Sleeping With the Enemy (16 page)

    Anka led her to the bed and drew her down with him. “Tell me what you’re so worried about,” he murmured once he’d arranged her against his length.

    Wariness flickered through her. “I told you. Don’t pretend you don’t know that this is a restricted area. I know you have them on your own base.”

    He shifted far enough away to study her face. “I wouldn’t insult your intelligence,
nodia
.” He released a harsh breath. “I shouldn’t have come.”

    Sybil wrestled with the thoughts that had been circling her mind ever since the conversation with Meachum earlier. She didn’t think they would’ve taken root and created uncertainty if she hadn’t already been struggling with doubts of her own, but she realized she simply didn’t want to face the possibility that Anka was trying to use her. “I wanted you to come, hoped you would. I know you’ll be leaving soon and…” She paused, swallowing with an effort against the emotions clogging her throat. “I just don’t want to create problems for you.”

    “That’s all of it?”

    “It’s enough.”

    “It isn’t enough to keep me away. Tell me it will cause problems for you. Tell me you don’t want me and I’ll go and I won’t come back.”

    Sybil looked into his eyes mournfully, feeling her own fill with tears. She knew what she should say if she truly cared about him. “I don’t want you here. I want you to go.”

    His gaze flickered over her face. “Liar,” he murmured. Surging toward her, he pushed her onto her back and covered her mouth with his, kissing her deeply. The glide of his tongue over hers was sheer delight. His taste and scent invaded her like a strong intoxicant, making her dizzy, warm, and completely malleable.

    Sybil struggled inwardly, but it was a losing battle. She didn’t want him to go. She was too selfish to do the right thing and send him away. All that kept drumming in her mind as she luxuriated in the feel of his mouth on hers was that she only had a little time to be with him and she couldn’t bear to give it up. “You’ll be careful when you come?” she asked breathlessly when he broke the kiss.

    “I’m a cautious
ril
,
nodia
. I’m always careful,” he murmured carelessly.

    “I mean it, Anka!” she said as he nibbled a trail kisses along her face and down her neck.

    “I am deadly serious also,” he murmured, plucking at the nipple he found with his lips.

    “That feels good.”

    He smiled against her breast. “Does it?”

    “Mmmm.”

    He moved to the twin peak. “And this?”

    “Mmmhmm.”

    He sucked it briefly and lifted his head. “Where else do you like kisses?”

    Sybil opened her eyes with an effort and lifted a hand to touch his mouth. “I like this mouth. I like your kisses. You can kiss me anywhere you want to.”

    His eyes gleamed. Rolling off of her, he pulled his boots off and then his suit. A wicked grin curled his lips when he climbed onto the bunk again and grasped her ankle. Sybil eyed him with misgiving. Jerking her foot off the bed, he caught her big toe between his teeth and raked them along the tender pad.

    Sybil jerked all over and let out a shriek of laughter before she could stop herself. She clamped a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the urge to laugh hysterically as he systematically nibbled each toe, but she was laughing so hard by the time he got to the pinky tears were streaming from her eyes. “Anka! You madman! Stop it!” she hissed at him in a whisper.

    “You said anywhere,
nodia
,” he reminded her, grabbing her other foot. She tried to wrest it away from him, but his grip was unbreakable. Instead of raking the toes with his teeth, however, he sucked them one by one and Sybil felt the urge to laugh die. Her belly shimmied.

    He sent her a knowing look. “Where else are you sensitive, I wonder?” he said musingly.

    Sybil swallowed convulsively.

    He tilted his head. “You won’t talk? I guess I’ll have to discover it on my own.”

    She gasped as he began nibbling kisses along her calf to her knee. “Don’t torture me,” she murmured playfully.

    He sent her a heavy lidded look. “Too late to beg for mercy now.”

    She wasn’t sure she wanted to, or could as he passed her knee and began to nibble along her inner thigh. It
was
torture. It made her belly clench so hard it cramped, but it also sent out electrifying currents of heat. Her back came up off the bed when he reached the apex of her thigh and sucked on the soft patch of flesh at the very top. She grabbed his head between her hands. He caught her wrists, forcing her hands down until he’d clamped them on either side of her hips. She tried to clamp her legs together but discovered he’d effectively blocked that avenue of escape with his body.

    “Anka?”

    “Shhh,” he murmured, leaning down to suck the same spot on the opposite thigh. “Relax,
nodia
.”

Relax?
With his
head
between her legs?

    She would’ve jackknifed upright again when he moved to the cleft between her legs if she could have. She discovered she couldn’t. For several moments after he’d begun to drag his tongue along her cleft from her sex to her clit she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to escape or not. The moment he caught her clit between his lips and sucked at it, however, she lost any ability to think. She nearly passed out at the jolt that went through her and the wave upon wave of shocks that followed it with each tug of his mouth.

