Toxic Desire Read online

  I orgasm so hard I have to detach from her throat to let out my own climatic shouts. It slices through my gut and short-circuits my brain.

  Rewired, unmade, I collapse over her and fall into blissful unconsciousness.

  Chapter Three

  Nem

  He bit me. I asked him to. He gave me an orgasm. I made him come, too.

  At least the burning stopped.

  Or dulled.

  The heat lessens, and I am grateful. I don’t care what I had to do to get it to stop. I don’t care that the man—or male Ssedez—who destroyed my ship and half my crew had to lie on top of me. I don’t care that I begged him to bite me and fell victim to…to…to whatever the hell his fangs did to me.

  And his body—all the rippling gold muscle in my hands, over me, trapping me—

  Damn, it was good. Whatever it was. I don’t care that I should’ve killed him already—at the moment, anyway. That will change.

  This isn’t me. I don’t do this. I’m a career military woman. I don’t fuck the enemy.

  I don’t fuck anyone.

  I’m dedicated to my crew. My mission is everything to me. My entire life, everything my family sacrificed, the future of the universe, could depend on what I was forced to leave behind on that ship.

  I don’t know what the hell this planet is doing to me. I can’t fathom how it’s making me lose my focus, but this bullshit stops now.

  At least I no longer feel like I’m on fire from the inside out. That was the most excruciating pain… Followed by the most blissed-out orgasm ever. But whatever. I’ll block that out.

  When my will to move returns, I push him off me and get away from him. I lean on my knees and breathe, nauseous. And I am horrified to feel a dull heat simmering in my core—that can’t be the burn still there.

  But I slip my hand between my legs and rub myself—it sends a jolt up my spine.

  “What the hell?” I shout at the ground. I’m still swollen. This can’t be happening. I rarely think about, much less need, sex—an intentional by-product of my bioengineering. But it doesn’t seem to work here.

  Images of him and his fangs—what it would’ve been like if he’d taken off his leather pants and torn off my clothes. What his cock would’ve felt like, the one I felt between our layers of fabric, as big and hard as he is, thrusting into me. That body of loaded gold muscle fucking me.

  His skin was smooth under my hands. And cool. A refreshing cool next to my steaming skin.

  His hair—I touched it. The shining strands look coarse. The gold metallic appearance is deceptive. They were luxurious and soft.

  I want to touch it again. I want to twist my hands in his hair while he fucks me mercilessly.

  I come against my own hand. It’s a murmur of a climax compared to the one he gave me, but it clears my mind briefly enough to remember…

  He is my enemy.

  And I am unarmed.

  I glance back at him, and he is watching me, his hand massaging himself through the leather he wears. He totally saw me make myself come again.

  I force myself to focus. No matter how badly I’m craving to see what his cock looks like, there are more important things I need.

  All my weapons were attached to my armor, which is now lying helter skelter—and he is between me and it.

  I spot his chest holsters lying on the ground and grab them. Their weight is significant; the pouches must hold more than knives, likely explosives by the heft. I stand, unsheathe the fiercest looking blade, and face him.

  He’s still sitting. He’s stopped touching his cock, but his gaze is far from someone at a disadvantage. Which I suppose is true. He could swipe a leg at my ankles and bring me down.

  Not that I’d let that happen.

  “Are you going to kill me now?” He nods at his knife in my hand.

  I shake off the chill his voice sends through me. “I should.”

  “Would’ve been smarter to do while I was in thrall.”

  “I enthrall you?” I’m too shocked to play coy with it.

  He makes a grunting sound and stands. I don’t miss how his gaze sweeps over me as he does. It lingers over my thighs and hips.

  He stares at my neck. “That was not an attempt to kill you, I will say.”

  I touch the two puncture wounds on the side of my throat. “I surmised as much.”

  “If you let me lick it, it will heal faster.” His voice lowers, even softens.

