The Alien’s Claim by Zoey Draven
Chapter Twenty-One
Erin blinked up at the dark ceiling of the cave, watching as the light from the lantern danced across, producing interesting shadows and patterns on the stone.
One of Jaxor’s stiffened horns was pressing into the soft flesh of her belly. A stray thought came to her. That he could move the wrong way and cut her deeply. It only served to remind her of how different they were.
She swallowed, knowing she should be frightened, but she couldn’t bring herself to be.
He hadn’t moved from his position. She felt his breath fanning out along her inner thigh and though she’d just had the orgasm of the century, she felt her body impossibly readying for more.
Her friends had told her about this. This insatiable, driving need. A couple nights back, when they’d been dry humping each other like teenagers, that had only been like jiggling the handle of a door better kept locked.
Now?
It was like the floodgates had opened. Burst open, blowing that door off the hinges. They hadn’t had sex, but anticipation was making her shiver. What would it be like if he was inside her? Filling her, stretching her? Feeling his seed inside?
What is wrong with me?she questioned, her face beginning to flush from the thought.
The realization of what they’d just done was slowly rebooting her mind. He’d been different that night. He’d been open to her, open to possibility. But what did it mean?
Erin cleared her throat. Her hand was still wrapped around one of his horns and she slowly released it.
Whenever Erin had done something stupid, or something out of her control, her motto had always been: it happened…move on.
Only, Erin wasn’t so sure she wanted to move on. What if she let this play out? What if she explored this with him?
Jaxor moved, slowly lifting his head to peer up at her. His eyes were so dark they appeared black, his pupils blown wide.
Erin licked her bottom lip, tasting him there. “That was…”
Nice? Fantastic? Mind-blowing? Out of this world? Fuckinglife changing?
Jaxor straightened and before she could blink, he lifted her from the edge of the hot springs and maneuvered back into the steaming water.
Erin was surprised when he brought her against him, but slowly she relaxed in his arms, holding onto his shoulders as her legs wrapped around his waist. She felt his still hard cock pressing into her belly.
Surprised confusion made her brow furrow. “You didn’t come?”
His voice was gravelly and rough as he said, “I am surprised you ask me this when I bellowed so loud, I am certain the kekevir heard it.”
Erin blushed. “Oh.”
But she was pleased—and perhaps more than a little turned on—with the knowledge that he’d orgasmed hard. Just like she had.
“You are my temptress tonight,” he murmured, leading them to the other side of the hot springs, where his travel sack was. He’s getting the soap, she realized, watching as he took the vial out. They’d come there to bathe, after all, not to fool around.
Temptress? she questioned silently, still liking it entirely too much when he called her his.
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes you are…steady. Calm. You look at me and I feel not so out of control.” Her lips parted, surprised by his confession. “Other times, you show me how uncontrolled you can be too.”
Erin swallowed, remembering crouching over him in his sleep, pressing the knife to his throat. He didn’t say it in a way that made her feel embarrassed. Rather, his tone told her it was acceptable to be that way. But perhaps he recognized that same impulse in himself. Perhaps he understood.
“And then there are times when you test my control entirely. When you tempt me beyond reason,” he murmured, his lips at the shell of her ear, softly pressing the words there, though they made her shiver. “The image of you in the waterfall, watching me as you bathed, will forever be imprinted on my mind.”
His voice sounded like a groan and Erin gasped, feeling his words burn in her belly.
“I had never thought it possible to envy water until that moment,” he confessed.
Erin was dizzy with his confessions. She was so used to him putting a wall up between them, so used to him not speaking about things like this. Hell, she was so used to putting a wall up too. But now, when he was tearing both of those walls down, it was both thrilling and terrifying.
“Tonight, you are that female—my temptress, teasing me beneath a waterfall and forcing me to beg for her—but I wonder which I will have tomorrow.”
“Maybe you’ll have all three,” she said.
