Royal: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 5) Read online

  Luke stopped just short of the doorway and crooked his thumb in the general direction of The Tin Can. “Maybe I should go back and let you sleep.”

  “After coming all this way?” Duke grabbed Luke by the front of the shirt and yanked him inside.

  After he’d closed and locked the door—including the brand new bar lock—he looked at Luke.

  Luke scoffed. “When’d you start using that?”

  “When certain people showed me firsthand that they can enter my vehicle with a single swipe.”

  “I’ve got a high clearance level. Not too many people have those cards.”

  Duke narrowed his eyes. “And does the Jekhan government know you’re using yours in an unofficial capacity?”

  “I doubt they give a damn. As long as I’m not using it on a Jekhan, why would they care?”

  Duke cocked a brow.

  Luke shoved his hands into his pockets and looked around the ship. The last time he’d been inside had been during the tense ride back from the lake with Autumn and Cree.

  Autumn had sat at the window, grinding her teeth most of the damn way and not looking at him.

  Luke had been trying to think of anything to say but opted to keep his mouth shut. There was nothing left to say. He still felt like shit about having to let her off the hook, though.

  “Are you here just to look at me?” Duke asked. “If so, I’d prefer for you to stare at me while I’m horizontal.”

  “Oh.” Luke waved him on to the bed. “Go on. Don’t mind me.”

  “For once, I won’t argue.” Duke started for the bed, only to stop, and backtrack to a storage container mounted on the starboard wall. He pushed up the heavy metal lid, bent inside, and after rooting around, extracted a black rectangular box.

  He placed it in Luke’s arms, closed the container’s lid, and made tracks for the bed. “That’s for you.”

  Luke furrowed his brow. “What is it?”

  “Open and find out.”

  Luke set the black wooden case on the bench behind the captain’s seat and flipped the latches. “Did this come from Earth? Jekhans don’t use wood this way.”

  The bed sheets rustled. Duke grunted.

  Luke lifted the lid. Nestled inside dark gray cushioning foam along with several recharging inserts was a sleek silver weapon with a familiar design. Duke had one. Luke had admired it once.

  Nice.

  “Your cousin make this?” Luke asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not selling them now, is she? Because we had a chat about that and decided that’d be a bad idea, right?” Luke tested the heft of the gun in his grip and fired dry toward the closed door. Beautifully smooth action on that thing. He’d have to judge for himself how accurate it was, though. Electronic weapons were still in the heavily experimental phase back on Earth.

  “No, she’s not selling them. The last time I spoke with her, I asked if she had another. She did, and sent it with Oreva. It’s yours now.”

  “For real?” Luke felt like a little kid on Christmas morning—back when things had actually been able to surprise him.

  “Mmm. Don’t shoot me with it.”

  Luke laughed. “The fact you make that warning makes me wonder if I should for some reason.”

  “No more reasons than you already know.”

  “And those are probably enough.” Luke pressed the gun back into its foam cushioning and latched the case. “Matching guns, huh? Next thing you know, you’ll want us to get matching polo shirts and tattoos.”

  “I don’t have any tattoos.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’d start all kinds of scandals if you were seen sporting some ink. How dare you have an actual personality, right?” Luke heeled off his boots and staggered to the bed. Duke sprawled on his belly with his limbs extended to the four corners, hogging most of the space, but Luke had ways of making him move.

  He eased onto the edge of the bed behind him, shoved his hand down the back of Duke’s boxer briefs, and put a clench on his nuts. “Move or I’ll squeeze.”

  Duke’s ass cheeks clamped together beneath Luke’s wrist. “You’re…already squeezing,” he said with a gasp.

  “Yeah?” Luke worked the royal balls around in his palm and pressed his lips to the back of Duke’s neck. “And you’re still not moving. Does that mean you don’t want me in your bed, or does it mean you’re inviting pain? ’Cause I gotta tell you, if it’s the latter, one of us is going to have a lot of fun.”

  “I’m too tired for pain, you degenerate bastard.” Duke moved slightly, closed his legs, and pulled his right arm in close to his body.

