Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One (10 page)

She nodded, her eyes still wide.

“I’m letting go of your mouth now,” he warned. “Be quiet.”

She nodded again.

He let go, and her expression immediately went from surprised to annoyed as she grabbed her pillow and tried to put that in front of her more private parts, sitting very quickly up and ignoring the uncomfortable sting in her backside. “What are you doing here? How’d you
get
here? How’d you know where to find me?”

“That’s a lot of questions, little lady,” he replied, lowering his face to hers. “But… I’m a
professional
.”

“Don’t kiss me. Don’t even start,” she threatened, getting a good, firm grip on her own self-control and tightening the pillow to her body.

He looked like he went through a metamorphosis of expressions—from anger all the way to embarrassment, even horror. “You’re right. God help me, I must be losing my mind…” He took her arm and pulled her into standing, which she didn’t do easily. “Get dressed, we have to go.”

“
Go
?” she echoed, her face twisted with confusion. “Go
where
?”

“There’s a landing dock about two klicks from the palace. We have to use the emergency tunnels. The boys are securing us a ship, but they’ll leave without us if we’re not there in fifteen minutes, so you need to move your ass.”

Yes—fifteen minutes to run two kilometers? She better put a move on; especially with welts on her feet. She jumped up from the bed. “We can’t just
go
,” she explained, jumping behind her changing curtain and quickly grabbing the first clothing items she could find.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Peyton and Mary-ah!” she yelped as she slid on pants—the panties weren’t quite as bad. “I can’t just leave them here.”

“Sorry, sweetheart—no time to deviate from the plan.” Truthfully, he hadn’t seen Peyton yet and he was beginning to think he wasn’t going to make it. “I wish we could take your friends.”

“But…” she came behind the curtain, wearing a flowy pair of pants and a thin blouse.

Graham felt himself stiffen again, but tried his best to ignore it and stepped forward to grab her hand. “I’m sorry, Sweet One. But we have to go.”

She stepped backwards, suddenly resisting. Her heart was beating rapidly—she couldn’t imagine just leaving Peyton and Mary, despite the fact that she wanted to see Peyton in enormous pain not ten minutes ago. “I’m not going without—”

She stopped when she saw the resolved look in Graham’s eye. Without saying words, it quite nicely got across that there was an ‘easy way’ and a ‘hard way’, but either way she chose, it was going to happen.

She didn’t have a chance to feel disappointed—things were beginning to move too quickly. She saw him pull a blaster off his utility belt—he was wearing that earlier, but there hadn’t been any sort of gun on it. He clicked it on and charged it up.

“Sorry,” Graham declined when he looked and saw her panicked and pleading expression.  He opened the door and tugged her with him out into the hallway.

She understood why Graham was able to so freely move about the palace: he was extremely stealthy; his feet made no sound whatsoever when they hit the ground, it seemed, while nearly every step she made onto the marble floors with her bare feet sounded like she was lightly clapping her hands.

When he led her straight into a dead-end, she had to admit that she was surprised. He didn’t seem like the screw-up type. Though, suddenly he bent down and plucked a grating off of a vent. “Here we go,” he told her quietly. “Ladies first…”

Then, suddenly, they heard another blaster behind them charge up. Graham sighed, cursed something in his own language, and put his hands up to turn around… Just in time to see a pair of human hands come up behind a particularly un-lazy Frian guard and snap his neck quietly to the side, breaking the neck instantly. The body was lowered to the ground, and Peyton’s firm, bulky body stood proud and straight in the middle of the hallway.

Peyton put his finger to his lips and then went around the corner, reappearing with Mary in-hand. Ellie looked completely dazzled by all of this.

“Peyton!” she cried, though as whisperish as she could.

“Shh!” Graham said anyway, and bent her down into the vent. “Careful of the drop. Feet first.” He took her hand and lowered her down where, she was surprised to see, there was a dark, empty, long tunnel. When he lowered her in until her feet touched the ground, Graham offered his hand to Mary, who, though reluctant, accepted and was also lowered down.

“I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna make it. Too busy painting your toenails?” was all Graham said when they were alone together.

