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“And they would be punished.”
“Yes. Maybe. No? They’d probably say it was an honest mistake.” I am verbally working through the plausible deniability of what was done to me. I thought we’d reached equality among mankind. But the men who run the EET are just shipping difficult women off to planets that make humanity’s tendency to patriarchy look like… I’m lost for similes. Basically, they’re consigning us to a fate worse than them, and that’s pretty fucking bad.
“You want revenge, but you won’t get it. You’ll get more pain.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because that is what vengeance always leads to. Revenge doesn’t really exist, Jem. It’s a concept the hurt strive for and imagine might satisfy their wounds. It doesn’t. Never has, and never will.”
“So I just let them hurt me? I let them get away with what they’ve done? I let them, and these wild things destroy everything I’ve ever worked for and I what… shack up with you and live happily ever after?”
“Sure,” he says. “Why not.”
“You’re here,” he tells me. “You can live here. With me. I can keep the males at bay. Of course, there may be understandings. Trade-offs.”
“What kind of trade-off?”
“They might, perhaps, like to watch us mate.”
I can’t believe he would say such a thing after the revelations that have just unfolded. I tell him that everybody I’ve ever known has fucked me over and he suggests I fuck for the public? His timing is atrocious, and so very male. He’s not thinking about my feelings. He is thinking about my form.
“I am not putting on a sex show for your desperate friends, Gruff. If you knew me better, you’d know not to so much as suggest such a thing.”
“You can act as offended as you like,” he says, “but you were soaked when Piam’s sons came. You dripped with lust. I think you would have given yourself to them if they had not left. He knew it too. That is why they departed so swiftly. We sense the chemistry too, Jem. You are not the only one who feels the heat.”
I blush. I didn’t know he knew. I didn’t knowtheyknew.
“You’re a beautiful, fertile, eager female,” he says. “There is no hiding that, and you should take no shame in it. The way you respond to me is the strongest, but you respond to almost all males who come in peace. It’s only the aggressively hostile, desperate ones who turn you off, as they should.”
I’m thoroughly embarrassed. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I bite my lower lip and I look away and I change the subject.
“I need a way to charge my weapons, or I’m going to be unable to protect myself. Do you have any knowledge of technology? Can you salvage anything they… desecrated?”
“Let’s take what we can carry,” Gruff says. “This is contested territory. You are much safer inside my territory. The wild ones will not cross my borders.”
“They’re not stupid. They’re going to work out there’s just one of you and dozens of them. Maybe they never crossed your borders before because you never had what they wanted before.”
“Maybe,” Gruff allows.
That’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to tell me that if they so much as tried, they’d be fried to a crisp by his dome, or something.
“Do you have any defenses? I mean besides your scent and your charm? Do you have anything in place to stop your little hut and your goats from being overrun by a small army of lustful bucks?”
“Your fantasies are quite vivid, aren’t they,” he smirks. “Does that excite you?”
I pull my weapon and push it against his chest. “Gruff, I am not fucking around,” I growl at him. “We need actual defenses. And no, I do not want to bone the entire countryside, so you can stop saying things like that.”
He grabs my wrist, pulls it to the side and yanks me hard against his body. His lips are against my ear as he snarls. “I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to. You’re mine. But so are your fantasies.”
Fuck. He makes me weak at the knees with the way he speaks, the way he smells. This close to him, I feel his pelt and the hot muscularity of his body against mine. I am so much smaller than him. I am so very much at his mercy.
“I don’t think that kind of fantasy is very appropriate, given… everything.”
“I think that fantasy exists because of… everything,” he replies. “Now, come. Let us see what we can salvage.”
We manage to pack a few items onto Gruff’s back. I can’t imagine this is going to work. The power systems are so different. Mine are far more advanced, and unless Gruff is an incredible engineer, I am going to be dependent on much more primitive means to defend myself.
7
