Lords of the Deep (12 page)

He wasn’t the least surprised when his cock rose and wove a path to her, lifting the cloth and heading unerringly for the hole.

She clamped her legs tightly together, forbidding entrance—which also didn’t surprise him but vastly disappointed him.

He lifted his head, uttering a disgruntled sigh. “Not ready yet. At least you didn’t bite me,” he muttered wryly. “It must be love.”

The thought startled him even though he’d thought it with wry amusement to begin with. Unfortunately, he didn’t see anything in her expression to suggest there was any possibility of truth to it.

Not that he could see much of her face.

Slipping an arm around her, he dragged her out of the door. It had been borne in upon him that she not only knew what the lab was, she fully expected to become something in one of Miles’ petri dishes. Without any way to explain that that had never been Miles’ intention, and certainly wasn’t his, he thought it might be best to lull her suspicions before he escorted her there for the scan Miles had planned.

Most of the tension left her as soon as he turned in the opposite direction from Miles’ lab, supporting his suspicion. Holding her close to his side so that he could control her if she decided to bolt without making it quite so obvious that that was his intention, he walked her around the entire structure, pointing out various things and saying the word, listening with half an ear when she identified it in her own language.

Half, because it was both enjoyable and discomfiting to hold her so close, at least partly because of the height difference that made walking together awkward but mostly because he was too aware of every lightest brush of her against his body. He studied the top of her head, wishing he could see her face as she looked around at everything. Occasionally, she would tip her head back to look up at him, usually when he spoke.

He couldn’t tell anything from her expression, but her beautiful blue eyes were wide and seemed to suck him in each time she looked up at him until it was all he could do to keep his mind on what he was supposed to be doing—lulling her so that he could get her into Miles’ lab and onto the scanning bed without having to force her, which carried too much of a risk of hurting her.

He wanted to kiss her again—more. He thought he would’ve been satisfied with that—at least for a time—if he could kiss her, taste her, feel her warm, moist flesh wrapped about
some
part of his anatomy. His cock had other ideas, though. It was determined to test the ‘waters’. She’d been patient thus far, but he didn’t hold out much hope of that continuing if he couldn’t figure out how to tame the damned thing.

He was fairly certain the only thing that was going to do that was appeasing its curiosity and she wasn’t ready to allow that.

It was almost worse when it gave up and lay down. That left him with a hollow feeling in this pit of his stomach in place of the fire that had been gnawing at his belly before. It never stayed down for long, though, gods damn the thing. She’d touch him—somewhere—however lightly and it instantly sprang to attention again.

He hadn’t had so much trouble with it in years—not since he’d reached maturity and finally settled, more or less, into the accepted cycle.

She didn’t like the
terrium
, he discovered, which surprised him since she seemed to enjoy looking out the viewer. She halted abruptly, though, when he escorted her through the door, ducking beneath his arm.

Actually, to be accurate, she sort of slid beneath. Her head didn’t even come up as high as the underside of his arm and she merely turned sideways, slipping from his grip and beneath his arm as he stepped out onto the
terrium
as easily as if he hadn’t been holding her at all.

Making a mental note that she could be slippery
and
fast, he corralled her with both arms before she could completely escape him, swinging her around and placing himself firmly behind her. Reaching around to cup her cheek in one hand and tilting her face toward him to get her attention, he pointed at the terrium, sorting the handful of words in her language he’d managed to figure out—nothing helpful except no. She’d been saying that a lot, he thought wryly. “Angie no …?” He struggled for several moments and finally pointed to his eye.

She glanced toward the enclosure uneasily. Frowning, he studied the view himself, but he couldn’t see anything that would frighten her. Miles’ garden looked like hell—no surprise there—and he’d allowed a good bit of wild growth around the place, but it was still a fairly pleasant view of the valley.

Although ….

He dipped down to see if he could actually see over the brush from her viewpoint and discovered it wasn’t quite as a good a view as he’d thought. Straightening, he looked up. There wasn’t actually a lot to see from that viewpoint either, he decided—a rogue octopus had wandered within view—the wildlife generally kept their distance even this far from the city.

He pointed it out to Angie. She shuddered, backing in to him.

Damien’s fingers tightened on her shoulders the moment her buttocks bumped his groin. His cock leapt, burrowing along the cleft of her ass, following the curve and straining toward the hole it couldn’t quite reach from that angle since she was so much lower than him. She tensed. Damien was dimly aware of it, but he was far more aware of the pleasure radiating through him from the flesh wrapped snugly around his member. Swallowing with an effort, afraid to move, afraid to breathe for fear she’d jerk away from him and slap the hell out of him, he stood perfectly still, kneading her shoulders with his fingers, fighting the surge to scroll his palms down her body and press her more tightly against him.

Mating aggression flashed through him unexpectedly—
completely
unexpectedly because it was directed at her. There wasn’t another okean within sight and, in any case, the urge wasn’t to fight. It was the urge to take … her, then. Images flooded his mind of lifting her onto his flesh, of coiling his arms tightly around her so that she couldn’t escape him and bending her to his will so that his cock could sheathe itself inside of her. Heat scored his insides like a deadly toxin, making him dizzy, crushing the air from his lungs.

He struggled with the images flashing through his mind and finally put her away from him almost forcefully. Striding across the
terrium
from her, he stared out over the valley, willing the images to fade, feeling weak and shaky and vaguely ill when the mating aggression finally began to ease the tension from him. Like the aggression he’d felt toward her, it wasn’t something he was accustomed to dealing with—not in that way. He’d never felt it, at all, except when faced with another okean intent on mounting the same catkin he had his eye on. Unless she intervened by choosing one or the other, they fought until they’d exhausted the aggression—which was often the case even if the catkin chose one of them afterward to bestow her favors upon.

