The Morcai Battalion: Invictus. Diana Palmer

as hard as she could. She tasted blood.

      He growled again, and his teeth bit in harder.

      She cried out furiously, struggling as the pain increased. She lashed out with one leg and connected with his shin. While he was reacting to that attack, she launched another on his arm with her teeth. He pinned her with ridiculous ease and brought his teeth to her neck again, pushing her down with his formidable weight in a surge of pure aggression.

      “How dare you!” she rasped indignantly. All her imagining hadn’t prepared her for this sort of domination. When she got her hands free, she was going to pay him back royally!

      There was a louder growl, unrelated to her resistance, and then a brief lessening of aggression.

      She increased her struggles, sensing weakness, but with all her combat training, she couldn’t budge him. She groaned furiously, all her resentments combined in the angry sound.

      He whipped her onto her back. His fingers locked into hers. In the darkness, she could see only the green glow of his eyes as he looked down at her.

      “This is not as I wished it,” he said in a voice that sounded odd, different, as if the Standard words were being formed in a throat unaccustomed to making the sounds. “The violence is our shame, the penalty we pay for daring to experiment with our own genetic structure. I would not hurt you for any reason, if the choice were mine. It is not. This is my nature,” he ground out. “This violent, animal ferocity.”

      She was still trying to reconcile her anger with his guilt and find a balance. She had rarely been bested in combat, even by an adversary so superior. She swallowed, hard, and struggled for breath.

      His head bent and he brushed his face against hers, tenderly. “Now you can understand why Komak’s genetic mix was necessary,” he whispered. “Without it, I would have killed you.”

      There was torment in his deep voice. She realized that he wasn’t exaggerating. His claws would have punctured her lungs, as they had on Lagana even when he was in control of himself. His strength was so superior, even with her modifications, that she would have bruises. She recalled hearing him talk about Hahnson’s broken back from only the preliminaries of his mating with an exiled Cehn-Tahr woman. Dtimun had said that no method every discovered by science could lessen the aggression. As she had been three years ago, she could not have survived this.

      She was realizing something more, as well. Her mental neutering was supposed to cause excruciating pain if she attempted to mate. It had not. Although, there had been another sort of pain…

      “That could not be helped,” he said at her ear. His voice was calmer now. “Something a physician should know.”

      There was almost a teasing note in his voice. She felt herself begin to relax, despite the discomfort. She would never admit that he had frightened her, of course.

      “Of course,” he murmured dryly.

      “You stop that,” she said firmly. “My thoughts are my own.”

      He drank in the scent of her. “My father said that my mother attempted to jump out a window at their first mating,” he whispered.

      That surprised a laugh out of her. “A window?”

      “Yes, on the top floor of a very tall building.” His tongue brushed her throat as he inhaled the floral scent of her hair. “My father was quick. He caught her as she fell.”

      His fingers felt odd. Thicker than they appeared. He was incredibly heavy. She also had the impression of massive physical presence, strength, raw power. He seemed much taller, broader, than he appeared. Despite her reengineered bone mass, he was many times her superior in strength. Was the darkness to hide him from her eyes, she wondered, so that she couldn’t see what he really looked like?

      “An astute guess,” he said huskily. His fingers, strong and thick, speared into hers, sliding in between them. “We do not mate as humans do, but as the great galots do. Males dominate by pinning the female at the back of the neck. An undignified, shameful process, which we hide from outworlders. I told you that you might learn things about us which you would not like.”

      His deep voice was harsh with regret. She began to understand why the Cehn-Tahr were so secretive about their behaviors. Her body slowly began to relax. It wasn’t fair to blame him for something that was inborn in him, in all his species. She had agreed to this. It was not against her will. Securing the timeline required sacrifice. Certainly, this episode was as difficult for him as it was for her.

      “Yes,” he answered the unspoken question somberly. “Intimacy requires a lowering of barriers which is difficult for me. I have always been alone, apart.”

      “So have I, really,” she confessed. She moved and winced. There was a lot of discomfort.

      “You must heal the damage, Madeline,” he said softly.

      “You said the physicians would have to examine me. Couldn’t they…?”

      His hands contracted. “You misunderstand.” His tongue caressed her throat again, producing exquisite sensations. “I have not finished.”

      Her mind was fuzzy. “But…?”

      “Do you think I wish to go through the rest of my life with a memory so brutal and unfeeling as what we just shared?” he asked at her ear. “You will forget. I will not.” He stilled. “Heal the damage.”

      She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was curious about what he meant to do. She used the wrist scanner and activated its drug banks. For an instant, when the screen lit to calculate the dosage of nanocells, she got a glimpse of a huge hand with broad fingers which looked nothing like the commander’s.

      He put his hand over the screen, shielding the light. “You will not look at me,” he said firmly. “And you will not touch me, regardless of what happens.”

      Now she was truly curious. She deactivated the unit. “Why?”

      He moved down against her. His tongue rasped against softer flesh, creating sensations that overwhelmed her. She gasped and her fingernails bit into his muscular arms. Involuntarily her hands slid to his back and encountered a long, soft line of fur over his spinal column…

      He pulled her hands away and smoothed them over his broad, hair-covered chest. “You will not touch me, except here,” he whispered again.

      “O…okay,” she whispered back. She was barely capable of rational thought, awash on a wave of delight so intense that she shivered.

      “Our first encounter did not produce a child,” he said huskily. “This one will.”

      “How can you know…?”

      He laughed softly as he felt her shocked reaction. His tongue slid down her throat, over her collarbone. His teeth bit in, gently, and she shivered again.

      “This is how we mark our mates,” he whispered. “It is a ritual older than time. But I promise you, there will be no pain from it.”

      She felt thick, soft hair against her skin; more like fur than hair. His mouth opened. She felt his teeth. But at the same moment they bit down, explosive sensations blinded her mind and her body to anything except a wave of pleasure so overwhelming that she gasped and then sobbed helplessly.

      “What are you…doing?” she cried out.

      He laughed deep in his throat. “Something that you will never learn from falsified black market vids,” he whispered.

      Her nails bit into his chest. “You wouldn’t tell me, and there was no other way to find out,” she accused shakily. She groaned and caught her breath. “Dtimun!” she exclaimed.

      It was the first time she’d ever used his name. The effect it had on him was explosive. His reaction drew sounds from her that she’d never heard herself make. She hoped the doors were tightly closed.

      He heard that thought and chuckled. “The