  “Much obliged.” Luke started to pull his hand out from between Duke’s legs, but it was warm in there, so he figured he’d let his hand hang out for a while.

  He traced the seam of Duke’s tight ass for a few laps, and then experimentally nestled his index fingers between the cheeks.

  Duke looked over his shoulder. “What… What are you doing?”

  “Helping myself fall asleep. I’m a fondler. Don’t mind me.”

  The crease between Duke’s brows deepened, but he put his head back down on his pillow and closed his eyes.

  “Tell your ship to turn that stinking overhead light off.”

  Duke muttered something in Norwegian.

  The ship went dark.

  Luke had the best fun in the dark.

  He withdrew his hand and sucked on the middle finger. He got it slick and wet before delving down the back of Duke’s shorts again. Working his fingers between Duke’s cheeks, he nestled his body closer to the other man’s and breathed in his expensive scent. Just being around Duke made his cock too hard for him to bear. He wasn’t expecting relief, but he did expect at least a little tactile satisfaction.

  Duke couldn’t strut around being too hot to stare at and not expect that someone would eventually want to make him submit.

  Luke probed the tight rosette with his wet finger and Duke picked his head up.

  Luke shushed him preemptively. “You were sleeping. Go back to sleep.”

  “Hard to sleep when you’re doing that.”

  “What am I doing? Hmm?” Luke pressed his fingertip in to the first knuckle and felt Duke clamp down hard around it. “Just a fingertip,” he whispered. “That’s all.”

  “I hardly think you’ll be satisfied with that.”

  He was probably right. Luke wouldn’t be satisfied until the cocksure bastard was on his knees, panting, and with his hole gaping.

  “Maybe,” Luke said. “Maybe not. If you need some help relaxing so you can go to sleep, though, maybe you should grab your cock and start tugging. I always sleep better after I’ve jerked off.”

  “Then maybe I should jerk you off so I can get some sleep.”

  Luke snorted. “Go ahead, then.” He gave Duke the space he needed and freed his hand from between his cheeks.

  Eyes still closed, Duke rolled onto his side and his hand went unerringly to Luke’s junk.

  “Mmm. Good radar, there.”

  “Be quiet. This requires concentration.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Luke nudged down the front of his boxer shorts to give Duke more room to play.

  Duke spit on his palm and got to work in earnest.

  Luke even did him a little favor and thrust into his grip a little bit. Felt nice, and he had to admit he’d been pretty stressed out while Duke was gone. He’d been too prideful to go begging for crumbs of affection from Owen and Ais.

  He propped his head against his fist and savored the rough feeling of Duke’s palm against the sensitive head of his cock. “Just like that, Duke. Hold it like you’re not afraid of it.”

  “You know, I like when you use my actual name.”

  “Everyone gets to use your name. I’m the only one who calls you Duke.”

  “But you slip up sometimes. You say Alex when you forget. And believe it or not, most people call me Hauge.”

  Draping his upper leg over Duke’s thighs and rocking his hips i
nto the man’s steely grip, Luke rubbed his eyes. Duke was killing his sex buzz. His erection endured, though. He was sliding slick and fast in Duke’s hand, and already, the slit was weeping. Duke kindly spread the moisture over the head for him. “So, me calling you Duke bothers you?”

  “In a different way than before. You were teasing me at first, but then the name stuck. Why can’t you just call me Alex?”

  “If I call you that, then what? You’ll feel like I actually see you? Like I actually know who you are? Trust me, Alex, you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “You call me Duke because…because you don’t think you’ll keep me.” His hand stilled.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” Luke grabbed his wrist and forced him to get moving again. “I don’t want to talk about that shit right now. Should be enough that I’m in your ship, in your bed. Should be enough that I came to you. Lick that.”

  “What?” Duke’s voice was tinged with obvious confusion.

  Rolling his eyes, Luke placed his hands on Duke’s shoulders and gave him an insistent downward push. “Put your mouth on me. Get a good taste. Get down there and do it, or I’ll feed it to you myself.” He counted to three in his head, figuring that would be all the time Duke needed to work out what was being asked of him.

