“How could I tell you?” he demanded. “When you have been so afraid that I would force myself upon you? I have seen that fear in you from the day that first we met. And then you did allow me to sex with you, because you did not wish to see me suffer, you said. On my world, we would not consider that a passionate invitation. Gods, can you know how cruel you were in your compliance? To permit me to come to you in Heat, when I wished only to come to you like
this
?”
He cupped the full curves of her bottom and pulled her hard against him, shaping her to his rampant desire, and thrusting his hips at hers. “You said if I were human, if you knew no fear, you would have taken me to your bed before this,” he growled, biting and sucking at her jaw, her neck, her breast. “You said you found me attractive. You could have drawn a knife and
stabbed
me with less pain!”
“Then why didn’t you—?”
“Because I am
Jotan
and I am
male
, and we do not go to females,
they come to us
!” Tagen forced his hands to release her and he stepped away, breathing fast and hard. “Tell me what to do,” he snarled. “Tell me how to win you. Tell me how to please you. Tell me anything, but
tell
me, Daria Cleavon! You expect me just to know these things!”
“I know.” She was flushed and would not meet his eyes. Her hands rose and rubbed at her arms as though she were cold. Her face was pinched with hurt and unhappiness, but more than anything else, it was a lost and child-like confusion that haunted her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know what I want. I just know that you’re the first…the first man that I…”
Her hand found her cheek, covering that small part of her that she had allowed to become her whole self, her whole world, and suddenly Tagen was furious. Not at her, but at Earth, at this hot, miserable, poisonous planet that had first spoiled and then forsaken her.
He closed the distance between them in a single, swift step and yanked her hand away from her face. “
Stop that
!” he snarled, fighting for calm and yet roaring it anyway. “Stop doing that to yourself!”
He let go of her and grabbed at the shirt he wore, ripping it when he could not seem to pull it off fast enough. He caught her hand again and slapped it down over the keloided scars left by some years-past blaster fight, a starburst of raised flesh he had never bothered to have repaired. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded. He seized her head when she tried to wrench away and made her look at him. “It is skin, Daria. Skin. It keeps the life in our bodies and it keeps the weather from getting in. It does not define us. It does not command us. It is only skin.”
He stepped back and pulled her with him, off the counters and behind him as he marched her through the house and out to her yard. He stopped when he came to the raised garden with its little wall of stone and put her in front of him, cupping her face and making her look at what he needed her to see. Her lindaria, her hateful little weed, twining delicately out through the cracked rock to seek the sun.
“That is what you are,” he said. “That is what I see when I am with you. I see the vine that grows through stone.”
She made a sound, something between a sob and a scream, and tried to break away from him.
“You credit me with saving you,” he said, holding her implacably in his iron grip. “You tell me you were drowning in fear and that I have pulled you free. You do yourself injustice, Lindaria Cleavon. I am just another stone, and you have grown through me. The strength was yours and it was with you all the while.”
With great reluctance, he let her go. If he had not reached her after all of that, then Earth had won, and he never would.
She didn’t run. She didn’t hide her eyes and she didn’t cover her scars. She didn’t even hit him, a thing Tagen expected and could not have blamed her for. She stood shivering and looked down at the weed in her garden. When she finally spoke, her voice was whisper. “If I asked you to leave right now, would you go?”
He felt something inside him break open and bleed. He had no will left to argue with her. He had fought, and he had lost. “Yes,” he said, and turned away.
Her hand caught his. “And if you wanted to stay, would you?” Her eyes met his, bright with her human tears, searching.
“Yes.” And, gods help him, he meant it.
“Then stay. Please stay.” She looked at his hand in hers, brought it to her lips and kissed it. One of her tears fell, tracing a trail down to drop off his claw. “I want you to stay.”
He cupped her chin and gently brought her head up until her gaze met his. “And what else do you want?” he asked quietly.
Her mouth worked but she made no words. She looked at him in helpless silence, trembling.
