Probably since before her work had been stolen from her, along with her heart. Before both had been used for such evil.
She hadn’t fully realized at the time what—she could say his name now—Peter had been planning to do with the records he’d absconded with. It wasn’t until the first Three had been announced that she’d finally understood what he had wrought. Human beings, linked together with their individual wills suppressed, their memories erased, their very personhoods lost to a collective decision-making algorithm and an override switch that kept them bound to an external, controlling will.
It had been too horrifying to speak of. Intent on stopping such madness, she’d reconnected with her old mentor, Isabel, and begun working with Stan to figure out exactly what was being done. They’d experimented with stronger links, and as more and more Threes were created and turned into mercenaries for hire, they’d even eventually managed to get their hands on a set.
They’d seen firsthand the damage that occurred the longer that kind of invasive, all-consuming connection was allowed to stand. They’d mourned the loss of humanity. And they’d fought over it. Bitterly.
It had been the one area of true contention in her and Stan’s partnership, his belief that once a person went down that road his emotions and humanity were forever forfeit. Aurelia, meanwhile, had clung to the idea that anyone could be redeemed. That anything could be fixed.
Jinx had redeemed himself. She’d suspected it earlier, but she knew for sure now. Improbable as it had seemed in their lab, he’d rediscovered compassion and regret. He was still a man. A man who had done terrible things.
A man whose master was clearly after her and her work.
She forced herself to refocus as she gazed at him. While it was entirely too easy to be distracted by the joy of learning she’d been right, there was so much more she still needed to know.
As their eyes met, one side of his lips curled up with the faintest ghost of a smile. He was looking at her with so much uncertainty but so much hope. It made his whole face look different. She’d found him startlingly attractive the night before, thrumming with rage and protectiveness, but this was something else entirely. How handsome must he have been back when he’d been his own man? When he’d been happy—if he ever had been.He tilted his head to the side, fingers pulling at grass, and she ached to reach out to him. Her own hand inched forward, hidden by the soft waves of golden green.
“Will you, please?” she asked. “Will you tell me everything?”
She had to catch her balance as yet again he opened the gates to let countless fragments of memory sweep past her vision. Dark and bloody, tinged with self-loathing, they flew through her mind, one after another, all too quickly for her to process except to understand that the question was too broad and he was overwhelmed. The nascent smile wilted and a blackness bled into his gaze.
There was too much to unpack and too much of it hurt him too dearly. She had to narrow this down. “Will you tell me about last night?”
The flood of images came again, but this time he seemed to be in better control of it, better equipped to supply her with the narrative. She saw an image of her own face, and then of her laboratory, both laced with a question.
“Yes,” she said. “Start there.”
He tensed his jaw and forced his gaze to the tree line behind her. “It was a basic assignment. We got the call in the afternoon, just an address and a list of things to look for.” His gaze snapped back to hers. “I didn’t know it was yours. Or rather, I didn’t know who you were. Not until this morning.”
The force of his remorse pressed heavily against her chest, and for a second she feared the worst. “Did you hurt anyone?”
She’d already lost Stan. She couldn’t lose Isabel, too.
“No. The lab was deserted.” In her mind, he showed her the truth of it, panning from an empty hallway to a series of keystrokes as he cracked into the security system they’d invested in so heavily, to the dark workroom and the rows and rows of file cabinets.
“What did you take?”
“Everything we could get our hands on. They wanted schematics and notebooks above all else.”
“Computer drives?”
“Yes.”
She had to close her eyes. All that work. It was backed up elsewhere, of course, but it was compromised now, to be used against her. Or worse.
She couldn’t focus on that now, though.
For all his earlier hesitance, the words and images were flowing from him in a torrent now. “We took what we’d been instructed to, then headed back to the barracks to await further instructions. Curse and Charm were…” he gritted his teeth, “…distracted. I was the one to realize our base had been compromised.”
He showed her the adrenaline-filled race back to the house where she’d sought shelter, then an image so colored by tenderness it melted whatever defenses she still had left toward this man. She looked at him again to find his face just as soft as his memories.
“And then we found you. You looked so broken and still so beautiful. I hadn’t seen beauty like that in…” He interrupted himself, eyes intense as they blazed. “Never. I’d never seen beauty like that. Not in this life. And suddenly it was like I remembered.”
Her throat tightened. “What? What did you remember?”
He sat straighter, rising slowly to his knees, arms held up in front of him a gesture meant to convey he meant no harm. “That I was a man.”
Oh, and but he was. She relived with him the sharp satisfaction of realizing independence while trailing her gaze down the length of his body. It was all long, muscular lines, a trim, strong build. How he would look over her and under her, naked and straining…
His eyes darkened. He shifted forward, the motion tentative as he approached her. All the air escaped her lungs as a new but entirely related set of impressions flooded the link, saturating them in pure sex. The heat of it was so vivid, the need made all the more intense by how new this was to him. Every touch was a revelation. Every breath on skin a thrill. She reached out her own hand, unconsciously angling toward him as her body thrummed.