  The thought of him touching me, let alone with his mouth, has heat flooding my veins—again. “I’ll heal on my own, thanks. My bioengineering is more advanced than that.”

  His breath shudders, and he forces his gaze from me. “Your choice.”

  I don’t know what to do. He’s made no violent advances toward me. But I can hardly let my guard down.

  “What is this place?” he asks, looking at the environment. “This is nothing like we supposed Fyrian would be.”

  “Fyrian?”

  “This planet. The fire world.”

  “The fire world?”

  “Its atmosphere is a haze of red. From space, we believed it engulfed in flames.”

  I recall the star charts aboard my ship. “You mean Planet 6542. It’s caused by a gas releasing from the planet’s core.”

  “Is it toxic?” He puts his hand to his chest. “This burning feeling. It is being caused by something.” He feels it, too. His gaze barely manages to stay on my face, drifting to my nipples and back to my lips.

  And this is why, even after I went rogue with my crew and could’ve abolished the gender-free regulation, I did not. If the others know I’m female, it changes everything, from how they speak to me to how they look at me. Best to just require everyone to wear their helms, armor, and voice scramblers. Then everyone is the same, and there is no sexist treatment.

  But now, thanks to this damn “fire planet” heat thing and my armor’s inability to cope with the temperature, I’ve let my enemy know my secret.

  No orgasm, no matter how good, is worth that.

  “Eyes on my face when you’re talking to me.” I point his knife at his chest.

  Something happens to his skin. It goes from smooth as mine to a thick texture, a diamond pattern slipping over the surface like a protective covering. Almost like scales. Almost like a serpent.

  “What the…” My knife hand falters, and he seizes my lapse in attention.

  He grabs my wrist, keeping me from bringing the knife closer. “Unlike you, I do not require external armor.”

  I could test it. My knife work is good. I could release his hold and slice his forearm open. I could find out if his natural armor is as impenetrable as my shellskin armor was.

  But his touch, the smoothness of his palm—he slides it down my forearm beneath the sleeve covering it. He strokes me with the pads of his fingers, and I become aware how soft my skin is. And how much he likes it.

  “Why did you hide your sex?” he asks. “Female warriors among Ssedez are rare and treasured.”

  That breaks my hypnosis. “To be treasured is to be inferior.” I jerk my hand back. “I am a soldier.” I turn toward the escape pod.

  But by some trick of his fingers, he disarms me.

  I stare back at his hand, the knife I was holding now grasped there. I’m forced to concede his knife skills are superior to mine. Which I shouldn’t take as a blow to my pride—knives are obviously his primary weapon—but I don’t like being inferior in anything.

  “Those belong to me.” He nods at his holsters still in my other hand. His tone is deceptively casual; his stance, however, is ready to do battle.

  There’s a cache of weapons, my kind of weapons, in the bunker inside the pod. I calculate how fast I can get to them. It’s a game of chance. I don’t want to appear hostile. We have a good truce going on here, and logic says we’ll survive this foreign planet better as a pair than alone.

  “If you really want to try and kill me, go get your weapons.” He nods toward the pod’s interior.

  “If I were a man, you wouldn’t give me that chance. This is why I hide my sex.”

  “You’re upset that I give you mercy?”

  “I don’t want your mercy.”

  He steps closer, invading my space, towering over me, though his knife is lowered. He’s not pointing it at me, but he could in an instant. “What do you want?”

  “I want you dead.” Or that’s what I wanted before. It’s what I should still want.

  His eyes flash as though he finds this exciting. “Then why am I still alive?” It’s a taunt. He doesn’t think I would kill him. “You want more, don’t you?”

  I growl, pissed at myself for not killing him. Pissed at him for knowing why.

  He leans his mouth down to my ear. “You may not like me knowing you’re female, but since I do, you’re dying to be fucked.”

  Anger seethes in me, and I swing his ten-pound holsters at his head. He ducks in time, but it throws him off balance. It leaves me an opening, and I charge him.

