The Krinar Eclipse, page 5
part #0 of Krinar World Series
Bianca’s heart rate and blood pressure spiked, then dropped dangerously low. Too low to be safe. Something was terribly wrong with his human female. He called up her coordinates, then rushed out the front door of his new home—a manor house he’d purchased this morning in Princeton—and climbed into the small spacecraft waiting for him outside. He tried not to think about what was happening to her, if she was hurt or sick—and what would happen if he couldn’t get there in time.
His ship slipped into the sky and headed straight for Bianca. Even though it took only two minutes to reach the bar, those two minutes felt too long. He left his ship on the roof and leaped off, dropping into the alley below just in time to spot a man dragging a large duffel bag across the asphalt toward a waiting car. The headlights of the car flashed on him as he landed, momentarily blinding him. He roared in rage as he caught the scent of Bianca and blood in the air.
“Fuck!” The man saw him and let go of the bag before he stumbled and ran for his life.
Soren wanted to hunt him down, to rip him to pieces and bathe in his blood, but the need to protect Bianca was stronger. He rushed to the bag, ignoring the squeal of tires as the vehicle sped off. He tore the zipper open and found Bianca bent double in the fetal position in the bag, unconscious. He carefully pulled her free of the duffel, cradling her to his chest. His blood still roared in his ears like the tidal waves off the coastlines of his home world.
“Put her down!” someone yelled. Soren spun to face the two Secret Service agents, their weapons drawn.
“You left her alone!” he snarled. “Some human filth was dragging her away in this.” He kicked the bag at the man. The canvas duffel bag smacked one of the agents in the chest. They both lowered their weapons but didn’t put them away.
“Ambassador Soren, put Ms. Wells down.” The other agent’s voice was soothing, gentle, but Soren almost laughed. There was no soothing an angry Krinar. Only his charl could ever reach him in this state. “You do your job and find the man who hurt her. I will protect her—she’s in my care now.”
He tensed and leaped onto the bar’s roof and strode toward his ship, Bianca still in his arms. He got inside the spacecraft and sat down on the flat plank seat, which immediately shaped to his body, and laid Bianca on his lap. The sleek silver ship activated its light-refractive panels and vanished to human sight as it took off.
When the ship landed on the front lawn of his home, he carried Bianca inside and set her down on his bed. He stood there, breathing hard as he fought to control his rage at the one who’d tried to kidnap her and the fear that she’d been terribly hurt. She was so fragile, her human life a mere blink of an eye to someone like him, yet that single blink meant everything to him. His affection for her, his feisty charl, swelled tenfold in that moment as he bent over to brush her hair back from her face. Her skin was as pale as alabaster. Whatever was happening, she was getting worse, possibly dying.
“Hang on, little one—I’ll take care of you. Just don’t let go.”
He accessed the central core technology inside his home and sent Driana an emergency message with his location. He needed her help to save Bianca. She would be invaluable because of her familiarity with human biology.
He retrieved a small medical device called a jansha from his closet and waved it over Bianca’s face, then worked it down every inch of her body. Soft light illuminated scrapes and cuts on her arms and legs from where she’d been dragged. They left his sheets stained with small splatters of blood. Rage exploded through him again, and his hand that held the jansha trembled. Doubts spiraled through his head. She should be waking up. He was healing her, wasn’t he? Krinar healing devices were very effective, unless the damage was deep inside her and progressed too quickly for his small device to fix what was wrong.
“Soren?” Driana stepped into the bedroom a few minutes later. Soren tensed at her intrusion, his focus so intent on Bianca that he was surprised that Driana had made it all the way to his bedroom without him hearing her.
Driana held up her hands in deference as she stepped into the room, but her eyes filled with worry as they settled on Bianca.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s not waking up, and the jansha is ineffective. I don’t know what to do.” Panic began to set in as he moved to the side, giving Driana room to work. He clasped one of Bianca’s hands while Driana looked her over.
