Page 60 of Fighting Gravity
“Look, any room will do. I’ve been sleeping in the vents for days, remember? My standards are pretty low.”
Rhone walked up to the bed and set me down, tossing the blankets over my still-damp, naked body. When I looked up at him, I didn’t expect to see him staring right back at me. I paused and pushed up on my elbows.
“Where are the chains and cuffs?” I said, running my hands over the silky sheets. “This isn’t exactly how prisoners are treated.” I held up my wrist where the pinkish scarring from the first time he cuffed me was prominent. “And I know it’s not howyoutreat prisoners.”
He eyed my wrist. If he looked remorseful at all, I’d have thought I was dreaming. He didn’t, though. He just narrowed his eyes and took a long, exaggerated breath.
“No, this is not how I treat prisoners,” he admitted.
“So, why am I laying in a giant bed? You have no qualms about hurting me. We both know that.”
The corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk and it set my cheeks on fire. There was no way I was starting to think that green face was handsome.
Leaning forward, Rhone put his fists on either side of me and moved his face in close.
“Because I need you to heal if I’m going to do it again,” he whispered, sending the flames shooting south.
I swallowed, pinching my thighs together and doing my best to put on a defiant face. It was getting harder, though.
26: Rhone
“Youwhat?!” Veron said, eyes rounded with shock.
I sat slumped in the captain’s chair on the bridge, one long leg outstretched as I leaned my head on my fist. She was already giving me a headache.
“You mated her?” she continued, pacing loudly.
“Don’t act as if this somehow affects anything.”
“It does. The gods never meant for us to mate withthat.”She gestured down the hall.
“The gods mean for us to do as we please.”
“If the signs lead us in such a direction.”
“She responds to my Thel. Is that not proof enough?”
“Proof of what? For all we know, all humans respond to our Thel. She’s the only one we’ve ever known…”
Veron’s voice faded into the back of my mind as I replayed the moment in the cargo bay. The moment I grabbed Quinn and felt her hot flesh in my hands. The moment I scented her need and heard her invite me to take her. My cock still tingled with the memory of her tight channel sheathing my girth. She claimed she was larger than most females of her species, but to me, she was small. Delicate. I barely held back the way I should have when I ravaged her.
I hadn’t meant to go to her in the shower, but something in my gut was telling me she wasn’t well. I even brought her food because I knew she’d been surviving on nutripacks. It was no way for anything to live for an extended period of time. But when I brought the food and saw her huddled under the water, my pulse thrummed with a desire to make her better. To see her strong so I could bury my cock inside her again.
Gods, it was making my mind swell painfully. Veron was right. Our species was meant to procreate with our own kind. Or so I’d always believed. Now, I was uncertain. Quinn responded to my Thel and my Thel responded to her. I purred in her presence, sometimes without realizing it. My body wanted hers and it felt wrong and perfect at the same time.
Part of me wanted to care for her after the damage I’d done but to say I regretted it was a lie. I loved it. Gods, I loved it too much, but I wanted to mend her afterward and that was an act reserved for mates.
Quinn wasn’t my mate…
She was my prisoner.
“Where is she now?” Veron asked, breaking me from my train of thought.
“Resting.”
“Where?”
“In my bed.”
