Before Raine could speak, Kit was bending over him, Raine’s cock in his mouth again, and one finger slipping into Raine’s ass. The invasion gave him a second of pain, but he quickly got over it and writhed against the digit.
“More…”
Two fingers now and Kit found his prostate. Raine yelled so loud they must have heard him on the bridge, and he didn’t care, because there was no bridge, no ship, nothing but this bed and him and Kit.
“Fuck me!” The words surprised him, the crudeness and the request itself. Not something he asked for often. But he didn’t often have a man in his bed he desired as much as he desired Kit. Even as he spoke, he came, and anything Kit might have said was silenced by Raine’s climax. Kit raised his head a moment later, panting, grinning, face red and sweating and savagely beautiful in his excitement.
“Fuck me,” Raine said again. Wanted Kit in him, utterly joined to him. Kit’s eyes widened.
“Oh, you want me to actually fuck you. I thought you were just, ah, expressing pleasure. You know like ‘fuck me, that was good’?”
“Shut up and fuck me, you damn fool.”
Kit giggled, somewhat disconcertingly. “I warn you, I can fuck
and
talk at the same time.”
“As long as you do the first, I can take the second.”
“I’ll bet.” He shuffled around on the bed, wincing from undoubtedly cramped muscles, rummaged in the same drawer where he’d found the lube, and came out with a pack of condoms. “Hmm,” he said, looking at Raine as he put a condom on. “I think it’s best if you turn over.”
Raine did. Best position for them in the cramped space. Being completely, bonelessly, wiped out from his orgasm would make anything more than lying sprawled impossible anyway.
His cock, still hard, rubbed against the bedsheets and jerked when Kit positioned himself and thrust in. Quite rough in his excitement, close to coming already. He buried it to the hilt, and Raine grunted. Been a while.
“Okay?” Kit said, a tiny edge of concern in his voice.
“Yes! Yes, it’s…” He moved himself until he found a good position, and the head of Kit’s cock grazed his prostate. “Oh God!”
Kit wasted no words—a miracle. He leaned over, his legs nudging Raine’s farther apart, his hands planted either side of Raine’s body, and thrust strongly. Those long, lean legs had more strength than Raine might have expected—Kit’s thrusts were powerful and deep. He quickly set a fast rhythm, and despite his earlier assertion about being able to talk and fuck at the same time, he didn’t say a thing. When Raine looked back over his shoulder, he saw Kit’s eyes were screwed closed, sweat was shining on his face, and his hair hung limp and bedraggled. But still beautiful. Right at this moment, Raine would give him anything. He didn’t care if this was all a plot to get Raine on his side to help him. He’d give Kit the launch codes for the captain’s yacht as long as he just didn’t stop.
He had to stop in the end, but a spectacular stop, after building to a frenzied rhythm, breath coming in gasps. Raine writhed under him, the pounding on his prostate more than he could stand without crying out in a mix of pleasure and pain. Too sensitive, too close, too intense. Never like this before. Never like this.
“Kit!”
The word and the orgasm were one, his mind wiped out to a blank, blind thing for he couldn’t tell how long. Then awareness of reality returned. Kit was lying over Raine’s back, panting, limbs sprawled around him. The weight of him felt good, but the heat was too much even for Raine. He needed some air on his skin and stirred.
“Gotta move,” he said. Kit didn’t protest. He rolled off Raine—fortunately toward the wall, not the open side of the bunk—and Raine turned onto his side. With so little room, they were still crammed close, sweaty and overheated skin pressed together, but there was a cooling draft on Raine’s back at least. He reached out to stroke Kit’s hair, no longer silky but coarse and heavy with sweat.
“That’s nice,” Kit sighed, and Raine smiled to hear the pleasure in his voice. A lazy, blurred edge to it, like a half-asleep cat. They lay quietly for a few minutes, breathing slowing. Kit’s eyes were closed, but Raine kept his open, looking down at the man in his arms and thinking impossible things.
“Didn’t think you’d want that,” Kit said after a while, opening his eyes. “Guys like you never want me to top them.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. Except me back here this afternoon, when you can fuck
my
brains out.”
Raine sighed. This afternoon, because Kit would have to go back to work soon. The thought splashed cold water down Raine’s spine. This might feel good, but that didn’t make it right. He slipped out of Kit’s embrace and off the bunk.
