RisingGreen Read online

  But now. But now she shivered at his touch. Her nipples, which had already been tender, hardened like little stones. A pulse beat low in her belly. Her clit began to throb.

  She looked up at him and their gazes tangled. He stared at her with a strange, muddled look, as though he’d never seen her before. Or never seen her like this.

  She licked her lips.

  His mouth dropped open. “Sage…”

  Well, hell. Was he leaning in? Was he leaning in for a kiss?

  It took just about every ounce of determination she had to force herself to her feet. In a rush, she collected her rucksack and Dan’s Glock, which was on the worktable, and hightailed it out of the medic’s station.

  She didn’t understand these feelings. But she knew one thing—she didn’t like them in the least. And until she shook off whatever had happened to her out there on the heath, she would damn sure avoid Riley Spencer.

  She found her sanity, as she always did, in her lab. The one place where things always made sense, where things were always as they should be. She could push everything else to the back of her mind when she worked and it was wonderful. Wonderful to be able to forget.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon analyzing and studying the clippings she’d taken from the strange plant on the rocky escarpment in sector four.

  The cross section under the microscope shocked her to the core. This was no ordinary plant. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Perhaps even unearthly. The cell structure was a different shape than any plant she’d studied and each cell had an unusual number of mitochondria. Aside from that, there were multiple lysosomes in the cytosol, which was much more common in animal cells. Interesting…

  She pulled the slide from the microscope plate and was about to pop in a cross section from the leaf, when a sound behind her caught her attention. She turned.

  Kale leaned with his shoulder against the frame of the door, watching her with a smarmy smile plastered on his face.

  Shit. Not again. Hell, she should have smelled him coming.

  He was out of uniform, dressed in faded jeans and a tight tee shirt with the logo of some Hong Kong whorehouse plastered all over it. His short hair was mussed, as if he’d gelled it and gone to sleep. It poked up in all kinds of directions. Sage curled her fingers against the annoying and unfamiliar urge to smooth it down.

  “What do you want?” she muttered, carefully placing the slide back in the rack. She pulled off her gloves, glared at him and tapped at the face of her watch in an impatient tattoo.

  “Just watchin’ you work, doc.” He sucked in some air through the gap between his teeth. “What can I say? I like the view.”

  Sage crossed her arms over her chest, ignoring the scrape of her sleeve over her nipples. Damn if those things weren’t hard again. Of all the men in the world to be patently uninterested in, Kale was at the front of the line. He was crude, rude and socially stunted. In his opinion, women were for fucking, and frankly not good for much else.

  Sage had little use for him either. Or at least she used to feel that way.

  Now, here in the muted shadows of her lab, now as he stood there all muscled and bulging and big, looking at her as if he wanted to lap her up… Well, now she felt differently.

  Now she wanted to lap him up too.

  His bulging neck, which had always disgusted her, looked thick and…tasty. She wanted to wrap her lips around those defined veins and suck. And his arms—muscled biceps rippling and clenching at her glance—those arms could lift her, hold her, move her.

  She looked away and cleared her throat. “Didn’t…didn’t Dan talk to you about bothering me when I’m working?”

  “Am I?” He quirked a brow, making the scar on his forehead dance. He stepped into the room, crowding her, and kicked the door shut with his heel. “Bothering you?”

  Heat rolled off him in waves. An answering heat rose within her. Something squirmed in her belly and a shiver racked her frame.

  “Yes… You…” She waved impotently at the closed door. She should say something to get rid of him. She should do something to arrest his insistent approach.

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t. And before she knew what happened, he had her plastered against the wall, trapped in his heat. He looked down at her, down from the heights. She tipped her face up so she could see him.

  Damn. He was good-looking. In a savage, brutish kind of way. Why hadn’t she noticed before?

  Her palms, ostensibly holding him off, tested the rigidity of his chest. His muscles bunched in response and he growled.

  “There’s something different about you, doc,” he said, nuzzling her earlobe.

