Chapter Three #2
Torr shrugged. “None were armed except the asshole that challenged you for the woman. He sent them back.”
Ryne’s lips tightened. “There was no challenge. He claimed her. She was surprised, though. Beyond that, I saw nothing in their behavior toward one another to support his claim. I do not think she is truly his. I do think, though, that he considers her his and he will fight to keep her.”
Torr thought that over, struggling with resentment. “Mayhap it is only that he is their chief and that is what that was about? Protection because she is one of their people?”
Perhaps, Ryne thought, but he did not believe he had read the male wrong.
They left the village of the star people and headed toward the river village where they had been living since the war had ended with the bastard that had come to claim their world and rape it of everything of value--leaving almost nothing to keep the natives alive--no shelter and very little food.
The welcome smell of food cooking on the hearth greeted them when they had made their way behind the waterfall and through the hidden entrance to the underground village.
The gathering place was full almost to overflowing, they discovered.
Torr and Ryne shared a speaking look and simply got in line. Ordinarily, since they were villagers and contributed to the food supplies, they would have expected to be served before visitors, but they had not arrived until after the distribution had begun … unfortunately.
Luckily, food was far more plentiful than it had been in years past when they had had to avoid capture or death by the hunters whenever they went out to try to gather food, and they found that there was plenty for everyone.
When everyone had been served and settled to eat, those who had gone to the village of the star people to see what they could discover began to share the news they had gathered.
“They have the look of the star people who came before--those who fell from the sky in eggs. They use the same speak, as well,” Milak, the eldest warrior present announced.
“I spotted tek in the sky below us,” Ryne said when his turn came.
“It did not have the look of the tek the conqueror, Ama-Zing, used, but it was very similar. My padur and I followed. It went straight to the ruins. It stayed and looked long enough we decided to follow it when it left and came upon the village the new star-people are building. It landed there.”
Their observations started an angry uproar.
Ryne and Torr exchanged a long, speaking look.
“They are like the sky egg people who came to live among our people. Not like the usurpers,” Torr shouted above the others.
That assertion silenced some, quieted others.
“They are not welcome to take what we have either!” another warrior shouted.
“You are certain? You saw them well enough?”
“You heard their speak and it was the same?”
“I approached a young female and spoke to her,” Ryne shouted over the other voices. “Yes. We are certain.”
“Their leader came to warn us away, but he did not attack,” Torr said. “They were working very hard to make a village for themselves.”
“We cannot afford to make war if we do not have to. Roque is a man I call friend who, with his padur, fought the evil bastard who destroyed our villages and won a great victory by blowing up that evil place of our enemy. I have heard that he has taken one of the women of the sky eggs as his padra. I will go to speak to him and his woman and see what I can learn of this.”
That did not settle the matter entirely, naturally. There were more who did not trust the sky people among them than those who did--even though they had absorbed them into their tribe and some had taken a sky woman as their padra--not in their own village, but in some they had all heard.
Because females of a mating age of their own people were few in numbers.
He was of no mind to make war on the people if it was not necessary, however.
He wanted the woman he had found. The one the possessive bastard had called Belle.
He would steal her if that was what it took, but he wanted more from her than she would willingly give, he feared, if he was forced to that.
“Do you think if we make peace with her people that she will consider accepting us?” Torr asked in a carefully neutral voice when they had found a place to make a pallet and settled to sleep.
“I think we will have no victory otherwise,” Ryne retorted tightly.
“Likely you are right,” Torr agreed. “I am thinking we will have to steal her away from that bastard that claimed her, however.”
Ryne thought much the same, but he was willing to coax her to him either way and he thought, wryly, that it would be less frightening, and more effective, if he did not have to steal her first.
* * * *
Belle was thoroughly unsettled by her experience.
A level of excitement thrummed through her so powerfully, though, that it was difficult to collect her wits enough even to attempt to analyze the source of it.
There was fear in the mix.
She was convinced of that.
She wasn’t certain that it dominated. In fact, she was almost sure that it was far below … the thrill of excitement pounding through her even after Connor Carnegie had dragged her back inside the ‘fortress’ and the gates were closed.
Logically, she thought that it could be put down to nerves from what might have been a deadly encounter and anxiety of a continued threat.
She couldn’t completely dismiss that.
But her mind wasn’t focused on any sense of threat or danger, really.
It kept replaying the moments when she had spotted ‘him’ and when he had dropped from the branch and stood before her--close enough he could have reached out, easily, and grabbed her.
Instead, he had merely stood examining her with his gaze while she had examined him with hers.
He was a … stunningly beautiful creature, she thought.
Stunning to her, anyway.
Exotic … strange to her eyes, but … beautifully made for all that he seemed so very alien.
