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Out of that blossomed, fully, the realization she’d been trying so desperately to resist. She had a… thing. For this thing. This alien male. This… man.
Her eyes fluttered open to find him staring at her intently. An uncontrollable urge to be cute bubbled through her. For the first time ever. “Will that be all?” she whispered. His smirk delighted her.
“Quaia Sangsen,” he whispered back, as if savoring the feeling of her name on his lips.
But whatever he intended to say, he seemed to recoil from it as if he had touched something hot. He turned quickly, and moved away from her.
“The session has concluded,” he told her, his back turned.
CHAPTER 10
Torian was grateful for his extensive training as a combat medic. Reaching for the switch in his mind, the one that allowed him to become clinical and detached, was a trained and well-honed skill.
He did so now, after disciplining Quaia Sangsen, for his own protection and for hers. He had gone too far, said too much.
He’d been driven to that breach of… was it ethics? Duty? He couldn’t even be sure… because his Voklha—the inner instincts of the Voklish male—was screaming out for her. The scent of her arousal was an intoxicant that drove him wild. Tangy, sweet, unique to her and her alone, it awakened a hunger inside of him, the kind he’d never felt before. He wanted to taste her, to please her endlessly with his tongue, drinking in the sweet nectar of her arousal.
What he wanted to do after that was well outside even the most liberal reading of his mandate—which gave him a wide berth, certainly. Maybe even wide enough to taste Quaia for himself, provided he could rustle up an explanation for having done so. Which he could.
What he couldn’t do, he felt certain, was taste her and then stop there.
But if there was no more to it than the delicious smell of her, the promise of her sweet taste, maybe he could have done his job professionally and without straying outside his mandate.
But the marks he had made on her skin, across the expanse of pale and delicate softness, burned into his eyes and worked into his thoughts. Not just when she was present; all the time. His entire half-cycle had been clouded with images of her, images that crept into his mind’s eye and blocked out everything else: his work, his correspondence, his many mundane tasks.
He clenched and unclenched his hand several times as he stood over the workspace, his back turned to Quaia. The soft mewl of her pleasure echoed in his ears, daring him to elicit it again.
Nothing he’d said to Quaia had been untrue: if the circumstances were different, he would have claimed her immediately. He knew as soon as he saw her that something inside him had snapped.
So he consciously reached for the switch, the turning off of emotion and the closing off of his heart and his Voklha.
To some extent, it worked: the path to the mind of a combat medic, seeing only problems and potential for resolution, only flesh, for which he felt nothing more than would a mechanic for a machine, was an easy and well-trodden one for him.
Quaia Sangsen was not his, and never would be. She never could be.
Robotically, he turned to her and recited his list of instructions. Quaia was to be trained, not pleasured. He tried very hard to ignore the obvious confusion that played on the features of her face. He couldn’t be responsible for that.
He performed his duty, reciting his instructions to her, a silent prayer running along beside them in his mind: that she please do as he asked, because if she failed to do so, he wasn’t sure that he could maintain this division between his mind and his raging Voklha.
When he escorted her to her quarters and closed the door on her, his heart twisted violently in his chest.
He made his way back to his quarters, but his calm was fraying by then. Avalar passed him in the corridor and looked at him with her piercing eyes, absorbing his energy. She seemed poised to ask him a question, so he glared at her until she thought better of it and looked away. “Greetings,” she said simply.
He wasn’t even sure if he’d answered her.
He knew that he looked like a madman. He was a madman. His legs didn’t return him to his quarters, where his mind wanted him to go. They continued, taking him and his wild eyes, his aching heart, to the room where he knew that he could at least feed his craving, to tamp it down.
The training room was empty, but Quaia’s presence had infected it, and her scent lingered everywhere. Feeling like an animal, he leaned over to inhale more deeply, and when his nose found the scraps of her odor that remained in the air, on the table, they sent a shudder through his entire being.
CHAPTER 11
She, of course, was very careful to remember all the instructions he gave her before she left. The trainer could be removed (though she strangely, no longer desired to). She was to wear the same jumpsuit-like outfit laid out for her in her quarters.
And she was to arrive promptly at the change of the watch.
“You must be obedient,” he had added. “Or I will be forced to discipline you further.”
And then he had sent her on her way. Coldly. His sudden detachment had rolled through her, as if she’d swallowed a block of ice. Her eyes even threatened to moisten and spill tears.
