Her thoughts smothered him.
He could see her desire in vivid imagery, hear it in her voice, spoken and unspoken. Her mind was a garden, lush and golden and gorgeous, and he wanted to stretch out naked in it, let it grow over him and encase him. He wanted to be tangled in her.
Oh, hell, as if he hadn’t been for a long time now. The power surge was just making the partition of such thoughts harder than usual.
Hard. Thoughts. Fuck.
Mari leaned into his touch. “How long?”
He knew what she meant. She meant how long had he been reading her thoughts, if he’d been able to do it only since jacking into the Pentarc or if he’d had the capability before. But on the other hand, it sounded sordid, too, and she didn’t clarify out loud. Hell, knowing Mari, she probably meant the double entendre.
The air didn’t have enough oxygen. They might be hiding out in a multiroomed unit, but the foyer was damned cramped. Tiny. Stifling. Intimate. His thumb swept up, skirting the underside of her breast. Her breath hitched.
“Not long enough. But please, if you will, ponder something else.”
“Come again?”
Supremely unwise choice of words.
He could have darkened the cameras, could have cut the communication with his evacuation team. So many sacrifices he could have made to focus power to his autonomics. To take control of his body. He chose not to jeopardize their safety. Instead, he sliced open the partition and loosed some of that roiling desire.
More came through than he intended. Rather a lot more.
It tore a gash, rushed out in a torrent. His hands clasped her, pulled her closer. “You can be so fucking provoking, you know that?”
And before Mari could formulate any more chatty thoughts, his other hand came up, tipping her chin back, and his mouth descended, pouring some of that torrent down her throat, into her body.
He didn’t spend the time to test her willingness or worry what this would do to their partnership. He couldn’t. All he could do was feel. Press. Breathe. Feel. And kiss her, kiss her, touch her, wrap his hand behind, cupping her bare ass and pushing her hot against the swell of his dick.
Mari, slick and trembling beneath his mouth, his hands, his cock. God, he’d wanted this. He wanted her. In the dark, against the door, in danger of discovery or worse. Fuck it all, he wanted her. Right now.
He slid his left hand up her ribs and rolled a ripe nipple between his thumb and forefinger. His nipple or hers? Inputs had merged, and he was getting thoughts, hot and dark and roaring, from both their minds.
They danced, coalesced, fused. His will and hers. Theirs. One.
• • •
Fuck yeah. The flame-retardant metal door pressed up tight and cold against Mari’s shoulder blades, but the heat radiating off this kiss, off his hands, was hot enough, it might just set the whole Pentarc on fire anyhow. The coarse terry of her robe scuffed against the one nipple he wasn’t pinching, and she longed for a similar friction between her legs. A rub. His fingers. His cock.
She was wet for him. It would be so easy.
Her index finger straightened, and she let the duffel slip to the floor with as controlled a shush as she could manage, but really, her mind was elsewhere. In that moment, she wasn’t thinking about the security drone outside or the feds or the job or even the poor schmuck in the next room. All she wanted right then was for Heron to pin her to that goddamned metal door and fuck her until they both hollered like banshees.
Between their bodies, she struggled with the robe’s knot. He’d already delved in one side, but she wanted more. She needed to be completely open, full of him.
Dammit. He replied with fingers far too patient. Even his hand on her ass applied only the necessary pressure. She wanted him to squeeze, to grasp her so hard, he left bruises. She wanted him to rip open his fly and ram his cock into her.
The knot loosed, and Mari shoved her robe wide. She moved her feet apart on the tile floor and tipped her pelvis, inviting.
His patient hand cushioned her ass against the door, but the metal hinges groaned. Mari went up on her toes, moving her hand lower and matching her body to his, pressing her mouth deeper into his kiss.
His cock swelled against her knuckles, and she turned her hand sideways, sinking her thumb hard against her clit and her fingers firm against the bulge in his pants.
Come on, partner. Right here.
And then he did the unthinkable.
He stilled.
“God, Heron, don’t you dare stop now.”
