it.”
Her fingers closed involuntarily. Only the darkness in her gaze hinted that she knew what she was doing.
He had to clench his fists to keep himself still. He was approaching orgasm again. “Put the edge on your tit.”
The control compelled her. She didn’t need to watch what she was doing. Blindly she moved the scalpel until the blade rested against her nipple, intense silver against brown. The nipple was erect and hard, as if it were ready to be cut.
“You can understand me,” he said thickly. “I know you can, so pay attention. I can make you cut yourself. If I want to, I can make you cut off your whole tit.” He was tempted to have her draw blood, just to demonstrate his power; but he was afraid if he did so he would come right away. “Remember that when you think about breaking my neck.
“I’m going to break you. I’m going to break you so hard you’ll start to love it, need it. Then I’m going to break you some more. I’m going to break you until you don’t have anything but me to live for.”
Her eyes were still out of focus; but he could see anguish in their depths, a wail she was unable to utter.
She looked so lost that he almost turned off the zone implant. It would be an exquisite display of possession to make her do what he wanted by plain fear rather than with the implant—to make her return the scalpel to its compartment, then come to him, kneel in front of him, and open her mouth so that he could thrust himself down her throat. His thumb was on the switch to release her.
But at the last moment, instinct prevailed. He couldn’t take the risk of ignoring her threats. She might be stronger than he could predict. If she was—The idea took some of the stiffness out of him.
Angrily, he kept her under control.
Moving like a robot—responsive to nothing but the implant’s functions—she replaced the scalpel in its compartment. When he instructed her to smile, she obeyed; but the lift of her lips remained as expressionless as the rest of her face. Obediently she knelt in front of him.
His organ was no longer as intensely eager as it had been a few moments ago. Down in the black bottom of his heart, he was disappointed. His cowardice had cost him something he wanted. But disappointment made him angry—and anger had its uses. Suddenly furious, he forced open her mouth and drove himself into her, gagging her fiercely until he came.
Then a sense of depletion as sudden as his rage took everything else away. Without a glance at her, he pushed the buttons which put her to sleep; he left her naked on the floor of the sickbay. Thinking he was tired, he lumbered away toward his berth to get some rest.
But he wasn’t tired. What he felt wasn’t fatigue: it was loss. After several restless minutes, he left his berth and went, fuming bitterly, to Bright Beauty’s bridge and the command console. There he keyed on the cameras and screens so that he could look at the damage Starmaster had done to his ship.
She had a cabin-size dent in her side. Her steel skeleton was no longer true. One part of her nose looked like it’d been hit by an impact-ram.
She could be repaired. He knew where to go to get her patched and welded and sealed: fixed. But she would never be the same again.
As he studied her wounds, Angus Thermopyle’s eyes began to spill tears.
CHAPTER
7
F rom that point on, he no longer hit Morn Hyland. She was his, and he was ready, eager, to use her hard; but he didn’t want her damaged.
Driven by anger and grief, and by a vague, inexplicable sense that he was no longer in control of his life, he used her so hard that several days passed before he could begin teaching her how to help him with Bright Beauty. He’d never had much to do with women. In fact, he’d never doubted that he could live perfectly well without them altogether. But now his brain teemed with lust. Perversions which had never occurred to him before now seemed exciting, even compulsory. The more he saw of her