Explode: Team Supernova (The Great Space Race) Read online

  He wasn’t sure what made her decide she wanted him. Emotions and stress hormones must be cascading through her too.

  But he’d worry about that later. Right now she was warm and pliant in his arms, and when their lips met, he felt stars explode inside him.

  Supernovas. Maybe the people who gave them that ridiculous team name had been on to something.

  *

  Oh Great Cat Mother, she could climb this man. She might need to climb this man, given his height. She’d expected his big, calloused hands to be rough, especially since they’d gone from fighting to fooling around so quickly. Actually-factually hoped for them to be rough going into it. That kind of sex would clear her head and besides, she was still a little…not mad, but irritated at his reaction to her success and her brilliant takeoff, the way he treated her as if she was a clever but badly behaved kitten. Playing hard would give her an excuse to be rough back, bite and scratch and get some things out of her system. Instead, he touched her with something like reverence, wonder.

  Normally that would have made her crazy and in a squirmy, irritating way, not a good one. Heat followed that gentle touch, though. “I’ve never…” he breathed. “Your skin…so soft. And yet the muscles under it….” Not terribly coherent, but she felt the words on the surface of her skin.

  One thing to be said for the hideous Octiron jumpsuit. It was easy to peel it off to get to the human underneath. Good thing, because her hands were shaking like a young girl, barely more than a kitten, trying to figure out how to undress a friend for the first time. What was he doing to her? What was she doing to herself, for that matter? She’d figured sexytime with her handsome crewmate, or at least making out with him, would cap the wild, wonderful evening nicely, settle the combination of excitement and residual fear so she could sleep.

  She didn’t think she’d be sleeping any time soon. This wouldn’t be the quick and dirty game she’d imagined. She’d only gotten him undressed to his waist and she still had all her clothes on, but she knew that.

  Oh, it would definitely be dirty, but not quick. There was so much of him to touch, for starters. Why hadn’t she thought of him as pretty-pretty at first? His chest and arms…stars, the man was muscled as heavily as a Furagi and tattooed almost as heavily, at least on his arms. Whirling constellations—not ones familiar to her but they looked real, not like random, made-up designs—rising over the curve of a rocky, unfamiliar planet she’d guess was his homeworld. Geometric patterns that she suspected were meaningful. And across his lower right arm, just above the wrist, one heavy black bar, bisecting one particular pattern of stars.

  She wanted to touch him everywhere

  “The constellations represent my family members,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “We follow the Central Principles of Kaarlsagan—we are all star-stuff.”

  “I like that. It’s even true, if you get down to atoms.” She ran her hand over the bar, feeling the rough scar underneath. “What does this mean?”

  “That I had a work accident and a bad idea to cover the scar. Haven’t had a chance to get it fixed.”

  She suspected he was lying about the black bar, but it wasn’t the moment for a serious conversation anyway, not when there was so much delicious Tripp to explore. A trip to take exploring Tripp.

  She ran her tongue over the scar. “I’d have gone for vines or something spiky…but what do I know? Tattoos don’t work well on our skin.”

  “Your skin is perfect as it is, except that too much of it is covered.” He untied her shirt, his big hands deft, drew the rough garment back.

  Made a small noise of surprise that he quickly covered by leaning in to kiss her breast, tonguing her nipples until an electric connection zinged between them and her sex. Then, to her astonished delight, he worked his way to the two sets of small secondary nipples, which her few previous human lovers had ignored as one difference too many. Then he paused. “Is this good?”

  “Stars, yes” she moaned, cradling the back of his head to keep him right where he was. His hair was dusty from their time dirtside, but she took advantage of her felinoid flexibility and buried her face in it. That stars-cursed dust smelled a lot better on Tripp than it had on the planet.

  Okay, it probably didn’t. The sensations his tongue drew from her nipples were making her hallucinate or something. She could live with that.

