Beast of Dreams Read online

  “Yes…” she said, panting heavily with the need to come.

  Karrick gave a hard thrust and felt the knot slip past the tight entrance into her vagina. Amanda shuddered with the invasion of the pressure, the feeling of fullness driving her near the edge of a violent orgasm.

  Her fingernails dug deep into his shoulders, past his layer of heavy fur and into his skin, drawing blood. “Kiss me again,” she said desperately, “I want you to fuck my mouth with your tongue.”

  Karrick pulled her to him for another wet fervid kiss, holding her tight against him as he rocked his cock back and forth in her vagina, the knot moving with him, rubbing against the ridged walls of her tightly stretched pussy.

  Amanda teetered on the edge of intense pain/pleasure, falling into a spiral of uncontrolled fire, and she moaned deeply into Karrick’s mouth at the explosive climax consuming her.

  Karrick heard her moans as he felt the intensity of her climax, her pussy walls squeezing violently around his knot and the thick head of his embedded penis. The pressure within his balls passed the critical limit, his semen exploding out of his cock. Gush after gush of the abundant life-giving sperm sprayed the interior of Amanda’s vagina, the pressure of his balls driving it deep within, forcing spurts of it deep within her cervix. He shuddered with the release, sensing that despite Amanda’s claim she was protected against pregnancy, his seed had just found fertile ground.

  * * * * *

  Several moments passed and Amanda, covered with sweat from the intense mating, felt her legs go weak. “Hold me, Karrick, I can’t stand, my legs won’t hold me.”

  Though still knotted within her, Karrick lovingly scooped her up under the buttocks with one arm, while somewhat awkwardly pushing her panties and slacks the rest of the way off her legs. He then spread her thighs apart so he could settle her atop his lap with her legs around his waist. He kneaded her back softly with his knuckles while they waited for the swelling of his knot to go down enough so he could pull his cock from her. Nearing that point, Karrick said, “Amanda, I can pull out now if you want.”

  “No, stay with me, Karrick. Just keep holding me. I like feeling you hold me like this. Just keep rubbing my back; that feels so good…”

  His heart raced but he needed to let her know how deeply he felt for her. “Amanda, I know it’s only been a few days, but I’ve never felt like this before. I love you.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you angry at me?”

  “No.”

  Surprise made him ask, “Why not? I thought you’d be ready to tear out a piece of my mane, especially since I tried to get you pregnant last night.”

  Her eyes gazed deeply into his, seeing in them the other half of her soul. “I’ve never felt for any man like I do you. I know it’s only been a short time but you understand me, the real me, better than any man I’ve ever been with. You like me the way I am, alpha female and all. I have to admit I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. Most men find me too aggressive. Guess that’s why I’m still single,” she said with a grin.

  “I find it hard to believe someone like you would still be alone. You’re so beautiful, Amanda.”

  She flushed at the compliment. “I’m not used to having a relationship. Most women are much prettier than I am and feel comfortable wearing dresses and makeup. I was raised by men and no one was around to teach me any of that, not that I felt the lack. But I want you to know that I’ve always been considered one of the guys. Men don’t usually pursue me like you’re doing.”

  “Maybe you just never noticed that they were interested because no one taught you the signs, Amanda, but their loss is my gain. All I know is that every time I look at you, I want you even more.”

  “I want you, too, Karrick. I’ve never been very active sexually, and I didn’t even know I could ever feel so intensely driven to mate, like I do now. But it’s not just the sex; it’s how you make me feel. There’s a sense of rightness being with you. I love you, too, Karrick.”

  Karrick’s heart leapt in intense pleasure and he gathered her to him for a consuming kiss. He stopped and stroked the sides of her face, gazing intently into her eyes. “Be careful. If this were the fairy tale, now would be the part where I turn into Prince Charming.”

  Amanda’s mouth twitched in amusement before she broke into laughter.

  Chapter 8

  Amanda let Karrick know that although she enjoyed their lovemaking very much, he had left her a mess and now she wanted to get cleaned up. Karrick chuckled and told her that he always planned well. In another ten minutes of walking, they’d be at a river where they could bathe to her heart’s content. She asked if he was sure it was safe to bathe in and he assured her that it was.

  Karrick found a patch of ferns growing near the river shore and gathered a pile of them to spread in a large rectangular area where he and Amanda would have something comfortable to lie on after their swim.

  He watched her now with a faint glint of amusement in his eyes, as she left to presoak the grey outfit and panties she had worn earlier, with the plan to wash them by hand after their swim. She had become disgruntled when he asked her why she needed to do that; didn’t she have a handy gadget stored away in her backpack that could do the job? Her answering glare warmed him. She was so much fun to tease.

  Amanda scooped out some sand next to the shore line and watched the hole fill in with water. She dumped the clothes in the hole and added a small amount of biodegradable soap. Karrick’s eyes darkened as he drank in the sight of her nude form, except for protective shoes, sauntering toward him.

