“It’s all right if you need to cry,” he murmured, stroking a strand of hair out of my eyes. “I still get choked up about my dad too. I think it’s better…better to let it out.”
His kind, gentle words seemed to break a floodgate inside me. I leaned my head against my new big brother’s broad shoulder and cried like my heart would break—like it was already broken.
Josh pulled me close, and I pressed my hot cheeks to the hard, warm planes of his chest. He smelled so good—like some indefinable masculine spice. The scent invaded my senses as I cuddled closer, drawing comfort from his strength and warmth. I didn’t know if it was just basic human biology or something special about Josh, but his scent made me feel better on a very primal level. I felt safe…protected. And I knew that even though I had lost my mother, I hadn’t lost my future. Josh was going to watch over me and protect me and somehow everything was going to be all right.
* * * *
After that, Josh took care of me, even though he was barely an adult himself. He was as loving and protective an older brother as could be, even if we weren’t related by blood. In fact, sometimes he was
too
protective—which was how I was able to reach the ripe old age of twenty-two and still remain a virgin.
Some of the blame for my virginal state could be laid on the fact that after that first year together, Josh and I traveled a lot—taking most of our courses by correspondence so we could spend time in the field. It’s hard to put down roots and make new relationships when you’re zipping around from planet to planet all the time. But a good deal of it was the fact that whenever a man showed the least bit of interest in me, my normally sweet and mild-tempered stepbrother got angry and mean.
Seeing this transformation from nice guy to caveman scared even the most determined suitors off. It didn’t hurt that Josh was a big guy—six feet five and very muscular with black hair and forbidding dark-blue eyes. He looked more like a bouncer at a club than a xenobotanist.
I didn’t really mind my lack of social life, though—I was studying to become a xenobiologist as I had always wanted to. In the meantime, I acted as Josh’s research assistant out in the field—and in our line of work, the entire galaxy was our field.
Spending most of our time in a small, two-man spacehopper going from planet to planet to study new plants and animals was fascinating. But as I said before, it limited our opportunities for outside relationships. It’s probably fair to say that we were close—much closer than most stepsiblings ever get. But there was never anything more than normal brother/sister affection between us.
I complained about it to Josh but to be honest, I really liked our lifestyle. We were free to do whatever we wanted and go wherever we wanted at any time. Neither of us punched a time clock, and we had each other for company if we ever got lonely. Sometimes we stopped in spaceports just for some outside contact—and so Josh could occasionally get laid, although I never got the same privilege. The people we met were always surprised to hear we were brother and sister until we explained we were only stepsiblings. Probably because with my petite figure and long silvery-blonde hair, I looked the exact opposite of my stepbrother.
I used to hate being so tiny and delicate—it’s not an asset in space, believe me. But then, after Josh and I had been together almost five years, my body
finally
caught up with my mind. Shortly after my twenty-second birthday, we spent an extended vacation on Earth. Humanity’s home planet was largely decimated, but there were a few research facilities left high in the mountains. It was there, while we were preparing for our next mission and long after an Earth-standard woman would have stopped growing, that I finally got some curves.
If I say so myself, they were really
nice
curves, which was only fair—I had been waiting long enough for them. Where once my figure had been flat and boyish, now I was an overflowing D cup with full hips and a rounded ass to match. My face filled out a little too, losing its waifish, angular look and becoming more mature and womanly. After years of being mistaken for a little kid, I
finally
looked my age.
I was thrilled with my new body—it was so nice to appear like the woman I had been inside for ages. People spoke to me like I was an adult now, instead of dismissing me as a child. I got respect and more than that—I got attention and admiration. After years of being ignored by everyone but Josh, I found my newfound power to fascinate intoxicating. I
loved
the way men looked at me when we went out in public. Not that they got much past looking before Josh went into angry-overprotective-big-brother mode, but still…it was nice.
