“Please—one kiss, Doc. That’s all I’m asking,” Peyton whispered.
Kyra sighed loudly. “You’re a hard man to say no to, and today I’m a sentimental fool. Close your eyes, Captain. I haven’t kissed a man in a long time. I can’t look at you or I’ll lose my nerve.”
When Peyton sighed dramatically in return and leaned his head back, Kyra climbed on the electrical shield at the bottom of the operating chair until she was standing between his legs. Heat emanated from every inch of the man and he still smelled a little like burnt circuitry. Yet underneath that stark reality, Peyton also smelled masculine and very alluring.
Kyra sighed again. “I wish I could send you out the door to live whatever the hell kind of life you want just as you are right now. That’s what you deserve, Captain Elliott. I want that badly for you, but I can’t make it happen. Your cybernetic enhancements require you to retain knowledge of how they work. Too much is at stake and the outcome of your healing affects more than just the two of us. But thank you for giving me a glimpse of why putting you through this hell is so important. This moment—it’s very humanizing for both of us—to want to be kissed and then actually be kissed. Thank you for sharing this moment with me.”
“Man, you sure talk a lot. Still waiting for that kiss, Doc,” Peyton said. He was keeping his eyes tight and his mind off how sexy she sounded when she got all philosophical.
Kyra snorted at his chastising. She touched her lips to Peyton’s and instantly found her bottom one nipped aggressively between two rows of even teeth. Moaning at the delicate trap he’d set for her, her body tipped forward against his and she had to catch herself on his wide shoulders. Her hands slipped over them and down his chest without her mind questioning the action.
When she moaned against his mouth, Peyton ordered himself to turn loose. After he did, he stared hard at the lip he’d bitten. The woman wanted him. He could taste it, smell it, and damn it he wanted her too. It was exhilarating to feel such pure desire flowing so freely through his cells.
A demand to sate that intense longing came from some desperate part of him that was both familiar and strange at the same time. What the hell was happening to his mind? It was both relieving and like finally waking up after being asleep for too long.
“Climb up here and give me a real kiss, Doc. And don’t be so damn stingy with sharing your tongue. I intend to use it to imagine what else I’m going to do when you cut me loose from this freaking chair.”
Groaning at how aroused he’d just made her with his sexy declaration, Kyra climbed into Peyton’s large lap to straddle him. It gave her better access to his mouth and the chance to indulge just a little more as she eased her hips down on him. She sighed at her nearly out-of-control feelings and touched her forehead to his.
“The only reason I’m doing this is because I know you’re going to take great pleasure in ridding yourself of this memory tomorrow. I won’t blame you for that action, Peyton. Hell, I think it’s the smartest thing you could do.”
“Stop whining about what hasn’t happened yet, Doc. I’m so hard for you I hurt. It’s damn cruel to suggest this instant attraction between us is nothing. Now kiss me like you want to—and damn it, I know you want to. I am a cyborg, you know.”
He ordered his processor to store the image of her face just as she caved in to his demand and dipped her mouth to his. Her lips were lush and hot and wet, and her kiss was the most deliriously wonderful experience he could recall happening in ages. Free of leg restraints, he lifted his hips, begging her to ride the hardness she had caused. He watched her eyes close in pleasure at his action, but lowered himself back down to the chair when he saw two tears run down her face. A second later, tears were flowing off her chin in two tiny, steady streams.
“What? What is it, Doc? What’s wrong with this? The attraction is mutual, isn’t it? We’re alone in here just the two of us. I’m wearing too many damn restraints to do much harm to you. Hell, keep the chair restraints in place woman—just be with me before I die from wanting you.”
“I can’t. I can’t take advantage of you, no matter what I’m feeling,” Kyra said, lifting both her arms to swipe at her eyes. “Thank you for the sexy kiss, Captain Elliott. It’s been a very, very long time since I felt anything remotely close to that level of desire for a man. Even if you wipe this away, I’ll never forget it—or you.”
Kyra slid reluctantly off his lap and straightened her clothing. “I’m going to release the last of the chair restraints now. Please keep your physical distance so I don’t have to use the controller. I’ve hurt you enough in the last couple days.”
She hastily swiped her thumb across both wrist bands and stepped out of reach. It surprised her when Peyton remained seated. She wiped her eyes again as she put more distance between them. The one sleeve got so wet, she had to switch to the other to stop the flow.
“How are your legs now? Can you walk yet?” she asked to distract herself.
“The initial paralysis is gone. However, I have another kind of problem preventing walking at the moment. Give me a moment to. . .adjust.”
Kyra shook her head. Denial was not just a river in Egypt. It was her best coping mechanism.
“There’s a bathroom with a large shower off to the right. I won’t put you in the cage until you’ve had some time to clean up. You’ll find toiletries, towels, and men’s clothing in the cabinets. The men’s clothing should fit well enough. The last cyborg that used them was your size. Everything about this situation is temporary, including your time with me. Please don’t forget that.”
