His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Read online

  She frowned, confused, but then shrugged. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been doing drugs. Maybe there was something amuck with the strain of weed Tim had given her? Either way, the effects probably wouldn’t last through the night, and she figured she’d be fine when she woke up. She headed back into her bedroom, padded through the room, and crawled underneath the warm blankets on her bed before turning the lights off.

  It didn’t take her long to fall asleep; her brain was far beyond whirling around in self-pity, and her feelings felt completely repaired from being called names by a couple of guys she didn’t even care about. The only people she really, truly cared about were her brother and her cousins, and they cared for her right back. She fell into a happy, carefree sleep. The sort of sleep she was used to.

  * * *

  This girl is going to be trouble, Peyton thought to himself sourly as he watched the ‘primping’ slaves unclasp the little five-foot-nothing girl from her chains. In his experience, most feisty little females were, especially those who knew more curse words than he did. The curse-word dictionary had already been verified. Her sellers had to drag her all the way into the palace kicking and screaming.

  Why Lord Jazeel, his master, even chose this girl from myriad options, Peyton could only guess. What her purpose could possibly be was even more of an enigma. What work could she possibly do? What position could she possibly occupy? A stiff breeze could blow her away. She couldn’t weigh anything—she had bird bones; even the primping slaves were effortlessly forcing her into a tub of hot water as they would if she were a toddler.

  “Get the fuck off of me! Who the fuck do you think you fucking are, you fucking whores!” she was screeching. Peyton had grown up in the West Texas badlands, and hadn’t heard women swear until he got recruited into the army, so nearly every word she said made him wince over his morning coffee.

  The primping slaves couldn’t care less about what she said to them; they had heard it all before. Every few months Jazeel would buy another slave or two for his palaces, mostly because he gave so many away as gifts to his favorite emissaries that he needed a constant supply of them. The primping slaves were nearly forty. They were the oldest slaves of the collection and the only ones who had been there longer than Peyton had, which was four years now. They’d been at the palace since they were practically children, and they’d been born in captivity, so they didn’t have much sympathy for those who had just been snatched off their planet before they knew what was what.

  “Any special orders for her, Prime?” one of the slaves asked him as she looked over the head of the small new girl.

  Peyton sighed and stepped forward, watching as one of the primping slaves tried to wrestle every scrap of clothing away from the fiercely struggling girl. “You have a lot of work ahead of you without special requests. Remove all unnecessary hair.” That would take hours. The girl was practically a monkey. “Polish her skin. No calluses. Clean nails. Clean up her hair and keep it long. Then let me know when you’re finished.”

  “You—can—go—fuck—a—bag—of—elephant—dicks!” the girl seethed. She was on the floor now, trying to keep her shirt over her breasts. She was still modest.

  “Shut up,” Peyton said, stepping forward before the new girl started biting the two slaves who were really just doing their jobs. The slave above her looked at him, distracted, and the new girl looked at him with hatred in her eyes. “Hurt them, and I will belt you fifty ways from Sunday, li’l girl.”

  The girl looked him up and down. Hopefully she was concluding that if they went at it, she wouldn’t come out in one piece unless he wanted to let her. “Let me the fuck go,” she hissed at him, despite any of her conclusions about him.

  He threw his arms into the air. “Where?” he demanded. “Let you go where, exactly? Let me lay it out for you—you’re on Hathra. You are now property of Lord Jazeel—welcome to our merry little family. None of us care where you came from or what you’ve been through. We don’t care what you think of us. The only thing we care about is doing what we’re told, because if we don’t, Jazeel will whip, castrate, or do a million other horrible things to us. Maybe under different conditions, you’d think we were great, understanding people. Currently, be aware that we don’t care what you think, or what you say. If you’re smart, you’ll hop on our bandwagon sooner rather than after you’ve learned from your own hard experiences.