Powerfully designed--sleek and muscular--his chest and arms. Even his thighs and legs that had been sheathed in some sort of leather trousers and boots had seemed powerfully muscular, well defined in a way that made him more of a work of art than a flawed creation of nature.
Not that he looked like any of the creations of the mythologies she had always found fascinating--but in that vein, she thought--a winged being.
With horns.
And a narrow, angular countenance that missed ugly entirely because it screamed high testosterone male, she realized.
Especially with the heavy brows.
That was what had her body in chaos, she thought abruptly.
He had only to land within an arm’s length of her to throw her entire system into chemical Armageddon.
She dismissed the thought as suddenly as it formed.
He screamed ‘alien’--not male in the sense of attraction!
It was insane that the thought had even occurred to her!
If anything it was Connor’s sudden appearance that had prompted it, she was sure.
It wasn’t as if she was immune to the bastard’s scary-stunning attractiveness any more than any other woman on the damned ship!
No doubt about it. Unless a woman just preferred another woman, Connor was the male, the pinnacle of what every woman wanted. He exuded self-confident male as if it was some mind-bending drug-cologne that made women want to climb up him.
Inspired psychos--like the one that had just … accosted her out of the blue.
As rattled as she was, even though she wasn’t actually aware of it at the time, she was sure it was Connor showing up like some kind of super hero/knight in shining armor to rescue her that had thrown her completely off-kilter.
“What the fuck was that about?” he growled, shattering her fantasy abruptly when he dragged her to a halt the moment they cleared the crowd that had gathered near the gate.
Belle gaped at him, trying to regain her equilibrium. Finally, she managed to blink and that seemed to jumpstart her brain function.
Prompted by her thoughts and a sudden sense of guilt, heat rose to her face and intensified.
Because it occurred to her that it was not an accident that he’d been heading her way.
And she’d feared, at the time, that it was pointed because of something the bitch had said.
Still--she wanted a clearer picture of what she was being accused of before she started manufacturing a lie to cover her ass.
“What?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
Because there was no getting around the fact that the man unnerved the hell out of her when he came anywhere near her--at any time--and especially when his mood seemed … a little impatient.
Something flickered in his eyes. He dragged in a heavy breath and let it out slowly--as if he was trying to tamp his anger.
“I know you …. Everybody thinks I’m an asshole that just enjoys throwing my weight around, but there is a reason for my decisions.
I thought I’d made it clear that no one was to leave the colony alone,” he managed to say evenly.
She hadn’t forgotten that.
She thought, maybe, she really ought to assure him she didn’t think he was an asshole. That would be the polite thing to do. But it wasn’t as if she’d said that.
Sure it crossed her mind to think of him as an asshole at least as often as she thought about how stunningly attractive he was ….
And, now that he brought it up, she did recall that everyone was told not to go off alone, but she hadn’t actually realized that she had.
She couldn’t very well tell him that she’d ducked out of sight because she thought he was going to confront her about something, though.
Well … she could, but she didn’t want to.
She licked her lips while she was struggling to formulate a believable lie. “I didn’t actually realize I had--become separated,” she said--which was the absolute truth because she’d been completely focused on hiding from him.
She wrestled with the urge to tell him the alien man had already been sitting in the tree when she discovered him.
Because she knew he had been--watching their camp--even though she hadn’t consciously acknowledged that was why he was there.
She could protect herself by telling the captain that and it would probably completely divert him--maybe in a hostile way.
She didn’t actually know that he--the alien man--had evil intensions though, she reminded herself.
It didn’t seem right--or smart--to risk stirring up trouble with the natives just to keep from getting lectured. “I thought I was in trouble,” she confessed uncomfortably.
She couldn’t say that the confession did a damned thing for the tension. His lips tightened. That time the flicker she saw in his eyes seemed … more angry, not less.
“So … you’re saying you expected …?”
Belle cleared her throat. “That … woman that spoke to you. She’d … said something to me and then went and spoke to you and I thought …. I thought she was trying to get me in trouble.”
His expression hardened. “You have a hell of an opinion of me,” he said coldly. “That was all it took to have you run right into danger?”
Put that way, it sounded really stupid--like childish stupid. “I don’t know you,” she said angrily. “I have no opinion of you at all! I just didn’t feel like trying to defend myself from her spite!”
“So you presumed she had said something spiteful? Because you are prone to spite?”
Belle gasped at him in outrage. But then she’d known if the bitch said something ugly about her that she was going to be fighting a losing battle trying to defend herself. People always tended to believe the first ugly thing they heard.
Especially if it was about her.
Because if it was something ugly, then it was probably true, right?
“She seemed to be laboring under the idea that I had an interest in you,” she said tightly. “I assured her I didn’t, but she didn’t appear to believe me. Thank you for helping me. I’ll make sure I don’t go out alone again.”