Defiance (4 page)

“What would you have me do? Accept
my fate?”

“Yes! Have we treated you badly?
Humiliated you? If this was a proper
Xyran
slave ship
you would have been chained, but David told me not to do that. He told me a
woman like you wouldn’t respond well to being tied up. But you’ve just killed
us all.”

Doubt flickered through her. “What?”

 
“You didn’t destroy navigation. You destroyed
the life support systems!”

Jordan
flicked a gaze over the mess
before looking between
Laith
and David.
“Really?
Are you sure?”

Laith
took
a threatening step toward her, and David had to grab him to hold him back. “Don’t,”
he said. “We have to conserve oxygen.”

“She wants to die so badly out here
in the coldness of space then I’d be happy to oblige her,”
Laith
growled.

“I don’t want to die at all,”
Jordan
said and
waved a hand at the smashed console. “I didn’t know that was life support.”

“It was foolish to attack something
you don’t know a thing about,” David told her.

“I could say the same for
kidnapping me,”
Jordan
said. She gestured to the damage. “By the way, this is
all
your
fault.”

“Our fault?”
Laith
roared. “If you’d have stayed in your cell like
an obedient girl we wouldn’t be losing oxygen!”

She poked his chest, knowing it was
the same as poking a rabid animal, but she had to make a point. “If you hadn’t
kidnapped me, I wouldn’t have smashed your console! I’m
not
some human female that will meekly roll over and obey her captors’
demands. Yes, you scare the crap out of me, but I’d rather die fighting with
every breath I have than surrender by sitting in a cell saying
yes, sir
.”

Laith
shrugged off David’s hands and stepped into her space. They stared at one
another, both not budging an inch. She refused to let him see how much she was
shaking, partly from fear but also from the flare of desire that burned from
her core. Out of everything that had happened to her, that scared her most of
all. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back inside the cell. He sat on the bed,
which wobbled a little and made him glower even more, before he yanked her down
across his knees.

“What the hell are you doing?” she
screeched.

His legs trapped hers, and before
she knew it, his superior strength had her completely subdued. He brushed her sheet
aside, and then his hand swooshed back and landed on her unprotected ass with a
hard smack. She howled in pain and struggled, but he spanked her again and
again, each smack landing a little bit harder. Her cheeks burned and stung, and
tears ran down her face, mainly from the pain but also from the humiliation.

“Stop!
Please!”

But he kept on spanking her, one
blow after another, until her ass became numb. And that’s the point when the
pain turned into something different. The heat radiated from her numbed
buttocks to spread throughout the rest of her body. Her heart pounded for an
entirely different reason. And she could feel the area between her thighs grow
heavy with dew.

The spanking abruptly stopped,
leaving her slightly empty and unfulfilled, although she had no idea why. He
pulled her up until they were face to face. His forked tongue darted out to
taste the air, and it both fascinated and horrified her. She’d attended church
as a child, and the stories of demons come to tempt mortals still lingered in
her imagination.

As his tongue slid back into his
mouth, some of the anger eased from his dark eyes. He regarded her with a
mixture of disbelief and wariness, and by the expression on his face he didn’t
seem any happier than she was with this attraction that seemed to have sprung
up suddenly between them.

“David,” he said in a low, gravelly
tone. “Watch her while I start scanning for places we can get repairs.”

“I think we’re close to Station
Three,” David stated. He took hold of her wrists and led her from the cell. She
stared up at him in a daze, unsure what just happened. Her mind said one thing,
but her body was saying something completely different.

Laith
gave a sharp nod, turned on his heel, and marched back up the ladder. She was
left alone with David, but if she thought that chemistry she felt with
Laith
would go with him, she was sadly mistaken. Her
awareness of David was every bit as confusing, maybe even more so, because David
took that interest and seemed to embrace it.

He brushed a finger down her cheek.
“You’re erratic,” he said.
“Confusing.
You clearly have
no sense of self-
preservation,
otherwise you wouldn’t
have blindly done what you did. Do you realize that by your actions you might
have destroyed all hopes of getting back to Earth?”

She took a deep breath to clear the
cobwebs in her brain. “I react badly when I’m scared. But you’re right, I
am
unique.”

The corner of his mouth turned up
in a wry grin.
“And modest, as well.”

“What’s happening?” she asked. “Are
you … flirting with me?”

“I believe I
am
flirting with you.
Xyrans
don’t flirt,
but in his own way,
Laith
just did the same.”

“Spanking is his way of flirting?
Great.
Why are you with him? You’re human.”

“There’s much you don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Why
don’t you tell me why you dressed like a boy?” He stepped closer to her. Unlike
the
Xyran
, David had light green eyes, beautiful gems
that gleamed under the artificial light causing butterflies to dance in her
stomach.

She cleared her throat. “I’ve been
pretending to be a boy for fourteen years.”

He ran his fingers through her hair,
and she shivered at how pleasurable it felt. The image of having him touch all
over her body brought a delicious flush over her skin. He moved closer and
placed his hands on her bare shoulders, causing electric sparks to shoot all
through her body.

“W-what are you doing?” she asked
breathlessly.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “All I
know is that I like touching you.”

“Oh.” She swallowed thickly.

“Do you like being touched?”

“Uh … I’ve never been touched like
this.”

He cupped her face, and she leaned
into him. She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off his mouth.
His
beautiful, delectable mouth.

“David!”
Laith
called out. “Get up here.”

