Without warning, he yanked back and out (casting one swift glance downwards; no blood) just to punch into her again. She shrieked and tried to scramble away, her hips humping at the bed in her efforts to escape him.
Kane reared back and began to ride her, both hands on her hips now, letting her flee a little ways just for the pleasure of yanking her back, sliding her up and down his pumping cock, falling into the rhythm of thrust and draw. Sometimes he caressed her, drawing the backs of his hands down from the nape of her neck, down the bare shadow of her spine. Sometimes he struck her, beating out cracks like gunplay on her flanks when her struggles waned. He fucked her, hard and fast and steady. He savored the fucking, thinking with the rational part of his mind that this was better than anything he’d ever had, even with that fine female, Tari’i Sunorrok. And just why that should be, he didn’t know, since Raven surely didn’t have her heart in it at the moment.
No, it wasn’t the way she was moving, and it wasn’t just the grip and the pull of her. It was all of her, all his Raven, and the knowledge that she was his. He bent swiftly and savaged Raven’s shoulder in a bite, feeling a sudden swell of affection for her, then reared back and split the night with her screams again.
Chapter Sixteen
Kane came around slow, his mind calm and syrupy with sleep. Light was coming in around the heavy drapes, and with it, the ever-present heat. He should get up now, switch on that rattling bastard of a climate-regulator, and avoid Heat for a few precious hours. It was a tempting thought to stay where he was another day, but time was trickling by as steadily as it ever did, and he knew he had to hunt.
Later, he thought. Later.
His hand splayed flat against Raven’s belly and he felt the metal he had put in her beneath his touch. He smiled, his eyes still shut, and pulled her against him. His Raven. His fascinating, ferocious, fuckable little Raven.
The scent of blood was in his nostrils. Kane opened his eyes and looked down, seeing first the deep lacerations on her shoulder where he’d bit her the night before. He really had to remember not to do that again. And he’d better do something about it now, he realized. With all the metal he’d put in her, she’d probably take very easy to infection.
He sat up and threw back the thin bedding, meaning to fetch his pack and stir up some antibiotics, and his whole body locked up tight.
There was blood on the sheets. Blood all over the sheets, spreading out from Raven’s hips.
Kane’s voice ripped from him in a roar, snapping Raven out of sleep. She started to roll towards him, but he was already in motion. He seized the bedding and tore it away from her in shreds, then pushed her back on her face and tried to see how bad the damage was. He had no surgical gear, none at all. Damn him, she was going to bleed out and die!
“What the—?” Raven reached down between her thighs and looked at the blood painting her fingers. “Oh,” she said.
“Lie still,” Kane told her, his heart racing. What did he have? What could he use? There wasn’t so much blood, really. It was still wet, she must have been bleeding all night, but it wasn’t a heavy flow. There had to be a way to dress the wound. To cauterize and close it, if nothing else.
“Kane, it’s okay,” Raven was saying. “This is normal.”
He gaped at her. His N’Glish was good, but that just couldn’t be what she’d meant to say.
“It’s not what you think,” she said, and gently pulled out of his grip. “This doesn’t have anything to do with last night. This is something else.”
Something else. Kane’s thoughts leapt first to disease, to the hemorrhagic fevers the mining laborers often caught. That he could fix. He sprang from the bed for his pack. When he turned around, Raven had wiped herself clean with a handful of sheets and had spread her thighs to show him the source of the bleeding.
Kane stared, physically dizzied by confusion. Slowly, he put his pack back on the hotel table. “Did…did something tear?” he asked. His eyes flicked to the bed, but he saw no metal ornaments free on the sheets.
“No,” she said. “It’s normal.”
He couldn’t process that, couldn’t understand how his clever Raven could even say something like that. “Bleeding is not normal,” he argued. “It’s never normal.” He regarded her with growing suspicion. “What are you hiding from me?” he demanded. And what had she exposed him to, knowing this disease was rooted inside her as he fucked her?
She saw the expression on his face and seemed thrown by it. She looked down at herself, daubed again at the slowly-welling blood, and then looked around the room as though for help. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” she said. “But I can prove it.”
“How?”
Raven got up from the bed and started to dress herself. “You’re going to have to trust me, Kane. This is perfectly normal, and I can prove it.”
Kane followed her into the privy and watched, his guts in turmoil, as she wadded up tissues and staunched the flow of blood. She looked nervous, he thought, but how much of that was due to the hemorrhaging and how much to him, he couldn’t know. “Prove it,” he said finally.
“I can’t here,” she said. “We need to go to the store.” She turned to face him, her gaze steady and her chin bravely raised.
“If you’re lying to me, I am going to rip you open,” he said quietly, and he meant every word. His affection for her had congealed into a molten weight in his gut. The scent of blood was cloying in his nostrils; it was the smell of betrayal. If this was disease, then she’d hidden it from him hoping to have her vengeance by infecting him, and he meant to see her repaid.
She swallowed hard, but she never dropped her gaze. “I know.”
Kane held her with his eyes a minute longer, and then he turned and swiftly stalked away to dress. He shouldered his pack and went to the door, snapping his fingers for her to follow.
The heat of day beat down on him in a fury, but Kane scarcely felt it beyond his own churning emotion. He was primed for rage, holding it at arm’s reach by the merest shred of will. He did not believe her. He could not believe her. But he saw no lie in her eyes.
Kane sat silent and grim as death as Raven drove them away from the motel. He stared into the side of her face, tasting her edgy fear and her blood in every slow breath he took.
The place she called a ‘store’ was a great warehouse of a building, cool inside and brightly-lit, and stocked to the bursting point with goods, much of it food. Raven led him past several aisles of bright packages. She did not look around at him; her step was steady and sure. She glanced up at the director boards hanging over each double-row of shelves and finally aimed herself down one, Kane right on her heels.
At the very end of the aisle, she stopped. She took a thin, blue-colored box off the shelf before her and handed it to him. It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that he might not be able to read human, and in point of fact, Kane could, but it took a considerable effort to turn the alien characters before him into readable words. “Security plus,” he muttered, his eyes narrowed almost to slits as he grappled with the sideways writing. “Flexible to prevent leaks. Un…scented.”