How easy it would be to take, he mused. To ease the stiffness from her small frame with his unrelenting touch. She would fold, he knew. She had resisted him in the kitchen, but she had clung to him in the end. It would be so now. He had only to fight her a little.
But he was tired of warfare. “I am male,” he reminded her, and stepped forward so that she could feel the proof for herself. “You are female. The females come to us. The females command. Command me, if you want me.”
Color flooded her cheeks and she cast her eyes about despairingly before meeting his gaze again. “I…Kiss me.”
It was a start.
Tagen bent and touched his lips first to her cheek, kissing the scars that laced along the side of her face. Then lower, nipping lightly at the delicate curve of her jaw. He kissed the hollows of her slender throat, smiling to find the racing of her pulse just beneath the thin skin. And finally her mouth, sharing her breath and feeling her lips part to admit him.
The sun was on his back, spurring him to greater urgency. And she was warm against his bare chest, warm and soft and insistent all at once as she brushed her fingers through his hair and pulled his mouth even harder against hers. He pulled away, seeking breath and a moment’s stillness before his needs wrested control from him, and she bit him, her human teeth sending sheer fire right through to the heart of him.
He must have cried out because she drew back at once, looking nervous. “Did I hurt you?” she asked.
He stared at her dazedly and then pulled her hard against him, invading her mouth and groaning as she met his caresses with the red passion of tooth and claw. He was untried in the ways of her wooing, as much as she was with his, but they found a common ground together and fought there to give as much as they could to the other.
Her hands tugged at his clothing, bringing painful awareness of that barrier back to his mind. He drew away, trying to puzzle out the fastenings on her frayed shorts, and finally panted out an apology and shredded them in his claws.
She laughed, the sound like water tumbling blessedly over the molten rock of his mind, bringing clarity back to him enough to delight in her again. He had never known such a female; he had never experienced such vulnerability and strength, such passion coupled with such sincerity. He unknotted the tied folds of her shirt and pulled it from her with an exaggeration of gentleness, just to show her that he still knew how, and then lifted her in his arms and pressed his mouth over the swelling of her breast.
She gasped, her legs flying out to enfold his ribs, and he grinned as he explored the sensitivities of her flesh. The thin human skin was a masterpiece of responsiveness, and Daria was unmoored in the storm it inspired in her. She rocked against him, clutching at his shoulders, screaming at the sky. He could content himself with this for hours, just to feel the freedom of her passion and to hear her unbridled cries.
But in the end, she would not allow it.
“C-command you!” she managed, and he lifted his head in surprise. Her eyes were burning down on him from above, fierce and glazed with need. “I command you to make love to me!”
Of all the times to need a language lesson.
Tagen hesitated, lowering her until she found her feet. “Make…?” he echoed. He would do anything she asked, perform any human act of courtship. He was close to winning her. He could sense her desire rippling in the air like, well, like heat.
She laughed again, a tight and frustrated sound, and dropped her hand to grip his rock-hard shaft. “Lie down with me,” she said. “Right here. Right now.”
Ah. That he could do. Growling, he swept her feet from under her, catching her wrists and lowering her to the dry grass. He knelt between her legs, caressing her supple calf before sliding his hand up to cup her hip, lifting her to meet his first careful thrust. She welcomed him with a cry, locking her ankles behind his hips and bringing him home to her.
He could feel her breath panting raggedly on his chest in time with his steady motions, but he wanted to see her face, to read the effects of his labors in her calescent eyes. He rolled to his back, swinging her above him, and groaned as she immediately took up the lead. She rode him wildly, her entire body alive with kinetic interplay, testing every shred of discipline he possessed to keep her in the throes of her ravenous desire.
He knew her climax by the telltale fire in her eyes and the sudden frenzy of her movements. His own was not far behind, roaring through him with an intensity and power he had never experienced. It felt it might go on for hours, searing his senses until he fell into ash, but it faded gentle and warm as the summer wind that blew over them.
