8. Clair #4
“Never.”
“Big fella?” she suggested, relenting a little.
Kaelus sighed heavily.
“That one is at least factually accurate.”
Clair laughed.
“Fine. I have plenty for you. But what are you going to call me?”
“I will call you Clair. It is less formal than Doctor Donovan and should suffice,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Nope. Too normal.”
“It is your name,” he pointed out.
“That doesn’t matter,” Clair told him. “If we're supposed to look madly in love, you need to call me something affectionate.”
Kaelus raked a hand through his hair.
“Fine,” he said at last. “There is a word in the Kindred Mother Tongue which comes to mind when I think of you.”
Clair perked up at once.
“What word?”
He hesitated, then finally murmured,
“Lissa'ra.”
Clair tried it carefully and found she liked the way the alien word rolled off her tongue.
“Lissa'ra. What does it mean?” she asked.
Kaelus's gaze slid toward her.
“Litte, precious one.”
For a moment Clair forgot how to breathe. Then she recovered and frowned.
“Little? Excuse me, I am not little.”
Kaelus raised one dark eyebrow.
“You are little to me,” he pointed out.
His gaze moved slowly over her, from the top of her curly head down over her full breasts and hips before returning to her face.
“You are barely more than half my size,” he went on. “You’re delicate and small and soft and so little I can lift you with one arm.”
“You don’t need to sound so pleased about it,” Clair said.
She meant for her words to come out sounding dry and sarcastic…instead her voice was breathy. What was wrong with her?
“I am merely stating a fact,” Kaelus said.
“Well, I'm five-foot-four,” Clair said. “That's not abnormally short.”
“You are little to me,” Kaelus repeated. “Little and soft and fragile—which is why I feel so protective of you and the reason I didn’t want us to go on this mission.”
There was something about the deep, quiet way he spoke that made Clair clench her thighs together. So he felt protective of her? He’d never said that before—not right out, anyway.
She swallowed hard, trying to play it off.
“Fine,” she said. “Lissa'ra is nice. I suppose I can live with that.”
Kaelus's golden eyes remained on hers.
“It suits you,” he rumbled.
Clair's stomach performed an irritating little somersault. She shouldn’t be feeling this way about the big grumpy Hybrid—especially since she’d sworn off men and sex for good.
She looked down at the questionnaire on her tablet again.
“All right, moving right along before this gets weird,” she mumbled.
“I believe it became weird some time ago,” Kaelus pointed out. “However, weirdness is unavoidable if you insist on asking and answering such intimate questions.”
“That's probably true.” Clair cleared her throat. “Moving on…what do we argue about most?”
“The laboratory,” they both said at the same time.
Clair burst out laughing, glad for the release of tension.
The corners of Kaelus's mouth twitched up.
“You smiled!” she accused.
At once, he frowned.
“I did not.”
“You did. I saw it. Mister Grumpypants smiled!”
“You are hallucinating from excessive caffeine,” he countered.
“And you're full of crap,” Clair said, grinning.
He shook his head.
“I do not understand that expression.”
“I know.”
Still smiling, Clair went to the next question. But when she read it, she froze. Maybe they ought to skip this one.
Unfortunately, Kaelus noticed her hesitation.
“What?” he asked, frowning. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Clair said quickly, trying to hide the tablet.
His golden eyes narrowed.
“You have asked every other ridiculous question on that list of yours. Why are you stopping now?”
Clair cleared her throat.
“Because this one might be… a little personal.”
His brows rose.
“More personal than discussing where we sleep?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
He frowned.
“What is it?”
Clair bit her lip. Should she? Then she decided, what the hell?
“We need to decide how often we have sex,” she said bluntly.
Kaelus had been drumming his long fingers on the steering yoke impatiently but now he went completely motionless.
Clair had to work very hard not to laugh at his startled expression.
“Excuse me?” he asked at last.
“You heard me.”
He frowned.
“I sincerely wish I had not.”
She reached across and patted his arm which was tight with tension.
“Come on, we're going to a planet where their entire society seems to revolve around mating. What if somebody asks?”
“No civilized individual would ask another male how often he mates his female,” Kaelus growled.
“You don't know that,” Clair said.
His eyes blazed.
“It would be an outrageous invasion of privacy!”
“So is asking married couples whether they knew what color toothbrush their spouse used, but apparently immigration officers on Earth do that kind of thing,” she pointed out.
