Sleeping With the Enemy (24 page)

    “My
nodia
is impatient?” he murmured teasingly.

    “Damn it, Anka!” she gasped. “I’m going to come!”

    “Not without me,” he countered, driving completely inside of her finally and then withdrawing almost out.

    She gasped, arching her head as she felt a quivering deep inside of her, waiting for the next pass to set her off. He waited until the spasms eased and then slid inside of her again. Once more the tremors shook her and still her climax eluded her. She began to think he was more intent on punishing her than satisfying her, but even as the thought crossed her mind he settled to thrusting rhythmically. Within a few minutes, he took her to the top of the mountain and carried her into heaven.

    She’d forgotten, she thought dreamily as the convulsions ceased to wrack her, just how wonderful it felt.

    He slowed, waited for her to catch her breath and began all over again. Accustomed to it by then, Sybil didn’t struggle against the rise of heat, knowing he could carry her all the way as he had before.

    “Shall I try for three?” he gasped when she drifted down from her second rapturous high.

    “Oh please,” she gasped drunkenly, “let me die in peace!”

    He uttered a choked laugh, but fell to seeking his own release. She was amazed he found it with her lying beneath him like a dead thing, but she discovered an unexpected bonus to her exhaustion. For once she got to feel what it was like when he came without being so absorbed in her own heat that she could barely take it in.

    And she discovered that it was more rewarding in some ways than climaxing herself. She was just regretful that she’d been too focused on reaching climax that first time herself to feel his release with anything but disappointment.

    Closing her mind to the dark thoughts fluttering just beyond her reach, she cuddled against him when he rolled the two of them onto their sides and sought oblivion. * * * *

    Sybil wasn’t sorry she’d spent the entire night with Anka. She did regret the morning return to her quarters, however. As luck would have it, Lt. Brant was on duty. Bracing herself, she entered the foyer, prepared to make an apology to the man after the scene she’d inadvertently embroiled him in the night before.

    “That worked almost too well. I thought for a little bit there that I was going to have to kick his alien ass.”

    Enlighten crashed over Sybil so abruptly at Brant’s comment that she was too stunned to assimilate it all at once. She’d suspected something was up and it still outraged her to realize that the entire cozy flirtation the night before had been a setup job. There was no denying it also stung her ego, but then she didn’t really give a damn about the bastard! “He would’ve broken you in half,” she responded coldly. “Be glad you didn’t get the chance to find out.”

    Anger glittered in his eyes, but he merely shrugged. “All’s well that ends well-mission accomplished. I don’t suppose you got anything?”

    She felt like punching him. “I should’ve smelled the stench of Meachum on you right off. You’ll have to tell your
lover
I was too busy fucking to chat.”

    Brant caught her arm as she moved to pass him, gripping it tightly enough Sybil had to struggle to keep from flinching. “Oh, I like pussy same as the next man. I just don’t like the idea of taking alien leavings, if you get my drift.”

    “Afraid you couldn’t match up? You should be. You aren’t half the man he is.” Sybil jerked her arm free. “Touch me again and I’ll file charges. I’m still an officer, asshole.”

    “Meachum isn’t going to be happy,” he called after her as she marched past him.

    She barely made it to her private bath before she threw up. She leaned weakly against the wall when her stomach stopped heaving, wondering if it was her pregnancy or just revulsion that had made her puke. She hadn’t been sick before, though. She’d felt twinges of nausea from time to time, but nothing like this.

    Shuddering, she flushed the toilet and moved to the shower to wash the feeling of disgust off. She discovered she couldn’t scour it from herself, though, because it went well beyond skin deep.

    Between throwing up and the hot shower afterward Sybil felt weak almost to the point of fainting. It took all she could do to drag herself to her bunk when she emerged. She sat down, thought about it a moment, and finally just lay back, trying to collect herself.

    She should’ve been better prepared, she told herself angrily. She’d worked for Meachum long enough to know how the man operated. There no was getting around the fact that Brant had taken her almost completely by surprise, though.

    She supposed that was his specialty and the reason he’d been assigned to keep an eye on her.

    She didn’t know what made her angrier-the fact that he’d played her or the fact that he’d used her to play Anka.

    She was angrier on Anka’s behalf, she decided. God only knew what sort of repercussions there might be for him. It made it worse that she was almost certain she finally understood their situation and the motivation behind their willingness to consider a peace treaty.

    A sense of pride flitted through her that Anka had so neatly outwitted them at their game. They’d seriously underestimated him.

    She wanted to keep it that way, but she knew she wasn’t nearly as good at deception or manipulation or even reading people as any of the other players. The only thing that had become clear to her was just how important it was that Meachum never get any clue of the Sumpturians’ situation-not before they had time to grow stronger. Anka had been right not to trust them. One whiff of weakness and the government would’ve been all over them.

    She thought the American people would’ve tried to help if they knew. Despite all of the hardships they’d endured, they still struggled to help their neighbors, anyone in need, and she felt that they would have empathized with the tragedy that had befallen Sumpturians. The government was a whole other breed.

    The problem was, she had no clue of how long it might take and she didn’t have a lot of time that she could devote to trying help them. She still had the baby to consider and she had her doubts that it would be something she could hide many more weeks.

    She shouldn’t have had to concern herself about it. The Embassy was officially American soil now and the Sumpturians had agreed that it was sovereign territory. Unfortunately, she already knew that Anka would do whatever he pleased, regardless of the circumstances or the restrictions. He had to have known even before she’d told him that the base was a restricted area and off limits to the Sumpturians and he’d come to her quarters anyway. He would come to the Embassy if he felt like it. She knew it and, unfortunately, Meachum knew it.

