Authors: Abby Blake
Chapter Two
Buy her? Jesus, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
One moment, she was about to be forcibly introduced to the duties expected from a whore, and now she had another guy haggling to buy her. When her pimp had threatened to sell her, she’d been so desperate she hadn’t really considered what he’d meant.
Was she being sold into slavery?
“Sixty thousand credits,” her pimp and slave trader demanded.
Her blood ran hot and cold. That was about ten times the amount she needed to get off the planet and a huge sum of money in anyone’s language.
“Ten thousand,” the new guy countered.
And then back and forth they haggled. Offer, counteroffer, offer.
The man still holding her over his shoulder laughed, smacked her ass hard, and threw in his own offer, and suddenly the new guy seemed the far better choice. Her heart pounding, her breathing shallow, terror still trembling through every muscle, Mikayla listened as three men chose the course of her future.
* * * *
Eighteen thousand credits
! His brothers were going to kill him. Buying a whore wasn’t exactly a tax deduction.
He’d almost backed away from the outrageous sums being discussed, but then he’d caught the desperate look on the woman’s face and realized that going with his instincts was the right thing to do. Whatever the consequences of spending so much money, he’d deal with them with a clear conscience. Evans would’ve raped the girl—even though on this planet there was no law against it—and Matt’s sense of humanity wouldn’t have let him walk away under those circumstances.
Strange how the farther away from Earth he and his brothers traveled the fewer human traits the people had. Considering that most here were human in a genetic sense, it was quite disturbing.
He hustled the girl out of the club with a protective arm around her shoulders. To say she looked terrified was a complete understatement, but she’d nodded effusively when her pimp had demanded that she forgo her cut if he sold her at such a low price, so she’d clearly shown a preference between him and Evans.
Matt wanted to offer her comfort but wasn’t sure exactly how to do that without giving her the wrong impression. Despite his reason for coming to this club, he had no intentions of having sex with this woman.
“What’s your name?” he asked as he pushed his hand into his pocket in order to resist the urge to brush her hair from her eyes.
“Mikayla,” she said, looking him squarely in the eyes.
He smiled at the small flash of pride. She may belong to him in a fiscal sense, but she wasn’t going to submit to him without a fight.
“Well, Mikayla, what do I do with you now?” She looked mildly surprised but wisely didn’t make any suggestions. “Do you have a home? Family? Anyone you can call to let them know where you’ll be for the next twelve months?”
She shook her head, her eyes wide as she processed his words. She seemed reluctant to answer, and it took him a moment to realize that if she was really alone on this planet, admitting it to a complete stranger could be a foolhardy move on her part.
She hesitated a moment longer before she voiced her lie. “Yes,” she said, verbally stumbling over the word, “my fa…brothers will come l–looking for me.” She nodded her head as if she’d solidified the fake story in her mind. “My father and brothers will come looking for me,” she repeated more forcefully.
Matt would bet every credit he had left, which unfortunately wasn’t all that much, that she had no family to speak of, or if she did, that they had no concern for her welfare. But he wouldn’t tell her. She needed the security the bogus story gave her, and he wouldn’t rob her of that.
As pleasant as it sounded to have female company at their research station in the middle of nowhere, these weren’t the circumstances he would’ve chosen.
“Well, Mikayla, let’s get home so that we can get you settled in.”
She glanced back at the club and then turned to follow him. That’s when he realized she was still dressed in the skimpy string suit that all the dancers wore. The poor woman would be freezing. He shrugged out of his jacket and settled it around her shoulders. She quickly punched her arms into the sleeves but kept her hands curled inside the cuffs.
“Th–thank you,” she managed to say through her chattering teeth.
“Is there anything you want to collect? Any possessions you want before we head home? It’s quite a long journey.”
She shook her head quickly, and it only seemed to confirm his earlier suspicion. If she had family, wouldn’t she at least try to pass a message to one of the other dancers in case someone came looking for her?
He escorted her to his vehicle with a hand on her lower back. He didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, but every protective, caveman instinct in him was demanding that he bind her to him. She was still in danger on this practically lawless planet, even with him by her side, and the sooner they got into the vehicle the safer she would be.
He opened the hatch of his modest flying pod and stepped into the vehicle behind her. His heartbeat slowed considerably as the door slid closed behind them, and his sense of urgency lowered. He helped her into the passenger chair beside his pilot seat, but she hissed in pain when she lowered her ass onto the cushioned fabric.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said too quickly. If she was ill or injured, he needed to know, and he looked at her until she gave up and told him the truth. “It hurts. My ass, where he hit me,” she said, looking away like the assault had somehow been her own fault.
“Let me have a look,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
The obstinate woman argued, anyway. “It’s okay. It’s nothing, really. Just a bruise, I think.”
Alarm bells went off in Matt’s head. He’d heard the slap Evans had given her when she’d been struggling over the man’s shoulder but hadn’t really given a thought to how hard it must’ve been for the sound to be heard clearly over the loud music.
“Mikayla,” he said, grabbing her chin as she tried to look away, “I need to check before we leave the city. There’s no medical assistance at the station, so if you need a doctor, I need to know now.”