Jordan
blinked and took a step
back. She took a deep, shaky breath as David gave her a lopsided grin. He pushed
her back into the cell, bent to pick up the screw, and then closed the door in
her face.

****

“Station Three is only seven
klicks
away.”

“I’ll plot a course,” David said as
he sat down.

“This wasn’t on our schedule, David.”

“I know.”

“We need Commander Kath to take me
on board his ship, and this little detour is not helping our timetable.”

“I
know
,
Laith
. But you have to look at it
from her point of view.”

Laith
turned in his chair to study him. “Are you empathizing with our prisoner?”

“Of course I’m empathizing with
her. I’m human, too.”

“My instinct is to hurt her. She
could have killed us.”

“We’ve talked about this. You don’t
hurt women.”

“I know. And I won’t. But the
Xyran
heritage is hard to suppress, even when I know it’s
wrong.”

David laid a hand on his shoulder. “I
know this is difficult for you. Just like I know you’re attracted to her.”

Laith
sighed and ran a hand over his face. “We can’t alter our plan, David. I swore a
blood-oath of vengeance against Kath and his raiders. To my people, there is
nothing more sacred.”

“You don’t have to remind me of your
oath,
Laith
,” David said. “I knew this mission would
be one we wouldn’t walk away from, and although I’m not
Xyran
,
I swore to you we would kill the bastard who killed your sister. I’m with you until
the end.”

Laith
took a deep shuddering breath. “I can’t see her as an individual, as someone
I’m attracted to. I can’t be that type of
Xyran
anymore.”

David cupped
Laith’s
head and bent to place his forehead against his. “I know. It’s all right,
Laith
.”

“No, it is not. She is my prisoner.
My slave.
If I desire her, than I am no better than
Kath. I am no better than who I used to be.”

“I will
never
let you be who you used to be,
Laith
.
I promise.”

“She is just … so frustrating!”

“Perhaps that’s why we both find
her so desirable.”

Laith
nodded. “No matter how we feel, we still have to sell her. It’s the only way to
get to Kath.”

“I know.”

Chapter Five

As soon as the ship docked inside
Station Three,
Laith
stepped out of it. The first
person he saw was
Tarrn
, an ally of his tribe and a
friend of his father’s, and he smiled at the old
Xyran
mechanic.

“What are you doing here,
Tarrn
? I thought you were stationed on Sarton Moon.”

“I ran into a bit of trouble when
some of Kath’s raiders visited.”

Laith
tensed. “What happened?”

“I might have sabotaged every
single computer program on his battle cruiser. It was completely useless.”

“Wait, are you saying Kath does not
have his ship?”

Tarrn
nodded. “Kath only has a handful of his men right now as his ship gets refitted
with new software.”

Laith
had
to bite back a curse. If Kath’s ship was damaged, he wouldn’t be taking on new
raiders. Helpless rage tore through him, threatening to bring him to his knees,
as he realized his plan had disintegrated before his eyes.

 
“I saw your name register on the repair list
and accepted it. I am to be your mechanic.”

Laith
struggled to get his mind back on the present issue at hand, which was fixing
what
Jordan
had broken.

“Good, I would not trust anyone
else,”
Laith
replied. “The life support console met
with an unfortunate accident.”

“Let me see it to assess what needs
to be done.”

He waved
Tarrn
to follow through the port side opening and down the ladder to the computer
consoles. The ship was small and had the appearance of being barren, but the
propulsion system was the best that wealth could buy. He was actually glad to
have someone working on it that he could trust. He was still having a difficult
time accepting that he was back at square one where Kath was concerned.

As
Tarrn
inspected the console,
Laith
glanced at the sealed
cell door. Right before they had docked he had personally made sure she
couldn’t get into any more mischief by placing magnetic sealers around her
wrists.
And a gag in her mouth.

“Do you know the definition of accident?”
Tarrn
asked sarcastically as he looked at the
console. “This looks like it came through the battle of Talus.”

“The accident part came from this
being destroyed instead of navigation,”
Laith
replied
dryly.

“Did your slave do this?”

Laith
shook his head. “No. We, ah, have a guest.”

“Guest?”

“A human female.”

“What?”
Tarrn
demanded. The old
Xyran
turned and put his hands on
his hips. His voice dropped to a whisper. “There is only one reason to have a
human female this close to the
Targin
Market. What are
you doing,
Laith
? The last thing I thought you would take
up again is dealing in the slave trade after what happened to
Julyah
. Does your father know?”

Even though he knew no one could
overhear them in the ship, he couldn’t help but glance around to make sure no
one was listening. “Be careful what you say.”

“He does not know, does he? Your
father has no idea about this.”

“I am not in the slave trade. Well,
not exactly.”

“What does that mean,
Laith
? What are you planning?”

“What I have to in order to bring
Kath down. Now, are you going to fix the console or not?”

Tarrn
blinked and frowned at the harsh tone. He drew himself up stiffly and nodded. “Yes.
It looks bad, but it is all superficial. All I have to do is replace this
console and attach the wires. I only need two hours.”

All
Laith
wanted to do was get away from
Tarrn
and his
affronted expression.

“Excellent. I think I’ll head out
to try to discover any information on Kath since he is not operating his battle
cruiser. If you see David, tell him I shall be back shortly.”

****

Jordan
sat on the newly fixed cot
trying to figure out how to get out of the manacles on her wrists. She knew
they were docked at a space station, so this would be the opportune time to
escape. She didn’t have much to bargain with, but perhaps she could find some
sympathetic traveler to take her back home.