“Funny, Dick. Next time you set off the decoy and
I’ll
rescue Ellie,” Peyton replied aloofly, climbing down into the tunnel himself, leaving Graham with his eyebrows knitted together and a victorious grin on his face.

Graham climbed down and replaced the vent grating behind him. “Can you make two klicks in nine minutes?” he asked Peyton.

“Can
you
?” Peyton challenged.

“I can’t,” admitted Ellie promptly, wondering what they were going to do now. She had never done a seven minute mile in her life, let alone done two kilometers in nine.

Graham picked up Ellie as if she were a doll, not even thinking twice. Peyton mirrored his movement. It wasn’t comfortable—all the skin on the entire surface of her backside felt raw. Still—despite being uncomfortable, she had to admit—she was happy that Peyton and Mary were with her.

“Let’s kick this pig,” Peyton said, beginning to run extremely quickly.

Graham also took off with an odd, thoughtful expression on his face. “Humans and their crazy euphemisms. Hopefully there’s a book somewhere. I need to catch up.”

Chapter Five

“Gee, Boss, I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna make it!” Thorton grinned as he stepped out of the lowered entry ramp, gun in hand, ready to return fire if any Frians popped out anywhere. It was unlikely—it was dead, in the middle of the night. The ship was noisily taking off, and still there didn’t seem to be any pursuers. This was surprising to Ellie.

“Just keeping you on your toes,” replied Graham, slinking by him. Thorton followed him and the ramp rose into the ship again as they went.

Thorton looked at Peyton, who was setting Mary down on the floor. “So, looks like you brought lunch.” He grinned maniacally for a second, until Peyton sufficiently glared at him. Thorton waved, “I’m just kiddin’.”

Graham finally put her down on the way to the control room, but he brushed right by her as soon as he did. She spun around and looked at Peyton and Mary. “What’s going on? How did you get in on all of this?” she asked, gesturing at the ship around her.

“Peyton’s a moron,” Mary explained shortly.

“I know, that’s why I’m confused,” Ellie replied with a shrug.

Peyton rolled his eyes and led both girls by their arms towards the control room. “The commander and I have an understanding. He had me launch Jazeel’s emergency ship into orbit. That way, we had more time to make a clean get away. It should take a few more minutes for them to figure out that the emergency ship is unmanned, and that we escaped another way.”

“Isn’t Jazeel’s emergency vessel able to be remote-controlled?” Ellie asked, knowing quite a bit about the ship Peyton was referring to—she had done a lot of work on it.

“Yeah, that’s why we’re not on it,” Thorton replied, breezing by.

She hummed in response and walked up to Graham, who was typing something quickly into the main system. “What can I do to help?” she offered, still feeling ridiculous after being carried two kilometers. Not that Graham even broke a sweat.

“Sit down and be quiet,” he directed, pointing to a nearby chair.

“Yeah, right,” she looked at the chair as if it was an instrument of pain. Even her clothes she found irritating; sitting would kill her, she was sure.

“You’re distracting,” he added, leaning over the control panel she was next to, reading a screen before taking a seat there. He suddenly gave her bottom a hard smack. “
Get
.”

Her jaw dropped. Was she just
swatted
? She grabbed her bottom with both hands and glared at him with an indignant look.

He typed a few things into a nearby keyboard. “Are you still there?” he asked, obviously noticing her in his peripheral vision, because he didn’t turn to glance at her.

She flicked him off, not that he could get the full gravity of that, as he was from a different planet, but it made her feel slightly better for a moment until suddenly all the lights on the panel started flashing red, just as the ship was taking off.

“I didn’t do it!” she held up her hands to show that she wasn’t touching a goldarned thing.

Graham cursed in his own language, and then continued to mutter in it.

She saw the panel next to her light up, and it began to say that wire 119 was a dead wire; not that she could read a word of Frian; but she helped fix enough electrical problems that she knew most problems on site, and could recognize numbers.

She knew exactly where to find wire 119, however, which she continued to do as the horizon continued to darken as the ship elevated through the planet’s atmospheres. She scooted underneath the dashboard. “One nineteen, one nineteen…” she grumbled, her mood further dampened by the lack of light.

