A full-body shudder wracked his frame and he closed his eyes with a muttered curse. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes again and took her other hand grimly. He wasn’t going to take any chances that she’d start touching him and blow apart the measly control he had left.
Bending his head, he kissed her softly, nibbling with his lips, sucking ever so gently on her bottom lip, and trying not to pant like a dog at her taste. Sweet and luscious, she was like a creamy dessert, delicious and tantalizing. He wanted more of her, all of her. With a rough sound, he ran the tip of his tongue over her bottom lip then he sank his teeth into her quivering flesh. She made a sound that he was going to hear in his hottest dreams for the rest of his life and he jerked his head up, gulping for breath.
"Oh, Declan, that felt so—"
"Shh," he interrupted, pressing another quick kiss to her parted lips. "I’ll go crazy." He slid his lips over hers just once more, lingering achingly, before he lifted his head and whispered, "Goodnight, honey." Then he walked away, leaving pieces of himself scattered at her feet.
Ryelle watched him go with an ache in her chest and a heavy heat in her body. She didn’t want him to leave. She understood his concerns. She didn’t know if she was ready for all of it, for…for sex. But she knew she didn’t want him to go away from her. To stop touching her. It hurt somewhere deep inside to watch him walk away.
"Declan," she sighed, but he was too far away to hear. He turned the corner without looking back and she wobbled into her quarters on shaky limbs and with a heavy heart. Damn it, she missed him already. And her mouth hadn’t even stopped tingling from his last kiss.
She collapsed into the seat at her work station and stared moodily at the com unit. She knew she needed to contact the Institute. She was surprised she hadn’t heard from them already. Grieve was going to blast her up one side and down the other for not wearing her snood all day. Well, he could blast all he liked. She’d be damned if she would wear the thing any longer.
With a flare of rebellion, she sat forward and touched the com, requesting contact with the Institute. The system informed her that it was unable to make a connection. She blinked at the viewer for a moment then broke into a wide grin as she remembered. She’d scattered the tunnel. No communications could get through the scatter field, or the nebula for that matter. She’d been on her own, clear of the Institute, since that morning. For the first time in her life, she was free of them.
Jumping up, she whirled around her living room in a wild dance, laughing breathlessly. The only thing that would make this moment better was Declan. And her mother. She came to a sudden halt, her heart diving past her feet. She’d never be truly free of them. They had her mother. She went from manic joy to sobbing tears in seconds, scaring herself in the process. What was wrong with her?
Half blind, she stumbled into her bedroom and changed into her sleepwear, tears still pouring down her cheeks. Crawling onto the bed, she curled up in a ball under a thermal and wept as if her heart was breaking. A long time later, when she was done, she realized why she had reacted so strongly. She had never had such emotional freedom before. They said they didn’t watch her at night, but she’d never trusted them. This was the first time since her mother had been taken away from her that she could fully express her emotions, her grief.
Her tears were spent, but her entire body ached with loneliness. She had needed her mother so badly. They were each other’s only family, only allies in the face of the Institute’s insidious pressures. They’d called in her mother when she was five, because they couldn’t control her any other way. But her mother had insisted on staying over their objections and Ryelle had stubbornly refused to let her leave. For years they’d withstood the pressures of the Institute together and the hostility from other telenetics and gotten through her training together. Her mother had refused to authorize the snood before her collapse, even though Ryelle’s control had not been seamless. Her mother had always believed in her, told her that she had enough control and wasn’t a danger to anyone. But then she’d fallen into a coma and everything had changed.
Ryelle curled tighter into herself but found no relief from the emptiness. She was alone. Her mother’s love was gone, her touch, her strength. All gone. She was so alone. Wait, no. Not completely alone. Not anymore.
She scrambled from the bed and grabbed her portable viewer. Perching on the edge of the bed, she made the call with a thrill of hope and desperate need.
Declan smiled when he saw her, but his smile faded quickly. "Ryelle, what’s the matter?"
