Page 32 of Taken to Kor
“Do I look like Mathilda to you?” His deadpan makes me laugh shakily and when I try to turn around to face him, I end up wobbling and falling onto my back. Rhork grunts when I land and his gaze sweeps my body in a way I’m completely unprepared for. It makes me heat.
“Centare,” I answer, clearing my throat. “Uff.” I’m turtling on my back and when I roll to one side, I recognize the issue. I’m hanging in a net. It’s stretched from one wall to the other, but the holes are still big enough to stick my hands and feet through. Heck, I’d fall straight through it if it weren’t for the pile of blankets underneath me.Net, rhymes with bet, which sounds an awful lot like bed. Is this a Niahhorru bed?
I fall back into the blanket mound again and am just about to ask him if this is, in fact, a bed, when his hands move down to the laces of his pants and my thoughts die at their points of origin. A new thought rises up: I’M NAKED AND HE’S ABOUT TO GET NAKED, TOO. HOLY SHIT!
“Shrov!” I pull a blanket around me, but it’s caught under my fat ass. I yank and grunt as I do, but Rhork looks at me and speaks like he’s totally calm and like this is all totally normal and like I’m not about to poop my lack-of-pants.
“I’m happy to let you inspect me more, in case you think I still might be Mathilda.” My motions stall as his hands move around his hips, drawing attention to the muscles and plates disappearing beneath his pants’ thick, grey material. They lace up the sides, so it takes all four hands working in coordination to free the ties.Ties rhymes with dries, which is exactly what my mouth and throat are doing.
In a last ditch effort, I throw my right arm over my tits and squeeze my legs together so he can’t look right up the barrel of my lady bits, but he just grins in that way he does that reveals his teeth. Not just white, but radiant, they shimmer behind his grey lips like mother of pearl.
“Who do you think cleaned you, Deena?”
“C-clean?”
“Ontte. I took the gamma wand to every piece of you. Between your toes, between every coil of your hair, between your legs.” His chest lifts and the plates lining it all shift as he takes large, even breaths. Meanwhile, my brain has short-circuited and I’ve completely stopped breathing. “Your breasts required special attention.”
I pat my tits, like I’m trying to make sure they’re still there. A new thought fires into my mind then and I actually manage to voice it. “The cuts.”
“Quintenanrretclosed them, but don’t worry, he made sure not to erase the scars. You still bear them.”
“Scars…”
“Yes, I told you, you’d still have them.”
“What? Why?”
He looks at me like I’ve just asked him why there are stars in the sky. “Because if you don’t keep scars from the battles you fought, how will anyone know you fought them?”
“I…” He keeps watching me expectantly, clearly waiting for an answer. I can’t give him one. “I don’t know.”
“The correct answer is, they won’t.”
“Why do they need to?”
“To see your strength. On the outside…” His gaze sweeps my body salaciously, sticking every place it touches. The glue will leave a residue I know I’ll never be able to wipe away, mainly because I don’t want to.He called me beautiful once. When he looks at me like this, I imagine that he was telling the truth.
I suck in quickly through my teeth, tasting him on the air. He tastes so clean, cool in a way that doesn’t make sense. Like a breeze.Maybe one that rolls in from the ocean.And then I blurt, “Everyone can see your strength on the outside.”
My gaze follows a similarly invasive pattern over Rhork’s skin and plates, his chest, his arms. Shrov, I like the way he’s put together.
“Do you like thestrengthI wear on the outside?” He simpers, one brow cocked.
“Uh huh. Yeah. Ontte!” I shout — no filter at all — and then humiliation crushes me down into the blankets below. “I mean…”
He grins wildly at that and I short-circuit outright when he does. My mouth opens, my tongue lolls out, and a surge of heat fires between my legs like lightning. Instead of ignoring it like any decent, Tri-God-fearing woman would’ve, I make it a helluvalot worse when I reach down and cup my vag, like I’m trying to stop it from making a damn beeline for Rhork, which isexactlywhat it — and the rest of me — wants to do.
Rhork’s already wide nostrils flare and the swirling patterns of his eyes start to dance even more sensationally. He seems to get bigger, taller, and then the unimaginable happens. The laces on his pants finally meet their last resistance and the entire material peels away from him, like the skin from a banana.
“Good,” he says as he steps out of the material and covers the rest of the distance to me, reaching the net in four easy strides. He’s just as naked as I am and he wears his nudity with a ferocious pride. I want to touch him.
“I want to touch your…strength.” Shrov! Did I just say that out loud!
He freezes with his hands on the edge of the net, like he was about to climb on but now he’s not. Mortification blasts through me, but it isn’t enough to douse the flames that ripple over my entire body.
“I didn’t…” I start.
He cuts in. “Are you trying to torture me? You remember what I told you about Niahhorru males.”