She looked embarrassed but let him help her to stand and then turned away and bent forward slightly so that he could inspect the injury. It didn’t occur to him that he basically had his face pressed against her pussy until the strings of her outfit shifted and the tender, swollen flesh of her slit was exposed.
Trying to remind himself that he was looking for injuries, Matt gathered the strings and moved them aside so that he could see her ass cheek more clearly. What he found doused his small spark of desire faster than a dozen cold showers.
Evans’ abuse had left a large, red handprint on Mikayla’s ass, and the welted skin looked raw and painful. The beginnings of what looked to be a huge, black bruise seemed to align with a ring or some other type of jewelry. Matt wouldn’t put it past Evans to have turned a large, ornate ring into the palm of his hand just so his blow would hurt her more. Every primitive emotion roared at Matt to go find the guy and pound him into the concrete.
But he resisted the urge. Barely. He had to get the vehicle into the air before he did something mighty stupid. Even if he locked her in the pod while he tracked down the asshole who’d hurt her, he couldn’t guarantee her safety. Starting a bar fight might just be enough to land him in the lockup for a while, and he couldn’t risk leaving Mikayla alone for so long.
He reached for the first aid kit and set to work.
* * * *
The man’s warm hands slid over the heated flesh of her bottom as he soothed some sort of cool gel over the sore area. It felt weird to have a total stranger touching her in this manner, but for some reason, this man didn’t frighten her the way the other had.
Although, considering that he’d just paid an enormous amount of money for her on a planet where women had virtually no rights, her problems could just be beginning. She’d gone to the club with the hope of earning enough money to get home, but that certainly wasn’t going to happen now.
Terror of the unknown had her heart pounding uncomfortably again, but the man’s gentle touch and deep, comforting words went a long way to keeping her from hysterics. She wasn’t usually the overexcited type, but considering that she was basically a slave on this planet, she figured she was entitled to a moment or two of panic.
The man finished his ministrations, helped her back into his jacket, and then buckled her into the seat. The sting on her tender flesh was far reduced, and she looked up to him gratefully.
“What happens now?”
His eyes flared a moment, and he mumbled, “I have no idea,” as he moved to take the pilot’s seat. Mikayla didn’t have a clue what he meant by that. She looked at him, knowing that her fear was very clear in her eyes, but she was unable to hide it.
When he caught sight of her expression, he leaned over and touched her face with a callused fingertip. “It’s going to be all right. We just need to get back to the station and talk with my brothers.”
“Brothers?” she asked in a squeaky voice.
Being purchased that way had been completely humiliating, but a part of her had rejoiced at being a whore to only one man. It wasn’t exactly what she’d planned, but it sure as heck beat the idea of being a whore to a dozen different men a night.
“How many brothers do you have?” She barely managed to force the words through her tight throat.
“Seven. Well, six plus me,” he said absently as he started the engine and lifted the small pod craft into the air. Seven? She could handle seven, couldn’t she?
“So…so after the year is up, what happens? Will I be able stay on to earn enough to catch a flight home?”
He grimaced and looked a little upset.
“I’m not sure. We’ll discuss it with my brothers when we get home.”
Mikayla slouched a little lower in her seat. She knew the laws on this planet were fucked up, especially where women were concerned, but the one she understood very clearly was that a woman was always paid for sex—consensual or not. Some of the girls at the club had come here simply because the money was good. Whoring was a dangerous business on most planets, but at least on this one the law made sure a woman got paid.
“Where do you live?”
Chapter Three
Matt glanced over to the woman in the seat beside him. She’d asked several questions, but the one that irked him was the one she hadn’t asked. She still didn’t know his name, and it was starting to bug him. He didn’t want to be treated like some sort of hero for rescuing her from Evans, but it would be nice for her to at least
want
to know his name.
“How long have you been on the planet?” he asked, deliberately ignoring her question.
“Six days,” she mumbled softly.
“So you came here to make your fortune and what? Changed your mind?”
“No,” she responded angrily. “I came here with a…uh…friend and h–he left without me.”
At first, Matt thought she was trying to lie again, the way she had when asked about family, but a quick glance to his right proved that she was upset rather than being deceitful.
“Explain,” Matt ground out through clenched teeth. Thinking she was a whore who’d changed her mind was one thing. Seeing her as a victim of some man’s malicious actions was another.
“What’s to explain? He said he loved me, promised me the world, and at the first sign of trouble, dumped me.”
Matt suspected that her lover had planned things a little more callously than she was seeing. There were no tourist-type attractions on this planet. The people here were mostly miners, and the town consisted of only the facilities required to keep the small community functioning. That’s why there were only a few women. The only employment opportunity they had was whoring.
But for a man who claimed to love Mikayla, dumping her on this planet seemed premeditated, perhaps even planned from the beginning. Matt had more questions but decided they could wait. She was obviously upset.
Her story, however, changed every partially formed notion in his head. He’d had a half-baked idea of sharing her services with his brothers. At least that way he could sort of justify the expense, but discovering that she’d neither planned nor chosen this line of work put a damper on his strategy.