“You can have the shower first, since you need to get out of here sooner.”
Kit leaned up on his elbows, some disappointment in his face. But he rallied and put on his cocky grin again. “What, we’re not going to share?”
“Hah, you’ve never seen the showers in the cabins have you?” Had he? What about Parker’s? Kit didn’t correct him.
“They’re smaller than the ones in the bunk rooms?”
“Much smaller. Trade-off for the extra privacy, I suppose.” He put on his bathrobe. “Go on, I can wait. There are towels in there.”
Kit looked at him oddly but got off the bed and walked into the tiny bathroom area. The shower started running. Raine smiled, letting himself picture Kit in there, knowing he could walk in and see it if he wanted. But it was no exaggeration to say the showers were not big enough for two. They were barely big enough for one. A muffled curse made him guess Kit had banged an elbow against the wall.
The shower shut off a few minutes later, and Kit emerged with one towel around his waist and blotting his hair dry with another.
“If I didn’t have claustrophobia before, I do now.”
Raine thought of Kit’s tiny nest they’d discovered after they captured him the first time and of the crate he’d tried to escape from the ship in. “You don’t seem like a man prone to claustrophobia. Okay, my turn.”
Kit frowned as Raine swept past him.
“You got anything to drink around here?”
“There.” Raine pointed at the door of the cooler built into the wall. “Help yourself.” Then he closed the door behind him. When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Kit was lounging on the bed, naked except for a towel draped on his shoulders to keep his wet hair off his skin. He was drinking a cold soda and eating chips.
“Done already?” Kit asked. “On the double, eh?”
“No need to linger or waste water.” He cinched the belt of his bathrobe around himself. The room felt extremely chilly to him. How could Kit stand to lie there naked? “Um, do you want a robe or a shirt or something?”
“I’m fine. Want some chips?”
“The chips weren’t in the fridge,” Raine observed, sitting down beside him.
“Call me a thief and I’ll act like one.”
A fair point. Raine took a couple of chips.
“Look, Kit. This was”—
Incredible? Bone-melting? Mind-bending
?—“great. But you know it can’t go on.”
He expected an argument, but Kit just looked back at him for a moment and took a sip of soda. “Okay.”
“It’s wrong. You must be able to see the logic. Maybe after the voyage is over, once things are sorted out for you…”
“Fine. Absolutely.”
The airy unconcern in his voice started to bother Raine. He’d expected an argument. Why was Kit so happy not to get to sleep with Raine anymore? Raine wasn’t happy about it.
Kit finished his soda and climbed off the bed. The fresh scent of soap on his skin as he passed made Raine’s cock stir slightly. Kit started to gather up his clothes and put them on.
“Whatever you want, Raine. We’ll totally stop having sex.” He pulled up his baggy pants and tied the draw cord. “I won’t offer to suck your cock again.” He fiddled with the shirt, turning it the right way out. “You don’t have to fuck me.” He pulled the shirt on over his head and freed his hair from the neck. “I won’t fuck you, and you won’t suck me.” He found his shoes and slipped them onto bare feet. “There’ll be absolutely no kissing, handjobs, frottage, or any other form of sexual activity between us.”
Raine shifted uncomfortably because of the effect of the images evoked by Kit’s words, but Kit took no apparent notice. He tied the belt of his apron around his hips, giving himself back the slender but angular and masculine shape the baggy clothes disguised.
“In short, you’ll never again see me naked. You must be terribly relieved. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go work the lunch shift. I believe we’re serving unicorn steaks with a side of ambrosia.”
The door slid closed behind him, leaving Raine staring. So… Kit might not be entirely convinced Raine meant what he said.
* * *
Kit called Raine’s bluff. He knew Raine still wanted him, but if he kept making the first move, Raine would keep on saying that they shouldn’t do it again after
this
time, and Kit would once again be painted as the one who’d tempted him. So he took Raine’s insistence they couldn’t do it again at face value and let him stew. Let him get to the point where Kit would come into Raine’s office and find him lying naked on the desk with a bow tied around his cock.
For two days, Raine did the check-in meetings, and Kit was such a good boy during them. He stood at something resembling attention, pretending he didn’t notice Raine was flushed, shifting in his chair, and hoarse. Pretending he didn’t notice Raine’s eyes were not only undressing him, they were ripping his clothes off and screwing him silly on the floor of the office.
