Lords of the Deep (21 page)

She chuckled.

He grinned reluctantly. “I’m glad you find it so damned amusing, sweetheart. I think I might have cracked my skull.”

Her amusement vanished. “Come see let?”

He studied her a moment, but when she motioned with her hand, he moved closer, turning his back to allow her to examine his head. She stood up on the bottom rung of the stool, resting one hand on his shoulder for balance and lightly touching his caplet with the other.

He discovered he hadn’t imagined how pleasurable her touch was. Nor had it been magnified by the other pleasure he’d been experiencing at the time. Within moments he was so aroused he felt like he was nearing climax and his cock was trying to burrow between his legs to get to her. Reluctantly, he caught her hand to still her movements. “It doesn’t hurt there anymore,” he said a little hoarsely.

He could sense her curious gaze as he moved away from her and tried to remember what it was he’d been doing before she’d touched him. The dent in the preserver unit reminded him he’d been looking for something to cook and he moved to it again.

“This Atlantica called?”

He flicked a glance at her while he assembled the ingredients to make another
bocite,
a fish and vegetable casserole he liked to cook because it didn’t require tending and could be cut up once cooked into finger food servings. In the beginning, he’d also considered the casserole, and others that were similar, were better because she didn’t need utensils to eat it, which eliminated the possibility of giving her a weapon she could use on him, but mostly that was all he ever cooked. He liked to eat. He didn’t like kitchen clean up, and he didn’t like having to stand over the food to keep it from burning.

“Atlantica. This kingdom is called Atlantica. There are seven kingdoms of the merfolk.”

“Oceans. Name oceans.”

He sent her a questioning glance.

“We call. Atlantic, Pacific, Artic, Indian ….”

He gave her his full attention. “You know of the seven kingdoms?”

She shook her head. “Oceans.” She held up her hand, spreading her fingers. “Five seas.”

Returning his attention to his task after a moment, he considered what she seemed to be saying—her people knew nothing about his and yet the names they used for the seas were virtually the same. It couldn’t merely be coincidence. When he’d finished mixing the casserole and put it in the cooking unit, she climbed off of the stool to study the unit. “Stove or maybe microwave. How this cook? What radiation use?”

He studied her for a moment. “A combination of sonic and electrical.”

Her brows rose. “Sound?”

“At certain wave lengths it produces heat.”

She nodded. As she turned away, he caught her arm. “You understand electric?”

Again, she nodded.

He lifted his free hand and held it level, generating a light spark. She jumped, her eyes widening. He met her gaze evenly when she looked at him. He’d suspected she didn’t have the ability to throw current or she would’ve used it at some point to try to defend herself.

He wanted to tell her he was sorry that he’d used it on her to subdue her when he’d captured her, but he knew that wasn’t strictly true. He felt no regret that he had captured her and brought her to Miles. Otherwise, he would never have known her at all. If he had any regrets, it was that it couldn’t have happened any other way, that he’d hurt her, frightened her.

She shook her head, almost as if she knew what was going through his mind. “Not regret.”

He frowned faintly wondering if she meant she didn’t regret it or if she’d forgiven him for it. Unfortunately, he didn’t know and even if she had forgiven him it wasn’t something he could forgive himself. He was always going to regret that he hadn’t met her under better circumstances, some situation where there wouldn’t be shadows.

She touched his face. “Glad.”

He eyed her dubiously.

She grimaced. “Am glad. This thing bad,” she added, tapping the head set.

He chuckled. “Very bad.”

Distracted by the sound of the timer on the cooking unit, he grabbed a pad and opened it to remove the casserole he’d cooked, searched for a knife to slice it into manageable portions and finally served it up on two plates. Setting them on the counter, he went to the preserver unit for a beverage to wash it down and finally simply poured her a glass of fresh water since she seemed to prefer it. To his mind it was pretty flat and tasteless, but she didn’t seem to care for his beverage of preference.

Angie propped her elbow on the counter, studying Damien speculatively.

He lifted his dark brows at her questioningly when he’d settled. “Not hungry?”

“Hot.”

She flashed when she said it and Damien studied her curiously. Finally, he lifted a hand and touched her cheek. “Why this? Why do you change color like this?”

Angie looked down at her food in chagrin, wondering whether to pretend she hadn’t understood what he’d asked or not. She didn’t suppose it mattered. If the sounds he was hearing were anything like what she was receiving, it must be pretty near impossible to understand what she was trying to say anyway. It seemed almost easier to try to get her meaning across with one word or two.

Finally, she just shook her head, unwilling to tell him that, although she’d meant the food, the moment she’d said it she’d realized she was.

It was hard not to feel hot when he was around.

One would think that she would’ve gotten used to seeing him naked after all the time she’d spent with them, she thought wryly. She supposed she had, just as she’d begun to feel more comfortable with her own nudity. That didn’t change the fact, though, that she found him extremely attractive—with or without clothes, she thought she would’ve heated up any time he came anywhere around her.

She was pretty sure she couldn’t blame his nakedness for the fact that she couldn’t keep her mind off of sex.

She was, in fact, certain that wasn’t it because, except for when he was aroused, it wasn’t particularly noticeable that he was completely naked, not just bare chested. Due to the coloration of his lower body and the striations, his genitalia, which was the same color and had the same markings, weren’t blatant, no more than it would’ve been if he’d been wearing formfitting jeans or something of that nature.

Of course, she knew he wasn’t, but the mind tended to make things fit familiar patterns and, mostly, she didn’t think about his lack of clothing—not any more.