“What happened?” Driana asked, her gentle tone slightly calming him. “Be specific.”
“She was at a bar. I wasn’t with her. I was giving her space. But then I was notified that her heart rate and blood pressure had dropped. By the time I found her, someone had shoved her into a bag like trash and was dragging her toward a car.”
“Was it the anti-K resistance?” Driana asked, still looking Bianca over. She focused her own jansha on Bianca’s stomach.
“Most likely, but I have no proof to that effect.” Soren brushed his fingers over Bianca’s brow, removing blonde hair from her eyes.
“She’s been poisoned.” Driana removed a small pill from a container in the pocket of her trousers and slipped it into Bianca’s mouth. “This will neutralize it. We created it to neutralize a wide range of human poisons.”
“Poison?” The word dripped off his lips in equal venom. When he found the man who’d done this, there would be nothing left of him to identify.
“Yes. A lethal dose, most likely administered via an alcoholic beverage. Whoever gave it to her wanted her dead within a few hours.” Driana stroked her fingertips down the column of Bianca’s throat, and she stirred, softly moaning.
Soren fell to his knees beside the bed, whispering words of comfort to her in his own language, hating every second that she suffered in pain.
“She will be well now, Soren. But the toxin had already spread to her cells. It will take a while for the antidote to extract and neutralize it all. She will need a few days of rest, with plenty of food and water.” Driana touched his shoulder gently in support.
“Thank you, Driana. I…” How could he ever repay her for saving his female?
“Take care of her, Soren. Claim her as your charl now, if that is your intention. Make the necessary arrangements before anyone can stop you. She will need our protection. Her own people will not be able to stop the resistance from killing her.”
An aching numbness filled his chest as he gazed at Bianca’s face. She was so pale, even her soft, dusky lips were bereft of color.
“Will you be all right?” Driana asked.
He answered with a brisk nod, unable to speak. He couldn’t let her see the powerlessness he felt at not being able to help his charl. His heart thumped hard as he brushed his knuckles over Bianca’s cheek, his hand shaking as he did so.
He waited an hour until her breathing returned to deep, slow inhalations and then carefully removed her clothes, leaving only her panties. He slipped her into comfortable oversized pajamas he kept at his residence for when he relaxed in the evenings. Most Krinar males slept naked, but he hoped pajamas would make Bianca feel comfortable and warm.
Once she was dressed, he pulled back the covers of the bed and tucked her in. He used his fabricator to destroy the bloody comforter she had lain on and created a new one. He wanted no reminders of what had happened for either of them. But the fear and anxiety he’d felt at the prospect of losing her so soon would likely haunt him for the rest of his long life.
He poured a glass of water and set it on the table by the bed within easy reach before he went and showered. He needed to purge himself of the stink of the alley behind the bar. He scrubbed his flesh and closed his eyes beneath the hot water.
This was not Zaruth. This was not the cage he had been trapped in for three centuries. He was in an open bedroom, with wide windows facing the lovely Earth woods, moonlight playing among the shadows of the trees. He was not a prisoner—he was free. Nothing was suffocating him or drowning him here. He breathed in deeply, letting the tension in his rigid muscles finally fade as he focused his thoughts back on Bianca.
He lifted his palm up and in his head composed a message to Arus, requesting Bianca be given charl status and her name added to the list of charl humans with the United Nations. Once she was on that list, she would be safe from human interference. No more agents, no more life-threatening situations. He would have control over his wayward female. He would protect her, provide for her. Her father, President Wells, would no doubt be furious, but Soren would mend that relationship later, after he’d fully claimed Bianca as his mate and was assured of her safety.
Soren turned off the water and dried himself before he pulled on another pair of pajama pants. If he crawled into bed bare-skinned, he might forget his self-control come morning when she woke. After a moment of indecision, he sent a second message to his offices in DC, alerting them to notify the White House that he was in possession of Hummingbird, as they called Bianca, and that she was safe. He would speak with the White House in the morning, once he was sure she was feeling better and could talk to her father. He ended the message with a final instruction that he was not to be disturbed. His location here, this secondary residence close to Princeton, was known only to a few of his subordinates at the Krinar embassy.
