The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  Chapter Six

  It was strange, Lexa reflected, how the mind worked.

  Only a few days earlier, she’d been focused on nothing but surviving—thought about little beyond how uncomfortable she was and how low her supplies were getting. The search for food, water, and shelter of some sort was all that had run through her mind for years—except the horrible memories and she did her utmost to blot those out. It was preferable to focus on her needs.

  Oddly, those ugly memories of her time with Ralph didn’t seem to stem the flow of imaginings that had been going through her mind since the incident the first day on the trail.

  Even the possibility that Gabriel might have interest in claiming her as his woman should have revolted every feeling because she’d sworn never to allow herself to fall into the hands of another man, to allow herself to become a slave to any man’s whim, if she had to fight to the death. And those feelings had not been lessened by the fact that he wasn’t a man at all, wasn’t human. She’d been angry even though she didn’t believe that he’d meant to give the villagers the impression that he was claiming her. She’d also been unnerved by the looks the villagers had given her and worried that her situation might get ugly in a hurry if the man Gabriel had disciplined, or any of the others, decided to blame her for the incident or just to despise her for the fact that she appeared to have been claimed by one of the angel-demons and retaliate against her.

  And yet, it almost seemed that from the moment the idea had popped into her mind it had taken hold and grown in a direction it shouldn’t have. She found herself wondering what it would be like to be his woman, found herself studying him when she was convinced he wouldn’t notice. From there it hadn’t been much of a leap to imagining what it would be like to have him rutting her.

  Well, it hadn’t been difficult imagining him fucking, at any rate. She knew the mechanics of copulation all too well so it wasn’t difficult to imagine in that sense but it was hard to imagine herself in that picture. Especially given the contempt he so clearly had for all humans. It took an effort to do that, though why she tried she didn’t know and beyond that, she didn’t know why it was that the images didn’t repulse her when she did manage it.

  Far from it.

  He was a male. From what she could see, angel or not, he didn’t look that much different from any other male she’d ever run across—except for the wings, of course.

  And the fact that he wasn’t nasty, stinky, and didn’t do any of the disgusting things she’d seen so many men do.

  And his form was actually pleasing.

  She liked his face. She didn’t know why it appealed to her, but there was no getting around the fact that it gave her pleasure to look at it. It made her belly feel oddly weightless when she looked at him and imagined him rutting her—as if she’d just fallen off a cliff.

  Or completely lost her mind!

  She did not like that! She knew what it was like—anywhere from horrible and painful to just plain disgusting, but never anything she had ever wanted to do. Why would she imagine that it would be different if he did that to her?

  She thought part of it might have been because of what he’d said the night he captured her—that he never had sex with a woman who didn’t want him to and that there were plenty of willing women.

  That statement made her wonder if the angel women were different, if they actually liked it—because she didn’t believe she was alone in thinking that human women had no liking of being rutted. She hadn’t seen many women who looked to be pleased about belonging to some man. Mostly they just looked hollow-eyed, hopeless, and miserable, although she’d also seen plenty that she thought looked as she once had—their eyes filled with desperation or horror.

  Despite her best efforts to dismiss the entire idea from her mind, though, she found herself wondering if there was something about the way he did it that made the fucking something they wanted.

  She told herself it was far more likely that it was pure male arrogance. Ralph had certainly seemed convinced that she looked forward to their coupling with anticipation rather than dread. One of the things she’d hated the worst about it was hearing his ragged voice in her ear demanding for her to tell him how much she was enjoying it. It was salt in the wounds he regularly inflicted and it outraged her, eventually drove her to stupidity and incautiousness.

  “You like that? You love feeling my dick pounding into your tight little pussy, don’t you, bitch?”

  It was a litany she’d heard many times since he’d captured her and yet when it reached the point where she couldn’t stand it anymore without telling him exactly how she felt about it, he taught her to regret her honesty.

  “I hate it. I feel like puking every time you touch me. I’d cut it off and shove it up your ass if I could.”

  That brutal honesty had cost her far more than the tiny rebellion of simply saying nothing at all and allowing him his illusions. Refusing to give him the answer he so obviously wanted only resulted in frantic, punishing thrusts that hurt but seemed to make him cum faster.

  That time, as soon as he caught his breath, he’d beat her so badly she’d lost the baby she was carrying, but she’d learned her lesson. She kept her mouth shut after that.

  For a while, those memories banished her fascination with the angel and the curiosity to know if being fucked by Gabriel would somehow be so completely different from her experiences before that she would be willing to allow him to do it to her whenever he wanted to. By the next day, though, she was back to wondering.

  Her preoccupation nearly cost her her life.

  * * * *

  “How many in the group you’re bringing?”

  “A hundred.”

  Maya sent Gah-re-al a startled look. “So many? That’s a large group to process. It’ll be hard to give them individual attention.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m going to have to see if I can find more volunteers.”

