Page 23 of Soliv Four
“Let me go, you pig! I am mated.”
He had loosened his grip to grope her, giving her a chance to elbow him in the gut while stomping down on his foot. As he bent over her from behind, she threw her head back to smash against the lower part of his face. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t break free. The male was bigger and stronger. She was just about to scream for help when Tomak yelled.
“Podmal, get your fucking hands off my mate!”
The alien looked up at Tomak, pacing toward them. He was a head taller than Tomak, but the human had bested numerous beings that outsized him.
“Come closer, and I will break her neck.” He held Angie’s head in his big hands, prepared to give her head a quick hard twist.
Tomak had no doubt he could pull it off. “Then, there will be no reason for me to let you live,” he said casually with a stoic expression.
Meanwhile, Coraz approached silently from behind and pressed the point of his combat knife against the back of the alien’s neck.
“Unless you want me to sever your spinal cord, you’d better let my commander’s female go.”
That was all the encouragement he needed to let Angie go. She ran to Tomak and threw herself against his chest, hugging him.
“Now, leave!” Coraz told the would-be kidnapper.
Despite his anger at her disobedience of his one rule, Tomak hugged her back. “Damn it, Angie! What have I told you? Are you trying to get raped or killed?”
“No, I just wanted to see you,” she said in a tiny voice, hiding her face against the middle of his chest.
“You know, you’re going to be punished for this.”
She shivered against him while he got hard just thinking about it. But it would have to wait because he barely had the strength to stand, let alone punish her and fuck her senseless.
“Thanks, Coraz.”
“No problem, Boss. I saw where she was going and figured she might get into trouble. Don’t be too hard on her. Those fights were hard for me to watch.” Coraz put his knife back in the sheath at his waist.
“What about your mate?”
“She’s sitting upstairs with J’garin and his female. I’m going right back.”
Tomak nodded. “We’re going back to the flat.”
Angie could tell that Tomak was exhausted by how he held her possessively close with his arm around her shoulders. He didn’t let go of her until they were safely inside their flat. He grabbed a drink from their dispenser to continue rehydrating after his marathon fights. After gulping down his drink, he shuffled over to the bed and dropped onto it face down, with a groan.
He didn’t even take off his prison garb.
Angie stood a short distance away, just watching him breathe as he fell asleep. What she did was stupid. There were at least a few dozen fighters in the bowels of the arena at any given time. She had done well with her self-defense lessons, but she was nowhere near good enough to take on a brute that much bigger and stronger as the alien who grabbed her.
Getting raped by him, she thought, would have been way worse than any punishment Tomak would deliver. He never said it or showed it in public, but she knew he cared for her by how he held her gaze and made love to her.
Being on the prison planet hadn’t seemed too bad, with Tomak. They had a routine and private quarters where they would have sex for hours when they finished training. But watching Tomak fight in the arena against two and three at a time made her realize he could be killed.
Sure, it was nice for a prison. That was only because Tomak and his men fought in the gladiator matches with crude, ancient weapons. Unlike free men, they couldn’t just quit. They would all be sent to the mines or one of the mob rule continents.
Angie berated herself for breaking Tomak’s one rule. It didn’t matter where they were on this planet; there was nowhere she would be safe to go out alone. Although she lamented being stuck on a prison world, she knew she could never leave Tomak even if she were offered her freedom.
It was early for sleep, but they had been up at dawn. Angie was a little stressed anticipating Tomak’s matches. They weren’t deathmatches, but the swords were real, and he could still get hurt as some of his body scars attested.
She wasn’t overly concerned with her impending punishment. The last time he’d punished her by denying her an orgasm while he dominated her sexually. Angie didn’t believe he would deliberately injure her. A little pain was not necessarily undesirable when the sex was so hot.
She didn’t feel like looking at vids, and she was pretty sure Tomak would probably sleep through the night. With nothing else to do, she crawled onto the bed and lay beside Tomak, drifting to sleep.
FOURTEEN