But he had already, and it took Mari a couple of breathless seconds to realize that, in all her urgency, she had spoken.
Um, out loud.
The light beyond Heron’s body expanded. Mari strained to see around him, but his hands retreated to her hips and clamped like vises. He rested his forehead against hers, and she thought she heard the scruff of a shhh in her earpiece.
“Heron? Is that you, sweetling?”
Ack! The person who lived here, whose entryway they’d appropriated. A person who would be scared, probably, and…wait.
Sweetling? The voice from the doorway was scratchy, like someone who still inhaled her chems in direct defiance of the FedHealth air-quality regs. Her chems, too. Yep, definitely a female voice.
“It is. I’m sorry we’ve bothered you. We were trying to be quiet.”
Lord, how could he sound so calm?
The bearer of that crackly voice might have snorted. “Of the three of us, I suspect I’m the one least bothered right now. And normally, I wouldn’t have interrupted, believe me. Normally, I’d be thrilled you brought a friend around for drinksies. But it seems we’re in lockdown, and I have a pretty good idea why that might be. You lot probably want to come in further, in case the intruders—federales?—do a door-to-door.”
Heron still didn’t let her move. Was like he was trying to settle himself down, and Mari knew she ought to do the same. But she didn’t have to like it.
“You know the person who lives here?” Mari mouthed.
He held her, forehead to forehead. Their breathing matched, slowed. “Of course I know her.” He switched to voice but still didn’t turn. “Mari, meet Mrs. Adele Weathering. I wouldn’t have barged into just anybody’s home. That would have been rude.”
Mari didn’t turn either, and she didn’t speak out loud. Not yet. The way he’d gotten her worked up, he deserved a piece of her mind first. “Now, you wait one dadblamed second. To recap: you’re bleeding out the back of your skull, I’m mostly naked, we’re hiding out from the law in some strange woman’s vestibule, and we just damned near…well, seems like you could let some of them manners slide a bit.”
He paused. Lord, what was he thinking? Didn’t seem fair he could know her thoughts but everything in his head was still a mystery to her.
His face was in shadow so she couldn’t see clearly, but he might have smiled. “I see no problem with the way you’re dressed.”
She considered tweaking his nipple through the shirt but somehow managed to resist. “Missing the point.”
Heron turned finally, straightening Mari’s robe in the process so that she was semidecently covered. Couldn’t get her blush to cool down, though, and the kicker of it all was that she wasn’t sure whether she was blushing because she’d just gotten caught feeling up her partner, or because she’d just gotten caught sneaking uninvited into a stranger’s living unit, or because she wished-wished-wished that this Mrs. Adele Weathering person had waited maybe ten more goddamned minutes to butt in.
Mari’s skin was still tingling where he’d touched her. Her mouth still throbbed from the pressure of his kiss. And if she hadn’t been in the process of evading capture for her other sins, she would sure enough have sought seclusion and a hum-buddy to ease this storm between her legs. But she got control of herself, more or less, squared her should
ers, and followed Heron toward the next room.
He was all polite smiles, greeting Mrs. Weathering with a hug. She had to admit it: it did gall her somewhat that he took the whole transition so easily. Her own body, for contrast, was having serious trouble pretending all that by the door had never happened. She squeezed the rolled collar of her robe tight, but she squeezed her thighs tighter, dialing down the friction, and wondered what she could offer fate for a time warp back to a few seconds ago. So close.
It wasn’t until Heron had already ducked through the doorway that Mari caught a clear look at Mrs. Weathering. Like Mari, this woman appeared to have sidestepped the cosmetic reconstruction fad of the last decade. Her face had deep lines around the mouth and at the corners of her heavily mascaraed eyes. Old-fashioned mascara, the kind that smeared. It filled a few wrinkles, spidering out at the edges and crumbling in spots. Same with her scarlet lipstick. She had a home-rolled chemstick pinched between her forefinger and thumb, Russian-style, and her mouth bore purse marks, like she used it to suck a lot.
