The Lawgivers: Gabriel (10 page)

He hadn’t been aroused.

Well, not really. Not because of her,
at any rate.

Granted, he’d felt a twinge or two in
her presence but that was primarily because it had been fucking
months since he’d been within sniffing distance of an udai woman!
It was a natural reaction of a healthy male to an uncomfortably
long abstinence. It had nothing to do with Lexa!

He considered that for some moments and
recalled the possibility that it was her imagination and began to
wonder why.

Because she was attracted to
him?

His pulse quickened at that thought. He
didn’t have to examine that reaction too closely because arousal
followed almost instantaneously. He struggled to tamp it by
summoning an image of her for his mind’s eye, but that only had the
surprising and unwelcome effect of arousing him more.

Incomprehensible and
unwelcome!

He was hornier than he’d
thought.

And he was imagining things
besides.

He had seen awe in her eyes, but it was
fearful—and that was understandable. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he
was dangerous. He was far more powerful than a human male and he
held her life in his hands.

Upon further consideration, he realized
that it was pretty hard to ignore the fact that she actually seemed
far more leery and suspicious than afraid. If she was truly
frightened of him, would she have argued with him at every turn?
Would she snap at him as if she considered herself an
equal?

He had mixed feelings about that, he
discovered. He’d long been in the habit of considering humans
inferior to the udai.

In almost every way that he could see,
they were—certainly physically. They had no wings for one thing. He
had not encountered one male that seemed even close to him in
strength. Beyond the physical inferiority, they didn’t make
anything that the udai had been able to discover—beyond more just
like them. They were scavengers. And they lived and behaved like
animals—worse. Most animals didn’t prey upon their own kind and
they didn’t foul their dens.

How was it, then, that Lexa seemed to
see herself as an equal? Considering everything that she had told
him about her life, in seemed almost inconceivable that she would
even consider herself the equal of a male of her own
kind.

But she did.

She had truly believed she had a chance
of exerting her claim to that spot, he realized. If he hadn’t
intervened, she would’ve challenged the man … and probably gotten
pulverized.

It rankled to admit, even to himself,
that he might have underestimated the humans because of his
arrogance … particularly when it had never occurred to him that he
was arrogant.

Chapter Six

It was strange, Lexa reflected, how the
mind worked.

Only a few days earlier, she’d been
focused on nothing but surviving—thought about little beyond how
uncomfortable she was and how low her supplies were getting. The
search for food, water, and shelter of some sort was all that had
run through her mind for years—except the horrible memories and she
did her utmost to blot those out. It was preferable to focus on her
needs.

Oddly, those ugly memories of her time
with Ralph didn’t seem to stem the flow of imaginings that had been
going through her mind since the incident the first day on the
trail.

Even the possibility that Gabriel might
have interest in claiming her as his woman should have revolted
every feeling because she’d sworn never to allow herself to fall
into the hands of another man, to allow herself to become a slave
to any man’s whim, if she had to fight to the death. And those
feelings had not been lessened by the fact that he wasn’t a man at
all, wasn’t human. She’d been angry even though she didn’t believe
that he’d meant to give the villagers the impression that he was
claiming her. She’d also been unnerved by the looks the villagers
had given her and worried that her situation might get ugly in a
hurry if the man Gabriel had disciplined, or any of the others,
decided to blame her for the incident or just to despise her for
the fact that she appeared to have been claimed by one of the
angel-demons and retaliate against her.

And yet, it almost seemed that from the
moment the idea had popped into her mind it had taken hold and
grown in a direction it shouldn’t have. She found herself wondering
what it would be like to be his woman, found herself studying him
when she was convinced he wouldn’t notice. From there it hadn’t
been much of a leap to imagining what it would be like to have him
rutting her.

Well, it hadn’t been difficult
imagining him fucking, at any rate. She knew the mechanics of
copulation all too well so it wasn’t difficult to imagine in that
sense but it was hard to imagine herself in that picture.
Especially given the contempt he so clearly had for all humans. It
took an effort to do that, though why she tried she didn’t know and
beyond that, she didn’t know why it was that the images didn’t
repulse her when she did manage it.

Far from it.

He was a male. From what she could see,
angel or not, he didn’t look that much different from any other
male she’d ever run across—except for the wings, of
course.

And the fact that he wasn’t nasty,
stinky, and didn’t do any of the disgusting things she’d seen so
many men do.

And his form was actually
pleasing.

She liked his face. She didn’t know why
it appealed to her, but there was no getting around the fact that
it gave her pleasure to look at it. It made her belly feel oddly
weightless when she looked at him and imagined him rutting her—as
if she’d just fallen off a cliff.

Or completely lost her mind!

She did not like that! She knew what it
was like—anywhere from horrible and painful to just plain
disgusting, but never anything she had ever wanted to do. Why would
she imagine that it would be different if he did that to
her?

She thought part of it might have been
because of what he’d said the night he captured her—that he never
had sex with a woman who didn’t want him to and that there were
plenty of willing women.

That statement made her wonder if the
angel women were different, if they actually liked it—because she
didn’t believe she was alone in thinking that human women had no
liking of being rutted. She hadn’t seen many women who looked to be
pleased about belonging to some man. Mostly they just looked
hollow-eyed, hopeless, and miserable, although she’d also seen
plenty that she thought looked as she once had—their eyes filled
with desperation or horror.

Despite her best efforts to dismiss the
entire idea from her mind, though, she found herself wondering if
there was something about the way he did it that made the fucking
something they wanted.

