Lords of the Deep (20 page)

Damien glared at him.

“If they notice anything beyond that scarlet caplet and her blue eyes,” Miles continued, “I’ll be fucking amazed.”

Damien frowned. “Mayhap we could find something to alter the color? It would make her blend better.”

“Except the enforcer will
know
! You can bet your ass he’ll be there.”

“Fuck!” Damien snarled. “It had slipped my mind.”

“I wish to fuck it would slip mine! I have a bad feeling we’re both going to end up in jail over this! If she can’t carry it off … if they begin to suspect she isn’t just a foreigner ….”

Damien’s lips tightened. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said pointedly. “First we see if she’ll agree. If she does we’ll have to convince her to attend the gathering and do her best to blend. We’ve got more to worry about than landing in jail over bringing her here. They’ll take her and decide for themselves what to do with her.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” Miles said, flicking an uneasy glance at her. “Don’t you think they’d just send her back?”

“Maybe … and maybe they’d decide the security of the kingdom was at stake and they needed to study her to see if her people presented any kind of threat.”

“Gods! I hadn’t considered that! Maybe we should just return her, Damien? I don’t think I could live with myself if something like happened.”

“Unfortunately, I think it’s too late to consider it,” Damien said grimly. “If we hadn’t attracted the notice of an enforcer—and
she
hadn’t, then maybe we could get away with it. If he writes a report, though, regardless of what he said, there’ll be a record … and he isn’t just going to forget about her. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. The bastard will be watching the place like a predator. I don’t think we could slip her out if we wanted to and she demanded it.

“We’re stuck now. The best hope any of us have is to get her ready. Once the breeding is done and everyone goes back to their business,
then
we could return her if that’s what she wants. We’re just going to make matters worse if we try anything before that.”

Miles settled on a stool, digesting that and finally nodded. “Gods, this just gets worse and worse! Alright—things to do …. She has to have a guardian for the mating grounds—otherwise the okeans will fuck her to death. No way can she fight them off by herself. That means my mother or yours.”

Damien groaned. “Well, there’s no doubt mine could beat them off! The question is whether we could convince her to help us or not …. I’m betting not. She never has been terribly fond of me, Miles.”

Since he knew it was true, Miles didn’t argue. “Mine’s a sweet old gal, but a bit flaky. I’m sure we could convince her, but I don’t know effective she’ll be. If I’m not mistaken, she’ll probably be attending with two of my sisters this time.”

“Gods!” Damien exclaimed. “Just how many did she birth?”

Miles shrugged and grinned. “She was always fond of the gatherings and too much of a pushover—just too soft hearted to discourage her suitors with any real force—there’s four of us.”

Damien’s lips tightened. “My mother it is,” he growled. “She won’t mind knocking the hell out of any of them if she can be convinced to protect Angie.”

“Yes … but will she let either of
us
near her? That’s the question. I don’t mind telling you she never seemed very fond of me either!”

Damien studied over their dilemma frowningly. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to bring your mother in—tell her everything and convince her to sponsor Angie and enlist my mother’s help to manage the three?”

“That might work!” Miles said enthusiastically. “She’s more likely to agree to help my mother anyway than she would to help us and she’ll be too occupied to keep as close a watch on all of them. She thinks my mother’s an idiot.” He frowned after a moment. “No enticing Angie to let you sample her favors while I’m gone or I’m not fucking going!”

Irritation flickered through Damien, but he agreed. “I think we’re going to both have to agree to keep our minds on the project if we’re to have any hope of carrying this off.”

Miles frowned. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Try!” Damien ground out.

“I’ll try,” Miles agreed a little doubtfully, studying Angie hungrily, then added abruptly as if the thought had just popped into his mind, “Why did you suckle her?”

Damien felt his face color with discomfort. He was tempted to say he’d figured out it was part of their mating ritual, but Miles would know it was a lie. “I don’t know,” he ground out. “Why did you?”

“Because you did and I liked the way it looked. I liked the way
she
looked when you did. She didn’t look surprised or disgusted. She looked … it gave her pleasure.”

Damien felt his throat close as if with intense thirst. “It gave me pleasure.”

“Me, too,” Miles admitted, even though he looked uncomfortable at the admission. “I’ve spent a great deal of time, in fact, thinking about other things I’d like to do to her. Does that seem … unnatural?”

Damien shook his head. He wasn’t about to be drawn into a debate over whether the things he wanted to do were natural or not, gods damn it! If it wasn’t
natural
, why would he want to? “Just because we haven’t before doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” he growled. “It isn’t wrong if it gives her pleasure … and us. It’s only wrong if it doesn’t.”

To his relief, Miles seemed to agree with him. “Mayhap the competition isn’t as stiff with them and they’re able to spend more time with their catkins? Mayhap they have more time to explore other possibilities?”

“Or mayhap,” Damien pointed out dryly, “it’s because she wasn’t actually in season and she had no itch?”

Miles shook his head. “She’s different from us. There’s just no getting around it, Damien, whether either of us are willing to accept it or not. No catkin would allow us to convince her if she had no itch—so either she did or she’s very different.”

“Or it’s because we’ve never been allowed near catkins
approaching
their time? You know they always withdraw a good week before.”

Miles blinked at him. “Actually, I didn’t know that.”

“You have sisters ….”

“Which doesn’t mean a damned thing! We didn’t even go to the same school. And I went to high school after low school to pursue a career in science. Truthfully, I’m always surprised when I recognize them.”

Damien couldn’t argue with that. He had barely seen his mother a half dozen times after he was sent off to school. Everyone, without exception, lived on school grounds once they were entered, of course, but most mothers visited their children fairly regularly and even many of the fathers. He knew Miles probably wouldn’t have seen his mother a great deal, but he’d thought he might have been around his siblings at school. He hadn’t considered that Miles’ siblings had probably been sent to other schools since becoming too dependent on others was discouraged.

