by Megan Hart
He used his new, encrypted phone to thumb a text to Willa but erased it before he could send it. She knew where to find him just as much as he knew where she was. If she’d wanted him, she should have reached out. Instead she was making friends and getting herself settled in here with a new job and all of that business.
He made his way to the cafeteria, which featured a buffet line more suited to a Vegas casino than a business facility. He loaded his tray with small tastes of whatever he thought looked good, then took the plates to sit at one of the heavy wooden tables lined with comfortable chairs.
“Mind if I join you?”
Phoenix looked up at the unfamiliar male voice. The guy in front of him wore a pair of faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His reddish hair had been cut in a vintage style, adding to the ’50s Happy Days look.
“There are plenty of other places to sit. Why don’t you go find one of them?” Phoenix dug his fork into a slippery pile of chicken potpie.
The guy didn’t leave. He set his tray down across from Phoenix. “Look, it’s time we met, anyway. I’ll move if you want me to, but I was hoping we’d have the chance to talk. Get to know each other a little bit. I’m Jed. Collins.”
Phoenix paused with his mouth full of soft noodles slippery with chicken gravy. He chewed. Swallowed. He took another slow, careful bite, giving Jed no indication that the introduction meant anything to him at all.
“I’m your brother,” Jed said.
“We shared the same parents. That doesn’t make you my brother.”
Jed nodded. “Fair enough. Does it have to be such a big deal, though? It’s not like I’m trying to get good old Mom and Dad to take my side over yours about who gets to pick which television show we watch. We share DNA, Phoenix. And experiences. There has to be something to that.”
“Why?” Phoenix gestured around the cafeteria. “Betcha half a dozen people in here have had similar experiences, if not directly at Collins Creek, at least someplace like it.”
“Not related to each other.” Jed smiled and tilted his head.
Phoenix felt a small, tickling nudge he was quickly able to ignore, although he did sit back in his chair to stare at the younger man. “What’s your thing? Can you make yourself look like someone else, the way Persephone does? Or do you influence people to do things, the way I can?”
“I might be able to do a little bit of both, but mostly I affect things. Not people.” Jed began peeling the paper off a blueberry muffin encrusted with sugar. “Persephone said you weren’t staying around.”
“I don’t plan on it. No.” Phoenix eyed the other guy.
Jed glanced up. “Yeah, I don’t stick around here for more than a week or two at a time, then I’m off in the field working. I spent the first twenty years of my life locked up in a tiny room. I get antsy if I have to stay here for very long.”
“...Locked up?”
“Wyrmwood,” Jed said. “You’ve heard of it.”
“Hell, yeah, I’ve heard of it. Bastards have been after me for a long damned time. I don’t intend to let them get me, and I don’t intend to get stuck here just to avoid having them catch me, either.” Phoenix stabbed his fork into a pile of noodles again but didn’t bring a bite to his mouth. “You were in there?”
“Yes. They took me from the farm and put me in there until Vadim and the Crew came to break me out.”
Phoenix put the fork down without eating. His entire life for the past twenty years had been spent running from Wyrmwood. Every decision he’d ever made, it seemed, had been to keep himself out of there.
“It was bad?” he asked.
Jed didn’t answer at first. Then he nodded. He took a bite of salad, crunching it before speaking. “It was very bad.”
“And you don’t feel like the Crew is just more of the same, maybe the cells are bigger, maybe your walls aren’t quite so high, so you can still see the sky, but don’t you feel like it’s still a prison?”
“No, not at all.” Jed gave Phoenix another curious look. “There’s nobody here telling me when or where I’m allowed to go, unless I’m on a job, and even then it’s my choice to take it or not. I mostly take the jobs. If you don’t work in some way, you don’t get paid, but that’s how it works anywhere, isn’t it?”
Phoenix had never had a normal job, not really. “You said you can’t stand to stay here longer than a week or so.”
“True, but I get to travel all over. I spent years never getting out of a single room, except to be taken into another single room for testing. I want to see as much as I can. I want to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and smell the air. I want to swim in every lake and ocean I can. I want to live my life.”
“And you’re not afraid Wyrmwood will find you, grab you? Get you back?”
“Nope.” Jed grinned. “Not anymore. Not with what I can do to keep myself out of their reach. The Crew’s helped me with that. Helped me train, learn. With the kinds of resources we can access here, anything is possible.”
“But you have to answer to Vadim.”
Jed looked surprised. “Huh? No. I mean, sure, he’s the boss, but again, you do a job, you get paid. He’s the boss—he’s in charge of that. But the rest of your life? No, man. He doesn’t get involved with that stuff.”
“Somehow, I can’t believe that’s true.” Phoenix had lost his appetite, and he pushed away his tray.
“You don’t have to, I guess.” Jed shrugged and forked another bite of food. He chewed slowly, looking Phoenix in the eyes. “Speaking for myself, though, I spent a long time wishing I had a family, and now I do. You’re a part of that, even if you don’t want to be. We don’t have to arm wrestle or anything. You don’t have to teach me how to ride a bike. I just thought it would be great to have someone else around who understands what it was like where we were born, and what it’s like to live with what they made us into.”