  Amanda blushed, knowing the kinds of thoughts that probably were running through Karrick’s mind. “I know that look. Don’t you ever think of anything else?”

  As she neared him, he captured her hand and pulled her to him for a warm embrace. “Actually, I was looking at your shoes and glad that you’re being careful of your feet. The water is plenty safe but you need to watch out for cuts on your skin on this planet. There are some pretty virulent strains of bacteria that are very hard to control once they get into an open wound.”

  “I’m sure there probably was a nanosecond where that thought may have crept in, so I won’t make an issue of it.”

  Glancing at the river, she lifted her chin and caught his eyes with hers. One eyebrow raised, she issued him a challenge. “Let’s go to the river and see who falls into the water, first.”

  “I’m game.”

  They ran down to the river shore and Amanda stepped into the water thinking it was cool and surprisingly clear, given that it was late summer/early fall. “I would have thought that there would be more tannin in the water—” she said.

  “Farther down the river, there is. This portion of the river is pretty clear because most of the tributaries feeding it come straight from the mountains. The soil here is pretty sandy, too, so there isn’t a lot of sediment to stir up.”

  “How deep is it? Any drop-offs?”

  “A couple of meters. I don’t think there’s any drop-offs until you get a few kilometers down the river.”

  They both strolled through the slow-moving water and stopped when the depth reached a point where the water was just above waist level. Karrick smiled as Amanda attempted to take him down. She almost succeeded but he was learning fast how to anticipate her moves. Also, unknown to her, he had Jadd look up in the computer files for any information regarding ‘Aikido.’ Jadd had shared much information in the form of mental images of the various postures, holds, and throws of the martial art during a dream communication early last evening, and Karrick was confident he might be able to try a move or two on his own.

  “Want to add a little fun to the challenge?” he said.

  “Sure. What are you proposing?”

  “I win, you do something for me. You win, I do something for you.”

  “Like what?”

  He leered at her. “Whatever you want.”

  “Even making sure I have a nice home-cooked breakfast every day for the
next week?” she said with a brow raised.

  He looked a bit disappointed. “Okay, I promise that if you win, I’ll provide you with a very nice home-cooked breakfast every day for a week.”

  She laughed. “What do you want?”

  “You walk on my back to work the kinks out and then give me a full body massage. Oh, and do that every day for a week,” he said, adding the last since he’d be damned if he’d only get something once if she was going for a week of cooked breakfast.

  She thought about this and figured his chances of winning were small. “Agreed. Quit talking and start moving.”

  Amanda thought it a mistake on his part to make such a bet and figured this as an easy win for her. However, after a few minutes of watching his movements, she surmised that he suddenly knew a lot more than he did earlier, at least a few of the basic moves, and had found a way to compensate for his prior lack of knowledge. “No fair, Karrick.”

  “You know what I think of fair,” he said eagerly, his eyes sparkling with mischief. He knew it was just a matter of time before his secret advantage would show up, and he readied himself to take full advantage of the situation.

  Amanda mentally prepared the attack in her head as she circled him. She figured she’d start out with hiji dori, an elbow grab, but the feel of something slithering past her legs broke her reverie. She glanced down in the water and saw several two-meter-long eels with sparkling gold scales swimming through the passage between her and Karrick. She let out a squeal and Karrick, seeing his secret weapons swimming by, quickly took advantage of the situation to attempt a koshi nage, a hip throw. He was much surprised to see that it actually worked and was totally unprepared for the Ushiro udoroshi, pull down from behind, that quickly had him underwater, or the Ushiro eri-dori, a hold involving a neck grab from the back. Amanda surfaced, pulling Karrick with her, the wolfan sputtering water from his mouth.

  “I’d say I won that round,” Amanda said, her voice full of laughter.

  Karrick coughed to clear the remaining water from his lungs and smiled smugly. “Not quite. First one to fall loses and that was you, my dear.”

  Her mouth twisted wryly, rather perturbed by the fact he was right. “Alright, I’ll concede that you won, but don’t tell anyone you beat me. I have a reputation to protect.”

  “You can buy my silence if you’re that concerned about it.”

  “Nah. Let’s go for two out of three, instead.”

  * * * * *

  The day had warmed considerably and Karrick and Amanda lay on their backs on the soft ferns Karrick had spread on the ground for them earlier. Both were lost in their own thoughts.

  Amanda, speaking aloud to herself, said, “I think I’ll have you do the breakfast thing for me for two days, then I’ll do the back rub thing for you on the third day. We’ll just keep alternating.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll provide breakfast tomorrow and then you can do my back rub the day after that.”

  “That’s cheesy. Today doesn’t count.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s penance for sneaking into my tent.”

  He just shook his head. “You ate two helpings. Only the first one counts as a penance.”

  “What a bean counter,” she grumbled. “Hell, I’ll give you a back rub if you go wash my clothes. I hate doing that. I should’ve bought that personal soil extraction unit at Gliese III so I could just toss them in and shake them out when they’re done. It only weighed four kilograms.”

