Like it washerfault she had everything out and dangling—in a public place!
Unreasonable bastards!Theyhad stripped her bare and not given her a damned thing to cover herself with.
It was her last thought before she felt the prick of an injection and lost consciousness.
Chapter Ten
The first thing Emma noticed when she rose toward awareness was that her throat felt tight. It brought on a sense of choking and she jolted into full wakefulness, clutching at her throat.
It wasn’t a nightmare. There was something heavy around her throat.
“Dis control ting.”
Emma nearly jumped out of her skin when he spoke, whipping her head to look at the man lying next to her so fast she felt her neck bone pop.
She wasn’t exactly relieved to discover it was Gaelen lying on the platform beside her although that certainly beat the hell out of waking up beside a complete stranger.
She was still thoroughly confused, but she couldn’t seem to gather her marbles to figure out what was wrong with the picture at the moment.
“What happened?” she asked hoarsely.
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Dey zap us.”
And put this … ‘control ting’ around her neck?
And also his, she saw now.
It looked like it was made from some sort of metal, but she had a bad feeling it was something like the control collars they made for dogs to be used with ‘invisible’ fences, except probably worse.
“Take de head off if dey feel like it.”
Yep. Worse. Way worse. She closed her eyes and settled back again, struggling to focus and beat back the rise of hysteria in her throat before she had a full blown panic attack. It was that effort to focus that finally produced memories from just before the blackout.
“Did you …? Did you bring me here?” she asked tentatively after a few moments.
“Dey brought us.”
Dey? They? The robots? She was about to ask why they had done that, when she’d been with Kadin before, why had she ended up with him, but almost as quickly as she wondered, an answer seemed to materialize.
It wasn’t just by chance.
She didn’t think.
No more than it was just by chance that she’d been tossed in with Kadin and without a stitch of clothes.
She was still confused. The aliens wanted her bred, why switch her partner so quickly?
God! She supposed she was lucky they’d given her this much privacy instead of tossing her into a pen and turning a half dozen ‘bulls’ loose on her!
“You’re suppose to … uh … we’re supposed to … uh ….” Ok there was no delicate way to put it.
He lay back, staring up at the ceiling. Silence enveloped them. “I no touch you no want.”
Well fuck!
Thank you for being so kind as to put me in the position of having to ask for it, she thought indignantly!
She swallowed against a knot of misery in her throat. She liked him. She didn’t want to make him feel bad. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t find him the least bit attractive. He was very attractive.
For an alien man.
Well, honestly, any man.
“That’s … that’s sweet.” She bit her lip. “But … uh … what will they do if we don’t do what they want us to?”
He said nothing for several moments. Then she heard him swallow. “Dey will gibe you to somebody else.”
Emma thought for several moments that her heart would beat her to death. Someone else like Kadin? Or Hauk?
Or someone else like the thundering hoard that had tried to get to her just before all hell broke loose?
What was he thinking? She’d rather be with anybody else?
She’d actually rather not be ‘bred’ at all, damn it!
But she had no choice and that being the case, she thought having sex with the guys she’d come with beat the hell out of having sex with alien males she hadn’t even set eyes on before. She at least knew that the three that had brought her to the ‘dance’ had some sense of decency, that they wouldn’t hurt her or allow it if they could prevent it.
And really, Gaelen was probably the sweetest of the whole bunch—as far as she could tell.
She just wished she thought she had time to get used to the idea at least a little bit, but she had a bad feeling they were being monitored and the bastards would know they weren’t fucking.
Sucking in a sustaining breath, she very carefully moved to her side facing him. “I … uh … I don’t think I want to find out what they’ll do to you or to me if we don’t cooperate. This … uh … this entire thing has been … uh … un…” Unpleasant wasn’t the word she ought to use, she decided. “Scary.”
He rolled toward her. “Dey watch an dey listen,” he said on a low voice.
Faced with a wall of yellow flesh, Emma discovered she had to make several attempts before she could swallow past the damned choker the aliens had fitted her with.
She hadn’t been this close to him before, hadn’t truly appreciated how damn big he was even though she’d thought about all of them as giants. “That’s—that’s what I thought,” she murmured, reminding herself that she’d managed to accept Kadin because she’d realized she really didn’t have a choice and also because it had occurred to her that, if he could achieve the deed, she might get Nye back.
Not that it had been a terrible chore or challenge. He was attractive in a very exotic way, physically, and also personality wise.
She could say the same for all three of them—handsome, very well built, and character to be admired, she believed.
It just felt strange when she still felt like they were pretty much strangers and not even human—sort of titillating but also a bit like playing hooky from school—something she thought was going to get her into trouble at some point.
She supposed she was more of a prude than she’d ever realized.
