely repaired him. The repairs had been competently done, but the flesh would never be whole.
His voice was gravelly and broken, probably another souvenir of whatever had burned him. But when he’d spoken to her, she’d sworn that just for a moment another smooth, rich voice had whispered in her mind.
Tell me what you want, Katarina. What you want deep inside yourself.
Ridiculous. Katarina slammed the hypo back into the box and snapped the lid shut.
She had everything she wanted—a career, a fine house her mother had left her in the Serestine Quarter, plenty of friends.
Loneliness.
Katarina punched her handheld and swept from the room to see her next patient.
Sometimes the little voices inside her needed to shut up.
*
Dr. Laas flicked off her screen and grinned. A curious young woman had been sifting through the Shareem database at the Ministry of Non-Human Life Forms, digging through for information on one particular Shareem.
Calder.
“Baine, bring up all the information you can on one Dr. Katarina d’Arnal.”
Dr. Laas’ computer, so ultra-superior that it had a complex about it, whirred and hummed. “Here she is, madam,” Baine said, his voice accented like an old Earth butler’s. “Dr. Katarina d’Arnal. The usual sort of highborn woman.”
She wasn’t though, Dr. Laas thought as she skimmed the information. Katarina d’Arnal had not yet married. Her mother had been prominent in Bor Narga’s social sphere, but both mother and father had been killed in an accident in a hovertrain, leaving a house and fortune to Katarina.
After grieving, Katarina had entered medical school. When she finished, she’d volunteered in a clinic in Pas City, saying that she wanted to help the underprivileged, especially males, whose health care was too neglected.
The young innocent. Dr. Laas chuckled. If Katarina d’Arnal wanted to do good, she could learn on someone who really needed it.
She smiled, pulled her bare feet up on the sofa that was massaging her back, and told Baine to bring up a data code that was deadly secret except to those in the know.
She keyed up the encoded application to enter Calder’s private sexual paradise and, with one finger, typed “Katarina d’Arnal.”
Chapter Two
“Are you sure this is right?”
Katarina studied the sand-scoured face of the building in front of her. Her handheld told her the street vendor she needed to treat lived here, but this place looked like a disused warehouse.
The woman who drove the cab leaned out the open window and gave Katarina an odd look. “385 Barkelo Street, ma’am. You sure this is where you want to get to? You don’t look the type.”
Whatever that meant. “I might not look the type, but I have a job to do.”
The woman raised her brows, charged Katarina’s credit slip, closed the window and roared off down the street in a choking cloud of sand.
Katarina waved away the dust and turned to the door. Rust-streaked and peeling from dry rot, the door was almost as unprepossessing as the rest of the building. In the center of the door, a perfectly good, modern, clean thumbprint pad awaited the right person’s touch.
She found no door chime, no way to indicate she’d arrived. The thumbprint pad would be keyed to the owner, not her.
Annoyed, she pressed it anyway—then stepped back in surprise when the door rolled open.
A dim corridor coated with a thin film of sand stretched away from her. Katarina stepped inside then jumped when the door slammed shut behind her.
“Hello?” she called to the empty corridor. “Someone here called a medic?”
No answer. Sand gritted under her boots as she walked along, but no one greeted her or came to meet her.
When Katarina reached a door at the end of the hall, it obediently opened for her.
Unlike the front door, this one slid back smoothly and quietly. Katarina stepped through it into a place of amazing beauty.
A mosaic-tiled walkway twisted before her, leading the way through lush greenery.
The light overhead was soft, the ceiling twilight blue, baffling the eye as to how high it was. A cool, natural-feeling breeze ruffled Katarina’s hair and tranquilizing calm stole over her, as though a relaxation scent was being pumped into the air.
She moved curiously down the path. The walkway was mazelike, bending around greenery and latticework walls laced with exotic flowers. Fountains trickled and the flowers’ scents filled the air. The garden was a masterwork, at once lovely, peaceful and disorienting. A lot of money had been spent transforming this warehouse into a paradise.
The mosaic walk ended at another door, this one open. Katarina stepped through into a room about twenty feet square, painted black, with the same dark, cool-air ceiling. Muted lights kept everything dim and candles placed in a few tall stands created wavering shadows.
A reflective copper sheet ran from floor to ceiling at one end of the room and water quietly shimmered down it. A platform about ten feet square and three feet high rose in the middle of the room. It was covered with black, white and red cushions, and a bundle of roses lay in the middle of it.
