Soul Dancer (3 page)

“I will have power over the villa kattanee,” he whispered against her ear. “I’ll change their circumstances. None will have to wear white, and everyone can make friends with those who appeal to them. And I’ll do away with the death penalty.”

She shook her head. “Becutan are resistant to change of any type, especially the black-skinned ones,” she whispered.

He turned her chin toward him and forced her to look at the determination etched on his face. “When we were children, we never had to think twice about running outside and playing with each other. Everything came easily to us. I want it to be the same always, for everyone, no matter what age they are.”

“You’re a dreamer. You can’t change those things.” She moistened her bottom lip and the small action drove him wild.

“You’ve said that before, too many times to count. I may not be able to change them all at once, but gradually I can. We’ll worry about that later. Right now, I’ve got more important things to do. Like fuck you out of your mind.”

“Hmm?”

He didn’t think she expected a reply and gave her none. His cock was about to explode in a burst of heat and arcing fireworks. He lifted his knee and settled between her thighs. Cool air washed over his damp, perspiring back. Her fingers, exerting pressure, silently urged him on.

His own joy knew no bounds. The tip of his rock-hard shaft nuzzled her slick entrance. Very slowly, he slid into her channel. She was so wet and ready for him. Sucking her other nipple, he began to thrust with long, even strokes. Her vagina convulsed around his cock, and once more, he heard her groan as her tension heightened then dissipated as she climbed another mountain on her way to an orgasm.

Jamar had wanted this first time with Kierra to be special, to savor their joining, but he couldn’t hold on any longer.

“Kierra!” he cried out and lost himself in a flurry of bliss and exuberant whirlwinds that picked him up and tossed him in every direction.

* * * *

Jamar’s arm lay across the flat of her stomach as he slept, his breathing light and even. Their lovemaking had been explosive, but the ever-present fear reared its rotting head again. Dreading she’d be discovered, Kierra had to get up without disturbing him.

She watched his long lashes flutter and, for a brief moment, thought her chance to escape was gone. But maybe he was dreaming. He continued to sleep.

What goes on in your beautiful head, Jamar? Is it fanciful dreams of changing the way things are? Of making promises you simply can’t keep because most on this plantation and elsewhere are resistant to change, those stuffy ones who won’t let you? You must know the danger you put me in, but as ever, you think you can whisk a magic wand and make everything all better, don’t you? You are a dreamer, Jamar Q’ellan. I knew that the first time I set eyes on you as you paddled a makeshift raft that couldn’t possibly stay afloat. And even though I was ten years old, I fell inexplicably and madly in love with you. But I’m kattanee and you’re not, sweet Jamar. There is a deep division between us that can’t be forded no matter how we try or what we do.

She remembered the time they’d strolled into an ice cream shop to cool themselves with a sweet treat. The kattanee would not serve her but he was only too happy to serve Jamar, whose skin was black and which made him better than her.

She was very nearly ready to walk out when Jamar had called her back, offered her the strawberry ice cream he’d just bought and turned to the slave behind the counter and purchased one for himself. Tongues had wagged for days after that.
Jamar has the hots for Kierra Vonne, a lowly kattanee.
Ha! She didn’t even know what the ‘hots’ were, to tell the truth.

She never did tell him that her father had whipped her for that while her poor mother had watched with a horrified expression. After her father had finished and he’d gone, her mother rubbed salve on Kierra’s bruised back and told her that black and white had no place together. None at all. Hadn’t anyone ever taught Jamar that lesson, too?

No, I suppose not.
He was black, he was Jaquill and they were never taught to abase themselves. Why would they be? But the kattanee continually had reinforced for them that they were nobody, that they couldn’t do the same things or own the same type of luxurious possessions as the Jaquill did. Soon they wouldn’t be able to breathe the same air.

Tears streamed down Kierra’s cheeks. Why was she so fatalistic? She swallowed hard on a ball of sheer, rising terror. He was the man of her dreams, but they were too far apart to share the same bed repeatedly as man and wife. A marriage between black and slave was unheard of.

“What are you thinking?” Jamar asked in a trace of a whisper.

He startled her so badly she began shaking and, unable to speak, rested her palm over her thumping heart.

“Nothing good, I imagine.” He sighed heavily and tenderly caressed the cheek nearest him.

She didn’t dare meet his eyes and pursed her lips, wondering what she should tell him. However, no matter how her mind raged, silence was best and didn’t get her into trouble.

“I know of a man who knows a captain of a spaceship. He could find us a way out of here,” Jamar told her quietly.

She turned to him, her lips trembling, her mind rushing from one thought to another at a mile a minute.

“We might get caught.” Then she’d face death without flinching, knowing she’d had no choice but to accept her fate because she loved Jamar.

His thumb feathered up to her lower lip and trailed across the dry skin. “But then, we might not. Do you still read?” he continued in a voice that caressed her whole body with its soft timbre.

Speechless, she nodded. Kierra didn’t have much time after cleaning the villa from morning ‘til night and only read when she wasn’t exhausted, which wasn’t often.

“Have you read about the scientific experiments on Praadar?”

She shook her head. The kattanee didn’t have much access to information from other worlds. Jamar, however, was well read, and he could use his galaxy communication device, a GCD, that fit in his pocket for information he wanted. Kattanee were forbidden to own them.

“Men and women on Praadar are changing their skin color the same way they change their hair color. It’s fascinating.” Jamar continued to caress her cheek, but with the back of his knuckles.

“How do they do it? Do they paint themselves?” Kierra ventured to ask. They probably had to take a pill, and the transformation had to have some lasting effect, maybe an irreversible one.

She closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation of his soothing hand on her face.

“Nothing like that. They do it with a self-administered injection.”