  Gah-re-al looked around the room Maya called her office for a place to perch and finally simply leaned against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. Despite her dubbing the room as an office, it was like everything about Maya—expensively furnished and meticulous groomed. He wouldn’t have felt comfortable in the room if he wasn’t covered in trail dust. “It’s a big village. I quartered them.”

  Maya didn’t turn around that time. She was focused on her computer, but she snickered. “I hope not!”

  Gah-re-al smiled faintly in response to her ‘little joke’, but the laugh had been derisive and it puzzled him. She’d been one of the most vocal of what he referred to as ‘bleeding hearts’ in the movement to rehabilitate the natives and the callousness of her joke surprised him, especially considering how many heated debates the two of them had had over his views. He couldn’t see her expression, though. She was focused on her computer screen, carefully marking the location of the village he’d found. Maybe he’d just imagined there was more amusement at the thought than there was? Or she was amused because his inferior education was showing? She did have a way of pointing out, very subtly, that she hailed from the ‘upper crust’ and had been born on the home world where everything, naturally, was far superior to the colonies where he’d been raised in an orphan facility. “Brought a quarter of them,” he amended.

  “The Lawgivers have all been finding larger villages the further west they go,” she said musingly. “Looks like our projection on the numbers might have been off.” She turned away from the computer and smiled at him. “Why don’t you sit down? You look exhausted.”

  Gah-re-al looked down himself, feeling more self-conscious than he liked. “I’m filthy from the trail. I think I’d better stand,” he said wryly.

  “Hmm. You look like you’re going savage. Sound a little like it, too, the way you’ve been talking about that little savage … what was her name? Mex? Dex?

  She was smiling when she made the comments, but Gah-re-al didn’t think he was imagining the rebuke in her voice. Discomfort wafted through him. They’d
been friends and sometimes lovers for more than a year now. As far as he’d been able to tell, Maya was perfectly content with the arrangement but unless it was pure imagination that last comment seemed to contain at least a trace of jealousy.

  That wasn’t the only source of his discomfort, however. The suggestion that he was preoccupied with Lexa struck home. Mentally, he reviewed what he’d told her, but he couldn’t think of anything he’d said that she could’ve interpreted as an interest in Lexa beyond his assignment. “Lexa is the only one I’ve actually spoken to,” he said pointedly, emphasizing the name to correct her although he suspected Maya had deliberately screwed it up, not misheard or forgotten. “I thought you’d be excited about the information I’d managed to gather.”

  She smiled but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. He wondered if she’d always been that way or it was just that she was angry for some reason—jealous or just not too pleased to discover there were so many primitives it was going to be a far bigger task than she or any of the others had anticipated.

  He could see where that prospect might be daunting. Until he and the others had been appointed as Lawgivers they’d thought the problems created by the primitives would be an easy fix. They’d thought it was merely a handful of savages making a nuisance of themselves.

  The world had been surveyed, of course, before the first settlement had been established. But the evidence of some cataclysmic event on top of the fact that they hadn’t discovered anything but ruins as evidence of the existence of higher intelligent life had led to assumptions they shouldn’t have made—that the mass extinction had included the majority of the intelligent life forms.

  Well, it had. Clearly the world had once been burgeoning with life whereas, when they found it, there were great tracts of scarred desolation and little more than ‘dots’ of new, emerging life. And, quite naturally, they’d chosen the areas already recovering from the cataclysm for their colonies. The assessment just hadn’t been as accurate as it should have been. More research before colonization would have led to the discovery of scattered pockets of primitives. Instead, they’d leapt at the opportunity to establish another colony on a promising world, even if it was in sad need of improvement.

  Not that he blamed them. They’d traveled a very long way to claim it just to turn around and go back!

  “Oh I’m delighted that you finally gained the trust of one of them and gathered some useful information.” She chuckled. “And not particularly surprised one of the little savage females has attached herself to you. You’re a very attractive man, Gah-re-al. It just surprises me that you allowed it considering your views on the savages.” She paused, clearly trying to decide whether to pursue the topic or not. “It’s … a little odd that you keep referring to the primitive by name. You aren’t growing attached? Thinking of her as a pet? Because that’s never a good idea with these creatures, let me tell you. They are wild. And like any wild thing, they can be dangerous.”

  Gah-re-al felt his face heat with a mixture of anger and discomfort. “I don’t need you to tell me how dangerous they can be,” he said tightly. “It’s my job to put down the most savage of the lot in order to give the gentler ones a chance. And it’s no easy task, regardless of the superior weapons we have. They attack in packs and from every direction at once and quite often without any warning.”

