Page 43 of Taken to Kor
“Centare. I’m just…I don’t want to go back.”
“What?” He tenses.
“Can I stay?” I reach up and grab hold of the wrists of his lower arms, still trapped around my face. “Please?”
His brow furrows, flattens, then furrows again. He licks his lips, making me want to kiss them. “Deena, did you hit your head? I thought I made it abundantly clear that you aren’t allowed to leave me.”
“I’m not?” I gasp, heart beating hopefully.
“Centare, you’re not. Did you forget what I told you when we were alone?”
I nod even though I haven’t. Those little big words are tattooed across my heart.
“Deena,” he sighs and shakes his head. “You were born a human, but you’ve proven yourself to be a pirate. Your kin, your colony, your skin, where you came from, what you think about your own warriors’ marks have nothing to bear on this simple fact. You are a pirate. You belong with pirates. And now, I need you to turn around.”
He moves my shoulders and head with all four of his hands, then steps up and lines my back with his front. His heat slips and slides against mine and I can’t help but stick my ass out a little bit when I feel him tilt his hips a little further forward. I’m thinking about rutting and my embarrassment and worry about being rejected when Rhork taps on the yeeyar in front of us.
“Look,” he says, and I look, gaze focusing on the planet looming larger before us and everything I’m thinking falls apart.
And so does the emotion jar.
I take in a gulping, gasping breath. Rhork leans down and wraps all four of his arms around me and whispers directly against my neck, “Welcome home, pirate.”
Alright. Welp. That’s it for me.
I fall the frick apart.
“It’s beautiful,” I garble unintelligibly.
“Ontte,” he chuckles, holding me even tighter, nuzzling further into my neck, kissing me up and down the column of my throat, making me feel treasured and worshipped and wanted. “It is.”
The glinting shimmer of its surface is revealed when we enter the atmosphere and the far curve of the planet finally slips out of sight. The planet is all towering megalithic plates of glass unlike anything I could have ever imagined. They soar almost to the tip of the atmosphere, and it’s on one of those tips that we land. Like a giant ball balancing on a needle, I don’t understand the mechanics of it, but I don’t care. We’re stopped and I can hear pirates jostling one another as they exit, but Rhork and I don’t move. We just stand there on the edge of the ship, on top of Kor, looking out at its splendor.
Ships much smaller than this one zip back and forth across the sky, looking like shooting stars. Beneath them is pure chaos. Buildings of all shapes and sizes. The glass ones stand the tallest, but beneath them there are things that look black and grey and red and blue and green and yellow and brown and every other color.
“That’s the Reaver Market,” he says, pointing to what looks like a cluster of black tents — thousands of them — slightly to the right. “And there, Pleasure Alley.” The buildings he points out are all square and look like nothing from this angle. “Apart from everywhere, gambling happens at the Cosmos Dome.” A dirty, shimmery gold disc sits in the middle of so many clustered grey and black buildings not too far in front of us. “These black towers, like the one we’re on now, are the Niahhorru ports. We control them all.”
I wipe my fingers over the yeeyar again and again. Little pinpoints of black flare beneath my fingertips then die again as the black yeeyar moves on to some other place. “I can’t believe something like this exists.”
“Would you like to see your home from the ground?”
Home.Home rhymes with dome.The dome back on that dusty human colony is the only home I’ve known till now. And that sucked. This…this…this is beyond imaginings. Just like the male behind me. I turn in his arms and, before my brain has a chance to catch up with me and let my cowardice win, I pull down on his neck and lift up on my toes, climbing his damn body in order to reach his mouth.
He accommodates, pressing me against the yeeyar in a way that’s terrifying because, with its clear surface, it’s like there’s nothing at all to keep me from falling. Nothing but a bit of technology that I don’t understand and his arms. Only, right now his palms are pressed against the yeeyar as he jerks one knee up between my thighs to keep me in place. His hands are holding my neck, tilting my head back and then further back so he can plunder my mouth like the pillager that he is — the pirate.
I smile between his lips and breathily say, “Has anyone ever told you…” Insert kissing here. “…you kiss like a pirate?”
“Ontte,” he answers without missing a beat. It almost sounds like he’s not stopping to kiss me at all, but is speaking directly into my head. “Has anyone ever told you that you kiss like a pirate?”
“Centare.”
“Allow me…to be your first.” He bites my neck so hard I yelp. He laughs, laving the bite with his tongue.
“You’re not my first, you know,” I somehow feel the need to say.
“Not your first kiss? Ontte, I can tell. You kiss like you fight. With every piece of you.”
My heart is hammering and it’s not because of his kiss. It’s because he’s going to make me cry again. His hands are moving under my shirt now, groping my body beneath it. Well, not a shirt so much as a blanket I ripped a head-hole into and not so much my body as the rings of fat around my stomach — rings he doesn’t have. I try to squirm to get him to touch some other part of me and, when he doesn’t, I try to suck in.
