Dark Solstice (8 page)

It didn’t banish the hurt that welled in her. Nothing could wash away that awful feeling that he wasn’t even aware of her, that he thought he was making love to his beloved Amy, but the desire remained and winding through it and the hurt was another emotion, another need. If the loss and pain were so deep inside him it was only his unconscious mind that allowed it to surface, then he needed her touch. Perhaps, she thought, it would soothe the pain if she allowed him his dream lover?

She was willing to try, willing to ignore her own wound—which was surely superficial at best? A prick to her ego, nothing more.

It had to be. She didn’t love him as his Amy must have to have captured his love for her and held it so long.

It was just sex to her, welcome because it felt good.

Dragging in a shuddering breath, she lifted her hands and sifted her fingers lightly through his hair, enjoying the silkiness of it. He shuddered at her light touch, leaving off his wondrous caress of her sensitive nipples and shifting upward to press open mouthed kisses along her throat until he reached her mouth. She allowed her hands to drift to his broad, muscular shoulders as he shifted upwards to match his lips to hers.

A glorious madness overwhelmed her as his lips melded with her own and she felt the hungry caress of his tongue along hers, tasted him. Like a contented cat, she kneaded his shoulders and back with her fingers and skated her palms over the smooth, enticing flesh, undulating beneath him to brush every inch of flesh she could against his, to feel him everywhere at once.

He skimmed a hand down her side to cup and knead one buttock before he followed the cleft to her thigh and dragged her leg over his hips, reaching between her thighs to grasp his engorged member and drag it along her cleft.

Rhea gasped, breaking from his lips at the silken glide of the head of his cock, sucking in another quick breath as he found her opening and pressed inside of her. He rolled, taking her to her back, pressing into her insistently with short thrusts until he’d imbedded his thick flesh deeply inside of her.

She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, relishing the feel of him, breathless with the feeling of pleasurable fullness and the wondrous comfort it gave her to feel him as a part of herself, connected so deeply it was almost sublime. She lifted her legs and wrapped them tightly around his waist, wanting nothing more in that moment than to hold him to her, to retain that sense of oneness.

He began to move after a moment, however, slowly at first, drawing his flesh outward along her channel almost as if he relished it as much as she did before sinking deeply inside of her again. Heated currents began to stir to life, replacing the joy of before with a rush of impatience to feel more. Dropping her feet to the bed, she began to urge him to move faster, delve deeper as the urgency grew. She found herself rushing toward completion as his movements translated his own building needs to her. She sucked in a sharp breath at the first warning quake of the muscles along her channel, stilling, waiting expectantly, and then it hit her forcefully. She groaned as her climax lifted her, jolting through her. He groaned almost in unison, shuddered as his own body began to convulse with paroxysms of pleasure, and then moved faster, pumping his hot seed into her.

The bliss abated slowly, leaving her with a contented warmth. As sluggish as she felt in the aftermath, she skimmed her hands over his broad back appreciatively, stroking him soothingly as he struggled to catch his breath. He was still sprawled limply across her when she drifted to sleep again.

* * * *

The moment they were turned loose after their return from their second stint on Mars, Kyle yielded to his gut instincts where Rhea was concerned without a hell of a lot of cunning—no great surprise since Rhea had reduced him to the intellect of a moron.

“You said you’d consider a trade,” he said the moment he confronted Raathe, knowing the words came out as a challenge instead of the ‘only slightly interested’ proposition he’d intended. It sucked big time, but he didn’t think he’d be able to manage any better by waiting. He’d tried that, tried to get a grip. It wasn’t going to happen, not where Rhea was concerned.

Rhea recognized the voice even though she’d never heard it before except through the tinny, scratchy comm. units that altered the voices it piped through the low quality receivers in the PECs. Still reeling with exhaustion, it took her a moment, though, to recall the conversation Kyle Justice was referring to. When the memory surfaced, it roused her enough to pry one eyelid up and scan the cell.

The cell door was open. The discovery sent a jolt of uneasiness and surprise through her to join the prickle of wariness the question had already aroused.

