Chapter Five

Nem

I’m no stranger to pain. I’ve been wounded in battle countless times. I’ve been beaten. I’ve been scarred. I’ve been imprisoned. But I have never felt a burning like this.

Each time a leaf cuts me, I grit my teeth. There is nothing I can do. We have to get to my ship. There are valuable things on board, priceless things. If there’s any chance they’re retrievable, I have to get them. Not to mention the small hope someone on my crew survived the crash. Though it’s unlikely. What’s more likely is another escape pod landed nearby. No alerts of other pods have shown on my computer, but it doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Anyone else will head to the crash site.

But the cuts—it’s not the tear of my skin so much as the fire that starts at each wound, a burn of intense pleasure. I have to glance down to be sure actual flames aren’t creeping up my legs.

“Here. Take this.” The Ssedez puts his longest knife in my hand, and I don’t have to ask what it’s for. It’s not for killing him.

It’s long enough to carve a path for myself. A machete. I slice at the leaves ahead of me, bushwhacking through the jungle. It’s too late though.

My blood is already contaminated with the plants’ poison.

I start to hallucinate. I start seeing him in front of me—naked—and I want to cut my teeth on him. I want to get on my knees and suck his cock, then bend over on all fours while he fucks me from behind.

But that’s not even the best of the illusions.

In the next one, he bites me and does it all over again—except this time it’s twice as good.

I stumble, my body aflame, my nipples hard and scratching against the fabric of my body suit, my clit swollen and aching. Molten from fire scourging my veins, I’m dripping onto my thighs—soaking my clothes.

I stop, drop his knife, and start to touch myself. I need to make it stop. I have to make this end. I will incinerate if I don’t quench it somehow.

I fall to my knees. I’m urged backward against a strong chest, and masculine hands come around to replace mine. The broad fingers massage and caress my nipples.

“Harder.” I arch into his touch. He obeys, squeezing and twisting the points of my breasts.

It doesn’t ease me though. My clit throbs, and I tear one of his hands from my breasts and put it there. “Help me.”

His long fingers press me, and I cry out. I have no patience for waiting—I’m in too much pain. I grasp his wrist and use his hand, circling his fingers the way I want them to.

But it’s not enough; it still hurts. It blurs my thoughts, and I moan nonsensical things, unable to think except for what I need.

He gropes to find the hidden zipper in my suit, opens it, and sneaks his hand inside. His hot hand slips between my soaked thighs, and a loud groan vibrates from his chest into my back.

I don’t care about his reaction though; all I care is that he makes me come.

I collapse back against him and spread my knees, opening, letting him deeper. He strokes through my folds, and his fingers slip inside me like butter. My inner walls cling to him, squeezing him, desperate to wring the orgasm from his hand.

He slides his fingers in and out of me, their size and width the perfect size of a cock, and I’m so wet, I hear the sounds of him moving them in me. From this pose, I can watch, so I stare at his ethereally gold, shining hand, his palm so broad, his wrist so thick, the muscles of his knuckles flexing and tightening as he works me.

“Faster, faster,” I breathe between shuddering breaths, and he obeys. I grip his forearms, digging my fingers as hard as I can into his corded muscle. I start to come, my hips pumping shamelessly onto his hand.

The climax sets off in me like a bomb, wringing harsh shouts from my lungs and seizing my body. I lose it all—the battles, the will for control, the fight to stay alive. I don’t care.

I am sex. And pleasure.

The fire that was raging through my veins lessens, and I surrender against his chest. I lie back wasted, lungs heaving, and notice his breathing. It gusts against my ear, and he is as rigid as a statue behind me, his cock a steely, unmistakable force against my back.

He moves like he wants to get away from me, so I crawl forward. I’m too weak to stand, but I rest on my knees. I manage to close the zipper at my waist, not that the clothes are doing me any good, they’re so soaked from me and sliced with cuts from the leaves.

I turn to see him standing and staring at me—his cock at eye level.

He looks at me with sensually dark eyes like he wants to fuck me, but at the same time, he’s cautious. My caution is gone. My rational restraint is disintegrated. I’m forced to admit that in all my years of curiosity about the Ssedez, I never dared hope I’d actually meet one. Much less have the opportunity to have sex with one. They’re supposed to be extinct.