Then she lay beside him, one leg comfortably slung over him in a familiar gesture of possessiveness that he minded not at all. Her hand rested on his chest, her breath came soft against his neck, and even if it was too hot to lie together this way beneath Earth’s sun, it was too pleasant a thing to end.
“You understand,” he said eventually, “if we remain here very long, I am going to go into Heat.”
He felt her lips curve against his flesh in a smile.
Ah, she was right. Let the sun shine down.
*
The day lengthened. The sun moved. Eventually, they were lying in the shade. It was still hot, but there was a hint of a breeze now and then, and it was just nice to be outside. The grass was dry, but still soft beneath her. And when Tagen was touching her, kissing her, moving inside her, well, it was just too hard to worry about bugs in her hair. Even when he was in Heat and his needs more urgent than tender, he had a way of knowing her, of coaxing her to abandon that left her weak and helplessly clinging to him. She had never known such powerful sex, such intensity and control. She had never realized how wild she could be, or how capable she was of experiencing such thrilling joy and release.
But now, in the shade and in this course of the little breeze, Heat seemed to be done. Tagen lay beside her, his arm around her and his hand still drifting along the curves of her body. She watched the pattern of trees on sky and he dozed, growling low now and then and sometimes nipping at her shoulder or her neck. He made it impossible to pretend he was anything but what he truly was, and the longer he lay beside her, the less she found she cared about his inhuman nature. She wasn’t quite sure what that said about her, the willing lover of an alien, but she didn’t much care about that either. She was happy. It wouldn’t last forever, but it was enough for now.
“I suppose this is a little late to be asking something like this,” she murmured, and Tagen made a drowsily inquiring sound. “But have you got someone waiting for you back home?”
“Someone…? Ah. I see. No.” His arm tightened on her waist and he drew her back against him, his leg sliding possessively through both of hers.
“No wife? No ex-wife?”
“We do not marry.”
“Ever?”
“Mm.” He nipped at her shoulder. “A female may choose to keep a mate for many years, but there is no ceremony such as you have. And it is a rare thing in any case.”
“No girlfriend?”
“Why should there be, if there is no marriage?” he asked reasonably.
“No kids?” she pressed.
“No.” He paused and raised his head. “Yes,” he said.
She looked at him, startled. “Yes?”
“I have not taken a son,” he told her, “but I have been bred.” He gave her a look that was distinctly roguish, as though he expected that to be a turn-on.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.
Tagen blinked, drawing back. “Males, I should think,” he said. “I do not know for certain. She was close when my term of on-world service ended. The birth happened while I was away, and she was transferred to another station before my return.” He gave his claws a casual flick. “We have fallen out of contact. What little we ever had between us, that is.”
“She didn’t even tell you what they were? You’ve never even been to see them?”
He gave her a quizzical look. “Jotan do not often keep their young,” he said. “And sires, never.”
“Well, that’s—” fucked up, was how she wanted to finish, but she managed not to. “Different,” she said lamely.
He shrugged and lay back down. “Females frequently raise the young of their first birth,” he said. “Or any daughters. But understand, there are few females and Heat is unwelcome and painful. Females are…ordered to breed.” He was quiet a little while. “That is not the right word, but I have no other. What I mean to say is that save for who she would take for sire, a female may have little choice when it is given her to breed, and it is a considerable disruption to one’s career.”
She sat up and stared at him. “Are you talking about government-sanctioned rape?” she asked.
It was his turn to lie still for many minutes, his claws scratching lightly at his chest as he considered the question. “So some have called it,” he said finally. “But I do not agree. A race has a responsibility to propagate itself. For us, it is less easy and less pleasant than it is for you. But it is not rape the way you think of it. I have never known a female to refuse. She will have known her duty from childhood and, if not entirely enthusiastic, she will be resigned.”
“But she can’t say no, can she? If the President tells her to get pregnant, she has to do it.”
“We have no President,” he said.