    She gasped, panted, struggling to catch her breath, but his mouth and the sensations pouring through her had her entire focus. She felt her body heating toward explosion, felt the tension she recognized begin to build and it still caught her completely off guard when she climaxed, dragging a sharp cry from her. He continued to tease the exquisitely sensitive nub until she thought she would black out and finally lifted his head.

    She groaned piteously when he lowered his head to kiss her lower belly and began a tortuous assault upward, writhing beneath his touch as if he was branding her with fire. It
was
tortuous, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to beg him to stop, as certain as she was that she couldn’t bear it if he touched her breasts.

    She
knew
that was his goal.

    He caught her arms again when she folded them over breasts, suckling her breasts one that the time with a leisurely relish that forced the breath from her lungs.

    “Anka!” she gasped finally. “I can’t stand anymore! Please!”

    He released the nipple he’d been torturing, studied her face a long moment and surged upward, wedging the head of his cock in her opening. She was far more interested in ending the torment than anything else at that point, but the muscles of her sex had been clenching with such hard spasms they seemed to have permanently clenched together. Penetration was torture in itself, for both of them. He was shaking all over by the time he’d managed to enter her completely.

    She came almost as soon as he began to move, groaning, shuddering. He slowed, waited until she’d stopped convulsing and began to move faster, changing the rhythm and the depth until she began to climb again. Dread filled her along with anticipation, but no amount of reluctance was enough to stop the climb toward another peak. She was pretty sure she blacked out momentarily when it hit her.

    She was also pretty sure she bit him trying to contain the screams of ecstasy clawing their way up her throat.

    She collapsed gratefully, struggling for breath, holding on to consciousness by a threat when he drove into her the final time and shuddered with his own release. He rested a moment, panting for breath and shifted off of her.

    She shivered with the loss of his heat, almost too weak to breathe. Pushing one arm beneath her, he dragged her limp form against his own. “Three,” he whispered with satisfaction against her ear, nipping the lobe lightly. “Shall I try for four next time,
nodia
?”

    “Oh god!”

* * * *

    Sybil didn’t even try to dissuade him from staying the following night. She’d spent another miserable day at the job she was beginning to hate, looking forward to Anka’s nightly visit with a mixture of hope, dread, and uneasiness. He surprised her again. He curled up with her in her bed, caressed her, talked to her for several hours, and then simply fell asleep.

    She didn’t ask him about how the peace talks were coming, not because she had any idea, because she wasn’t actually privy to such information, but because she was afraid he’d either tell her it was progressing well and he’d be leaving soon or that it wasn’t progressing well at all. She didn’t want to know when he would go, didn’t want to think about the heartbreak in store for her when he did. She also didn’t want to consider the possibility that the treaty would fall through and one side or the other would declare war.

    Either way, she was going to be heartbroken. She struggled against accepting that fact for a while and finally realized it was useless to try to lie to herself. She loved him.

    She just didn’t know if the man she thought she had fallen in love with actually existed.

Chapter Ten

    “They’d kick some ass at poker,” Powell muttered under his breath.

    Sybil dragged her gaze from the vid displaying a live feed of the peace talks and glanced at him. She’d been wondering about that herself. She didn’t know if it was because Meachum had planted it in her mind or if she’d actually picked up on something herself, but she’d begun to worry about their apparent ability to simply shut down emotion. Either they were completely unconcerned about the outcome of the peace talks, though, or they were damned good at suppressing and hiding their emotions.

    They were as placid as a herd of cows, regardless of the veiled insults the men and women of the U.N. had dropped from time to time.

    If she hadn’t met the Sumpturians on Venus, hadn’t gotten to know Anka as she had, she would’ve believed they simply didn’t
feel
any emotion. As it was, she’d begun to wonder if everything she’d seen on Venus was a charade devised by Anka and ably performed by the men and women under his command.

    The impression she’d gotten was that they were as similar to humans as if they’d
been
human and were simply people of a different race and culture. At the festival, she’d seen them dance together and interact just as a group of Earth born young people might, laughing, apparently teasing and joking with one another, flirting shyly or outrageously as their personality dictated. Anka had behaved so
human-
like that he’d completely disarmed her.

    And yet there he stood among the Sumpturian dignitaries as stone faced as all the rest, betraying nothing of his thoughts, his demeanor cool but completely relaxed, his gestures the same. There was no sign of tension whatsoever, no stiffness that might betray anger or uneasiness-nothing for them to pick up on.

    They knew they were being watched and analyzed, she realized abruptly.