She grimaced. "I look that bad?"
He gave his sleep-mussed head an impatient shake, dismissing her words. "You’ve been crying. Are you okay?"
She ignored his question, studying him with greedy eyes. "You went to bed. Your hair’s all messed."
"Yeah," he said with a flicker of confusion. "It’s late."
"Did I wake you?"
His slow smile did wonderful, warm things to her insides. "Not yet. Told you it’d take a long time." He propped his chin on the heel of his hand and studied her in turn. "Tell me why you were crying."
She lifted one shoulder in a stiff shrug. "I was just thinking about my mother."
Concern darkened his eyes and he reached his fingers out to touch the screen. "Oh, honey. I’m sorry."
She wanted to crawl through the viewer and get as close to him as humanly possible. She’d climb inside him if she could. "Could I play on your sympathy to wheedle you into my bed?"
He clapped a hand to his forehead in agonized humor. "Woman, you’ll be the death of me."
"Will you stay on the com with me, then? I don’t want to be alone."
His smile was warm and faintly pained. "All night if you need me to."
"Maybe just for a little while," she modified with a flash of guilt. "Then you can go back to bed. I’m sorry I got you up."
"I wasn’t sleeping. I was laying there thinking how much I’d rather be in your bed."
She bit her tongue before she could say, Why aren’t you, then? Instead, she slid back up to her pillows and settled down on her side, propping the portable next to her. "Well, now you are," she said with a quick smile, pulling the thermal over her again and slipping a hand under her cheek.
He stared with such solemn intensity that she started to wonder what was wrong. "You’re in bed," he said in a husky voice.
"Mm-hmm."
"Now I’m never gonna sleep."
She laughed softly, warmed down to her toes. "It’s not like you can see much," she teased.
He leaned forward, his smile slow and filled with something she was just starting to recognize as hunger. "It’s the thought. And I can see your hair is down. You don’t wanna know how often I dreamed about your hair on my pillow."
"Actually, I think I do want to know."
"Ryelle," he said in that thick honey voice of his, "are you flirting with me?"
"Is that what I’m doing? I was trying for seduction, but I guess that needs more work."
He laughed, low and husky, his eyes a deep, deep indigo that made her entire body squirm. "Close your eyes, honey. You need your sleep."
"If you think I can sleep now, you really are an idiot," she muttered, but she closed her eyes, smiling to hear him laugh again. "Tell me more about your mother’s shop."
"Cause it’ll put you under?"
She opened one eye with a frown of reproach. "Because I love hearing about it."
"Oh, sure you do," he said with a little scoff then held up his hands when she opened the other eye to glare at him. "All right. You’ve wheedled me into your bed. Least I can do is put you to sleep."
She snickered, closing her eyes again. "Thank you for keeping me company, Declan."
"My pleasure, sweetheart," he said in a husky voice. Then he began a story about a dock worker named Pick who had a weakness for big women and a robust female client who’d come into his mother’s shop for a repair of her little cutter. She smiled her way through their
first catastrophic encounter, but as he was telling her how his mother had calmed the irate female down, she drifted off to sleep, a smile still curving her lips.
Declan never told her how long he watched her, before laying his head down and going to sleep with her.
Chapter 9
The entry to the nebula was smoother than anticipated, but it was still unpleasant to feel the Odyssey shiver and occasionally buck under foot. Declan seemed fascinated with the view of the violent star nursery from the observation deck, but Ryelle concluded that he just had no sense of self-preservation and did her level best to distract him away from it. It gave her a shudder of horror every time she saw him standing in that menacing bright cloud.
As the ship’s telenetic, she was on alert for any serious danger from the nebula, but the commander gave her most of each day off, since they were basically status quo until they passed through the noxious cloud. She spent a great deal of her time in engineering, helping Declan and the other crew with their work. The nebula stressed the engines, which kept the engineering crew on its toes. Whenever they could do it without shirking their duties, Ryelle and Declan found time to be alone. They talked, laughed, teased, touched, kissed, and generally blissed out on one another.