“On Praadar they don’t have much in the line of restrictions?” The Pradaarians were a free people, as free as the soaring eagle, she thought as the walls of Jamar’s room began to close in on her. On Praadar, there were no kattanee, no Jaquill and each person was free to choose how they lived. Such a contrast to Manitee-a and Becutan.

“Not many that I know of. Men and women change their skin color to make a statement or for fun. I’ve seen it.”

“To make a statement? But why?”

“Principally the teenagers are doing that, to show their parents they can be different. It’s the latest rage there to change the color of your skin.” He paused and heaved a deep sigh. “Here,” he waved his hand at the room and beyond, “we’re stuck in the dark ages, and the war between Jaquill and kattanee continues.”

“It’s not a war,” Kierra interjected, her voice sounding strained. “It’s the way things are. The past is finished. There’s no going back to undo what our forbearers began.”

“But that’s my point,” he said, his voice suddenly laced with excitement.

She instantly missed his gentle touch.

“Skin color doesn’t matter. After all, the same red blood runs through our veins. We have the same illnesses, the same joys, the same sorrows. We are born and die exactly the same way. Do you see what I mean?”

She did see. Only too clearly but she wouldn’t admit that to her friend, now her one-time lover.

“No.” Abrupt fear overrode her curiosity. It was much safer not to know, to pretend that being a kattanee was all right because she’d been born to it, just as Jamar had been born Jaquill.

His sexy mouth turned down. His gaze pleaded with her.

She gave him a disapproving frown.

“You have to see,” he protested. “You’re my soul mate.”

Her heart broke in two. She began to roll over to the other side of the bed to get up. “I’ve got work to do, Jamar. I’m a kattanee.”

He reached out and seized her upper arm in an unrelenting grip. “Stay with me. Please.”

She turned her head and let her gaze rest on him as she pondered his statement. Too bad he was naked. His cock was no longer flaccid but rigid and long. There was no mistaking he wanted her again.

Tugging on her arm, she said, “No. You treat me as your equal when it suits you, but when you want something from me, then you look down your nose at me.”

His gaze followed hers before he eyed her face. “Kierra, I love you. There is no other woman in this world or any other who’s quite like you or ever will be. Don’t you understand?” With lightning speed, he sat up and pushed her sideways across the bed.

“No,” she groaned. “I don’t understand.”

He canted his head to one side, evidently thinking. His eyes glazed over, and the sweet strains of a classical piece began. The emotion evident in the music haunted Kierra. It was as if Jamar could change her mind with its ethereal beauty.

“Remember how we used to dance, our thighs close, my head bent to your cheek? Do you remember how the stars would bless us and twinkle? Even the waterfall would slow to a trickle as if in awe.”

Not wanting to be reminded of the only good times she’d known in her life, she shoved at him to catch him off balance then she’d run. He straddled her thighs and lifted his ass over her stomach, imprisoning her in one quick movement. His shaft bobbed toward her.

“You can make love to me, Jamar Q’ellan,” Kierra vowed, “ and you can own me, but I won’t let you toy with my life. I won’t let you touch that.” She had no idea how she could enforce her warning, but she’d do everything in her power to try.

“I want to make love to you every day for the rest of our lives, star shine,” he said, using an old nickname he’d made up for her one night when they’d been dancing under the night sky filled with a canopy of winking, glittering diamonds.

“No!” Kierra’s eyes widened and she continued to shove at him ineffectually.

“Why are you struggling? Don’t you know I’ll protect you from every harm that might come our way?” He grinned. “Do you remember when we used to read together about a planet called Earth and a chivalrous period of black knights who would ride to the rescue of their fair maiden?”

He turned the music up louder. The struggled seemed to go out of her. She fell back on the bed and blinked several times but said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking. That I’m a dreamer.” Jamar edged her thighs apart with his knee and settled his bulk and his painfully throbbing penis near her pussy. “I admit to that.” His thoughts came faster than he could put them into words for Kierra’s sake. “I have an idea. Why don’t we create a new kind of dance? One of pure lust, of sweating bodies, one where we can dance as furiously and madly as we want?”

“Jamar,” she said quietly. “You’re dreaming again.” Her fingers rested on his relaxed shoulders.

His cock probed the slick entrance of her pussy, and he slid into her. She gave a small cry and turned her face away.

“Kierra?” he asked, concerned that he’d hurt her. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”

When she turned her gaze back to him, her cheeks were strewn with tears and her beautiful, blue eyes held such a depth of misery he could only guess what was going on in her head.

“Please,” he whispered thinly. “Tell me.”

She sniffled as she spoke. “You talk to me as if I were Jaquill. I’m not black-skinned like you, Jamar. I never will be.” She hauled in a breath and slowly expelled it. “So you can stop dreaming up our future. We don’t have one.”

He didn’t know what to say. Cold, hard reality hit him full force. He stopped thrusting. His heart pounded in his chest erratically, and his breaths were ragged gasps of agony. Images of the happy, blonde girl he’d played with flashed through his mind. How her thin, cotton dress would flutter in a sudden, hot breeze. How her upturned face looked to him for guidance. How her hand grasped his, white against black, yet they cared little about the subtle intrigues that swirled around them.

He jerked himself back from the past. He had Kierra now, in his bed. Her eyes stared at him unblinkingly. He had to hold onto hope for both of them, until the time came when they could be openly together.

Losing himself in his swift thrusts, he set aside the questions that plagued him. He’d find the solution and keep Kierra always at his side. He couldn’t fail because his well-being and his very life depended on it.

Kierra waited for Jamar to say something, anything at all. But nothing came. Her sheath widened to accommodate his large penis, and her back slid against the white silk sheets as if he were bringing her closer, then pushing her away.