    There probably wasn’t a square inch of her quarters that wasn’t covered by vid and sound devices.

    Lifting an arm, she draped it across her eyes. She’d thought she might be able to escape once she reached Venus. Right up until she’d realized what their situation was, she’d thought she could appeal to Anka for asylum. Now she realized that he couldn’t afford to offer it even if he wanted to.

    And she couldn’t ask it of him.

    She was just going to have to try to beat Meachum at his game if Anka came to her, she realized. She couldn’t even send him away without creating problems. If she refused to cooperate, Meachum would just have her shipped back home for trial and there was no telling what would happen to the baby.

* * * *

    Stripped to the waist to catch whatever cooling breezes happened along, Anka paused to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his face with the dangling sleeve of the top of his uniform, staring at the great machines the Earth people had unloaded that were crawling back and forth across the plain where their base would soon sit. The machines were antiquated to his eyes and they belched stinking fumes into the atmosphere that was still too thick for comfort, but he felt a flicker of envy that they had nothing to compare to them. They could’ve used something like that-something to cut the amount of physical labor necessary and the building time.

    Expelling a heavy breath, he scanned the distant horizon a little further until he spied the tiny habitat that temporarily housed the Embassy-where Sybil’s quarters lay. There was activity there, as well. No doubt they had something grand in mind, he thought wryly. The Earth people did love ostentation.

    For all the faults he knew they had, however, a lack of industry didn’t seem to be one of them. They’d set to work with a will from the time they’d landed. Already there were signs of progress well beyond the leveling efforts.

    His thoughts leapt from the construction to Sybil after a moment. He decided he was too tired at the moment, however, to struggle with the tangle. He had to make a decision about her, and soon, but he’d discovered it was easier said than done, especially since it wasn’t merely a personal decision but one that appeared to be everyone’s business.

    He uttered a humorless snort. He’d been too preoccupied most of the day after the festival to pay much attention to what was going on around him. Myune had jolted him out of it when she’d finally managed to waylay him on his way back to his quarters that evening.

    Anger flickered through him at the memory. The only reason her ass wasn’t sitting in the brig even now was due entirely to his realization that his own behavior had left a lot to be desired. He was well aware that he’d snubbed her publicly, but it certainly hadn’t been his intention, and it was only the fact that more people were interested in his personal life than their own that it had been so widely witnessed.

    It if had been anyone else, very likely no one at all would have noticed that he’d already signaled his interest before he abruptly dismissed her to chase Sybil down.

    Regardless, a flirtation during the dance wasn’t a gods damned commitment-not of any kind!-and he was still her commanding officer. He was willing to allow her to express her anger and her disappointment, but striking him was out of bounds, particularly for what amounted to no more than poor judgment and poor manners.

    It was a sign of the times, he feared. Their culture, what was left of it, was crumbling under the stress. It wasn’t that jealousy and fights didn’t occasionally break out between disappointed suitors or slighted females and the object of their interest, but in the times before that was rare. Mating was the joy of life and everyone worked hard to keep it that way. It was one of the main reasons they didn’t live with their lovers but rather their own blood. They toiled beside their blood kin in the day to day stress and boredom of survival. Familiarity and routine had its place there, where they had no one to impress. They preserved a little mystery and a lot of the excitement of their liaisons by endless courtship.

    The disaster on their home world had severely upset the foundations of their culture along with everything else, wiping out most of the family units and making orphans of most of them with no harbor to anchor in. And, just as they’d been left with great gaps in skills, they’d also found a serious imbalance in mating partners. There was no stigmata attached to women in the military. The custom was that the eldest in every family served and quite often the eldest was a daughter. Regardless, only about a quarter of their entire forces had been female and when they’d lost ninety percent of their forces that imbalance had increased not decreased. It was the same with the scientific community, the second largest segment of survivors and the end result was that one of the most important resources they were deficient in was women.

    That being the case, it made Myune’s behavior all the more incomprehensible to him. She was young and beautiful and had endless choices among the men. Why she’d singled him out when he wasn’t even
young
anymore was beyond him!

    Not that he considered himself old-although he was beginning to feel far older than his solars-but he was five and thirty solars!-nigh old enough to have
fathered
the spoiled, evil tempered bitch! He’d had a daughter barely five solars younger…

    Pain pierced his irritation at the wayward thought but, to his relief, it was a milder pain than he usually felt whenever he inadvertently allowed the past to slip the frantic rein he held on it. The sense of loss followed as it always had but that, too, was more bearable.

    Sucking in a deep breath past the constriction of his chest he turned away from his memories both figuratively and literally to stare at the progress of their current project. The engineers, he saw, were still scratching their heads over the force field. It had been the first order of business when they’d returned from the peace talks-erecting a protective shield. In part it was to protect their future colony from the forces of nature. Mostly, it was to protect their people from the Earth people building a military base within sight of their colony.

    It
still
wasn’t fucking working properly and he’d begun to wonder if it ever would!

    The soil and water purification units, fortunately,
were
doing their job, but they were going to have to scale up production by a hundred percent if they were ever going to reach a point of
not
living on the verge of disaster. In time, nature would take care of purification. Already they’d discovered signs of indigenous plant life. Water had begun to collect on the ground and stay and brought dormant life out to feed, and those simple, primitive organisms were cleansing Venus to make way for more complex life, but they didn’t have the time to spare to wait.