When he finally slipped into bed beside Bianca, he pulled her into the curve of his body and nuzzled her neck. That sweet vanilla scent teased his nostrils, and he inhaled deeply. Her aroma banished his memories of the cage on Zaruth into a deep dark box in his mind.
“You are mine now, lilana. I will never let anything happen to you.”
Bianca dreamed of darkness, of burning gold eyes and soft erotic whispers in her ear. These weren’t nightmares, not this time. She had given in, surrendered to Soren, and now there was only pleasure, a pleasure so intense it felt like she was dying.
She bolted upright in bed, reaching for the lamp on her nightstand. Her fingers met only thin air. Groggily, she struggled to find the blasted lamp. Her hand knocked something over, and it crashed to the ground.
“Easy, Bianca, easy,” a dark, sleepy voice rumbled from beside her.
Every muscle in Bianca’s body froze. Her mind buzzed as she struggled to take in the moonlit surroundings. She was not in her dorm room. She wasn’t even in the common room. Where the hell was she?
“Oh my God!” She tried to scramble out of bed, but the person beside her pounced, pulling her flat onto her back beneath him, trapping her with the weight of his muscled body.
Soren.
He gazed down at her, gold eyes swirling with turbulent emotions. He seemed to be searching for something in her face.
“You are safe. You are well. Please, lilana, you must rest.”
“Soren? What happened? Where am I? What the hell are you doing on top of me?” She bucked her hips, trying to dislodge him, but all she managed was to make it easier for him to settle deeper into the cradle of her thighs. His body responded as any man’s would. She felt the press of a large erection, but he made no move to take advantage of her…yet.
“Please, get off me,” she demanded.
“Only if you promise to stay in bed. You don’t realize how close you came to death tonight.”
She had been ready to punch him in the face to escape, but his words stilled her. When he rolled off her, she didn’t move.
“I… What?” She touched her temples with her fingertips, trying to think of the last thing she could remember happening. She and Claudia. The bar. The terrible bourbon. The bathroom…
“Observe.” Soren placed a flat white object on his palm, and it suddenly projected a holographic display in front of her. The image was so clear that when she took in what she was seeing, her stomach knotted with cramps and fresh terror.
A man, whose face was covered with a ski mask, was dragging her body through the bathroom window. She fell to the ground with a sickening crunch, but the man didn’t seem to care. He hauled her through the alley and retrieved a duffel bag from his car, stuffed her into it, and zipped it up.
Bianca touched her throat, imagining how she must have been suffocating in that bag. Then Soren entered the hologram, dropping from the sky like an avenging angel. She watched him rescue her, bearing her in his arms as he faced off with her security detail before he leaped into the sky and disappeared. The hologram faded.
“I retrieved this footage from Krinar monitoring systems placed near the bar you were at last night. You were poisoned. One of your drinks from the bar was laced with a lethal dose of arsenic,” Soren said. “Driana, the professor you met yesterday during the campus tour, came here and saved you. You will be all right, little one.” He reached for her, and this time she was too stunned to push him away. He shifted her so that she sat on his lap, and he leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He ran a hand up and down her back, whispering soothing words in his own language, one that she had always thought to be rough and unattractive, but right then it sounded like the most beautiful thing in the world.
“You saved me,” she finally said.
Maybe it was the fact that she had almost died, or maybe it was the spell of his eyes and the way they made her think of gold wheat waving in the wind, but she stopped fighting herself and the desire for him that she had tried to bury.
Would it really be world-ending if she kissed him one more time?
She leaned in, tilting her face up to his. His eyebrows rose. He seemed surprised, but she didn’t stop moving toward him until their lips brushed together. A tingling in her stomach swept into a swirl of butterflies as her lips moved back over his, coaxing him to respond. She curled her arms around his neck, scraping her nails against his skin, and he moaned in frustration.
