Chapter Three

Nem

He bit me. I asked him to. He gave me an orgasm. I made him come, too.

At least the burning stopped.

Or dulled.

The heat lessens, and I am grateful. I don’t care what I had to do to get it to stop. I don’t care that the man—or male Ssedez—who destroyed my ship and half my crew had to lie on top of me. I don’t care that I begged him to bite me and fell victim to…to…to whatever the hell his fangs did to me.

And his body—all the rippling gold muscle in my hands, over me, trapping me—

Damn, it was good. Whatever it was. I don’t care that I should’ve killed him already—at the moment, anyway. That will change.

This isn’t me. I don’t do this. I’m a career military woman. I don’t fuck the enemy.

I don’t fuck anyone.

I’m dedicated to my crew. My mission is everything to me. My entire life, everything my family sacrificed, the future of the universe, could depend on what I was forced to leave behind on that ship.

I don’t know what the hell this planet is doing to me. I can’t fathom how it’s making me lose my focus, but this bullshit stops now.

At least I no longer feel like I’m on fire from the inside out. That was the most excruciating pain… Followed by the most blissed-out orgasm ever. But whatever. I’ll block that out.

When my will to move returns, I push him off me and get away from him. I lean on my knees and breathe, nauseous. And I am horrified to feel a dull heat simmering in my core—that can’t be the burn still there.

But I slip my hand between my legs and rub myself—it sends a jolt up my spine.

“What the hell?” I shout at the ground. I’m still swollen. This can’t be happening. I rarely think about, much less need, sex—an intentional by-product of my bioengineering. But it doesn’t seem to work here.

Images of him and his fangs—what it would’ve been like if he’d taken off his leather pants and torn off my clothes. What his cock would’ve felt like, the one I felt between our layers of fabric, as big and hard as he is, thrusting into me. That body of loaded gold muscle fucking me.

His skin was smooth under my hands. And cool. A refreshing cool next to my steaming skin.

His hair—I touched it. The shining strands look coarse. The gold metallic appearance is deceptive. They were luxurious and soft.

I want to touch it again. I want to twist my hands in his hair while he fucks me mercilessly.

I come against my own hand. It’s a murmur of a climax compared to the one he gave me, but it clears my mind briefly enough to remember…

He is my enemy.

And I am unarmed.

I glance back at him, and he is watching me, his hand massaging himself through the leather he wears. He totally saw me make myself come again.

I force myself to focus. No matter how badly I’m craving to see what his cock looks like, there are more important things I need.

All my weapons were attached to my armor, which is now lying helter skelter—and he is between me and it.

I spot his chest holsters lying on the ground and grab them. Their weight is significant; the pouches must hold more than knives, likely explosives by the heft. I stand, unsheathe the fiercest looking blade, and face him.

He’s still sitting. He’s stopped touching his cock, but his gaze is far from someone at a disadvantage. Which I suppose is true. He could swipe a leg at my ankles and bring me down.

Not that I’d let that happen.

“Are you going to kill me now?” He nods at his knife in my hand.

I shake off the chill his voice sends through me. “I should.”

“Would’ve been smarter to do while I was in thrall.”

“I enthrall you?” I’m too shocked to play coy with it.

He makes a grunting sound and stands. I don’t miss how his gaze sweeps over me as he does. It lingers over my thighs and hips.

He stares at my neck. “That was not an attempt to kill you, I will say.”

I touch the two puncture wounds on the side of my throat. “I surmised as much.”

“If you let me lick it, it will heal faster.” His voice lowers, even softens.

The thought of him touching me, let alone with his mouth, has heat flooding my veins—again. “I’ll heal on my own, thanks. My bioengineering is more advanced than that.”

His breath shudders, and he forces his gaze from me. “Your choice.”

I don’t know what to do. He’s made no violent advances toward me. But I can hardly let my guard down.

“What is this place?” he asks, looking at the environment. “This is nothing like we supposed Fyrian would be.”

“Fyrian?”

“This planet. The fire world.”

“The fire world?”

“Its atmosphere is a haze of red. From space, we believed it engulfed in flames.”

I recall the star charts aboard my ship. “You mean Planet 6542. It’s caused by a gas releasing from the planet’s core.”

“Is it toxic?” He puts his hand to his chest. “This burning feeling. It is being caused by something.” He feels it, too. His gaze barely manages to stay on my face, drifting to my nipples and back to my lips.

And this is why, even after I went rogue with my crew and could’ve abolished the gender-free regulation, I did not. If the others know I’m female, it changes everything, from how they speak to me to how they look at me. Best to just require everyone to wear their helms, armor, and voice scramblers. Then everyone is the same, and there is no sexist treatment.

But now, thanks to this damn “fire planet” heat thing and my armor’s inability to cope with the temperature, I’ve let my enemy know my secret.

No orgasm, no matter how good, is worth that.

“Eyes on my face when you’re talking to me.” I point his knife at his chest.

Something happens to his skin. It goes from smooth as mine to a thick texture, a diamond pattern slipping over the surface like a protective covering. Almost like scales. Almost like a serpent.

