REMMEN
I was leaning on Anne harder than I needed to, but her skin was soft and smelled like the soap she used. I couldn’t make myself pull away; I didn’t want to.
My side smarted and I was bleeding, but the fight with the gorrel wouldn’t have even rated a trip to the healers for a bandage back in the arena. A bit of water to wash the wounds and a cloth and I’d be good.
Still, I let her lead me inside.
She steered me to the bench by the cold hearth and pushed down on my shoulder until I sat, and I let her believe it was her weight that moved me.
The house looked different with her in it. I’d never given the front room much thought before. A bench, the one chair, a table I ate at standing up, a shelf holding a jar of nails and a lamp.
Until a few weeks ago I’d never once expected to want anyone to see the inside of it. She’d been here before. I still wondered what she made of a home a man had so plainly meant to keep empty.
Without needing to ask, Anne stomped into the kitchen and grabbed rags from under the sink and filled a small bowl with water before coming back to kneel at my feet. She glared up at me and I felt my lips twitch.
“Don’t you dare smile.” She scowled.
I had her in my house in the middle of the day, down on her knees at my feet with a bowl of water, scowling at me for bleeding.
It was the only thing I wanted. Not the office, not the town. Her, here, in the daylight, where I could keep her.
I would do whatever it took to make that true, and I would not be gentle about it. Whatever it cost me, I’d already decided I would pay it.
“I’ll always smile when you’re kneeling in front of me.”
Anne’s cheeks flamed bright red and I rumbled out a laugh.
“You could have internal bleeding,” Anne insisted, and swiped her damp cloth none too gently over the worst of the scratches.
“I know what internal bleeding feels like. I’m fine.” But I didn’t pull away from her touch.
Anne cleaned the wounds, eyes so intent on my skin that she might have forgotten the rest of me existed.
Out the window the square was still churning with the aftermath, someone sluicing water over the stones, two bulls dragging the carcass off toward the tree line by a rope around its back legs. That was what I had to offer her. A hard planet, a rough town, and me.
“Why’d you come here?” I asked. “We’re a no-name rock and we don’t even have any coffee. You could have gone anywhere.”
She wrung the cloth out over the bowl, folded it, unfolded it, hunted down a scrape on my forearm that had already stopped bleeding and gave it all her attention.
Her hands were careful on me, gentler than the scowl she still had on, and I let her fuss over nothing because it meant she wasn’t leaving yet.
“I told you, the passage was free.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Darling—”
“Don’t.” She sounded like she was the one bleeding. “We can’t.”
“I know. I—”
“I was engaged.” She set the cloth down on my knee and left it there, and her hands went still for the first time since she’d hauled me through the door. “His name was Alistair and we started dating in college.”
I turned that over. Someone had been promised the whole of her, all that nerve and mouth and those stubborn clever hands, and had let her climb onto a transport and cross the stars alone. I couldn’t make it fit in my head.
Males killed each other over far less than what he’d thrown away.
Then the rest of it landed, the flatness under her voice she was working so hard to hold, and I understood there was a reason she wasn’t his wife.
“Is he dead?” I asked. Anne tried to stand, but I hauled her into my lap before she could pull away. I needed to feel her nearness.
“He’s married to my ex-best friend.” She bowed her head and it thunked against my chest. “While I worked for two years on Perren trying to build our nest egg and breaking myself a little more with the pain of others every day, he went and—he didn’t even wait three months.
And they didn’t tell me. I walked away from Perren because I couldn’t take it anymore and when I got home, I found Janice living in my house.
Sleeping in my bed. She was supposed to be my maid of honor!
” Anne sounded more indignant than upset.
“Two weeks later I was on a transport to the Alien Matchmaking Agency counselor training program. I still have their wedding invite in my bag. Can you believe they freaking invited me?”
The old cold came up in me, patient, and made itself comfortable. I’d never been a stranger to wanting to end a male. I spent six years pretending to be civilized, and mostly I’d learned how to set the past and leave it down. It stood right back up now.
Some soft creature on some green world had looked at my mate, at her loyalty and her years of grinding herself down for a future she thought they were building together, and had rolled it all up and handed it to her maid of honor.