Her giddy joy at being free from the Institute had morphed into an intense need to experience all she could before they reined her back in again. She enjoyed her new friends, the Sheridans, her commander, the rest of the engineering crew, but most especially she enjoyed Declan. Everything about him made her deliriously happy and utterly entranced.
Also incredibly frustrated. He refused to rush their physical relationship along. She wanted to tell him that they needed get a move on, since she only had a couple more days of freedom left, but that seemed terribly unromantic. They were still only kissing, and though they were amazing, long, slow, deep kisses that melted her into a quivering mass of longing, he refused to take it further. A situation that had her on the fast track to insanity.
Part of her problem was that she knew nothing about seduction. She watched vids, holos, VRs, read books, but none of them seemed specific enough to her situation. She found plenty of ideas but not how to implement them.
Their nightly conversations over the portable viewer helped sooth her heated, ragged edges. He’d gotten one, too, so they could talk to one another in bed. This was the part of the day she liked the best, though she couldn’t touch him. There was an intimacy to it that was deeply touching, comforting her in ways she couldn’t describe. They spoke of everything, talking each other to sleep. Something about that drowsy warmth made it easy for her to tease him, to practice her seduction-in-progress. He was much less reserved, not holding back his desire. She assumed it was because she was safely out of reach.
Then she got an idea, one that was so completely against all of her training that she rejected it a million times before she considered it as a serious possibility. She thought of discussing it with Declan a million more times before she worked up the courage to approach him. He wasn’t going to like it. Well, actually he was and she supposed that was the problem.
Then she had to work on where and when. Seductions did not have good conclusions in places like the engineering alcoves or the Chief’s office. She would prefer her room, but she hadn’t yet managed to get him across her threshold. It was going to have to be his quarters, but what to do about the roommate? She asked Frankie.
It was scary how enthusiastically the woman threw herself into the conspiracy. Declan’s roommate Carny seemed a little scared, too, but unable to refuse the veritable feast of female flesh that was Frankie. Once she had him under her spell, Frankie informed Ryelle that Carny would be thoroughly occupied for the next several days and Declan would have their quarters to himself. All she had to do was surprise him there.
Which she did that very evening.
Declan smiled with delighted surprise when he opened the door to find her standing there, but then his smile slipped into a frown of concern. "Ryelle, what’s the matter? Is everything okay?"
"I need to talk to you," she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. This seduction business was a lot harder than Frankie made it look.
"Sure. Come in," he said without even a hint of suspicion, for which she died a little of guilt. She’d been in his quarters many times, though usually with his roommate present, so he wasn’t the least bit wary.
Chewing on her lip, she stepped in, sending a quick glance around. No roommate. Not that she’d expected it—the last time she’d seen him, he was wearing a dazed, daffy grin as Frankie led him away.
"What’s the matter, sweetheart?" Declan asked, holding her hand with such sweet concern that Ryelle winced.
"I’ve been trying to seduce you," she said bluntly, unable to proceed with her carefully crafted, well thought out plan.
He grinned. "I know. Been damn hard to resist, too."
"Yet you have resisted," she said so irritably that he chuckled. "So I’ve come up with a secret weapon." She paused, chewing on her lip again, stomach doing acrobatic flips in her belly.
His eyebrows rose, his grin turning into a smirk. "Secret weapon, huh? That sounds interesting."
She didn’t try to play along, just took a deep breath and let him have it. "Would you like me to do what I did on the command deck again? Touch you with my talent?"
The smirk disappeared in a hurry. He also dropped her hand and took a couple of hasty, disappointing steps backward, hands held up to ward her off. "No! Ryelle…" The room wasn’t large enough for him to go far. He bumped into the desk behind him, catching a chair as it tried to skitter away. "That’s not—you shouldn’t—"
"You said it felt good."