  “If you think you can escape,” he continued to the girl who sat there, quietly looking at him with an angry yet thoughtful expression, “think again. You need telepathic powers to control Frian ships, and that’s if you’re able to steal one in the first place. Jazeel has over a hundred guards here at the palace, most of whom watch those ships. Even if you actually eluded them and got a ship into space, you don’t know how to pilot it back to Earth. This is where we are right now. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to get used to it.”

  There was a tense moment where the girl panted, but she stopped her struggles. One of the primping slaves picked her up off of the floor and said testily, “Now, if you’re done with your foolishness, you will get undressed so we can bathe you.”

  She let them pick her up from the floor, her eyes on Peyton. “I will escape,” she told him coldly. “You can give up, but I won’t.”

  He tried his best to keep from rolling his eyes. If he couldn’t escape from this place, it couldn’t be done. Least of all by a little brat like her. “As long as you’re not in my way, I wish you all the luck in the world.” He squinted, looking her up and down. Now that she was finally still, she seemed younger than he’d thought she was. Her eyes were very large and very vivid, holding an eye color he had never seen before. It was a very bright turquoise. “How old are you?”

  She brushed the hand of one of the slaves off her shoulder, looking disgusted by them still. “Eighteen.” He believed her. Her age was hard to place—some of her features looked much younger, but the calluses on her hands and her bearing made her seem older than that.

  “My name’s Peyton Jones. I’m the Prime—which means head slave—of the palace. If you’re unsure of what the rules or boundaries are here, I want you to find me and ask pronto. What’s your name?” he asked her, keeping his tone firm and hoping that would keep her from cussing up a storm again.

  She pinched her lips together tightly, obviously deciding whether or not to be combative. “Ellie Jonas,” she replied snappishly, the words coming out just like any ‘Fuck you.’

  “Ellie,” he repeated, trying to secure it into his memory. He nodded and then said, “If you don’t do as you’re told this morning by these ladies,” he pointed at the two primping slaves that he still didn’t know by name, “I promise that they will tell me about it and you and I will have a come-to-Jesus moment.” He knew he had to leave—she didn’t exactly look like an exhibitionist, and the last thing her type would want was someone like him watching as she was stripped naked, scrubbed clean, and shaved bare between her legs. Their relationship was tense right now as it was.

  Besides, he didn’t want her to think that she was going to be a sex slave. There were a lot of women who were—he’d seen how breeders operated out here and it wasn’t pretty—but the palace was a place where he hoped she wouldn’t have to worry about that. There was plenty on her plate right now already. Hell, there was plenty on everyone’s plates; Jazeel wasn’t exactly an easy master to please. He was fickle, strange, and hard to read. It seemed like he was happy to find fault in everyone for any reason.

  He turned his back and, sipping his coffee, said over his shoulder, “Give me a holler if she gives you trouble.”

  Honestly, he expected one of the primping slaves to rush in with a head wound or something along those lines at some point during the next hour, but it was quiet. He did his rounds, checked in with his master, and was eating a sandwich for his lunch in the kitchens when he finally saw one of the primping slaves walking over, sweeping sweaty hair off of her face. There were water and oil stains all ove
r the front of her dress. “Need me to come in there and bail you out?” he asked with a knowing smirk.

  She raised an eyebrow, then rolled her eyes. “Please,” she huffed with a dismissive snort. “If a girl that size could keep me from fulfilling my duties, I would have looked for work in the kitchens by now, instead. But what a mess! It took us ages just to do the simplest grooming maintenance, and there was so much of it to do. It was as if we were trying to clean sand off of a beach. We had to tie her to the table to finally shave and exfoliate her skin. But,” she raised a finger, “we prevailed! Now she looks worthy.”

  Peyton inwardly gagged at the word ‘worthy.’ The captive-borns would say things like that often: so and so being worthy to serve their master, doing work worthy of their master’s graces, to be worthy of a master’s praise.

  As if kissing the ass of a giant lizard alien was something to be worthy of! Every day for the last four years, Peyton had woken up wondering what he had done to deserve to live in this layer of hell. It had been so long he had given up on this all just being just a nightmare. No, he must have been damned.

