“I hate you,” she said, her voice cracking.

Kane strolled up beside her and set the bucket of chicken on the bedside table. He planted a knee on the mattress and then swung his leg up and over her, straddling her hips. She glared at him, her jaws tightly clenched, and he rocked a little, settling himself with insolent slowness atop her. He took a drumstick from the bucket and pinched off a bite, holding it to her lips.

Without thinking, she lunged up and bit him on the hand.

Kane hissed through his smile and his hips ground down at hers. It brought pain back to her in a sickening bloom, but it woke that druggy pleasure also. Raven gasped, her eyes rolling back with the force of the conflict, and writhed luxuriantly beneath him. Somewhere in the middle of her sensual awakening, he started to feed her. She ate mechanically, but there was something unsatisfying about the way the chicken broke open in her mouth. She kept trying to spit it out, to get her teeth on the hand that fed her, and every now and then, he’d let her.

“You’re still a little under, aren’t you?” he murmured. He tossed the bones indifferently to the floor and leaned forward, pressing his hands to the headboard and bending until his chest just lightly touched hers. His breath came in puffs against her face and she closed her eyes away from the sight of him overwhelming her vision.

He growled, a sound that vibrated through his chest and into her, stiffening her nipples and coarsening her breath. She turned her face into the pillows, not sure whether she were escaping him or offering herself, but she knew he’d take and he did. He nipped at her exposed jaw, lightly at first, and then as deeply and intensely as any kiss. Pain squeezed a sound out of her; he responded by moving his hips back and forth over hers. She could feel him stiffening through his clothes and she pressed up against that hardness, her mind fogging with opiate pleasure.

Kane’s hand pushed between them, feeling carefully at her slick sex. She moaned, trying to impale herself on his searching fingers, but though he ground his palm against her, he wouldn’t give her what she wanted. The pitch of his growl changed from that sensual rumble to one of sharp frustration, and then he pushed himself back to sit on her thighs. He peered at her splayed sex and bared his teeth.

“It’s okay,” Raven heard herself say, speaking fast and pleadingly. “I’m fine, it doesn’t hurt, it really doesn’t. It’ll be fine. Fuck me.”

He muttered one of his hard alien curses, glaring at her pussy. “No.”

“You bastard!” she said, and burst into tears.

“I know what that means and I had a father,” he replied, cocking a brow at her. “So that isn’t a very nice thing to say. Do you know what happens to people who say unkind things to me?”

For just an instant, lucidity froze over the swirling chaos of Raven’s mind. “You break their heads open,” she whispered.

He smiled faintly. “Besides that.”

Raven frowned, relaxing a little, and let some of that syrup thicken up in her brain again. “You hit them?”

“I do that, too,” he agreed. “But I don’t feel like hitting you right now. Guess again.”

Squarely back in inner-space, Raven scowled at him and said, “You tie them up and molest them, you sadistic fuck!”

“That isn’t very nice either, but I like the way your mind works.”

“I give up,” Raven grumped.

“Too bad, you had some really good ideas.” Kane reached down and stroked all around her pussy without actually touching it. “But no. Do you know what I do to Ravens who aren’t nice to me?”

“What?” she wailed.

He leaned forward, his face right against hers. “Nothing,” he said softly.

And then he got up from the bed.

She couldn’t believe him. She physically could not, and it was a physical inability, leaving behind it a physically cramping pain. The front of his pants bulged with the proof of his readiness and his desire and there he was, walking away from her as she lay spread-eagled on his goddamn bed. She screamed his name, and he reached down off-handedly, picked up her t-shirt, and came back to stuff it in her mouth.

“Tomorrow,” he said, clearing her brow of stray strands of hair. “Tomorrow, you’ll be healed up enough to travel again, and you’re going to look back on this and wonder how much you dreamed. Personally, I hope you remember all of it. Particularly this.” He reached down toward her sex.

She bucked up at him desperately, but he stopped with his open hand just above her. She ground at the empty air, screaming into her gag, and he grinned.

“I would give the blood out of my body to have you remember this,” he told her. “We’ll see. Close your eyes, Raven. Count to a thousand.”

He kept saying it as her struggles waned and finally, she obeyed. She lost count somewhere around two hundred, and slept.

*

“Like sands through the hourglass,” the tee-vee intoned solemnly, “so are the days of our lives.”

The words had a profound impact upon Tagen, as did the imagery of sand slipping through the glass funnel, unstoppable, even unslowable. Not enough to make him watch the program, but enough to make him think about it as he scrolled onward for something to look at.

He had been here four days. No, for today was his fifth rising from the bed in the room of holding, and he didn’t even count that first day when Daria had been drugged. He had been here six days, six! Time, like sand, falling through his fingers faster the harder he tried to grip.

He had seen no recognizable sign of E’Var on the human media shows, but that was evidence of nothing. The media was filled with death and it was impossible to tell how near to Tagen’s location any of it was. His gut told him E’Var was here; for now, he had to trust to that. But time, those cruel sands, was against him. He had only two suppressants left in his supply pack, two more chances to stave off the brutal weather before Heat set in. Heat. Here. On Earth. In Daria Cleavon’s home.

Just for a moment, that thought, which should have produced in him an ominous apprehension, stirred a wholly different effect. And for that moment, that briefest of moments, he imagined freely the sensation of Daria Cleavon’s small body fastened to his.

Tagen growled low in his chest and it was not a sound of irritation at all.

Then he shook his head, breaking the thought into pieces he would not allow to reassemble. Heat was not pleasant. Even in the most ideal of situations—with a female similarly affected and wild to mate—it was at best an act of uncomfortable necessity, with little pleasure to be had. He did not want it and he certainly did not want to inflict it on his human.

He put the thought away for now, knowing even as he did so that it would return. In the late hours, when Daria had taken herself to bed, Tagen’s hand had a way of finding the tuning control for the tee-vee and scrolling down to watch humans mating. Every night, he told himself he wouldn’t. Every night, he did and told himself it had nothing to do with Daria. Every night, he watched and thought of her, wondering how she would move, how she would sound. And every new day, he watched Daria occupy herself with work, studying surreptitiously the curves of her alien body and imagining.

All of this, yes, but at least he was also working. He was learning to hear and speak N’Glish, he was familiarizing himself with human technology, and he was at least trying to find E’Var’s mark amid those of every other human murder. Once Heat came, Heat would be all there was.

“How’s it going?” Daria asked now, bringing him back to himself. She was standing at the edge of the front room, holding a plate of food and a glass of iced drink out to him. Her eyes were on the tee-vee. “This doesn’t look like Law & Order.”