    Powell was right. They were playing a game of poker with a race of people that knew them as well as they knew themselves, perhaps even better than they knew themselves, could effortlessly and accurately interpret every eye twitch, every gesture, every word without giving an inkling of what they were thinking or how they felt.

    She didn’t know if that sudden insight was more unnerving or the fact that it was clear that Anka indeed had a great deal of influence among his peers. Their political leaders deferred to him as often as not and generally consulted with him on matters that were clearly not even vaguely military in nature. She could understand the former. It had become abundantly clear that he was the commander of their forces, not merely of the base on Venus, or he was at least the highest ranking military officer that was part of the Sumpturian enclave. It was surprising but understandable that they’d want him to make any of the military decisions. As for the rest… either they were unsure of themselves insofar as dealing with Earth people, or the hierarchy of the Sumpturian culture differed drastically from their own.

    The President and the members of the U.N. certainly consulted with military command, but they made it clear that it was only advice they wanted. They would make the final decisions themselves. More accurately, the President of the U.S. called the shots. Global economic disaster had hit everyone, including the U.S., but the U.S. was still on the top of the heap and grimly determined to stay there.

    There were interpreters for the U.N. members. None for the Sumpturians, and they were completely unconcerned about how much it unnerved the Earth enclave that they openly and freely discussed their views in their own language.

    Meachum was getting nastier by the day. If he was any indicator of how the talks were going, and she thought he was, then the Sumpturians were trouncing their opponents hands down. The first week after they’d arrived the Sumpturians had reviewed the terms so carefully drawn up by committee and rejected all of them-not surprisingly since the government was up to its usual tricks, compiling huge tomes of rambling discourse, interspersed with ‘hidden’ propositions that had little or no relation to the subject supposedly under discussion. They’d actually
edited
the agreement, removing all of the neat little extras the politicians had thought up to throw in, hoping the Sumpturians wouldn’t notice.

    The U.N. delegation had been livid, of course, the Sumpturians unmoved. They’d explained with patience that they had terra-formed and claimed both Pluto and Venus and had the right, by Earth laws, of first conquest. They’d also claimed water and mineral rights of the Kuiper belt, mineral rights of Mercury, and the planet Jupiter for fuel exploitation rights and waste disposal.

    No one had apparently anticipated that the treaty would entail a division of so-farunclaimed real estate across the solar system. The U.N. delegation scrambled to catch up, drawing up a second agreement which included proprietary rights of the Earth people to everything else in the solar system, apparently deciding to slug the division out among themselves at a later date. They’d had to send for a group of scientists to help them draw it up to make certain they didn’t leave anything out that might be of some importance in the future.

    In the end they’d claimed the inner asteroid belt-all rights-all the moons, even those circling planets the Sumpturians had claimed, Mars and Earth, of course, and the remaining planets the Sumpturians hadn’t lain claim to. They also wanted waste disposal rights on Jupiter.

    The Sumpturians graciously agreed to disposal rights as long as
they
were allowed to monitor what was disposed of on Jupiter and refused to give up the moons circling any of the planets they’d claimed, pointing out that they had plans to introduce a moon into Venus’ orbit to help to stabilize the planet’s eco-system and also that they intended to monitor Jupiter and would need to have bases there to do so.

    The U.N. fell to haggling over the ‘choice’ outer moons for future colonization or strategic bases of their own at least. By the end of the second week, they’d managed to reach an agreement regarding the disposition of every stone in the solar system. The Sumpturians seemed completely satisfied and, because they were, the Earth people decided they’d been screwed. They weren’t sure how, but they were certain the Sumpturians wouldn’t have been so damned satisfied if they hadn’t come out on top of the battle for the prime real estate. It didn’t matter that they had lain claim to parts of the solar system they hadn’t even had the chance to reach and probably wouldn’t be able to for generations. What mattered was that they didn’t like interlopers. They wanted the opportunity to look it over at their leisure and appropriate or discard it according to worth.

    They entered the third week of talks with an agreement hammered out, which hit a new hitch when the members of the U.N. pointed out that they would expect to be able to build an embassy on Venus once it was possible to do so in order to maintain the treaty. The U.S. wanted their own Embassy and also petitioned for a military base there.

    The two issues were discussed exhaustively but the Sumpturians finally agreed to allow it, both the Embassy and the base, once the President had offered to pay to lease the area set aside as ‘American’ soil. The actual haggling began when the President discovered that they didn’t consider American dollars of any value to them. They would take payment in trade. They pointed out that, since they already had access to pretty much any raw materials they could possibly want and their technology far surpassed any technology on Earth, the Earth people really had nothing to offer but food.

