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Terri stared at the food replicator, uncertain of what she wanted. She grimaced at some of the selections as she scanned through the holo-menu. Agami worms, steamed tirichi—a large beetle-like insect—in a mendak egg sauce. She gagged as she bypassed a large selection of Argurma delicacies. No insects… Hell no. She may have been hard up enough on Earth to survive on a regular diet of reptiles, but she couldn’t stomach eating insects.
Finally, she came to the wrapped scourra and sighed gratefully. Scourra was a livestock animal that tasted a lot like what she imagined beef once did. She didn’t know for sure, outside of a few questionable old cans of beef stew, but it was close. There was also a kind of noodle made of some sort vegetable smothered in a rich, spicy, nutty sauce. She licked her lips, making a few more selections as she scrolled through. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to eat all that… Maybe. It just all sounded so good, and she wanted all of it. Her pregnancy seemed to make the sharp bite of hunger felt more keenly.
Plates full of replicated food, and even a bowl of peeled slices of the foul axna fruit at her elbow, filled the small table in the galley. She eyed the spread as her stomach rumbled again. It felt like she had a huge hole where her stomach was. Perhaps pregnancy cravings weren’t going to be so bad. If only she could figure out just what it was that she was wanting.
Sitting at the table, she dutifully choked down the slices of axna and then dug in, the spices incredible as she plopped every morsel in her mouth. The nutty noodles and some strange fatty meat in a sauce that tasted something like the wild chilis she would occasionally find around Phoenix made her wiggle in her seat with joy as she stuffed her stomach. But what really satisfied her craving were the crispy-sweet nuggets. She wasn’t sure what they were, but they were both spicy and sweet all at once, and she loved them. When she bit into them, they oozed a sticky sweetness that made her tongue curl with delight.
“Anastha, you should have commed me if you hungered,” Veral growled.
Terri looked up and met her mate’s glittering gaze with a grin.
“Last time I ‘hungered’ when it was day cycle, you told me very specifically that you were not leaving the males run of the ship to satisfy our urges. So I decided to take care of it myself,” she replied as she glanced down his broad, muscular body, licking the bit of sauce clinging to her lips a little suggestively.
Veral growled again, his eyes narrowing on her, the tiny circuitry under his skin flaring brighter with the all too familiar spark that ran through him.
“You know exactly of which hunger I speak. This hunger I could have seen to without concern. You should have commed me and told me what you needed. I would have brought it to our quarters.”
Terri shrugged and mopped up a bit of sauce with a fragrant hard bread that, like the noodles, had a bit of a nutty taste. Not that she was one to judge. The only nuts she ever ate were some really stale peanuts she found as a kid while digging through a collapsed section of what had once been a grocery store. The taste was vaguely similar.
“I didn’t know what I wanted. I think this is the pregnancy cravings all the books I’ve been reading talked about.”
“Cravings?” Veral paused, his head cocking as his eyes ran over her.
She nodded her head. “Yep. There’s a book in that huge collection you downloaded into our system calledWhat to Expect When You are Expecting. I figured a lot of it would probably be as useless as a fishing pole in a sea of sand since this baby is half-Argurma, but it did talk about some of the things I would experience as a mom, like morning sickness—thank fuck I’ve managed to pass on that so far—and food cravings. I really wanted to eat something, but I had no idea what. So here I am. These, by the way, are just the thing.”
She tossed a handful of the sweet crisps into her mouth and groaned aloud at the taste once more lighting up her tongue.
Veral’s eyes flashed with humor, his lips quirking. “You enjoy vansik?”
The way he said it had her pausing, the sweet morsel at the edge of her lips as she looked at his suspiciously. He knew her food phobias and found them highly entertaining. That he was amused about her pleasure when it came to eating vansik wasn’t a good sign.
“If you’re about to tell me something disgusting, keep it to yourself. This is one of those times where I don’t want to know and will kill you if you ruin this for me.”
He shrugged, his vibrissae twitching over his shoulders as he watched her place the vansik on her tongue and slurp into her mouth. “I just thought my anastha had an aversion to eating insects. No insects, no bodily organs, nothing made of boiled or fried blood… you have an unreasonable list.”
Terri felt her face pale as the sweet innards dripped over her tongue. “Insect?”
“You did not wish to know, so I will not tell you,” he said as he sat beside her and began to snatch food up with his claws.
She glared at him and shoved several more vansik in her mouth. Fuck him. They tasted good.
“I don’t give a fuck. They’re good.”
“I am glad you think so,” he replied mellowly. “They are an acquired taste on Argurumal. Some like the sweetness, but few can get past that they are round parasites that live in large colonies in the liver of the igwinpek—sandshark, I believe you would call it. It is similar to the shark in your planet’s wildlife catalogs except that it dwells in the sand dunes and has two powerful legs for when it needs to surface above the sand. The vansik bloat themselves on the heavy sugars in the igwinpek’s blood. When they are cooked over intense heat, the sugar-rich organs liquify.”
His eyes fastened on her as he finished his explanation. She knew he was getting some satisfaction from the entire situation considering how many times she gagged and made rude comments about his love of tirichi. But that was different. That literally looked like an enormous beetle laid out, half-circled in on itself and covered in sauce. The smell of dead bug had been just enough to make her want to hurl. The vansik didn’t look or smell like anything she recognized. As long as she didn’t think about it, she would be fine.
Stubbornly, she lifted a handful and threw them into her mouth, letting the sweet round bits burst as she chewed them. Veral chuffed with humor and leaned forward, his two slender tongues snaking out to swipe a drop of sweetness from the corner of her mouth. She flinched, heat flaring to life in her belly as he regarded her, his face inches from her.
“As it so happens, I very much enjoy vansik. I do not think I have tasted it sweeter, however, than from my female’s mouth.”
With that, his mandibles spread wide enough to just graze the sides of her cheeks as his mouth claimed hers. The press of his hot lips sparked something within her. His tongue swept into her mouth, drawing along her tongue and licking at the insides of her mouth until she squirmed with pleasure. He froze, his muscles tightening and his tongue retreating as the sound of a blaster priming filled the air.
“As much as I hate to break up this sweet moment—on your knees, Argurma,” a voice said coldly.
Terri looked up, and she too froze. The Blaithari were no longer in fine robes, their hair gathered into crude knots rather than fussy styles that Veral described. All three males held blasters pointed directly at them. A rattling growl hissed out from between Veral’s lips, increasing in volume as he turned toward them, his inky vibrissae whipping around his dark silver face. Despite his obvious anger, he dropped to his knees, his muscles straining with tension.
The male at the fore, who could only be Egbor, nodded toward her. “Retrieve his mate and bring her over here. She is the tool with which we will control him.”