He could not recall ever feeling it
toward
a catkin, though—
ever
.

It was the most unnerving thing he’d ever experienced.

She eyed him warily when he finally realized what he’d done and turned to search for her, having retreated just inside but gone no further. Relief flickered through him. He brushed a shaking over his face, still far more disturbed by the feeling that had come over him than he liked.

Why would she effect him that way?

He was no believer in mystical powers, and he didn’t believe now. Science he understood. Mayhap it was some chemistry between them?

Or, at least affecting him, he mentally amended wryly. She didn’t look to be in any great distress.

Beyond the marks he had left on her thin shoulders when he had gripped her so tightly, he saw uncomfortably.

Mayhap they should consider swaddling her in
more
rather than trying to take what she had, he thought irritably?

At the rate he was going he began to think he might be mad long before the gathering.

* * * *

Miles was hunched over his computer key board when they arrived at the lab. Anticipating that Angie would once again refuse to cross the threshold, Damien scooped her up and carried her in, settling her on the examination table before she had time to do more than draw in a sharp breath. She tried to bail out on the other side, but Miles for once had been completely distracted from his computer. He’d already surged up from his stool and met her as she leapt from the other side. Catching her around the waist, he promptly set her on the table again. Instead of letting go of her, he pointed to the scanner and began explaining the procedure.

“Nothing to it,” he assured her, curling his lips in a quick smile that vanished almost as rapidly as it had appeared. “No hurt! This thing will just pass right over you and you will not feel any pain whatsoever. It records,” he added, picking up the recorder. “Remember this? Talk, talk, talk—then replay? This does the same only with pictures.”

She studied his face and looked at the scanner each time he touched it. “It won’t hurt?”

He nodded.

“Will hurt?”

“No! No hurt!” He said, shaking his head this time. He turned it on and passed his hand back and forth beneath the blue-white beam that appeared on the table. “See? No hurt.”

She shifted close enough to pass her own hand beneath the light. She still didn’t look happy about it, or completely trusting, but she finally yielded to Miles’ determined efforts to get her lie down on the table, still staring uneasily at the scanner at her feet.

Miles frowned. “Ordinarily the patient faces the other way, but I don’t suppose it matters,” he said doubtfully.

“Just turn the gods damn thing on before she decides she doesn’t like the looks of it after all!” Damien snapped testily.

Sending him an irritated glare, Miles set the scanner and stepped back to look at the screen of the monitor.

Damien studied the slow progress of the scanner for a moment and then glanced down at Angie. Her fists were clenched. He touched her hand, stroking it lightly, and finally glanced at her face when she uncurled it. He discovered she’d transferred her attention from the scanner to him. Curling his fingers around hers, he lifted her hand and lightly brushed his lips across the back. “It won’t hurt, Angie. I swear it. I wouldn’t let anything hurt you,
mesoma
.”

“Do you mind?” Miles said testily.

“Actually, I do,” Damien retorted, but he settled Angie’s hand on the table again and released it.

She tensed again when she saw the light had reached her upper thighs, but she didn’t curl her hands again and she slowed her breathing. Miles, who’d been dividing his attention between her and the monitor, studied her for a moment with an arrested expression as she held herself perfectly still. “She knows what this is—maybe not at first.” He met Damien’s gaze.

Damien flicked a look at her face and then met Miles’ gaze again. “This is the very latest technology,” he said slowly.

“Exactly,” Miles said, studying her a little longer before he returned to the monitor.

He looked up at Damien after a moment. “Let us see what she does when it reaches the end.”

“It has to pass back again, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I want to know if she knows that.”

She closed her eyes as the scan reached her chest, swallowing noticeably, but she didn’t move even when the scanner momentarily halted before reversing and beginning the trek backwards. She waited until it had traveled all the way to the beginning before she tipped her head to look at him questioningly.

When he nodded, she sat up and scooted toward the edge of the table nearest Damien. He caught her waist and helped her down, lifting a questioning brow at Miles.

“Why don’t you walk her back to her room and come back?”

Chapter Six

“What’s on your mind?” Damien asked when he’d returned to the lab and settled on the table Angie had vacated only a short while before.

Miles had been studying the read out from the scanner. He jerked his head up a little guiltily when Damien spoke, stared at him blankly a moment, and finally switched off the monitor.

Damien’s eyes narrowed.

“What?”

“You told me to come back?”

Miles blinked rapidly several times. As if the blinking had somehow helped him focus his mind, he nodded abruptly. “She’s no primitive. She comes from a civilization that has technology at least as advanced as ours—maybe more so.”

Damien shrugged. “I’m willing to agree she’s no primitive. I’m not sure how you arrived at this certainty, though—particularly when you seemed pretty damned convinced just a few days ago that she wasn’t much more than animal.”

“Because she wasn’t supposed to be!” Miles said tightly. “Not according the myths, and I had nothing else to go on. The
above
can’t be as desolate as the tales imply, though, if her people have advanced to roughly the same point as we have. And I say, maybe more, because she was afraid of the light. Lasers, Damien! We’ve barely begun to explore the possibilities, but she expected it to hurt and it wasn’t because she didn’t know what a scanner is. We don’t have lasers strong enough to hurt, but Research and Development is working on it—all sorts of applications, for medical use—to operate—cut and seal at the same time and possibly even for military use.”