Suddenly, in the monitors overhead, she heard a Frian shal’ta travel through the specialized intercom, and it was, like the Frians themselves, not very hard to understand.

You do not have permission to enter orbit or hyper speed
, the Frian on the other end noted.
You didn’t have permission to take off. All aircraft must be landed immediately. If you do not comply within three minutes, you will be shot.

Thorton was suddenly crawling next to her under the dashboard. “I found wire 119,” she told him, as if it was a greeting. “Do you have some spare line?”

“Yeah,” he replied, sounding out-of-breath for some reason.

“Eleanor! What the hell are you doing under there? Go buckle up, or I’ll buckle YOU,” the threat in Graham’s tone above-head was undeniable; she didn’t have to see his expression.

“Graham,
fuck off. Leave me alone and drive
!” she growled, cutting the wire out with the pliers Thorton had handed her. “That man’s
pushy
,” she explained to Thorton, whose dark expression now seemed a little anxious.

Her fingers worked fast—this was actually child’s play. Though,
most
wiring jobs were child’s play to her. She had wired up more complicated speaker systems into the trunks of old Dodge Chargers that had given her more flak.

“It’s working now,” she heard Thorton say, who scooted his head up to the dashboard to check. “Good job, Kitten,” he said with a wink.

A voice above them clucked something in Swarii, and she could only assume it was that they needed to enter hyperspace right NOW, because Thorton swore again, and disappeared. Just as she was wondering what the hell
his
rush was, her foot was dragged immediately out from under the control dock and Graham hauled to her feet and sat down in his chair with her so fast, that it made her head spin.

Just as she realized that Graham was holding her down in his lap, they went into hyper drive.

She was drugged most of the journey between Earth and Jazeel’s planet, so she hadn’t remembered the awing sensation of hyper drive. It sucked. Nearly literally—it felt like she was literally getting sucked through a straw like a piece of strawberry at the bottom of a glass of lemonade, and then got spat back out a rocket-speeds.

There was no similar roller coaster ride that could describe it, except that it felt like, for a full minute, that not even gravity itself knew what was going on.

And then everything returned to normal.

She found herself clinging to Graham like a wild yet frightened animal. She was nearly ashamed of herself for her display, and would have slowly gotten off him if he hadn’t put his hand under her chin to keep her head up and focused on his own eyes. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she wheezed.

He stood up quickly, and she nearly fell to the floor because of it. “Good,” he said brusquely. He looked around the room and announced. “Good job, men. Now, if anybody bugs me for the next hour, it had better be about life and death.” Suddenly, he took her hand and began to wheel her out of the control room.

“Wait—” Peyton was a few feet behind them, trying to unbuckle himself. “Where are you going with her?” he demanded. But he knew—the expression on Graham’s face was undeniable. He was going to have his way with Ellie; but the thought of it bothered Peyton—watching someone that he had taken under his wing like a sister about to let an alien between her legs with no formal wedding, no dating.

Graham barely took the time to glance at Peyton as he walked by him. “Believe me; it is none of your business where we’re going or what we do when we get there, got it?”

Peyton obviously didn’t like to be shrugged off. He finally got the harness unfastened and quickly went to block the door. “Where she goes, I go.”

“You have your own woman,” reminded Graham, nodding towards Mary. “This one is
mine
.”

Peyton didn’t move.

Graham suddenly grabbed the blaster off his utility belt and powered it on. He pointed it at Peyton’s head.

“Graham! Stop it!” Ellie said, trying to break free of his grasp.

“Step away, Muscles,” Graham growled threateningly. “I’m not in the mood to explain myself, and I’m not in the mood to dance with you.”

Peyton’s eyes shifted nervously, and he stepped aside and let them through the door.

“That was stupid!” Ellie lectured as Graham dragged her through the hallway.

Graham opened a door, looked in, and then closed it. “Is there ever a time where you are
silent
?” he asked her, then opened another door, looked in, and then tugged her into the room with him, shutting and locking the door behind him before he let her go and turned on the lights.