WastelandRogue by Brenda Williamson Read Free Book Online

save one. He wasn’t lamian .
    “How long have I actually been asleep?” she asked, shaking
off her attraction to the human.
    Besides, until she found Shay, she’d never completely be
happy, so why think of soul-gratifying luxuries such as everlasting love?
    “All day.” Sevrin shook out pants, bent down and stepped
into them. “You sleep like the dead.”
    She watched the clothing conceal the manliness of his lower
half. With the light of the fire now behind him, she wasn’t able to see his
body in detail anymore.
    Glad to be free of the distraction, she rose to her feet.
“How did you know to put me in the dark?”
    Lamians kept certain aspects of their lives a secret
from humans as a safeguard. Sleeping in a tight dark space was natural, as if a
form of rebirth to them. It also had benefited them as a good hiding place when
on the run from vigilantes.
    “You told me,” he answered.
    “I did?” She couldn’t remember.
    “It wouldn’t have mattered. I know a little about lamian physiology. It may not be much, but it’s proved to be enough to keep you from
dying so far,” he added, fastening his pants.
    She noticed he shied away from staring at her. Feeling as if
she were a deformed freak, she looked at her bare arms, her bare breasts and
her belly. No evidence of her wounds remained. Was there something else he
didn’t like? Was she too skinny, too tall, maybe too small in the breasts?
She’d heard human men liked females well endowed in the bosom. It didn’t make
sense since humans could no longer conceive. Without a baby to nurse, what
point was there to big breasts?
    She raked her hands through her tangled hair. He had given
her blood, cooled her dehydrated skin and washed her. Why had he not clothed her?
There was a shirt. Why wasn’t it on her any longer? She glanced at the rack by
the fire and saw it next to his, the reason now apparent. He had washed their
clothes.
    His constant avoidance of looking at her made her
self-conscious. She wanted to fold her arms up and conceal herself to break the
awkwardness of the moment. Then he walked toward her.
    As he moved closer, she saw lust darkening his brown eyes.
While unsettling, his now unwavering, radiant gaze prevented her from wanting
to move at all.
    Her cheeks tingled with an unusually strange warmth
radiating up from her neck.
    She changed her mind about her assumption he didn’t want to
look at her. Maybe that was the reason she had no clothes on, so he could ogle
her naked form or do more. How often had he lifted the lid to the crate and
stared at her? Had he touched her? Fondled her nipples or thrummed his fingers
between her legs? She ached from head to toe. Had he repeatedly raped her
unconscious body?
    And now what?
    She contemplated where to run. Could she run? Her legs felt
weak, so she doubted she’d get more than a few steps before he caught her.
    Rye tried turning her attention to the cavern of the
mineshaft as a distraction. Darkness swallowed whatever lay beyond. The black
hole offered nothing to prevent her from turning her gaze back to Sevrin’s
stare.
    The prickling heat spread along her limbs, arousing her in
the familiar way it had when he had washed her. Eager for his caresses fondling
her and his kisses bathing her in passion, she couldn’t deny wanting him. She
yearned to hear him grunting and feel him rutting atop her.
    “Here, it’s cleaner, even though it doesn’t look it, but now
it’s dry.”
    Her unexpected desires confused her. “What?” She glanced
down at the shirt she hadn’t noticed before in his hand. He wanted her covered
up? Confusion turned to embarrassment and then sizzled into an infuriating
slight upon her generosity. She never took kindly to any human’s indifference.
    She snatched the shirt from his hand, angered by what she
perceived to be his prejudice against lamians . In her haste to quickly
put on the item of clothing, her wobbly knees gave way and she toppled into
Sevrin.
    He caught her.