  He forced himself to grin, as if he was pleased by the woman in front of him. “Excellent. Good work.”

  The woman, beaming, bowed low at him, obviously pleased with herself.

  “Peyton,” another girl, Earth-born, came into the kitchen, looking winded. “The master called for you.”

  Peyton looked down at his sandwich. The only good thing about this planet was the food—there was plenty of it and it was very Earth-like, in fact some was almost exactly what he used to have at lunch back on Earth. This sandwich was well made, with the freshly baked bread still warm with a crunchy, flaky crust. The meat, a type of ham, was cured perfectly, the lettuce crisp, the tomatoes ripe, the cheese flavorful and delicious… It was going to be really hard to leave it. If his balls weren’t on the line—and they were; he was sure Jazeel was just looking for a reason to make him into one of the palace’s many eunuchs—he probably would have braved Jazeel’s displeasure and stayed to finish.

  Alas, just as he had been explaining to the new girl that morning, the world he was living in was one in which he obeyed every order he received.

  And he used to think the army was full of hard-asses who used to make him slave to their beck and call. Now he’d give anything to be in the Green Berets again.

  “Damn it,” he cursed, then pushed himself away from the table. He ran out of the kitchen and toward Jazeel’s chambers, where he knew him to be, and then quietly stepped into the room after a single knock. Jazeel was in the middle of a com-call, which was good news, since it meant that he hadn’t been waiting on Peyton. Jazeel was speaking in some language Peyton didn’t know, nor could even try to speak, since he was sure that he was missing the necessary type of alien vocal cords to make most of those sounds.

  Peyton waited patiently until Jazeel’s yellow eyes rolled in his direction. He gave a grin and then said something to the vision and image in the middle of the room before turning to Peyton. “What is the progress on my new little pet?” Jazeel asked him, in English.

  Peyton bowed. “Her grooming is completed, it was just reported,” he answered promptly.

  “Excellent,” he purred, then gestured at a small package, wrapped in red paper. “I want her brought to me in the main chamber. I have a meeting in there soon,” he told him. “But I want to see her progress. Bring that to her and make sure she’s dressed in it when she sees me. It’s a special outfit I bought just for her.”

  Peyton’s brow furrowed, intensely confused. He still could not fathom why Jazeel liked her so much. He never called his slaves his pets. He never required them to be dressed in anything particular. The little munchkin was collecting a lot of the lizard’s attention. “Yes, Master,” he said, bowing his head and walking over to retrieve the package, feeling prickles on his skin because Jazeel was watching his every step, his every move.

  It was unnerving. “Don’t take too long dressing her,” Jazeel finally said, breaking the room’s silence.

  Peyton turned and bowed. “I’ll bring her to you very soon, Master,” he promised, and then quickly strode from the room, anxious to get out of Jazeel’s yellow-eyed stare.

  He walked toward the room where he had left the primping slaves with Ellie, and when he entered, both slaves were there, cleaning up tables and mopping water from floors. It looked like it had been a warzone all morning. “Where is the new girl?” he asked, confused.

  “We locked her in her bedroom,” one of them said, pulling a key out of her pocket and walking to him. “She wouldn’t stay still to let us clean up after the grooming.” She motioned toward all the hair behind her on the floor and the creams that had been spilled.

  So, she had gone ahead and become a brat as soon as he’d left the room. That was fine—she wouldn’t try it with him. He turned and walked toward the chambers that had been cleaned up for her use, and unlocked the door.

  He looked around and eventually saw a heap of towels on the bed and realized that there was a body writhing in the middle of it all. “Hey, new girl—” he began pointedly.

  “Ellie,” the heap of towels groaned. “My name’s Ellie, fuckface.”

  “And my name’s Peyton, at least get that through your thick little skull,” he snapped in reply.