He frowned.
“What does an oral hygiene device have to do with mating?”
Clair shrugged.
“Nothing. That's my point.”
Kaelus rubbed a hand over his face and his fingers made a whispery sound over his stubble.
“Choose whatever answer you wish,” he said at last.
Clair grinned.
“Twice a week?”
His head snapped around.
“No.”
She frowned.
“No?”
“No,” he said firmly.
“Okay. Three times?” she offered.
Kaelus's expression was becoming increasingly dark.
Clair found she was enjoying this enormously.
“Every other day?” she asked.
He growled.
“Oh, come on, big fella. You said to pick an answer,” she said, laughing.
“Choose a believable one then,” he growled.
Clair's eyebrows rose.
“Okay, this ought to be interesting. What would you consider believable?”
Kaelus got a brooding look on his face but said nothing.
Clair smiled wickedly.
“Once a day?” she teased. “Twice a day? My, my—we’re really getting into can’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-other territory here.”
His golden eyes shifted to hers and something in them made her smile fade.
“If you were truly my mate,” he said in a low voice, “Twice a day would be insufficient. Because you’re right—I would not be able to keep my hands off you.”
Clair’s breath caught in her throat. The cabin of the long-range shuttle suddenly felt much smaller.
“Oh,” she managed. “Is…is that right?”
Kaelus's eyes remained locked on hers and she found she couldn’t look away.
His pupils had narrowed into thin black slits surrounded by glowing gold, and for the first time Clair understood exactly what Kat had meant all those months ago when she'd said Kindred males worshipped their females.
There was naked hunger in Kaelus's face. Not the crude, demanding kind Clair had become accustomed to seeing in James whenever he decided she owed him sex. There was nothing petulant or selfish about the way Kaelus was looking at her.
If anything, the intensity of his gaze made her feel as though she would be the one receiving instead of giving. It was almost as though he wanted to eat her up. Which was a crazy thought—wasn’t it?
Crazy or not, that thought sent a rush of heat through her.
Clair shifted in her seat, feeling suddenly hot and wet between her legs.
“Well,” she said, trying desperately to sound casual. “That’s, uh, good to know.”
Kaelus looked away first.
“We should tell them once a day,” he rumbled. “They won’t understand a Kindred’s hunger for his mate—his need to taste her and fill her.”
Clair felt her cheeks get hot all over again.
“Who said anything about ‘tasting’?” she asked, her voice coming out breathless.
Kaelus gave her a steady look.
“Tasting your woman is one of the greatest pleasures a male can have,” he rumbled.
“Kindred males actually have a biological need to taste their mates. So if we were mated, yes—I would want to taste you often. I would want to spread you with my tongue and feel you tremble and hear you moan as I pleasured you with my mouth.”
“Oh…I…I…”
Clair didn’t know what to say. The way he was looking at her and the hot things he was saying were making her feel flustered and breathless.
At last she nodded.
“So once a day—that’s your compromise?”
Kaelus nodded.
“Yes.”
Clair let out a nervous laugh, though she was still feeling breathless.
“All right. Once a day,” she said.
Neither of them looked at the other for the next several minutes. It seemed too dangerous somehow to look into the golden depths of his eyes again. Kaelus seemed to feel that eye contact was dangerous too, because he stared steadily out the viewscreen.
Clair tried to look at her list, though her brain kept replaying the fact that twice a day would be insufficient and how much he wanted to taste her in Kaelus's deep rumbling voice.
They had answered all the most important questions, she decided.
No way was she going to ask the one about “which is your favorite sexual position.” They were already getting in way too deep.
She put away the tablet and turned toward the viewscreen.
Titus Four was still an hour away, but a bright star gleamed in the distance, surrounded by the faint glow of the system they were approaching.
She had started the questionnaire because she was afraid that she and Kaelus didn't know enough about each other to convincingly pretend they were mates. Now she had an entirely different problem.
Because somewhere in the course of asking about favorite foods and sleeping habits and ridiculous pet names, Clair had discovered that Kaelus knew what time she woke up, how she took her coffee, what she ate when she was upset, what she did when she was nervous, and exactly how her face changed when she was excited about her work.
And she knew more about him than she'd realized too. Maybe pretending to be mated wasn't going to be the difficult part after all.
Maybe the difficult part was going to be remembering that they weren't.