Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One (19 page)

But the spanking was quickly over, almost as if he had felt he was crossing some sort of propriety line by spanking her at all. Still, when her feet again touched the ground, she put her hands behind her to cover her bottom protectively. Her skin was already hot to the touch, sore, and tingling. The spanking had been very short but not light. He said a couple of short words in Swarii, and she knew what they meant. “Bad girl”.

He took her hand and began to pull her back towards the lounge.

She dug her bare heels into the floor and grabbed the chair with her other hand. “
Wait, wait!
” she was finally able to shal’ta. She knew it sounded as desperate as she felt. “
Please
!”

“
Girl, I can make sure that by the time you CAN sit again, you won’t remember how it’s done
,” he threatened darkly.

“Please
let me show you something… Sir?
” she pleaded, giving him the no-fail puppy eyes, trying to give him the kind of subservience that would curl Jazeel’s toes.

They remained the
no-fail
puppy eyes. He finally huffed angrily and let go of her hand. “What?”

Ellie grabbed the headphones and then carefully presented them to him.

He grabbed them and put them on. “What? Are you making calls or something?” he snapped, but suddenly his brow crinkled.

His expression changed from anger, to confusion, to intensity, to doubt, to amazement, and finally back to intensity again. These emotions didn’t come and go quickly, either. She watched him with amusement for about five minutes before he finally, very slowly, pulled the headphones off his head.

“
Was that what I think it was
?” the admiral asked very crisply.

For a moment, she wondered if she was in trouble—his expression was dark. She nodded, wringing her hands in front of her nervously.

“
Did
you
do this
?”

She nodded again, even more hesitantly. This time, she put her hands back over her quivering bottom.

And then he lunged towards her. She squinted when he did so, expecting him to haul her over his knee again. That’s why she was very surprised, indeed, when he picked her up by her waist and twirled her playfully around, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes—it was suddenly too much.

Finally, he put her back down, and gave her a tap on the nose. “
You need to learn how to obey my son, little one, or else you could have gotten yourself frozen to the wing! I figured you the stupidest creature this side of the universe; I still think he’s going to have his hands full. At the time I even felt
sorry
for him. And what you did to Fie is absolutely
deplorable
. You’re just lucky you’re not
mine
.

“But I’m impressed by this. And by God—I’m not impressed very often!”

“
You don’t seem like you are…
” she finally said, finally brave enough to smile.  He didn’t seem like a man who smiled often, either. But he certainly was smiling now, bright, white, and wide.

* * *

“I swear, Bro, you are stupider than hell,” Peyton heaved as he braced Thorton against him, his arm slung around his shoulder as Thorton limped along pathetically, bleeding from his mouth and not being able to see because of his swollen eye. Jio was helping Thorton on his other side.

“I said ‘no gambling’, Soldier. No fighting. Do you
remember
any of that?” Graham continued to nag, as he had been nagging all the way home. He pressed in the code to the spaceship door. It opened in front of them.

“I don’t remember a
lot
of things right now, Boss,” Thorton admitted.

“Of course you don’t. You got your
ass
kicked. You’re lucky you were at a place we happened to be walking by.”

“Lucky, or
strategic
?” was Thorton’s response. It probably hurt to smile with a busted lip, but he did, anyway.

“
Lucky
you weren’t
shot
,” Graham grumbled.  “Completely unprofessional. If I were my father I would give you the lash. We can’t do this every goddamned time we land somewhere.”

“Hey, I sold this ship for pretty good money, Boss. More than she’s worth!” he defended.

“I don’t know if that’s much solace for dealing with your bull—” Graham turned the corner and recognized his father sitting on the couch where he had expected Fie to be. Thorton’s large, bulky headphones were around his father’s ears yet the television monitor in front of him blared on quietly.

That wasn’t as shocking as the fact that both Mary and Ellie had curled up with him. Ellie was sitting on his lap resting her head on his chest, and Mary was curled up into his side, cocooned in a blanket. It was a very similar image to how his father had been with his sisters, when they were alive and young. He thought all the warm-and-fuzzy had been wrung out of him long ago from the losses he suffered in the war, but as he watched the girls snuggle up to him comfortably as they slept, it made him rethink that.