She wasn’t aware of making any noise, and yet Raathe turned his head slightly in her direction and slid a narrow eyed, assessing look at her.

“What makes you think you have anything I’m interested in?” he finally responded, his voice as cold and unwelcoming as ice.

“I have information—a piece of code.”

Frowning, Rhea pushed herself upright, straining to hear the conversation. Low to begin with, Justice’s voice dropped another notch as he made that announcement. Raathe’s reaction, as minute as the signs were, was telling. He tilted his head, assessing the other man. “What would I do with it?” he finally responded, his nostrils flaring slightly and one corner of his lips curling in a sneer.

Kyle sent her an indecipherable look before he returned his attention to Raathe. “If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll take it to somebody else.”

Raathe shrugged. “And maybe they’ll have some use for it.”

Kyle’s faced hardened, but he merely nodded and then shrugged and turned away. He paused at the door and glanced at Raathe again. “I’ve got a schedule to go with it.”

Rhea studied Raathe for several moments after Kyle had left, wondering what the conversation had meant. That it was far from idle chit chat, she had no doubt. She just couldn’t seem to fit the pieces she’d heard together to make any sense. Giving up the effort after a few moments, she struggled out of the bunk and moved to the facilities. Either because he was too deep in thought to really be aware of her, or out of politeness, he remained in the opening of the cell, his back to her, staring down the corridor in the direction Kyle had disappeared.

She felt only marginally more alert when she’d finished. Without any real downtime from the first trip to the Mars surface, the second excursion had pushed her further toward complete collapse from exhaustion than she’d ever been in her life. They’d returned only the night before after another four day stint, been processed, and finally allowed to return to the cell.

Raathe had woken her some time after they’d collapsed onto the bunk together.

She still wasn’t certain that he’d been awake himself. In fact, she was almost convinced that he hadn’t been. He’d made love to her. As brain dead with exhaustion as she’d been, she’d retained enough reasoning ability to know the vast difference between an animalistic coupling and the tenderness he’d exhibited when he caressed and aroused her to heights she’d never experienced before.

He’d called her Amy—again. That was the most telling clue, next to his tenderness, that he’d been asleep and had no idea who the woman was that he was making love to.

She still had no idea who Amy was, but she no longer had any doubts about the relationship. It was the woman he’d loved—the iceman—a man so reputedly cold that ice water ran through his veins, pumped through a frozen heart, who was closer to reptilian in nature than human.

Her throat closed at the thoughts, the memory of his touch, clogging with an unidentifiable emotion she had no desire to examine.

There was a spark of humanity in him and, at least at one time, there’d been goodness. Maybe it was all gone now, or maybe it was just buried so deeply that it might as well have been, but she was as certain as she’d ever been of anything in her life that all humanity wasn’t lost to him if it could still surface in his unconscious mind.

Moving to the bunk, she straightened the cover and sat down on it with her back to the rock wall of the cell, studying the taut lines of Raathe’s back. As she did, she noticed things that she hadn’t before—mostly, she supposed, because she’d been too afraid of him to do more than register impressions, certainly too unnerved by him to study him.

He carried himself like a military man even though it had been years now since he was a soldier. No matter how tired he might be, his posture was always rigidly correct, his broad shoulders squared, his bearing and movements purposeful and confident and infinitely sexually appealing by virtue of his sheer animal masculinity.

His ash blond hair was longer even than the retro, shaggy style so popular back on Earth when she’d left, evidence of his lengthy stay in hell. It was darker at the roots, as if it was particularly susceptible to radiation and the longer the exposure, the more color was leached from it. She supposed, if he’d been exposed to ‘real’ sunlight instead of the weak artificial solar radiation piped into the prison his hair might have been completely colorless.

Or maybe not. His hair was surprisingly thick and when he tossed his head, impatiently flicking the wayward locks from his eyes, she could see layer upon layer of deepening shades of blond down to a color near his scalp that was almost tawny.

She’d been studying him so intently she discovered when she finally transferred her focus from the silky hair that made her fingers itch to tangle in the appealing locks, that he’d noticed her attention. A self-conscious blush heated her cheeks. “Why is the door open?” she asked, voicing the first question that popped into her mind.