Peyton toyed with the mobile restraints on his wrist. He could tell they were uniquely coded because he’d found a slew of standard codes stored somewhere he couldn’t pinpoint in his mind, but none had activated the release mechanism. He might be able to decipher the code and escape them well before her intended release time, but it would take more than a day to do so. Until then, he would play along and find out what the hell was going on here. Was he a patient or a prisoner? He still couldn’t quite tell. The sexy doctor wasn’t giving much away.
“So is your word the real deal, Doc? If I do as you ask, you’ll tell me what this secrecy is all about?”
He watched as she nodded, looking incredibly sad. Was it because of his question? She wiped her eyes on each of her sleeves again and made him regret asking her anything. Her persistent crying played hell with his intentions to honor her request to keep his distance. If he moved fast enough, he could probably prevent her from using the controller on her wrist. And if that worked, he could actually have her in his arms before she could deny him. He wanted that volatile, sexy-talking mouth of hers on his again. He wanted to see how much more the woman could make him feel.
“Stop looking at me that way, Captain Elliott. Go take a shower—a cold shower. I’ll tell you everything tonight after you’ve eaten. While you’re cleaning up, I’ll put your dinner inside the cage. I tried to make the damn thing as comfortable as I could.”
Nodding at her husky, almost tearful reply—which had his damn dick twitching again—he reluctantly rose from the chair and took a couple careful steps. The stiffness in his limbs eased as he moved across the floor in the direction she had pointed. It was only after he closed the bathroom door behind him that he allowed himself to wonder why the medical room had looked so much like a cybernetic lab.
Chapter 5
After locking him in the cage with his dinner as promised, his mad scientist had disappeared for an hour while he ate. When she finally returned, she smelled strongly of the citrus body spray she had mentioned. His senses tingled with excitement, but he knew not to get his hopes up when he saw her shoulder length hair clipped tight at the back of her head. The style made her look older than she was and way more severe. All traces of the softer woman who had climbed into his lap to kiss him had been erased from her body. The woman staring at him through the bars now projected nothing but a professional stoicism, right down to the fresh white lab coat she wo
re.
Despite his capacity for analyzing large amounts of data, Peyton could only guess the reasons Dr. Winters had taken so many physical steps to retreat from him. Her shadowed, hollowed out eyes hinted at a story, but it was one he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear yet. He had seen that same look on plenty of non-enhanced soldiers when they had been gearing up to do something they hated—like facing their potential deaths. A feeling of dread dropped like a cloud over his entire body. There didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do to stop himself from feeling it.
“Doc—I have to tell you this. It pisses me off to see you looking like I’m going to kill you in a few minutes. No matter what you’ve got to tell me, I’d never do that. Hell, I’ve been in more bad shit in my life than you could ever imagine. I double damn guarantee your story won’t be the most horrible one I’ve ever heard.”
Kyra frowned over the supportive statement as she rolled her desk chair closer before she sat. “Trust me, Captain Elliott. This will be the worst story of your life.”
Peyton sighed at her resigned tone and sat down on the small metal bed. As his backside sunk into the mattress, he found himself automatically gauging whether or not the frame could hold their combined weights as well as stand up to what he’d like to do with her.
“Before we start the shitty conversation I feel coming, can I just make that offer to show you heaven one more time? Damn lady—I don’t remember the last time I wanted to kiss and hold a woman, much less bury myself inside her. I feel like I’ve been living in some kind of desert for years. This feeling of wanting you so badly carries with it the promise of some terminable thirst finally being quenched.”
Kyra hung her head and bit her lip as she ordered herself not to cry again. Would his poetic side remain after the assimilation? She lectured herself about how foolish it was to care for something so immeasurable as Captain Elliott’s penchant for flirting.
“Your eloquent speeches are very charming, but please stop flirting with me. I don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for either of us anymore. No matter what I might want to do, you and I have to talk about your future cybernetic life.”
Peyton reached up and rubbed his head, something he’d caught himself doing several times that day. It was an odd mannerism with no purpose other than it gave his restlessness a physical expression. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about my cybernetics. Right now in this moment, I feel more normal than I’ve felt in ages. I’m assuming you know the reason and are planning to tell me, but frankly I’m not sure I want to know the particulars, Doc.”
Kyra nodded in answer to Peyton’s questioning gaze. She was not surprised Peyton had figured it out. So had Alex, and Marshall before him. Feelings were natural for humans and they felt natural. She had also learned that awareness of them came back quickly when nothing was neurologically blocking their way. Unfortunately, some feelings were more pleasant to experience than others, as Peyton was about to find out.
“Let’s start by discussing the work I did on you. I incapacitated you by activating a hidden reboot code in your cyborg programming. Then while you were unconscious, I replaced your primary processor. The new one I gave you isn’t keeping your synapses firing with actions and thoughts you used to be programmed to repeat and follow twenty-four seven. Without those repeating signals blocking the way, your very human emotions are free to find normal synaptic paths across the various parts of your brain. You have physical body parts that rely on you having a processor, but there’s no reason you can’t have access to both your cybernetics and your feelings. To achieve that end, I’ve been working on a viable restoration process for the last seven years.”