  Duke didn’t move except to blink at him in the near dark.

  “Why do you have to be such a stubborn asshole?”

  Duke shrugged.

  “All right, then. You asked for it.” Luke straddled Duke’s side, rolled him onto his back, and yanked him mostly upright against the headboard. Just the right height.

  Luke slapped his cock against Duke’s lips until he parted them. “There you go, baby.” He slid the head against Duke’s hot tongue and curled his toes in his socks at the exquisite caress of the other man’s mouth.

  Sweet Jesus.

  “No need to do anything fancy,” he said in a strained rasp and Duke gave the underside of Luke’s cock a couple of experimental licks.

  He looked so good with a dick in his mouth. No, Luke’s dick. Probably the only one the bastard was ever going to taste.

  Luke notched his fingers into Duke’s mussed hair and helped him establish a rhythm. “Just suck the head, Duke. Taste the salt on it. Think about how wet it is and how that’d feel pressing against your hole. Could you take an inch or two, Duke? Just past the flange? I bet you could. It’d hurt so good.”

  Duke tried to murmur something around Luke’s cock, but Luke tightened his grip in that thick mane of his and drove his cock into his mouth even deeper. He gave his cheek a little slap, and Duke started to suck.

  “There you go, baby. There you go. Think about how wet you’d want it to be if I was putting it inside you and make it happen. Suck it like you want it to wrinkle, Duke. Shine it up pretty. The first time I take your ass—”

  Duke objected with a muffled groan.

  Luke gave his cheek a little slap, and Duke resumed sucking again. “I’m going to play right at the hole, stretching you out with my head until you hate me. I’ll keep teasing you until you can’t tell if my cock is in you or out of you, and it’s going to be you who’ll be trying to bear down on me and take me into you. Then when you’ve figured out that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew—”

  Duke’s upper body spasmed and eyes started to water. It seemed he’d tried to take Luke down his throat.

  Luke traced his fingers down Duke’s long neck, encouraging, massaging. “You won’t be able to figure out if you should be trying to get me out of you or if you should just lay there and take it.”

  Duke raised a brow.

  “Oh, you’ll want to take it, baby. You’re not one to back down from a challenge, are you? You’ll figure you’ve gone that far, what’s a little more, right? And the longer you lay there, clenching and throbbing, you’ll ask yourself what that feeling is. What’s that thing that feels so good? And you’ll be rocking your hips and trying to get a little more of it, right?”

  No response from Duke, except the notching of his fingers into Luke’s ass cheeks and the rolling of his gaze to Luke’s face as he hollowed out his cheeks and sucked hard.

  Shit, he’s good at that.

  Luke put his head back and pounded the headboard. “Fuck. If that’s how you suck a clit, it’s no wonder you’ve got a bunch of royal groupies scrambling to stay on your radar.”

  “Stop talking,” Duke said around Luke’s dick.

  “Okay. Shit.” Luke wouldn’t normally have obeyed, but most of the time, he could tell what was good for him, and what was good for him then and there was Duke’s mouth on him. What Duke lacked in experience, he made up for with enthusiasm.

  Damn, his enthusiasm.

  Luke rolled his hips and clenched his teeth together hard to keep them from chattering. If he wasn’t careful, Duke was going to pull his soul straight out of him, and all that would be left of Luke was the smiling shell of a man.

  Generally, he wouldn’t have tried to draw out the pleasure. He would have teased and taunted, withdrawing his cock and returning it at his leisure to take his partner off guard. He wasn’t predictable, and he wanted them to remember that.

  But he was with Duke, and Duke merited a special kind of treatment.

  “Okay,” he whispered as his toes curled and belly quivered. His balls were climbing up into his body, his cock achingly hard. One more accidental scrape of Duke’s teeth and he’d be done. “Fuck, Duke…” He pulled his cock from Duke’s mouth and replaced it with three fingers.

