Her Resistance: Planet Athion Series (Darkest Skies Book 2) Page 5

  “I’ve been thinking about how the Trads have been taking the women,” he said against the top of my head. “Obviously, we don’t know what kind of technology they have on Tradrych, but my guess would be that they certainly don’t have the kind of technology that allows instant teleportation from one planet to another.”

  I lifted my head from his chest so I could look into his face. “Where are you going with this?”

  “They must have spaceships somewhere in our orbit. If we can work out a way to locate them, we may be able to rescue the women who’ve been taken before they’re even transported to the planet.”

  I narrowed my eyes as I considered his words. “You think they might have some kind of holding ships above us where they’re keeping the women initially?”

  He nodded. “They won’t be transporting them one by one to Tradrych. It would be impractical, and not to mention insanely expensive.”

  I could see where he was going with this. “So, if we figure out a way to locate the ships, we’d be able to stop them taking the women.”

  “For the moment, at least. I’m sure the Trads would find some way around it, moving forward, but it might mean we can save some of the women who have been taken.”

  Including Tara.

  “When we see the footage from before the attack, we’ll bring this up and see what the rest of the president’s team thinks. It’s a good theory, Casey. Let’s hope we can make it work.”

  Impulsively, I stretched up and kissed him. His lips were soft and dry, and they parted, his tongue darting out to touch mine. Excitement surged up inside me, but with it came a flicker of worry. I could trust Casey, couldn’t I? I’d known him since long before the attack, but still there was that nagging concern that the Trads may have started this before we’d even realized. What if they’d planted their males on Earth months or even years before the attack? And there was no doubt that I was attracted to Casey—just as I was attracted to each of the guys.

  He must have sensed my hesitation, as he pulled away. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head and couldn’t meet his eye. My concerns embarrassed me, and I was worried he’d think differently of me for not trusting him.

  I didn’t need to say it out loud.

  “You’re worried about the possibility of me being a Trad, aren’t you?” he guessed.

  “Yes.” I spoke hurriedly. “I mean, I know you’re not. I’ve known you since before the strike, and the sensible part of my head is telling me that of course you’re human, but I can’t stop that niggling little doubt. It’s just that after seeing what happened with Tara, I’m not sure it would even be worth the risk.” My cheeks heated as I realized what I’d said. “I mean, you are worth the risk...” I tailed off. “Shit, sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. It’s hardly surprising that you’re cautious after everything that’s happened. I’d probably think it strange if you weren’t, to be honest.”

  I should have known from the start that Casey would understand. He wasn’t hot-headed like Mike, or overprotective like Aleandro. Not that I didn’t love those traits about the other men, but Casey was the one who always thought things through and viewed things rationally.

  “Hey, wait.” He’d thought of something, I could tell. His eyes always got this little flash of light when an idea came to him. He tugged off his shirt, revealing a smooth chest and a set of washboard abs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Here.” He grabbed my hand and put it against a spot just above his ribs. “You see that, feel it, too? It’s a scar where I flipped my pushbike over when I was twelve and basically embedded myself on a fence post. I had to have eighteen stitches.”

  “What—?”

  But he didn’t let me finish. He twisted around to point at his back. “And you see I have a small birthmark on my shoulder blade.”

  “Yeah, it’s raised.” I frowned. “And it’s in the shape of a cat.”

  He laughed. “That’s the one.”

  Understanding about why he was telling me all of this dawned. “The Trads are perfect—no flaws.”

  “Exactly, so I must be who I say I am.”

  I so desperately wanted to believe him. I should believe him. Neither he, nor any of the other guys, had ever given me any reason to think they weren’t who they said they were.

  He touched my chin. “Hey, Camille. If this makes you feel uncomfortable in any way, we don’t have to do anything, okay? I’m not going to pretend like I don’t want to, but you mean too much to me for me to ever want to do something you’re not comfortable with.”

  “I’m comfortable with you, Casey. Really I am. I just keep closing my eyes and seeing Tara’s face.”

  “It’s too soon, I get that.”

  “But you know, there are plenty of ways to relax us without having to have full sex.”

  A smile crept across his lips. “You know, I think you’re right.”

  As long as I didn’t do anything that got me pregnant, I was safe. I just had to make sure I didn’t get carried away in the moment. It wasn’t as though I could completely forgo sex for the rest of my life. If that was the case, I thought both myself and all the men around me would probably end up losing their minds within a few months.

  I slipped my hand up his leg and to where the line of his erection hadn’t abated at all during our conversation. I dragged my nails over the hard ridge in his pants, and he sucked in a breath. Twisting to face me, and shuffling himself down the bed a little, Casey kissed me again. His kiss was slow, as though he was taking his time. His teeth nipped my lower lip, and our tongues tangled. God, the man knew how to kiss.

  I kept my hand where it was, stroking the outline of his erection over and over. His hand went to the waistband of my jeans, and he popped the button of my zipper and then pushed his hand down the front. His hand was big, and it was a tight fit. I lifted my hips and allowed him to slide the jeans down my hips, giving him more room. I mirrored his movements, working his zipper to free his cock. It sprang out into the space between us, and I took his length in my hand. He was already rock-hard, and I swiped my thumb over the slit, his pre-cum wetting my skin.

