And they hadn’t even asked. Seriously? I wasn’t one of those girls that expected a big production out of a wedding proposal, but it would have been nice to at least be asked. What happened to the whole, I love you and want to be with you forever speech? After what they’d just done to me—or rather, what they’d allowed the doctor to do to me—I wasn’t in the mood to be forced or coerced into anything else. I had a plug in my ass because they wanted it there, and because I was honest enough about my own desires to know that I wanted to take them both, at least once. But this…?
I closed my fist around the collar and lowered it to my lap. “No.”
He glowered as the doctor stepped back mumbling about challenges and killing. I could have tried harder to listen, but I was too busy staring down two big, bossy aliens.
“Put it on, now.” Nial’s lips thinned and his eyes narrowed as he tried to intimidate me into obeying him. “Jessica, by Prillon law I cannot force you to wear my collar. However, if you do not put it around your neck right now, you will be placing yourself at risk.”
I glared right back. Seriously? He’d just let a doctor double penetrate me with a couple of dildos and a magical suction cup in sexual fantasy land, and he expected me to say yes to a proposal he’d never made? I looked around the room. Nope. No big hulking monsters waiting to strike me down for refusing his non-proposal. Just me, my mates, and the doctor, who’d already done just about everything he could do to me. I would not be bullied into obeying. Not for this.
“Where I’m from, when a man asks a woman, and let me repeat that one critically important word here, asks a woman to be his bride, he usually gets down on one knee and gives her a damn good reason to say yes.”
Nial’s brow went up, but that was it. “Put the collar on.”
“No.”
“Put the collar around your neck, right now.”
“Ask nicely, Nial.”
I threw his own words back in his face and crossed my arms beneath my naked breasts. I was over being embarrassed by my nudity and sat like a queen holding court. There was nothing on this body that all three men in this room hadn’t seen aplenty and my pussy and ass still tingled and throbbed from the release. Surely the table was slick and wet beneath where I sat.
Ander rose from his place beside me and faced what appeared to be a doorway, ignoring me as Nial’s silver eye turned jet black. I didn’t care if he was angry. I was, too.
First I’d been denied transport by his stupid father, tracked by the Hive and nearly killed by my old mentor. Nial had saved my life, but he’d tricked me into being with both of them right after I’d been shot. Then they had taken me from my planet, tied me down, spanked me, and fucked me with strange medical equipment and forced me to lose control of myself in front of a total stranger. I rolled with the punches, adapting to the situation. I had gone along with everything they had wanted, despite my own better judgment. I was not going to agree to marry these two cavemen if they didn’t even ask me!
I glared right back at him waiting for him to figure out what I wanted, what I needed from him. His shoulders dropped and his eye changed back to silver as he stared at me. “What do you want, Jessica?”
The defeat I saw in his eyes nearly made me relent, but damn it! I wanted a real proposal. After everything they’d put me through already, I at least deserved that. It wasn’t like I was going to say no. I had no home and no life to go back to. If I went home—which was probably impossible anyway—I’d be dead in less than a week.
And I’d miss these two warriors as well, as much as it pained me to admit that, even to myself. I’d only known them a few hours, but already they felt like they were mine.
I was staring into Nial’s confused eyes, trying to figure out how to tell him what I needed without sounding like an overly sentimental idiot, when the door burst off its frame and two huge warriors invaded the room.
The bigger one was covered in the same silvery skin my Nial had, but his silver covered his chest and neck, not his face. His eyes were a warm honey brown but he had an odd metallic attachment imbedded in his flesh just above his right eye, like a second eyebrow. He didn’t even look in my direction, but directly at Nial.
“I challenge for the right to claim this Earth woman as my bride.”
Chapter Eleven
Jessica
Nial seemed to grow several inches taller, his silver skin sparkling under the slight blue tinge of the exam room lighting. “Touch her and I will kill you.”
Another man, one I realized now was the challenger’s second, moved along the edge of the room, toward me… and Ander, who positioned himself in front of me. The one moving toward us looked completely normal, for an alien, until I looked into his eyes. They were both lined with silver rings, like a jeweler had wrapped matching wedding bands around his irises.
Contaminated. The word floated through my mind until I heard Nial’s roar.
Turning quickly, I saw Nial lift the other warrior over his head like a weightlifting bar and hurl him sideways into a piece of black glass more than twenty feet across the room. The glass, or whatever it was, shattered and fell to the floor with a loud cracking and tinkling sound and I gasped as row upon row of warriors were revealed to me where they must have been standing the entire time.
Watching everything. Oh, my God, they’d seen me being spread open and spanked and fucked and my orgasm and my pleasure and…
Ander waited for his attacker to charge as Nial’s roar literally shook the remaining windows. Ander drew back and planted his fist squarely in the challenger’s jaw, sending him sprawling, unconscious several feet back from where he’d started his attack. One punch and the man was down.
Nial and Ander looked at each other and positioned themselves around me. I looked up to see another pair of warriors nod to each other and enter the room through the broken doorway. They were huge, equal in size to my mates, but much more cautious than the first two had been.
I stared at the black strip of ribbon in my hand and gave in to the inevitable. I understood now the urgency, the doctor’s warning. All of it. I knew I wanted my mates, I just wanted them to desire me with more than their bodies. I wanted their hearts. I wanted a true connection.
That kind of love took time. I knew that. In the meantime, I did not want my mates to have to fight the entire Colony to get me out of here. And I definitely did not want to take the chance that they might lose a challenge, or be seriously hurt, although that did not seem to be much of a problem.