Or sometimes they were pleading with Kit to screw Raine silly. Interesting that. A big guy, in authority, but that day in his cabin, he’d let Kit take the lead. And most guys like him didn’t bottom, in Kit’s experience. They thought it made them less macho or something. Dicks. So…interesting.
But he still wouldn’t make the first move.
On the third day after they’d had sex in Raine’s cabin, Raine finished the check-in and dismissed him. Kit turned to march out as smartly as any soldier when he heard the whisper.
“Kit.”
Raine had started calling him “Miller” again in the office, so the name caught Kit’s attention.
“Don’t turn around.”
Kit didn’t. He stood by the open door. Outside, the security team went about their business. None of them could hear Raine.
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Neither could Kit, but he wouldn’t admit it.
“Will you come to my cabin tonight? After you finish dinner cleanup? I’ll be off duty by then.”
“Twenty-two thirty,” Kit said, not looking back at him so Raine couldn’t see his huge grin. “And turn the heat down.”
Chapter Nine
It had become a routine in the ten days since, Kit coming to Raine’s cabin straight after dinner cleanup finished. Raine insisted Kit went back to the bunk room afterward, though, as if he thought they could keep it secret. Kit could have told him that wasn’t happening.
“Won’t be seeing the chief tonight, then?” Gracie said as she and Kit manhandled a supplies cart into the stores container.
“He said he’ll be back too late,” Kit said with a grimace. Raine was going with the captain and other senior officers for a dinner aboard the escort’s flagship. The
Dawn
had arrived at the rendezvous to join up with the convoy, and officers from the escort ships had already arrived aboard for an inspection visit. “Anyway, he’s got his panties in a wad about being ready for them. I think I’d rather stay away from him today. He’d be kind of tiring.”
“Going by how worn-out you look these days, I’d say he’s always rather tiring.” She grinned, consulted the list, and led him along an aisle. “Come on, let’s grab the crappy rubbish we’ll be eating tonight while your boyfriend and his la-di-da officer friends are getting the silver-service treatment.”
“Boyfriend?” Kit laughed. “We’re not exactly about to get engaged, you know. He hasn’t even told me his first name.”
“What? Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He got this
thing
about telling me back before we were doing it, and I sort of laid out a challenge, and he still hasn’t told me.”
“He probably forgot he hasn’t,” she said, running a scanner over some boxes before loading them onto the cart.
“Forgot? No way. Raine thinks about me all day and every day, obsessing over the minutiae of our relationship.”
She giggled at his mock-aggrieved tone. “I know his first name. It’s—”
“Don’t tell me. I know I could find it out in a second in the ship’s computer or by asking someone, but I want
him
to tell me. And no, I don’t believe he thinks about it all day long, but he’s aware he hasn’t told me yet; I’m sure of it. So he’s either testing me, or he’s got some kind of mental block about it.”
“That would be messed up either way.”
“Undoubtedly. I just haven’t decided what kind of messed up he is yet.”
“You could pop over and ask him.” She nodded back the way they’d come. “There he is.”
Kit looked around at the sound of voices, and saw a party of people heading down the same aisle as them.
“Uh oh, look busy,” Gracie said, bending over her list.
The party consisted of Captain Dryden, Raine, Warner, the first mate, and a man Kit didn’t know, wearing Earth military uniform with a lot of silver braid on it.
“Commodore Wright,” Gracie whispered. “He commands the escort.”
As the group approached, Kit heard the first mate explaining some stuff about cargos to Wright. Dryden walked on the man’s other side, her tense expression a contrast to her usual mildly amused one. Raine walked beside her. He caught Kit’s eye as they approached but quickly looked away again. This may not be the time for a touch of visual seduction, Kit thought. It would be cruel to flash Raine a look guaranteed to give him an erection while in such august company. Tempting, though…
“Good morning.”
The deep voice startled Kit away from looking at Raine to look instead at Wright, a dark-skinned man in his late forties. He had some iron gray in his hair, but his face retained the good looks of his youth. He projected an air of authority, which radiated through even this huge space. The kind of presence Kit associated with chief executives and chairmen of the board.