  Even his big frame is no match for the full impact of my body slam. I knock him to the ground and snatch another knife from his holsters. I get the blade to his neck.

  But not before he gets his knife to mine.

  Stalemate.

  He chuckles low in his chest.

  “What’s funny?” I say. “I’m as likely to kill you as you are me.”

  “Go ahead. Try to cut me. See what happens.”

  Curious, I press the blade against his skin, but it scrapes over the protective covering and—nothing happens. No give, no indentation.

  I’m baffled, and in my surprise, he gets the better of me and flips me onto my back.

  He knocks the wind from my lungs and traps my legs with his. “And since you took your armor off, y
ou are at my mercy now.”

  I struggle but only briefly. He’s trapped me. He learned my move of pressing him away with my leg. My other mainstay, breaking his nose with my forehead, isn’t an option with a blade at my throat. “Bastard.”

  “I do not plan to kill you. Not yet. I need information from you. And I need you to operate the support systems on that pod, because I do not know how.”

  I grasp his hand, testing his strength against mine. He doesn’t budge. “You need me for more than that. Admit it.”

  The burn is heating inside me again. Having him on top of me makes it worse. The weight of him has me hungering for another of his mind-bending orgasms—except this time with him fucking me.

  I shift my hips and feel his cock hard against my belly. Long and thick. It could be its flaccid state. I don’t know, but going by the heat in his eyes, it’s not.

  A growl rumbles low in his chest, and he fingers the puncture wounds on my neck. They’ll heal before the day is over. All trace of them will be gone by morning. But he stares at the marks, and his mouth parts to reveal his fangs lowering again. I watch them protrude past his lip, his tongue licking the tips.

  His tongue—it’s forked.

  If I wasn’t enflamed between my legs, I am now. With my thighs pressed together between his legs, a wetness seeps onto them. I can’t help it—not with the thought of his dual tongue tips licking through the thick folds between my thighs.

  I whimper, and I can’t believe the sound is coming from me.

  I close my eyes and turn my head away, forcing myself to breathe.

  He gets off of me.

  I sit up, resting my head between my knees. Whoever this person is, this me who craves sex like she needs air, I don’t know her. She is foreign, and I don’t know how to deal with her.

  My anger at myself twists my stomach almost as hard as my hatred for him does. It’s his damn fault we’re in this mess—his brutality that destroyed my entire life’s mission.

  And this gods-forsaken planet that has me hungrier for sex with him than for a desire to get revenge and kill him.

  It has to be something about this place causing me to feel this way.

  I need answers. I stalk to the pod and pull its portable computer from the control console. Whatever is in the atmosphere burning through my lungs and veins has to be causing this.

  There’s no other reason why I would want to fuck this male who has cost me everything.

  Chapter Four

  Oten

  Tasting my venom again sets off warnings in my head. I did not think about it the first time, because my blood was on fire. But the venom is not something I have tasted since I was a pubescent youth, not for a hundred and twenty-five years. It is not something that happens with just any sexual encounter.

  It is only supposed to happen at the initiation of the Attachment.

  Which cannot be. She is not even Ssedez, of my own species. She is human, and therefore denies the ethic of life and freedom to any people not her own. I cannot be forming a mating bond to her.

  But my body, now that I have bitten her, literally has begun to believe she is my mate for life.

  Which is impossible. And yet the venom does not lie.

  Nor does my deluded urge to protect her. Or the fact that holding her at knifepoint made me sick to my stomach.

  Unthinkable.

  It must be this place.

  The feelings cannot be true.

  The Attachment will never be completed. There are other steps involved. My heart and soul have to form an intimate bond as well as my body. My self-preservation instinct has to morph into a willing-to-sacrifice-my-life-for-her commitment.

  None of those things have happened. And never will. So once I get away from her, the physical bond will disintegrate.

  It has to. That is the only option.

  I just have to survive this urge to bite her again. And the need to fuck her senseless.

