Punished, Tana Stone [top reads .txt] 📗

Disgust and self-loathing wracked my body, making me fist my hands by my sides. What was happening to me? A human female was the reason I was exiled. They were a weakness I’d always disdained, and one I never wished for myself. How could I desire one? How could I want one so powerfully my body trembled from the need to touch her again?

“Speaking of my sister’s baking,” Sienna said, her voice artificially cheery. “I snuck some rolls out with me. Are you hungry?”

I bit back the sharp retort I wished to make. None of my troubles were this human’s fault, as much as I might want to punish her for it. The sad fact was I was stuck on Kimithion III, and she was the only human who’d proved to be at all interesting. I almost laughed at myself. Interesting was too tame a word for what I thought about her, but I also couldn’t think those things about her. Not when I was planning to leave the planet and use her to do it.

When my cock had relaxed and my heart rate resumed a normal pace, I turned to her. “I’ve been hungry since the moment I arrived.”

The smile that crossed her face was one of relief. She hurried over to the fallen log, digging around in her cloak before producing a cloth-covered bundle and waving me over to sit next to her.

When I sat next to her on the tree trunk, it settled a bit lower from my weight, and she cut her eyes to me as she passed me a crusty roll. “Let’s hope we don’t end up on the ground again.” Then her cheeks colored, and she turned her attention to her roll, no doubt thinking about what had almost happened down on the ground.

I’d never apologized to a female before. I’d never had to. I’d also never been with an innocent one who hadn’t known exactly what to expect from a Vandar warrior. Even though Sienna looked much more like a grown woman with her hair spilling around her face, she was still out of her league when it came to a Vandar raider—in every way. I was used to fighting and fucking with the same level of abandon. I was not used to tempering my desire or pulling my punches.

“Thank you,” I finally said, not glancing over at her as she bit into her bread. “And I am sorry if I scared you.”

Her head snapped to me. “You didn’t scare me. Not that you aren’t a big badass Vandar and all, but I’m not afraid of you.”

“You should be.” I bit into my own roll and crumbs cascaded onto my lap.

“Why? Because you’re bigger than me and stronger than me and know how to kick my ass a thousand different ways?”

No, because I want to fuck you a thousand different ways.

She took a quick breath before continuing. “You might be a tough guy, Corvak, but you’re not a bad guy.”

I thought back to the prisoners I’d tortured in my oblek and even to the human female—Raas Bron’s female—that I’d strapped to the wall so I could extract information from her. My life had been about fighting and death, all in the name of the Vandar cause and to free the galaxy from imperial rule, but I’d still spent years inflicting pain on others. “You don’t know that.”

She shrugged. “If you were a bad guy you wouldn’t be sweating it out every day in the amphitheater trying to teach a bunch of clueless males how to defend their planet. You didn’t have to teach them or me.”

I’d agreed to it because I couldn’t bear to leave the planet unprotected. The Vandar home world had been unprotected millennia ago, and the Zagrath had decimated it and then taken it from us. I couldn’t let that happen to other planets. The people of Kimithion III didn’t deserve that. Sienna didn’t deserve that.

“Maybe I just enjoy fighting,” I said. “There is no holo-ring on this planet, so live opponents are my only option.”

She handed me another roll as soon as I finished the first. “I don’t buy it.”

“Buy it?” I twisted my head to look at her, stifling a grin. “You have never thought anything you haven’t uttered, have you?”

She shot me a scathing look, but her own lips twitched up at the corners. “They’re wrong when they say the Vandar aren’t hilarious.”

I enjoyed verbally sparring with this female almost as much as I enjoyed grappling with her. “Our sense of humor is underrated.”

“Joke all you want, but I know the truth about you. You’re a good guy buried deep underneath a grumpy, hostile warrior in a skirt.”

“A skirt?” I gaped at her. “The Vandar battle kilts have been our traditional battle garb since the days when our hordes roamed the plains on our home world.”

“Battle kilt? That’s a fancy name for flaps of leather that look like a skirt.” She eyed the kilt fanned across my legs. “I guess they are easy to fight in.”

“Do not think I am overlooking you calling me grumpy,” I said, swallowing the last bit of bread.

“I don’t blame you for being grumpy. I’m stuck here, and I’m grumpy most of the time.”

“If you are so unhappy, why have you not considered leaving?” I asked. It was clear that Sienna didn’t fit in on the planet. She was too much of a rule breaker to flourish in such a controlled society.

“No one leaves.”

“Because who would leave a planet that gives you immortality?” I answered my own question.

“I don’t care about that,” she said. “I’d rather have one lifetime filled with adventure, than a dozen lifetimes filled with nothing special. Life means more when you know it isn’t forever.”

“Then why stay?”

She let out a tortured breath. “My sister. I can’t leave her behind with my father, and Juliette isn’t like me. She likes things to be the same. She’ll be perfectly happy marrying