Free Blue Light of Home by Robin Smith Page A

move in my own time.”
    “Please,” she gasped.
    “Hm. Well.” He bent, and she thought for a moment he would nuzzle at her, expected it so completely that she could actually feel the phantom press of his strange mouth against her neck, even arched her own back to receive it. But he only said, “It pleases me to oblige you this once.”
    He gripped her hips hard then, his thumbs searing deliberately across the rounded swells of her hot bottom, and gave her what she needed. Her second spanking began; his hips slapped against her fast and hard, and her rapture struck and took her with it right into the sun. On and on, in ways she hadn’t known could happen or ever be prepared for, and when she came back, there was Vala hot against her back, to murmur in her ear, “Someday we’ll have to try this without the fighting first.”
    She laughed, gasped, and he began again.
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “Oh, you monkey-thumping son of a troll,” Skye said, almost without emotion. She followed this strange statement with several loud seconds of swearing and holographic-key mashing, then slapped both hands over her face and screamed into them.
    Vala scrolled his way quietly through a number of geologic maps and selected two to upload.
    “Stupid ice elves,” Skye muttered. “They got me.”
    “So I gathered.”
    “It’s not fair!” she wailed. “They freeze you in place for five whole seconds. Five! That’s practically a whole fight! And they’re immune to fire attacks. How does that even work? I invested hundreds of gold in fire enhancing enchantments, dammit! Why aren’t they melting?!”
    He glanced her way, grunted, and continued to look at maps. “You’re quitting,” he observed.
    “I play Battlehammer to relax, not get more stressed.” With a few frustrated stabs at the floating keys, Skye exited out to the title screen and then threw herself back in her chair. She watched Vala move to another terminal and begin the endless process of sifting through data streams for a few precious grains of information. Slowly, her indignation at suffering an ignoble demise at the hands of the prancing ice elves eased. Vala never lost his temper at the computer. “You can play if you want to,” she offered, knowing he wouldn’t.
    “I have work to do.”
    “Oh come on. I could sure use some pointers.”
    “Vaaji warriors do not play silly games.”
    “Oh.” Skye smiled at his stiff back. “So this level 68 lizardman warrior that popped up for the first time last month must have been saved to my account by mistake. I’ll just delete it.”
    He threw her a withering glare over his shoulder, became distracted by something on his screen, and was soon absorbed in scrolling lines of text and WAV files.
    She watched him work for a while without speaking—when he was like this, he wasn’t any good for conversation anyway—but when he started the lengthy upload, she figured it was okay to ask, “What are you reading about now?”
    “China,” he replied, already at a new station.
    “Still.”
    “It has a lot of history.”
    “Interesting reading?” she asked, toying with a loose thread on the knee of her sweat pants.
    “Fascinating. I want you to purchase this book for me…this Sun Tzu book.”
    “ The Art of War ? Sure. They’re not going to send it up here, though.”
    “They will if I tell them to,” he said mildly.
    He was probably right. Skye shrugged and twirled her chair around, watching the room swirl and spin. “Well, if you’re going to waste a million taxpayer dollars on a delivery launch anyway, make them send a pizza too. I’m sick of glop.”
    “Since you bring it up, you’re losing weight.”
    “Because I’m sick of glop.”
    “That’s really too bad, because now you have to eat more of it.”
    She stuck her tongue out at his back and twirled the chair again. “So…what is the ultimate goal here anyway? Do you think that if you just know enough about us, you’ll find a