Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I blush. I didn’t know he knew. I didn’t know they knew.
“You’re a beautiful, fertile, eager female,” he says. “There is no hiding that, and you should take no shame in it. The way you respond to me is the strongest, but you respond to almost all males who come in peace. It’s only the aggressively hostile, desperate ones who turn you off, as they should.”
I’m thoroughly embarrassed. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I bite my lower lip and I look away and I change the subject.
“I need a way to charge my weapons, or I’m going to be unable to protect myself. Do you have any knowledge of technology? Can you salvage anything they… desecrated?”
“Let’s take what we can carry,” Gruff says. “This is contested territory. You are much safer inside my territory. The wild ones will not cross my borders.”
“They’re not stupid. They’re going to work out there’s just one of you and dozens of them. Maybe they never crossed your borders before because you never had what they wanted before.”
“Maybe,” Gruff allows.
That’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to tell me that if they so much as tried, they’d be fried to a crisp by his dome, or something.
“Do you have any defenses? I mean besides your scent and your charm? Do you have anything in place to stop your little hut and your goats from being overrun by a small army of lustful bucks?”
“Your fantasies are quite vivid, aren’t they,” he smirks. “Does that excite you?”
I pull my weapon and push it against his chest. “Gruff, I am not fucking around,” I growl at him. “We need actual defenses. And no, I do not want to bone the entire countryside, so you can stop saying things like that.”
He grabs my wrist, pulls it to the side and yanks me hard against his body. His lips are against my ear as he snarls. “I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to. You’re mine. But so are your fantasies.”
Fuck. He makes me weak at the knees with the way he speaks, the way he smells. This close to him, I feel his pelt and the hot muscularity of his body against mine. I am so much smaller than him. I am so very much at his mercy.
“I don’t think that kind of fantasy is very appropriate, given… everything.”
“I think that fantasy exists because of… everything,” he replies. “Now, come. Let us see what we can salvage.”
We manage to pack a few items onto Gruff’s back. I can’t imagine this is going to work. The power systems are so different. Mine are far more advanced, and unless Gruff is an incredible engineer, I am going to be dependent on much more primitive means to defend myself.
7
“What are you doing, Jem?”
Gruff’s shadow falls over me a few days after the entire debacle with my ruined dome. I am out the back of the house, working on a few personal projects. I was hoping to keep this a secret, because Gruff is still convinced that he can chase off all the baddies in the world with his big manly horns. I’m sure he can keep some of them at bay, but let’s be real, there are only so many bucks he can smash in the the head with his head before that’s not going to work anymore.
“I am carving some weapons. Stakes. We can dig holes and put them inside…”
“And skewer the goats. Excellent idea.” He takes the knife from me. “Trust me when I tell you that you are safe, Jem, and stop devising traps that will only hurt us.”
“You have no defenses, Gruff.”
He sighs and looks at me with eyes of emerald frustration. “Do you really think I have no defenses, Jem?”
“I don’t see any. You haven’t told me about any. You could share them if they existed, and you could make me feel better.”
His lips curl into a smirk. “I don’t want you getting into them. I don’t want you getting into trouble. What I want is for you to tend to the herd. There are pens to be cleaned, water to be carried, and grain to be fed.”
“You’re hiding your technology from me. You don’t trust me.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. Your impulse to shoot first and ask questions later doesn’t give me much confidence. You’re lucky I let you keep the weapons you do have, given the way you wave them around like punctuation at the end of sentences.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“Maybe,” he allows. “But only a little. You don’t need access to more weaponry. You need to go clean the goat pens. Now.”
He sends me off to work like I’m his slave. I don’t want to do any labor, certainly not filthy goat-tending labor, but my choices feel limited. I can’t just run away into the woods. The bucks have my scent now and as bad and bossy as Gruff is, he is not passing me around half a dozen wild bucks.