Gerald's Lot Page 10

  “Leisikei will mate you. It’s already arranged.”

  “What the fuck,” Gerald sputtered. He tried to move. Tanis didn’t let him. “I object. I object a whole damn lot!”

  “If you find another you’d rather mate, he can fight Leisikei.”

  “When heat season is over—”

  “Nothing will have changed. We aren’t heat mates. Your place is with me until death breaks our bond.”

  Gerald growled out a frustrated sound and clenched his fist in the bedding near his knee.

  Tanis released Gerald’s neck and climbed onto the bed behind Gerald. Gerald didn’t waste a second bringing his arms up so his hands rested beside his chest. It would give him leverage, if he needed it.

  Hot breath skimmed his back as Tanis leaned over him. The tickle of a claw raking down his spine caused a hard shiver to course through him, and his lips parted on a gasp of breath.

  “You wanted to know if this was a permanent mating,” Tanis said, his dark, full voice echoing off the room’s bare walls and windows. “I have no intention of letting you go when heat season ends. I am your life now and you are mine.”

  “I’m not going to make anybody a good mate. Didn’t I just prove that?” Gerald tried to push himself up off the bed so he could turn his head.

  Tanis flattened his hand between Gerald’s shoulders. “Submit!” he demanded, and this time the word had an edge to it Gerald couldn’t ignore.

  He took a shallow breath, lungs constricted under the pressure of Tanis’s weight and strength. He didn’t often push Tanis this far and the reminder of their power imbalance had a disturbing effect on his dick. He was hard and his dick was leaking from the slit, making a damp spot on the bedding and on his belly where his hard flesh rested because of the awkward position Tanis had forced him into—shoulders and chest down, ass up, and arms as useless against Tanis’s greater strength as his flexing toes.

  “I submit,” he breathed out.

  Tanis eased his weight off Gerald’s spine.

  Gerald dragged in a quick breath.

  Tanis breathed faster, and the sound of him jerking off over Gerald was unmistakable. Tanis growled low in his throat just seconds before Gerald felt the sudden splash of warmth hit his lower back. The alien semen was thinner than human semen and it started a quick slide down Gerald’s spine toward his neck, tickling enough to make Gerald squirm.

  When Tanis reached down to caress Gerald’s scrotum, he jerked, digging his toes into the bed.

  Tanis began to fondle Gerald, his touch gentle but firm, and then he leaned over Gerald again and licked away some of the semen dripping its way toward Gerald’s ear.

  Hot, thick alien cock slid into the crack of Gerald’s ass, hanging for just one moment at the tight pucker of his asshole.

  “Tanis,” he gasped out.

  Tanis’s warm breath teased the back of Gerald’s neck. One, two, then three kisses trailed across his jaw bone, and then Tanis kissed Gerald on the mouth, thrusting his tongue between Gerald’s lips, and Gerald could taste Tanis’s semen, a bittersweet tang in his mouth.

  That was the moment Tanis breached Gerald’s asshole, pushing inside with unyielding force. Gerald’s breath caught and he tried to push into the stretch, at the same time twisting his face into the bedding.

  “Tanis,” he gritted out. “Tanis, fuck.”

  He was getting pretty good at remembering not to call out to God when he had Tanis buried inside him.

  Tanis fucked him, dragging out Gerald’s pleasure by forcing Gerald’s hand away every time he tried to reach for his dick. In the end, Gerald was whimpering with a near sob at the building pressure in his balls while Tanis rutted into him and came for the third time.

  Then he flipped Gerald onto his back and closed his mouth around Gerald’s dick.

  Gerald didn’t have time to do more than stiffen with shock before Tanis swallowed him down, taking Gerald’s cock so deep, Gerald felt himself sliding into the tight clench of Tanis’s throat. His hips came off the bed and he came so hard he saw black spots at the edges of his vision.

  He was still gasping from the hard release when Tanis pushed Gerald’s legs up and thrust inside him again. Gerald sucked in air and grabbed for the back of Tanis’s head. He held on as Tanis started moving more frantically, fucking him with the kind of abandon that said his heat cycle had started in earnest.