"Oh my god, woman, you don’t know how good. But I can’t—I wouldn’t be able to control myself—"
"That’s the whole point," she snapped, hurt and anger spiraling up her spine. "I don’t want you to control yourself! I want you, Declan. All of you, the whole way. No holding back, no taking it a slow step at a time. I don’t care about going too fast. At the rate we’re going, I’ll be old and gray before I get to take your clothes off."
"Ryelle, you’ve never—"
"I’m aware!"
"But I have."
"I know that, too."
"You do?"
"Yes. I was introduced to girl stuff. Frankie knows quite a bit of girl stuff, actually."
"God’s mercy," Declan wheezed, looking a little unwell as he leaned back against the desk.
"Right. Suffice to say, I am very well educated on the subject. What I’m not is experienced. It’s your job to fix that."
"Ryelle, honey—"
She unleashed her talent, slowly unraveling it between them. She knew he could feel it coming, saw his eyes widen and heard his swift indrawn breath.
"You touch me like that and I’m not gonna be any good to you anyway," he said shakily. "You almost finished me last time in the middle of a bunch of crew. And that was before I got to torture myself by touching and kissing you every day. We’re alone, and I want you so bad I hurt. How long d’you think I’ll last?"
She blushed hotly, both from embarrassment and desire. She understood what he was saying, but a part of her wanted to go through with it anyway. To see what he really felt when she touched him that way. To see how long he’d last. The idea that her ability could cause such enormous pleasure made her hot all over.
She bit her lip, trembling and weak with longing. Indecision made her power fluctuate around her and she heard him groan softly. He closed his eyes, his face lined with pain or effort as his head bent forward, gripping the edges of the desk until his knuckles whitened.
"God, stop, Ryelle. Stop." Then his head came back up, eyes snapping open to fix on her with wild indigo heat. "No, damn it, don’t stop," he growled, pushing off the desk and lunging at her.
Startled by his sudden movement, she wasn’t quick enough to prevent him from brushing against her power. He made a sound like a caged animal befor
e he collided with her. He pressed her against the wall, hands flat to either side as he dove into her mouth in a kiss that blazed like a sun. She could feel every hard inch of him imprinted on her and she reveled in it. He was hot and hard and shocking to her quivering flesh, his kiss demanding and ruthless, but she still could barely contain her delirious joy. This was what she wanted. She didn’t want him to be careful. She wanted him to let go, to give her every part of him. She needed it like she needed her next breath. Wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, she pulled him closer with a moan, kissing him back with everything she had.
The deck rocked under her and for a moment, it seemed part of her wildly unsteady, deliriously burning world. Then the ship alarm blared and they burst apart as if blasted, staring at each other with shocked eyes. The deck rocked again and Ryelle stumbled for the door, crying, "Stay here!" over her shoulder.
"Hell with that," he retorted, leaving the room right on her heels. "Be careful!" he called to her as he bolted down the corridor toward engineering.
Ryelle ran in the other direction, lifting her skirts out of the way of her quick-moving feet. Her talent moved faster, ballooning out through the ship, reaching to find the threat. The nebula was thinning, the violence of the cloud easing as they reached the edge. It had not been the star nursery that had jarred the Odyssey, but another ship. No, two, three, four ships, each roughly a quarter the size of the Odyssey. Even as she identified them as GenTec, one ship fired another blast of energy at the Odyssey’s protective net.
"That’ll be enough of that," Ryelle muttered aloud, batting the blast away so that it scattered into the nebula. It was an unlucky shot—the scattered blast set off a chain reaction within that section of the nebula. Ryelle winced, feeling the building explosions with her talent. "Oops."
She checked her headlong pace when she reached the command deck, smoothing her skirts before she stepped through the door and walked toward the commander with as much dignity as she could muster. She could see by the tension in his lean form that he was in full hunting mode, though he couldn’t pace—she could see the shimmer of force around his torso as he stood at his command podium, keeping him erect and secure against any battle jarring.
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