  He started chuckling to himself and soon had tears running down his cheeks. Curiosity caused Amanda to ask what was so funny.

  “You.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and your gadgets. I swear you try to have something for every situation a person can imagine.”

  Amanda blushed, having been teased many a time by family and fellow explorers for her obsession with all forms of devises. “Hey, it pays to be prepared.”

  “It’s okay, Amanda. I’m like that myself. I get a real kick out of learning something new or finding ways to make things better. I’ve been here so long that all these things you show me are completely new and I want to play with them, myself. They’re like toys for adults.”

  Amanda turned to him, this wolfan who understood her so well in the few days they had got to know one another. She decided to broach the subject that had been between them for the past day. “Karrick, what’s going on with you and the other wolfan here? I want to help.”

  He was silent for a moment before he finally spoke. “Your father was Jonathon Parker. That makes you Amanda Parker, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father is Alexander Logan. Dr. Alexander Logan, the geneticist and founder of the Wolfan Psi Pack.”

  “Wow. But…I don’t understand how that could be. The ship crashed.”

  “It crashed and some of us were killed, but most survived. The ship had been sabotaged. Your father knew that, having arrived two weeks after we did, to deliver additional supplies.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. He said that you were all dead. Aerial photos of the site showed a pattern of destruction that no one could have survived.”

  “Think, Amanda. What would the safest course of action be if you knew that one attempt had already been made on the lives of your family, and it was only a short matter of time before the next?”

  She contemplated this for a few moments before responding, “I see what you mean. Your people decided to make the search for them pointless…and fake their deaths.”

  “Exactly.”

  “My father must have helped.”

  “Yes, he did. After the first week, which he spent helping us tend to the injured and providing for some of the colony’s basic needs, he and my father put their heads together to make a plan to save the pack from further harm.”

  “I can’t believe he never told me about this.”

  “He was probably just trying to protect the pack and you as well. “

  “Perhaps, but it bothers me that this is how I have to find out about it. So what did they do for their plan?”

  “First they decided that they had to make it look like the sabotage attempt succeeded. Your father created a computer model that calculated what the pattern of destruction would look like if the ship had exploded several kilometers above the ground.”

  “Why not just have the model center on the ship crashing on the ground? It would be easier to fake something like that and still have it look very real.”

  “Yes, but it would also leave open a small window of doubt. It had to look like the ship, the equipment, the people…everything, was annihilated.”

  “It must have taken an incredible amount of work to set that up.”

  “It took months. It meant destroying and scattering what was left of the ship’s structure. We removed everything that would be useful and hid it inside an underground cavern. Everything else was deliberately charred or otherwise destroyed and became part of the debris scattered over hundreds of kilometers. It paid off, though, when six months later a scout ship for the Conglomerate came by and recorded the destruction from the air. They took the aerial photos you saw. No one’s come by since that we know of.”

  “How many people survived?”

  “There originally were thirty-nine, and five of us were killed in the initial impact. All were wolfan except for my father. One of the five killed was our ship’s engineer, Ron Mistelski. Ron was the one who found the bomb that was set to go off once we started landing procedures. He noticed something wrong and found the bomb shortly after we entered orbit around Eridani. In order to remove it, he had to dismantle the landing thrusters on the outside of the ship, while in space. There was no way they could be removed without first opening the compartment to the engine drive.”

  “Oh my god… The radiation level must have been unbelievable.”

  “Yes. I don’t know how he managed to work through the intense radiation exposure, but somehow he did. I think he realized
there was no other way and he had a wife and two children on board.”

  “Karrick, this must have been so horrible for all of you.”

  “I was only two years old, so I don’t really remember anything other than the hard crash of our landing. But, yes, those who were there and old enough to remember talk of it when we have our yearly memorial. If Ron hadn’t been able to get at least three of the landing thrusters back on line, we’d never have made it.”

  “What happened to Ron?”

  “He died shortly after he got the third thruster on line and never made it back inside the ship. When your father came two weeks later, he and Yosuyoshi found Ron’s body floating in orbit and placed it in an anti-rad container. He’s buried in the forest near our compound, in a place he would have appreciated,” Karrick said, his voice grown soft with the reflection. “Ron loved the forest of his homeworld and helped choose Eridani for our colony because of its natural beauty.”

  “How many of you are there now?”

  “One hundred and fifty-seven. Most of us are genetic constructs carried by surrogate mothers, since this is a starter colony and we’re trying to achieve maximum genetic diversity.”

  “Shouldn’t your number be higher than that? After thirty years?”

  “Normally, at this stage, we should have had about five hundred, but much of the equipment was damaged or destroyed when we landed. We also lost about forty percent of our cryogenically frozen embryos, most of them female.”

  “You are all so lucky to be alive. Karrick, I’ve been thinking. I want you to take me to your compound. I think that talking to you and your people is what my father expected. Maybe together, we can find a way to help stop more attacks on the wolfan.”

  Karrick’s mouth curved with tenderness. Her thoughts matched his. “Let’s go. It’s just a half hour walk from here.”