  Rockets exploded in her body as he hit that spot, making her dizzy, blurring her vision. Delight shimmied down her spine, drawing a line between his scraping teeth and the snarling ache in her cunt.

  How was this happening? How could this be happening? How could she be letting it?

  But it felt so good. It had never felt good. Not like this. Not like…

  “You are so fucking sexy in a lab coat.” Even as he said those words, hot and heavy in her ear, his hands slipped to her waist, beneath her lab coat, beneath her shirt, to rest against the damp skin of her belly.

  Sage threw her head back as frissons of electricity slashed through her. Against her will, she arched her back and rubbed her pelvis against his. She licked the salt from his neck, suckled the vein throbbing there.

  “Shit.” His voice was feral. He pulled back and glared at her with a wild glow in his eyes. “I’m gonna fuck you,” he said. “I’m gonna fuck you hard.”

  Even as he issued this threat, this promise, he popped open the buttons of her jeans, yanked them down her thighs and groped the nest between her legs.

  He was rough. There was no cadence or seduction or technique. There was only sensation, ruthless, insistent abrasion over an engorged nubbin that ached, wept for nothing but more. More. Sage kicked off her jeans and propped one leg up on the counter. It was uncomfortable, unnatural, but she didn’t care. She wanted. She needed.

  In a frenzy, she sucked and chewed at his neck, rubbed his ribs, pinched his nipples, as rough with him as he was with her. It inflamed him.

  When she found the bulge in his pants, he hissed through his teeth. “God yes. Yes.”

  She slapped him there. Hard. His nostrils flared. A muscle bunched in his cheek and he pulled her closer. She wasn’t sure where this was coming from. She was not that kind of woman, but something about him, his scent, his energy, his brutality, wove itself into her sanity. She became like him. An animal, mindful of one thing and one thing only—rutting.

  Put your fucking cock inside me.

  Did she say the words or only think them? It didn’t matter. It was a searing mantra possessing her mind, her starving, aching body.

  She spread her legs wider as he fumbled with the catch to his jeans.

  I need your cock. I need your cum. I need it. Give it to me.

  And, oh God, he did.

  Again, no style. No seduction. No preparation. Only a big cock at the mouth of her cunt, pressing in, filling her, abrading her, scratching the itch she could no longer scratch for herself.

  How he filled her. Her cunt lips sucked at his girth and she squeezed as tight as she could. The walls of her pussy wept with rapture as he shoved in. When he pulled out, she whimpered. He laughed, a deep dark chuckle, and plowed into her again. Deeper. Harder. The skin between them was slick and hot. She moved her leg to strengthen her position in the battle.

  All along, he murmured obscenities and foul curses. He bit at her neck, twisted her nipples, and she gloried in it all.

  Because she felt it.

  She felt it coming.

  Her raw hunger for it mounted.

  The pressure between them rose higher and higher. His brutal thrusts became quicker and shorter. He grunted in harsh guttural bursts. Like a boy, he fumbled with her clit, trying desperately to make her come, trying desperately to mak
e her pussy the tight vise he craved.

  Something blossomed inside her. It lashed at her, danced within her. Exquisite agony.

  His eyes went wide and he thrashed against her, in her. He sucked in a high-pitched peep, something like a whimper. His eyes rolled back and he released.

  His cum washed through her womb in a hot, burning tide.

  And then—ecstasy. Absolute bliss. It soaked her, saturated her. Fed her.

  She held on to the sensation, reveling in it, held on to him, milking each delicious drop of his seed.

  But when the moment passed, she pushed him away. “Now, get out.” A snarl.

  Kale slipped from her pussy and fell to his knees, staring at his cock, still rock-hard, still quivering, still dribbling little spurts of cum.

  “Holy shit, doc. That was fucking amazing. How did you do that?”

  She glared, her old disgust for him raising its hoary head. How on earth could she have wanted him?

  “Out.” And when he didn’t move except to gape at her like a man bewildered and bemused, she hissed, “Don’t make me tell Dan you’ve been bothering me again.”

