The Spawning (22 page)

Dragging her astride his thighs without breaking the kiss, he lifted her hips high enough to align his body with hers and pressed her down until she’d engulfed his flesh. She shuddered, feeling the muscles along her channel clenching madly around his engorged member. He broke from her lips to sample her throat as he lifted her slowly upward and slowly settled her again, holding her there for a long moment.

The long, leisurely strokes, the sporadic cadence, threw her off kilter and kept her there. It didn’t prevent a fresh rise of tension. It teased her to distraction until she was begging him to cease tormenting her and give her what she needed. Releasing a ragged, pent up breath, he did, began to move rhythmically until she reached a point where she felt as if she was dangling over the edge of a precipice and then, when she’d almost begun to weep for it, he gave her release.

Gerek practically snatched her from Teron’s lap, dragging her to him and

mounting her almost in the same motion.

Two wild rides and three climaxes later, she lay plastered against the dirt feeling as if she was going to melt into it as she listened vaguely to Adar’s retreating steps, wondering bewilderedly what had just happened. Discovering she wasn’t in any

condition to figure it out, she gave up the effort to hold onto consciousness and dropped into oblivion.

The morning light woke her to the discovery that she was lying spread eagle on the dirt like a carcass. Dew and the airborne sea spray coated her liberally. It took a strenuous effort even to lift her head and look around. She discovered when she had that she wasn’t alone. Littering the compound were the rest of the women, some sitting up and looking around dazedly, some lying as she’d been, like the dead, others having just come around sufficiently to lift their heads weakly and glance around as she was.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 98

The place looked like a war zone—as if a bomb gone off in the middle of the

compound and blown their clothes off and scattered them haphazardly across the yard.

Pushing herself upright, Miranda scanned the area again, not certain what she was looking for until she didn’t find it and realized she was looking for the Hirachi—more specifically Khan, Teron, Gerek, or Adar. They weren’t there, of course. There wasn’t a single Hirachi in sight.

Beginning to feel a sense of hurt worming its way through the wall of confusion, Miranda got to her feet with an effort and headed down the beach toward the water, more because everyone else seemed to be headed that way than because she was really conscious of a decision to do so. When she’d waded in up to the waist, she splashed water over her face to try to drive the fog from her mind. Along about the time she began scrubbing water over herself with her hands, she remembered her gifts from the night before, specifically the soap.

Anxiety instantly assailed her. She’d left the pile when Khan had dragged her away, she realized in dismay. Slogging out of the water instantly, she headed up the beach, trying to ignore the twinges of discomfort every step caused her.

Relief flooded her when she saw her pile as she’d left it. Rushing to it, she dropped to her knees and checked everything, just to be sure, and finally sat down.

“That was a hell of a party,” Deborah muttered wryly, drawing her attention.

Miranda turned to stare at her, still trying to gather her wits. “What happened?”

Deborah blinked at her. “Aside from getting fucked six ways from Sunday, you

mean? Not sure,” she responded when Miranda nodded.

Discovering she was still too exhausted to figure it out, Miranda got up after a few minutes, gathered her gifts, went to retrieve her ugly gown, and then headed to the hut. She’d already collapsed on her grass pallet and was drifting toward sleep when the other women began to stagger in and fall out on theirs.

Hunger and thirst roused her some time later. Groaning, she rolled over and

struggled to sit up. She hadn’t had one sip of anything stronger than water and she still felt as if she had the worst hangover she’d ever had in her life. Her head was pounding and … actually her sex seemed more abused than her head.

It didn’t take a lot of searching to find the answer to that. The moment she began the search heated remembrance washed through her. She’d had sex—with Khan, Teron, Gerek, and Adar.

No wonder she felt like she’d been run over by a tank. She’d been run over by four tanks!

She glanced a little self-consciously around at the other women. They looked as bad as she felt, though, and between that and the vague memory that she’d passed at least two couples engaged in amorous adventure on the way to her own rendezvous she

realized pointing fingers and snickers wasn’t something she had to worry about. She didn’t entirely understand why the ‘gang’ had fucked her silly and left, but she had a bad feeling it was circling in the back of her mind just waiting to pounce.

Deciding to focus on her physical discomfort before she allowed anything

unpleasant in the doors, she turned to study her spoils from the night before.

It was really unfortunate that that particular word popped into her mind because it was followed by some of the thoughts she’d been trying to keep at bay.

Like the fact that she’d paid for her ‘gifts’.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 99

That explained at least part of the vague sense of hurt that had been teasing her since she’d woke the first time. Determinedly pushing it from her mind, she took everything except the knife and the shift and headed toward the water’s edge. When she’d taken care of nature she gathered her belongings and went to the opposite end to bathe.

They were going to have to do something about a more permanent, less repellent sandbox, she thought as she trudged along the beach. She wasn’t comfortable about polluting the water they had to use for bathing—or that the Hirachi used. Then again, they were going to pollute
something
. There was no avoiding it. They didn’t have the nice sewage system they’d had back in civilization to carry everything away tidily so that they didn’t have to think about where it ended up.

Building an outhouse wasn’t a lot more appealing, in fact would probably be

worse in very short order.

Unless they put it outside the walls of the compound? Then again, getting eaten while they were trying to take care of nature just wasn’t the way she wanted to go.

Dismissing it from her mind for the moment, she used the soap to bathe

everything, including her teeth—uck!—and then spread her ugly gown on the ground and settled on it to dry while she very carefully worked her comb through her hair. She was dry by the time she was satisfied she’d gotten all the knots out. Her eyes were burning from the sting, and her arms felt as if they might fall off.