  His cock was long and lean, just like the rest of him. I desperately wanted him embedded deep inside me, to slide up and down his length, and close my eyes and forget the rest of the world, but I held myself back. We could still satisfy each other like this.

  “Turn around,” he told me.

  “What?” I was confused for a moment, thinking he wanted me to roll over. I started to move, but his hand on my arm stopped me.

  “Not that way. Swap ends of the bed. I want you on my face.”

  “Oh!”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him. I kicked off my jeans and then wriggled around so I was facing the end of the bed. I felt slightly awkward lifting my leg up and over his head, but he grabbed both my thighs and pulled me down, so his mouth was directly beneath my pussy. His tongue lapped at me, and I groaned. The position spread me perfectly, and I resisted grinding right down on him, not wanting to suffocate him in my enthusiasm.

  His cock jutted out of the opening of his pants, bobbing right in front of me. Taking the hint, I leaned forward and gripped his base in my fist. The angle brought my clit closer to Casey’s wickedly probing tongue, and I curled my toes as he hit exactly the right spot. The scent of salty pre-cum filled my nostrils, and I held him steady as I ducked down to take him into my mouth.

  I slid my lips over the smooth bell-end of his cock and swirled my tongue across the top of him. It had the desired effect, and he lifted his hips. I sank lower, his length sliding across my tongue until the tip of him hit the back of my throat. I fought to control my gag reflex and won. I didn’t even care about the bit of discomfort bringing tears to my eyes. His tongue was long and probing now, pushing inside my channel, making me heady with desire. It was like being drunk without the alcohol.

  Reaching between his thighs, I cupped his balls in
my hand while I sucked him and ground down on his face. We writhed and moaned against each other, filling each other’s senses. Oh God, that felt so good, my body working in rhythmical pulses, climbing higher to my precipice.

  I worked him harder and faster, squeezing and massaging his balls with one hand, while I used my other to hold his cock steady at the base. I wanted nothing more than to spin around and straddle his hips, and sink myself down onto this beautiful dick, but Casey was doing a damned good job down there. I was so close to coming, it would only take a few moments. Arousal had tightened in a coil at my core, and I was ready to spring open at any moment.

  He suddenly pushed the tip of his finger into my ass, and I bucked on him, my cries muffled with his dick between my lips. Pleasure tumbled over me, and I felt like I must be gushing all over his face, but I didn’t care. My orgasm rippled through me, my eyes rolling and toes curling. I sank deeper than ever before, and his cock swelled in my mouth and his hips jerked. Hot, salty cum filled my throat, and I barely needed to swallow.

  My orgasm faded away, my pulse slowing. I gave him a final lick and let him go, and then climbed off him, dazed from my orgasm. I snuggled back up against his side, and he wrapped his arm back around me.

  “Do you think the others might have heard us?” I said, whispering now, even though we’d made no attempt to be quiet before.

  He kissed me, and I tasted my arousal on his lips. “Do you think they’d mind?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been intimate with both of them as well.” I’d had sex with Mike, and Aleandro had gone down on me, though, like with Casey, we hadn’t had full sex yet.

  “We’re hardly in a normal situation, are we?” He pulled me closer into him. “We have no idea what the future is going to hold. I think if we can find some comfort and solace in each other right now, we probably shouldn’t look into it too deeply.”

  I squeezed him tight. “Thanks, Casey.”

  “For what?”

  “Being so levelheaded.”

  He had said all the right things, but something still niggled at me. Maybe he was right when he’d said we shouldn’t look into it too deeply, but I also hoped that didn’t mean he only wanted me around for sex. I respected Casey, and I thought he respected me, too. I wanted more from him than just the physical side of things, but I also wanted the same with Mike and Aleandro, and I knew that wasn’t possible. Things didn’t work that way—or at least they hadn’t used to work that way.

  Was it possible things might change now? In societies where women were scarcer than men, did the men eventually learn to share?

  I couldn’t deny that the idea excited me, but with the excitement also came shame. People were dead, women had been abducted, and our civilization was hanging on by a thread.

  The last thing I should be worrying about was my love life.

  Chapter Six

  We dozed in each other’s arms until a knock came at the door. We’d had the sheet covering us, but I quickly scrambled out of bed and pulled on the jeans I’d kicked off earlier.

  I caught Casey’s eye, and he gave me a grin as he buttoned up his own pants.

  “Come in,” I called when I was fully dressed.

  Agent Faw stuck his head around the door. His line of sight flicked between us, but he didn’t say anything. What we did in private wasn’t any of his business.

  “You’re needed in the Situation Room.”

  I hoped nothing else had happened. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, the president wants you to take a look at some of the intel gathered from before the strike.”

  “Sure. Do we need to wait for Mike and Aleandro?”

  He shook his head. “No, I believe this is your area.”