  The only problem, as far as she was concerned, was that she couldn’t reach most of Tripp’s erogenous bits at the moment or even get the rest of his marling jumpsuit off. She touched where she could, stroking his broad back, marveling at the texture of the skin, so different from her own but so delicious. Kissed where she could reach. Wrapped her tail around to stroke across his lower back, then curl over his upper thighs. He wouldn’t feel its soft-furred strength properly, especially with the top half of the jumpsuit bunched up in that area, and she couldn’t feel his skin, but the touch, the contact, was good.

  It grounded her as his mouth and fingers on her nipples sent her rocketing toward the stars.

  She squirmed under him, mewled, “Too much.” It wasn’t exactly what she meant but she couldn’t find words to describe how he was pushing her almost too quickly into the stratosphere. All that adrenaline, maybe…or maybe the man was simply good at this particular flavor of naughty.

  “Not even close,” he growled, and the deep, gravelly voice made her shudder. He kissed her belly once, as if planning to chart a course toward the unknown territories under her skirt and panties.

  Then he pulled his lips away, but pressed her against him, almost squashing her.

  “I don’t know about you,” he whispered, “but I don’t want to share anything more with our viewing audience.”

  Oh. Right. The camera-drones scanned this part of the ship regularly and if Gus, or whoever was manning the drones back in the studio, noticed them on the feed, they’d have definitely focused in. They’d put on a good show. Tripp’s body probably hid her breasts from the camera, but a kitten could figure out what they’d been doing and where it had been heading, and she hadn’t exactly been quiet in expressing her appreciation. Nothing more than you’d see in a suggestive scene in a holo-drama, but knowing it was two people really going at it would make it more intriguing.

  “Oops. Sorry folks, that kind of show belongs on a different channel.” She waved at the invisible audience, because what could you do under the circumstances except pretend that you’d done it on purpose, or at least didn’t care about the itsy-bitsy miscalculation? Even if you were a skosh embarrassed because you couldn’t think of anyone, even your brother, who’d ever gotten quite that close to the sex part of sexytimes on intergalactic holo-vision. (On the other hand if Rahal had made that mistake, he’d spin it as being something deliberate, daring, and badass, so that would be how she played it.)

  Then she turned back to Tripp. “Don’t freak. At least all the parts of you that showed are parts you could flash on a family-friendly show. I’m going to sport those weird black boxes that scream ‘wonderful body parts some cultures want to pretend don’t exist, right here!’ in a lot of markets.”

  Which could still happen to him if he moved the wrong way. It was one thing to get naked on purpose and then realize you had an audience. Dropping trou accidentally when you already knew people might be watching? That would embarrass even her.

  Thinking fast, acting fast, she grabbed the flopping arms of the jumpsuit and tied them into a loose belt.

  Then he scooped her up as if she weighed nothing, which was probably true by his standards. “Your cabin or mine?”

  “Pick one. But don’t say it out loud. There aren’t pre-set cameras in the rooms—I checked—but they may have a way of getting a feed or tiny drone in there.”

  He chuckled, a deep rumble that didn’t make a lot of noise but vibrated through his body and into hers in a way that felt a lot more interesting than the amount of sensation merited.

  He was laughing. Tripp Gallifer was laughing. He sounded ha
ppy.

  Even if nothing else had gone right tonight, she’d feel like she’d won simply for that.

  Chapter Ten

  THEY ENDED UP in her cabin because it was easier for her to free a hand to work the bio-keyed lock. “How did you manage to strew so much around when most of our stuff’s still locked up?” Tripp said, laughing, as he pushed six pairs of lacy underpants and a couple of tail and hair bows (she’d managed to convince the show-runners the bows were a vital cultural expression, which was only a little lie) onto the floor.

  “Natural talent. I have more interesting ones, though.”

  Tripp finished taking off the hideous jumpsuit. He wasn’t quite naked, but the skintight, dark blue clingbriefs outlined his…attributes so nicely it was almost better. Almost.

