“The night,” Rylee mused as we left the food prep area with its large pot of nutri-slime and went down the long, curving corridor that led to the guest quarters. “But isn’t it always night in space?”
“Technically, yes,” I said. “But we hold with the standard twenty-seven hour solar day, just like we have on Denaris.”
“Huh—our days are only twenty-four hours on Earth,” Rylee remarked and yawned again. “I’m sorry—I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
“Like you said, you had a long day, baby,” I told her gently.
She looked up at me, her black eyes flashing.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
I shrugged. “You said it was a term of affection. I guess I was feeling…affectionate. I think Lucian feels the same way.”
“Is that why he keeps calling me “ma 'frela? What does that mean?”
“I’m not the one to ask about Fang Clan dialect,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure it means ‘beautiful one’ or ‘lovely little one.’ Something like that.” I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Would you rather we only called you Rylee?”
“Well…” She frowned, considering. “We don’t really know each other well enough for nicknames.”
“Don’t we?” I asked her quietly. I was thinking of the intense surge of sexual pleasure that we’d all experienced when Lucian and I held hands with her. From the rosy tint of Rylee’s cheeks, she must have been remembering the same thing.
“I…uh…” she stammered. Then I opened the door to one of the guest rooms—the one beside my own—and her eyes lit up. “Oh—it’s gorgeous in here!”
I had to admit she was right. The copper walls were lit from above and below with colored glows that switched slowly from pale blue to light purple to forest green, one tint shading into another so gradually it was hard to catch them doing it. For art, there was a shimmering display of vanites framed in a large plasti-glass aquarium which took up most of one wall. They also changed color, forming ceaseless patterns as they enacted their endless mating dance over and over, no two patterns ever the same.
“Oh,” Rylee breathed, walking over to take a closer look. “They’re like fireflies—multicolored fireflies!”
“Fireflies?” I asked, frowning.
“They’re like a kind of bug back on Earth. They light up but usually only in yellow. These are like a living rainbow!”
“I thought you didn’t like bugs?” I said, raising an eyebrow at her.
“I don’t mind them as long as they’re not huge.” Rylee frowned. “And as long as they’re not all over the place. These, uh, can’t get out, can they?”
“Completely contained,” I assured her. “They’re only there for your amusement. Some people think they bring good dreams if you watch them before going to sleep.”
Rylee yawned again. “I’m down with the sleep part. Is that the bed?”
She pointed to the large, flat sleeping platform which was hovering above the floor at about waist height to me—which was more like chest-height to Rylee. It was made of deep blue padded sensu-foam which cradled the body comfortably in any position. Neatly spread across it was a shiny silver tempra-quilt which would adjust to whatever body temperature would be most conductive to sleep for whoever used it.
Of course, the sleeping platform was huge because it had been made for Triumvirate use. Rylee was probably going to look like a doll in it.
“Yes, that’s the sleeping platform,” I said. “You need a boost up?”
“I think I can manage. Just don’t look,” she directed me. “In case this jacket thing rides up.”
Gripping the sides of the sleeping platform, she hoisted herself up—or tried to, anyway. She nearly fell—would have fallen if I hadn’t caught her.
“Hey—I told you not to look,” she complained as I grabbed her by her waist and deposited her neatly on the platform.
“I caught the motion of you going over from the corner of my eye,” I said blandly. “What was I supposed to do—let you fall?” I didn’t add that I’d also caught the sight of her full, rounded ass which made me wish I could join her on the platform.
But of course, it wouldn’t feel right if it was just the two of us—we needed another male—someone to lie on the other side of Rylee to help me pleasure her. For a moment I pictured Lucian there—the three of us wrapped in each others’ arms, giving and receiving pleasure as we acted out our own mating dance, every bit as intricate and endless as the dance of the vanites.
I pushed the idea away—it was Goddess-damned ridiculous. We’d have no one to perform the Beta’s duties and I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to perform them. I doubted Lucian would be interested either.
“You said you were going to find me something to wear?” Rylee said and yawned again. She really did look tired, poor little female. It made me want to tuck her in.
“Yeah—I think Lucian has a clothing-simulator somewhere on the ship. Just let me see what I can do and I’ll be right back,” I promised her. “Lights, dim,” I added and the multicolored glows dimmed until they were barely visible. Only the shifting pattern of lights from the vanites allowed me to see Rylee’s face.
“Okay, thanks.” She had already snuggled down under the silver tempra-quilt and her eyelids were heavy. I wondered if she would even be awake when I came back.
“Sweet dreams,” I murmured, brushing a strand of hair out of her face.
“Thanks. But I think I’m already dreaming.” She sighed contentedly and closed her eyes.
Before I could ask what she meant, Rylee was already asleep.
I tucked the tempra-quilt more firmly around her shoulders.
“Sleep well, baby,” I murmured. I couldn’t resist the urge to touch her again—didn’t even try. Gently, I stroked the curve of her cheek with one finger. Her skin was satiny soft and warm to my touch. She sighed and snuggled deeper under the quilt. Gods, she was beautiful!
I wished we could keep her.
But there was no point torturing myself with hopeless dreams. Instead, I went to find Lucian.