“I fear you’re not thinking clearly, Bianca. It’s the adrenaline and the aftermath. You’re desiring physical closeness because you nearly died. We can’t do this now.” But Soren’s eyes were full of bedroom heat that made her toes curl.
“Screw that. I want you, Soren.” She stroked her fingertips along a jaw that could have been carved of marble. His thick sooty lashes dipped down as he closed his eyes in pleasure at her caress.
“You don’t want this…not yet,” he managed to say as he lowered his forehead to hers, their breath mingling together.
“Now you’re being noble? What happened to the aggressive Krinar male who took what he wanted in the library? Just kiss me,” she pleaded. Only his mouth would take away the memories of her brush with death, at least for a little while. He was right about her mental state—she was clinging to him because of the trauma—but it wasn’t just that. It was more, had always been more, from that first moment they’d met five years ago. Now she had an excuse to do something completely insane, like this.
“You’ll be angry when you come to your senses, Bianca. I won’t take advantage, no matter how tempting you are” His hands smoothed her hair back from her face as he put some distance between them.
Damn him and his infernal self-control. She wanted the wildness she’d tasted in the library, that raw hunger that had no limits. She wanted him to take her now in every way possible, because she was too afraid to let rational thought return. If he was the big, bad, sexy alien ravishing a human woman, she couldn’t feel guilty for how much she enjoyed it.
He tried to slide off her, but she wrapped her legs around his waist, holding him to her. His shaft pressed against her belly, hard and long and more than a little intimidating, which was all the more reason she didn’t want to slow down and let her brain catch up to what her body wanted. She growled at him, hating how he made her burn only to shut her down.
“Shut up and kiss me, Soren,” she snapped. Then she moved her mouth to his neck and bit him. She had heard rumors over the years that biting a Krinar male made him lose control.
She was suddenly flipped onto her back, and the aroused Krinar mounted her, pinning her to the downy-soft comforter. His mouth devoured hers, his lips rough and his tongue delving between hers, taking her for his own.
There…there was her savage conquering lover from the stars. This was what she wanted, to let him take her so she could surrender to whatever came next without guilt.
Her body was electrified by the connection of their mouths, and soon she was so lost she almost didn’t hear the sound of fabric ripping or feel the cool air caressing her skin. Delicious shivers ran through her as Soren’s mouth moved down to her throat, then to her collarbone. He nibbled at her skin until she giggled. But her laughter turned into a gasp as he fastened his mouth around one sensitive nipple. Her back arched off the bed as she pressed against him.
Bianca’s head swam in dizzying circles as he suddenly sank his teeth into her neck. The sharp pain faded within seconds, and it was like she’d taken a shot of that bourbon straight to the heart. She clutched his head, her fingers tangling in his silky russet strands. Everything winked in and out, like the flashing slides of an old home movie playing through a broken projector.
“Soren…” She whimpered his name as something hard and hot speared into her womb. Pain blurred with pleasure as she felt his cock slam into her. It felt so good, the fullness…the connection between them as he sank deeply into her. There was no end to her, no end to him. He moved slow and hard, crafting a symphony of moans from her lips, torturing her with an aching emptiness and blissful stretches as they came back together again, over and over.
“I’m sorry, lilana. Sorry to hurt you this first time. Never again.” Soren’s words blended together in her head and heart. She would be frightened of him and what those words promised tomorrow, but right now she couldn’t think past the flashing points of light in her mind. Soren was finally claiming her in the way she’d dreamed about these last few years, and it was infinitely better than she’d ever imagined.
“Don’t hate me tomorrow, lilana,” Soren murmured in her ear. “I will give you galaxies. I will harness the stars upon your command.”
Hate him? How could she hate him? He had saved her. He’d given her this sweet erotic bliss, letting her forget all her fears and worries. Right now, there was only this.