  Duke kept sucking as Luke spent into his hand and tried not to topple over. His brain didn’t know the difference between fingers and cock in that moment. A suck in one place was as good as anywhere else, and he kept coming as if his ejaculate was some inexhaustible thing.

  And he was exhausted. His thighs and torso were sore from him holding himself so rigidly, but he was afraid to move. He was afraid to chase away those last remnants of pleasure. Would have been better if he’d been lying down. He could have closed his eyes and went right to sleep with his cock crushed against Duke’s face.

  Next time.

  But next time, they could work on reciprocity. He didn’t expect a blowjob novice like Duke to be very efficient at sixty-nining, but Luke could think of no better way to get his tongue and fingers into Duke’s ass and keep the guy from bolting at the same time.

  Groaning, he slipped his fingers from Duke’s mouth, and then sat back on his heels to admire the other man’s swollen wet lips, the flush of his cheeks, the largeness of his pupils in the pools of greenish blue.

  Luke had to kiss him because when Duke looked like that, he needed to be kissed. He needed to be reminded that he was more than a receptacle for Luke’s parts. If that had been all Luke wanted, he wouldn’t have been so anxious about them being something resembling a couple.

  He skimmed his lips tenderly across Duke’s and moaned when Duke slid his tongue into his mouth. He grabbed Luke’s shoulder and his waist, trying to pull him down to him, clinging to him desperately, but they had all day. Luke didn’t have any damn where he needed to be.

  “Just stay there,” he whispered.

  Duke furrowed his brow, but unhanded Luke without a word.

  Luke shuffled into the lavatory and washed his hands. He splashed cold water on his face and tried not to think about what he was doing. He tried not to think about what he’d said he wasn’t going to do.

  He didn’t see how he couldn’t give in to Duke. The man was perfect in every way, and was the only person he could actually have who made him feel like there were even more amazing things yet to come.

  Good amazing or bad amazing—he didn’t know and didn’t really care.

  Didn’t seem to really matter.

  Luke dried his hands and moved silently back to bed.

  Duke patted the space on the bed in front of him. “I don’t trust you to spoon me.”

  Luke snorted and took the offered spot. He closed his eyes as Duke pulled the c
overs up over them. “I’d definitely rub my cock between your cheeks, but I wouldn’t try to penetrate you in your sleep.”

  “Oh?”

  Luke grunted and closed his eyes. “No. I’d want you to be awake for that. You can’t beg if you don’t know what you’re getting, baby.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Can’t sleep?”

  At the sound of the deep, even voice, Brenna poked her head out from behind the pantry door and found Herris standing in the middle of the dark kitchen.

  He’d lost probably twenty pounds since the first time Brenna had laid eyes on him, and he hadn’t been all that healthful then, either. He’d been in the getaway van when they’d all escaped from Buinet. He may not have been a heavyweight, but he had the broad frame to indicate that he may have been once upon a time. Living through the riots and the displacements, and then losing his lovers and children would probably do the same to any man. He endured. He just wasn’t the same as the man he’d been.

  She held up a container of brownies she’d hidden from the household. “Nah. I couldn’t sleep. Not that I sleep much lately, anyway.”

  “I see.” He gave a curt nod and silently pulled a chair out from the dining table for her.

  She set the brownies on the placemat but ignored the chair for the time being. Brownies needed to be washed down with something. “Want tea?” she asked.

  “Tea is what I came to the kitchen for.”

  “I’ll boil the water.” She filled the electric kettle and plugged it into the one converted socket in the room. The house was wired for Jekhan electronics, but there were a few gadgets the McGarrys couldn’t live without. They’d figured out ways to jury-rig the existing electrical interface to run the less efficient Terran technologies. Trigrian didn’t quibble. If he’d had his druthers, he’d have everything fit better, but until someone upgraded all the Terran plugs, they had to make do with what they had.

  Brenna got them a couple of napkins, found the box of herbal tea, and snatched mugs from the shelf.

  Herris lifted the lid on the brownie container and took one. “I shouldn’t eat this.”