They’re sort of soft to the touch, not hard like I was expecting, and they smooth back until they’re almost hidden in the groove down the center of the tail.
“Do all Sarkarnii have these?”
“Not all, just the warlords,” Dante says, his voice somewhat strangled. “It is a measure of our seniority.”
I lift my eyes from the tail to him because the concept of Dante being senior is somewhat hard to comprehend. He has, at least, stopped drooling.
Instead he is staring intently at me, as if his eyes could see into my soul. It suddenly dawns on me I have his tail in my hand, I’m stroking the spines, and I have no idea if either are an erogenous zone for a Sarkarnii. I let go instantly.
“I have…quarters,” Dante says, his forked tongue, like all the Sarkarnii have, poking out between his lips and wetting them. “They are adjacent to mine. They are keyed to your DNA and mine. No one else can enter.”
“Just you?”
“Just me.”
“And if I want to keep you out?”
A flicker of emotion runs over Dante’s handsome face. “You would want to keep me out?”
“I’ve already been bitten by you before. Of course I want to keep you out.”
“I bit you because you are mine.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I retort. “Nor does it work if you bit me because youweren’t yourself. No biting and no coming in my quarters without permission.”
Dante has the good grace to stare at his boots for a brief instant.
“There are…I need to…” He lifts his head up, and those beautiful eyes spin with fire. “I am not what you think I am, little flame.”
“I don’t know what you are. What I do know is you changed everything, and I need to come to terms with it.” I walk towards the door which slides open at my approach.
“What then?” Dante asks.
“Then, maybe, we can talk.”
“What if I don’t like to talk?” he says, hands dangling by his sides, claws relaxed and half extended.
“Then you’re going to need to learn,” I reply as the doors slide shut, cutting off my view of him.
I lean against the door frame, exhaling a long, long breath. Dante has sent my emotions into complete turmoil.
In the atrium, when we were so close, so very close I thought he might…
And I wanted it. No matter what had gone before, the fact I’ve been ordered to stay with him on pain of his entire crew ending up banished to a barren moon, along with Dante—it doesn’t give me much choice, and I should be so damn angry.
But his lips, his eyes, the spicy scent of his scales, the fact we were just about to…I don’t know what we were about to do.
Whatever else I might think about Dante, about his behavior, about his desire to make things explode and damn the consequences, underneath I want to think he has a good heart.
Before I can even think about the moment in the atrium, I need to find out more about him, about what I’ve got myself into.
And most of all, how I can possibly extract myself from it…if I need to.
Something I can’t possibly let Dante know about and something I need to approach very carefully, if I’m not to have a whole ship full of Sarkarnii banished to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
ROSALIE
“Food,” Dante says when I open the door to him the following morning.