But there was one small matter that worried me about my new appearance—I was anxious that it might make things awkward between me and Josh. And yes, I did catch him staring at me sometimes and then when he saw me, he’d always look quickly away. But he never said anything directly about my changing proportions, and he was the same sweet guy who could always make me laugh and gave me good advice. He was the one person more important to me than anyone in the universe. So our relationship stayed pretty much the same…until our trip to Svortza 6 where everything changed forever.
Chapter Two
My old grav-top was a little snug in the bust, and I pulled at it distractedly. But honestly, my new curves were the last thing on my mind as I stared at the viewscreen where another, much larger curve was spinning slowly in space. Our little spacehopper was orbiting Svortza 6, a planet with a wealth of exotic alien flora and fauna to explore and catalog. What we were mostly interested in, however, was a certain plant the natives called the
lish k’lit—
or truth plant. Supposedly it had properties that forced people to state or act on their deepest intentions and emotions—something I found hard to believe but interesting nonetheless.
We hoped the plant would have valuable medicinal properties, and Josh had been promised a huge sum by the Pharm-Co Company back on Earth if he brought back samples. The money they were offering was enough to buy us a whole new hopper—which I was beginning to think was a good idea. Not because ours was broken or in need of repair, but because lately it had begun to seem too cramped for the two of us to be in such close proximity. Or at least, Josh seemed to think so.
I nibbled my bottom lip and stared at the lush green globe swinging beneath us as I contemplated the recent change in my big brother on this latest trip. In the past, Josh had always been very loving and warm. He’d hug me when I felt sad and sometimes even held me on his lap when we cuddled up at night to watch our favorite shows on the com-link. He often kissed my cheek and called me “sweetheart” and other endearments as well as shortening my given name of Cassandra to “Cassie” when he was feeling particularly sweet.
There was nothing sexual about our interaction—Josh had never, ever done anything inappropriate with me. He was an honorable man, and I had the feeling he would rather cut off his right arm than hurt me like that. Despite the fact that we had no real blood ties between us, he considered himself my big brother, my protector. And besides, he had always seen me as a little girl who needed protection and care—not as a woman with any kind of sexual nature. So he was kind and affectionate to a fault.
But not on this latest trip. Since we entered the cramped confines of our spacehopper the month before for our mission to Svortza 6, he had become withdrawn…aloof. And he almost always seemed to be ill at ease whenever I was around.
It’s my fault, I told myself miserably, moving the controls to adjust our orbit somewhat. He’s uncomfortable because of what happened in the shower last month. I know he is.
In the beginning of what I had come to think of as “the truth-plant mission,” Josh and I had had an…well, an
incident
for lack of a better word. It was disturbing for both of us, and we had barely left Earth orbit when it happened.
The incident had happened while we were taking our nightly shower together. I know it sounds strange, but it wasn’t like we showered together for any kind of kinky, weird reasons—it was the simple need to conserve water. Even with the ship’s recycler going at 100 percent, H2O was still a rare and precious commodity in deep space, and we couldn’t afford to waste a drop. The nightly shower was a routine for us—something we had done a thousand times before on our different space missions and nothing ever happened between us. We just kept our backs to each other while we did a quick soap and rinse and then got ready for bed.
This was the first time we had showered together following the changes to my body, however. During our long layover on Earth, we had each our own room, and there was no need for communal showers. In fact, it was probably the normal gravity on humanity’s home planet that finally jumpstarted my late development. Anyway, by the time we got back on board
The She-Creature
, our affectionate name for the little spacehopper we traveled in, I was a whole new woman so to speak.
Of course Josh had noticed my new curves—I knew he had—there was no way he could miss them. But we had been able to keep our distance on Earth, so it wasn’t really shoved in his face. Now there was no way he could avoid looking—not in such tight quarters.
* * * *
It was awkward but still, when Josh and I squeezed into the tiny bathroom together, I tried to act like nothing had changed. I adjusted the water temperature and hummed a nervous little tune under my breath as I got it just right.