It was him, plain and simple—maybe because he was so exotic, but she thought it was just that he was physically appealing and also charming, despite the language barrier.

She liked his smile.

She liked the way his eyes lit up with amusement sometimes when he didn’t actually smile.

She liked the way he’d worked so hard to try to talk to her in her own language, just to reassure her.

She liked his face—everything about it.

He was handsome by any standards.

And just plain sexy.

My god! The things the man did to her when he touched her!

That was why she couldn’t keep her mind off sex.

She discovered when she emerged from her thoughts that he was studying her quizzically. “Embarrassed,” she said finally in answer to his question. Unfortunately, the computer chip didn’t translate—or maybe that was actually fortunate since she didn’t really want to tell him start with? “Shy?”

He tilted his head curiously at that. “Shy?”

She shrugged—not exactly, but she supposed it was close enough.

He touched her chin with one finger, tipping her face up. “Angie shy?”

She felt her face heat.

He chuckled.

He seemed inordinately pleased to find out that was what it meant—not that that actually
was
it, but it must have been something that was bothering him. Maybe he’d thought it meant she was angry, she thought, remembering that both he and Miles had turned really red just before they’d gone outside and tried to pulverize each other?

And, of course, she did turn red when she was angry. It was the curse of the damned hair and fair skin. She flushed noticeably when she was overheated—weather-wise and otherwise—and when she was confused or embarrassed or angry or just felt uncomfortable or awkward.

In fact, if often seemed to her that she was just a natural born neon sign.

Boy was he going to be confused if he thought that one answer was
the
answer!

Seeing the food had cooled enough to eat, she focused on eating, but her thoughts kept going back to what she’d seen outside the last time Damien and Miles had taken it into their heads to go out to wrestle. “Man outside,” she said finally. “Who was?”

Damien nearly choked on his food. Clearing his throat, he took a gulp of his drink. “What okean?”

She frowned at him, certain he was hedging. “Window. Before.”

His brows drew together, but he shook his head again.

“After ….” She made the hand signal. Crude it might be, but he had no trouble interpreting the finger in the hole signal!

His skin color darkened—not red but more yellowish. “Enforcer,” he finally muttered.

He’d blushed, she realized, abruptly recalling she’d noticed Miles had a particular tendency to darken that way. It distracted her for moment. “Trouble?”

He shrugged. “We’ll talk about it later—after Miles fixes the damned translator.”

She nodded, but she found his reaction a little disturbing. She didn’t know what a
mertiz
was, and she hadn’t understood half of the last he’d said, beyond ‘talk later’, but she had a feeling it concerned her.

Mostly, she thought wryly, because the
mertiz
had stood at the window staring at her and had thoroughly unnerved her.

The food finally distracted her from the anxiety—not because it was good, although it was, or because she was particularly hungry, because she really wasn’t, but because it reminded her of what had happened before the
mertiz
had showed up.

She toyed with the idea of deliberately dripping some of the juices on herself just to see if he would be as assiduous in cleaning her up as he had been before. The problem was she didn’t think she could deliberately ring her boob if she tried—not and also make it look like an accident, and she wasn’t certain she could be brazen enough to carry off ‘provocative’.

She was still pondering it, wavering over whether she could manufacture a believable ‘accident’ or not when Damien solved her dilemma for her, uttering a sound of annoyance and surging to his feet. Her gaze zeroed in instantly on the stream of juices trickling down the center of his chest.

Better! She’d been wondering if she dared initiate.

Sex and food—her two most favorite things!

Chapter Ten

Damien looked at her with a mixture of surprise and confusion when she stood up and moved toward him, catching his wrist as he reached to brush the juices off, but he didn’t resist as she moved his hand away.

Leaning closer, she flicked her tongue out and dragged it leisurely up his chest, gathering the juices along the way. He tensed all over, sucked in a harsh breath and held it.

Taking that as encouragement, she drifted closer, exploring as much of his chest as she could reach by simply tilting her head, with her lips and feather light brushes of her tongue. Damien dripping with ‘whatever’ juices, she thought a little whimsically. Delicious.

“Angie!” he said hoarsely.

She paused, tilting her head back to look at him. “You’d don’t like it?”

He squeezed his eyes tightly closed. “Gods! Yes!”

She lifted her hands to aid in her exploration, marveling at how satiny his skin felt, how hard the sleek muscles beneath it. She doubted her own skin was as soft.

He began to tremble with the effort to remain still. She felt her belly clench with heated desire, felt her chest tighten with anticipation. She rubbed her cheek along the ridges of muscle, skimmed her hands lightly up along his chest and then down again across his belly. He sucked his stomach in tightly as she touched it.

His cock, which had risen the instant she stepped close to him, and had been stroking along her thigh, reared upward. She captured it in one hand, stroking the silky length of it with almost a sense of surprise to discover the skin that covered it was even smoother.

He caught her waist just as she was trying to decide if she wanted to see what it tasted like, lifting her straight up from the floor. She sucked in a sharp breath of surprise, lifting her legs instinctively and wrapping them around his waist. His mouth covered hers before she’d even finished sucking in the breath, conforming tightly to hers, sucking at her lips feverishly. He shuddered when she thrust her tongue into his mouth, sucking at that, as well and sending a flash heat through her to join the fire that had already sprung to life in her belly.

“Goodness!” a feminine voice exclaimed from somewhere behind them, sending a jolt through both of them that was far less pleasant than the jolts that had preceded it.

Damien jerked away from her guiltily, trying to set her on her feet and away from him and only succeeded in pushing her upper body away since her legs were locked firmly around his waist.