Slumping, she rested for a few minutes before she tackled gathering her hair up with the combs Khan had made for her. After several failed attempts, she finally stood up and bent at the waist, using gravity to help her gather it at the crown of her head and secure it.

The trousers fit surprisingly well. They were a little loose, but not enough to be a problem.

Which meant Gerek had a surprisingly good eye for measurements.

Teron did, too. The boots he’d made for her fit her as nearly perfectly as any shoe she’d ever bought and felt worlds better, at that. Sitting down once more on the gown she’d spread out, she studied the pants and boots.

They were made from leather so soft it felt almost more like cloth than leather and there was nothing sloppy or defective about the craftsmanship that had gone into cutting them or putting them together. She had a vague idea that making animal hide into leather wasn’t something that was quick or easy, so they’d either been working on the gifts for her for weeks, or they’d already had the leather and they’d still worked on fashioning them into something for her to wear for weeks.

For her specifically, she wondered? Did they fit her well enough she could

assume they had been intended for her from the beginning?

Picking up the comb Adar had fashioned for her from some sort of shell, she

supposed, she studied it carefully. It hadn’t snagged her hair. Each tooth was as smooth as a comb manufactured by a machine that poured liquid plastic into molds. In fact, it was a lot better made.

How much time had it taken to make something like this, she wondered? Hours

upon hours, surely?

Just like the combs that held her hair off her shoulders and out of her eyes.

She couldn’t seem to reconcile the hours of dedication that had gone into each THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 100

gift—even the gifts that they’d bartered for represented hours and hours spent collecting
jasumi—
and what she’d woken up to.

Desertion. That was why she felt that tease of unhappiness at the fringes of her mind, the fact that she hadn’t wanted to face.

The gifts said one thing. Their behavior the night before, their
discarding
of her, said something else entirely.

Getting up abruptly, she picked the gown up that she’d been sitting on, shook the dirt from it and pulled it over her head. She hated to top off her beautiful boots and pants with anything so ugly, but she didn’t have anything else to cover herself.

Anyway, she thought, it would protect the nice things from catching too much dirt and stains.

Carefully gathering her dried cake of soap and her comb, she headed back to the hut to put them with her gown and knife, wishing she had some place ‘safe’ to hide them just in case anybody decided to covet them. After a little thought, she tucked the small bundle beneath the grass of her pallet and shoved the knife into the side of her boot as she’d seen the Hirachi do.

The knife, she discovered, fit as comfortably as the pants and the boot, the length and width of the blade as well as the handle seeming as if they’d been custom made to fit her hand and balanced for her size and strength.

She discovered when she left the hut again that some of the women had already

fed the coals from the fire the night before and begun reheating the remains of the meat.

She’d given up worrying about dying of food poisoning. They didn’t have any way to refrigerate, or in fact any way to preserve anything. All they could do was heat the meat again and hope for the best.

They sure as hell couldn’t afford to just throw away whatever they didn’t eat—

not unless it reached a point of being completely inedible—which hadn’t happened yet.

Generally, with the number of people they were feeding, they were lucky if one hunt brought in enough to feed everybody one meal and occasionally two. Moving to the spit when she saw one of the women struggling to turn the carcass by herself, she helped.

It was burned on one side from being left unattended while the fire was still hot enough to cook.

Everyone had been otherwise occupied the night before, however.

She had a knife now, though. She could always hack off the burned part.

There was still no sign of the Hirachi. Wondering if they’d returned to the beach while she and the other women were still sleeping off their wild night, she headed toward the bins to check to see if they’d brought in a load of the
jasumi.

The bins were still empty.

They’d left the night before and they hadn’t come back.

The sense of having been abandoned welled up once more, washing over her

more forcefully. Glancing around to find a place to steep in her misery, Miranda saw a large pile of the roots they’d discovered in the forest that were edible.

Pretty disgusting, but not toxic and they contained some essential nutrients.

They’d found that if they soaked them in sea water for a while before they cooked them, the tubers absorbed some of the sea salt and weren’t quite as disgusting to eat.

Using her gown to form a pocket, she counted out one for each of the women and headed down to the water.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 101

The meat would have to cook a while to lessen the possibility of food poisoning anyway. When she’d washed the roots and piled them so that the lapping waves could wash over them, she squatted down just out of range and stared at the water.

Khan had said the spawning was upon them, she recalled abruptly.

Frowning, she struggled to remember what he’d said to her. She’d been too

wrapped up in the desire pounding through her at the time to pay a lot of attention, but she remembered pretty readily that he’d said something about her choosing him as one of her lovers.

How the hell had that happened when she couldn’t fucking remember doing any

such thing, she thought, suddenly angry?

Not that she hadn’t lusted over all of them, she reminded herself judiciously. She had felt a very definite interest in all four and she’d hoped she had a chance with at least one of them, but she couldn’t remember anything she’d said or done since her arrival that could’ve been construed as having chosen—not by them. She’d thought she’d done a fair job of keeping her interest in them to herself, especially when she could see the more aggressive females among them had earmarked all of four of them. She’d figured they had a far better chance at interesting the men than she did—which was why she’d not only tried to keep her interest to herself, she’d tried hard to keep that interest from growing into anything that might end up hurting her.

Almost certainly would since watching any of the four with any of the other

women would have made her unhappy at the very least.

But she’d chosen—all four of them?

And they’d just accepted that?

Obviously, they’d accepted that, she thought irritably. There was no way any of them could’ve failed to know. Not only had they had a compound wide orgy going on, but there was no real privacy for anybody.

And besides that, they’d fucking been waiting in line!

Gerek had dragged her off of Teron, for gods sake!

It took her a while to recall what Khan had said afterward, because she’d still been reeling in the aftermath and in no condition to think.