  She rose abruptly and rushed to him, slipping her arms around his waist and settling her cheek on his shoulder. “I know! I’m sorry. I worry about you every time you go out. I worry that I won’t see you again.” She leaned away to look at him earnestly. “Were you injured putting the savages down?”

  Gah-re-al peeled her loose and stepped away. She looked hurt and that made him more uncomfortable. “I stink,” he said by way of apology. “I know I should’ve cleaned up before I came, but I have to return as quickly as I can. I left them camped in the open and they’re defenseless.”

  Maya studied him, her expression still a careful mask of concern although anger flickered in her eyes. “You’re worried about them? Or her?”

  Discomfort wafted through Gah-re-al again as the questions sank home. He hadn’t examined his anxiousness to get back to the group he’d left on the plain. They were his responsibility and he took his responsibilities seriously—whatever Maya thought about his views on the primitives. It struck him as soon as she asked, though, that most of his focus, most of the anxiety churning in his gut, was about Lexa.

  He shook his head. “As long as you’ve been an advocate of the ‘save the humans’ drive, I’d think you’d be glad to think I was coming around to your views. Not that I am. They’re a dangerous species and either too wild, now, to ‘patch them up’ with a little instruction and expect them to behave like the civilized beings your people think they were or they never were civilized and the only thing you can hope to do is to train them to perform—give them a veneer that’ll disappear the moment you turn your back. It’s simply a matter of my responsibilities and I’ve always taken those seriously. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.”

  He’d meant it as a joke, but he was unnerved by the look Maya gave him. “Oh I know better than to get attached to you,” she said with slightly forced humor. “You’ve made it clear you aren’t in the market for a mate to settle with.”

  The comment annoyed him. “I’m a Lawgiver, Maya. As you pointed out yourself, there are no guarantees any time I go out that I’ll be coming back. There’s more danger out there than the primitives themselves. I’ve been seeing more and more signs of predators … the four-legged kind,” he added dryly, “which is one of the reasons I don’t like leaving the humans for very long, the other being I don’t want to have to round them up again. They aren’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of being your little social experiment.”

  Maya looked horrified. “Oh gods! You haven’t been attacked by one of the beasts we re-introduced?”

  “I haven’t had a nasty encounter … yet, but then I’m strong and well armed. The natives aren’t either of those things … which is one very good reason that I need to get back to the group under my care as quickly as possible. I only came to gather supplies to get them here and took the time to stop by to give you a report.”

  Actually, he mentally amended wryly, he’d hoped for a little recreation—trail dirt and grime or not—to rid himself of the growing temptation to try to seduce Lexa—the idea that had been sewn the day Lexa pointed out that his actions made the others believe she was his woman. Not that he’d consciously acknowledged that before Maya had rubbed his face in it! He’d thought it was a simple matter of having done without a female too long. He was still more inclined to think so than the alternative. Lexa was merely attractive enough to him to remind him that he hadn’t been with a woman in far too long and he’d thought it might be a good thing to work it out of his system before his baser urges overruled good sense.

  Maya had never seemed particularly put off by a little dirt, he thought wryly. In fact, she seemed to find a little exciting—as long as he didn’t actually stink. She’d said she liked the smell of a hardworking man. Privately, he’d thought it was part of the attraction of the savages for her—she just had a taste for low company. If she hadn’t, he didn’t think she would’ve given him the time of day. He’d been a soldier before he’d become a Lawgiver and she was far above him in social rank. Women of her class generally didn’t associate with men of his—which was the reason he’d thought it safe enough to take her as a lover.

  He wasn’t particularly pleased to discover that she seemed to have expected some sort of commitment from him.

  Then again, maybe she hadn’t expected or wanted it? Maybe she was just peeved that he hadn’t tried? Somehow he couldn’t see her actually settling for a man like him when she could do far better for herself.

  Maya pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, Gah-re-al, truly. But you know we have to carefully balance the ecosystem.”

  “Yeah, well I don’t especially care to be a meal
just to balance things out,” he said sardonically, “and I don’t think the humans would be too keen on it either.” He shook his head in disgust, mostly because the ‘reunion’ hadn’t gone as he’d expected it would. “I have to go.”

  She sent him a coy smile. “You didn’t want to get in a little fucking before you leave again?”

  Considering that was what he’d stopped at her habitat for, he wasn’t particularly happy to discover that he’d lost interest and wasn’t the least bit tempted to take her up on the offer. Then again, the main reason he’d been attracted to Maya was because she was a ‘lady’ and as desirable for being his social superior as she was unattainable. Her penchant for being crude and ‘earthy’ in the bedroom didn’t particularly thrill him since it demolished the illusion that he was making love with a high society woman. He could have that with any whore he cared to pay. “Too late, now,” he responded, grinning at her to soften the rejection. “I’ll take you up on the offer when I get the primitives settled in the new location.”

  “Maybe I won’t offer,” she said coolly.