  A sonic boom draws my eyes to the sky.

  And there I see a horrifying, surreal sight—General Nem’s starship.

  It is so large, it almost seems to float, but it must be falling near the speed of sound. I hear a gasp behind me, and she is there, watching.

  Her mouth falls open on a silent, “No,” and her expression is a vulnerable sea of shock. I should be rejoicing. This is what we intended when we boarded her ship. To destroy it.

  But instead, I feel sorrow.

  Which I should not feel. She is the enemy.

  I have no shame over what I have done. The Ten Systems’ army she takes orders from, they murdered a million Ssedez, attacking us mercilessly on our home world and in space, attempting genocide.

  After fifty years of war and death, we decided to fake our extinction and vacate our home world. We settled on a new one in a different system—one unknown to our enemies.

  Until now, when Nem flies her ship into our airspace.

  But that ship is no more. Thanks to me and to my warriors.

  A quake of land-moving force shakes the ground beneath our feet. In the sky, the bow of her ship has hit the planet surface, and the stern falls backward until the ship disappears beyond the tree-filled horizon, followed by another quake.

  Then silence.

  Even the jungle’s creatures are quiet.

  I feel a sense of completion. Mission accomplished, without loss of Ssedez life or exposure of the location of our new world.

  But it is not a sweet victory. Not like it should be. Because of her.

  She hides it well in the set of her mouth, but the shimmer in her eyes gives it away. Losing her ship is a catastrophic loss. It would be for me as well.

  But when her gaze shifts to me, it floods with hatred. “You.” Her voice is more gravelly than any voice scrambler could make it. “How many of my crew are dead because of you?”

  I am stunned; she is more feeling than I thought. She cares more about the people who are likely dead than she does for her ship. “Many.”

  “Why?” she screams. “We did nothing to you!”

  My lip curls in a snarl. “You humans attempted to destroy my entire species.”

  “We were traveling peacefully through universal airspace!”

  “In a warship!”

  “We’ve made no aggressive maneuvers since entering the system. Nothing we did gave you cause for attacking us!”

  “Your existence gives me cause to destroy you.”

  And yet I haven’t. I could kill her now. Torture her for what she knows. Get it over with. But the thought of doing that, of hurting her, reviles me. A war wages within me. My heart, which still aches for the loved ones I lost in the war, wants to see her blood on the ground.

  My body, though, will not allow me to lift a knife to her.

  It would be so easy. Without her armor, she is so vulnerably mortal. One slice of my knife and she would be dead. Unless she fought me off first. She might.

  I cannot do it. I cannot hurt her.

  “Why am I still alive then?” she says, her voice low.

  “Because I am not ready to kill you yet.”

  “Then I guess I’ll find a way to kill you first.” She retrieves the holster from her armor and fastens it around her hips. It is stocked with weapons, not all of which I recognize, and watching her buckle it is akin to a physical taunt.

  Her skin is so pale; she’s obviously spent zero time in the sun and most of her life in space.

  The white suit she wears, that her armor hid before, accentuates the curve of her hips and the muscle tone of her body.

  The heat, the flames, reignite within me. Gone are the horrors and spoils of war, the threats of who is killing whom. She is female, and I am the male who wants to claim her.

  I want to strip her and make her come. To feel her body writhe in ecstasy on my hand, on my mouth, on my cock.

  I step forward to reach for her, but she grabs the blaster at her waist and warns, “Don’t even think about it.”

  “That won’t—”

  “I know it won’t kill you, but it will slow you down.” She tilts her head curiously. “And I wonder how many shots you can actually withstand. It’s self-charging. I’ll never run out.”

  She disappears back inside the pod.

  I force myself to stay where I am. If I move, I will go after her.

  She comes back out with a large pack and a little touch-pad computer in her hand. “I was right.” She rattles off a foreign name of a chemical compound I do not recognize. “The air is filled with it, and its effects on life-forms are unknown.”