  She reached for him, then had a thought that only a real nashbet would have at a time like this. The downside of being an engineer was that her training forced her out of the ‘problems are fascinating!’ mindset natural to her and into one of ‘problems are fascinating to solve and some problems cause actual-factual explosions if you don’t deal with them.” This one had potential explosions written all over it. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “No. Pretty sure it’s the second dumbest idea I’ve ever had—first being getting involved with The Great Space Race.”

  “So…want to do it anyway?”

  He didn’t hesitate for a nanosecond. “Stars yes, unless you come to your senses and say no.”

  The analytical part of her brain, the one that reveled in complex equations and making things work in the vacuum of space, pondered the question super-briefly. Sometimes you hooked up with someone and realized it was a disaster and you never wanted to see them again. That was easy enough to deal with when you had a whole planet full of things to see and people to do. But when it was just the two of you (and Sparky the AI) on a small racing yacht, and you had to work together, potentially for months, it could get awkward.

  On the other hand, her panties might literally melt if she didn’t get them off soon and get some soothing attention from Tripp’s tongue for her heated flesh. Trying to find medical help for melted-panty burn on a strange planet? Talk about awkward, not to mention costing precious time on the way to the checkpoint. “Asking the question was as close to coming to my senses as I want to get right now. Come here, you big lug.”

  Tripp eased her back onto the bed, untied her top, pushed the skirt out to the way. She wiggled out of her panties herself. Stupid things anyway. Whoever thought they were a good idea?

  Sarr’ma figured he’d be stripping off his clingbriefs and entering her within nanoseconds, because that was what you did during a semi-angry fuck you were pretty sure qualified as a good bad idea.

  Instead, he picked up the kissing-the-way-down-her-body trick that had been interrupted by reality (or at least reality holo-vision).

  Shivers as he kissed her belly turned to trembling by the time he turned his attention to her inner thighs. When his heated mouth finally melded with the heat between her legs, she moaned and wrapped her legs and tail around his lower body and tangled her hands in his hair.

  “Your tongue is amazing,” she managed to say.

  Then her speech degenerated into moans and mewls. Pleasure coiled tight in her belly as Tripp licked and suckled. Her hips bucked, rubbing her against his mouth, adding to the sensation. When she was hovering on the edge of something that felt vast and dangerous, maybe a black hole, he slid two fingers inside her and found some of her favorite nerve endings.

  She cried out, an astonished mewl, as she peaked, then slumped back onto the bed, all the muscles in her body relaxing.

  But Tripp was relentless. He was licking more delicately now, fingering her more slowly, but not stopping even though it must be obvious she was ready for him to enter her, or at least shift positions so she could return the oral favor. But under that clever tongue, she soon found herself hovering at the edge again.

  He slid his fingers out—then came back in with three, filling her almost too much, as in too much of a good thing is great.

  At the same time, he intensified the licking.

  The thing she’d been hovering on the edge of? It must have been the edge of a black hole, because she was spinning and falling and coming apart under his mouth, his hands. Flying to pieces, dissolving into atoms, and wasn’t it a kick in the tail that this serious, sometimes cranky human could do this to her?

  Even crazier when he half-stood to wriggle out of his clingbriefs, she didn’t take the opportunity to pin him to the bed and take charge, reduce him to the same quivering mass of protoplasm he’d created from her blood, bones, and brain. She reached for his cock—thick and dark with blood as it emerged from his foreskin—and gave a quick lick to the head, mentally grinning as his eyes rolled. She always reveled in the first time a lover of another species caught on to how much pleasure her soft but raspy tongue could provide. She took him deep once, twice, drinking in the taste and scent. Neither of them had taken the time to sonic-cleanse and the dirt of Izbo clung to him. But under that was warm, musky male, that peculiar flavor that told her he was human, and a clean undertone—like rain-washed granite, only blood-warm—that was Tripp’s alone.

  But when he moaned “enough,” she didn’t defy him, didn’t claim the power as she usually would. She let him press her back down onto the bedding, let him lie on top of her, spread her legs wider—not that she wasn’t eager to do that anyway, but she liked the feeling of him pushing her to do something she craved.

