Pirate's Gold - S.J. Sanders Page 0,14
just all sounded so good, and she wanted all of it. Her pregnancy seemed to make the sharp bite of hunger felt more keenly.
Plates full of replicated food, and even a bowl of peeled slices of the foul axna fruit at her elbow, filled the small table in the galley. She eyed the spread as her stomach rumbled again. It felt like she had a huge hole where her stomach was. Perhaps pregnancy cravings weren’t going to be so bad. If only she could figure out just what it was that she was wanting.
Sitting at the table, she dutifully choked down the slices of axna and then dug in, the spices incredible as she plopped every morsel in her mouth. The nutty noodles and some strange fatty meat in a sauce that tasted something like the wild chilis she would occasionally find around Phoenix made her wiggle in her seat with joy as she stuffed her stomach. But what really satisfied her craving were the crispy-sweet nuggets. She wasn’t sure what they were, but they were both spicy and sweet all at once, and she loved them. When she bit into them, they oozed a sticky sweetness that made her tongue curl with delight.
“Anastha, you should have commed me if you hungered,” Veral growled.
Terri looked up and met her mate’s glittering gaze with a grin.
“Last time I ‘hungered’ when it was day cycle, you told me very specifically that you were not leaving the males run of the ship to satisfy our urges. So I decided to take care of it myself,” she replied as she glanced down his broad, muscular body, licking the bit of sauce clinging to her lips a little suggestively.
Veral growled again, his eyes narrowing on her, the tiny circuitry under his skin flaring brighter with the all too familiar spark that ran through him.
“You know exactly of which hunger I speak. This hunger I could have seen to without concern. You should have commed me and told me what you needed. I would have brought it to our quarters.”
Terri shrugged and mopped up a bit of sauce with a fragrant hard bread that, like the noodles, had a bit of a nutty taste. Not that she was one to judge. The only nuts she ever ate were some really stale peanuts she found as a kid while digging through a collapsed section of what had once been a grocery store. The taste was vaguely similar.
“I didn’t know what I wanted. I think this is the pregnancy cravings all the books I’ve been reading talked about.”
“Cravings?” Veral paused, his head cocking as his eyes ran over her.
She nodded her head. “Yep. There’s a book in that huge collection you downloaded into our system called What to Expect When You are Expecting. I figured a lot of it would probably be as useless as a fishing pole in a sea of sand since this baby is half-Argurma, but it did talk about some of the things I would experience as a mom, like morning sickness—thank fuck I’ve managed to pass on that so far—and food cravings. I really wanted to eat something, but I had no idea what. So here I am. These, by the way, are just the thing.”
She tossed a handful of the sweet crisps into her mouth and groaned aloud at the taste once more lighting up her tongue.
Veral’s eyes flashed with humor, his lips quirking. “You enjoy vansik?”
The way he said it had her pausing, the sweet morsel at the edge of her lips as she looked at his suspiciously. He knew her food phobias and found them highly entertaining. That he was amused about her pleasure when it came to eating vansik wasn’t a good sign.
“If you’re about to tell me something disgusting, keep it to yourself. This is one of those times where I don’t want to know and will kill you if you ruin this for me.”
He shrugged, his vibrissae twitching over his shoulders as he watched her place the vansik on her tongue and slurp into her mouth. “I just thought my anastha had an aversion to eating insects. No insects, no bodily organs, nothing made of boiled or fried blood… you have an unreasonable list.”
Terri felt her face pale as the sweet innards dripped over her tongue. “Insect?”
“You did not wish to know, so I will not tell you,” he said as he sat beside her and began to snatch food up with his claws.
She glared at him