  After that, there was no talking and no thinking. Gerald just held on and let Tanis fuck himself out.

  He woke up a few hours later, blinking the heaviness of sleep out of his eyes. Sundown came early this time of year, and he doubted it was much later than seven, maybe eight, o’clock, and when he looked up through the wide window near the bed, half the moon glowed bright and sharp behind a high cloud.

  He rubbed his hands down his face and rolled over. One of his wrists banged into his chin.

  Fuck. He’d forgotten Tanis had put cuffs on him. They were large enough to be difficult to hide, but not any more uncomfortable than those he’d worn for Devon. The cuffs weren’t locked together, but could be, and Tanis had sworn that if Gerald tried to leave the house, they would set off a den-wide alarm.

  He dropped his hands to the bed just as a voice came from the doorway. “It’s time for us to leave.”

  Gerald looked in that direction. Tanis was just a dark shadow within an even darker shadow at the rectangle of the open door.

  Gerald sat up, letting out a soft groan as his body told him quite clearly that he hadn’t slept long enough for this.

  “Now?” he asked in a voice crusty with sleep. He cleared his throat.

  “Now,” Tanis said, his footsteps a quiet click on the hardwood.

  Gerald frowned and looked down. Tanis wasn’t wearing shoes or socks, and Gerald could see the faint shadow of his claws fully extended. “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. But it’s time for us to leave. I have what you need. Come.”

  Gerald pursed his mouth but shoved the quilt off him. Tanis must have covered him at some point during his nap. “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “Home,” Tanis said. “Temporarily.”

  Gerald gestured toward the bathroom door. “Do I have time for a—”

  “No.” Short and firm, no room for misinterpretation.

  “Shit.”

  Gerald got his bearings in the still dark room and reached for the jeans he’d been wearing earlier that day. He only had two pair. Tanis kept swapping them out, and the only reason Gerald knew for sure was because Tanis had managed to tear one of the belt loops loose during one of their more heated fucks. Those were the jeans he was pulling up his legs at that moment.

  When he straightened, the dried semen on his back tickled his skin. He stretched his arm behind him and tried to scratch some of it loose. “This really isn’t fun, you know that?”

  “Quiet, human.”

  Gerald snorted and ignored Tanis long enough to pull on his dark t-shirt.

  Something soft smacked him in the face.

  “Hey!”

  It was a long-sleeved shirt made of something soft and thin and it had buttons down the front. He shrugged it on and glared at Tanis’s shadow.

  “Sit,” Tanis said, pointing at the chair by the window.

  Gerald looked behind him. His boots were beside the chair. He rustled his hand through his hair and moved to the chair.

  He sat.

  Tanis dragged on Gerald’s socks with swift, sure movements and then pushed Gerald’s feet into his boots. Gerald clutched his fingers together behind his head and leaned back, letting Tanis do what he wanted while Gerald stared out at the evening sky through the window behind him. Fall had come in earnest and that meant the cold wouldn’t be far behind.

  “I hate winter,” he said, for no other reason than to hear a voice.

  “All seasons are gifts from the universe. Ours were shorter. I enjoy Earth’s more, I think.”

  “A shorter winter would be nice,” Gerald said,
lowering his arms and looking down at Tanis’s bent head.

  “Earth’s mild weather is a gift from the universe. I enjoy not having to fight to survive the cold even as short a span as it lasted.” A sharp tug on the laces and Tanis had one boot tied. He turned his attention to the other. “We’ll have a short walk before we reach a ship. Do not leave my side under any circumstance. Do everything I tell you to do, and do not ask questions. If you do…”

  “I’ll regret it, right?”

  “You won’t be the only one to regret it.”

  Something in the tone of Tanis’s voice unsettled Gerald and he tried to look harder through the shadows. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “To borrow one of your human phrases, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  “I hope you’re smart enough to know just how much bullshit that is.”

  Tanis tugged hard at the laces of Gerald’s second boot, then looked up. The moonlight glinted off his eyes and they glowed with an inner light.

