But the effect was not purely physical. She found herself marveling at how gentle he was being. Caring, almost. As he spread the water over her back, his fingers lightly grazing her skin left a trail of gooseflesh behind their touch.
He was bathing her. An alien was bathing her on a hostile planet, and she was fluttering her eyes and trembling inside like someone had ordered her a male stripper who was paying his way through med school.
“Can you tell me more?” she whispered. The trauma of her kidnapping was gone, replaced by the same profound curiosity that had drawn her out of the ship against Kat’s warnings. A deep need to understand this creature, these creatures, and their motivations formed in her mind, along with an awe at standing next to an alien race so similar to her own that it seemed impossible. His strong hands on her skin made her back arch. She felt her nipples stiffen harder still.
“The others did not ask so many questions.”
Sonya found herself smiling a little in spite of herself. “You have no idea how many times I’ve been told that.”
The creature’s fingers, gliding over her back between her shoulder blades, lifted from her skin and hovered above her back. She could feel their presence, inches from her skin, like static electricity—invisible, but containing a charge or a force of some kind.
He then made a sound that was so much like a human laugh that she smiled reciprocally and huffed her own laugh out before she had even thought about it.
“I am also told frequently that I ask more questions than the others,” he said, and Sonya felt something wrench inside of her. He was just like her, she thought.
But that was ridiculous. This was an alien life form planning to breed her, not a possible friend.
“There are not enough females here to sustain a population,” he said, as his fingers returned to her skin. His voice was low. “We have been harvesting foreign wombs for millennia. It is an accepted practice. Have you born offspring before?”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Somehow she still managed to shake her head in answer to the question—she knew at least that much.
“No,” she whispered.
“You will be made comfortable. It will not be distressing,” he said, pouring more water over her shoulders. “Our species has adapted our methods for maximum efficiency and comfort for each specimen.”
This all seemed like a dream. Not a nightmare, yet, strangely. Disturbing, yes. But oddly enough, not ominous. Sonya held her own hand out in front of her to confirm that she was experiencing real life.
What the heck should she say in response tothat?
“You’ve been doing this for millennia,” she mused. “How do you, uh…?” She found herself struggling, in spite of being a scientist, for a way of asking exactlyhowthey were impregnating females. She found herself almost hoping for an answer that wasnotsterile and clinical. “How do you… do it?” she finally blathered.
This gave the alien pause again. His fingers slowed, and she dared to look at his face. Now that she was calm and had some level of trust with the creature, it was not as frightening to look at him.
But his demeanor changed suddenly again. He seemed to do a great deal of thinking in a short amount of time and not reveal any of it, to her, at least.
He ran his hands down her arms to her bound wrists, his fingers lingering sensually on the binding, stroking her skin.
“Obey and you will not be punished. Disobey and you feel the whip again,” he said, his lips next to her ear. His breath swept over her skin and made a fresh crop of goosebumps erupt along her neckline. Underneath her skin, the words seemed to burn, entering her bloodstream, arousing her.
But he was analien,she reminded herself. She wasn’t supposed to be feeling this way, entertaining ideas or feelings like the ones she was having.He hadn’t even answered her question.
She closed her eyes and drew in a breath as his hands traveled back up her arms. She shook her head again. “I… I can’t,” she said. “I need… answers…” Even as she spoke the words, she lost heart in finishing the sentence.
“You can and you will,” he said. “It will not be distressing,” he repeated.
Her head started to spin. It all seemed so unreal. Standing next to this alien life form, hearing that she was going to bebredand that it would not be distressing. She glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t do this,” she said. She was floundering, saying things she felt like sheshouldsay, but not really meaning the words.
“We can and we will,” he stated.
He drew more water and poured it over the small of her back. It snaked over her skin, breaking into forks of titillating pleasure. His hands moved lower, grazing her bottom, washing her in intimate places. She should have resisted, she knew; but she had no impulse to pull away from his touch. Instead, she stiffened at the unexpected arousal his touch was eliciting in her body. A cascade of emotions sprang from there: humiliation, lust, arousal, a curious sense of well-being and of all things,safety. They all seemed to well up from his rough touch on the slow-burning beneath her tender, spanked skin.
She blushed again, as a fresh wave of reason washed through her thoughts: this wasabsurd. A glance down at her nipples showed them stiff and more red than pink. “I… I…” she stammered, unable to put a sentence together.
His right hand swept around to her front, to the base of her belly, then dipped lower to the inside of her thighs.
“Please,” she gasped. She wasn’t sure what she was begging for. She knew what sheshouldbe saying. But her body was not reacting the way it was supposed to.
She tried to move her hands to stop his fingers from seeking out even more intimate places, but he issued her a warning by looking at her in the eyes, burning through her thoughts with the alien message behind them.