“I want to forget all that,” Phoenix answered sharply. “I don’t want it following me around all over the place for the rest of my life.”
Jed shrugged and took a long drink of water. “Seems to me that it is already following you around, and you can’t get rid of it.”
Phoenix was not going to give Jed the satisfaction of knowing how deeply he’d dug with those words, so although he wanted to get up immediately, he made a show of finishing his food and tossing the trash before leaving the cafeteria with a casual, deliberately neutral wave in Jed’s direction. Once he left, there was no place to go but to follow the winding halls of the complex to find Willa’s room. He figured she wouldn’t be inside. She was probably off in the library somewhere.
She answered. She wore her dark hair piled on top of her head. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. Her white blouse, formfitting but unbuttoned to the throat, and the black skirt that hit just above the knee were such a cliché that he laughed. It came out of him on a stuttering sigh, not sounding much like humor.
“Come in.” Willa stood to the side to let him pass. “I was just finishing a shift in the catalog room.”
“Looking like that?”
She hesitated, glancing down at her clothes. “It’s a professional outfit, Phoenix. Do you have a problem with it?”
“No. I love it. It makes me want to tear it off you.”
He wanted more than that. He wanted to go to his knees in front of her while she began to work her magic on him the way she’d done every time they were together. He wanted her to thread her fingers through his hair, tip his head back and scour his throat with her teeth.
He did not want to tell her that.
“Really?” She smiled and gave him a considering look. “I suppose that could be arranged.”
Chapter 10
Willa hadn’t seen much of Phoenix over the past week or so. S
he’d been busy learning as much as she could about the Crew and the facility here, about the library system and how she could be of use in running it. It was a dream job, no doubt about it. The only strings attached were that she needed to live on-site, but since room and board were included with a very generous salary, including full health benefits, there didn’t seem much reason to turn down the offer. With the money they were going to pay her, she could afford to travel during her vacation time.
The only drawback she could think of was that it meant embracing a whole bunch of ideas she’d discounted for most of her life. Even that wasn’t insurmountable, she thought as she stepped aside to allow Phoenix to move past her and into the tiny kitchenette she hadn’t used much. He went straight to the cupboard to pull down the bottle of whiskey that had come with the place. Glasses. Ice from the freezer. He poured two drinks and handed her one. He downed his at once, grimacing, the set the glass on the counter so hard she thought he might have cracked it.
“Come here,” he said.
She did at once, curious about his intentions. Heat already had begun its slow and sensual rise from her belly toward her throat. When she got within reach, Phoenix grabbed a double handful of her blouse. He tore it, buttons flying, and left the thin fabric in shreds. He’d yanked hard enough to rock her forward, and she put a hand on his chest to keep herself from falling.
“Oh,” she said.
His mouth was on the slopes of her breasts, exposed over the lacy edge of her bra, before she could make a protest. Not that she had any to make. She wanted his mouth on her. His hands. His lips tugged the points of her nipples through the soft lace. She moaned. His hands moved on her back, unhooking the bra and exposing her bare skin to his teeth and tongue. When he fastened his mouth on one nipple, Willa cried out.
“Take off your skirt.”
She reached behind to get at the button and zipper. The motion thrust her breasts harder against him. He bent to the other nipple, suckling and nipping at the soft flesh surrounding it. She let the skirt drop and stood before him in only the matching lace panties.
He touched her at once, his forefinger stroking along the seam between her legs and up, up to center on her clit. Seconds only of pressure before he was slipping his fingers beneath the waistband to dip low and find her slickness. He brought it up to coat her clit, making small but firm circles.
His other hand went to the back of her neck, fingers curling tight. His gaze dug into hers. His mouth thin, grim, his expression bordering on fierce. A challenge.
“I want you to suck my cock,” Phoenix said. “On your knees.”
She went at once, wincing only a second at the hardness of the floor. He’d unzipped his jeans, freeing his erection. Willa tipped her head back, staring up at him. She opened her mouth. Waited.
Phoenix grabbed his cock at the base and guided it between her lips. He sank deeper than she would’ve, had she been controlling this, but she took him in as best she could. He throbbed on her tongue. With a small groan, Willa moved to let his cock slide free of her mouth. Then back in, slicking him thoroughly with her spit until he moved easily in and out of the heated cavern of her mouth. It was easy for her to pleasure him in this position, especially when his fingers sank into the back of her hair and he used that grip to guide her.
With her hand in a fist between her thighs, it was also easy for her to rock herself against it, getting herself off. And oh, she was, turned on by the taste of him, by the way he spoke to her, hard and fierce, as though it made any difference at all in the matter of who, in fact, was truly in charge. He could think so, Willa knew that, but in the end she was still the one who decided whether or not she got on her knees.
