Heart of a Warrior

13

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BRITTANY'S STOMACH WAS DOING THE BUTTERFLY THING. Her heart was slamming in her chest. Her instinct was to drag Dalden straight to her bedroom, and yet she had twenty-eight years of strict upbringing rooting her feet to the spot there in her living room.

He hadn't even kissed her yet. They'd only just met, not even six hours ago. How could she possibly give in to these primitive urges she was feeling? How could she not, when she'd been waiting so long for the right man to come along?

It wasn't as if she had to wait for marriage. Very few women did anymore in this day and age of self-gratification. And she'd been willing to sleep with Tom before he made that tactless remark that killed her feelings for him. But there was the rub. She'd had feelings for him after their many months of dating, had felt she knew him really well. That might not have been the case in the end, but she'd thought it was. But she didn't know Dalden at all, and she was reacting to him in a purely physical way that had absolutely nothing to do with emotions.

She suspected she might be more old-fashioned than she'd thought when she heard herself saying, "I'm not sure I can relax my morals quite that much, Dalden, when I barely know you."

He didn't exactly look disappointed, but then he hadn't been told a flat-out no yet, either. "You require the dating first?"

"That's usually how it's done."

"Our finding each other cannot be considered usual, kerima. In all the universe, we have managed to meet. What is felt here, between us, is stronger than either of our cultures, stronger than any ideals."

Was it? She'd certainly never experienced anything like this herself before. Was he saying he hadn't, either? She was so thrilled with that thought, her knees actually got weak. But a small, rational part of her warned that some men would say just about anything they thought you wanted to hear if they sensed they were close to sexual victory.

She wished the rational part had kept quiet. She didn't want to think that Dalden might be one of those men. But she had to remind herself once again that she knew next to nothing about him. She'd told him practically her whole life history. He'd told her only that he was here to complete a pretty strange task and needed her help for it.

"Your uncertainty is felt," he remarked, his tone without inflection when there should have at least been some disappointment in it. "Very well, tonight we see to dating, tomorrow we see to having fun."

She started to laugh. She couldn't help it. He still didn't get it, and she just didn't feel like explaining it any further. Nor was she given a chance to. He was suddenly kissing her. For him, that was apparently allowed, part of dating. Nor could she possibly have objected in that precious moment of tasting him for the first time.

His other hand came up to cup her left check. Her face was warmly cocooned between his large palms, his lips amazingly soft. He was touching her in no other way, just holding her face while he gently kissed her, and yet she felt as if he was touching her all over. To have felt all of him just then would probably have been too much for her senses, already on a thin thread of control.

She found out she was right when a few minutes later, he sat down in the chair she'd been in and drew her onto his lap. Wearing shorts, her legs were mostly bare, and all of that bareness was now exposed to the buttery-soft leather of his pants. It was one of the most sensual sensations she'd ever felt, not even remotely similar to leather upholstery. But that wasn't even half of what she was able to feel of him, sitting sideways on his lap.

Against her hip was the power and strength of his desire, impossible to ignore. One breast was pressed hard to his side; the other rubbed against his chest as he wrapped her arm about his neck. One of his hands was then placed high on the back of her thigh to keep her from sliding, not that bare skin had much chance of sliding on leather. His other arm fully supported her back and drew her even closer to him as his mouth came down to hers again, this new kiss so different from before, deep, claiming, branding her his.

It was absolutely more than she could handle, the kiss along with touching him in so many places. The passion that overcame her was amazing. She had nothing to compare it with in her own experience. And it took her beyond thought, beyond anything except feeling and need.

She clung to him for all she was worth. She was kissing him back as if she meant to devour him. So she could hardly blame him for drawing the wrong conclusion.

"Have you changed your mind?" he asked. "You will show me where you sleep?"

She was gasping, while his tone was calmness itself. "No, no, I just… got a bit carried away."

"It was not my intention to punish you, yet does your dating seem to do that very thing."

"Huh?" Okay, so her thoughts weren't exactly coherent yet, but how could anyone equate punishment with kissing? "I thought you had the definition for 'punish' figured out. Need me to break out the dictionary?"

"Punishment may come in many forms."

Her thoughts were starting to clear, enough for her to realize he was probably talking about sexual punishment, the kind sometimes practiced when one half of a married partnership was annoyed with the other half.

"You mean like my telling you I've got a headache?" she said.

His frown was filled with sudden concern. "Your head hurts?"

She sighed. "No, that was just a comparison-never mind. And you don't have to keep petting me. I've got it under control now."

From the moment he had mentioned punishment, he'd been caressing her in a very nonsexual way, soothing her to calmness like he might a child. Not that it did much good, when any touch from him at all was stimulating. But he didn't seem to need calming down himself. If she couldn't still feel that thick bulge against her hip, she'd swear he hadn't participated at all in the heavy kissing they'd just done. His composure was-unusual, to say the least, something else beyond her experience of men.

But then she noticed his eyes, and she was completely reassured that she wasn't the only one who'd gotten hot and bothered. He'd been affected, all right. His amber eyes were liquid gold, filled with enough passion for three men, the intensity unnerving in a man his size. And yet his control seemed almost superhuman. His breathing was normal. He hadn't broken a sweat. His tone was steady, his heartbeat probably the same.

But with that passion still there under the surface, just laying in wait, she figured it might be prudent to more fully distract them both. To that end, she asked, "What was that foreign name you called me?" His questioning frown added the prompt, "Cara something?"

"Kerima? It means little one."

She burst out laughing. "I know you're big, but I am, too. It's music to my ears, really, but it's kind of ridiculous to call me little."

"For your men, perhaps. For me, you are a perfect size. Any smaller, and I would fear to break you."