“And then being alone in that room with you.” His nostrils flared. There was nothing tentative about the way he was closing the distance between them now. “I’d known arousal before, but never like that. Never when it was for someone. When it was from touching your skin.” He shuddered. “And that was before.”
Had she moved forward, too? Somehow they were in the middle of the clearing, squared off, mere feet between her body and his.
She hadn’t touched him since he’d revealed his part in this, and she was suddenly crazed for it, the demands of the link crying out for him and for contact. For something to ease the strain in her body and her mind.
He breathed in deeply, and his whole chest seemed to fill, making him bigger and more all-consuming in his presence and his heat. “That was before you let me into your mind. God, Aurelia. I’d never known such peace. Such quiet.” He reached out. The instant his fingertips grazed her cheek, everything seemed to melt, the distance and the space all liquid, her thoughts spinning with relief as they twined with his. He hissed out a ragged sigh. “How it feels to touch you. Your body and your thoughts. You’re perfect. So perfect.”
He was close enough now she could taste his air, could anticipate how it would feel to take him inside her. She watched him tremble as she imagined it. Her body burned to ash.
She needed more.
“Jinx?”
He licked his lips and darted his gaze down to hers. “Yes?”
“Kiss me.”
It was just like it had been at the car. The instant Jinx’s lips met hers, all the shaky, unraveling pieces of his psyche went smooth as glass, the link strengthening from a tenuous grip at the edge of a cliff to a clutching embrace. She was so soft, her breath hot and her mouth succulent against his tongue. Ba
rely conscious of what he was doing, he pressed her back into the grass. She pulled against his push, though, anchored him against her until he hovered above her body. One kiss bled into another until there was just her.
No pain. No noise or regret. Just Aurelia.
With a groan, she shoved her hands beneath the fabric of his shirt, and a whole new world of nerves shot sparks. He’d never been touched before, not like that, not for pleasure. As she peeled that layer of clothing away, he feared he’d fall apart and yet he’d never felt so whole. The frantic pressure of mouth on mouth broke just long enough for her to tear the fabric over his head, and then he was fitting his tongue to hers again, breathing hard at every new revelation of her palms against his skin.
More, he begged. Her calves hooked around his thighs, and when the hard need at his hips met the cradle of hers, he had to rear back. To wrench his lips from hers and roar.
Pleasure. This was pleasure.
In her mind, he saw his hands cupped to the ripe fullness of her breasts, and in the next instant he was there. He attached his mouth to her throat and reached into the bunched mass of fabric at her waist, pushed up and up until his palms curled around feminine softness.
Then his fingertips brushed the line of the bandage he’d wrapped around her shoulder the night before, and he froze.
Her hand was cool against his cheek. “Look at me.”
He opened his eyes to stare at the beauty of hers. Let the anguish of his worry pour into his voice as he gritted out, “Don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t. You aren’t.”
Before he could protest, she opened her mind to him in a rush. His whole body shuddered, cock throbbing against her hip at the waves of heat inside her body. He was making her feel good. He could do that.
“I’ll tell you,” she promised.
He saw in her thoughts the lines of injury, the pieces of shoulder and knuckle and scalp where he should not touch. And then a fire lit in the places where he should. She threaded her fingers through his hair and yanked sharply, a delicious burn that melded pain and pleasure in a way he would never have foreseen, and he was dragged down, lost in her kiss again and shoving his body into the open valley of her hips.
She showed him how to take the clothes from her body, and he did so with madness and reverence. When he stripped his pants from her hips, exposing new flesh, lush and pale, his need redoubled.
“I don’t know— Can’t—” Everything was ache and desire, touch and the overwhelming sensation of completion. Inside and out. “Too much—”
She shushed him with gentle fingers at his lips. “Just feel.”
He felt everything.
With her hands and with her thoughts, she showed him how to touch her. When his fingertips parted wet, female flesh, he felt her tremble, felt her body opening for him. She brought his thumb to the silken bulb atop her sex and pressed his fingers into her more deeply. Her back arched, her moans and the soft sounds of her slickness drowning out the world.
Then she pulled her hand from his, and before he knew what was happening, she had his pants down to his knees, her palm curling around his cock, and every nerve and synapse ignited at once. His length slid through the circle of her fist as he buried his fingers to the knuckle in liquid heat. He dropped his head to the ground, opened his mouth against the thrumming of her pulse.
“Aurelia…”
She tugged at his wrist until he withdrew his hand from between her legs. With her palm still wrapped around the base of him, she placed his tip at the entrance to her body and then touched the side of his face. Stifling a groan against her throat, he shifted forward, sliding an inch into heaven before stopping. He bit his lip and forced his eyes open, forced his hips to still.
Bracing himself with one hand on either side of her head, he reared up and looked into her eyes. And then, achingly slowly, he pressed himself home.
Jesus fucking—
There were no words and no thoughts, only impressions of heat and fullness, the crushing embrace of her and the raggedness of her gasp.
