“Huh?” Okay, so her thoughts weren’t exactly coherent yet, but how could anyone equate punishment with kissing? “I thought you had the definition for ‘punish’ figured out. Need me to break out the dictionary?”
“Punishment may come in many forms.”
Her thoughts were starting to clear, enough for her to realize he was probably talking about sexual punishment, the kind sometimes practiced when one half of a married partnership was annoyed with the other half.
“You mean like my telling you I’ve got a headache?” she said.
His frown was filled with sudden concern. “Your head hurts?”
She sighed. “No, that was just a comparison—never mind. And you don’t have to keep petting me. I’ve got it under control now.”
From the moment he had mentioned punishment, he’d been caressing her in a very nonsexual way, soothing her to calmness like he might a child. Not that it did much good, when any touch from him at all was stimulating. But he didn’t seem to need calming down himself. If she couldn’t still feel that thick bulge against her hip, she’d swear he hadn’t participated at all in the heavy kissing they’d just done. His composure was—unusual, to say the least, something else beyond her experience of men.
But then she noticed his eyes, and she was completely reassured that she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten hot and bothered. He’d been affected, all right. His amber eyes were liquid gold, filled with enough passion for three men, the intensity unnerving in a man his size. And yet his control seemed almost superhuman. His breathing was normal. He hadn’t broken a sweat. His tone was steady, his heartbeat probably the same.
But with that passion still there under the surface, just laying in wait, she figured it might be prudent to more fully distract them both. To that end, she asked, “What was that foreign name you called me?” His questioning frown added the prompt, “Cara something?”
“Kerima? It means little one.”
She burst out laughing. “I know you’re big, but I am, too. It’s music to my ears, really, but it’s kind of ridiculous to call me little.”
“For your men, perhaps. For me, you are a perfect size. Any smaller, and I would fear to break you.”
She grinned. “Let me guess. You’ve had the same problem I have, of finding partners of an acceptable size.”
He surprised her by shaking his head. “Size is of little matter. Frailty of body is of greater concern. But you are not frail, are you?”
“Wielding a hammer all day tends to build a sturdy frame, no pun intended.”
“Pun—ah, you speak of house-building as well as body-building.”
She blinked. “You got it without an explanation?”
“I have the proper translations now for all but what you call brand names.”
“I don’t get it. It just suddenly all clicked for you? A few hours ago you couldn’t make head or tails out of some pretty common words, but now you can?”
“This is so.”
“Then I think you’d better convince me that you haven’t been pulling my leg all along, because what you’re suggesting just isn’t possible.”
She had shot out of his lap, had her hands on her hips, was glaring down at him, so his remark wasn’t really a question. “You are angry.”
“Damn straight,” she growled. “I don’t like being made a fool of.”
“Nor have you been,” his calm tone continued. “The mistake was made because of the slowness of your computers. It has been corrected. I have been receiving the proper translations for several hours now.”
“Language courses don’t work that fast!”
“I am told you would understand ‘new technology,’” he offered. “The means of teaching me is not known to all the universe yet.”
“World,” she mumbled, somewhat mollified, though she was still incredulous that something had been invented that could speed along learning that fast. But apparently all the kinks hadn’t been worked out of it yet, since he was still getting a few words wrong.
“Explain?”
“You keep using the word ‘universe,’ when you obviously meanworld. Universe implies beyond this planet, but there’s nothing out there in deep space, at least nothing alive, so ‘world’ is the better descriptive word for what you were talking about.”
He smiled at her. “Are you certain?”