“There are many ways I could make it look like an accident.” I wasn’t sure if I was joking.
She smacked my shoulder. “You were a gladiator, not an assassin. And you’re not killing my ex.” It made her laugh. “Honestly, thank god I wasn’t with him when I got here. This agency bullshit between us is bad enough. Breaking up over video call would be the icing on the cake.”
“So you’d choose me over him?” I couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of my voice.
“You’re my mate, you big lug. I thought we established that. The hand of fate is not exactly subtle.” Her lips brushed against my jaw. “You could have died out there.”
“I was never in any danger of that happening.”
“Be serious.”
“I know exactly what kind of danger I can handle. One gorrel couldn’t strike me down. A whole pack might be a problem.”
I swallowed the rest of it. There’d been a night near the end in the pits when they loosed a whole pack of something long and low into the sand with three of us, no weapons worth the name, to see what we’d do for their crowd.
I remembered the sound of it better than anything else. Two of us walked out of the ring.
I didn’t tell her that part. She had enough dead men in her nights already, and I didn’t want to be one more.
“I can’t lose you.” Her voice grew serious. “I don’t know how—no, we can’t do this, but I can’t lose you. Even if we never…”
I cupped her cheek and stole a kiss. With her right on my lap, it was as simple as breathing.
Anne sank into it, opening her mouth under mine like she belonged there.
She tasted of salt and the long day and the fight going out of her, and she made a small sound into my mouth that I felt everywhere at once.
I got one hand into her hair and the other flat against her spine and brought her in until there was nothing between us but cloth.
She was so small against me and she never seemed to notice it, never held herself careful. She kissed me with her whole self, no hedging, and stars help us both I thought she’d been wanting to since the middle of the square.
My blood had been running hot since the square, and now it pooled low and heavy. My cock thickened against the seam of my trousers, and she was right there in my lap to feel it, and she pressed down into it instead of pulling away.
“When does your contract end?” I asked as I pulled away. I knew the particulars of the program, but each employee was unique and with Anne all over me, I couldn’t remember specifics.
“Two years,” she said between kisses that were no more than brushes of her lips against mine.
I groaned. “A year I could endure, but two?”
Her lips curved against mine, but I could feel the sadness in it.
“If I quit this job in the middle of my contract, I won’t get a reference; no one will hire me.
” She placed a hand flat on my chest before I could make some grand declaration.
“The only reason I have clients right now is because you’re dragging them to my door.
New Knossos really doesn’t need three of us if no one will open up. ”
She didn’t see the good she’d done here, that she’d reached the Butchers of all men and had brought them closer into town than I ever thought possible. But every good thing she did was a mark against our future.
“I don’t want you to go,” I confessed.
“I’m not planning on leaving.” She leaned up and kissed me again, and this time she didn’t stop to say anything after it.
We were done talking. There was only so much a male could be expected to withstand, and I’d reached the far end of it a good while back.
I kissed her until she was breathing hard and fisting a hand in my hair to keep my mouth where she wanted it, and then I got an arm under her and stood up out of the bench with her held against my chest.
She yelped and grabbed on. My side gave a dull complaint and I ignored it entirely.
I carried her back through the house to my room, where the sun came through the thin curtains I’d hung over the glass.
I’d hung them weeks ago. Not for the morning light.
So a small human woman could lie in my bed in broad daylight and no one out on the street would ever see her there.
The light came through them soft and gold and filled the whole room, and we were still a secret inside it, and I laid her down in the middle of the bed.
I took her clothes off slowly, because I wanted to and because it made her squirm, which I wanted even more. Her shirt first, up over her head, her hair coming loose. Her breasts came free and my mouth went dry, small and soft and already tipped with tight pink nipples that begged for my tongue.
Then the band of her trousers, easing them down her legs, my knuckles dragging over her thighs the whole way. She let me. She lay back on my sheets and let her knees fall open, and I looked my fill.
Flushed pink down her throat and across her chest, and lower, where the soft curls between her legs were already slick, where she was swollen and open and glistening for me before I’d laid a hand there. The scent of her arousal hit the back of my throat and my cock throbbed.