Learning to Blush: Swarii Brides, Book Two Read online

  Learning To Blush:

  Swarii Brides, Book Two

  By

  Korey Mae Johnson

  ©2012 by Blushing Books® and Korey Mae Johnson

  Copyright © 2012 by Blushing Books® and Korey Mae Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Johnson, Korey Mae

  Learning To Blush:

  Swarii Brides, Book Two

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-60968-818-9

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  http://koreymaejohnson.stormynightpublications.com

  Images by Image credits: Bigstock via Okssi and CanStockPhoto.com via Denisov

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Chapter One

  Captain Graham Masterson was famous in multiple galaxies, and not for one reason only, but for three. Firstly, he was known for his great works in his thirty-one years that had saved the lives of thousands of the Swarii, his own people, throughout the known universe. Secondly, he was known as the youngest captain in military history, and thirdly, because he was the husband of a mostly-human engineer named Eleanor Masterson.

  For Eleanor had become not so much famous as notorious. She was an oddity, and not just because she was one of the first Human-Swarii cross species on record, but because she was the first female ever to get inducted into the service and served UNDER her husband, of all places.

  What was odd about them both is that Graham Masterson, for as respected as he was, allowed Eleanor to easily be considered one of the least subservient married women in Swarii remembrance. Back on Eleanor’s home world of Earth, there were some cultures that found this as a positive thing: they might have made a movie or a pop song in her honor.

  But she lived among the Swarii and had for nearly a whole year now, and the Swarii didn’t revere oddities at all. In Eleanor’s case, they liked to pretend she was something she wasn’t. They ignored the fact that she was practically a miniature being at only 5’2’’ and only a measly 110 pounds. They ignored that she was an engineer with little strength and only five fingers, and they most especially ignored the fact that she was a woman whenever possible.

  Until, of course, she’d talk to her husband on-duty, where it became obvious that she was indeed a woman and indeed the captain’s wife… If simply because anybody else would have been shot in the face by now.

  “You’re being stupid!” she heckled, following Graham over to the control bridge while carrying a stack of rolled up plans as if she was planning on using them as a club. “The modification would be well worth the delay, you can’t possibly be so obtuse you can’t see that. If there even WAS a delay, that is, and there WOULDN’T be. You just don’t want to take the risk!”

  Graham stopped in his pacing just enough to growl a response. “Exactly, Lieutenant. I don’t.” He had hoped calling her by rank would remind her that she wasn’t just speaking to her husband, but to a senior officer—neither of whom would change their minds about a most decided topic. “The modification to the engines is unprecedented and untested, possibly even lethal. It’s likely to be of more harm than good, and I don’t have the time. This ship needs to be docked onto the mothership in seventy-two hours, and not a second longer. I have a schedule to keep. Responsibilities.” He drawled out the last word as if it was even more foreign to her than the rest of the language.

  “Are you suggesting that I don’t have any responsibilities?” she quipped angrily. “Because I would like to see you to do what I do!”

  “You might have responsibilities,” he granted, “But you don’t have the concept of priorities.” He suddenly looked toward the ceiling and groaned. “Lord, why I’m wasting my time talking to you about this, I will never know. What about your superior? Where’s he?” He asked this in a bit of a distant way, as if her engineering commander wasn’t Graham’s first cousin and best friend.

  “My superior isn’t superior,” she sneered. “He ALSO doesn’t have a pair of balls.”

  The command bridge, once a bastion of clicking noises and murmuring, silenced as everybody turned to watch how their captain was going to react.

  They were disappointed if they thought he was the type that would lose his temper with her so utterly that he would take her to task in front of the entire bridge, even if it was his right. “You can return to your duties, Mrs. Masterson,” he returned crisply. “We’ll talk about your lack of respect this evening in our apartment.”

  “No,” she refused, straightening her shoulders and raising her chin. “You aren’t even listening! This modification can allow you to actually control the ship while in warp jump. It could considerably shorten the length of time traveling between galaxies. It would be perfect to come into the Mothership with that sort of technology on our hands!”

  He looked easily over her head towards the guards near the door. “Guards? Please escort the lieutenant to Commander Thorton Hux. Please tell him that he has to control his staff.”

  It only took one guard, of course, who merely scooped Eleanor up and threw her over his shoulder as Eleanor continued to protest, “Maybe I should be head of the household, Graham! I have bigger balls than you do! Do you hear me? You’re sleeping on the sofa, Buster! If you think I’ll stand for this treatment, think again! I will not be cast aside so you can kiss your own father’s ass! Graham!”