“Well, they generally withdraw from company,” Damien said. “I always thought it was to build anticipation in the okeans, but maybe it’s because they begin the change and they’re susceptible to pleasure even before they reach their peak? If that’s the case, they wouldn’t want to risk becoming so wrapped up in pleasure that they lost sight of the true objective and became impregnated by an okean they thought totally unsuitable.”

“I wonder if anyone really knows?” Miles said thoughtfully. “I think I shall have to try to pin that down to a certainty rather than a guess. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to compare any data with that I accumulate on Angie.”

Damien didn’t argue the matter, although he had some doubts, now, that it was going to make much difference to either of them. He did want to understand Angie better, but he realized now that the information wasn’t likely to mean much to him once she was gone, beyond, possibly, making him feel worse about every misunderstanding that he might have prevented. It wouldn’t spare her from all the fear and anxiety she’d experienced because of what he’d done.

And it seemed unlikely he would get the chance to try to redeem himself in her eyes for capturing her to start with.

And the paper Miles so wanted to write could never be written. If Angie left—when—he would have no proof to substantiate his findings and if, by some miracle, she decided to stay it couldn’t be written for fear of exposing her to possible harm.

He put that from his mind. It would be better to begin to accept that she could not and would not stay rather to allow himself to hope she might.

Why would she, he thought disgustedly? No doubt the entire experience had been hellish for her. He and Miles had been too smitten with her to consider her feelings beyond trying to keep from scaring her to death or inadvertently hurting her, but as much pleasure as he’d taken from the experience he wasn’t stupid enough to think it had been equally pleasant for her.

She had accepted the coupling, but he couldn’t even congratulate himself on that. If Miles was right and she wasn’t in season, there was a strong possibility that she’d only allowed it because she’d been afraid they would be hostile if she didn’t. He knew she was intelligent. She knew she was vastly at disadvantage in any kind of physical contest of wills. He doubted even one of their own catkins, as feisty as most of them were, unless she was just downright stupid, would have been willing to try to fight off two full grown, mature okeans. There was a great deal of mock fighting during the mating frenzy and some of the catkins got downright nasty if a male they didn’t want was particularly determined, but they were under no real threat and they knew it. They depended upon the rest of their suitors to defend them if any unwanted male was too persistent.

And Angie hadn’t had a defender.

Sensible, unfortunately, didn’t equal true acceptance and certainly not want.

He left the lab. He’d already wandered into the kitchen before it dawned on him that he was hungry, which in turn reminded him that he’d just taken food to Angie when he’d yielded to the urge to suck the juices she’d dropped off of her skin. With a mixture of amusement and discomfort, he went to check the damage and discovered the food had flown off the tray and all over the floor when he’d pitched the tray from the bed and had since been trampled.

That explained the disgusting mess he’d felt sticking to his feet when he’d stalked out, he thought wryly.

The food on the bed confused him until he remembered Angie had still had the
bocite
she’d been trying to eat in her hand when he’d grabbed her. He grinned, wondering how much she’d managed to smear down his back and through his caplet while she was ‘fondling’ him.

So much for thinking she’d been as enthralled as he was, he thought wryly, heading into the bath to check the mirror to see how much he was still wearing. He was a little surprised to see he wasn’t wearing any of the food, but then he supposed once he and Miles had tangled that had taken care of it. He checked the bruising on his throat while he was studying himself. He was about to leave when he abruptly recalled that Angie had told Miles he was handsome. Frowning, he studied his own face, wondering if she found it as pleasing.

Realizing after a moment that it was a waste of time since he was obviously no judge of what she thought, he headed back to the kitchen, collected the cleaning bot and guided it to Angie’s room. Obviously the bot that generally cleaned the bed chambers wouldn’t be equipped to handle food spills—not of this magnitude.

Angie returned while he was propped against the door frame, watching.

She peered around him and studied the bot. “Doing this thing?” she asked in Miles’ voice.

He was taken aback. After staring at the headset she was wearing irritably for a moment, he finally grinned at her. “Obviously that thing still has a few bugs in the programming,” he murmured. “It’s a cleaning bot.” He shrugged. “I dropped the food while ago.”

Angie stared at him a long moment and he knew she was probably trying to interpret what the translator had spit out—which, if it sounded anything like what he’d heard, probably wasn’t much more comprehensible than the language had been without it. She bit her lower lip after a moment, her lips quivering. “Drop?”

He studied her mouth, smiling faintly in return when he saw the amusement dancing in her eyes. “Alright threw,” he conceded. “Hearing you talk with Miles’ voice is going to take some getting used to.”

She listened in frowning concentration for a moment and finally nodded. “Talk me in Atlantica do that other,” she responded. “Place this called? Atlantica?”

Damien began to chuckle. “Gods! It was almost easier before. Where’s Miles?”

“Said go, Mother get.”

“He must have decided he could handle that better than trying to interpret what the translator was spitting out,” Damien muttered wryly. Dropping a hand to her shoulder, he guided her down the corridor to the kitchen. “Since you didn’t actually get to eat while ago—and I didn’t, I need to fix us something else.”

Angie settled on the counter stool as he bent over to study the contents of the preserver. “Feed then breed,” she said.

He slammed his head against the top of the unit as he bolted upright. Rubbing his head, he turned to look at her in confusion. “What?”

He could see she was struggling not to laugh. He couldn’t decide whether he felt like joining her or not. His head was throbbing like a son-of-a-bitch and he was pretty sure he’d dented the unit. He closed and opened it a couple of times, testing the fit of the door.