This whole mission of mine—the one he ruined—was all about leaving the Ten Systems and breaking away from their “Assimilate or Be Conquered” rule of law. My crew, our goal is one of discovering worlds and species unknown. Of finding things in common with intelligent life-forms—not dominating others in war.

It is my life’s work. And this enemy of mine who brings me so much pleasure is a specimen of my heart’s desire.

“What’s your name?” Nothing like getting orgasms from a male without knowing his name.

“Oten.” The guttural sound to his voice, it fills me with new arousal. The first word I’ve heard him say in his own language. I don’t know how he knows my human language so well, but he’s obviously studied it intensively. His name, Oten, is harsh and gritty sounding, the stop on the “T” like a preparation for something ominous. And it is. I recognize it.

“Oten?” I gasp. “As in…” My mind must be playing tricks on me.

“Have you heard the stories of the Ssedez?”

“Are you the Oten?” I catch my breath, remembering all I can of the story. “As in the warrior who created the stars of the universe with refracted light across his skin?”

“That tale formed a thousand years ago and refers to my father.” He strokes my face, as though enamored with the feel of my skin. “And it is armor. Not merely skin.” His abdomen tightens, and he holds his breath—as I watch the surface of him change.

His skin thickens, strengthens, into something like armor. I trace the emerging diamond pattern that shines like metallic gold in the sunshine. He’s so bright, it’s as though the sunlight isn’t glancing off of him, but rather, coming from inside him.

It’s a good thing the sun is shining on him from the side, not head on, or I’d be blinded. “You’re made of gold.”

He smiles, and it’s stunning, seeing the gleaming surface of his face bend with his curving lips. “A hundred Ssedez in the sun will blind an army on the battlefield. Alas, most of our battles are now in space, so it rarely helps.”

Even his hair seems effervescent, as though laced with sunlight. It hangs in waves, brushing his shoulders, reflecting the sun the same way as his natural armor.

There’s another myth that I’ve always wondered if it was true. The human history books deny it. “Are you the Oten who saved the Ssedez from certain genocide by piloting a star cruiser solo into the Ten Systems’ fleet, destroying them by blowing up your own ship?”

His eyes go wide with surprise. “It was not solo. There were many warriors aboard. I didn’t know the humans told it as a genocide tale.”

“They don’t. But that’s what it was. They feared your immortality.”

He nods. “And our honor.”

“How did you survive it?”

He straightens his shoulders. “Why would I reveal such a secret to you? You are one of them.”

I don’t correct him. It won’t matter to him that I left the Ten Systems’ fleet and commandeered a ship with a crew who believe the same as me: the conquer-or-be-conquered Ten Systems’ treatise is unethical. I am human. My ancestors sought to destroy his species and believe they succeeded. He has every right to hate me.

He is not godlike—he is an immortal.

Whose cock stands at attention, sheathed in leather, before my eyes.

My military agenda becomes meaningless in the resurfacing of my lifelong fascination with Oten, the Sun God, and his son of the same name. The long repression of my sexuality is over. I have no reason left not to suck his cock.

He tenses, and his armor recedes. The diamond pattern merges back into his skin, leaving it smooth again. Almost like human skin, still gold, just without the shiny metallic hue.

I run my hands across his abs, feeling the texture of him.

He’s hard to the touch.

I pull at the laces of his leathers, and what’s exposed is as godlike as I’d hoped it would be.

Long and thick—if I thought the rest of him was hard, his cock is marble. Except it’s not smooth like the rest of his skin without the armor. He’s ribbed. There’s a spiral pattern of ridges along his cock. They wrap around him and swirl from base to tip. The apex is a seam, the only one on his body.

I rasp, in awe. “Does it feel?”

He grunts an affirmative. “What are you going to do?”

I grasp him with my hand, my fingers not able to meet around his impressive girth. He steals a hard breath through his teeth, and his hips buck. He braces his hands on my shoulders.

“It burns, doesn’t it?” I ask him.

He nods, his breath ragged. “Like a fire raging through my veins.”

“I can help.” I slide my hand up and down him. His ridges tickle my palm. And I have to know what he feels like in my mouth.