He was in the control area of the ship, entering the final coordinates for our home planet. A vast array of perfectly designed controls surrounded him, calibrated down to the nth degree. Lights blinked and a 3-D holo display-map showing the stars and wormholes in our local quadrant floated in front of his face. When I walked in, he looked up.
“How is she?”
“Asleep.” I nodded at the co-pilot’s chair. “You mind?”
Lucian considered for a moment, then shrugged.
“All right. Why not?”
I sat, a little stiffly. We’d been trying to avoid each other as much as possible almost from the moment we’d been bonded. This was the first time I’d ever willingly sought my temporary bond-mate out for any kind of discussion but I felt like we needed to talk.
“She’s really something, isn’t she?” I said. “Brave…gorgeous… Special.”
“She’s a La-ti-zal,” Lucian pointed out. “She ought to be special, especially at the price we paid.”
“Any price is worth it to sever the bond. To be free of each other,” I pointed out. “Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, of course,” he said quickly, scowling.
I shrugged. “Just asking. You seem sorry we paid.”
“No.” He was clearly on the defensive. “I never said that. But you must admit it’s a lot to pay when we can’t even keep her.”
“Keep her and do what with her?” I demanded, even though I’d been thinking the exact same thing not five minutes earlier. “It’s not like we can offer her a solid bonding and a proper fucking Triumvirate.”
“I know.” He glared at the controls. “The sooner we get her back to Tanta Loro so she can dissolve our bond, the better. I just…I wish I could have met her under different circumstances.”
“Meaning with a bonded Beta psy-mate.” I played aimlessly with the lighting controls, causing the overhead glows to brighten, then dim
. “Yeah, I get it. Me too.”
Lucian sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have room in my life for mates or a family.”
“I guess they’d only mess up your work schedule, wouldn’t they?” I said sarcastically. “Because who wants to come home to a female and a Beta and a domicile full of kids when they can work twenty-seven solar hours a day instead?”
His face went dark. “As a matter of fact, that’s right.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Lucian,” I growled. “I know you were lonely when we got bonded—as lonely as I was. It was one of the main emotions I got from you right from the start.”
“You can learn to live with loneliness,” he said stiffly. “It’s much easier to deal with than having a whole set of unwanted emotions in your head.”
“Well, I don’t fucking want yours in my head either,” I snarled. Standing, I headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Lucian asked, his eyes narrowed with irritation I could feel clearly through our link.
“To find your clothing simulator. I promised Rylee I’d make her something else to wear.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “Don’t bother me again while I’m piloting.”
“Wouldn’t fucking dream of it,” I growled.
And just like that, the uneasy truce we’d had for a moment was ended.
Chapter Eight
Rylee
I woke up in the middle of the night in a strange bed with my heart pounding.
Where am I?
I knew it wasn’t my apartment in Seminole Heights, the old central part of Tampa. For one thing, I didn’t hear the constant rush of traffic from nearby 275 which ran just outside my bedroom window. Instead, there was a quiet hush of air circulating through some unknown filtration system.
I also missed the reflected headlights rushing across my bedroom ceiling. When I first moved into my little apartment, it used to bother me—the light glaring in the windows. Then I put up a pair of thick drapes so the white brilliance was muted, only able to slip through the crack between the top of the drapes and the ceiling. I found the lines of light from passing cars racing across my ceiling strangely soothing but I didn’t see them now.
Instead, there was a window with a strangely shifting pattern of muted rainbow luminescence right across from the bed I was in. And speaking of beds, this one most definitely wasn’t mine. I had a standard full bed—the largest size that would fit in my tiny bedroom. The bed I was currently lying in was huge—a vast, bewildering expanse of mattress that stretched out on either side of me and felt like the most luxurious memory foam I’d ever experienced. It was much bigger and nicer than the mattress I had at home.
I didn’t like it.
Where…? Why…? I still couldn’t figure out where I was or how I had gotten there. I had the feeling I should know but my brain was still fuzzy from sleep—I couldn’t get it to answer my questions.
Suddenly something moved on the wall—a slithering, sliding motion like a shadow detaching itself from the blackness.
Oh my God! I sat up in the bed, clutching the strange, rustling blanket to my chest. It seemed to be made out of some kind of shiny metallic fabric which reflected the muted rainbow light from the window. It was the perfect weight—neither too thick or too thin but it wasn’t the ratty old throw I’d had since I was a kid. That threadbare blanket was the only thing besides pictures that I’d salvaged when my mom died and I had to go live with my aunt. Phillip used to make fun of me for having an actual security blanket but I didn’t care—I always slept with it—always. But it wasn’t here.
Where am I? I thought again, beginning to panic. And what—?
The shadow moved again, slithering over the glass window with its multicolored patterns this time, seeming to suck in the light like a moving black hole.
It was getting closer.
A breathless scream left my lips. Coming for me—it was coming for me!
Suddenly the door to my strange new bedroom slid open and I saw a huge, broad-shouldered shape silhouetted against the light spilling in from the doorway. The shape was at least seven feet tall—it looked like it belonged to a giant.