  “But doc—”

  “Go.” She pulled up her jeans, ignoring the wet trail of jizz making twin tracks down her thighs, and turned back to the microscope. She had work to do. She was far too busy for this.

  Far too busy to wonder about the insanity that just possessed her. Far too busy to reflect on the profound feral pleasure she’d felt when Kale’s sperm splashed against the mouth of her womb.

  Chapter Three

  “So.” Riley sat in the chair facing hers and propped his hands on his knees. “What seems to be the problem?”

  Sage rubbed her belly. “I’m not sure.” She wasn’t sure about a lot of things lately. Not the least of which was why she felt compelled to come here and burden him with her concerns.

  He tipped his chin and sent her a look. She tried to ignore how his blond hair flopped onto his brow. How he raked it back with long, thin fingers.

  They said finger length and girth were a reflection of another appendage. Sage couldn’t help but wonder if this was true. Riley’s were awfully long.

  She swallowed the drool pooling in her mouth and tried to focus on the reason she’d come. His presence there, just a few feet away from her, was annoyingly distracting. His neck, for one thing, was long and thin and slightly veined. She glanced at her watch but then her eyes tracked back to his face.

  “Come on, Sage. You know what’s bothering you. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Tell me.”

  She shrugged, one-shouldered, as though she didn’t really care. “I dunno. Since the other day, I’ve been feeling strange.”

  He leaned closer, his eyes intent.

  Damn.

  She fixated on his lips, those perfectly molded lips. His tongue dabbed at them, an unconscious gesture perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.

  Whatever had happened out there in sector four, it was clear something within her had changed. In addition to her frequent and irresistible urges to fuck any man who came within spitting distance, she had developed an uncanny ability to sense a man’s arousal. And stroke it.

  When she was close to a man, especially an undeniably attractive man like Riley, she became super aware of his every breath. The way his pupils dilated when she touched him, however innocently. The way his pores opened when she was near, the subtle scent he emitted. Hell, she could feel his heart rate increase, his temperature infinitesimally rise.

  “Strange, how?” He set his palm gently to her forehead and then to her cheek.

  A shiver, harsh and hollow, slashed through her. A ravaging hunger settled in her belly. “I’ve been…” She let her lashes flicker. “Horny.”

  He sat back suddenly. His heat receded with him and she ached to draw it back, to wrap it around her like a blanket. She glanced up to see his Adam’s apple bobble.

  “Um. Horny?”

  “God, yes.” She met his eyes and willed him closer.

  Instead he stood and showed her his back. “Anything else?”

  Sage frowned, although it was a wasted effort since he kept his back to her. She rubbed her belly again, as though this could still the peculiar churning there. It felt good and it ached, all at the same time. “Cramps.”

  He looked at her, from across the room. Too far. Too far away.

  “Fever.”

  He stepped closer. “You didn’t feel warm a minute ago.”

  “It comes and goes. With the hunger.”

  “Hunger?” His brow quirked. He leaned against the back of the chair facing hers.

  “Oh. And it…hurts to urinate.”

  “Really?” He sat. Ah yes. He sat. Close to her again. A sweet warmth gushed through her.

  She leaned closer. “It hurts…and it feels good.”

  “Well.” He was comfortable again, cloaked in the mantle of his profession. Safe from inconvenient feelings. Feelings of a personal nature. A sexual nature.

  Because he wanted her. She could smell it. He wanted her and he was fighting the urge.

  “Sounds like a urinary tract infection.”

  She nodded. Smiled. Leaned closer. “Can you fix it?”

  “Well, sure. A simple antibiotic should do the trick.”

  “And the hunger? Can you fix that too?” Her message was clear. She saw it in the flush crawling up his neck. God. She wanted him. And she wanted him now.

  He cleared his throat. Looked away. “You could eat something.”

  “It’s not that kind of hunger, Riley.” She traced the nodules on his knee.

  His entire body stiffened. “Sage…”

  “Riley.” She angled out of her chair and stood before him, one hand on his shoulder.

