much as he mourned the loss of his squad and disliked the presence of the invasion force, this soldier had wheedled his way into earning Hamm’s respect with his professionalism and strange blend of aggression and submission.
“Never mind that your technology is probably worth more than the raw material they’re looking to harvest here.” Staille’s throat convulsed as he swallowed, and the strange smell grew stronger. Hamm could see the male’s wariness, caution. He would make no attempt to best either of them in a tussle. Not because he wouldn’t be physically capable of overpowering them, either.
“What if they don’t listen to you?” Reccin asked. “What if they use your signal to target and kill us all?”
Caught off guard, the prisoner reared back, then angled his head and glanced between them.
The scent thickened, saturating the air.
His need to touch, fuck, mark, intensified. Hamm’s hands twitched, his skin tingled. He wasn’t resisting, just delaying. He would. Just not while Reccin’s question wasn’t answered. And not in his office where the scent would linger indefinitely.
He’d never get anything done in here ever again if he did that.
“If they don’t listen to me, I’ll die with the rest of you, won’t I.” Staille’s voice was soft. Like it had been when Hamm had first come up behind him while he was crooning to his death stick. “But I’ll die knowing I made the right choice.” The alien’s sky-colored eyes bored into him. How could his gaze make Hamm’s blood boil that way? As though Staille’s attention radiated its own kind of heat, ten times more intense than the summer sun.
That strange scent, so subtle beside the aroma of ’nip rolling off the soldier, was truth .
As Commander Orsonna led the way through the corridors, Marc tried to take mental notes. Hanging upside down with his senses addled didn’t make optimal conditions for situational awareness. He kept finding little details he’d missed. Furr architectural techniques alone amazed him. He’d thought they were hewn stone, but no tooling marks existed. Natural formations then. But could a series of shelves jutting from a wall be considered natural?
Reccin served as rear guard, though he seemed less than pleased with the task. He grunted every time he checked his stride to avoid running over Marc. When the furr jostled him hard enough to slam him into the wall, Orsonna grabbed his forearm and rumbled something. The translation device remained silent. Perhaps the programmed subroutine was still calibrating. The furr’s grip on his arm wasn’t rough. The only thing he could parse from the commander’s body language was mild impatience.
And arousal. The furr appeared unconcerned by his half-mast erection bobbing with each stride.
Not that Marc was staring. It was hard to miss, since their concept of clothing was minimal at its most excessive, and the commander had a large-caliber gun there.
This close, the earthy scent of soil was stronger. The musk rolling off him was a heady aphrodisiac. His groin tightened in the space of a heartbeat. He caved to the urge to lean toward Orsonna and inhale a deep lungful. It earned him a glance and another wordless growl-sound.
Or was that a purr? Difficult to tell the difference; the natural resonance of their voices was only partly to blame. He was still trying to match sounds he heard with translated meanings. It was slow going without visible cues. The only time lips and tongues were involved seemed to be in a language all their own, communicating aggression or dominance, not forming sounds. It didn’t help that the bio-processor seemed suspiciously disinclined to translate many of the more important sounds, even if contextually innocuous.
He wanted to ask a thousand questions. What made this alien special? Why did only Hamm’s pheromone-laden musk affect him so strongly? It wasn’t normal, was it? He was a prisoner. Was that just how they intended to keep him
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