Graham looked to his left and his right—his men were extremely tense, as if they had just walked into a room with a sleeping dragon.

“Who’s
he
?” Peyton whispered, also sensing the tenseness.

“Admiral Masterson,” Thorton whispered back. “He might not have noticed us. We might be able to get out alive…” he tried to steer Peyton so he could limp safely from the room with his help.

The movement caught the edge of the Admiral’s peripheral vision, and his neck turned to face them. “What the hell happened to
you
, Lieutenant?” he snapped, clearly already of the mind that whatever happened was of Thorton’s own making.

Graham, as he’d done since he was a child, stepped in front of Thorton as if to shield the sight of him, and saluted his father respectfully. “Admiral,” he acknowledged, his posture straight as he put his hands behind his back in order to puff out his chest. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Well, after you sent me your mission report, I made it so the fleet just
happened
to be in the area,” the admiral noted frankly. “From the sound of it, you’re lucky you weren’t shot in the face. It certainly would have made your escape
tricky
.”

Graham nodded so slightly that the movement of his head could barely be detected with the human eye. “Indeed,” he agreed.

“But although I didn’t think it WOULD be, it’s possible that having the union with the human is the best career move you’ve ever made.”

Graham didn’t respond. He was too shocked by his father’s statement. In reality, he had dreaded what his father would say about it—he wasn’t the most open-minded man in the galaxy, for certain.

Peyton, who couldn’t speak Swarii, looked over at Thorton and whispered, “Translate?”

“I don’t think I should. I don’t think he’s the admiral anymore. Possibly a robot spy that merely
looks
like him…” Thorton replied, a stupid smirk appearing on his beat-up face.

“This update she did to your communication system is revolutionary, Son. I haven’t been able to get over it. She’s sort of the mad-scientist type,” the admiral said, gazing down at her as she continued to snuggle into him.  He played with her five-toed little feet, which had been getting warmed with his hand all the while. “Only the human part makes her a little too damned cute to take seriously at first.”

Graham felt a mix of emotions in him—he would have felt nothing but pride at whatever it was his father was so happy with, but he was mostly thinking how he had specifically told her not to fix or fiddle with anything while he was gone. That’s why he had left Fie behind—to insure that.

He looked around the room, suddenly confused. “Where’s Fie?”

“Probably still in his bedroom, puking his guts out,” he answered, looking unconcerned, and even a little bit amused. “This one slipped him some sort of drug, or so she
says
. But I
really
think it was
this
one,” he said, nodding over to Mary. “Because she’s been acting
far
guiltier about Fie’s side effects. She’s exhausted; been at Fie’s side for the last seven hours. It feels like they’d pre-arranged who’d be at fault.”

Graham was massaging his scalp already with the tips of his fingers. “Urgh,” he finally said, and took inventory of his current problems: a drop in from his positively frightening father, also the highest commander of his fleet and life, a banged-up electrician, an exhausted doctor, a poisoned research scientist, and the wife that poisoned him and obviously went off to do whatever she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. “Terrific,” he grumbled.

He spun around and pointed at Thorton and Jio. “Take him to bed. I’ll send Mary in there behind you. Don’t translate for Peyton what happened, because I want her to see to Thorton first.” He pointed at Brahm. “Check on Fie. Make sure he’s not dead or almost dead.” Brahm nodded and disappeared out of the room.

“Wait, wait—” Thorton said, waving his hand before Jio and Peyton could help carry him out. “If she’s getting a spanking, can I watch?”

Graham jerked his thumb towards the hallway, and Jio, with a grin, continued to guide Thorton out.

Chapter Nine

The rumbling of Jack’s voice finally woke Ellie gently out of sleep. Despite a poor first-impression, she was now quite certain that the admiral took a great liking to her and Mary. Whether or not this apparent ‘liking’ was going to get her out of a ‘licking’, she did not know. In fact, she doubted it.