  I didn’t like us being separated, but he was right. Aleandro didn’t know anything about studying space, and Mike was in the communication side of things. I guessed they’d be brought in when their expertise was needed.

  “Just give me a minute,” Casey said.

  He ducked into the room he’d been supposed to sleep, and emerged with his glasses back on his face. I smiled at the sight. That was the Casey I’d grown to know and love. He looked incredibly sexy without them on, but there was something comforting about him wearing them again.

  We followed Agent Faw out and back the way we’d come. I’d expected to speak with the president again, but when we arrived in the Situation Room, she was no longer there. Instead, Franklin Bernardo, the National Security Advisor, was waiting for us.

  “Thank you, both, for coming,” he said, half standing as we walked in. “The president has had other matters she needs to attend to, so she asked me to speak with you both.”

  I gave him a smile to say that was okay and exchanged a quick glance with Casey. I wondered what we were about to be shown.

  “We’ve gathered all the footage from satellite radars, not only owned by America,” he continued, “but from all over the world—satellite images we haven’t had access to before.”

  “We’re sharing intel with other countries?” I asked, curious.

  “Yes, they’re sharing with us, and we’re sharing with them. The more heads we can put together for this thing, the better. This is an ‘us against them’ situation, and for once it isn’t human against human. There seemed no reason to hold anything back.”

  I nodded in agreement, liking the way he was thinking. Other countries’ satellites would have been in different positions to ours before and during the attack and might easily have picked up something important we’d missed.

  “You might as well get comfortable.” Franklin ducked his head toward the big black chairs in front of the screen. “There’s a lot of footage to go through.”

  Casey and I exchanged a glance and took a seat beside each other.

  “Bring up satellite radar zero-three-five-one-one,” Franklin said, using voice recognition software to control what we saw on screen.

  The screen changed and brought up footage of the hours before the attack.

  Both Casey and I leaned forward, studying the movement of the space debris. I kept an eye on the time at the bottom of the screen, waiting for the moment when Casey had first spotted the asteroids. I wasn’t expecting to see anything different than what we’d already watched a hundred times over, but I also didn’t plan on missing anything. We knew more now than we did a couple of days ago, and that might give us a new perspective.

  I was such a luddite. There were multiple advances in technology that I had shunned in favor of the old ways of doing things. I didn’t trust self-driving cars, and having the chip in my wrist that allowed me to make and receive phone calls only made me believe I’d give everyone a way of tracking me. Homes could be fully automated now, but even that left me feeling weird. At what point did convenience become sheer laziness—were we incapable of even hitting a button these days? Still, I shouldn’t complain considering our advances had given me a career. We wouldn’t be conducting the sort of space travel that had allowed us to communicate with other alien races if it weren’t for the advances we’d made in the past thirty years. I loved what I did, but life had been far simpler before we knew of the existence of other alternate races and civilizations.

  But we couldn’t turn back the clock, so there was no choice but to look toward the future, and right now it didn’t seem we would even have a future if we didn’t figure out how to rid Earth of the Trads.

  Franklin Bernardo left us to it, clearly with more important things on his plate than supervising the two of us. We watched through hour after hour of footage, but nothing showed us anything that we hadn’t already seen.

  I thought of something. “When the asteroids first appeared on our satellite radars, where had they come from?”

  Casey frowned behind his glasses. “What do you mean? They’ve come from somewhere farther in our solar system.”

  “Have they? Or are we just assuming they have?”

  “You think they
came from somewhere else?”

  “If we’re working on the theory that the Trads are needing spaceships to move the human women back to their planet, then isn’t it possible the asteroids were released from the same ships? We already know they’re not real asteroids, but have been designed and manufactured to replicate asteroids and also deliver the Trads safely to Earth without being noticed, but they must have got the asteroids here from Tradrych in the first place. They couldn’t rely on sending them from their planet and expect them to make contact with Earth—there are far too many variables for that to go wrong. Ultimately, the asteroids still relied on trajectory and velocity for them to hit Earth, which means they must have been carried here on another vehicle and released when they were in our orbit.”

  Casey nodded, understanding where I was coming from. “So, we’re back to the ships again. If the same spaceships that released the asteroids are also the ones collecting human women, we need to figure out a way to locate them. Doing so might mean we’re able to save some of the women who’ve been taken, but also could prevent a second attack.”

  “Agreed. The question is, how?”

  “They’re definitely using some kind of shielding. It must not be functional once inside our atmosphere, which is why we saw the asteroids reappear right before they hit us.”

  I frowned, thinking hard. “If their shielding doesn’t work in our atmosphere, it would also explain why they couldn’t just land Trads on Earth in regular spaceships, because we would have seen them and been alerted to their presence right away.”

  Casey ran his hand over his mouth. “The asteroids also gave them the opportunity to cause damage to our infrastructures and leave us vulnerable, too.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” I paused, my mind whirring. “If the ships are hidden in our orbit, maybe we can’t see them, but we could use a different way of finding out if they are there. What about space debris?”