She shook with her impending climax, but subtly. Quietly. She focused on taking him in deep and letting him out slowly, until he grunted and started urging her to go faster. She let him fuck her mouth, doing little more than keeping her lips wide and her tongue flat.
She thought he was going to climax then, and she was ready for it. On the edge herself, needing only a little more to tip her over. When he withdrew and took a few steps back, Willa needed a second or so to orient herself to the fact he’d moved away.
She didn’t try to interpret his expression beyond that he looked distressed. She thought she knew why, but there wasn’t time now to dissect anything. She simply got up and went to the bed, where she placed both hands on it and bent at the waist. Feet apart. Ass tipped. She made an offering of herself, at first uncertain if he meant to take it, but when he did she closed her eyes against a sudden rush of emotion she hadn’t been expecting.
He pushed inside her, fast and deep. Pounded. His hands gripped her hips, moving her body in time to his pace and rhythm. He reached around once to stroke her clit with his fingertips, but after that he resumed his rhythm. She touched herself, instead. It was enough. Better than. She was on the edge in seconds, riding the waves of pleasure as he thrust into her from behind.
“You feel so fucking good,” Phoenix said. “I feel so good inside you.”
Willa had words in response but kept them to herself. She answered with only a moan, a sigh, the rolling of her hips to bring him in deeper. She urged him harder with the motion of her body. Her orgasm rushed over her, and she shook with it, knowing he would feel the pulse and clench of her body around him as he moved inside her.
“Oh, fuck, yes...” Phoenix thrust again, covering her back with his body and shuddering as he came.
They stayed like that for a half a minute or so. Breathing getting slower. The pounding of their hearts easing into a normal pace. He pulled out and backed away from her, and Willa turned to sit on the edge of the bed, very aware of the slippery heat of him on her thighs.
“When do you plan to leave?” she said when it became clear he had no intentions of speaking.
Phoenix frowned as he tucked himself back into his jeans and zipped them. “Was my sister talking to you?”
“She didn’t have to. I could see it on your face when you walked in here, that you meant to tell me you were going. So go, then,” Willa said. “You have no reason to stay here.”
“No? You’re not going to ask me to stay?”
Her heart hurt a little at the hard tone of his voice, but she refused to allow him to see that. “I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to, Phoenix, and I would never want to.”
“Because you’re not like me,” he said. “That’s what I do, isn’t it? Force people to do things against their will, all for my own gain.”
Willa lifted her chin to stare into his eyes, trying to make him understand what she wasn’t sure she did herself. “You don’t do that with me.”
“I just did!” he cried, advancing on her so fast, with such ferocity, that she recoiled. He got up in her face. “I just fucking did it with you, Willa. I came in here, and I made you do all of that stuff you’d never have agreed to if I wasn’t forcing it on you...”
“That’s not true!”
He shook his head. “What we just did? That’s not how we are. It’s not who you are. I did it to prove to you that I was capable of it. That you should never, ever trust yourself with me, because you’ll never be able to tell if what you are doing is because you want to.”
“I am perfectly capable of knowing that I want you,” Willa said and stood, not caring that she was naked and he was fully clothed. “Tell yourself whatever lies you have to, Phoenix, but you don’t get to make me doubt my own mind or what I want to do. No, that’s not who we are or what we do, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t allow it. Willingly. On purpose.”
He sneered and scoffed. “And you’re going to tell me that you want me?”
She crossed to him, hating the way he flinched from her touch. “Do you know how rare and precious it is that we found each other? That we bring each other such pleasure in such a unique way? That’s not easy
to find. I certainly haven’t found it with anyone, not as good as this. And believe me, I’ve been looking for a long time.”
He didn’t look at her. “You say that, but good sex—”
“Phenomenal sex,” Willa cut in.
“Sex,” Phoenix repeated as he looked at her, finally, “is not the only thing that matters. Because, believe me, I’ve done more than my share of bed hopping over the years, and in the end it doesn’t last. No matter how hard you come, someone always, always wants to leave.”
“Right now that person is you.” She stepped back, releasing the front of his shirt. “So go, then. Find your way out there in the world, doing whatever it is you think you need to do.”
“And you’ll just wait here for me?” Derision fairly dripped from his voice.
She shook her head. “No. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to be here. They offered to let me work remotely. I could go home, back to Penn’s Grove, but with security measures in place in case Wyrmwood thought they needed to come back around for me. I’d be able to work for Vadim with almost all the same benefits. The money is fantastic. But no, I don’t have to stay here.”
Phoenix shook his head. “You’ll still be answering to him.”
“I have to answer to someone,” she told him. “Unless I become independently wealthy, I’ll always need a job. This one seems to be pretty damned good.”
She thought he’d turn on his heel and storm out then, and this would be over. She was ready for that if it happened. She would find a way to move on with her life.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who I can’t force to do what I want,” he whispered.
Willa took a chance and moved forward. She put her hands flat on his chest. She pushed up onto her toes to kiss his mouth.