  Of course, he ignored her. She kicked her legs around after the guard took her down the hallway, and Graham still hadn’t pursued her. “Oh, just put me down, Derek!” she told the guard.

  The guard, who had been the one guiding her back down to the engineering level in the past, set her down when he got
inside the elevator. “You play a dangerous game, Little Girl,” the guard warned her. “If you were mine, I would have you—”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not yours, Derek,” she reminded tersely, snatching her rolled plans back from him. “And let me remind you—when I single-handedly win the damn war for your stupid race, you too will stand in line to thank me!”

  “Single-handedly, huh?” Derek droned in echo, his face as blank as it always was. The elevator opened and they stepped out.

  “Who the hell else will help me?” she replied, narrowing her eyes as Thorton walked over to her, bare-chested and throwing his large arms up in the air.

  “Where the hell were you?” he asked, exasperated. He looked over at Derek, who shrugged, waved lazily, and returned to the elevator. “You weren’t kicked out of the bridge again, were you? Ellie—goddamn it! Who do you think he’s going to yell at for you lipping off? Me, that’s who! What in the blue galaxy—ah, for cripes… You were nagging him about that damn engine modification, weren’t you? Ellie, that modification could blow the whole damn system!”

  “No guts, no glory,” she said in English, pushing the rolled up plans into Thorton’s chest.

  Thorton grumbled—Eleanor had a way of shaming him that he had to fight off. That girl thought she was so much better at his job than he was, simply because he tended to look before leaping. Of course, he didn’t have the ‘I’m a woman’ safety net. He didn’t have anyone to bail him out if he failed. She had her husband at the end of the day, and past that, she had the Admiral of the entire fleet wrapped around her finger.

  “Ellie, you can really kill morale, you know that? Especially mine… Look, please get the radiator on generator eighteen changed out. Please—for the love of God!—wear proper safety gear this time.”

  “You get the radiator changed out,” she countered, walking towards the engines.

  “I don’t have time to change the radiator!”

  “You have time to nag at me,” she responded with a shrug.

  “Goddamn it, Kitten! If you touch one engine—just one—I swear to God I will actually use my strap on you. Don’t think I won’t do it!” he threatened, following close behind her.

  “Fine,” she snapped, turning the corner towards the generators.

  “Safety gear!” he reminded with a shout. He watched as she stomped down the hallway until her figure disappeared around the corner, then he turned towards his office, looking up at the ceiling. “That girl’s gonna give me an ulcer. And I used to think humans were cute! Bah!”

  As soon as he walked into his office and threw the plans across his desk haphazardly and sat down in his chair for the first time that morning, he heard his communicator buzz for his attention. “No,” he groaned, reading that the message was coming from the command deck. He tried to ignore it. “No!” The communicator on his wrist started to buzz. That was harder to ignore. He turned on the communicator on his desk. “Commander Hux,” he sighed wearily, his shoulders slumping.

  “Do you have a problem with discipline, Commander?” Graham both looked and sounded pissed.

  “If this is about Ellie, she’s your wife, not mine,” Thorton reminded bravely, shrugging.

  “She works under you, not under me. Where’s your sense of control? Are you running a pirate ship down there, or are you actually part of the fleet?” Graham snapped. “Let me remind you that you’re the one that wanted her working under you. I certainly know that I didn’t send myself a petition to put her in my service.”

  “Her engineering test scores are off the charts, Boss. You know that,” Thorton groaned. “And she’s gotten us out of a couple of binds this year, you have to admit. Only a human can human rig. We don’t have that level of creativity or problem-solving by a long shot…” He wiped some sweat away from his neck—it was always hot as hell in the engine room. “I don’t know… Maybe the modifications wouldn’t be a bad idea…” he mused, sounding tired.

  “Are you giving in because you actually think it’s a good idea, or are you giving in because she wore you down?” Graham countered, narrowing his eyebrows dubiously.

  “She wore me down,” he responded quickly and truthfully. “There’s no working with her when she has it in her mind to do something like this…”

  The captain sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb for a moment. “No. If she wants to experiment, she can do that back at the Mothership in a closed environment abiding proper testing procedures and clearance.”