  But when he held himself up with strong arms and legs, letting his cock tease at her sex, she concluded there was enjoying going with the flow and there was being too marling passive. She circled his cock, wrapped one leg around his hips, and used that connection as leverage to push herself up, impale herself on his waiting cock.

  At first, they hovered, barely joined, both straining to take control of the fuck.

  The next thing she knew, he was fully inside her, and she was caught in his wild, wide gaze. His pupils had expanded so much the brown was lost to black.

  “Look at me,” he growled. “Look at me while I’m fucking you. See my light while I see your fire.”

  “That’s intense.” She meant it as a joke, at least she thought she did, but it came out in a husky whisper, and she reached up to cup his face.

  This might be a one-time fling born of a crazy victory that was also a loss. It might be they’d continue to enjoy each other for the rest of the race. It might mean everything, or more likely, nothing but two people far from home, wound up, and horny.

  But it was intense. Tripp was intense—those fierce dark eyes, the tattoos that told stories he wasn’t ready to share, his usual calm that hid mercurial feelings.

  She thought she saw the light he was talking about. It had been hiding in him under an almost grim exterior. But now she glimpsed something brighter, a part of him he kept hidden. She wanted to see that passion again, that light or fire.

  She wanted to see it when they weren’t fucking, because it was easy to drop some of your guards when you were naked and joined as close as two people could. Almost cheating. If she could see that light another time, a fully dressed time, she’d know she wasn’t imagining it or mistaking the glow of lust for something deeper about his character.

  It would be a win.

  Who knew what he was seeing in her. Something good, she hoped. Something that showed him a glimmer of all she was, the wild kitten and the overly-serious astrophysics nashbet. And if he saw a happy woman who enjoyed his cock inside her, his hands on her body…well, that was a simpler truth but still a good one.

  He was so much bigger, it might have felt as if she was trapped under him, but he did a good job of spreading his weight, supporting himself so she felt the contrast of their bodies without him crushing her. Gentle and fierce—he fucked gentle and fierce, driving into her hard, but touching her with the same spooky reverence he’d shown earlier. The contrast was d
riving her straight toward another black hole. It was sucking her in, and this one would tear her apart.

  She focused on his eyes as if doing that would keep her whole.

  She still shattered in a million-billion charged atoms, and her explosion created an echo in him.

  Tripp’s neck strained and his face turned red. He was still meeting her eyes, though.

  She bet he was still trying to do so when his own orgasm claimed him.

  Couldn’t say for sure. At the end, she’d had to look away, close her eyes, as if blinded by a brightness she’d never expected to see.

  Chapter Eleven

  “EMERGENCY!” SPARKY’S METALLIC voice chimed through the audio settings in Tripp’s com and, slightly off sync, through the speakers throughout the Supernova. “Approaching the Karilio asteroid field. I repeat, emergency. Further instructions needed.”

  He jarred awake. Sarr’ma stirred against him. Her ears twitched. Obviously she was hearing it too, but equally obviously it wasn’t cutting through the haze of sleep.

  Larfing cats anyway. In other circumstances, her oblivion would be charming, especially considering he could blame screwing each other’s brains out—but she was the one who’d have to deal with getting them through the asteroid field if necessary. “Sparky, steer us away from the asteroids!” he ordered.

  “Calculating options.”

  Great. That didn’t sound promising. Tripp shook her roughly. “Wake up!”

  One big green eye opened. Then everything she’d half-heard seemed to register and she was on her feet. “Sparky, what’s our status?” she asked frantically. “Time before entering the field?”

  Tripp grabbed his jumpsuit from the floor.

  “Roughly 5.25 minutes.”

  “Why do I know that if I don’t take the time to put something on, there will be marling camera-drones all over me? Don’t bother answering that question, Sparky.” Within seconds, she was dressed after a fashion—she’d gotten the skirt on and the shirt was shrugged over her shoulders. She was wrapping it as she ran out the door toward the bridge, Tripp on her heels, still fastening the jumpsuit. “What the marling stars are we doing this close to an asteroid field?”