The Taming: Book 3 in the Tribe Warrior Series by Imogen Keeper (romantic novels in english TXT) 📕

and he realized he’d never even told her he liked it, hadn’t touched it. Had barely touched her since she’d been lost in the riot.

Just wait, he tried to say. Just wait. The Premier is coming. They can’t kill me. If they kill me, Vesta will retaliate. Just wait. The Premier saw your film. Everyone saw your film. Just wait.

Sweat poured down his cheeks, and his voice went hoarse from screaming behind the gag, but none of it did any good.

She stared up at him, letting him blabber, unmoved by his bellowing. “Coming here was the stupidest thing you could have ever done.”

He stared at her, breathing hard around the gag. He shouted at her.

Just wait.

“I hope I remember. All of it. Even the birds and the beans.” She leaned up to press a kiss against his jaw. She smelled like that damned elusive tropical fruit. He breathed her in.

She smelled like sunshine, flowers and that fucking fruit. How had he not recognized it? Levidicus! That was the name of the planet, he suddenly remembered. He and Jasto had spent a week hiding in that jungle, watching for their perp. They’d gorged on the fruit. It had been the best thing he’d ever had, and it had kept them alive that week. The thought brought the memory so strong of Jasto laughing. She smelled like a week he’d spent laughing in the sun with a friend, completely free.

And then she was gone. Her soft hair left his cheek.

He opened his eyes. She was trying to get away.

“Let’s go, Spiro,” she murmured.

He shouldered her back, pinning her to the wall with his body, shuddering at the contact of her warm, soft breasts mashing against his chest. Don’t do this. It was a whimpered garble now. Just wait.

The noises that came out of Tor at that were beyond human. The guards flipped their safeties off, leveling their sights square on him.

Spiro leaned against a wall opposite, arms crossed, tracing his thumbnail along his fore-teeth.

Tor screamed at him behind the mask, garbled threats, nothing that made any sense, because none of this made any sense, and Spiro met his eyes, bright blue.

Klym tried to shift away from him, but he snarled and shoved her back into the wall with his hips.

Spiro sucked in a breath, and the hand left his mouth, lowered to his weapon belt.

Klym pushed at him harder with sharp elbows.

Stay there. Just wait.

But Klym never listened to him even when he could talk, and she never did what he wanted her to do. She turned to Spiro, her eyes full and wet. “You promised.”

She tried to shove him away, but he didn’t budge.

“You promised,” she shouted at Spiro.

“Let’s go, Vestige,” said Merona, and a guard prodded him in his flank.

Tor rounded on him and came face to barrel with a rezal, and while he was distracted, Klym got away, her slim hand left him, and so did the fruit.

The pearl thief pressed down on the pre-trigger, and the tip gleamed orange as it gathered energy to form a blast. “Let her go,” said the guard.

She crossed the room to Spiro and didn’t look back.

44

This isn’t what was

supposed to happen

“TAKE ME TO YOUR home, Spiro, please,” Klym said, and Tor’s whole body froze, every bone in his body rebelling against hearing his own godsdamned wife begging some other man to take her to his home and fuck her.

There weren’t enough curses in the universe and none of them came close to addressing the load of bullshit piling up around them.

He was losing his voice, and his screams behind the gag sounded like barking.

The pearl-thief guard shoved him in the general direction of the hallway, and it was perfect, a thing of beauty. Tor couldn’t have orchestrated better timing. Time slowed, and thank Vaniiya, because this was battle-rage and in it, he didn’t even have to think.

He’d make good his promise to see blood.

The pearl-thief guard put his hand on his upper arm, leaning in with his oily beetle-black eyes, the rezal held steady in his other hand, and he made a mistake. He got his face just close enough.

Tor reared back, put all his weight straight in his core, and slammed forward with the top of his head. The guard was just the right height too.

The hardest part of Tor’s skull, right at the top of his forehead, collided with all of his substantial mass in a head-butt that landed square in the pearl thief’s nose.

His hands flew up to his nose as he staggered backward.

The other guard shouted, swiveling, his shiny head catching that single swaying overhead light. Tor swung around with his booted foot to catch his knee, the guard dropping to the floor.

It wasn’t going to get him free, but that wasn’t what Tor wanted.

He just needed time. Agammo should have already been here.

He stormed Merona, breathing hard, got in his face, glaring for all he had, snarling.

Merona just glared back, rezal squarely at Tor’s chest. “Stop.”

Tor stood between Klym and her father, breathing hard.

The pearl thief, with his broken nose, was panting against the wall. He’d gotten to his feet and collected himself. Blood poured down the bottom half of his face, staining his teeth.

Klym came up, her sharp little hands digging into his flank, and shoved her body between him and her father, pushing at the rezal with her hand. “You swore not to hurt him, Father. You swore.”

“And you swore to accept Spiro.”

Tor shook his head back and forth. Not in a hundred thousand years was that happening. They would have to kill him first and separate the limbs. Even dead, he’d come back and haunt them. She was his.

What the fuck was it with Spiro anyway? He shouted that, enraged, his tongue jamming up around the stupid rubber ball, but nothing useful came out.

He rounded on Spiro, a man he’d seen in action enough times to have learned to respect back on the ship, and his face went hot with all the muffled