She grinned. "Let me guess. You've had the same problem I have, of finding partners of an acceptable size."

He surprised her by shaking his head. "Size is of little matter. Frailty of body is of greater concern. But you are not frail, are you?"

"Wielding a hammer all day tends to build a sturdy frame, no pun intended."

"Pun-ah, you speak of house-building as well as bodybuilding. "

She blinked. "You got it without an explanation?"

"I have the proper translations now for all but what you call brand names."

"I don't get it. It just suddenly all clicked for you? A few hours ago you couldn't make head or tails out of some pretty common words, but now you can?"

"This is so."

"Then I think you'd better convince me that you haven't been pulling my leg all along, because what you're suggesting just isn't possible.

She had shot out of his lap, had her hands on her hips, was glaring down at him, so his remark wasn't really a question. "You are angry."

"Damn straight," she growled. "I don't like being made a fool of."

"Nor have you been," his calm tone continued. "The mistake was made because of the slowness of your computers. It has been corrected. I have been receiving the proper translations for several hours now."

"Language courses don't work that fast!"

"I am told you would understand 'new technology'," he offered. "The means of teaching me is not known to all the universe yet."

"World," she mumbled, somewhat mollified, though she was still incredulous that something had been invented that could speed along learning that fast. But apparently all the kinks hadn't been worked out of it yet, since he was still getting a few words wrong.

"Explain?"

"You keep using the word 'universe,' when you obviously mean world. Universe implies beyond this planet, but there's nothing out there in deep space, at least nothing alive, so 'world' is the better descriptive word for what you were talking about."

He smiled at her. "Are you certain?"

"That it's the better word?"

"That there is nothing out there?"

She made a soft snort, would have expounded on the concept that seeing is believing and so forth, but once again she got thoroughly distracted. She hadn't jumped very far away from the chair. He had sat forward, which narrowed the space between them even more, so he didn't have to even stretch his arms when his hands came to her hips to rein her back in.

"Ah… what are… you doing?" she asked a bit breathlessly.

He had circled her hips with one arm to put her in the position he wanted and keep her there. His other hand made a slow trip from the edge of her shorts down the back of her bare leg to nearly her ankle. His head was pressed squarely between her breasts.

He tilted his head up to answer her, a grin on his lips. "Dating you."

She would have laughed if her senses hadn't gone haywire again over what he was doing to her. Her breasts had seemed scalded by his breath. She had so much gooseflesh running down her legs, it was a wonder she wasn't sprouting feathers. And yet he looked so boyish with that grin, so pleased with his answer, so delighted by what he was doing, that she didn't have the heart to correct him. But she had to, because she was afraid he still hadn't grasped where she was coming from, with her objections to their having his kind of fun right off the bat.

"No, this isn't really dating, this is the stage beyond that. Perhaps a better definition of dating would help. The kind of date we're talking about is a social appointment made by two people of the opposite sex to meet, usually for a specific purpose, like going to a movie, out to dinner, on a picnic, things like that. And typically while they are out together they do a lot of talking, which lets them get to know each other better. Now, I've been doing a lot of talking, but you haven't been doing much of any."

That finally got a frown out of him. "It will be a hindrance, my inability to talk?"

She brushed the hair back from his forehead. "You talk just fine, Dalden, just not enough about yourself. Can you understand my need to get inside your head, to feel like I know all there is to know about you, before we do anything so intimate as making love?"

He released her, slowly. "I am reminded I have a specific task here, and my need to join with you cannot interfere with it. When the task is done, then may I speak of myself. Until then, I am warned to keep my true self from becoming known to your people."

"So there's a specific reason you don't say much about yourself? Because you can't?"

He nodded. He sighed as well. He leaned back in the chair and stared up at her, and there was such yearning in his eyes it made her catch her breath.

She couldn't imagine the reason behind his needing to be secretive, other than to not give that Jorran guy any warning that he was on his trail. The reason wasn't all that important, really. His hands were tied, so to speak. There was certainly nothing she could do about that, other than accept it. And he'd said he could talk freely when his task was done. There was hope in that.

Still, there was some definite disappointment in her own tone that she simply couldn't conceal when she said, "Then I guess we should concentrate on finishing your task. A good night's sleep and an early start in the morning will help for that."

"Will you sleep with me-here?"

It was amazing, what those simple words did to her. The urge to jump back in his lap and start kissing him again, and to hell with getting to know him better, was so strong that she had to take a step back to resist it. This kind of temptation was more than she'd ever experienced, more than she could reasonably be expected to handle. How could she say no when her body was thrumming with desire to say yes? But how could she throw caution to the winds and say yes?

Honestly, she told him, "I don't think I would be able to sleep, touching you."

"You will," he insisted with confidence as he held out a hand to her. "You will be soothed in my arms. The only thing that keeps you from me is these 'morals' you speak of. This is understood. But understand as well that having found you, I cannot bring myself now to let you go far from me. I will rest easier with you in my arms. And you will know that you have nothing to fear of me."

There was no way she could say no now, not to a simple request for closeness. She knew she wouldn't sleep, she was wound up with too much sexual tension, and getting close to him again was just going to increase it. But she gave him her hand anyway and let him pull her back into his lap, where he positioned her for maximum comfort.

For a moment she felt like a child again, curled up in the lap of one of her parents. The lights were still on, and the TV droned on at low volume. It was silly to try to sleep in a chair when there was a perfectly good bed nearby. She almost mentioned it, but caution prevailed and she said nothing.

He said nothing more either. But his hand pressed her head to the bare part of his chest, where his tunic spread wide. And she didn't know how she did it, but she fell asleep listening to the steady beat of his heart.