The controls were greatly dissimilar from those in Daria’s house, but not complicated beyond understanding. A far greater irritation to him was the ridiculously-proportioned soaps. The bottle of hair-cleanser in particular was a nuisance; it was small enough that merely spinning off the tiny cap was difficult and shaking the thick fluid out of the inflexible bottle was a sore test for a newly-risen man. He didn’t think it was very good for his hair, either. It lathered poorly and when he added more to make up for it, the suds immediately ran into his eyes.

He was still trying to clear them when he heard Daria return. ‘Return’ was too light a word, perhaps. She banged into the main room shouting his name.

Tagen’s instinctive response was to leap naked and blinded from the shower. His talons ripped gouges from the synthetic flooring as he fought for traction and once he had it, he ran to meet her with privy-paper clinging to his wet feet.

“Tagen, they were here! They—Oh gosh, sorry.”

“Here?!” Tagen groped for the bed, scrubbed a corner of the thin blanket over his face, and peered at her through stinging tears. Gods, if this was what it did to his eyes, what in hell was it doing to his hair? “When?”

“Last night.” Daria scooped up his clothing and held them out, her eyes snapping as her anger reasserted itself. “They were here last night, they checked out just two hours ago. If that pervert at the desk hadn’t been such a son of a bitch, we’d have had them! God damn it!”

Tagen pulled his breeches on, left them half-fastened, and ran to rinse his hair and badly-abraded eyes. Here. Last night. In the next room, for all that he knew. This mission! The hands of the gods had been against him from the very start! What could E’Var have possibly done to earn his good luck?

“I should have made him tell me,” Daria was saying when he came back into the room for the rest of his uniform.

“How?” he asked. “From what I saw through the window, you could hardly have bested him in battle.”

“He only clammed up at all because I told him to get his eyes off my boobs before I slapped him,” she said darkly. “Hell, he’d have probably given me the key to their room and a box of doughnuts if I’d shown them off like he asked.”

Tagen paused in the act of fastening his gunbelt. “He…did what?”

She gave her head a short, hard shake, still with that expression of chagrined anger. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter! God, I’m such an idiot!”

Tagen felt his jaw tighten and his claws curl. “What exactly did this person ask you to do?” he demanded.

She tossed him an exasperated, bemused glare and shook her head again. “Take the saddle off that charger, white knight,” she said, utterly incomprehensibly. “It doesn’t matter, I said. Let’s just go and catch up as fast as we can.”

Tagen bent and gathered Grendel obediently enough, but that unreasoning outrage was still burning in his heart and provoking his speech. “Why did you not tell me this offense when it occurred?” he asked, making an effort to sound more calm than he felt.

“Why, so you could go in and defend my honor with your fist?” She went past him to the collect the scratch-sand. “How would it—Holy crispy crap, Grendel! You little orange shit!” She came out again with a fierce glare for the cat, and then continued, “How would it help anything for you to get involved in an assault and battery?”

“How would it harm?” he countered. “We would have been away before the police arrived.”

“And that makes it all right to hit the guy?”

“Perhaps not.” He went ahead of her to open the cargo hatch for the groundcar. “But I should not let that rob me of a sense of due satisfaction.”

“Do the men on your planet really get to fight over their women all the time like this or am I just a special exception?”

“No, we do not,” he admitted, setting Grendel inside. “Neither are they permitted to make insulting overtures to females. If you had laid open his face with your claws last night, then I should not feel obligated to do so now.”

“What claws?”

“Precisely.”

She laughed, which was not the effect he’d hoped for, but was not entirely unpleasant, either. And when she put the cat’s sand in the hold and came to put her arms around him, the little irritation he’d felt at hearing it evaporated completely.

“My white knight,” she said, and kissed him.

Sooner or later, he was going to have to ask her what that meant. But not now. Her lips were sweetly insistent as they coaxed his apart. He was content to leave explanations of her N’Glish for another time. He tasted her, nuzzled her away so that his mouth was free to travel down her slender throat. He could feel her pulse quickening there, he could hear her light gasp against his ear, and he was tempted to linger. Not long, certainly not so long as would require to fully indulge his heightening desires, but he knew well enough that even this little delay was too much. A two-hour lead, and every second more that Tagen spent with his twining lindaria was a second more that E’Var had between them.

And she knew it as well as he. It was Daria who drew back first, reluctantly perhaps, but with resolve. “We’ve got to go,” she said.

“Yes.”

He released her and stepped away, his hands already longing to have her soft hair running through his fingers, her soft skin rising to meet his touches. Heat was a part of it, he did not doubt, but not every part and not even the largest part. Jotan did not bind their emotions so fully to the physical acts of mating as humans did, but here at last, Tagen finally found the one quality of character at which he excelled. He did not have insight, wit or humor, but by the gods, he was adaptable to alien customs.

But Daria was turning away, her face already clouding with the grimness of pursuit and with that bitter self-recrimination that indicated she was still thinking herself partly responsible for letting the prisoner slip them. She walked around to the pilot’s chair and Tagen let himself in to his own, settling himself once more for a groundcar-ride. With luck, it would be a short one.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Thirty-Three

The room was muggy, but not too bad. The climate controls were fairly quiet and its effects nearly immediate. Kane stood before the chilly breeze it spat out, gazing through the curtains at the groundcars rushing by. Humans doing human things, busily pissing away their lives and completely unaware of how transitory it could be. He shut the curtains.

Sue-Eye had taken one of the beds and sat there looking sullen, but she was easy to ignore, especially with Raven standing beyond her. Raven’s eyes were shining with anticipation, her color was high and her breath quick. Her musk was in the air, as it had been in the groundcar, betraying her earnest arousal to him. She had wanted him all morning, but now that she had him, she was waiting for his word. She was flushed and she was eager, but always obedient to his will.

Kane strode towards her, smiling. His Raven. His fierce little fuck-mate. What he wanted now more than anything was to take her with all the vehement jubilation of a true Jotan frenzy. He wanted to take her up against the wall, not even to undress each other but just to lose one another in thrashing, eager flesh. He wanted to revel in her. He wanted to feel her teeth and give her his claws. He wanted all these things, yes, but it wasn’t what he’d promised her and there was an excitement and a power in just the thought of surrendering himself to her that made his Jotan urgings quiet. He stopped just a pace shy of her and spread his arms in invitation.

She came at once to kiss him, a human thing he had anticipated, and he lifted her so that she could more easily reach his mouth. She tasted him hungrily, invading him again and again only to draw back, sucking and biting at his lips. He mimicked her tolerantly and felt her pressing harder against him in response. There were no words between them, but communication of some kind passed anyway; he gave before her greedy assault, pursuing only when she withdrew, letting the kiss become a test of her dominance