  “Hah. We’ll see if she gets it since she blew up that lab last season,” reminded Thorton. “I mean, the Admiral loves her—that’s obvious. On that note, he doesn’t want her to blow herself up on his watch. He was pretty jarred after the close-call…”

  “Everyone was jarred by the close call. She nearly sucked the whole floor into outer space. And she killed the gravity generator… That was expensive.” The memory was obviously not getting Graham excited about letting Ellie start her experiments on his own ship. “You need to make her drop this—she can’t keep going over your head when she doesn’t get her way. Are you a commander or aren’t you?”

  Thorton blanched. “I’m a commander—everyone else I don’t have any problems with. Ellie’s the only prima donna!”

  “And you made her that way by not providing discipline. I won’t allow favoritism. It hurts morale. If you want me to write you a good report, you’ll lead a good command,” Graham informed. “Clear?”

  “Yes,” Thorton grumbled.

  “Good. Masterson out.” The image of Graham disappeared, leaving Thorton stewing. The full-blood humans on the ship weren’t even a fraction as much trouble. The couple was a pair of model citizens.

  Thorton grumbled and turned his chair around to grab a sandwich from the small kitchenette area he had behind his desk. Finally—breakfast. It was already afternoon, of course, but that’s how things were since he took the engineering commander position—he had to grab food when he could, whenever he could, and as much as he could.

  Ellie might not have been a very good officer, but she was a good engineer. She had gotten the ship out of a few tough binds that year, as Thorton had predicted. It seemed like nothing could stand in the way of that girl’s goals—not lack of materials and not lack of time. She always figured out how to make something work. If she had a submissive bone in her body, she would be a perfect worker. But as it was, she was unstructured and arrogant.

  A red light was suddenly flashing above his head, followed ultimately by a ringing of an alarm. He looked over at his desk to see where the alarm was pulled. “For fuck’s sake!” Thorton growled angrily, stuffing the rest of his sandwich into his mouth before sprinting out the door towards the engine room.

  “Goddamn it! I told her not to do it. I told her!” he growled to himself as he and the lower-level engineers rushed to the engine room to find that the system was overloading. A radiator had already busted a seam. Of course, Ellie was straddling a pipe above the engine and reaching down bravely to fix what she’d done. “What did I say?” Thorton shouted at her. Someone shut off the steam valve as he grabbed a steel sheet and, with the help of two others, repaired the ripped seam before turning the steam valve back on.

  “Ellie, goddamn it! Get down here! The engine is unstable! I don’t want you in the area! We have to turn off the reactor first!” He knew Ellie knew all that—in the last year; hell, in the first three months, she learned the engineering core backwards. Still, she didn’t move from her position.

  “I got it!” she called down to him. She was wearing protective goggles, which were fogging up in the room’s steam, and the fact that they covered half of her face made it nearly impossible to tell whether or not she was worried except that her lips were pursed with resolve.

  He didn’t chance it. He began to climb the ladder up to where she was. He would drag her down if he had to. If the engine overloaded, parts could explode and spit at her like a projectile. The worst thing that could hap
pen is the engine could rip open a seam big enough to cook her. “Eleanor! Get down from there!”

  “I almost have it!” she argued, still trying to jerk her wrench over a socket.

  Thorton ordered his men to shut down the reactor from the ladder, and kept on climbing until he was able to crawl out onto the piping that Ellie was sitting on. It was nowhere nearly as sturdy as he hoped it was up there, and the tubular piping rocked slightly under his weight. He took a deep breath to get his courage, and then continued to crawl towards Ellie, who was still trying to relieve pressure on the engine.

  “I almost have it, I almost have it!” she told him, not even glancing up, although she could surely see him moving nervously in her direction from straight-ahead.

  “Leave it! That’s an order, Kitten!” Thorton issued firmly. She didn’t even acknowledge him, just worked faster. “Did you hear m—?”

  KAPLOW! Suddenly the engine hiccupped underneath them, and a nut flew between them. It was close enough to Ellie’s face that she swung away to somehow avoid it, and then lost balance on her pipe. Thorton reached out and grabbed her hand, which wind milled in his direction as she fell off.

  He let out a surprised shout as he caught her entire bodyweight. The pipe under them creaked dangerously. He certainly noticed how her jaw dropped in horror and how firm her grip was on his.

  “We’re okay,” Thorton promised. He looked at his position… It sucked, simply put. She was too far off the ground to toss safely away from the engine. He held onto the pipe under him with one arm and both legs and slowly scooted back towards the direction he had come, holding Ellie by her arm.

  “Hurry,” she begged, looking down. They were both thinking the same thing—the engine could bust at any second. They could hear the metal creak. She grabbed his arm with her other hand. “Hurry!”