Calder Read online

  An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

  www.ellorascave.com

  Calder

  ISBN 9781419923654

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Calder Copyright © 2009 Allyson James

  Edited by Kelli Collins

  Photography and cover art by Les Byerley

  Electronic book Publication September 2009

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Calder

  Allyson James

  Chapter One

  DNAmo compound, Bor Narga

  “I got word from the directors.” A man’s voice cut through Calder’s fog of pain. “The specimen is to be terminated.”

  The room went quiet except for the faint beep of machines. In the darkness of Calder’s brain, his screams went on and on.

  “Just what I need,” a second man said. “Directors interfering with my research.”

  “He’s got to be in excruciating pain. It will be kinder to him.”

  The second man growled, “Yes, but the whole point is to see what he can stand. I can’t do that if they terminate him, now can I?”

  “Well, he’s not much of a Shareem anymore,” the first voice said. “The company won’t make any money off him like this.”

  “He can still provide valuable data on how they behave in high-stress situations. We can add it to the code for the new batch.”

  “Maybe, but if they lose money, I’ll give you three guesses whose salary it will come out of.”

  The second man sighed. “Damn it. Oh, all right, give me the hypo.”

  Calder dragged his eyes open. The pain of the tiny movement nearly killed him.

  He could see nothing but a gray haze and lumps of darker gray. He summoned all the air in his lungs and forced his lips to form words.

  “Fuck you.”

  Two dim blurs froze. “Gods,” the first one said. “He’s conscious. How can he be conscious?”

  Because I have bigger balls than you.

  “He won’t be for long.” Calder felt a touch on his arm. “You’ll be out of pain soon, Shareem. Just relax.”

  “Stop!” A female voice cut through the quiet room like a knife on glass. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The first man answered, “Obeying orders. He’s a write-off.”

  “Get away from him. Now!”

  Heels clicked swiftly across the room. Calder heard the sound of a tray falling and the crunch of a plastic hypo under a stiletto heel. He would have smiled if he could.

  “Angelica…” the first man began.

  “Don’t you ‘Angelica’ me. He’s in this state because of you. Now get the hell out of my way so I can save his life.”

  “Why?” the second man asked. “He’s a total loss. Shareem are supposed to attract women. He’ll scare them away.”

  “He has a point,” the first scientist said. “Even if you save him, he won’t be useful for anything but stress experiments.”

  “If we let people live based on their usefulness, you two would have been put down a long time ago. Now get out and let me work.”

  “This is our lab,” the second man said petulantly.

  “And I’m commandeering it. Go whine at the directors. It will probably take you three days to get in to see them.”

  The first man heaved a sigh. “All right. It’s your funeral.”

  The second was more put out. “This isn’t over, Dr. Laas.”

  “Don’t forget to close the door on your way out,” she snapped.

  Calder started to chuckle. It hurt like hell, his burned and ruined skin pulling and cracking. All the male scientists at DNAmo were intimidated by the petite genius of Dr. Angelica Laas.

  He heard the door slide closed. A cool hand touched him.

  “Calder,” she whispered. “Oh gods, what did they do to you?”

  Calder tried to form a reply. “Fucking experiments.”

  “No, don’t talk. You’ll damage the vocal cords even more. I’m going to fix you. Do you understand me? It will hurt, but I’m going to fix you. I’ll not let you die.”

  Calder touched her hand with his two good fingers. As he closed his eyes, she burst into tears.

  Great. Here I am, burned and broken, and the very best DNA scientist in the galaxy is crying because she knows she can never make me whole again.

  He calmed her with his Shareem pheromones, letting them brush over her body. At least that part of him still worked.

  * * * * *

  Twenty years later

  A soft chime sounded.

  “Time,” Calder said.

  He lifted himself off the writhing woman, his cock deflating, his body cooling rapidly.

  She clutched at him and moaned. “No. Not yet.”

  Calder backed away and faded into the shadows. The woman on the floor whimpered. “No, please. Come back. I have money. I’ll pay you twice as much. Please. I need you!”

  He didn’t answer. His breathing calming, Calder exited through a hidden door that noiselessly slid shut behind him.

  The woman would do what the others did, plead for a while then swear at him and threaten him. Eventually she would pull on her clothes and quietly depart. He’d never see her again.

  Calder made his way through the long back hall to his own apartment, far from his lair. The lights came on in his tiny bedroom when he entered it.

  In his bathroom, he stripped off, avoided looking into the mirror and stepped into the cooling stream of his water shower. Calder had a more expensive sterilizer, but he liked the feel of water on his skin. It was especially nice after unsatisfactory encounters like the one he’d just had.

  Fucking stupid way to live. But there were few options for Shareem.