    That was a painful negotiation. Nobody wanted to admit that there were already food shortages on Earth, however, due the climate change. They might as well have. They haggled more furiously about the food than they had over the planets. An agreement was finally reached, however, when the Sumpturians agreed to take part of the payment in DNA samples that would allow them to accelerate the development of flora and fauna on Venus.

    As relieved as Sybil was that they’d managed to hammer out a treaty, particularly when it had seemed for a while that they wouldn’t be able to, she was so depressed over the knowledge that Anka would soon be leaving that it was all she could do to pretend she was pleased about it.

    She hadn’t seen him nearly enough to get her fill, even though she’d managed to convince herself that what she felt wasn’t real. It was more in the nature of a crush, or maybe hero worship like a woman might develop for a man that seemed larger than life, extraordinary- like an entertainer or sports figure or powerful politician. She just needed to work it out of her system and try to break the spell he’d woven over her so that she could see him for what he truly was-probably a completely ordinary individual if not a galactic con artist who’d considered she might be useful to him in some way.

    Well, she supposed she had. She’d done her utmost to influence her own government favorably-not that she thought she’d actually succeeded, but she had doggedly refused to put a negative spin on her interpretations.

    She hadn’t managed to get him out of her head or work him out of her system, though. She didn’t think if she’d spent every single night with him since his arrival that she would’ve been able to, but she hadn’t gotten the chance. His visits seemed deliberately random. He’d come the first night he arrived and for two nights running after that and then she hadn’t seen him for two days-not privately, anyway.

    She was pretty sure that his visits
had
been deliberately random. What she wasn’t sure of was whether it was calculated to keep her off guard or if it was to eliminate the risks of predictability if it had been discovered that he was visiting her. She wanted to think the latter but then she was painfully aware that she was eager to explain away her own doubts.

    In spite of everything, it was a relief to be dismissed. They weren’t even allowed to stay and watch the signing, the most historical signing in the history of the solar system! Sybil was just glad to be able to reach her quarters where she had a little privacy and didn’t have to guard her tongue or her expressions anymore. She simply sat staring at the walls once she had, her mind strangely empty for a while. After a time, thoughts and emotions began to trickle back, however, and she began to wonder if this was to be her very last night, ever, with Anka, or if he wouldn’t come at all and she’d actually already
had
her last night with him the night before last. Would she even get the chance to say good-bye to him?

    She wanted to be alone with him-just one last time-so she could do and say all the completely stupid things she’d been bursting to. She was willing to settle for a public good-bye if that was all she could get, but she had a bad feeling that wasn’t likely. They’d kept the Sumpturians carefully segregated the entire time. It didn’t seem likely they’d lift that ban now.

    She discovered when she’d been summoned to report to her commanding officer that she was wrong. The President had decided to throw a gala to celebrate the agreement-and hopefully to impress them with American wealth and power, she was sure. She and the other liaisons had been invited to attend. Otherwise, it was only the upper crust that would be attending.

    She was instantly sorry that she didn’t have the outfit Anka had given her anymore. She supposed it wouldn’t have been acceptable even if she had, though, and it was just as well she hadn’t been tempted to flout convention and wear it considering the snooty would be in overwhelming attendance.

    Expecting a dismissal at least from her services as a liaison, she discovered that the real reason she’d been summoned was because she hadn’t returned the papers agreeing to serve another tour of duty. Caught off guard, she stammered her way through an explanation for her decision not to sign up for another tour.

    He wasn’t pleased. She could see that, but she thought she could endure his displeasure for the month or so that she had left. She didn’t regret the decision. She was afraid she might eventually, but she didn’t at the moment. She was just sorry that she had to stay that long. She would’ve loved to have been free to brush the moon dust from her boots immediately after the Sumpturians departed and head back to Earth.

    To say nothing had turned out the way she’d hoped and planned would’ve been an understatement, but she realized she also wasn’t sorry that she’d been snatched from the Mars mission and sent to Venus instead. Whatever happened, she couldn’t regret having known Anka. Her memories might be bittersweet, but at least she would have them and what a tale it would be for her children and grandchildren!

    If she ever had any.

    Shrugging her depression off, she headed back to her quarters after she was dismissed, determined to spend the time before the gala primping as she’d never primped before. It was her last chance! She was going to knock Anka’s socks off if it was at all possible!

* * * *

    Sybil had splurged. Once she’d examined her wardrobe and discarded everything in it, she’d left the base and headed to the Fontainebleu, a luxury hotel for wealthy tourists. More specifically, she’d headed to the clothing stores on the first level for the rich and famous where she’d managed to knock such a huge hole in her savings that she was still suffering from sticker shock when she finally reached the party several hours later. She’d gone one step further and, next to the purchase of the dress, it was the most outrageous thing she’d ever done in her life- she’d rented a room for the night and arranged to have a pickup at the conference center.