“Seven years? I don’t recall being modified for much more than three years.” His processor spun as he sought to validate or invalidate her statement. He could tell the answer was buried in his brain somewhere, but he just couldn’t get to it.
Kyra took in a breath and let it out slowly. The truth had to be said aloud, but explaining it to her third restored cyborg didn’t make it any easier.
“Captain Elliott, you’ve been a full cyborg and running programs off artificial intelligence chips for ten of the thirteen years that have passed since you received your first modifications. At the time you signed up for your military enhancements, there was no way to reverse the process as I just did. The military lied to you about it because the fledgling UCN believed Cyber Soldiers were necessary to end the wars. It was only later that scientists and non-scientists alike realized there were a great many things that could not be undone. Complete reversals are not physically possible nor mentally feasible. In short, once converted to a cyborg, a person cannot be anything else. For the rest of your life, you will always be part man and part machine.”
Peyton rose and began to pace. His stomach contracted painfully at hearing he’d been existing in some sort of cybernetic limbo. He felt the truth of it instantly in his gut, plus it finally offered a plausible explanation for the gaps in his memories. But how could so much time have passed without his awareness? That seemed improbable.
Damn it. Was the woman lying to him? Was she his enemy? If she was, how had she created such an elaborate illusion?
Peyton turned and glared. “What was your role in the situation you’re describing?”
Kyra stared back without blinking at his rising anger. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before.
“I am one of the two original creators of the Cyber Soldier program. I didn’t engineer your prosthetics, but I wrote nearly all the code that makes your brain work with them.”
Peyton ran a hand through his hair. “Did you know back then? Did you know there was no way to reverse the process when you cut off working parts of our bodies and made us what we are?”
Kyra swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. I knew. But just like you got the enhancements for the noblest of reasons, I believed by the time your duty was done to the world, scientists like me would have discovered a way to restore all the soldiers. Unfortunately the other original creator developed an idea that was deemed a much better solution than attempting to reverse cybernetic modifications. He won the debate and I was never allowed to officially work on a restoration process. For the last seven years, I’ve been doing it on my own. I realize now that blocking someone’s humanity from being expressed was never a proper action to take.”
Peyton walked to a wall of bars and gripped two of them in his hands. A quick scan told him the tensile strength of the metal was more than he could bend. He also picked up a low level hum indicating the bars of his prison were electrically charged at a level that would knock him out if a full charge was activated. Dr. Winters was a smart woman. She had all the bases covered when it came to keeping him trapped.
“Did you kidnap me from some assignment in the field so you could experiment on me?”
Kyra’s eyebrows rose at Peyton’s assumption. Like Marshall and Alex, Peyton’s last human memories had been of their war time service. Jackson had never allowed any of them to realize how much like a machine they had become and she had written code expressly to make it happen. Once she had even believed that kind of ignorance was showing a kindness to them.
She shook her head as she answered. “No, Captain Elliot. I did not kidnap you from any mission. For the last decade, you’ve been serving in what is called the Cyber Husband program. It was the UCN’s way of retiring Cyber Soldiers while keeping track of where they were. Funds from your various Cyber Husband contracts went into UCN coffers. You were unknowingly paying them back over the years for the cost of installing your cybernetics. You’ve personally been enhanced and fixed and redefined many times to suit your various wives. What I did to you yesterday was really just one more in a long line of tweaks. The difference is that I modified you for your benefit this time. In short, I think I have found a way to keep the promise the military didn’t. All preliminary indications are pointing to evidence that I managed to free your human side from being stifled by your cyborg programming.”
Kyra frowned as Peyton turned and gave her his back. It was not the response she had expected.
“Or you could be making all this shit up for reasons I don’t know yet,” he said flatly.
While not used to being accused of lying, she accepted Peyton’s skepticism as healthy under the circumstances. At least he was still asking questions.
“No. I’m not making this up. You’re my third and final experiment. I’m out of funds and out of time. There’s an ongoing investigation into the deaths of my previous two Cyber Husbands, both of whom I tried to restore. The organization I once worked for did this to you and now suspects what I’ve been doing. It’s only a matter of time before they come after me to find out for sure. I hope to finish your restoration long before they do that.”
Peyton crossed his arms. The physical action felt good—and made him feel safer. Of course that was irrational, but it was like every body motion he made counted in a new way. “After all the trouble you say you went through to get me into your lab chair, I don’t see you taking off without seeing your mad scientist scheme through to the end.”
Kyra shook her head. “I’m not going far. I’m planning to blow up the cybernetic facility at Norton Industries. It won’t stop new cyborgs from being created elsewhere in the world, but it will stop them from being created here in our country for a good long time. At this time in our history, there are over fifteen hundred registered cyborgs in the world. Most of them were never soldiers. Few of them volunteered for their changes.”
“You talk about a corporation making cyborgs like it was making air jets. Cyber Soldiers are a military endeavor, not a civilian one. Are you certifiable, Doc? Is that why I’m locked in this cage?”
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