  Calder had another appointment in a half-hours time but not with a highborn lady who wanted to experience The Beast. Every six months, Shareem had to submit to an exam and get an inoculation that prevented both conception and disease. That had been the price levied on all Shareem twenty years ago for being allowed to stay alive. Any Shareem who missed his inoculation was arrested and terminated.

  Calder visited the same medic each time, in a backstreet clinic run by the Ministry of Health. Dr. Mareesh had reached her century mark and didn’t care about the genetically enhanced Shareem and their powers over women. She’d silently roll back Calder’s sleeve, administer the cocktail of vaccinations and contraceptives into his arm, slam her thumbprint on her handheld and dismiss him with a sour nod.

  Mareesh saw no need to strip him down to be scanned, for which Calder was silently grateful. His weight and height never changed, and Shareem bodies deteriorated twice as slowly as a normal human’s. The scan would say the s
ame thing each time, so why bother?

  Calder dressed in a black leather bodysuit that hid every inch of skin. He pulled sun-blocking cloths around his head and face and fixed his sun goggles in place. He slid on the black gloves that hid his hands and stepped from his house into the harsh Bor Nargan sun.

  People in this neighborhood were used to seeing the six-foot-eight, black-clad giant walking through the streets. Even so, they didn’t greet him, and most turned hurriedly away when he trained those blank goggles on them.

  The clinic Calder sought was four blocks away. This was the heart of Pas City, the biggest slum of Bor Narga. The streets were crowded with vendors selling everything from useless robot parts to colorful sweets, from bright cloth to questionable meat on skewers. People swarmed everywhere despite the heat, Pas City always alive.

  Calder ducked under the rusted metal entrance of the clinic. The place mostly catered to junkies who could afford a quick dry out, or to women with too many children who bullied their husbands into coming in for sterilization.

  The receptionist gave Calder a nervous look when he stepped into the crowded waiting room and immediately ushered him into the back. Soon Calder found himself sitting on a metal table in the familiar examination room. He peeled off one glove as he waited.

  The door opened and a young woman glided in. She wore the baggy silk tunic and colored leggings of women of the medical profession and an opaque veil across the lower half of her face. A few curls of light brown hair trickled from the veil draped over her head and shoulders. The color and pattern of the veils told the world that she was upper class and unmarried. That she wore a face veil told him she wanted to hold herself aloof from the unwashed masses.

  Mareesh never bothered with veils. Her seamed face had always been bare for all to see.

  “I’m Dr. d’Arnal.” The young woman glanced quickly at him, revealing brown eyes and thick, black lashes. She set down a handheld computer and a plain metal box, which she opened, revealing the usual hypo. “Please undress behind the screen.”

  Calder didn’t move. “Where’s Mareesh?” His voice grated, his vocal chords never having properly healed.

  The young woman’s nervousness screamed to Calder, who could smell fear, taste it on the air. Too bad, because what he could see over the half veil was pretty. More than pretty. Lush and sexy. Those eyelashes would feel good against his balls.

  “Dr. Mareesh retired,” she said. “A month ago.”

  Damn.

  “She left me her notes. I’ll get a quick scan and then inject you. I’m sure you know the routine.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but her voice quavered.

  Calder shoved his sleeve up his arm, baring six inches of burn scars. “Give me the hypo, then I go. No scanning.”

  “But the Ministry of Non-Human Life Forms requires—”

  “Fuck the Ministry. Give me the damn hypo.”

  Uncertainty then anger flashed through her eyes. “I’m sorry, but that’s not what I was told to do.”

  “This your first time with a Shareem?”

  “Yes.”

  Calder leaned forward. He’d removed his goggles but kept his facecloth tucked around the left side of his face, the ruined side.

  “I don’t undress,” he said. “I don’t get scanned. That’s the way it is. Mareesh knew.”

  Dr. d’Arnal met his gaze. She had lovely eyes, warm and flecked with gold. His Shareem imagination put her on the floor under him, those eyes hot with passion.

  “I’m not Dr. Mareesh,” she said.

  “No, you’re young and naïve.” Calder grabbed the hypo out of the box and pressed it to his arm.

  She tried to snatch it then stopped as though fearing she’d hurt him. Fearing to hurt a Shareem. Gods, what an innocent.

  Calder lifted the handheld, seized her frozen hand and jabbed her thumb onto the thumbprint pad. “There. Done.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I just did.”

  She gaped at him. “I could lose my job for that.”

  “Then don’t tell anyone.”

  Calder rose from the table, towering over the woman by a good foot. She’d snuggle nicely under his chin. That is, if she ever removed the stick from her butt.

  Her chest rose and fell, a shapely bosom waiting under the layers of garments. He’d love to peel back the cloths, lower his head to one of her tightening nipples, rub his tongue over the firm bud.

  No.