Mari couldn’t tell whether Mrs. Weathering had endured any other cosmetic alts: her whole body from shoulders to fuzzy-slippered feet was draped in a cheery, printed muumuu. Synthsilk charmeuse, true, but still a muumuu.
A curl from the chemstick wafted near Mari: patchouli, cannabis, and something sort of like cinnamon.
And also, Mari wasn’t the only one doing a bit of inspecting. Faded blue eyes assessed her as if she were a pastry in a case, about to be consumed. Mrs. Weathering met Mari’s gaze and cracked a grin.
“Oh, and speaking of manners,” Heron went on, even though the previous discussion hadn’t included Mrs. Weathering. “Adele, meet Mari Vallejo.”
“Vallejo?” Mrs. Weathering’s tatted-on brows marched up her creased forehead.
Mari caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Did the name mean something to her? Had she seen the news alerts? But the tiny frown on Mrs. Weathering’s face slipped off, and Mari let her expectation go right along with it. False alarm.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty thing? Taller than I imagined. Boy, you can bring her here any time.”
Heron grinned and reached back, grasping Mari’s hand and pulling her along in his wake. Mari almost snatched her hand away out of pique. Almost. But damn it, she couldn’t bring herself to withdraw from his touch completely. Oh, she had it bad, she did.
Also, she found it oddly flattering that he’d mentioned her to his neighbors. That implied that he talked about her when they weren’t working. Had to be a good sign, right?
“We’ll see,” Heron said. “I didn’t really expect you to be here. Is Fanaida home, too?”
The pressure of his hand indicated that she should scoot on into the parlor, but Mari didn’t much like being ordered around. She paused.
“Not at the moment. She should be coming back north any day, probably with new friends or pets in tow. I can’t wait to tell her I got to meet your girl and she didn’t. Ha.”
When Mrs. Weathering cackled, Mari finally put a guess on her age: she cackled just like Aunt Boo, and Auntie B had to be near eighty. For a whole-organic without any visible mods, Adele Weathering had held up spectacularly well.
“You kids come in here for a drink. Looks like you might need one.”
“Actually,” Mari said, disentangling her hand from Heron’s and stepping back toward the front door and her duffel, “I’d like to get my clothes on. You got a niche where I can…”
“Oh certainly, cupcake, right over there around the corner. There’s a free-fae on the shelf.” Mrs. Weathering pointed toward a hallway.
When Mari moved away from him, Heron’s fingers stretched long, trailing along the back of her robe, like they were still hoping she’d come back and hold his hand again. But he didn’t look at her, and Mari counted that as a blessing. Her body was a jumble of hot-ended nerves, confusing and overwhelming and damn near incapacitating. And it wasn’t just because of her legal trouble or the folk out in the hallway hunting her.
It was because of him.
She needed to get away from Heron for just a second, gut-check herself. Then she’d be okay. She’d be able to think. Just not while she was touching him.
Mari snagged the duffel and paused, letting Heron into the lounge first. Not touching. See how she was not touching him? She gave her self-control a mental cookie.
He ducked his head to fit under a low arch, and when he did, Mrs. Weathering gasped and pushed a fist against her mouth. “What happened?”
“Little head wound, and you know how those bleed. It looks much worse than it is. Kellen’ll patch me up shortly. I just need to get Mari out of h—”
Mrs. Weathering tsked behind her coffee-yellowed teeth. Two manicured fingertips reached up and moved his hair aside. “Ick. It’s still seeping. You need a coagulator shot at least, and probably something for the pain. Come here.”
“You really needn’t…”
“Boy”—her tone sharpened—“you will let me bandage you.”
Mari smiled. Heron totally deserved the talkin’ to. The concern. The soft coo and gentle hands leading him to a settee with ball-fringe cushions covering cigarette burns. He deserved clean cotton rounds and tenderness. Love. Yeah, that’s what he deserved.
Her own smile faded to shame.
