Captive - Cheryl Brooks Page 0,26

helped Nexbit and Temfilk put him in the speeder. Then when he escaped—twice—he’d managed to capture her. Being pinned against the wall and to the floor should have been the most terrifying moments of her life. And yet, while they were certainly memorable, those incidents were in no way terrifying.

Opting for a simple “Good night” with no touching whatsoever, she left the room. She even held her breath as she passed by him. Somehow his scent followed her until she could no longer go without breathing. Her inhalation was more of a gulp of air than a simple breath. And his scent flowed into her nose and lungs, triggering an emotion she couldn’t identify.

She’d never felt the need to label her feelings before. Yet now, as she walked the long corridor to her room, she wished she could because this feeling was completely new. So new, she not only didn’t know its name, she didn’t have the slightest inkling of what she could or should do about it.

At least she didn’t make my dick hard.

That was about the only positive spin Moe could put on his most recent encounter with Klara. Granted, he now had a villain to combat, but that wouldn’t solve everything.

I can’t believe I let myself purr.

He wasn’t some teenage kid dying to take his Zetithian sexuality out for a trial run. He’d already done that a few times, and he wasn’t proud of the outcome. Sure, he’d heard all the hype, but he’d never truly believed that Zetithian lubricating fluid and semen, or snard as it was called in the mother tongue, could actually trigger chemically induced orgasms in females. He’d proved it all right. He just wasn’t very happy with himself for experimenting with girls he didn’t love. They probably hadn’t loved him, either. But that didn’t mean they didn’t want more of him.

He’d assumed the first one was a fluke, that she’d simply reacted the way she’d been told she would react. The second one had never heard of Zetithians before, although since she lived on Rhylos, he found that a little difficult to believe. Zetithians had been in the news enough that she should have known something, although she might’ve been too young to take notice of current events when the most highly publicized events took place. The third had simply been curious enough to seek him out, even though she admitted that any Zetithian guy would do. Larry had turned her down. Moe was simply the next on her list.

Of course, all of that took place when he was in his late teens. He’d wised up a bit since then. At least, he hoped he had. Being a celibate Zetithian male wasn’t all that difficult. Without the scent of a woman’s desire, he couldn’t get it up anyway. Besides, he wanted to be loved for himself rather than the sexual fireworks he could create without even trying.

That was another problem with Zetithian sexuality. Having evolved to entice their own relatively disinterested females, their effect on women was overkill for most other species. Terrans were particularly susceptible, and there were plenty of humans scattered throughout the galaxy. Still, human females weren’t impossible to avoid. As a freighter pilot, a large majority of Moe’s contacts were male, and he’d learned to steer clear of spaceport brothels long ago.

Hookers loved Zetithians. The pleasure they gave far exceeded any received from clients of other species. The men were pleasant and law-abiding as a rule, and hurting women went against their most basic instincts.

Trag was the most likely one to blame for the way hookers tended to mob any Zetithian they spotted. Those women had their own galaxy-wide database, and any Zetithian wandering into their lairs was automatically tagged as a choice client. Which apparently was how Klara had been conceived. Moe wasn’t the least bit sorry she’d been born, but the more he heard about the harrowing life she’d led, the happier he was to have kept his dick firmly in his trousers while giving brothels a very wide berth. No child of his was going to live that way. Not if he could help it.

That determination was yet another reason to escape from Haedus Nine. Klara had hissed at him twice, and he’d purred while in her presence. She was obviously ignorant of their species’ mating behaviors. The attraction between them was already apparent, and the more time they spent together, the more likely they were to mate. If and when that happened, he wanted