He didn’t smile. He simply smoothed back her hair away from her face and her heart went wild with that gentle, intimate touch.
“I welcome all three,” he told her.
Those words gave her a lump in her throat. Erin looked down at the vial in his hands, watched as he unstoppered it and shook the black granules loose.
“Back on Earth…” she started, not quite knowing how to say what she wanted to tell him.
“Tev?” he murmured, lathering the soap in his hands while she held onto his shoulders.
“My siblings, my friends, anyone that knows me would tell you I was only one of those things. Definitely not two and certainly not all three.”
His eyes lifted to hers, pausing. “And which one would they say you are?”
“You know already,” she said, because she was certain he did. “I have never been called a temptress in my life. And the craziest thing I’ve ever done was try surfing once, though you know I’m terrified of sharks.”
He probably wouldn’t understand what surfing was, but he caught her meaning.
“What I’m trying to say is that I had a…a role,” she finally said, struggling to find the right word. But sometimes that was what it had felt like. A role. A part in a play. “I grew up trying to be responsible. Then when I grew up, I had to be responsible because otherwise…”
She trailed off but she didn’t look away from him. Because otherwise, her family truly would’ve been broken. She would have failed Jake and Ellora. But now, Erin recognized that she was proud of them. Proud of the life she’d been able to give them, though it hadn’t been perfect. Far from it.
Looking at Jaxor, she knew there was so much they didn’t know about each other. So much they’d both kept secret. Erin was tempted to ask him everything.
At the same time, she wasn’t such a complete fool as to believe that what had just happened between them changed anything. It might change a little. It might have chipped away at the barriers between them. But there was so much that he still wasn’t telling her. And thinking about her short joyride in the hovercraft just that afternoon, Erin still held onto her secrets too.
Would that change? Could it? More importantly, did she want it to?
Yes, that little voice whispered in her mind.
Jaxor surprised her by leaning forward in that moment. Surprised her when he kissed her, softly, gently. Her fingers gripped his shoulders as she returned his kiss, her chest aching.
She wanted to test their new boundaries, she realized. Pulling back, Erin’s gaze darted between his eyes and she requested, “Tell me something you don’t want me to know.”
Jaxor’s gaze flickered, as she guessed it might. Then he said, “I want you more than I should.”
The corner of her lips tugged up. “I already know that.” To emphasize her point, she squeezed her legs tighter around his waist, highlighting their position. “Try again.”
Jaxor sighed, the sound whistling out of him. Finally, he said, “I have a blood brother. He still resides in the Golden City.”
Erin’s brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t you want me to know that?”
“Because…” he trailed off and then said, “Because most of my lifespan, I have been envious of him. He is more intelligent than I. He is a better warrior than I. He is loved more than I.”
His gaze found hers and Erin’s lips pressed together, her chest aching more, when she saw the shame there. And now she realized why he didn’t want her to know. Because it made him ashamed to envy his brother, to want the things that he had.
Sympathy rose in her chest. Because she knew what it felt like.
“Like what happened with Sarcalla?” Erin asked gently. His first love had turned her back on him and tried to pursue Jaxor’s brother. That would cause ripples between them, surely.
“Tev,” Jaxor said. “He was angry for me, angry at her for what happened, but it did not stop me from feeling…cast aside. But there were many moments like that when we were younger. He was one of the reasons why I left the Golden City when I did. It became difficult to look him in the eye, feeling the way I did. It was a cowardly thing to do, but I cannot change what happened between us.”
His arms shifted and the water trickled off his forearms. When silence stretched between them, he filled it by smoothing his lathered hands over her body, washing her, as if they’d done this a million times before.
A distraction, perhaps, but Erin wouldn’t let him get away with it. “Would you mend what happened between you if you could?”
He hesitated, but then he gave a slight incline of his head. “Tev. I would.”
“Then why don’t you?”
He ran one of his sudsy hands over his horn, something he did when he was nervous or frustrated, she realized. One of his tells. “It is complicated.”