But I found I couldn’t meet his eyes when I dropped my towel.
Though I wasn’t looking at him, I could definitely still feel Josh studying at me. A glance at his face showed that his eyes were wide with shock as he took in my ripe breasts with their puffy pink nipples and the curly blonde thatch between my thighs. Another glance, farther down, showed something even more disturbing—Josh had a hard-on.
In all the years we had been showering together, my stepbrother’s body had never reacted to mine. But now it was—and in a big way. My eyes widened as I took in the length and girth of his cock. It was nine inches at least and so thick around I was sure I wouldn’t be able to circle it with my fingers even if I tried. Of course, I would never try such a thing with my own stepbrother. Just the thought of it made me blush.
Josh seemed to be blushing too, though he turned away from me so quickly it was hard to tell. Normally we laughed and joked in the shower, splashing each other and having fun. But this time there was a strained silence between us as we stepped into the tiny plasti-glass booth. Without talking about it, both of us were careful to keep our backs to each other and neither of us said a word as we washed.
It was awkward, but it still might have gone all right if not for the reeter bug.
Reeters are pests that like to infest outgoing spaceships, and they’re uniquely adapted to a zero-g, freezing environment—in other words, space. They stick flat to the side of a spaceship, just waiting for an opportunity to get onboard. The minute somebody pops an airlock to make repairs, they invite themselves inside. Since they can hold their breath indefinitely and extreme temperatures and poisons don’t bother them, there’s almost no way to kill them except to squash them dead.
But none of that tells you how they look. Reeters are descendants of roaches from Earth. They’re long and flat with a shiny purple-black shell and long, twitchy antennae. When they skitter around, they make a horrible chitinous clicking sound that makes my blood run cold every time I hear it. In size they’re about as big as my palm, and I flat-out
hate
them.
We had been doing pretty good with the reeters this trip—I’d only seen two, and Josh had killed both of them right away. He liked to tease me that my fear of the ugly bugs was girly, but this was one time when I didn’t care if I looked weak. I might have been training to be a xenobiologist but not all forms of life held the same fascination, as far as I was concerned.
I could deal with deadly animals in all shapes and sizes from the massive hairy man-eating
angorths
of the Andromeda Galaxy to the
blidgers
that live in the Crab Nebula and have poison so toxic a single drop will eat through a metric ton of flesh. But if a life-form was little and skittery with a lot of legs and might crawl on me or get caught in my hair, forget it—it had to die.
So there I was, in the shower, trying hard to ignore the sudden awkwardness between myself and my stepbrother, when suddenly I heard the telltale
click-click-click
on the tiles above me. Despite the hot water, fear made my whole body go cold. I looked up and sure enough, there was the biggest reeter I had ever seen. Forget the size of my palm—this one was the size of my
head
. It was sitting there on the wall, looking down at me with its antennae waving as though wondering which part of my naked flesh it wanted to crawl on first.
I did what I always do when I see a reeter—I shrieked and tried to get away. I can’t help it—it’s an instinctive gut reaction. Girly or not, nothing brings out my flight-or-fight response like a great big nasty bug.
At that point, my only thought was to get away from the ugly thing. And since Josh was blocking the entrance to the shower, I tried to go around him on the far side, near the wall. My sudden actions took my stepbrother by surprise and he turned, trying to find out what was going on. The result was that we wound up completely naked in each other’s arms with my breasts pressed to his muscular chest and his still-hard cock branding my lower belly.
“What the hell?” Josh bellowed as I basically climbed him like a tree.
“Reeter!” I gasped, clutching at his shoulders and wrapping my legs around his hips. “There’s a—” I broke off as something more important than the pesky space bug got my attention.
Due to my panicked escape attempt, my big brother and I were pressed together in the most intimate way imaginable, and I do mean
intimate
. Despite the many times we’d shared the shower, there had never been this much contact between us before. My nipples rubbed against the hard planes of his chest, but worse than that was what was happening down below.