  Gerald’s breath stuck in his throat.

  “It’s a strategy you’ve followed for years, according to your own confessions. It’s a strategy that will have to do for now, for this.”

  “Ah.” Gerald picked at the side of his fingernail with his thumbnail. “Okay, then. So something big’s happening and I’m a liability.”

  “I had not intended to take a mate.”

  Gerald raised an eyebrow, thinking of all those female wolves Tanis had said he’d fucked just a few weeks ago. “Heat mates, for breeding. I get it.”

  Tanis let out a frustrated sound and pushed to his feet. “You do not get it, but I expect nothing more for the moment.”

  He took Gerald’s hand and pulled Gerald to his feet. “We’re to leave quietly. Don’t do anything to draw attention.”

  “Sure,” Gerald said as they crossed the room together.

  What was going on? Why the secrecy? Why did Gerald have the kind of feeling in his stomach that he’d had the moment Devon showed up in Gerald’s temporary quarters two weeks ago, with proof that Gerald had betrayed him?

  Gerald followed Tanis down the stairs, and then out the door. He hadn’t noticed the shaking of the trees from inside the house, but out here, the wind swirled and gusted, throwing leaves at him with startling ferocity.

  The long-sleeved shirt he wore whipped open, letting the chill seep through the thin t-shirt underneath. Gerald reached down and started fastening buttons, taking a quick look at Tanis, who wore only a dark t-shirt identical to the one Gerald wore.

  Tanis didn’t seem to notice the chill wind. His attention was focused down the path, his head high, the moonlight setting his eyes aglow with a light that put Gerald on edge. It wasn’t Tanis, specifically, but Gerald had only a few memories that included wolves with glowing eyes and every one of them involved harrowing adventure and threats to his life.

  Somewhere deeper into the den, Gerald could hear voices and activity, but here, with the wind shaking the trees and the clouds scudding quickly past overhead, a deep disquiet settled in his gut.

  Change was coming. He could feel it in his bones.

  “Leisikei is here.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s ready?” a low, accented voice asked from behind Gerald.

  Gerald looked over his shoulder, unsettled at how easily someone had gotten close without him realizing.

  Leif and two other wolves stepped up beside him, including the young wolf that had tried to get Tanis to mate him. Gerald eyed them all before turning raised eyebrows on Tanis. “Am I in danger here? Because I have a feeling this isn’t safe.”

  Tanis didn’t answer. His gaze skipped to Leif and he said, “Do you have it?”

  “I do.”

  “We go now, then. I have her scent. She’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Yes, Alpha.”

  The younger wolf’s gaze flickered toward Gerald then quickly away.

  Without another word, Tanis began walking down the path. Before they reached the next building, he snagged Gerald by the arm and broke from the path, pulling Gerald with him. They walked through the woods for more than an hour.

  They wove between the sparsely set buildings at the outer edges of the den, until finally they reached an area where the oaks became pines, thick and tall and cloyingly sharp, and the way forward narrowed enough that they had to walk single-file through the tightly packed trees and underbrush while broken limbs and pine needles poked and scratched as they squeezed through.

  No one talked, and Gerald had enough sense to keep his own mouth shut, even when one unseen branch gouged him in the cheek.

  Tanis stopped, turning, head tilted, hand resting on the rough, bare trunk of a top heavy pine. “You’ve hurt yourself.”

  “It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Gerald touched his cold cheek and winced. Sure enough, blood smeared under his fingertips. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Here.”

  The moonlight wasn’t bright enough under the thick canopy of pine branches to see what Tanis was doing, but Gerald heard fabric rip and then Tanis raised his hand to Gerald’s face.

  “Hold this to your injury.”

  Gerald took the soft piece of t-shirt and wiped away the blood, then folded the fabric and pressed it firmly to his cheek, wincing as he did.

  “Alpha…” Leif said from behind Gerald. “She should have joined us by now.”

  Tanis looked off into the distance to their left. “She knows our destination. She’ll find us.”

  Gerald had questions, but he didn’t ask them.