“It always is,” she said softly, though affection bloomed in her chest, watching soap drip from his horn onto his cheek.
She’d never thought she would feel affection for someone as broody and closed off as Jaxor, but perhaps that was just a type of armor for him. Perhaps there were many, many sides to him, just like there were to her.
“I know what you feel,” she said softly, wiping away the soap.
His brow furrowed. “Rebax?”
“I have two younger siblings and sometimes I was very jealous of them, though it’s a terrible thing to feel about those you love, isn’t it?”
She was tempted to look away, but she watched him steadily, despite her fear and her need to retreat whenever she spoke of her family and every ugly little crevice within it.
“I never knew my father, but my mother remarried when I was young. And when I was five, she gave birth to Jake and Ellora. Twins. My brother and sister,” she told him. “But their father was violent, just because he wanted to be. He would abuse my mother.”
His claws pricked her when they curled. She sensed his muscles bunching, as intertwined as they were. “Did he ever hurt you?”
“No, only her,” she said, swallowing. “He left us shortly after the twins were born. And shortly after that, my mother began to…pull away from us. She was depressed and liked her pills—any pills, really—a little too much. I was six or seven when that began happening. She would sleep all day, missing work. There would be no food in the cabinets because she’d forgotten to go shopping or because she couldn’t afford it. All the while, the twins were so young.”
“You were so young, rixella,” he rasped.
“Yes,” she whispered, conjuring a small, sad smile. “I just remember them crying all the time. I remember hating them because they made so much noise, all while loving them because they would smile up at me when they weren’t crying.”
“Vrax,” he murmured, looking away from her momentarily, shaking his head.
“I had to take care of them because my mother wasn’t doing enough for all of us. Because their father wasn’t around. And that continued until I was eighteen-years-old, the legal age of an adult where I lived. And then I fought for custody of them in family court, which I think broke down my mother even more.”
Painful memories. Erin could still feel the pain of watching her mother’s face, of hearing the judge call her ‘unfit.’ Erin had wished for so long that she could be detached from those feelings, but despite everything, Erin still loved her, still cared for her.
“What I’m trying to say,” she continued, clearing her throat, “is that I know what envy feels like. I gave up a lot raising them the best way I could. I had to grow up too fast. I never got to be a child. I never got to play sports or have after-school clubs or make friends I could hang out with on weekends. I had to work two jobs in high school because we needed money. But I watched them have those things as they grew older. And I’m not proud that some days I felt a lot of bitterness because of that, because of those small things I never had. But it never made me love them any less.”
He watched her quietly for long moments before saying, “And your mother? What became of her?”
Erin sighed. “I’d been mending that relationship when I got abducted. She wanted to be in our lives, but I told her she had to get help, stay clean, no more pills…which she did. I was proud of her. And though it will never be the sort of relationship I want, she was in our lives. She’s made a lot of progress. I just hope that she’s continued to be there for the twins now that I’m gone.”
Moonlight slanted into the overhead entrance to the cave, piercing and silver. His skin flickered between a grayish-blue and a golden yellow as he told her, “You should be proud of what you have done. It was unfair what you endured, but you are strong because of it, rixella.”
Her throat felt tight with those words. She’d kept that story so close to her that not even her friends there on Luxiria knew the whole truth of it, just bits and pieces she’d mentioned over time that could be pieced together into a fragmented picture.
Perhaps she’d been too closed off at times, she realized now. She didn’t have the openness of Beks or Cecelia. She rarely wore her emotions on her sleeve. She’d kept them close, guarded, and because of that, her friends saw her much like her siblings probably did.
But Jaxor had already seen past that, to the darker parts of her, to facets of her that she’d perhaps never realized she’d had. It was a relief. It was freeing.
“Thank you,” she said softly, sliding her arms around him.
And she might not trust him completely, but that night, she might have lost a tiny piece of her heart to him nonetheless.