Black shadow monsters sliding around the walls, a giant coming into my room…I felt like a girl trapped in a fairytale—one I couldn’t get out of.
“Please,” I whispered, my mouth numb with fear. “Please don’t hurt me!”
“Rylee?” a smooth, deep voice rumbled.
“Who are you?” I shrank even further back in the bed, pulling the strange silvery blanket all the way up to my chin.
“It’s just me, ma 'frela. Are you unwell?”
Ma 'frela—it means beautiful one. Or lovely little one, a voice whispered in my head. Who had said that to me? I clutched desperately at the memory but when I finally brought it into focus, it didn’t make me feel any better.
Drace—he said that to me. And that’s Lucian, standing in the doorway. I’m on a spaceship with them, headed for a whole different solar system, light years from Earth.
“Oh my God,” I whispered unsteadily. “It wasn’t a dream. It really wasn’t a dream!”
“What wasn’t a dream, ma 'frela?” Lucian came into the room, his sharp, handsome features faintly illuminated by the glow from the window—no, not a window. It was a tank of some kind that held the rainbow-colored firefly bugs. More and more details were rushing back to me but they only scared me more.
I’m here—I’m really here on a spaceship! With two strange men who aren’t even men—they’re aliens! I might never get home again! Trapped—I’m trapped!
My heart started pounding and suddenly it seemed like I couldn’t get a deep enough breath. I could hear a frightened panting-gasping sound and realized it was me but somehow I couldn’t stop.
“Rylee! What is it? What’s wrong?” Lucian ran to my side and reached for me but I shied away from him.
“I can’t,” I whispered in a shaky, tearful voice. “I can’t actually be here. I thought it was a dream! This is supposed to be a dream.”
“No dream, ma 'frela.” He sat down on the bed beside me and put a large, warm hand on my back, right between my shoulder blades. The pressure of his palm made me aware of the strange fabric I was wearing. The jacket-thing he gave me when they first brought me to the centipedes’ space station. I must have fallen asleep in it.
I winced away from the touch, feeling more panicked than ever. Not only was my dream of being abducted and taken light years from home in a strange spaceship not a dream, the aliens that went with it were also frighteningly, impossibly real. Nothing was right—nothing was familiar.
Nothing was safe.
Suddenly another huge shape appeared in the doorway.
“What’s wrong?” a deep, rough voice asked—Drace.
“She’s having some kind of an attack.” Lucian sounded grim and worried. “Maybe some kind of delayed reaction to being taken from her home world. I can’t get her to calm down.”
“Do you have sedatives in your med-aid kit?” Drace asked. “I’ll go get her something to help.”
“No, wait.” Lucian put out a hand and the other man halted.
“What?”
“She doesn’t need sedatives.” It sounded like the words were being dragged from Lucian but he spoke them anyway. “I can’t…can’t calm her alone. Come here. Please.”
“Why?” Drace held his ground. “You don’t need me. You told me not to fucking bother you.”
“Please,” Lucian repeated steadily. “It takes two males to do this correctly and you know it. I’m not asking for myself. Do it for Rylee.”
Drace hesitated for a moment more. Then he growled, “All right, Gods damn you.” With a swift, angry stride, he came around to sit on the vast bed on the other side of me.
I was still nearly hyperventilating, my mind trying to come to terms with the fact that the freaky dream I’d thought I was having wasn’t a dream at all. If you think about it, it’s a lot to take in. I mean, it’s one
thing to believe there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe and quite another to actually be kidnapped by that life and taken to a galaxy far, far away.
I wasn’t dealing with it very well.
“Get close to her—she needs both of us now,” I heard Lucian saying. “We need to hold her between us.”
I wanted to protest at this—mostly because I still had a vivid memory of our three-way handshake and the way my body had reacted so sexually to their touch. But my mouth was too dry to speak and I wasn’t able to do much of anything as the two large, hard male bodies flanked my own and pressed against me. They weren’t touching bare skin but their very presence in the bed on either side of me made me feel incredibly small and vulnerable.
I should have felt crowded and frightened and squished…and for a moment I did. Then I took a deep, gasping breath and a scent entered my nose. It was two scents, actually—one cool and sharp and the other warm and spicy. Both were somehow completely masculine. They mixed together and, like some strange aroma therapy, seemed to ease the horrible tension that had filled me to the brim like poisoned water.
I took another deep breath…and then another and another, breathing it in. My heart, which had been pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears, started to slow its frantic rhythm. The big male bodies on either side of me felt good—warm…safe.
I felt myself relaxing.
“Better, ma 'frela?” Lucian’s deep, smooth voice murmured in the dimness.
“I…I think so.” I put a hand to my forehead, which was wet with sweat. “I guess…I thought this was all a dream. I think I expected to wake up in my own bed. Instead…here I am.”
“Is that what scared you? Waking up in a strange room?” Drace asked. He sounded as concerned as Lucian.
“Partly,” I said. “But there was something else. It was—” Something dark caught my eye—the black, snaky shadow flitting over the tank again. I screamed breathlessly and held out a shaking finger. “There! It’s there!”
“Where?” Lucian demanded at the same time Drace said,
“Lights on!” in a loud voice.