“What the…” My knife hand falters, and he seizes my lapse in attention.

He grabs my wrist, keeping me from bringing the knife closer. “Unlike you, I do not require external armor.”

I could test it. My knife work is good. I could release his hold and slice his forearm open. I could find out if his natural armor is as impenetrable as my shellskin armor was.

But his touch, the smoothness of his palm—he slides it down my forearm beneath the sleeve covering it. He strokes me with the pads of his fingers, and I become aware how soft my skin is. And how much he likes it.

“Why did you hide your sex?” he asks. “Female warriors among Ssedez are rare and treasured.”

That breaks my hypnosis. “To be treasured is to be inferior.” I jerk my hand back. “I am a soldier.” I turn toward the escape pod.

But by some trick of his fingers, he disarms me.

I stare back at his hand, the knife I was holding now grasped there. I’m forced to concede his knife skills are superior to mine. Which I shouldn’t take as a blow to my pride—knives are obviously his primary weapon—but I don’t like being inferior in anything.

“Those belong to me.” He nods at his holsters still in my other hand. His tone is deceptively casual; his stance, however, is ready to do battle.

There’s a cache of weapons, my kind of weapons, in the bunker inside the pod. I calculate how fast I can get to them. It’s a game of chance. I don’t want to appear hostile. We have a good truce going on here, and logic says we’ll survive this foreign planet better as a pair than alone.

“If you really want to try and kill me, go get your weapons.” He nods toward the pod’s interior.

“If I were a man, you wouldn’t give me that chance. This is why I hide my sex.”

“You’re upset that I give you mercy?”

“I don’t want your mercy.”

He steps closer, invading my space, towering over me, though his knife is lowered. He’s not pointing it at me, but he could in an instant. “What do you want?”

“I want you dead.” Or that’s what I wanted before. It’s what I should still want.

His eyes flash as though he finds this exciting. “Then why am I still alive?” It’s a taunt. He doesn’t think I would kill him. “You want more, don’t you?”

I growl, pissed at myself for not killing him. Pissed at him for knowing why.

He leans his mouth down to my ear. “You may not like me knowing you’re female, but since I do, you’re dying to be fucked.”

Anger seethes in me, and I swing his ten-pound holsters at his head. He ducks in time, but it throws him off balance. It leaves me an opening, and I charge him.

Even his big frame is no match for the full impact of my body slam. I knock him to the ground and snatch another knife from his holsters. I get the blade to his neck.

But not before he gets his knife to mine.

Stalemate.

He chuckles low in his chest.

“What’s funny?” I say. “I’m as likely to kill you as you are me.”

“Go ahead. Try to cut me. See what happens.”

Curious, I press the blade against his skin, but it scrapes over the protective covering and—nothing happens. No give, no indentation.

I’m baffled, and in my surprise, he gets the better of me and flips me onto my back.

He knocks the wind from my lungs and traps my legs with his. “And since you took your armor off, you are at my mercy now.”

I struggle but only briefly. He’s trapped me. He learned my move of pressing him away with my leg. My other mainstay, breaking his nose with my forehead, isn’t an option with a blade at my throat. “Bastard.”

“I do not plan to kill you. Not yet. I need information from you. And I need you to operate the support systems on that pod, because I do not know how.”

I grasp his hand, testing his strength against mine. He doesn’t budge. “You need me for more than that. Admit it.”

The burn is heating inside me again. Having him on top of me makes it worse. The weight of him has me hungering for another of his mind-bending orgasms—except this time with him fucking me.

I shift my hips and feel his cock hard against my belly. Long and thick. It could be its flaccid state. I don’t know, but going by the heat in his eyes, it’s not.

A growl rumbles low in his chest, and he fingers the puncture wounds on my neck. They’ll heal before the day is over. All trace of them will be gone by morning. But he stares at the marks, and his mouth parts to reveal his fangs lowering again. I watch them protrude past his lip, his tongue licking the tips.

His tongue—it’s forked.

If I wasn’t enflamed between my legs, I am now. With my thighs pressed together between his legs, a wetness seeps onto them. I can’t help it—not with the thought of his dual tongue tips licking through the thick folds between my thighs.

I whimper, and I can’t believe the sound is coming from me.

I close my eyes and turn my head away, forcing myself to breathe.

He gets off of me.

I sit up, resting my head between my knees. Whoever this person is, this me who craves sex like she needs air, I don’t know her. She is foreign, and I don’t know how to deal with her.

My anger at myself twists my stomach almost as hard as my hatred for him does. It’s his damn fault we’re in this mess—his brutality that destroyed my entire life’s mission.

And this gods-forsaken planet that has me hungrier for sex with him than for a desire to get revenge and kill him.

It has to be something about this place causing me to feel this way.

I need answers. I stalk to the pod and pull its portable computer from the control console. Whatever is in the atmosphere burning through my lungs and veins has to be causing this.

There’s no other reason why I would want to fuck this male who has cost me everything.