She told herself it was far more likely
that it was pure male arrogance. Ralph had certainly seemed
convinced that she looked forward to their coupling with
anticipation rather than dread. One of the things she’d hated the
worst about it was hearing his ragged voice in her ear demanding
for her to tell him how much she was enjoying it. It was salt in
the wounds he regularly inflicted and it outraged her, eventually
drove her to stupidity and incautiousness.

“You like that? You love feeling my
dick pounding into your tight little pussy, don’t you,
bitch?”

It was a litany she’d heard many times
since he’d captured her and yet when it reached the point where she
couldn’t stand it anymore without telling him exactly how she felt
about it, he taught her to regret her honesty.

“I hate it. I feel like puking every
time you touch me. I’d cut it off and shove it up your ass if I
could.”

That brutal honesty had cost her far
more than the tiny rebellion of simply saying nothing at all and
allowing him his illusions. Refusing to give him the answer he so
obviously wanted only resulted in frantic, punishing thrusts that
hurt but seemed to make him cum faster.

That time, as soon as he caught his
breath, he’d beat her so badly she’d lost the baby she was
carrying, but she’d learned her lesson. She kept her mouth shut
after that.

For a while, those memories banished
her fascination with the angel and the curiosity to know if being
fucked by Gabriel would somehow be so completely different from her
experiences before that she would be willing to allow him to do it
to her whenever he wanted to. By the next day, though, she was back
to wondering.

Her preoccupation nearly cost her her
life.

* * * *

“How many in the group you’re
bringing?”

“A hundred.”

Maya sent Gah-re-al a startled look.
“So many? That’s a large group to process. It’ll be hard to give
them individual attention.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m going to
have to see if I can find more volunteers.”

Gah-re-al looked around the room Maya
called her office for a place to perch and finally simply leaned
against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. Despite her
dubbing the room as an office, it was like everything about
Maya—expensively furnished and meticulous groomed. He wouldn’t have
felt comfortable in the room if he wasn’t covered in trail dust.
“It’s a big village. I quartered them.”

Maya didn’t turn around that time. She
was focused on her computer, but she snickered. “I hope
not!”

Gah-re-al smiled faintly in response to
her ‘little joke’, but the laugh had been derisive and it puzzled
him. She’d been one of the most vocal of what he referred to as
‘bleeding hearts’ in the movement to rehabilitate the natives and
the callousness of her joke surprised him, especially considering
how many heated debates the two of them had had over his views. He
couldn’t see her expression, though. She was focused on her
computer screen, carefully marking the location of the village he’d
found. Maybe he’d just imagined there was more amusement at the
thought than there was? Or she was amused because his inferior
education was showing? She did have a way of pointing out, very
subtly, that she hailed from the ‘upper crust’ and had been born on
the home world where everything, naturally, was far superior to the
colonies where he’d been raised in an orphan facility. “Brought a
quarter of them,” he amended.

“The Lawgivers have all been finding
larger villages the further west they go,” she said musingly.
“Looks like our projection on the numbers might have been off.” She
turned away from the computer and smiled at him. “Why don’t you sit
down? You look exhausted.”

Gah-re-al looked down himself, feeling
more self-conscious than he liked. “I’m filthy from the trail. I
think I’d better stand,” he said wryly.

“Hmm. You look like you’re going
savage. Sound a little like it, too, the way you’ve been talking
about that little savage … what was her name? Mex? Dex?

She was smiling when she made the
comments, but Gah-re-al didn’t think he was imagining the rebuke in
her voice. Discomfort wafted through him. They’d been friends and
sometimes lovers for more than a year now. As far as he’d been able
to tell, Maya was perfectly content with the arrangement but unless
it was pure imagination that last comment seemed to contain at
least a trace of jealousy.

That wasn’t the only source of his
discomfort, however. The suggestion that he was preoccupied with
Lexa struck home. Mentally, he reviewed what he’d told her, but he
couldn’t think of anything he’d said that she could’ve interpreted
as an interest in Lexa beyond his assignment. “Lexa is the only one
I’ve actually spoken to,” he said pointedly, emphasizing the name
to correct her although he suspected Maya had deliberately screwed
it up, not misheard or forgotten. “I thought you’d be excited about
the information I’d managed to gather.”

She smiled but the smile didn’t reach
her eyes. He wondered if she’d always been that way or it was just
that she was angry for some reason—jealous or just not too pleased
to discover there were so many primitives it was going to be a far
bigger task than she or any of the others had
anticipated.

He could see where that prospect might
be daunting. Until he and the others had been appointed as
Lawgivers they’d thought the problems created by the primitives
would be an easy fix. They’d thought it was merely a handful of
savages making a nuisance of themselves.

The world had been surveyed, of course,
before the first settlement had been established. But the evidence
of some cataclysmic event on top of the fact that they hadn’t
discovered anything but ruins as evidence of the existence of
higher intelligent life had led to assumptions they shouldn’t have
made—that the mass extinction had included the majority of the
intelligent life forms.

Well, it had. Clearly the world had
once been burgeoning with life whereas, when they found it, there
were great tracts of scarred desolation and little more than ‘dots’
of new, emerging life. And, quite naturally, they’d chosen the
areas already recovering from the cataclysm for their colonies. The
assessment just hadn’t been as accurate as it should have been.
More research before colonization would have led to the discovery
of scattered pockets of primitives. Instead, they’d leapt at the
opportunity to establish another colony on a promising world, even
if it was in sad need of improvement.