  Calder didn’t get to have sweet fantasies with sweet women. His purpose was to fulfill rough, nasty, dirty fantasies for women who could afford it. Whatever they wanted for whatever amount of time they paid for, no safety words and no stopping. The women signed consent forms before arriving that said Calder could do to them anything he wanted. Anything he deemed necessary.

  “I’ll be back in six months,” he said.

  He gave Dr. d’Arnal’s curved ass a slap and walked out. He wasn’t allowed to touch women without their permission, but Calder liked to bend the rules when he could, and her ass was so very spankable.

  He heard her gasp of outrage as he went and permitted himself one little chuckle.

  * * * * *

  Katarina d’Arnal had no idea how long she’d stood with her handheld to her chest and her mouth open.

  He’d touched her. The Shareem had touched a highborn woman without permission. And the way he’d touched her…

  She felt a tingle on her backside the exact size and shape of his hand. What would it feel like to have him smooth his hand there instead?

  It was forbidden. He’d broken all the rules—not allowing himself to be scanned, grabbing the hypo and inoculating himself.

  What had she expected? A grateful Shareem, happy that she’d tried to help him not spread disease or father children?

  Katarina had always felt sorry for men on Bor Narga, relegated to lesser jobs because it was thought they didn’t have the intellectual capacity for business or government. Men in the slums of Pas City often didn’t get good health care because their women wouldn’t pay for it. Hence Katarina’s volunteer work in this clinic. She wanted to help men in need.

  Men of Pas City included Shareem. The clinic’s director, who didn’t think much of Katarina’s soft heart, had said, “If you love males so much, you can have the Shareem. One’s coming in at two.” The woman had sneered when she’d said it. Doing a Shareem check was considered a crap job.

  His name was Calder, the appointment roster said. The first Shareem Katarina had ever seen in the flesh.

  And what a Shareem. The man was huge. She’d never seen a man with as large a body, with such power when he moved. Every part of him was gigantic.

  Every part, her cursory research on Shareem had said.

  His eyes, shadowed by his head cloths, had drawn her in. No, sucked her in, as if she’d become a puppet on strings the minute he’d looked at her. She’d done what he’d said with only token protest.

  Shareem blue, she’d heard the color called. Shareem eyes were larger than those of a normal man, the irises a bit wider.

  But there was something wrong with him. His bared arm had been covered with ropes of scars and mottled flesh. She recognized that he’d been burned so deeply that skin grafts hadn’t completely repaired him. The repairs had been competently done, but the flesh would never be whole.

  His voice was gravelly and broken, probably another souvenir of whatever had burned him. But when he’d spoken to her, she’d sworn that just for a moment another smooth, rich voice had whispered in her mind.

  Tell me what you want, Katarina. What you want deep inside yourself.

  Ridiculous. Katarina slammed the hypo back into the box and snapped the lid shut.

  She had everything she wanted—a career, a fine house her mother had left her in the Serestine Quarter, plenty of friends.

  Loneliness.

  Katarina punched her handheld and swept from the room to see her next patient. Sometimes the little voices inside her needed t
o shut up.

  * * * * *

  Dr. Laas flicked off her screen and grinned. A curious young woman had been sifting through the Shareem database at the Ministry of Non-Human Life Forms, digging through for information on one particular Shareem.

  Calder.

  “Baine, bring up all the information you can on one Dr. Katarina d’Arnal.”

  Dr. Laas’ computer, so ultra-superior that it had a complex about it, whirred and hummed. “Here she is, madam,” Baine said, his voice accented like an old Earth butler’s. “Dr. Katarina d’Arnal. The usual sort of highborn woman.”

  She wasn’t though, Dr. Laas thought as she skimmed the information. Katarina d’Arnal had not yet married. Her mother had been prominent in Bor Narga’s social sphere, but both mother and father had been killed in an accident in a hovertrain, leaving a house and fortune to Katarina.

  After grieving, Katarina had entered medical school. When she finished, she’d volunteered in a clinic in Pas City, saying that she wanted to help the underprivileged, especially males, whose health care was too neglected.

  The young innocent. Dr. Laas chuckled. If Katarina d’Arnal wanted to do good, she could learn on someone who really needed it.

  She smiled, pulled her bare feet up on the sofa that was massaging her back, and told Baine to bring up a data code that was deadly secret except to those in the know.

  She keyed up the encoded application to enter Calder’s private sexual paradise and, with one finger, typed “Katarina d’Arnal.”

  Chapter Two

  “Are you sure this is right?”

  Katarina studied the sand-scoured face of the building in front of her. Her handheld told her the street vendor she needed to treat lived here, but this place looked like a disused warehouse.

  The woman who drove the cab leaned out the open window and gave Katarina an odd look. “385 Barkelo Street, ma’am. You sure this is where you want to get to? You don’t look the type.”