  Tanis turned and began to lead them through the forest again, and Gerald watched and listened as Leif and the other two followed, and he tried to make sense of what he’d already learned, but he just didn’t have enough information.

  Not long after, they broke through a line of trees into a moonlit clearing that stretched for acres. In the distance, too far away to make out details, a house sprawled in the shadows at one edge of the forest, dark, possibly abandoned. But it wasn’t the house that caught and held Gerald’s attention.

  An alien ship loomed in the center of the field, the hull dull and dark despite the glimmer of moonlight that spilled over the land, the smooth, sleek shape enough to steal Gerald’s breath. He wanted to speak up, to say something about the first alien ship he’d ever stood this close to, but one look at Tanis told him now wasn’t the time.

  Tanis gestured, making no sound at all.

  Leif jogged away from them and slipped back into the tree line.

  The younger wolf watched him go before catching Gerald staring. The wolf pulled back his upper lip and flashed his teeth silently.

  The third wolf, another Gerald was sure he’d never met, grabbed a handful of the younger wolf’s dark t-shirt right between his shoulders and almost yanked him off his feet.

  The younger wolf cut off a soft cry and stumbled into place behind the other wolf.

  The older wolf bowed his head in Gerald’s direction, before turning his attention to Tanis.

  Shadows hid Tanis’s reaction to the whole incident, and Gerald pushed aside the unease that hadn’t left him and turned his attention to the ship.

  A body came into view, someone walking around the ship.

  Tanis stilled, the moment dragging out slowly for Gerald as he held his breath and waited.

  Tanis waved the two wolves forward, but when Gerald started to move, Tanis hauled him close, pressing his mouth to Gerald’s ear. “Remember my warnings. I am sorry for what I have to do.”

  Pain stole Gerald’s next breath.

  In the split second it took him to recognize the feeling flashing through him, he lost control of every muscle in his body.

  Tanis caught him as he fell.

  Chapter 14

  “I took him for a mate,” Tanis was saying as he rolled Gerald onto his back.

  “A mate,” a heavily accented female voice snarled in the wo
lves’ language. “We do not take mates from these people.” Something heavy pressed down on Gerald’s chest. “If you need another mate, you can—”

  The pressure disappeared and a harsh scream echoed on Gerald’s eardrums.

  “He is mine. Don’t touch him again.” Tanis said something else but spoke so harshly that Gerald couldn’t understand.

  He was lying on the floor of the ship, he was sure of that. The sharp scent of urine teased the back of his throat and he had a cooling wet spot at his crotch—a feeling he remembered from the last time he’d found himself mostly conscious but temporarily immobilized less than two weeks ago.

  A groan wanted to climb out of his throat but he didn’t let it. He wasn’t ready to draw attention to himself. Still, he opened his eyes, because there was only so much his ears could tell him about what was going on.

  Tanis had the female by the neck, but she also had her claws in Tanis and blood dripped from both their wounds.

  Gerald had to work to keep his breathing steady.

  “You have a companion,” Tanis said.

  “He follows orders, and I have use for him now.”

  Tanis let out a soft snarl. “He follows orders less well than you think. He killed the human spy we wanted.”

  We.

  No. That couldn’t be right. Tanis wasn’t…

  A sudden surge of tingling fire in Gerald’s legs forced out the groan he’d been holding back.

  Tanis pushed the female wolf away, removing his hand from her throat.

  She released Tanis just as quickly, her gaze flickering between him and Gerald. She stepped back, raising her knuckles to her forehead, head lowering. “His smell is already distracting me. If he attracts too much attention, you’ll have to release him—or kill him. I won’t have everyone fighting over his scent.”

  “I do not care how many want him. He is mine.” Tanis’s snarl was back. “Do you not believe I can defend what’s mine?”

  The female sniffed with obvious disdain. “Let’s see what Alpha says about your plaything. Maybe she’ll want him for herself.”

  Tanis lunged at the female. She jumped back, then slung herself at Tanis and they crashed into the wall of what looked like an area meant to hold cargo.