She’d offered him none of those things, and especially not the last. Mari was danger, drama, baggage, sin, and soulless, right-the-hell-now sex when she could get it.
And it didn’t matter one bit that she wished she could be what he needed.
She grabbed her duffel with both hands and ducked down the half corridor to change.
Her clothes. To change her clothes.
• • •
Back during the riots, when he had been trying to escape Austin, Heron had sustained several injuries that should have been fatal. The queen had been with him, though she wasn’t a queen back then, just a thing, priceless and broken and scared. Disconnected from the university supercomputer for the first time in her short existence and flailing without her usual succor of information, she hadn’t been much help in navigating through the chaos. They’d forced a path through a tangle of looters, National Guard militia, and rabble-rousers shouting about liberty and taxes, and he’d kept his head down and hauled her along in his wake.
A homemade bomb a block south of the capitol had turned his world red, had melted the skin and nerves and other tissues, laying bare the bone along the left side of his body, all in less than a second. He didn’t feel the pain, not right then, but it would come soon enough, and it would incapacitate him. The queen knew this.
Behind a still-burning food cart near Third Street, they had hunkered together, the stolen thing and him, and waited for death. Or he had. The queen had lacked a human’s capacity to lose hope. She had bent, unrolled a silicon-wrapped bundle, and drawn out an electrostatic containment vial.
“Eyes open. Be still,” she had said in her raspy metallic voice. “You have a venous access port on your right arm. This vat will invade, replicate, repair, and you will have no pain. The nanos are programmed for me, though, and you will change. Everything will change, but you will live.”
He stayed still while she ripped his sleeve off at the shoulder, exposing the port. After all that had been done to him over the years, her probe hurt least but dehumanized him more. He had known exactly what he was accepting with that injection, but he hadn’t stopped her. Instead, he had focused his gaze on the blue-light dance of downed live wires in the street, the klaxon sounds of his city falling to chaos. Everything had changed that night, just as she’d promised. And he hadn’t so much as blinked.
That was kind of how he felt now. His universe had shifted inexorably.
Mari had kissed him. Or he’d kissed her. Skin to skin, dark and hot and wet and within microns and moments of fusing. And he hadn’t had a scrap of c
ontrol, no resistance. Against her mouth, he’d become an electric pulse of raw and mortal and ignorant and wild and elated. Out of control but too terrified to stop the wild hurtle. His body had responded as if touching her, consuming her, fucking her, were the most logical and inevitable things in the universe.
Always before, he had damped those reactions. Repaired them. And he absolutely should not have failed to do so this time. What was wrong with him?
Through the vague pressure on the back of his skull, sensation pricked bright and white. It should not have. But it did. He made an inarticulate sound and stiffened, and the fingers gentled.
“Sorry, sweetling. Whoever did this really made a mess.” Adele leaned back, drew a syringe from her sewing box, and filled it with something from a milk-glass bottle. “You already called Kellen?”
“Yeah. They will be here in forty minutes, give or take. I was going to use the helo pad over on South, but the police will have that covered.”
“Mmmmhmmm.” Dabbing antiseptic against the wound, but gently, as if he were an infant. “So what’s your plan?”
“We can use the false floor in your closet. I’ll take her down to ten, across the skywalk to the east spire, and then down to the carpark. Main exits will be covered, but we can use the tunnels. The car’s fast and has some stealth buffering, which will work better now it’s dark out. We’ll be okay.”
And all the people in the Pentarc would be safe then, too. He was counting on that.
On wireless, he pinged the arcology’s evacuation protocol, searching for the switches to open the escape tunnels. Nothing. Did it again. On the second try, it responded. Weird. Digital systems, unlike people, always replied predictably.
Always, except for right now.
He no longer had injector ports on his body, but when Adele stuck him, he didn’t feel the needle’s prick. He deliberately searched for the chemical bolus, routed it to the pain receptors at the wound in his head, dispersed it. His circulatory system wobbled. He blinked, resetting internal pathways, pulling more power from the arcology.
Wanted and Wired Page 7