She knew that Graham had returned before she opened her eyes; there was something extremely distinguishable about his voice. She could barely understand a word of what they were saying, mind you—they were speaking Swarii, not English. Still, Graham’s voice had the lulling sound of a deep, grumbling drawl. By the way his words rolled out of his mouth, she could certainly say that he enunciated the ending of his words better than the beginning, and that whenever he said a word with an ‘rr’ sound in it, it seemed drawn out like a growl.  It made him sound like he was serious and angry even when he wasn’t.

She was actually wondering whether or not to continue to pretend that she was asleep—Graham could not punish her if she was asleep. Rather, he WOULD not. She couldn’t imagine that he would wake her; she knew that he coddled her, and would continue to do so no matter what she did, to him, herself, or his friends. She understood very quickly into their relationship the tender mechanics of it; that she was the main gear in the relationship, the most important and unbreakable part as far as he was concerned, and he would go far out of his way to revolve around her more than he expected her to revolve around him.

Whether or not he
loved
her in the human-sense was inconsequential. Although she had just turned eighteen when she had been abducted away from Earth, she had recognized the significance a husband and wife would hold for each other, which was affection; sometimes possessiveness, sometimes a convenience. In all regards, Graham's bond with her was tougher. No doubt she was always in the back of his mind, and when he saw her, the affection that he allowed to be observed on his face was just as real as anything else.

In short, it was laughable to think that no matter WHAT she created—it could have been innerspace travel itself!—was not going to save her from punishment. He would not be as easily appeased as the Admiral, who was certainly looking at her invention as ANYBODY losing a war would view it—as a miracle.

Graham wouldn’t see it as that right away. His mind would certainly not move out of how blatantly she had disobeyed him, or how dangerous what she did was. He would be thinking about how she could have been electrocuted, how she could have slipped and fallen on the ice and could have fallen down a few
stories
, and
not
onto the wing. He would consider the fact that had not his father shown up, she would have frozen to death by now, or at least be in jeopardy of losing a toe or two—she would have been out there twelve hours; it was probably close to morning. Fie was far too ill at the moment to have saved her at any point in time, and Mary wouldn’t have been able to help her even if she had known where she was.

Finally, she realized that Graham was waking Mary. Mary was at her feet; her head was basically resting on Ellie’s knee. Mary made a moaning noise as she awoke, sounding very unhappy about being touched and being very dazed. “Mary,” Graham said patiently. “Can you please go to Thorton’s room? I think he needs some medical attention, and with Fie out of commission, you’re the closest we have.”

As Ellie opened her eyes, she realized Mary was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and she sat up. “Peyton?” Mary asked, worried when she looked around and didn’t see him.

“He’s with Thorton and he’s fine. When you're done tending to Thorton, I’d appreciate it if you let me know what chemicals you gave to Fie when you drugged him. I’m sure he’d also like to know.”

Ellie’s body went rigid. “It was
me
!” Ellie quickly said, jumping up in Jack’s lap.

Graham didn’t look amused. He crossed his arms. “Really? What chemicals did the drug contain?”

“It was a… sleeping pill,” replied Ellie, suddenly realizing that she had no idea.
Mary
knew that sort of stuff. They hadn’t discussed it; Ellie had essentially just phoned it in.

“Made of?”

Ellie bit her lip. “Alright, I had Mary make it for me, but she didn’t know I was actually going to use it,” Ellie finally blathered.

Graham’s head rocked towards Mary very slowly. He didn’t speak; his expression spoke for itself. It somehow was asking Mary if she was really going to go along with the story that a girl about 9 years younger than her had somehow duped her into drugging someone else.

The idea embarrassed Mary enough that her head dropped and her shoulders slumped. “No, no. I did it… It was Rohypnol; I was trying to cross reference Frian medicines with discovered Human medicines, and I found it. I don’t remember the Swarii name for it, but I could point it out,” she sighed. “I’m really, really sorry, Graham.”