his arms of steel where they planted themselves beside her. “Give me that mouth,” he demanded gruffly before claiming her lips in a tongue-thrusting kiss. Braced above her like a cage of Phaeton flesh, he fucked her good and hard as she grunted into his mouth to the rhythm of his claiming.
Nova pulled her lips away to take a shriek as he pummeled into her with such strength, she could do nothing but hold onto his sweat-slicked shoulders, enjoying the ride. With her knees up and wide open, she accepted him into her body over and over again as he whispered her name to a thumping beat against her neck.
“Nova.”
“Yes!” she screamed, her body racing for the pinnacle she could feel was near.
“Nova.”
“Yes!”
“Nova?”
Chapter Three
Nova frowned at the pair of familiar voices calling her out of the fantasy she’d escaped to. She’d tried to ignore them in hopes she could continue to hang with the man of her dreams, but that plan wasn’t panning out.
“Nova?”
“Is she sleeping, or do you think they finally killed her dead?”
“Nova?”
Each word they spoke was pulling her closer and closer to consciousness and farther away from her dreamy Phaeton husband. Damnit to hell!
“I think she moved.”
“Should we roll her to the mat?”
“I don’t know. There is no blood like before, but what if they broke something…”
“Our poor Nova,” the voices cried in unison.
Cracking her eyes open, the first thing Nova saw were two pairs of satin slippers. They belonged to her two best and only friends on Euphoria. A part of her wanted to curse them for interrupting her dream before things could finish, while the other part of her was happy she was waking up at all. She considered for a moment her fears that one day things would go too far and waking up would not be an option.
“I’m not dead,” she groaned, pushing up from the floor where she’d laid prone in a puddle of her own drool. Stretching, she noted the tightness of her “healed” back. It was a familiar sensation, given how many times they’d had to repair the skin on her back. It had happened more than she wanted to remember, that was for damn sure. The healing salve not only protected her open wounds, it also minimized the scarring as much as possible—something that made her slaver happy. “I feel like I should be.”
“What happened?” they asked in perfect unison, which weirded her out until she’d gotten used to it.
Lots of things used to weird her out back before she’d woken up in her current hell and struggled to survive ever since. Now, she shrugged things off that once would have caused her to look twice…or more. For example, her two new best friends were not only aliens, but twin, purple-and-blue-furred aliens that looked literally like human-sized sex kittens. With pointed ears, twitching whiskers and tails, Kalla and Halla looked like they’d leapt off the pages of an anime fantasy. It was no wonder why they were extremely popular in Cruum’s run-down brothel.
Delicate and feminine, the brothel often overbooked the twins. Of course, their popularity came at a price. Within the house, most of the other slaves were openly hostile, challenging the twins for clients out of jealous rage. Usually, Cruum and Talis kept the others in line, but there were times when the slavers let things slide. Nova had only been in the brothel for a few days when she’d saved the twins’ lives by stepping in after seeing one of their rivals pull a knife. Faced away from their attacker, the twins would have been stabbed in the back, literally, if Nova hadn’t stepped in. Talis, who’d been in the middle of threatening another slave in the hallway, took control of the situation quickly, but in that moment, she’d sealed her fate, making friends for life.
Her interference won her a beating from Talis and loyalty from the twins. Halla and Kalla watched her back, and she watched theirs. It wasn’t a completely ideal situation, considering she was still a slave and all, but her new BFFs always made sure she was fed and allowed off the chain Cruum kept locked around her neck every now and then.
“Remember when I mentioned how easy it would be to mix in with the slaves hauling water?” Nova posed the question, figuring she might as well start at the beginning of her tale. They’d often brainstormed ways to escape, and that was one of many ideas they’d posed as a possibility.