And somewhere deep inside, he knew he’d done this before. In another life, he’d known the satisfaction of a woman’s body, but even with that part of him closed off from his memory, he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t believe it had ever been anything like this. A meeting of bodies and minds, a union so complete and a sinking of one person into another.
“Be one with me,” she whispered, nails digging into his shoulder.
“I am.”
God, but he was.
And he hadn’t been.
He never had.
He fell.
In a singular, crystalline second, her mind unfolded in front of him into an infinite array of thought. The sheer exhilaration of it dizzied him as his vision narrowed, his being subsumed by the rush of synapses opening, her entire personhood laid out for him.
He was just as bare, just as naked before her.
As his hips drew back, he swore it was more than their link. That it was the meshing of souls.
And he’d doubted he’d had one for so long…
Over and over again, he fell into her, into her sex and into her mind, and with each thrust he got closer, until there was only the precipice, the cliff upon which he stood, poised about to truly touch her.
He hovered, opened his eyes and stared into hers.
She grasped to him more tightly, wrapped arms and legs around his body, then threw her head back, screaming and pulsing and forcing a pleasure too hot to contain into his bones.
In a surge that turned him inside out, burnt his body and mind to ash, he emptied himself into her.
And as he did so, it was to the concert of her scream. It was to her calling out a name he’d never heard.
His name.
Chapter Eight
Jack. It was such a simple name.
Aurelia didn’t know exactly what she’d expected, but as the most intense climax of her life had swept over her, the shape of the sound had come to her lips. She’d been so immersed in his mind, so filled with his body. Careening through the shadowy, crumbling pieces of his memory, she’d anchored onto one locus of identity and pulled it with her as she’d risen through the endlessness of existence, only to surface, gasping, shaking with a pleasure that consumed her, screaming that one word.
She clung to him with arms and legs, staring up into the sky and inward across a landscape of thought that spread out in all directions, as overwhelming as the physical high of coupling. Slowly, her breathing evened out, the spasms between her legs subsiding into a low glow of satisfaction. The seamless melding of their minds receded too, narrowing with every inhale and exhale from something infinite to a single doorway. A manageable conduit of measured thoughts and impressions.
It was a relief. And yet somehow, the instant that perfect union was lost, she missed it.
As the connection reverted, the strength in Jinx’s limbs seemed to fade with it, and with a low groan and a shudder, he collapsed onto her, letting her feel the full weight of him for just a fraction of a second before rolling. She loosened her grip, let him slide from her body to lie on the grass on his back beside her, their arms touching. In the silent moments that followed, she sought out his hand with hers. He intertwined their fingers without hesitation. It wasn’t the all-encompassing fever of lovemaking, but the contact still grounded her. Their tether was a warm hum, a soft sensation of presence. It felt more solid than it had before. It felt good.
He sucked in a deep breath, and the grass beneath him rustled. She turned her head, letting her gaze drift from the brightness of the sky to the dark of his wide, wide eyes.
His voice was a shuddering rasp. “What. Was. That.”
The laugh bubbled up from the very deepest part of her, a joyful noise that matched the innocence in this big, powerful man’s words and thoughts. Holdin
g tightly to his hand, she shifted to lie on her side and brought her other arm up, wincing at the low ache in her shoulder but pushing past it to press her palm to his cheek.
“That, Jinx, was a link.”
Because of course he wouldn’t have known. After years of being subjugated to another mind, bent to meet its will through force, he would never have experienced the pure joy of a connection forged between two partners, built with openness and care.
With love.
She closed the door on that thought as quickly as she had opened it. Her smile faltered, and his gaze flickered to where the edges of her mouth turned down. His brows furrowed slightly, and she stroked his cheek, leaning in to press a soft, closed-mouth kiss against his lips. He returned it with warm pressure. As she pulled away, he lifted his hand and slid his fingers through her hair.
Then his eyes darted sharply to hers, his thoughts echoing what she’d said.
“You called me another name,” he said slowly. “Before.”
She stiffened and nodded. “I did.”
“It was my name.”
“I think it was.”
He gazed at her for the longest time. While he was outwardly still, in his mind, memories swirled and faded, shadows moving in and amongst a ruined landscape of half-images, burned and black. They hurt to look at in their incompleteness, but if he felt the same pain he didn’t show it.
The slow parade of lost pasts faded away, and his whole face softened, the tenderness in his eyes disarming. He reached up a hand to cup her cheek. The kiss this time was all gentleness, the contact colored by an affection that was nearly overwhelming as he showed her that even these broken shards of memory were new. That she had given them to him.
“Thank you.” He pressed his lips to hers once more, then to her nose and to her brow. “Thank you.”
His thoughts radiating gratitude, he let go of her and moved to sit. They were quiet as he pulled his clothes back on and helped her into hers, taking that same care with her injuries that he had as they’d joined together, eyes still full of concern as he ran his fingertips along the edge of the bandage at her shoulder.
Through the Static Page 6