  The tower of towels rustled around until a head of chestnut brown curls and a cute face—with two separate eyebrows!—rose from the center. The perfectly shaped eyebrows were glaring at him. “Come to make my life a deeper hell?” she prompted him.

  “I could ask the same thing of you, sugar tits.” He dropped the red package in front of her. “Get out of all that and put this on. Jazeel wants to see ya. And I mean now.” He turned and walked to a marble counter that separated the room from her bathroom area and grabbed a glass of water, listening to her fingers shred the red paper from the wrapped clothing.

  When he turned, she was holding the clothing up—if it could be called clothing. It could be more accurately called a bikini. Although most of the girls in the palace were dressed like Arabian queens and princesses, Jazeel wanted her to dress like Princess Leia.

  He’d give Jazeel this: perhaps there was something different about her. Her looks were different than most of the girls he’d seen. Her eyes were bright, but her features were extremely expressive, especially now that the primping slaves had gotten rid of her little ‘mustache.’ Now that her skin was clear, her face looked girlish and fragile like a doll’s.

  Although he wouldn’t be very happy if he had to wear a glorified loincloth, either, he didn’t want to delay all day. Jazeel said he wanted to see her, and time was of the essence. “Are you gonna stare at that all day or are you going to put it on?” he prompted.

  “Tell the lizard to go screw off. I’m not going to wear that. It’s disgusting,” she said, even scrunching up her nose.

  He had a feeling going back to Jazeel with the message to ‘screw off’ wouldn’t go all that well. He had seen other slaves killed for far less. “Jazeel picked out this outfit for you himself. Wear it,” he ordered brusquely, taking another swig of water.

  She dropped the clothing onto the bed. “You wear it!” she argued, crossing her arms tightly against her towel-wrapped chest, her eyes showing absolutely no respect or fear of him.

  That was going to be a serious problem. If she didn’t obey, Peyton knew Jazeel would blame him for it. As prime, he knew it was his responsibility to force the girls to obey, which was not an easy task sometimes, but one he had yet to fail at. To stay healthy, to stay in his privileged, well-fed station, he needed to trust all the girls to cooperate with his orders. He let her defiance simmer on his skin, heating his blood.

  “These are barely clothes,” she cried, waving in the direction of the outfit. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not gonna serve Jabba the Hut in that rig! What if somebody saw me in this shit?”

  “Someone seein’ is the point, darlin’,” he growled. “You have to the coun
t of three to get your keister out of that bed and start getting those threads on.” Not that he needed to bother counting—it was pretty clear from her expression that she was just going to glare at him throughout his whole countdown, pointless as it was. He distantly wondered if she thought she could actually fight him off. Did she truly think that if she just stuck to her guns, nobody would force her to do anything? It hadn’t worked so far for her that day. And to what purpose would she be putting her foot down against his orders? Did she think this was a step toward getting back to Earth?

  “One. Two. Three.” He didn’t count loudly. There wasn’t any point. He knew he could threaten her until he was blue in the face and it wouldn’t work; she apparently thought he might be all bark.

  Well, it was time to show her his teeth.

  * * *

  Much to Ellie’s satisfaction, the traitor to his own race turned around toward the direction of the door. This was excellent, because she couldn’t tell herself that he wasn’t an intimidating individual. He was massively huge, and as tall as her brother. This guy definitely wasn’t the type one would want to enter a pig-wrastlin’ contest with—his arms were surely bigger than her thighs.

  She had been feeling slightly more confident about things after all the ‘grooming.’ She had looked in the mirror and, after she realized the girl in the mirror was actually herself, she realized that the guys back at home were all just a bunch of assholes. She was actually attractive, as surprising as that was, although it took a lot of pain for that sort of gain.

  The hair removal was a project that she would never want to relive, or even think about, for the rest of her life, even though now her skin felt ridiculously smooth and her face was now admittedly fetching. It was painful, damn it—most of her body had been slapped with a pain she thought was just jaw-dropping. Where her struggles really got violent was around the time that they spread her vaginal lips open to do a job that was uncommonly thorough.