  He looked up at her, his jaw slack. She caressed his nape, toyed with the thick waves of his hair. He closed his eyes and muttered a curse.

  “This is wrong,” he said under his breath.

  She ignored him. Hunger burned, pulsed within her. It consumed and controlled her. She stepped closer, straddled his thighs and sat on his lap. She rubbed her clit against the ridge of his cock and sucked in a breath at the sensation. So good.

  He didn’t stop her. Good.

  She laced her fingers through his hair and tipped his chin up, making his neck a clear target. And she feasted. Dear God, he tasted good. Smelled good. Of arousal and heat and caged sperm. She arched against him again, rubbing against the bulge in his jeans.

  “Riley,” she whispered. “I’m hungry for you.”

  “Please, Sage.” His breath was a hiss. “We shouldn’t.”

  “We must. I need you to fill me. Cure me.” She found and fisted his erection.

  He shuddered beneath her ministrations, but still he managed to resist. He lifted her, his tight grasp biting the tender flesh of her upper arms.

  “No, Sage,” he said, drilling her with a resolute expression. “No.”

  Frustration howled through her like a cold, piercing wind. A panic, unlike anything she’d ever known, swamped her. She needed him. She needed…

  A sharp rap on the door echoed through the room. They froze, a rigid tableau.

  Riley responded like a drowning man thrown a line. “C-come in.”

  The door opened. Dan’s nostrils flared as he took in the sight of the two of them standing too close together. He crossed his arms over his chest. His Adam’s apple worked. “Riley, Do you have a moment?”

  “Yes, Dan.” Shit. Was that relief in his voice? “Come on in. Sage was just leaving.”

  She glared at them both, boiling inside. Raw.

  Well, hell. Without a word to either of them, she stormed out of the medic’s office, slamming the door shut behind her.

  Disgruntled, hungry and aching, she headed for the kitchen. It was quiet and empty except for Sanders, one of the pudgy geologists, who was rooting around in the fridge. Her gaze snapped to him and tracked his every move. Her mood began to lift.

  Balancing a plate of cold cu
ts and a variety of condiment bottles, he turned and smiled. “Hey, Green.” He wore a grimy tee shirt and boxers, for Christ’s sake. His thick glasses sat heavily on his nose, weighing down his face. He was the definitive science nerd. The last guy she should ever want to fuck. “Want a sandwich?”

  A sudden, unbidden warmth sluiced through her. She was ravenous, aching. Just not for food. He set the plate on the table and opened up a loaf of bread. She inspected him with hungry eyes.

  God. Had she never seen it before? She stepped closer, as though in a trance.

  “Green?” He glanced up and caught her watching him, noticed her predatory approach. He licked his upper lip. “Green?”

  They were close now. Close enough to feel his heat, feel his arousal beginning to stir. She riffled his unruly hair, drew a soft, teasing line down his neck and across his chest. His mouth dropped open. She tugged him closer. Kissed his neck. Nibbled his earlobe. Ah, the taste of him. She felt it to her bones.

  “Jesus, Green!” he gasped.

  His hands settled on her hips. She pushed them higher until they cupped her breasts. Obligingly, he thumbed her nipples. A now familiar desire, that hot streak of lightning, shot through her. She rubbed against him like a cat.

  His cock was heavy and hot. It pressed against her clit with maddening friction.

  She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t wait.

  She pushed him to the floor and yanked down his boxers. His erection sprang free. It was long and thin and the bulbous tip was an angry purple. She stilled, licked her lips. How she wanted, needed to taste it. She took him into her mouth and sucked. He flinched and clutched at her hair.

  “Easy, Green,” he mumbled but she ignored him.

  He filled her mouth, so firm and hot and sweet. His scent enrobed her. She swirled her tongue over the head and sucked on him again, harder. He hissed a breath and arched into her mouth. His cock swelled, the way a cock swells when it is about to burst, so she pulled away. He whimpered a little and tried to tug her back. But that was no longer what she wanted.

  Now she wanted more.

  She quickly kicked off her jeans and peeled off her panties. And she mounted him.