Katarina wandered to the platform and touched a rose petal in wonder. They were real, heady-smelling Earth roses, blood-red.
“
Katarina
.”
The voice rolled through empty air, low and male, smooth and deep.
Her breath stopped. It was the voice she’d heard in her head when the Shareem Calder had come to the clinic five days ago.
Every night since, she’d dreamed of his voice, waking with her hand under her nightgown, fingers between her legs. As a doctor, she knew that, technically, the
aroused vulva swelled and opened to receive the penis, then squeezed to encourage the penis to release its life-giving seed. Technically.
She’d never felt a hardening clitoris, never experienced stabbing need between her legs. Alone in bed, she had rubbed herself until she’d groaned and released cream all over her hand. Every night.
Someone at the clinic must have tricked her here to see Calder again.
“I have to go.” Katarina swung around, seeking the door to the walkway and the path out. But where the entrance to the green garden had been, a black wall now stood, solid, sealing her in.
“Open this,” she said, her voice shaking.
“Not yet.” His voice flowed, sending warmth down her spine.
She wanted to beat on the wall, demand he let her out. He had no right to keep her here, she a highborn lady of Bor Narga, he a mere Shareem. How dare he?
And why did she buzz with excitement, wondering what he would do? Her research on Shareem told her they couldn’t touch her without permission. It had been built into their genetic programming.
Calder wasn’t touching her, he was talking, watching. He wasn’t even in the room with her, as far as she could see.
A door in the wall next to her hissed open, revealing a closet. Inside was a short dress of bright red supple leather and black boots with the highest heels she’d ever seen.
“Remove your clothing,” Calder said. “And put on what you find in there.”
Her heart beat faster. “Why on earth would you want me to wear that?”
“Put them on.” The voice brooked no argument.
Katarina suddenly thought she understood what was going on. Her fellow medics were testing her. Katarina had been put in charge of inoculating Shareem, and her colleagues wanted to see if she’d be afraid of them.
Wouldn’t they love that? The highborn doctor who’d condescended to work in the slums running home at the first challenge? They’d ridicule her, say she didn’t have the guts. And they’d be right.
Calder’s voice rumbled through the room. “Take off your clothes for me, Katarina.”
“Why?” she said to the air. “You wouldn’t take yours off for me.”
A laugh floated to her, deep and dark. “Too many eyes at your clinic. Here, we are alone. No one else will come.”
Katarina closed her eyes. Dear gods, she wanted this. She wanted to slide her tunic and leggings from her body and let him see her. She wanted to face him and open her arms, ask him if he thought her pretty.
What on earth was she thinking?
She remembered suddenly the scars on his arms, his harsh voice sharpening when he told her he wouldn’t disrobe.
Because he was ashamed.
Compassion made Katarina do what lust couldn’t. She undid the clasp that held her tunic and lowered the thick material to her waist. Her breasts tumbled out, unfettered.
She’d woken from another dream of him last night, her nipples tight, and she’d pinched the buds to ease the ache. The nipples were again as hard as little pebbles.
“You are lovely,” Calder said.
Katarina drew her thumbs across her areolas, marveling at the tingling sensation.
She knew he liked her doing this, even though he said nothing from behind the walls.
“Now the rest,” he said. “Let me see you.”
Katarina toed off her sand boots and, before she could think about it, let her pants slither to her ankles.
She assumed she’d be more embarrassed once she’d shed her clothes, but the cool air touching her skin made her feel curiously free. She liked the sensation of standing
naked in this black room while her unseen watcher observed her. She moved her legs apart, enjoying the feel of the tile on her bare feet.
“Katarina.”
She loved how he said her name, all long vowels separated by smooth consonants.
“Yes?”
“You are even more beautiful than I expected.”
“Expected? What did you expect?”
“I saw your picture on your consent form, with your face unveiled.” His voice dipped lower. “I grew hard just looking at you.”
Katarina’s breath poured back into her lungs, her skin suddenly cold. “Consent form?”
“It told me all about you. You are Katarina d’Arnal. You are twenty-seven years old, unmarried and rich. You have taken a job in Pas City to seek… What have you come to seek?”
“Peace. I think.”
“Fulfillment.”
She hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe that’s what I want, I don’t know.”
“With me, you will truly find out what you want. I will show you every step of the way, with my own hands, what you want.”
Her heart pounded. Without thinking about it, she touched the curls at her cleft.
“How can you possibly know when I don’t?”
It seemed easy to talk to him when she couldn’t see him, a voiceless entity whose rich tones wove magical strings around her mind.