He looked surprised. “We’re not under lockdown twenty-four seven.” His lips twisted. “There’s no need for it.”

It was Rhea’s turn to feel surprise. “And they just leave the doors open so anybody can wander around?”

His expression hardened. “Yeah, they let the animals wander loose.”

Anger joined Rhea’s embarrassment despite the vague discomfort she felt about insulting him. She looked away, staring stonily at the far wall instead of lashing out at him like she wanted to and informing him they
were
animals to her and he’d have to pardon her for not being happy to discover they
could
wander lose.

He made a sound of impatience. “You’re safe enough. Animals or not, the stupid die quickly here and those left appreciate the privilege of a little freedom too much to risk it by creating a disturbance that would give the fucking guards an excuse to put us on lockdown.”

Slightly reassured by that, Rhea tamped her anger and sent a speculative glance at him. “What did Kyle want?”

His lips tightened as he turned to study her. His gaze slid over her face speculatively and she had the distinct impression that he hadn’t been pleased about the fact that she’d called Kyle by his first name. She wasn’t certain why she had. He’d encouraged her to, flirted with her outrageously whenever the opportunity arose, but she hadn’t let her guard down, as unnerved by the possibility of arousing Raathe’s anger as she was by Kyle Justice’s interest in her.

At least, she hadn’t thought she had. Maybe it was telling that she’d begun to think of him as Kyle?

“You don’t strike me as stupid.”

Rhea felt her face redden again. Her anger resurfaced. “I got that. I meant, what did he really want?”

Amusement flickered in his eyes. Some of the tautness left his expression. “My guess? He
really
wanted a piece of you. If he made a habit of being that damned clumsy negotiating, he would’ve been dead months ago.”

“Alright, don’t tell me,” she said tautly.

“If you really want to find out what he’s up to, you’ll have to give him a slice of munch.”

Shock wafted through Rhea at the sheer crudity of his statement—she thought. The comment threw her into such an uproar she wasn’t actually sure which part of it unsettled her the most. She met his gaze with an effort, searched it, and then she knew—too much, things she didn’t want to know either about herself or about Raathe.

He hadn’t made love to
her
the night before. He’d made love to Amy, and yet the illusion had ensnared her just as surely as if he’d been completely aware that it was her, not Amy. An emotional connection had been forged, at least on her side.

Obviously, not his.

Maybe she was just as shocked to discover that he was suggesting, not ordering, her to perform in exchange for the information Kyle had offered? Maybe the little spurt of pain wasn’t even real emotion on her part but rather disappointment to discover she couldn’t count on any sort of attachment to help protect her?

She licked her dry lips. “You want me to fuck him for the information?”

His lips tightened. “If you’re here long enough you’ll discover there isn’t a lot to barter with around here,” he responded coldly.

She was oh so tempted to tell him to fuck Kyle himself if he wanted the damned information that badly—and she could see he did, regardless of the pose of indifference he’d put on for Kyle’s benefit. It was the reflection that she didn’t know just how far she could push Raathe that stopped her. He hadn’t hurt her or even offered to since she’d been with him. In point of fact, just the opposite. He’d taken care that no one else got the chance to hurt her, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t if she pushed him too far and she had no idea what his limits might be.

“Fine! I’ll fuck him for you.”

Instead of looking pleased, his face tightened. “I thought you might.”

Oh! She wanted to hit him for that one! She glared at his back as he left the cell and disappeared from her view down the corridor. The brief flare of temper didn’t last beyond his disappearance from her sight. The moment he had, she felt exposed and vulnerable and her mind began to conjure all sorts of scenarios of things that might happen to her while he was gone negotiating with Kyle.

To her vast relief, he wasn’t gone more than a few minutes. Her heart leapt into her throat as she listened to the brisk stride along the corridor, waiting in fear to discover who it was heading her way, and then settled in her chest with a dull thump as Raathe came into view. Kyle was no more than a few strides behind him, though, and everything inside of her clenched when she saw him.